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Every single craft involves clay, paper and cardboard. While paper is certainly plentiful and used every day, cardboard - especially shaped the way some of these need to be - is a bit unweildy for younger children. Clay can be loads of fun - with one child. A room full? Not so much.
From Enslow's site (bold is ours):
These crafts center on a theme and use simple materials found in the home, or are easily available. All of the projects combine to create one full scene, and are simple enough to make without a lot of parental help. Each book includes hands-on activities. Students can also choose to make just one or several of the crafts. A class group might work together to create the full scene, with each individual student responsible for a different craft.We have to disagree with that highlighted part. Amazon lists the age range as 4-8 years, but we think that's a bit low. These might be of interest to older children, particularly those who enjoy spending a lot of time on intricate projects. And intricate they certainly are! While children certainly don't have to get as detailed as the examples (the toes on the cabin boy!) they are almost certain to become frustrated and disappointed when their attempts don't match up. The lack of variety was also disappointing - one would expect a book of crafts on a subject to use different media and approaches, while these are just different variations on clay people and structures.
Cute projects, and the instructions are clear, but we don't see these getting much circulation. We give them a
3 out of 5.
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THE SUFI PATH OF LIGHT
The Sufis are lovers of light. That is why some flashes of light
will be shown in the parts below.
In 1183 a young man, a ragged dervish, entered Aleppo. There his learning and his magical powers drew the attention of all. The prince grew to love him and became his disciple. The other learned men, jealous of his ascendancy, complained of him to the king, the great Saladin. The king feared that his son would be led into heresy, and he knew that heresy bred sedition. Twice he ordered his son to kill the dervish. Heartbroken the prince at last complied. The dervish's disciples fled, and their names were forgotten. In Aleppo people remembered him, remembered the power of his personality and his speech and how he had sought to revive the Divine wisdom of the Ancient and thereby make the age luminous and how he had perished in the attempt. "His knowledge was greater than his prudence," they said.
But he had also left books behind - brilliant allegories of the mystical and philosophical life, powerful treatises of philosophy summarizing and pointing beyond the Peripatetic philosophy and his school, even prayers.
Above all there was a masterly book called THE PHILOSOPHY OF ILLUMINATION, a metaphysics of light and darkness, finished one September evening in 1186 as the seven Ptolemaic planets drew together on the western horizon of Aleppo. Its interpretation, he promised, was with "him who will arise with the Book," but here was no such person, or else he was lost to history when the dervish's disciples fled. In succeeding centuries some scholars in each generation sought to bring life to the dry bones of the master's writings and to follow the arduous mystical path that led to an intuitive understanding of his philosophy of illumination. And a few still do.
Source: John Walbridge in his "The Wisdom of the Mystic East"
dealing with shaykh as-Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism.
Shaykh as-Suhrawardi came to Aleppo and took lodgings in the Madrasat-al-Halawiya. At that time its mudarris was the Sharif, the head of the Hanafites, the late Iftikhar ad-Din. When shaykh Suhrawardi attended the class and argued with the jurists, he was dressed as a dervish and had only an ewer and a wooden staff, so no one knew him. But when he entered the discussion and stood out among the 'ulama', Iftikhar realized that he was learned, so the later got out a robe of watered taffeta, a gown, a coat and a large turban, and said to his son:
"Go to this dervish and say to him, 'My father sends his salaams to you and says that you are an 'alim and that you attended the class with the 'ulama'. He has sent you something to wear when you come'."
When his son came to shaykh Suhrawardi and said to him what he had been bidden to say, the latter was silent for a long time and said: "My boy, leave these rags and do something for me". He took out a Badakhshan ruby that looked like a pomegranate the size of a chicken egg. No one had one like it, either in size or colour. He said:
"Go to the bazaar and advertise this stone. Whatever you are offered, do
not undertake to sell it until you have told me".
So when he arrived in the bazaar, he sat by the 'arif (assistant market supervisor) and advertised the gem. The offers finally reached 25,000 dirhams, so the 'arif took it to al-Malik az-Zahir Ghazi (the 'prince' in the previous flash, who was at that time governor of Aleppo), the son of Salahaddin (the one who later on ordered his son to kill shaykh Suhrawardi).
The governor was astonished at its shape, colour and beauty, so he raised the bid to 30,000 dirhams. The 'arif said:
"I'll go down to the son of Iftikhar and tell him".
When the son told to shaykh Suhrawardi what had been bid for the gem, the shaykh then took the gem, placed it on a rock and struck it with another stone until he shattered it. He said to the son of Iftikhar:
"Take these clothes and go to your father. Kiss his hand on my behalf and say to him,
'If I had wanted clothing, I'd not have been prevented from getting it'."
Quoted with some changes from pp. 52-3 from
"The Leaven of the Ancients. Suhrawardi and
the Heritage of the Greeks"
by John Walbridge.
Shaykh Suhrawardi wrote for 3 kinds of people:
1. Those not yet ready to understand philosophical arguments. These are popular Peripatetic works, like "Temples of Light" which have received a number of western translations plus commentaries.
2. Those capable of philosophical argument but not equipped to understand
the highest aspects of his illuminative philosophy. These are his allegorical stories, which are written for murids on the Sufi path. A number of western translations plus commentaries have appeared. Next to these stories advanced Peripatetic works have appeared. They are written for a dual audience: Peripatetic philosophers and 'intermediate' students of his ishraqi philosophy. I'm not quite sure, but perhaps is his "The Book of Radiance"(Partow Nama) which exists in a parallel English-Persian text, an
example of this category.
3. Those capable of learning the highest teachings from him. The beginning part of his Hikmat al-Ishraq belongs with the advanced Peripatetic works together with some criticisms of the Peripatetics. The remainder is written symbolically in the language of light and darkness. French, German and English translations plus commentaries have seen the light of day. It is meant for the disciple, and its true interpretation is unwritten, as it is in the hands of "him who arises with the Book".
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi was both a philosopher as well as a mysic. This has created lots of problems for his translators who either emphasized the philosophical aspect of his work or the Sufi part. Sometimes they completely disagree with one another in their interpretation of his teachings.
I am however convinced that the sincerity of a seeker is stronger than the disadvantage of a poorly translated work, because (s)he'll receive the necessary light.
The two books mentioned above (“The Leaven of the Ancients” and “The Wisdom of the Mystic East”) are complementing one another, and that is why a third book of John Walbridge can also be recommended. It is "The Science of Mystical Lights. Qutb al-Din Shirazi and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy”; Harvard University Press.
The third book pays attention to the life and times an important commentator, i.e. Qutb al-Din. It proceeds with a chapter on Suhrawardi's science of lights discussing it in detail during about 50 pages. The book then proceeds with paying attention to The Pearly Crown, dealing with illuminationists elements in the commentary. The final chapters deal with the soul and the "World of Image" and a conclusion which tells about the value of this philosophy. There are 6 appendixes one of which deals with the possibility that shaykh Ibn al-'Arabi influened the commentator Qutb al-Din.
Up to a certain extent you can notice from the above account and by browsing in the others books of Walbridge , that next to information right on target this material also contains many details which may supply interesting information but which is not always of practical value.
There is a difference between trying to walk the path of shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi and collecting information about his philosophy. It is possible to drown in the details, so perhaps it is best to keep the main work of the shaykh the Hikmat al-Ishraq as a guide-line along which other books can supply some necessary explanation and nothing more.
People like John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai stress the philosophical idea of the shaykh, while Henri Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr stress his "mystical" qualities. The two groups combined present a more truthful picture of the Illuminationist teachings, while each group has its own shortcomings like personal biases, etc. The personal sincerity of a seeker offers sufficient compensation for these flaws.
A Chishti pir we've met in Ajmer has never explicitly mentioned to us the teachings of shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi. He however at times spoke about possible experiences dealing with light. This had however more to do with the teachings of shaykh Najmuddin Kubra and Mawlana Jami about light. This pir was able by means of his glance to supply light to his murids.
It can be said that for a beginner with a practical interest in this path it is necessary to have a spiritual guide. Shaykh Fariduddin 'Attar tells:
Dar saaye pir shaw ke naabinaa
Aan awlaatar ke baa 'asaa gardad
Sit in the shadow of a master,
For the blind are better off with walking sticks.
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi however also (i.e. next to accepting the above) states: "There may be, on the other hand, people who are capable of intuiting many problems without a human teacher. Therefore, it is not farfetched that there exist some people with powerful intuitions who may learn much of the sciences in but a short period of time" ("The Book of Radiance"; p. 80).
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi explains the following in his "Hikmat al-Ishraq" concerning the generosity of the Light of Lights:
Generosity is giving that which is appropriate without expecting any recompense. If you seek praise or reward, then you work for a wage, as you do when you seek to be free from blame and the like. But there is nothing more generous which is light in its own reality. By its essence it reveals itself to and emanates upon every receptive one. The True King is He Who possesses the essence of everything, but Whose essence is possessed by none. He is the Light of lights.
The Chishtis often repeat this teaching:
The lover of God should be charitable like the river,
generous like the sun
and hospitable like the earth.
The quality of the sun to be emulated, is that in its generosity it shines on everyone and does not expect anything in return. A Chishti pir had the habit of translating the word 'arif (someone with deep inward realizations; a gnostic) by means of the term "enlightened". He quotes Khwaja Mo'inuddin
The enlightened showers like the sun his rays of light on all the world.
The whole world is lit bright by his light.
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi uses the words Sahib-e-basirat (the owner of inward vision) for the enlightened in his Persian "The Book of Radiance" (Partow Nama). We are indeed in need of such people!
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi explains that the path leading to knowledge of God has 3 main stages: the beginning, the middle one and the final. At each stage a special kind of light is experienced by the traveller, beginning with flashes of light and ending with the most intense experience of the Light of the heavens and the earth.
The light that illuminates your heart at the intermediate state is called serenity (sakina). It is an inner light that you may experience on the path of ma’rifa (deep inward knowledge of the Divine).
The shaykh claims that it shines upon your heart and stays for a while, and he adds that it brings about serenity in the heart. There is even more, because according to shaykh as-Suhrawardi the possessor of this serenity is endowed with the power of clairvoyance, so that you are able to read the minds of other people and know about unseen events. He makes it clear that the possessor of sakina is enabled to hear supernatural speech and is inspired by divine words.
You can easily understand that these experiences can also confuse you and can be a source of misguidance. That is why a murshid is needed to direct you towards that which is truly important for your inner development. What is more important? The answer: To move in the direction of the higher stages of the path, so that you may experience light upon light.
Source: “The Light of Sakina in Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination”;
pp. 1-28 by Dr. Nasrollah Pourjavady.
All the sages (Shaykh as-Suhrawardi mentions among the Sufis Hazrat Bayazid of Bastam and shaykh Sahl at-Tustari) walking the path of the doctrine of illumination have expressed themselves symbolically in an encoded language. Symbols are configurations of an intermediary world, which is the only way to represent higher worlds. Shaykh Suhrawardi walks the path of light with companions who lived many centuries before him. He writes this in his “Hikmat al-Ishraq”:
I have all who walk in support on God’s path for support in everything that I have taken into account of the Pure Lights (or beings of Light), as well as all the rest. This high knowledge was indeed the ultimate experience (dhawq) of Plato, the Imam and leader of those who have wisdom, a man endowed with great force and interior light.
Such was also the case with Hermes before him, the Father of all sages, up to Plato himself, and also eminent philosophers, pillars of theosophic wisdom, like Empedocles, Pythagoras and still others. However, the doctrine of these ancient sages was presented in the cipher of symbols, so there is no refuting it. When someone claims to have an argument with the exoteric appearance (zahir) of their doctrines, then their true intentions are never encountered, because symbols cannot be refuted.
However, the basic oriental doctrine, the one concerning Light and Darkness, the doctrine that constitutes the very teachings of the sages of ancient Persia, such as Jamasp, Frashaoshtra, Bozorgmehr and still others before them is founded precisely on symbol. This was not the doctrine on which the impiety of the dualistic Magi (Majus) or Mani’s deviation was founded.
Source: Henri Corbin’s “En Islam Iranien”
volume 2; pp. 51-2.
The above flash has been commented upon. It starts with a critical attitude towards the dualistic Magi. Here it is:
The doctrine of Orientals (ahl al-Sharq) is founded on the symbol. The sages of ancient Persia professed the existence of two Principles (asl) of which one is light and the other darkness. These are respectively the symbols of being in its necessity and being in its non-necessity. Light represents (qa’im maqam) necessary being, Darkness that of non-necessary being. The absolute first Principle never redoubles itself into two principles, one Light and the other Darkness.
This no penetrating mind has ever maintained and it was also the weighty reason that the elite of the sages of Persia (fozala Fars) fathomed the depths of the ontological sciences. This is why our Prophet (Mohammed) said in their praise: ‘Science will be suspended from the Pleiades and the men of Persia will attain it’. Their high sciences and their doctrines are precisely those that Suhrawardi has revived in the present book.
It was apparently also the ultimate experience of the elite of the Greek sages, because the two communities (Greek and Persian) agree on this principle. Those (the Persians) were, for example Jamasp, Zoroaster’s diciple, Frashaoshtra (the brother of Jamasp and Zoroaster’s father in law) and more recently Bozorgmehr (he was the chief physician and minister of the Sassanid king Khusraw Anushravan). Their predecessors were the kings Gayomart (the primordial Man), Tahmuras (a legendary hero), Fereydun, Key Khusraw and Zoroaster, a number of high ranking kings and prophets.
Certainly, various vicissitued have ruined their high sciences; the most disastrous even was the loss of their sovereignty and the loss of their books by the fire caused by Alexander. However, after attaining certain aspects and noticing their agreement with things that appear to spiritual perception and intuitive vision (kashfiya shohudiya), the author has tested their excellence and laboured to achieve it.
Source: Ibid.; pp 52-3.
Attainment in this field is not required without satisfying a rigorous requirement. Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi formulates this in an impressive way:
Briefly, the Hakim muta’allih (sophianic sage) is the one for whom the body has become like a tunic, which is now taken off and then put on again. No one can be counted among them when this sacrosanct leaven is ignored [the shaykh refers to the double leaven of the sages of ancient Persia and the Pythagoreans as mentioned in flash 7], and this dressing and undressing [of the body] has not been tested.
After that they can rise to the light, if they wish. If it so desires, it manifests itself in any form it wants to. As for the power granted to them, it is actualized by the light of the Orient, when it embraces one’s self (al-nur al-shariq ‘alay-hi).
Don’t you see that iron brought to incandescence by the action of the Fire resembles it, bright from its brilliance and burning from its flames? So the soul, spiritual in essence, when it submits itself to the action of the Light and clothes itself in the robe of the rising dawn, also produces the effect and action of the Light by itself.
It becomes a sign and things happen at its beckoning. It imagines and things will come about according to the image imagined. Imposters (the wizards) seduce through juggling. The enlightened ones, the Perfect ones, whose love attaches itself to what is free from all evil, these come about through the spiritual action of the Light, because they themselves are the children of the light.
Finally shaykh as-Suhrawardi states it exactly: These things can only be really understood concerning what happens in the “intermediate Orient”, i.e. the imaginal world.
Source: English translation of ibid. by Hugo M. van Woerkom;
pp. 42-3, with some minor changes.
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi informs us thus:
“Whoever knows philosophy (hikmat), and perseveres in thanking and sanctifying
the Light of Lights, will be bestowed with the Royal Light of Gloru (khorrah-e-kayani) and with the Royal Splendour of Light (farr-e-nurani), and - as we have said elsewhere – Divine Light will further bestow upon him the cloak of royal power and value. Such a person shall then become the natural Ruler of the Universe. He shall be given aid from the High Heavens, and whatever he commands shall be obeyed; and his dreams and inspirations will reach their uppermost, perfect pinnacle.
And God knows best what is true”.
Source: “The Book of Radiance”;
pp. 84-5 with some minor changes.
Shaykh Yahya as-Suhrawardi informs us thus:
“Dreams occur when your animal soul is transformed and moves away from the outer senses affecting the inner senses. And if you continually meditate upon the heavens and abstains from pleasures, including food – save in amounts that are needed for survival – and pray at night, holding vigils and read much of the Divine revelation and free your mind through thinking good thoughts and, at times, put the soul to test and carry out inward conversations with God in the High Heavens and praises Him, then lights like dazzling flashes of lightning shall be cast upon you”.
“You’ll then experience such things without interruption so the lights will appear to you even in times other than those when you are meditating. You may also behold pleasant shapes. A tremendous dazzling flash may beckon your soul to the unseen realm. Luminosity more radiant than the light of the sun shall fall upon the sensus communis, thus causing you to experience pleasure”.
Source: “The Book of Radiance”;
pp. 83-4 with some minor changes.
This continues from flash 11:
“These Flashes and Lights are no theoretical knowledge and no intellectual representations. No indeed, these are hieratic irradiations (i.e. of the spiritual world). The spiritual world is all the lights in a state separate from matter. There is absolutely no limit, in power and splendour, to the Light of the Necessary Being and of Intelligence.”
“For souls in the other world it is far more manifest than perceptible objects are seen in this world. It is a Light more splendid than other splendours of light. The light of spiritual beings is not something that is added to their essence; no, they are Light, Light in a state separate from matter, as the luminous sage-philosophers claim after their own visionary experience”.
Source: Henri Corbin’s “En Islam Iranien”
volume 2; p. 96 and p. 62 of the English translation
by Hugo M. van Woerkom.
You probably will not know the “Risalat Qawanin Hikam al-Ishraq ila kull as-Sufiya”. It is a composition containing maxims of illumination addressed to all the Sufis. The author, shaykh Abu al-Mawahib ash-Shadhili was born presumably in Cairo. He has long been remembered because of his qualities as a teacher and preacher of elegance, piety, devotion and righteousness. His domicile was near the Azhar University on the roof of which he had a place of retreat (khalwa).
So deeply engrossed he was in his writings, discourses and meditations that a kind of intoxication always seemed to govern his physical being. Therefore, while walking and swaggering about the Azhar mosque, he often drew from men various kinds of comments. To some he seemed but an idiot, to others a very holy person.
His critics were largely motivated by jealousy. On one occasion his enemies found him while he was visiting a certain mosque. They attacked him until his head was wounded and bleeding. To this he only responded with smiles, saying:
“Truly, you are my masters and I am your servant!”
It is also reported that he used to say that if you desire to depart from your evil brothers, see to it that you first depart from your wicked qualities.
Once he paid a generous sum of a hundred dinars to a tutor who had taught his son two sections of the Qur’an. Astounded at the handsome reward, the tutor suggested that he only deserved part of that sum for his services. At that the Shadhili shaykh withdrew his son from that school and remarked:
“This is a teacher who thinks too much of worldly goods!”
His ideas about ishraq can be summed up as follows: He once declared that whatever degree of ‘illumination’ the seeker after truth may attain, is the result of remembrance (dhikr), which illumines the mirror of the heart. All that reveals God to you is light and all that fails to reveal Him is darkness.
Source: “Illumination in Islamic Mysticism”
by Edward Jabra Jurji; pp. 21-22.
Shaykh as-Suhrawardi presents us with this light-bestowing prayer
and may all of us benefit therefrom:
O Deity of the worlds! O eternally Subsistent!
Strengthen us with the light,
Maintain us in the light,
Assemble us under the light.
Make the end of our pursuits in accord with Your will.
May our ultimate aim be the one which prepares us to meet You.
We have troubled our souls,
Though You are never avaricious with Your superabundance.
Those who are imprisoned in darkness
Stand at Your portal awaiting mercy
And seeking liberation from captivity.[...]
Bless us in our remembrance [of You]
And remove evil from us.
Give success to the right-doers.
Peace be on the Chosen and all his family.
Source: p. 77 of "The Illuminative Philosophy"
of the Mevlevi shaykh Isma'il of Ankara.
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Ornamental grass has become quite popular in home landscapes. These tolerant plants require little care and can handle most soil conditions. Ornamental grasses come in an array of styles and sizes ranging from low-growing mounds to tall, majestic columns as large as a tree. Learning how to cut ornamental grasses begins with understanding the growth pattern of this type of plant. Having the proper equipment on hand makes the chore of cutting ornamental grass easy for this low-maintenance plant.
Wear gloves and protective clothing to prevent scratches and cuts from sharp strands of ornamental grass.
Schedule your pruning during the late spring before the ground has really warmed up after winter. Ornamental grasses don't need to be trimmed at the end of the growing season. Many gardeners choose to leave the brown grasses during winter to add some color and interest in the garden.
Examine the base of the ornamental grass by moving the leaves apart. Look for new, bright green shoots appearing around the very center base of the plant. Time your pruning when these new shoots reach 2 to 4 inches in height.
Secure a length of twine around taller stalks of ornamental grass to make trimming easier. Tie the twine about 2 feet above the garden surface to hold the clump in place for trimming.
Choose the correct tool for cutting your type of ornamental grass. Long-handled pruning shears work well for smaller clumps of grass and tall thin plantings. Use hedge clippers for dense bunches of grass and a chain saw for large mass plantings.
Cut at least 2 to 4 inches above new growth. Direct your trimming parallel to the garden surface to obtain a straight shearing cut across the entire clump of ornamental grass. Outer portions of the ornamental grass do not need to be trimmed shorter than the inside. Avoid cutting the new shoots since this may cause a hatched appearance as the leaves grow out. Remaining strands of dried grass will be hidden by new growth when the plant fills out.
Rake any dead strands from inside the clumps of grass to provide plenty of room for new shoots to grow. Discard dead grasses in the compost pile or in yard waste bags for recycling.
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Frac. Res. Banking
Throughout history, no fiat money system has stood the test of time. All attempts to substitute paper money for gold and silver have ended in the total destruction and debasement of the currency and a collapse of the economy. Argentina and Zimbabwe are modern life examples.
Click on the picture left to listen to: Economic Recessions, Banking Reform and the Future of Capitalism
While bankers do control the issuance of credit, they cannot control themselves. Bankers are the fatal flaw in their deviously opaque system that has substituted credit for money and debt for savings. The bankers have spread their credit-based system across the world by catering to basic human needs and ambition and greed; and while human needs can be satisfied, ambition and greed cannot - and the bankers' least of all. Aug 25, 2008 - Darryl Robert Schoon
Those who don’t like reading can watch this light hearted You-Tube video clip:
To have a better understanding of the mechanism, one first needs to understand the difference between Loan Contracts and Deposit Contracts.
In case of a Deposit contract, as funds are deposited within the banking system the depositor entrusts the bank to guard the funds and to return these to the depositor at any moment he should ask for it. The fundamental purpose of this contract is the safekeeping of the funds. Hence, for this service it is possible that in some cases the depositor has to pay a fee for the custody. An example is a bank or a broker holding securities for a customer. For simple deposits of cash money, banks traditionally do not ask a fee but rather pay a small interest.
A deposit is also an irregular deposit. In other words, the bank has the obligation to always keep available to the depositor goods of the same quality and quantity as those received. The logic behind this is that the safekeeping obligation requires the continuous availability to the depositor of a 100 % cash reserve.
Important is that the availability of the goods cannot be transferred and a 100 % cash reserve has to be kept at all times. In other words, there is no fractional reserve banking possible.
In case of a Loan contract, funds are deposited within the banking system but can be lend out to a 3rd entity that has to return the initial deposit and has to pay interest as agreed between parties. In other words, in this case, the availability of the good is shifted from the lender to the borrower for the duration of the contract. (ex. Fiduciary deposits)
Today as $/€ 100 is deposited into the banking system and as there is practically no obligation to keep a 100 % of availability of the funds (Banks have come to a point where they operate with fresh funds lend to them by the Federal Reserve/National Banks), the cash reserve is close to *zero and even negative. Hence, the bankers’ fraudulent activity can be (as long as it is not discovered and banks do not fail) expanded exponentially. In other words, a bank deposit of $/€ 100 ends up as $/€ 999 of freshly created money. In fact, the present situation has even become worse since money has become “debt”.
Additionally, both kind of money contracts (deposits and loans) are used in a similar way to increase the creation of fresh money.
Federal/National banks or centralization is something that was already used (and failed) by the Egyptians. The process has always been the same. After a pronounced inflationary boom (hyperinflation) there was a confidence crisis, a drop in the value of money and a failure of banks. This pattern can be seen over and over again in Egypt, Greece and later in the Roman Empire. In those days, instead of printing more money, they simply debased the monetary system by taking more and more gold and/or silver out of the coins in circulation. Each recession lasted until the supply of cash and credit money approached its pre-crisis level.
Each time we have the creation of money/credit that is unbacked by real savings, entrepreneurs receive false signals, and the so created fresh money is misallocated. In other words, it is NOT used in those sectors of the economy where it is most needed. We see Bubbles. A modern example is the Real Estate sector compared to the food commodity sector. Although there was no real shortage of Real estate, and because interest rates stayed low for so long, a self feeding price bubble was initiated. The price of real estate began to rise abnormally because of cheap credit and more and more funds were allocated to this sector. Other sectors, like Energy-Oil and food became uninteresting. Oil refineries were not modernized and no new ones were built. Hence we not only see higher prices as a result of monetary inflation, but also because of an inequilibrium of supply and demand.
As life gets more and more expensive, more home owners have to foreclosure and more builders go out of business. We have a Credit Crunch because credits were incorrectly allocated by the banks. Federal/National banks have to move in to avoid a run on the Banks (Northern Rock) which would inevitably bring down the whole system. This action liquefies the bad debt of the banking system as it is taken over in exchange for fresh money. By doing this, even more monetary inflation is created. At the same time, because of the credit crunch, less and less credit is allocated and banks (Fortis) try to increase their capital in order to regain a positive leverage on their own funds and deposits and in an effort to dilute the pain over a larger number of shareholders.
But the vicious circle has been closed. The banking system has ended between a rock and a hard plate. Either they stop creating money and interest rates will jump up today hereby pushing the economy into a depression, or more fiat money will be created insuring we end up in a hyperinflation cycle. The coming hyperinflation will then result in a confidence crisis, high interest rates and a depression and a destruction of the monetary system. This will last until the supply of cash and credit money approach its pre-crisis level. As a conclusion, we can say that interest rates are to increase in all cases!
In other words, as the Gold window was closed in 1971, the worst case scenario is that we could see a Dow Jones level back as low as 1000! The bright side is that at that time the Dow Jones will still exist and that bank deposits may be whipped out. This is certainly a situation Zimbabweans understand.
History shows over and over again that any lasting economic boom is based on real savings and not on Fiat Money. Only Real Savings ensure the prices for goods and services are optimized.
The Municipal Bank of Amsterdam(1609-1770) is the life proof that banking with a 100 % reserve ratio works. When John Law started his crazy inflationary politics in 1720, the deposits totaled 28,000,000 florins and the stock of cash 27,000,000. Only in 19th century the bank started to become corrupt.
Thanks to John Law, France is one of the countries where citizens hold the most Gold. Also, it was after a request of General de Gaulle , at the time he was president of France, to have the American debt paid into gold that in 1971 Pres. Nixon closed the gold window).
The bank’s failure to comply with a 100% reserve ratio on demand deposits bring about a situation where and depositors and borrowers simultaneously believe they can use the same money at the same time. Such a thing is only possible for liquid money.
The fiat money created as a result of fractional reserve banking is detrimental to third parties, who suffer from the damage caused by the banker’s activities.
Updated September 13, 2010
"The Fed is in the most unusual position of providing vast amounts of cash to the banking system - to such an extent that, instead of holding reserves deposited by member banks, the Fed is now a huge supplier of funds to the banks! The fractional reserve banking system has been turned upside down!"
With free capital markets, investment capital flows in increased amounts to the more profitable industries and producers, and in decreased amount to the less profitable declining industries and producers. Thereby the unencumbered free market also regulates the allocation of capital to meet the changing needs of the consumers.
In an economy with fractional reserve banking, where commercial banks are guaranteed against failure by central banks and receive credit at below market interest rates, the market restraints are replaced by opposite forces. This theory is exactly the opposite from the Keynesian monetary one which is followed by most modern economists and politicians.
The so created new money goes first to government, then to government employees, subsidy-beneficiaries (war industry) and suppliers. They are the ones who benefit from inflation, to virtually else’s detriment. Private enterprises and savers are the ones most victimized. They pay the highest prices and are the most damaged by the false signals and distortions caused by inflation.
Artificially low interest rates motivate businessmen to increase their investments; simultaneously, they discourage savings on the part of the public. And these savings are in fact badly needed for a sound economy and healthy financial system. Additionally, financial (Banks) entrepreneurs manufacture new leveraged (leverage works in two directions) financial products (CDO’s) to attract the investors. As long as the boom is in place, all goes well and the leverage improves the results. However, once the a recession starts, the leverage works against the financial entrepreneurs (read Hedge funds and Bankers). We have a CREDIT CRUNCH.
*Note: Since December 2006, the legal reserve rate for amounts up to $ 8.5 mio is 0 %. Up to $ 45.8 mio it is 3%. The maximum is 10%. Hence the expansion of $ 100 is a lot more than 1000!
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Children with non-specific cough (dry and non-productive cough without any other respiratory symptom, sign or systemic illness) are commonly treated with a variety of medications to treat the symptom of cough. This review examined whether there was any evidence for using leukotriene receptor antagonist in children with non-specific cough. There were two randomised controlled trials that included, but was not restricted to, children with non-specific cough, whereby no significant advantage over placebo was found in both studies. There is no RCT evidence to support the routine use of leukotriene receptor antagonist for the symptom of non-specific cough in children. Further research examining the effects of this treatment using child appropriate cough outcome measures is needed.
With the lack of evidence, the routine use of LRTA in treating children with non-specific cough cannot be recommended.
Non-specific cough is defined as non-productive cough in the absence of identifiable respiratory disease or known aetiology. It is commonly seen in paediatric practice. These children are treated with a variety of therapies including a variety of asthma medications. The leukotriene pathway is reported to be involved in the sensory (neurogenic) pathway, which is a mechanism thought to be involved in the pathogenesis of chronic cough.
To evaluate the effectiveness of leukotriene receptor antagonist (LTRA) in treating children with prolonged non-specific cough.
The Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), the Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register, MEDLINE and EMBASE databases were searched by the Cochrane Airways Group. The latest searches were carried out in October 2010.
All randomised controlled trials comparing LTRA with a placebo medication in children with non-specific cough.
Results of searches were reviewed against pre-determined criteria for inclusion. Two eligible trials that utilised montelukast were identified but no data was available for meta-analysis. It was not possible to separate results from children with non-specific cough from those without in one study and in the second, the groups were very small (5 in montelukast group and one in placebo group).
There was no significant difference in all study endpoints between the montelukast and placebo groups (total N=256 plus 6 from second study).
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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http://www.cochrane.org/CD005602/AIRWAYS_leukotriene-receptor-antagonist-for-prolonged-non-specific-cough-in-children
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Asthma affects every aspect of a person's life, in particular the ability to exercise. Yet regular physical exercise increases your fitness level, makes you feel better, and improves your self-esteem and confidence. This is particularly true in children. With proper detection and control of your asthma you can have an active lifestyle. Determining the correct medication and taking it appropriately are fundamental to maintaining control of asthma and will help enable you to live your life to the fullest.
Control your asthma first
Over the past several years asthma medications have been developed that can provide long-term control of the illness, as well as alleviate intermittent asthma attacks. One of the most effective is the inhaled corticosteroid, budesonide (Pulmicort®), used for treating inflammation of the airways, and the long-term management of asthma. Recently, a new medication for the control and treatment of asthma, called Symbicort®, which contains budesonide together with the fast and long-acting beta-agonist bronchodilator formoterol, was approved by Health Canada. It is indicated for regular maintenance treatment of asthma.
The combination of these 2 asthma medications in one inhaler allows for easier and more effective management of periodic asthma fluctuations. Essentially, the formoterol acts quickly to control asthma symptoms, while budesonide provides long-term control of airway inflammation. Symbicort® has the feature of flexible dosing, a unique property of this combination therapy.
The use of Symbicort® by patients with asthma has been clinically proven in several studies to improve lung function to the degree that it reduced the risk of having an asthma attack by nearly 40%. Additionally, study investigators have found that this combination therapy provided study participants with the equivalent of 60 days free of day or night symptoms, night awakenings, and rescue medication use compared to those who received budesonide (Pulmicort®) alone.
If your asthma is poorly controlled and you feel you could benefit from a change in asthma medication, consult your doctor. However, if your asthma is already well controlled, you may not need to change your medication.
Common sense tips for exercising
If you have not exercised in some time you should start slowly and gradually increase the duration or intensity of your exercise routine.
Warm up is an essential part of exercise, regardless of whether you're planning on cycling, swimming, or mountain climbing. Typically, 10 to 15 minutes of stretching exercises before you begin physical activity will help your body more easily adjust to the increased physical requirements.
Cool down is also important, and should be done 10 to 30 minutes after you exercise. Stretching or walking works well.
Avoid exercising in cold, dry, or dusty air, or placing yourself in situations that may trigger an asthma attack. And remember - take your medication with you.
67 of the 597 U.S. athletes who participated in the 1984 Olympics suffered from asthma. These athletes won 41 medals: 15 gold, 20 silver, and 6 bronze. They did it by taking care of their asthma - long-term management - taking their medications as prescribed.
Claire Sowerbutt, medical writer
in association with the MediResource Clinical Team
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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http://bodyandhealth.canada.com/channel/lung-health/asthma/exercise-asthma
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Enzyme nutrition and the food enzyme concept have given a breakthrough for health seekers, pointing out basic underlying causes of killer diseases and seeking to eradicate these causes as a supplement to palliative emergency measures.
Dr. Edward Howell has written an interesting book, "Enzyme Nutrition" that goes into detail on the food enzyme concept.
Many of these diseases basically have two causes. First is enzyme deficiency or under-nutrition. Quietly it prepares the ground in your body to speed up the developing problems of cancer, heart disease, arthritis, aging, etc.
The second cause brings us trouble when the first cause has done its work. It consists of harmful components such as carcinogens, cholesterol, bacteria, X-rays, food additives, tobacco smoke and the like. People who are getting enzyme reinforcements from outside sources have a bettr chance to deal with these destructive elements than those who don’t.
Have you ever thought of how wild animals don’t seem to have heart attacks or arthritis or breast cancer? Some would say6 that animals are free from civilized ailments because they don’t have the stress we do. But consider the wild rat facing death any moment from dogs, cats and humans. Or there’s the predator experiencing tension at getting a meal or starvation. No, we must not lose sight of the point that their relative freedom from disease is due to their living on raw, natural food with enzymes and not cooked food.
There are assertions in encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks that enzymes are not used up in doing their work. But there are many scientific reports on enzyme research in the world that hasn’t been put into textbooks of our colleges and universities that show this is not so. Instead, the scientific team MacArthur and Bailee of the University of Toronto found that each child is born with a certain amount of enzyme potential which can be either saved or used up according to the wear and tear of living at a faster or slower pace. This enzyme potential can last longer when outside supplements or raw foods are taken in.
A good source of enzyme supplements, electrically compatible to the human body, can be found here. Try them and see if you notice a difference in your health.
Go back to the Top of The Enzyme Nutrition Page.
Please note that we are affiliates for many of the products advertised on this site. This means that when you purchase an item from any of our affiliates--Amazon, for example-- we will receive a small commission. We appreciate your business!
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<urn:uuid:c9519bc6-0e43-4a8a-93d0-da8996c3b499>
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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http://www.howtobehealthynaturally.com/enzymenutrition.html
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1.Denmark is the happiest country in the world.
India ranked 122 out of 155 countries in the world.
2.It is said that carpet was a handicraft of Iran.
The messengers of Islam and traders of Iran came
to India and brought equipments of weaving carpets
along with raw materials. They made carpets and
also taught the Indians.
3.Card playing was introduced by the Chinese before
1000 AD. They reached Europe around 1360 from
Mameluke empire of Egypt.There is another theory
according to which roving Gypsies introduced them to
Europe, as they journeyed from village to village side
show and entertaining.Puritans called them ”Devil’s
tickets” and ”devil picture book.”
4.If a person slants the words to the right, he is an
extrovert, expressive and emotional in nature. If he
slants to the left, then he is an introvert and emotionally
5.The Great Wall of China, built by Ming dynasty in the
15th and 16th century stretches about 2,400 kilometres
along China’s northern border.
6.Mount Mauna Kea in Hawai is the tallest mountain on
the earth (10203 Metre)when you measure the distance between its base
and its peak. Everest’s claim to be the world’s tallest mountain
is based on the fact that its summit is the highest point
(8,848 metres)above sea level on the earth’s surface.
7.”Come” means ”less” in Hindi and ”more” means a ”peacock” in Hindi.
8.December 21 is the longest night of the year, before the days begin to
grow longer again. Romans worshipped the birthday of the Sun
on December 25 for winning over the darkness of winter. Pope
Julius Ist declared in 351AD, that the birth of Jesus would be
celebrated on the 25th December. The first recorded date of
Christmas being celebrated on December 25th was in 336 AD,
during the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was
the first Christian Roman Emperor.
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https://vanihegde.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/do-you-know-89/
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This is not a rainbow. It's a moonbow, an extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon caused by the near-full moon that it's extremely hard to catch. So hard, in fact, that you can only see its colors thanks to long-exposure photography.
It was captured by Wally Pacholka last January 20, at the Haleakala Crater on the Island of Maui, Hawaii. The moonbow—or lunar rainbow—is caused when the near-full moon at less than 42 degrees in a dark sky. The colors are so faint that the human eye color receptors can't be excited enough for the brain to identify them. Therefore, they appear as white arcs to the naked eye. Only by using long-exposure photography you can reveal the diffraction of the moonlight through the microscopic water droplets suspended in the air.
By the way, that red thing shining on the sky? It's Mars rising. Check out the rest of Wally's amazing images at [Astropics]
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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http://gizmodo.com/5467544/have-you-ever-seen-a-lunar-rainbow?tag=moonbow
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“According to the American Cancer Society, a person has a 1 in 50 chance of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma…. This type of cancer is slightly more common in men than in women.”
Although scientists are unable to pinpoint an exact cause of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, they’ve noted that people with weak immune systems are especially vulnerable.
We know that juicing boosts your immune system. Does this mean that juicing vegetables could help prevent cancer? The authors of the study, “Diet and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma risk,” believe that a poor diet causes cancer:
The role of dietary factors in the epidemiology of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) remains largely undefined. Dietary habits may play a role in the etiology of NHL by influencing the immune system.
Consumption of highest versus lowest quartile of proteins (OR, 8.088 P(trend)=0.000), fats (OR, 6.17 P(trend)=0.000) and sweets (OR, 8.806 P(trend)=0.000) were associated with a significantly increased NHL risk. The inverse association was found for fresh fruits (OR, 0.117 P(trend)=0.000) and vegetables (OR, 0.461 P(trend)=0.010).
An association between dietary intake and the risk of NHL is biologically plausible due to immunosuppressive effects of fat and animal proteins, and antioxidant properties of vegetables and fruits.
In other words, the more fruits and vegetables a person eats, the less likely he will develop cancer.
That study is an unsurprising finding. We are what we eat. We are what we juice. Consider buying the best juicer you can afford as an investment in your health.
Another study echoes that result. In, “Antioxidant intake from fruits, vegetables and other sources and risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma: the Iowa Women’s Health Study,” the scientists studied the eating habits of women with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
They tried to determine what foods best help prevent cancer. Their conclusion?
From a food perspective, greater intake of total fruits and vegetables, yellow/orange, and cruciferous vegetables, broccoli and apple juice/cider were associated with lower NHL risk; there were no strong associations for other antioxidant-rich foods, including whole grains, chocolate, tea or nuts.
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Copyright © July 1, 2013 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.
An Important Survival Food for Hard Times
All Rights Reserved.
North American Indians were eating beans and corn long before the first European settlers arrived on the North American continent. It is interesting to note that if beans and corn are both eaten during the same meal then they digest together inside the stomach and they combine to form a complete protein that helps the human body remain healthy.
Beans contain an average of 230 calories per cup of cooked beans. Beans are low in fat (less than 2%) and they contain no cholesterol. One cup of cooked beans provides an average of 60% of your daily fiber requirements, 30% protein, 14% carbohydrates, 3 vitamins, and 7 minerals. They also contain small amounts of 6 other vitamins and 2 other minerals. Complete nutritional data is near the end of this article.
Beans digest more slowly than most other foods and therefore they can help you from feeling hungry again for a longer period time. This has two significant advantages:
- Not feeling hungry could help you control your appetite and your weight.
- Not feeling hungry during a serious hard times event could help you conserve your food and not feel as if you were being forced to endure extreme hardship conditions.
Complete High Quality Proteins and Amino Acids
Milk, cheese, and eggs are complete high quality proteins.
However, beans should be eaten with a complementary protein food, such as rice, wheat, or corn. These combinations provide a balanced high quality protein that is extremely beneficial to the human body.
Some examples of high quality protein combinations are:
1. Beans with cornbread.
2. Beans inside a corn tortilla (or burrito) shell.
3. Beans inside a flour tortilla (or burrito) shell.
4. Beans and biscuits.
5. Beans and rice.
When beans are eaten with rice, wheat, or corn then they also supply essential amino acids that are needed by the human body.
Eating beans, peas, or lentils on a regular basis has been shown to reduce cholesterol, and to reduce the chance of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.
Canned Beans or Dry Beans
Canned beans are already fully cooked. However, as with most other canned food products, after opening a can of beans you should boil the beans for ten minutes to kill any potential life threatening toxins that may be in the beans. Since the beans are already fully cooked they will not require any additional water to cook them and they can be ready to eat in as little as fifteen minutes.
Dry beans must be rinsed and soaked overnight in clean water. Then the soak water must be discarded. The beans can then be cooked in fresh water for at least one hour but they will be tastier and easier to digest if they are cooked between 3 to 8 hours over very low heat. Therefore dry beans require a significant amount of water to make them edible. If you anticipate having a limited amount of clean water during a hard times event then dry beans may not be an option for your family.
One important advantage of dry beans is that they can be planted as garden seed and some of them will sprout (germinate) and they will produce a new crop of fresh beans at the end of the summer growing season. This would be a very significant advantage during a hard times event because a family could replenish one of their important food items on a continual basis year after year after year. (Note: Instructions on how to dry freshly harvested beans are included later in this article.) (Note: The percentage of dry beans that will germinate will decline each year they are in storage and after several years none of the dry beans will germinate. A dry bean germination experiment is included later in this article.)
Shelf Life of Dry Beans
A reasonable long-term food storage environment is one where the temperature remains somewhere between 60° to 75° Fahrenheit (or 15.5° to 24° C), and the area is dry and dark, and the area is free of rodents.
During their first five years of storage, dry beans will gradually lose most of their original vitamins. However, they will retain their calories, carbohydrates, protein, and minerals. This is based on research studies that have been conducted on similar foods. At the current time there are no dry beans nutritional degradation studies available to the general public.
With the passage of time dry beans will gradually and slowly become drier and drier and they will lose what little moisture they originally had and they will lose some of their natural oils. They will eventually begin to shrink and shrivel. At some point they will completely lose their ability to absorb water and when that happens then they can't be reconstituted into a normal edible bean. (Note: Some people recommend grinding the shriveled dry beans into bean flour when this happens. If you follow this advice then you must heat the bean flour to a temperature above 212° Fahrenheit (or 100° C) for a minimum of 10 minutes in whatever recipe you use the bean flour or you may get very sick from some of the toxins in the beans.)
Dry beans should be sealed in a container where the air has been replaced with nitrogen or with carbon dioxide. Or dry beans should be vacuum sealed inside a plastic container or inside a vacuum storage bag. If any one of these three storage methods is used then the following benefits will be achieved:
- Any tiny insect eggs that may be mixed in with the dry beans will die due to the lack of oxygen and this will eliminate a potential future insect infestation problem.
- Oxygen and light are the primary causes of beans losing their color. Oxygen also causes the oils in beans to become rancid. Therefore eliminating the oxygen will minimize these two problems.
- The edible shelf life of the bean will be extended well beyond ten years. Some of the companies that sell dry beans for long-term storage advertise that their storage method will extend the edible shelf life of dry beans to twenty years or more.
Two Long-Term Food Storage Experiments on Dry Pinto Beans
Experiment One (http://www.yourfamilyark.org/cooking-basic-foot-storage/dry-beanslegumes):
Some dry pinto beans were purchased in 5 gallon buckets and in #10 cans from the same supplier at the same time. The buckets and the cans of beans were divided between a brother and a sister and they were stored for 11 years in two totally different storages environments. One storage environment was appropriate for long term-food storage but the other storage environment was not acceptable for long-term food storage. After 11 years the beans that had been stored in the good storage environment looked good and they tasted delicious when they were cooked. After 11 years the beans in the poor storage environment were dark, broken, and they had a shiny appearance, and they tasted bitter when they were cooked. The conclusion drawn from this experiment was that the storage environment has a significant impact on the edible life expectancy of dry pinto beans.
Experiment Two (http://ift.confex.com/ift/2005/techprogram/paper_28584.htm):
A study by Brigham Young University reported that dry pinto beans that were canned in an oxygen free environment lost a small amount of their quality after 30 years in a controlled storage environment. Over 80% of the people on a 58-member consumer taste test panel rated the taste of the 30 year old pinto beans as being acceptable.
My Personal Experience with Aged Dry Pinto Beans
Over the past 15 years I have occasionally purchased dry pinto beans and put them into storage. A picture of some dry pinto beans randomly selected from six batches of pinto beans is shown on the right.
The temperature of the area where the dry pinto beans were stored was always between 60° to 72° F (or 15.5° to 22.2° C). The storage area was dry and dark and free from insects and rodents.
The beans were not vacuum sealed. All the beans were stored inside two plastic bags. The inner plastic bag was the same bag the beans were purchased in. The outer plastic bag was a heavy-duty zipper freezer bag. The purpose of the double bagging was to protect the beans from coming into contact with fresh air and humidity inside the food storage area.
The picture shows that dry pinto beans gradually became darker in color when they were stored in an environment that was not oxygen free. The presence of air inside the plastic storage bags allowed the beans to slowly turn dark.
I conducted two experiments on the beans that are shown in the above picture and the results from those two experiments will be summarized next.
My Cooking Experiment with Aged Dry Pinto Beans
I decided to test some of the dry pinto beans from six different bags of beans I had in storage. The beans were sorted and any broken or cracked beans were discarded. Then 100 dry pinto beans were randomly selected from each batch of beans and those beans were weighed on a scale and measured in a cup (dry weight and dry volume). The beans were then rinsed in clean water and the rinse water was discarded. The beans were then soaked in three times the volume of clean water for 10 hours. Then the soak water was discarded and the beans were weighed and measured a second time (wet weight and wet volume). Then the beans were cooked in four times as much water as beans. As the beans cooked additional water was added to the cook pot when it was needed. The beans were cooked until they were soft and tender and they could be easily pierced with a fork. When the beans were done the remaining water was drained off the beans and the beans were weighed and measured a third time (cooked weight and cooked volume). Then some of the beans were tasted and eaten. The results of my cooking experiment are summarized in the following table:
Summary Copyright © 2013 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.
Cooking Results on Six Samples of 100 Dry Pinto Beans of Different Ages
|Age of Dry Beans||Dry|
|Just Purchased|| 1.6 oz.|| 2.9 oz.|| 3.1 oz.|| 2.0 oz.|| 4.0 oz.|| 5.1 oz.|| Very Good|
|1 Year Old|| 1.5 oz.|| 2.8 oz.|| 4.1 oz.|| 1.8 oz.|| 3.8 oz.|| 4.6 oz.|| Very Good|
|2 Years Old|| 1.3 oz.|| 2.7 oz.|| 3.2 oz.|| 1.5 oz.|| 3.7 oz.|| 4.1 oz.|| Very Good|
|6.5 Years Old|| 1.5 oz.|| 2.9 oz.|| 3.8 oz.|| 2.0 oz.|| 4.0 oz.|| 5.0 oz.|| Good|
|14 Years Old|| 1.3 oz.|| 2.6 oz.|| 3.7 oz.|| 1.5 oz.|| 3.7 oz.|| 4.5 oz.|| Good|
|15 Years Old|| 1.4 oz.|| 2.6 oz.|| 3.3 oz.|| 1.8 oz.|| 3.7 oz.|| 4.2 oz.|| Good|
The beans 2 years old and younger were done after they had been cooked for 3 hours.
The beans that were 6.5 years old were done after they had been cooked for 4 hours.
The beans 14 and 15 years old were done after they had been cooked for 7 hours.
Note: If dry beans that are 2 years old or younger are slow cooked over very low heat for 7 hours then they will be so soft that they will fall apart when you try to pick them up with a fork. However, the dry beans that were 14 and 15 years old were cooked for 7 hours over very low heat and only about 1/3 of the beans were so soft that they fell apart, and about 2/3 of the beans were still slightly firm and they required a small amount of pressure to penetrate them with the prongs of a fork.
The above experiment shows that dry pinto beans will absorb their original weight in water during soaking, which means they will double in weight and in size. After they are fully cooked they will have absorbed an additional 30% of water weight. Soaking the beans in water and cooking the beans does not add to their nutritional value. Soaking and cooking only increases the weight and volume of the original dry beans.
The above experiment also suggests that as dry pinto beans gradually age it will take more time to properly cook them so they can be eaten and digested.
The experiment also suggests that the taste of cooked pinto beans will gradually decline the longer the dry beans remain in storage. However, I was the only individual who participated in the above taste test so this taste information is only an opinion and it is nothing more than an opinion.
The edibility of dry beans is related to the ability of the dry beans to absorb water. If the beans can absorb water then they will reconstitute (or rehydrate) properly, and they will cook properly, and they will be soft enough to eat and to digest. As dry beans age they will gradually lose some of their original moisture. At some point in time they will begin to shrivel and shrink and they will become so hard that they can no longer absorb moisture. When this happens the beans are no longer suitable for cooking. However, it may be possible to grind the shriveled dry beans into bean flour and then thoroughly cook the bean flour in a recipe to make them edible. Since I keep my dry beans in a reasonable environment for food storage, I have never had any dry beans reach this shriveled state. Therefore I cannot make any comment on the advantages or the shortcomings of grinding shriveled dry beans into flour.
My Germination (Sprouting) Experiment with Aged Dry Pinto Beans
The following results are from another experiment I conducted to determine the impact of age on the average germination percentage of dry pinto beans. Six samples of 100 dry beans were selected from six different bags of pinto beans that had been stored for different periods of time. The beans were selected on a random basis from a handful of beans taken from each bag of beans. The only beans that were discarded were beans that were broken or cracked. The beans were soaked in clean lukewarm water for one hour. Then the beans were placed between two damp paper towels to give them a chance to sprout. The paper towels were kept damp during the entire experiment. The temperature inside the germination room varied between 74° to 78° F (or 23.3° to 25.6° C) during the experiment. The following table summarizes the results after seven days of germination:
Summary Copyright © 2013 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.
Total Percent of Dry Pinto Beans that Sprouted After the Following Number of Days
|Age of Dry Beans||1 Day||2 days||3 Days||4 Days||5 Days||6 days|| 7 Days|
|Just Purchased|| 0%|| 13%|| 52%|| 73%|| 88%|| 93%|| 95%|
|1 Year Old|| 0%|| 19%|| 46%|| 79%|| 92%|| 95%|| 95%|
|2 Years Old|| 0%|| 14%|| 62%|| 78%|| 86%|| 91%|| 91%|
|6.5 Years Old|| 0%|| 0%|| 4%|| 21%|| 36%|| 48%|| 52%|
|14 Years Old|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|
|15 Years Old|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|| 0%|
The quality of the original dry beans evaluated in the above experiment was impacted by a variety of different variables over which I had no control, such as: the average growing conditions during the year in which the beans were grown (amount of rainfall, amount of sunshine, and the average daily temperature), the amount and quality of fertilizer used, and the type of crop that was grown in that soil the previous year. I had no control over these variables but they had an impact on the quality of the dry beans that were available for sale in the years that I purchased dry beans. Another variable over which I had no control was how old the dry beans actually were when they were offered for sale at the grocery store.
The above experiment suggests that dry beans will retain a germination rate in excess of 90% during their first two years of storage and they will retain a germination rate of approximately 50% after 6.5 years in storage. However, sometime after 6.5 years and before 14 years the germination rate of dry beans will drop to zero.
This is extremely important and useful information to anyone who is relying on their dry beans to provide healthy nutritious food for their family, and who also intends to use some of their dry beans as seeds to grow a fresh crop of beans.
This also suggests that a prudent person should periodically replace any seeds they have in storage. If you purchased your seeds several years ago, then their germination rate at this time may be extremely low or zero. This is a common mistake some people make when they purchase a "Complete Set of Vegetable Seeds Vacuumed Sealed in a #10 Can" from a supplier. They believe those canned seeds will be good for planting for a much longer period of time than they actually are. Hopefully you will not make this mistake.
Never eat any type of raw bean or ground dry beans (bean flour) that has not been properly prepared and thoroughly cooked.
Sprouting: The Chinese sprout mung beans and then they cook the sprouted beans in a variety of different ways. It is not safe to eat a raw bean that has been sprouted and not cooked. Most bean varieties should never be sprouted for human consumption.
The beans that contain the highest levels of undesirable chemicals are kidney beans, soy beans, and lima beans.
Uncooked or undercooked lima beans can cause red blood cells to cluster together. However, properly soaking and cooking dry lima beans will neutralize the compound that causes this problem.
Kidney beans and soy beans are the most difficult beans for the human body to digest. You should never sprout kidney beans.
All dry beans contain some chemicals that are harmful to the human body. One of these toxins is called "phytohaemagglutinin" or PHA. Kidney beans contain an estimated 10 to 20 times more of this toxin than other types of beans.
If you eat raw or undercooked kidney beans then in three hours (or less) you may experience nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Your natural immune system will usually eliminate this toxin from your body through vomiting and diarrhea, and you will recover in approximately 3 or 4 hours after the symptoms first appeared. However, you should seek assistance from a licensed medical professional whenever you have symptoms such as these.
The undesirable chemicals in dry beans can be easily leached out of the beans by soaking the beans in water, discarding the soak water, and then thoroughly cooking the beans in fresh water until they are well done. Cooking will neutralize any trace amounts of undesirable chemicals that may still be in the beans after soaking.
Caution: If you grow your own beans in a home garden then you should resist the temptation to eat a few of your raw beans as you harvest them. The few raw beans you eat could make you sick.
Dry Bean Varieties Not Recommended for Long-Term Food Storage: Dry kidney beans, dry lima beans, and dry soy beans are not recommended for long-term food storage. In addition, extra care should be used when preparing these beans for human consumption. If you already have some dry kidney beans, dry lima beans, or dry soy beans as part of your long-term storage foods then you may wish to gradually prepare, cook, and eat these beans in a safe manner and rotate them out of your long-term storage foods. As you gradually consume these beans then you can replace them with dry pinto beans because dry pinto beans are better for long-term storage.
Dry Beans Available for Sale at a Grocery Store
This information might be printed on a bag of beans. It refers to how often the beans were processed through the automated equipment that removes foreign particles from the beans, such as small sticks or small rocks. In my opinion double cleaning is adequate. Triple cleaning is fine but I suspect it is done primarily for advertising and marketing purposes because I cannot tell any difference between double cleaned and triple cleaned dry beans. I have also noticed that some of the different brands of dry beans no longer print the number of times the beans were cleaned on the plastic bag. This is probably the result of trying to reduce the total cost of processing the dry beans in order to keep the selling price of the dry beans as low as possible.
Double or Triple Cleaned
How to Grow Beans in a Home Garden
Soak the dry beans for one hour in lukewarm water. Remove the beans from the water and place the beans inside a damp cloth towel (or between two damp paper towels). Then place them in a warm dark spot. Keep the towel moist while the beans are germinating. Sometime between 4 to 7 days the beans will sprout if they are capable of sprouting. Plant the sprouted beans 1 inch deep about 6 inches apart in warm soil (at least 60º F or 16º C). Plant different bean varieties at least 150 feet apart.
One advantage of pinto beans is that it takes pinto beans somewhere between 60 to 90 days to grow from planting to maturity depending on your soil, rainfall, and daily temperatures. Most other bean varieties require between 85 to 115 days to grow from planting to maturity.
How to Dry Freshly Harvested Beans
Most beans, such as pinto beans and navy beans, do not require any special effort to dry them for future consumption. Pick the bean pod when the beans are fully mature. Maturity normally occurs when the exterior bean pod has turned brown but the pod has not yet split open. Pick the entire bean pod and leave the beans inside their pods for about two weeks at normal room temperatures to give the beans a chance to continue to harden and to protect them from a multitude of insects. Then remove the beans and discard the pods. The beans will continue to dry at normal room temperatures. If you can't dent a bean when you bite down on it then it is dry enough for long-term storage.
How to Vacuum Seal Dry Beans
If you purchase dry beans from a grocery store then you may leave them inside the plastic bags in which they were purchased. Place the bag of beans inside a vacuum bag of a slightly larger size. Punch three or four small holes or slits along the side of the inner plastic bag that will be facing the opening in the vacuum bag so that all the air can be sucked out of the plastic bag that contains the beans.
If you have freshly grown dry beans then you may simply fill a vacuum storage bag to within 2 or 3 inches of the top of the vacuum bag so the bag can still be properly sealed.
The quantity of dry beans that you seal in a single vacuum bag should be no more than what you believe your family will eat during one month. This will allow you to open and consume your dry beans gradually over a long period of time and you will not need to worry about insects or humidity destroying your dry beans before your family can eat them all.
On the outside of the vacuum bag you should use a permanent ink marker to write the name of the bean variety and the date the beans were vacuum sealed.
Vacuum Sealer Recommendation
In my opinion, the "Ziploc" brand Vacuum Sealer is currently the best value on the market at a cost of about $50. You press down on both sides of the vacuum sealer to lock it into position. After sealing a bag, you press in on the two release buttons on each side of the sealer to release the bag. This is a simple, basic Vacuum Sealer but it is the best one I have owned over the years. In the past I have owned the "Seal-a-Meal" brand and the "Food Saver" brand Vacuum Sealers and they both worked extremely well until they gradually wore out. My "Ziploc" Vacuum Sealer has not worn out yet and I am still very pleased with its performance. I also strongly recommend the "Ziploc" Vacuum Seal bags over the other brands that are currently available.
How to Store Vacuum Sealed Dry Beans
Vacuum sealed dry beans may be stored inside plastic totes, or plastic buckets, or any other suitable storage container that has a lid and that will keep light, insects, and rodents out of the container. The containers need to be stored in a cool, dry, dark area.
How to Cook Dry Beans
If you have more than one cook pot then you should select a pot, or a sauce pan, that has the following three characteristics:
Cook Pot Selection
- It should have a non-stick coating.
- It should have a lid or cover.
- It should be of the optimum size for cooking the quantity of beans you wish to prepare.
- Best Size: When you add the dry beans and the water to the pot then the pot should be approximately one-half full, more or less.
- Too Small: If you use a smaller pot then the water will be closer to the top of the pot and the pot may boil over onto the stove as the beans are cooking. This not only creates a mess on your stove top but you also lose some of the nutrients that were cooked out of the beans into the water.
- Too Big: If you use a larger pot then the water will be spread out over a wider area near the bottom of the pot. This will result in more of the water being lost to evaporation as the beans cook because the surface area of the water is bigger than it needs to be. This means you will need to add water more often and in larger quantities. It also increases the chance that all of the water in the pot will evaporate and then the beans will burn on the bottom of the pot.
Processing and Cooking Instructions for Dry Beans
Dry beans will expand between 2 to 3 times when cooked depending on the type of bean. Please keep this in mind when planning your meals.
After the beans are cooked, do not discard the water the beans were cooked in. That water contains healthy nutrients that were cooked out of the beans. The bean water may be consumed as soup, or the bean water may be consumed as you eat the beans.
1. Sorting and Rinsing:
Look through your dry beans and remove any small foreign particles such as tiny sticks, stones, or other debris. Rinse the dry beans thoroughly and discard the rinse water.
2. Soaking or Rehydrating:
Do not soak lentils, split peas, black-eyed peas, or mung beans.
Overnight Soak Method (Recommended): For each cup of dry beans, add two or three cups of pure water. If fresh pure water is easily available then use three cups of water per cup of dry beans. However, if fresh water is not readily available then you may use two cups of water per cup of dry beans. The advantage of the extra water is that the extra water can more easily and quickly absorb the undesirable chemicals from the beans.
Soak the beans overnight (between 8 to 14 hours) in a cool place. Drain the beans and discard the soak water because the soak water will contain the undesirable chemicals that have been leeched out of the beans. The soak water will also contain a small quantity of healthy nutrients but those nutrients will be mixed in with the undesirable chemicals and therefore the soak water should be discarded for health and safety reasons.
Quick Soak Method (for educational purposes only): Cover the beans with either two or three times as much pure water as the beans and bring the water to a boil. Boil for two minutes and then remove the pot from the heat, cover the pot, and allow the beans to soak for between 1 to 4 hours as the water gradually cools down. Drain the beans, discard the water, add fresh water, and cook. (Caution: The short boiling time may activate bacteria spores that may present in the beans. If this happens then allowing the beans to soak in a warm water solution would accelerate the growth of the bacteria. Therefore I do not recommend the quick soak method.)
Special Soaking Instructions for Kidney Beans: Change the soaking water at least three times while the kidney beans are soaking.
If beans are not thoroughly cooked then they are more difficult to chew and digest, and they will generate more gas during the digestive process.
Amount of Water to Add: Measure your dry beans in a measuring cup. Pour the dry beans into your cook pot. Then add four times as much pure water as dry beans. (Note: Some cooks prefer to only add two or three times the water. But I simmer the beans over very, very low heat for a long period of time and therefore I require more water than some cooks.)
Toxin Neutralization: In order to neutralize any minor amounts of toxins that may still be present in the beans after soaking, bring the beans in the cook pot to a boil and boil the beans for ten minutes, without any cover on the pot. Then reduce the heat to a simmer and put a cover on the pot.
Optional Seasonings During Cooking: Thinly sliced strips of meat (beef or ham or pork or bacon), or chopped onions, or chopped celery may be added while the beans are simmering. This will allow the beans to fully absorb these flavors while they are cooking.
Do not add salt or acids (tomatoes, catsup, wine, or vinegar) to the beans while they are cooking. These items slow down the cooking and softening process. You may add salt and acids (tomatoes or catsup) after the beans are fully cooked.
Slow Cooking (recommended): After reducing the heat to a very, very low simmer, put a lid or cover on the cook pot. At least once per hour stir the beans while they are cooking. The slower the beans are cooked, the easier it is to digest them. Slowly simmer the beans over very low heat for between 3 to 8 hours. Under normal cooking conditions the beans will be done in 4 hours or less. If you cook the beans longer than 4 hours then the beans become very soft and they will require almost no chewing and they will be very easy for most people to digest.
Fast Cooking (not recommended): The minimum cooking time for beans over medium low heat is 60 to 90 minutes. Soybeans should be cooked for three hours.
How to Add More Water: To prevent scorching you will probably need to add water to the beans as they cook because some of the water will be absorbed into the beans and some of the water will evaporate due to the heat. Do not add cool water or cold water to the beans while they are cooking because the cool water shock will toughen the beans and if this happens then they will require a longer cooking time and the beans will be a little harder to digest. Instead heat the extra water in a separate cook pot and then pour the hot water into the bean pot.
Maximum Cooking Temperature: If possible, do not cook beans at a temperature higher than 167 degrees Fahrenheit (or 75° C).
Total Cooking Time: Older dry beans will require a longer cooking time than freshly harvested dry beans. Therefore you should test your beans periodically as you cook them. The first test should be done after 90 minutes of slow simmering. Then continue to test the beans every thirty minutes until they are cooked to your satisfaction.
Cooked Bean Test: When a bean is soft and it can be easily mashed with a fork using just a little pressure, and the bean can be easily pierced with the prongs of a fork using just a little pressure, then the bean is done. However, some people prefer for their beans to be a little firmer than this, and some recipes require the beans to be a little firmer than this. Therefore you will need to decide when the beans are done based on your requirements.
Optional Seasonings After Cooking: After the beans are fully cooked then you may add salt, tomatoes, wine, vinegar, or any other acidic ingredient. Then simmer the beans over very low heat for a short period of time to give the beans a chance to absorb the new flavors.
My Favorite Bean Varieties
Black beans (or turtle beans) are good in any Mexican recipe, or with white rice and diced raw onions.
Great northern beans are white beans and they are good in baked recipes.
Navy beans are white beans and they are good as baked beans or in soups. They are also excellent when ground into bean flour. Fresh dry navy beans, or slightly aged dry navy beans, or older dry navy beans may all be used to make bean flour.
Pinto beans are pink beans with brown spots. Pinto beans are good in any Mexican recipe, or as refried beans, or in chili.
How to Salvage Old Beans
Bean Flour: Grind older beans into bean flour. Navy beans make the best bean flour.
Freezing: Soak and then cook old beans thoroughly. Wait for the beans to cool down to room temperature. Then freeze the beans. Freezing will rupture the exterior of the bean and this will make the beans tastier and easier to digest when you reheat them for eating.
Pressure Cooking: Pressure cook the beans following the directions that came with your pressure cooker.
How to Make Bean Flour
Bean flour may be substituted for 1/4 of the wheat flour required in a recipe.
Never grind dry beans and then simply mix them with hot water to make refried beans. All bean flour must be cooked or baked at a temperature that exceeds 212° F (or 100° C) until all of the bean flour has reached this temperature (or higher) for a minimum of ten minutes.
Some wheat grinders will process dry beans and some wheat grinders will not process dry beans. The instructions that came with your wheat grinder will usually tell you what types of grains and seeds can be ground without damaging the grinder. The instructions will also usually tell you what you should not grind in the grinder.
Almost any dry bean can be ground into bean flour. However, most people prefer to grind navy beans or great northern beans into flour because these beans are white beans and they blend well with hard white wheat flour without being noticeably visible.
Place the beans in the hopper and process them the same way you would wheat berries. If you wish to use them in a bread recipe then you should set the grinding adjustment to a fine grind. However, if you wish to use them as a thickener in a soup or stew then set the grinding adjustment to a course grind.
Hand Crank Grain Grinders
For a potential future hard times event I suggest you have a manual hand crank grain grinder that can process wheat berries, dry corn, and dry beans.
Information about bean grinders and grain grinders is on my website here.
A Few Simple Bean Recipes
Black Beans, White Rice, and Diced Raw Onions: Cook the beans and rice separately. Serve the cooked black beans in one bowl, the cooked white rice in a second bowl, and the diced raw onions in a third bowl. Then let each person transfer as much as they want from each bowl onto their plate. Some people prefer to eat these three items separately, but at the same meal. Other people prefer to mix these three items together on their plate and then eat them all at the same time.
Bean Casserole: 1 cup cooked navy beans, 1 cup cooked corn, 1 cup finely diced tomatoes, 1 teaspoon grated onion, 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt. Mix everything together and pour into a greased casserole baking pot. Sprinkle browned bread crumbs over the top of the mixture and cover the pot. Bake covered in a preheated 350º F (or 177º C) oven for 45 minutes.
Baked Beans: 2 cups cooked pinto beans, 1/4 cup diced onion, 3 tablespoons catsup, 2 tablespoons molasses (or 1 tablespoon brown sugar and 1 tablespoon honey), 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup boiling water (bean water or fresh water), 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce (the sauce is optional), and 6 slices of bacon. Cut each bacon slice into four pieces. Fry the bacon pieces in a skillet until they are approximately half done (not brown or crisp). Mix everything together except the bacon. Pour the mixture into a greased casserole baking pot. Place the half cooked bacon pieces evenly over the top of the mixture. Cover the pot. Bake covered in a preheated 250º F (or 121º C) oven for 6 hours.
Dutch Oven Campfire Beans: Dig a hole in the ground that is 6 inches deeper and 2 inches wider than your Dutch Oven. Build a fire in the bottom of the hole and build another fire beside the hole and wait for the two fires to burn down into red hot coals. Place the ingredients for Baked Beans (above recipe) into a Dutch Oven and put the lid onto the Dutch Oven. When the red hot coals in the bottom of the hole are about 2 inches deep then place the Dutch Oven on top of the coals. Push the red hot coals from the fire that is beside the hole into the hole around the outside of the Dutch Oven and onto the top of the Dutch Oven. Transfer the original dirt that you removed from the hole onto the top of the hot coals above the Dutch Oven so the entire Dutch Oven is covered with at least 3 or 4 inches of dirt. Wait six hours. Carefully remove the dirt and any coals that may still be hot, and then carefully lift the Dutch Oven out of the hole by its handle.
Refried Beans: Cook dry pinto beans over very low heat for 6 hours. The beans will be so soft and tender that they can be easily mashed with a serving spoon to create refried beans. Or if you have leftover beans from a previous meal then mash them with a fork or spoon and then reheat them to yield refried beans.
Taco Stew: 1 pound ground beef, 1 chopped onion, 6 diced Roma tomatoes, 6 ounces cooked pinto beans, 6 ounces cooked black beans, 6 ounces cooked corn, 1 package taco seasoning (mix the taco seasoning in some bean water or in some fresh water). Slowly cook the meat and the onion in a skillet over low heat. When the meat is completely done then add the other ingredients and continue to simmer over low heat until the mixture is at a suitable serving temperature. This thick taco stew may be eaten as a stew by itself, or it may be eaten with grated cheese and tortilla chips.
Nutritional Data for One Cup of Cooked Lentils or Beans
The nutritional content of beans will vary based on a number of different factors, such as the type of soil in which the beans are grown, the amount and type of fertilizer used, the amount of rain during the growing season, the amount of sunshine during the growing season, and the daily high temperatures during the growing season. Therefore the beans you grow or purchase will probably not contain the exact nutrition shown in the following table. But most beans should be reasonably close to the following values.
Nutrition per One Cup of Cooked Lentils or Cooked Beans
| ||Lentils ||Black ||Kidney ||Navy ||Northern ||Pinto|
|Calories ||230 ||227 ||218 ||255 ||209 ||245|
|Carbohydrate ||13% ||14% ||13% ||16% ||12% ||15%|
|Fiber ||69% || 60% || 66% || 76% ||50% ||62%|
|Protein ||35% ||30% ||34% ||30% ||29% ||31%|
|Fat ||1% ||1% ||0% ||2% ||1% ||2%|
|Cholesterol ||0% ||0% ||0% ||0% ||0% ||0%|
|A ||15.8 IU ||10.3 IU ||5.3 IU ||0.0 IU ||1.8 IU ||0.0 IU|
|B6 ||18% ||6% ||0% ||13% ||10% ||20%|
|B12 ||- ||- ||- ||- ||- ||-|
|C ||5% ||- ||4% ||3% ||4% ||2%|
|D ||- ||- ||- ||- ||- ||-|
|E ||1% ||- ||- ||- ||- ||8%|
|K ||4% ||- ||- ||1% ||- ||7%|
|Betaine ||- ||- ||- ||0.2 mg ||- ||-|
|Choline ||64.7 mg ||- ||- ||61.3 mg ||- ||-|
|Folate ||90% ||64% ||33% ||64% ||45% ||74%|
|Niacin ||10% ||4% ||5% ||8% ||6% ||3%|
|Pantothenic Acid ||13% ||4% ||4% ||5% ||5% ||4%|
|Riboflavin ||9% ||6% ||7% ||7% ||6% ||6%|
|Thiamin ||22% ||26% ||11% ||29% ||19% ||22%|
|Calcium ||4% ||5% ||8% ||13% ||12% ||8%|
|Copper ||25% ||18% ||23% ||19% ||22% ||19%|
|Iron ||37% ||20% ||27% ||24% ||21% ||20%|
|Magnesium ||18% ||30% ||19% ||24% ||22% ||21%|
|Manganese ||49% ||36% ||23% ||48% ||46% ||30%|
|Phosphorus ||30% ||24% ||25% ||26% ||29% ||25%|
|Potassium ||21% ||17% ||19% ||20% ||20% ||21%|
|Selenium ||6% ||3% ||3% ||8% ||10% ||15%|
|Sodium ||4.0 mg ||1.7 mg ||- ||- ||- ||1.7 mg|
|Zinc ||17% ||13% ||11% ||12% ||10% ||11%|
The above nutritional data is from the following web site:
Summary and Conclusion
If the members of your family can eat beans, then dry beans should be one of your long-term storage foods in order to provide the balanced nutrition your family will need. Other important long-term storage foods include wheat berries, yellow dent corn, and white rice. White rice can be purchased at a grocery store near the dry beans section and you can vacuum seal white rice the same way you vacuum seal dry beans. Wheat berries and yellow dent corn will usually need to be purchased in #10 cans or in food pails. Hard white wheat berries are preferred in bread recipes because their flavor is very, very similar to the type of wheat flour your family has probably been eating for many years.
When beans are eaten at the same time as wheat, corn, or rice then they digest inside the stomach and combine into a balanced high quality protein and some essential amino acids that can be used by the human body to maintain long-term good health.
Dry pinto beans gain most of their rehydrated weight and size during the overnight soak in clean water. The majority of the undesirable and unhealthy chemicals in the beans will also be leeched out of the beans during this soaking period. Therefore the overnight soak is an important step and it should be allowed to happen at its normal pace without trying to speed up the process (quick soaking). The soak water should be discarded because it contains undesirable chemicals in addition to a little of the nutrition that has been leeched out of the beans.
If a person eats approximately two pounds of cooked beans per week, which is approximately 1,400 calories per week from beans, then approximately 50 pounds of dry beans will last one person one year.
The storage environment and the storage method both have a significant impact on the edible shelf life of food, including dry beans.
Vacuum Sealing: Vacuum sealing dry beans will significantly extend their edible shelf life. However, the impact of vacuum sealing on the germination percentage of dry beans has not yet been determined. Therefore I recommend the following simple strategy.
- Storage Environment: A reasonable long-term storage environment for food is one where the temperature remains somewhere between 60° to 75° F (or 15.5° to 24° C), and the area is dry and dark, and the area is free of rodents.
- Storage Method: Dry beans should be sealed inside a container where the air has been replaced with nitrogen or with carbon dioxide. Or dry beans may be vacuum sealed inside a plastic container or inside a vacuum storage bag, and then placed inside a container that has a top or lid. The dry beans should then be stored in an appropriate long-term food storage environment.
- Beans for Eating: Vacuum seal all the dry beans you intend to eat. If you vacuum seal recently purchased dry beans and store them inside a container with a lid and put the container in a cool, dry, dark area, then the dry beans should remain fit for human consumption for at least 20 years (or more).
- Beans for Seed: Store one or two pounds of dry beans in a heavy-duty zipper freezer bag in a cool, dry, dark place. Do not vacuum seal these beans. You can use these beans as seed to produce a new crop of beans in your garden. You should consider replacing this small quantity of dry beans with fresh dry beans at least once every five years in order to ensure that your dry beans will germinate when you need them. Depending on the size of the garden area that you allocate to beans, one or two pounds of dry beans will normally be adequate as seed for the average family of three or four people.
Click on www.grandpappy.org for Robert's Home Page.
Grandpappy's e-mail address is: RobertWayneAtkins@hotmail.com
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Texas just changed the math standards for grades 3-8 beginning next school year. Major changes mean a series of unfortunate events for teachers and students.
Students in 4th grade will be expected to know a large quantity of what 6th graders are currently expected to know. There’s a lot of new stuff added for everyone as well. Teachers and students have serious obstacles to face here.
First, how is a student freshly out of 3rd grade going to perform at 6th grade level by testing time? (High school algebra students where I teach are often struggling with the concept of y=mx+b at test time.) I wonder if our legislators have considered that a child might not be cognitively able to perform math at this level. Or if a teacher can actually cram three years of math into one year — never mind if a child’s mind can hold it.
Second, regarding incoming 3rd graders, how is an 8 or 9 year old going to not only cover this new gap with any retention, but how is this child going to cover all of the additional standards the legislator has added as well? The standards teachers must get them to by 4th grade will be insurmountable, it seems to me.
Third, the STAAR test will have to be re-made. The test will be new. A teacher has no idea what will be on the test or what it will look like, but must prepare their students to do well on it. How can a teacher effectively manage this feat in addition to the new standards?
Fourth, a teacher is evaluated on his or her students’ performance on this one test through VAM methods (EVAAS in our district). What kind of accuracy can be expected when the test has never been given, the students being tested have never before taken a standardized test, and any projections that COULD be made are on a completely different test with completely different standards? Not that VAM evaluations are logical, reliable, or accurate in the first place.
Fifth, this evaluation will affect the state’s accountability as well as federal NCLB accountability.
The logistics of this are confounding.
Texas Education Agency (TEA) staff are currently working on a plan for assessing grades 3–8 mathematics in spring 2015. The plan will involve a special operational administration that incorporates the revised mathematics TEKS as indicated in the recently posted STAAR assessed curriculum documents and blueprints available on the STAAR Mathematics Resources webpage at: http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/staar/math/.
For the spring 2015 STAAR grades 3–8 mathematics test administrations, students will receive a raw score (XX questions correct out of XX total questions) prior to the end of the school year based on their performance on the assessments. Then data from the spring administrations will be used to establish new performance standards for STAAR mathematics in summer 2015.
— TEA Release
Furthermore, it involves some mathematical acrobatics.
The new performance standards will be retroactively applied to the spring 2015 administrations with new reports and data files sent to school districts in August 2015.
Because performance standards for STAAR grades 3–8 mathematics will not be set until after the spring 2015 administration, Student Success Initiative (SSI) retest opportunities for STAAR grades 5 and 8 mathematics will not be offered in May and June of 2015. For the 2014–2015 school year, districts will use other relevant academic information to make promotion/retention decisions for mathematics.
— TEA Release, emphasis added
To all math teachers, I say good luck. To all math teachers, grades 3-8 — I wish you more than luck. I wish you a miracle.
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|This Article is Budai Canon|
|Budai Canon applies to Buddhist and Hindu aspects that are similar to each other and belong to both religions. It mostly consists of Mahayana Canon and Hindu Canon. Hinduism and Buddhism share some of the similarities, such as Both Hinduism and Buddhism emphasize the illusory nature of the world and the role of karma in keeping men bound to this world and the cycle of births and deaths, desire is the root cause of suffering and removal of desire results in the cessation of suffering. Some of the Hindu texts such as the Upanishads (Isa) and the Bhagavadgita consider doing actions prompted by desire an attachment would lead to bondage and suffering and that performing actions without desiring the fruit of action would result in liberation, both religions believe in the concept of karma, transmigration of souls and the cycle of births and deaths for each soul, both emphasize compassion and non violence towards all living beings, both believe in the existence of gods or deities on different planes (Mahayana Buddhism), both believe in certain spiritual practices like meditation, concentration, cultivation of certain bhavas or states of mind, both believe in detachment, renunciation of worldly life as a precondition to enter to spiritual life. Both consider desire as the chief cause of suffering, Buddhism and Hinduism have their own versions of Tantra, both originated and evolved on the Indian soil. The founder of Buddhism was a Hindu who became the Buddha. Buddhism is the greatest gift of India to mankind.|
The traditional encyclopedia says that hair is ‘long, narrow, filamentous growths made of keratin scales that protrude from the skin of mammals.’ Yak! Sounds horrible! Hard to believe that such a thing could be thought of as beautiful and be so fundamental to our self-esteem. Men will go to great lengths to stop going bald or disguise it when it happens. The worst thing the French could think of to punish woman who collaborated with the Nazis was to cut their hair off. The men of the Kandyian aristocracy all wore luxuriant beards, it being considered a sign of authority and power. Women regularly shave their legs just as most men shave their faces. Chinese men have difficulties growing beards so if they have a hair growing out of a mole on their face they let it grow. Seeing a smooth-faced Chinese man with a single six or seven inch hair on their face always makes me want to pull it out! Thai monks shave their eyebrows, probably because of a pedantically literal interpretation of the Buddha's requirement to shave the head. Young monks at Vidyalankara University in Colombo used to let their hair grow very long and sport impressive sideburns to impress the female students. That was in the 1970's. I don’t know about now. The Tipitaka is full of information about what people did with and thought about their hair at the Buddha’s time and I present some of it below.
The Buddha was not ‘into’ hair. He asked his monks and nuns to shave their hair every two months or when it was two finger-breadth long (Vin.II,207). Nuns were expected to shave their pubic hair which apparently all respectable women did (Vin.III,260). Monks were also asked to cut the hair in their noses if it got too long (Vin.II,134). Statues of the Buddha always show him with hair but of course he shaved his head like all other monks. In spite of the fact that nearly all statues and images of the Buddha include hair with tight curls and a top-knot on top, the Buddha was bald, just as monks and nuns today shave their heads. In the Sutta Nipata (Sn. 142) there is a story of a brahmin angry at the presence of a shaved monk, he told him, "Stay there, you shaveling, stay there you wretched monk, stay there you outcast." In another passage, "One day the potter Ghatikara addressed the brahmin student Jotipala thus: 'My dear Jotipala, let us go and see the Blessed One Kassapa, accomplished and fully enlightened. I hold that it is good to see that Blessed One, accomplished and fully enlightened.' The brahmin student Jotipala replied: 'Enough, my dear Ghatikara, what is the use of seeing that bald-pated recluse?'" (Ghatikara-sutta, MN 81). We have quite a lot of information about the hair styles of the time and this is supplemented by archaeological evidence. Certain ascetics wore jatas, what we call dreadlocks, i.e. the hair was matted into long braids and then allowed to either hang down or be tied together into various shapes. When the braids were tied into a bun on the top of the head it was called jatanduva (S.I,117). Centuries later Siva and Avalokitesvara were always depicted with their hair like this. Brahman men probably shaved their heads except for a small part at the back which was left to keep growing, just as they still do. Topknots or buns on the back or top of the head were also popular. Another type of topknot was the culaka. Boys would ware five of these (Ja.V,250) and women would sometimes have a jeweled diadem attached to theirs (Ja.I,65). Sikhabandha seems to have meant twisting long hair and a long cloth together and then tying it around the head into a turban (D.I,7). Women favored parting their hair in the middle (dvedhasira vibhatta) as they still do, wearing plats (veni, Ja.II,185) and applying sandal oil to their hair both to perfume it and make it glisten (Ja.V,156). The high-class prostitute Ambapali used to ware her hair glossy-black, curled at the ends, with flowers in it, well-parted with a comb, decorated with gold ornaments and adorned with plats (Thi.252-5). When Nanda left to become a monk, he looked back and saw his girlfriend with her ‘hair half combed’ (upaddhullikhitehi kesehi), an image that later he couldn’t get out of his mind (Ud.22). Perhaps it was something like in those shampoo ads where you see the woman’s hair blowing in the wind. Bees’ wax was applied to slick the hair down (Vin.II,207) and later Indian works mention that the sap of the banyan tree was used as a sort of hair gel. Men trimmed their beards, grew them long, grew goatees (golomikam karapenti), and shaped them into four ends. They would sometimes shave shapes into the hair on their chest and abdomen or even have all their body hair removed (Vin.II,134). There were hairdressers (kappaka) and barbers (nahapita) to do all his coffering and the second of these usually doubled as bath attendants and masseurs. Just as today, both professions attracted homosexuals, as the Kama Sutra makes clear. The barber’s equipment (khurabandana) would include a razor (khura), scissors (kattarika), tweezers (sandasa), comb (koccha) and mirror (dasa).
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Scientists had been aware of autophagy since around the 1960s, but knew little about how it worked -- until Ohsumi's pioneering experiments with baker's yeast in the 1990s.
It's important because autophagy can eliminate invading intracellular bacteria, and disrupted autophagy has been linked to Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that particularly affect the elderly.
The term "autophagy" can be translated as "self eating," and was first coined by scientists studying cell behavior in the 1960s.
At the time, researchers found a cell could destroy part of its own contents by transporting it to another compartment -- called the lysosome -- for degradation.
But as Nobel Committee member Juleen Zierath explained
, Ohsumi showed that the lysosome "wasn't a waste dump -- it was a recycling plant."
The Nobel Prize winner's experiments in the 1990s used baker's yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy.
"He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast, and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells," explained the Nobel Foundation in a statement.
What does it mean for us?
"Thanks to Ohsumi and others following in his footsteps, we now know that autophagy controls important physiological functions where cellular components need to be degraded and recycled," it said.
"Autophagy can rapidly provide fuel for energy and building blocks for renewal of cellular components, and is therefore essential for the cellular response to starvation and other types of stress. After infection, autophagy can eliminate invading intracellular bacteria and viruses."
The foundation also explains that disrupted autophagy has been linked to Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly.
"Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Disturbances in the autophagic machinery have also been linked to cancer. Intense research is now ongoing to develop drugs that can target autophagy in various diseases," it added.
Remind me who won last year again?
In 2015, the prize was divided
-- one half jointly going to Ireland's William C. Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura for "their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites."
And the other half awarded to China's Youyou Tu for "her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria."
From the vault
Back in 2012 Britain's John B. Gurdon and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka won the prize
for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body.
"Since the method we've developed doesn't require embryos, it could technically allow anybody with a slight knowledge of chemistry to transform skin cells, and even possibly down the road produce a human being from skin cells," said Yamanaka at the time.
Watch the video of their remarkable discovery below:
Did you know?...
The most common birthdays of Nobel Laureates
is May 21 and February 28, with seven previous winners born on each of these dates.
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Teachers often think they just haven’t got time to differentiate the curriculum for gifted students. They may not use these exact words, but they look at all the other things they have to report on each week, and doing something extra on top of that for a small minority is beyond them. Besides, if they don’t really have training in teaching gifted students, what should they do?
Here are a few things that could be done in the regular classroom that would help gifted students and not hinder the rest of the class along the way. And it won’t take too much extra time, but will probably save you much stress and time in the long term. It is the start of an ongoing set of ideas especially helpful when getting started with meeting the needs of gifted children in the regular classroom.
Accept there are gifted students, even if you don’t know what they should look like. If a parent tells you their child is gifted, it is usually not out of pride or bragging. It is because they have lived 24/7 with this child for their entire life, and they know there is something different about the way they think and do life. Being accepted as they are is one of the best things you can do for a gifted student, and it doesn’t take you any time at all, short of a thank you or a smile when parents offer you advice that might help you with their child.
Think about what sort of investigations could be done at a deeper level right at the planning stage. This is the time you should be thinking about your gifted students, not just when they finish early or start to cause you challenges in the classroom lessons. Just as you have to think about ESOL or physical disabilities when you are planning, so you should consider how what you are planning will affect the child who might already know what you are planning to introduce to everyone in your classroom.
Use labels and practices that will not alienate your gifted child from their peers. If you say “Extra for experts” you imply that only those who complete the task at hand are experts, and worthy of a greater challenge. Gifted students are worthy of a challenge all the time, as is every student in the classroom. If they already know what is being taught, they should not have to repeat it just to earn an extra challenge. Try finding out what level each child is at before you start a topic; pretest, or maybe challenge them with the “Five most difficult first” strategy. If anyone is already familiar with the difficult level, then they should have an advanced level made available to them, or something that will challenge them to apply this knowledge in a new way.
Choice is paramount for gifted students. This involves being flexible in what you will accept as an outcome that displays what the student has learned. It might be negotiated individually with the gifted student, or be part of a whole class choice system. Having a variety of products based on learning preferences, or Bloom’s taxonomy, or The Six Thinking Hats, or allowing a different context for a standard problem will accommodate the needs of gifted students to work on meaningful tasks that they are passionate about.
Have a variety of question starters at all levels of thinking displayed prominently in the classroom to provide the opportunity to “differentiate on the spot” when challenged by a student needing something extra “now”. Ask the student to reword a topic with a particular question starter, or decide it yourself. Useful starters are … In what ways could you…? Thinking about this from the …’s point of view, how else could you …? Show how many different ways it might be possible to …? From your experience, how has this helped you …? If you are not very creative, ask someone else in the school who is, or brainstorm some good question starters at your next syndicate or staff meeting.
Ask your gifted students what they are interested in – it could be Antarctica, Roald Dahl books, Science Fiction, trains, aliens, or anything that they can sit and learn about for hours. Try to incorporate these passions into the curriculum they do at least once a term. Ask them a question about it at least once a week. Give them a smile at least once a day, especially when you see them reading or hear them talking about their favourite topic.
Try these six ideas out over the next few weeks, or whenever the time is appropriate, and let me know how you get on.
We have had a wonderfully hot summer in New Zealand, since Christmas. Yes, I realise it has hurt many who depend on the rainfall to keep drought conditions at bay, but it could have been worse if we didn’t have the last two wet months of 2012; I think a lot have forgotten that.
The media have had a field day with our long, hot summer, again offering doom and gloom and prophecies of the negative effects of the planet warming. The earliest mention of global warming I have come across is from a newspaper published the year I was born, 1959, which was found in the wall cavity of an old bungalow I was renovating with my husband in 2004. It talked then of the dire consequences we were to experience then, that are yet to take place to the full extent they predicted half a century ago. Continue reading “Global Scaremongering”
It’s a question many people have thought about, indirectly, as they ponder the tragedies that have struck them over the previous year. Illness and death of loved ones; marriage breakups and other family problems; natural and man-made disasters wreaking havoc in communities – never to be the same again! Continue reading “If God is for us who can be against us?”
Gifted Kids can often get into the bad books of their teachers at school because they have a propensity to argue the point. This in itself is not a bad trait, but it can be a little hard for teachers to swallow. I have always said it is better to teach them how to explain their ideas to others in a respectful manner. It seems this blogger at Prufock Press, the’ home’ of gifted education publishing agrees, and elaborates on a good way to do that.
Nobody likes to be shown up, especially by someone younger, and supposedly less knowledgeable An effective argument has to have both people committed to listening to each other’s point of view, so the sooner we teach our gifted kids this art of arguing in a positive manner, the sooner they will be able to effectively advocate for their own educational needs.
Things only get really interesting when you take full responsibility for the choices you make.
Changing your focus changes what is possible.
You must make the full choice – what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to.
If everyone’s happy then you are not doing great work.
If you’re doing it yourself, you are not doing great work – will you open the door to others?
Great work will make a difference to others. Sometimes we can be so wrapped up in what we want to do, we forget about our impact on others. Being empathic takes you out of the zone of self-fulfilment to ‘other centred’-fulfilment. As teachers, we need to look at our students to see that they are truly learning, before we accept any praise for ourselves. Unless they are truly learning, we are not truly teachers. Are we?
Just a thought to ponder online, as you prepare for the variety of students in your class this year!
Passion excites people – and what could be more exciting than breaking a world record for the Guinness Book of Records? Note from Self – My own daughter did this just last year when she was the 27th, I think, (and last) person to be slipped into a mini with the All Stars Cheerleaders from Auckland. Continue reading “A Kid With Passion – All Grown Up!!”
This blog was born out of a desire to reach gifted students and their families and teachers in the “way” of the future – online. I believe that in a world of such fast pace now, we often don’t look behind the surface and ask the question, “What is really happening here? Is there something I have missed?” Continue reading “Refocusing Thinkers Online in 2011”
With all the current discussion about Wikileaks, no matter how you view Julian Assange and his team, you have to credit them with some level of intelligence to be able to get their hands on the documents in the first place. And now, after falling out with his former partners, who are off setting up Open Leaks, it is revealed that this gifted guy became obsessed by his power, and started to alienate the very people who started the mission with him, to reveal truth that world powers were keeping hidden.
When gifted people use their high intellect for questionable deeds, they can do it expertly and gain much notoriety from it. These two go hand-in-hand. So we shouldn’t expect all our gifted students in our classrooms to be excellent scholars, because like all kids, some just enjoy the darker side of life. Or sometimes, it is the intensity with which they do things that draws them to extremes of behaviour.
Just as we have mentors (managers and coaches) that help our top sports people cope with the stresses that this level of play exposes them to, so do our gifted children need mentors that can help them be guided through the minefield of life that their high intellect will expose them to. But, somehow, the sports community seem to accept they need a coach to make the best use of their skill moreso than the gifted academic.
It is no wonder we find gifted young adults going off the rails because they haven’t learned to cope with their giftedness early enough in life. They fall into their own trap of thinking they are invincible, and when they combine this invincibility with their creativity, they can become very misunderstood people. Their passion to achieve a good cause can sometimes tip the balance to a point where notoriety becomes the focal point.
Tip for the day: Look behind the behaviour, to the motivation, to see what is really going on. Give some of your gifted kids the leeway they need, just like we give our rugby players 10 minutes in the ‘sin bin’ when they goof up in a game!
Latest Update: I jut took my grandson to see “Megamind” – and it had just the same storyline as this post! Gifted ‘kids’ using their intellect for ‘evil’ or ‘good’ – or both! Maybe director Tom McGrath knows a bit about these kids, too!
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Helping students reach their full potential
School counselors collaborate with students, families, community members and school personnel to assure that all students realize and integrate their academic, career and personal/social potential in order to develop and achieve an individualized vision of success.
- Collaborate - school counselors collaborate with students, families, school staff and community partners to help schools achieve their mission and students reach their goals.
- Academic support – school counselors help students with topics such as academic organization, course planning, study skills and post-secondary preparation.
- College and career planning – school counselors help students identify possible career paths through interest inventories, personality type assessments and learning style tests. Counselors help students understand the connections between their academic learning, post-secondary education and training, and their career goals.
- Personal/social support – school counselors help students with issues such as bully prevention, anger management, problem solving and cooperation. Counselors work with families to find students additional support if needed.
The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) model.
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Objectives: Examine and evaluate the reaction to the crash. DO Now: What were the primary causes of the crash. FDR’s New Deal. 1929– 3 million unemployed, family income 2300 1932-12.5 million (25%), family income 1400 683,000 vagrants thrown off trains
The Vets wanted their money early, hopped on empty train boxcars and headed for Washington.
20000 veterans and their families staged a protest at a camp at Anacostia Flats just southeast of the capital.
The Senate turned down their request
Troops were sent in led by Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to attack the encampment.
Tents and shack were torched and protesters were expelled. 100 injured and 1 infant killed.
Hoover and the republicans were voted out of office in 1932 in a landslide victory for the Democrats 472-59Bonus Army
Bonus Army– Attempt #1 mature in 45.
1932– Hoover v Roosevelt mature in 45.
Phew– That was a close one!
Born into a wealthy family mature in 45.
Worried about super wealth and rift between rich and poor
Harvard, then Colombia Law
Rode on shirttails of cousin Theodore
Polio at age of 39 changed him into serious determined politician
Empathy for sufferingFDR
FDR was elected in November but was not inaugurated until March (This was normal)
Hoover could not get anything done because he did not have support anymore (Lame Duck)
As a result– “Lame Duck” Amendment (20th) that moved inauguration to January 20th
Nevertheless, FDR needed to wait till MarchLame Duck Amendment
2 March (This was normal)nd Bonus Army march (a different reaction)
Immediate “Fireside Chats” to help restore hope
A “New Deal” – promises of “bold, persistent experimentation”
Federal Securities Act enact legislation that would provide relief, stimulate the economy and provide jobs passed in May of 1933 required to provide financial information if they were traded publicly
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)followed which regulated the sale of stock on margin
July of 1933 FDR dropped the gold standard which increased money supply =inflation =lower value of dollar =more exports =higher farm good pricesStill More Legislation
What was the “New Deal” enact legislation that would provide relief, stimulate the economy and provide jobsDo Now
Federal Emergency Relief Administration enact legislation that would provide relief, stimulate the economy and provide jobs (FERA)– support agencies that provide support
Also provided a great deal of money to public works programs– Government funded projects to build bridges, buildings, sidewalks, dams, etc.Still More Relief
Drought and misuse of farmland led to Dust Bowl Administration
Government responded by establishing SCS (Soil Conservation Service) to push more responsible farming methods (crop rotation, terracing and building barriers)More Problems
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The bloody civil war in Kikuyu country dimmed Britain’s appetite for colonial rule, but did nothing to resolve the problem of what was to become of the Europeans Britain had invited to settle in Kenya. Initially, Britain put members of the settler community in charge of figuring out a way to compensate their fellow settlers for the inevitable approach of African majority rule by appointing them to the Land Development and Settlement Board (LDSB), the body designated to oversee land transfer.
This self-dealing approach to the settlement of serious property rights issues failed, for reasons that are detailed in Chapter 4 of Land and Class in Kenya. Edward Muceru Ayub, a Kenyan friend of mine, was there to witness their downfall. Muceru, a graduate of graduate of Alliance High School, and one of the first two Africans to be employed on the LDSB’s staff, recalled later that his first few months on the job were very difficult. His European colleagues regularly exposed him to the all-too-familiar humiliations of colonialism. Continue reading
In a previous post we saw how increasing shortages of land were making life harder for Africans who had no land rights. The development of agriculture, both in the White Highlands and in the reserves, was working to the detriment of Kikuyus who had little or no land of their own. Source: University of Texas Libraries, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/kenya.html
Posted in Africa, Kenya, Kiambu, Murang'a, Nyandarua, Nyeri, The lives of your grandparents
Tagged Africa, colonialism, Embu, European land seizures, Kikuyu, Meru
The establishment in Kenya of what Europeans liked to call the White Highlands — land reserved for occupation by themselves — cut off the land frontier that Africans relied upon to accommodate normal population growth. In time, Kikuyus were forced into participation in the colonial economy. As it turned out, they were better prepared for that than Europeans generally expected. I’ve covered all that in previous posts, and you can find it by following the links.
Even those who lacked the skills or resources for a business career were not immediately left landless by the Europeans’ closure of the land frontier, because they were able to use European land. For many Africans, their first contact with the modern economy was the experience of working as a labourer in the White Highlands. In the early days of white settlement, such employment, for many, represented (or seemed to represent) a real opportunity. Continue reading
As European settlement spread through Kenya’s highlands early in the 20th Century, considerable amounts of African land were included in what became known as the White Highlands. In later years, defenders found a variety of justifications for these alienations of land.
Some land, it was said, was unoccupied or so sparsely occupied as to be virtually unoccupied. Some was taken by right of conquest. Some areas, it was maintained, were buffer zones between hostile “tribes” and European settlement was merely a means of bringing peace to the land. In other cases, mistakes were allegedly made and later on some minimal compensation was offered.
I’ve never understood how the term “tribe” has survived into the 21st Century as a supposedly acceptable usage. Its meaning is indistinguishable from the meaning of the phrase “ethnic group” (or perhaps “small ethnic group”) except that it is never used to describe white people. In other words — with whatever apologies may be due to my colleagues who are anthropologists — it looks like a racist usage to me.
When I arrived in Kenya in the early 1970s to do research for my Ph.D. thesis, an advisor suggested I do a study of something called the Million-Acre Settlement Scheme, a massive government program to settle thousands of African families on small farms. It was the best advice I ever had, because it propelled me into a mystery that fascinates me still, and experiences that changed the way I looked at the world, deeply enriching my understanding of it.
It’s a long story. I can’t tell it all at once, so let’s start with the mystery. Continue reading
We don’t read a lot of good news about Africa. As I write this, and google “Africa —- News”, the top hits are:
• Convoy attack kills three children, 19 adults in Central African Republic… Bodies burnt in street….
• South Africa marks worst year in rhino killings…
• South African [mineworkers] strike at… platinum producers
• China and Japan scramble for Africa
These headlines are not representative of African reality. They’re certainly a far cry from the Africa I came to know when I lived there for two-and-a-half years in the early 1970s. To be sure, one of my earliest African memories is of being adrift — the first time I ventured outside of Nairobi’s tourist bubble — in a bewildering sea of black faces. But once I got to know Africans personally, it became clear, on one hand, that they were just people like everyone else, and, on the other, that they had ways of understanding themselves and relating to others that were distinctly African. Continue reading
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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
The ecological significance of the big-headed ant in mealybug wilt disease of pineapple
|uhm_phd_9230490_uh.pdf||Version for UH users||2.85 MB||Adobe PDF||View/Open|
|uhm_phd_9230490_r.pdf||Version for non-UH users. Copying/Printing is not permitted||2.88 MB||Adobe PDF||View/Open|
|Title:||The ecological significance of the big-headed ant in mealybug wilt disease of pineapple|
|Authors:||Jahn, Gary C.|
|Abstract:||When ants are managed in pineapple fields, the mealybug population rapidly declines. Why ants are so vital to mealybug survival in pineapple is the subject of this dissertation. Historically, three explanations were given for the importance of ants to mealybugs in pineapple. One hypothesis was that ants protect mealybugs from natural enemies. Another hypothesis was that ants perform an essential task for the mealybugs by consuming the mealybug honeydew, suggesting that mealybugs would drown in their own waste material were it not for the sanitation activities of the ants. According to another hypothesis ants are the primary or sole means of mealybug dispersal in pineapple. In other words, the ants actually bring the mealybugs into the field and distribute them from one pineapple plant to another. These explanations are frequently presented in the literature as facts, not hypotheses; although little supporting evidence has been published on the topic. Through a series of field and laboratory experiments I have provided evidence that: 1. Big-headed ants (BHA), Pheidole megacephala (F.), are essential for the survival of gray pineapple mealybugs (GPM), Dysmicoccus neobrevipes Beardsley, in pineapple fields. 2. BRA suppress predator populations. 3. BRA do not aid GPM through sanitation. 4. GPM are not dispersed by BRA. 5. First instar GPM are dispersed by the wind. In short, the data presented in this dissertation do not support the dispersal or sanitation hypothesis, but do support the hypothesis that BRA protect GPM from natural enemies. Thus, when ants are eradicated from a pineapple field, the resulting increase in predation (and possibly parasitization) of mealybugs brings wilt disease under control. The pineapple industry has unintentionally been relying on biological control for wilt management. Once the most efficient species of natural enemies are identified it should be possible to artificially augment their populations and reduce the need for insecticides. The discovery that GPM are dispersed by the wind will be useful for monitoring populations with sticky traps. Wind barriers and traps may be also be used to prevent, or decrease the severity of GPM infestations.|
|Description:||Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1992.|
Includes bibliographical references.
xiii, 116 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm
|Rights:||All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.|
|Appears in Collections:||Ph.D. - Entomology|
Items in ScholarSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
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mountains of Rhodope created great variety of habitats with rich fauna and flora. The navigation of small vessels is possible until the height of Adrianoupoli. Tributaries of Evros in Greece is the Arda River, which crosses the Triangle area to the north of the county, the Erythropotamos, which passes through the hilly and lowland Metaxades-Palouri and crosses the city Didymoteicho as well Diavolorema, the Kamilopotamos and the Grand Stream. The river is characterized by large volumes of water and sediment transported to the estuary. The habitats of the area are of exceptional interest, like the flora with 350 recorded plant species. The four lagoons and salt steppes present in the Evro"s delta habitats are a European priority. The area is characterized by the presence of 6 important plant species. Among these, water chestnuts (Trapa natans) is included in the lists of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre and Nature (WCMC) and the European Red List of Endangered World Animals and Plants (European Red List Data of Globally Threatened Animals and Plants, a kind of (Iris spuria ssp. ochroleuca) is protected by Presidential Decree 67 (FEK 23/A/1981), 3 species (Cenchrus incertus, Heliotropium curassavicum, Leymus racemosus ssp. sabulosus) are rare in Greece and the region of Northern Greece constitutes the extreme limit of their spread and one species (the sea lily - Pancratium maritimum) is threatened by human activities on the coast.
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As Mumbai hosts an exhibition on hand-blown glass products, Kolkata-based artist Srila Mookherjee shares this unique process of shaping glass by blowing into it
“To make a hand-blown glass product, you need strong arms more than strong lungs because you are manipulating molten glass stuck at the end of a five-foot long pipe. Blowing is easy because glass inflates easily when it is heated,” says Srila Mookherjee matter-of-factly.
Mookherjee, who studied the art of glassblowing under the guidance of Anthony Stern in London during the 1980s, is the first person to set up a glass atelier (Aakriti) in India.
One of the exhibits created by Srila Mookherjee (seen in the pic of Step 3)
The Kolkata-based artist will showcase 80 creations using this technique that involves inflating molten glass using a blowpipe. As the exhibition, titled Found In Nature, begins today at Artisans, she shares the process of glassblowing.
Till: September 12, 11 am to 7 pm
At: Artisans’, 52-56 Dr VB Gandhi Marg, Kala Ghoda.
Following the principle that metal sticks to metal when it is hot, we heat a five-foot long blowing iron pipe and gather molten glass just at the tip of the blowing iron in a furnace. In case of making a coloured glass product, we add concentrated colour to the blowing iron and then gather glass over it.
2. Papering into shape
Once the molten glass is gathered on the blow pipe, you shape it using either a wooden block or a wet newspaper. We use a wet newspaper.
This is one of the main steps. You blow through the pipe to inflate the glass. Depending on the size that you want, you gather glass again and it is basically a process of reheating, blowing and shaping because glass can only be worked upon if it is hot. Wearing protective glares is necessary.
4. Attaching punty
After you finish blowing the bottom of the piece, you attach a punty rod (another hollow pipe) on the other side. Then you cut off the glass from the blowing iron using jacks (a tong-like tool) and work on the other half of the piece. Once it is on a punty, you can spin it into a plate or make it into a bowl.
5. The finishing touches
Once you have shaped the glass, cool it for half an hour in annealing oven. While the glass melts at 1,250 degrees Celsius, it is cooled down to 450-500 degrees Celsius. If not, it will shatter. Post this, you need to bring it down to room temperature over 24 hours. Each product has a gloss and shine effect because it is fire-finished.
The finishing touches
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Kilkenny, Irish Cill Chainnigh, city, municipal borough, and seat of County Kilkenny, Ireland. It lies on both banks of the River Nore about 30 miles (50 km) north of Waterford. The ancient capital of the kingdom of Ossory, Kilkenny in Norman times had two townships: Irishtown, which had its charter from the bishops of Ossory; and Englishtown, which was established by William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, and was raised to the status of a city in 1609. The two were united in 1843. The people of Kilkenny are known as “Cats,” the name likely originating in the medieval period.
Kilkenny Castle, perhaps the city’s most famous landmark, stands on an eminence of 100 feet (30 metres) overlooking the Nore. It was burned in 1175 but was rebuilt in the late 12th and early 13th century by William Marshal. In 1391 the 3rd earl of Ormonde bought the castle. Thereafter it served as a private home for the Ormondes until they abandoned the building in 1935. From 1967 the castle was administered by the National Heritage Council, and it now serves as a museum and art gallery.
Many parliaments were held in Kilkenny from 1293 to 1408. In 1609 Kilkenny was granted a charter by King James I. The Confederation of Kilkenny, representing the native Irish and the Anglo-Norman Catholics, functioned for six years as an independent Irish parliament, the first meeting of which was held in 1642. Oliver Cromwell’s forces attacked the town in 1650, and it surrendered.
St. Canice’s Cathedral, begun about 1192, occupies the site of a 6th-century church founded by St. Canice; the bishop’s residence was built about 1360. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary (1843–57) is a cruciform building with a 200-foot (60-metre) tower. A Dominican friary, founded in 1225, is still used; and the churches of St. Mary and St. John date from the 13th century. The Tholsel (1761) is used for corporation meetings. Shee’s Almshouse dates from 1594, and Grace’s Old Castle, which was used as a jail beginning in 1566, is now a courthouse.
Kilkenny is a market centre for a rich agricultural area. Woolen mills were long important to the city’s economy, and textiles and crafts—particularly those made of Kilkenny limestone—are still significant, as is tourism. Other industries include brewing, printing, engineering, and information technology. Pop. (2006) 8,661; (2011) 8,711.
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Saturday, January 5, 2008
"Science Master"-Learning science just got easier
"Science Master.com" is an educational "science learning" site, for students, parents and teachers.
Mission: To provide the best science resources for teachers, parents, hobbyists, and life-long learners. The ScienceMaster web pages include links to research sites, lesson plans, activities, and project ideas.
Goal: to excite young minds about science by integrating information, communication and community with compelling products and services all in a fun-to-use Internet network. The ScienceMaster team includes science professionals, educators, subject matter experts, and technical advisors who work collaboratively to bring you the best science resources.
ScienceMaster provides information, news, links, pictures, products and services, with the best content from NASA, the USGS, the EPA, NOAA & leading colleges & universities. You can learn about the universe, or space, find information on volcanos, and global warming, explore plants, animals or microbes, and study physics or chemistry.
Awards and achievements:
* ScienceMaster is winner of the Excellence in Education for All Best of the Web Award Winner for 2001 by The Education CoffeeHouse. This award is given to 100 websites that provide quality information to students, parents, and educators.
* ScienceMaster's A+ Learning Galleries has received the "Teacher Information Network Gold award" bestowed on sites which are utilizing the Internet as an empowering tool for quality education.
* ScienceMaster has been chosen as a Top Site by "Educating.net"!
Awards & Recognition
Main topic pages you may search:
- Geology and earth page
- Biology and life page
- Physical Science page
- Tech learning
Read very informative articles from teachers and learning professionals, scientists and parents: Link to Articles
Great images, sound files, software, try-outs all for free at:
Very interesting article about The human mind.
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By Veronica Penney
Food desert. If you’ve never heard the term before, it refers to communities with “limited access to supermarkets, supercenters, grocery stores, or other sources of healthy and affordable food.” According to the USDA, 18.3 million Americans live in food deserts, contributing to higher rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity among residents.
The Elyria-Swansea and Globeville neighborhoods comprise one of Denver’s food deserts, and The GrowHaus’ mission is to combat it. Located off of E 47th Ave and York Street, the 20,000 square-foot greenhouse farm grows high quality, local produce and acts as an educational center for the community.
“When you’re empowering a community, you really want to be integrating them into the systems that they don’t have access to,” explains Maddie Onofrio, a Communications Intern at The GrowHaus.
The GrowHaus emphasized community involvement from the beginning, holding town halls to get feedback, creating classes based on community wishes, and offering food options tailored to the needs of the residents.
For example, the in-house Mercado de al Lado marketplace sources food locally whenever possible, but also stocks staple ingredients that can be difficult to find in the Denver area. “Since this community is highly Hispanic, we try and tailor the food that we offer to their cultural diet, but some things, like avocados, we do outsource,” explains Onofrio.
The heart of The GrowHaus lies in food production. The greenhouse contains a mushroom farm, a 5,000 square foot hydroponics lettuce garden that produces 1,200 heads of leafy greens per week, and a 3,200 square foot aquaponics growing system. Fresh produce is available at the Mercado de al Lado, but the GrowHaus also distributes food to local grocery stores and restaurants.
The weekly food box program is another way that The GrowHaus makes high quality food accessible to the community. “It’s done on a sliding scale pricing structure, so in the 80216 zip, which is the Elyria-Swansea and Globeville area, they can come in and just tell us their zip code and they basically get the food at wholesale pricing,” says Onofrio.
Food boxes come in two sizes—a family box, which will feed 3-4 people, and a basic box, which is intended for 1-2 people. The boxes are filled with GrowHaus produce, eggs, and local bread from Blue Point Bakery. Subscribers simply pay ahead, then pick up their box during the pickup time at their chosen location.
For other Denver residents, the boxes will cost a little more, but proceeds “help to fund Cosechando Salud, [The GrowHaus’] free grocery program and cooking class, and Mercado de al Lado, our neighborhood market with special discounts for residents of the communities of Elyria-Swansea and Globeville.”
Aside from food production, food education is also a large piece of The GrowHaus’ mission. Monthly fee-based classes are open to the public and cover topics such as square foot gardening, mushroom basics, and cheesemaking. Service learning courses, like the Seed2Seed program, educate young adults on the basics of agriculture, allowing them to get an introduction to food that they can share with their parents and siblings.
There is also a pantry-style program for people who cannot afford food boxes. In exchange for attending one of the Monday night nutrition courses, residents can earn a free food box to take home to prepare their own fresh and healthy meals.
“The idea behind that is we really want people to know how to use what you’re giving them. You don’t want to throw someone some kale and not know how to use it and just throw it out, and not get those nutrients,” says Onofrio.
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Online School Second Grade Curriculum
Online second grade courses at Oregon Connections Academy focus on boosting student comprehension and critical thinking across all subject areas. Students will have learned how to take measurements, use maps, identify the different states of matter, and use technology to solve problems by the time they complete their virtual second grade classes.
Click on an option below to see the available online second grade classes in Oregon and their course descriptions. Learn why Oregon Connections Academy’s curriculum is a great alternative to second grade homeschool and traditional public school by checking out our sample lessons.
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Water restrictions in Australia
||This article needs to be updated. (March 2011)|
Water restrictions have been enacted in many cities and regions in Australia, which is the Earth's driest inhabited continent, in response to chronic water shortages resulting from the widespread drought. Depending upon the location, these can include restrictions on watering lawns, using sprinkler systems, washing vehicles, hosing pavement, refilling swimming pools, etc. Over population, evidence of drying climates, coupled with corresponding reductions in the supply of drinking water have led various state governments to consider alternative water sources to supplement existing sources, and to implement "water inspectors" who can issue penalties to those who waste water.
As of July 2007, some areas and towns have no water restrictions, including the Northern Territory, Regional Tasmania, Newcastle, Bathurst and Dubbo. There are also a few parts of Australia where the water storage levels are at or close to 100%, such as Taree. Many states describe the different levels of water restrictions in terms of "stages": starting at Stage 1, for the least restrictive, going up as far as Stage 8. The highest level reached in the current drought has been stage 7 for Kingaroy. There are different definitions given to each "stage" in different States.
Water restrictions by state or territoryEdit
Australian Capital TerritoryEdit
|Stage 1||Stage 2||Stage 3||Stage 4|
|Sprinklers and irrigation:||Alternate days, 7-10am & 7-10pm||Drippers only, 7-10am & 7-10pm||No reticulation|
|Hand-watering gardens and lawns:||No restrictions||Alternate days, 7-10am & 7-10pm||No watering lawns; watering plants alternate days, 7-10am & 7-10pm||Greywater only|
|Swimming pools:||No emptying or filling; Topping-up allowed||No topping-up, emptying or filling|
|Car washing:||Once a week, or at commercial car wash||Once a month, or at commercial car wash||Only at commercial car washes||No car washing|
|Window cleaning:||Only with bucket or high-pressure, low-volume cleaner||No window cleaning|
Canberra was subject to Stage 1 restrictions from 1 November 2005, which were increased to Stage 2 after a year on 1 November 2006. The continuing drought led to a further increase to Stage 3 from 16 December 2006; the restrictions were maintained at Stage 3 throughout 2007 and 2008. From 1 November 2010 Canberra moved to Permanent Water Saving Rules due to heavy rain bringing water storages close to capacity.
New South WalesEdit
The different classification levels of water restrictions in New South Wales vary widely, and are set by the different authorities responsible for water throughout the state.
|Level 1||Level 2||Level 3|
|Sprinklers and irrigation:||No sprinklers at any time; drippers only|
|Hand-watering gardens and lawns:||No restrictions||3 times weekly,
before 9am or after 5pm
|2 times weekly,
before 10am or after 4pm
|Swimming pools:||No restrictions||No filling pools over 10,000L without permit|
|Hard surfaces:||No hosing hard surfaces (paths, driveways, cars, floors and buildings)|
|Wikinews has related news: New South Wales water supply problems continue|
Falling dam levels prompted Sydney Water to impose Level 1 water restrictions on the Sydney area from 1 October 2003. When these restrictions failed to stem the reduction in the city's water supplies as a result of continuing drought, and with dam levels dropping below 50 per cent, Level 2 water restrictions were introduced from 1 June 2004. Further reductions in dam levels to below 40 per cent of capacity led to an increase to Level 3 water restrictions from 1 June 2005. Level 3 water restrictions were in place as of February 2008. Since June 2009, though, Sydney Water replaced water restrictions with Water Wise Rules. The Rules are:
- All hoses must now have a trigger nozzle.
- Hand held hoses, sprinklers and watering systems may be used only before 10 am and after 4 pm on any day - to avoid the heat of the day
- No hosing of hard surfaces such as paths and driveways. Washing vehicles is allowed.
- Fire hoses may be used for fire fighting activities only.
Sydney Water has imposed fines of $200 for violations of the rules for individuals, $500 for businesses, and $2,200 for water theft. Rules are enforced by Sydney Water staff through random checks.
As different towns in regional New South Wales take their drinking water from different sources, different levels of water restrictions apply. The levels or stages which apply in certain towns are as follows:
- Albury - no restrictions
- Bathurst - no restrictions
- Cobar- stage 5
- Dubbo - no restrictions
- Gosford - stage 4 from 1 October 2006
- Goulburn had Stage 5 water restrictions imposed from 1 October 2004, and went on to win a National Water Conservation Award for Excellence due to the water which had been conserved. From 5 July 2007, Goulburn relaxed its water restrictions to Level 3.
- Griffith - stage 2 introduced on 27 November 2007
- Leeton - level 3 introduced on 9 October 2007 but lowered to level 2 on 1 November 2008
- Orange - level 5a from early 2010
- Port Macquarie - stage 1 from September 2006
- Taree - summer water saving restrictions
- Wagga Wagga - Permanent Water Conservation Measure
|This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2014)|
Currently, no water restrictions apply in Darwin.
Some of the details of the different stages of water restrictions which apply in Queensland for the residential sector are as follows:
|Stage 1||Stage 2||Stage 3||Stage 4||Stage 5||Stage 6||Stage 7|
|Reticulation sprinklers:||3 days/week||No sprinklers||No external water use without permit|
|Sprinkler times:||4-8am & 4-8pm|
|Hose watering of gardens:||3 days/week||No hosing|
|Hose watering times:||4-8am & 4-8pm||Before 7am & after 7pm|
|Bucket/watering can watering times:||Any time||3 days/week;
4-8am & 4-8pm
|No watering lawns;
Otherwise 3 days/week, 4-7pm
|Pool filling:||Any time||Requires approval|
|Topping-up pools:||4-8am & 4-8pm,
|4-8am & 4-8pm,
|Hosing hard surfaces:||Prohibited at all times|
|Car/window washing:||Hose or bucket||Bucket only||Bucket only, to wash mirrors, lights & windows|
Although some regions of Queensland have had traditionally high rainfalls, some regions of Queensland have been subject to the toughest water restrictions in place in Australia. The highest level of water restrictions reached the drought was stage 7 for Kingaroy. Toowoomba, Brisbane and South East Queensland reached Level 6 restrictions.
On 13 May 2005, 13 local councils in southeast Queensland, including those in Brisbane, agreed to impose Stage 1 water restrictions, due to drying dams. These restrictions were increased to Stage 2 from 3 October 2005, which at the time were described as the "toughest water restrictions in southeast Queensland's history", except the Gold Coast which had been on Stage 5 restrictions since 2004. Stage 3 water restrictions were imposed on the region from 13 June 2006 amid projections that water storage levels would drop to 5% within 26 months. Water restrictions continued to increase, to Stage 4 from 1 November 2006, stage 5 from 10 April 2007, and up to Stage 6 from 23 November 2007.
Other towns and regions of Queensland are subject to different levels of water restrictions, as set out below:
- Cairns - Level 1 restrictions from October 2002 till about January 2004.
- Gold Coast - stage 6 from 23 November 2007, stage 5 from 10 April 2007, stage 4 from 1 November 2006. The Hinze Dam, which is the Gold Coast's main water supply reached 100% in January 2008 and the coast now has no water restrictions.
- Kingaroy - Stage 7 from 1 October 2007
- Toowoomba - stage 6 from 23 November 2007, stage 5 from 26 September 2006. In 2006, the town council proposed the use of recycled wastewater to supplement town water from dams, however the scheme was rejected by the town's population and the town has since resorted to drilling artesian and sub-artesian bores as an alternative source of drinking water.
- Townsville - stage 2 from 15 November 2006, stage 1 from 12 February 2007
Source: Queensland Water Restrictions, Queensland Water Commission
The different levels of residential water restrictions which have been applied to different regions of South Australia by SA Water are as follows:
|Permanent Water Conservation Measures||Eyre Peninsula||Level 2||Level 3|
|Reticulation sprinklers:||5pm-10am (6pm-10am in DST)||6pm-8am (8pm-8am in DST)||8pm-8am, 3 days/week. Sporting grounds and public facilities 2 days/week.||Prohibited|
|Hand-held hose watering and drippers:||Any time||1 day/week with trigger nozzle, 6-9am or 5-8pm|
|Bucket/watering cans:||Any time|
|Swimming pools and Spas:||No restrictions||No filling or emptying without permit. New pools or spas must have a cover.|
|Fountains and ponds:||No restrictions||Must not be operated and can not be topped up unless they support fish.|
|Car washing:||Bucket, commercial car wash or hose with trigger nozzle only||Bucket or commercial car wash only|
|Hard surfaces:||No washing or hosing down hard surfaces|
Different water restrictions levels apply to different parts of the state, depending upon the source of drinking water used in that region. SA Water have produced a map showing the current areas of water restrictions.
Areas using Murray River waterEdit
Adelaide and much of south-eastern South Australia takes its drinking water from the Murray River. Permanent water conservation measures were put into place in this region in 2003, and as a result of the most severe drought to hit the region since the 1940s, Level 2 water restrictions were imposed from 22 October 2006 on those areas (including metropolitan Adelaide) which use water from the Murray River. Even lower inflows to the Murray River over the course of 2006 led to the even tougher Level 3 water restrictions being imposed on the region from 1 January 2007, which remain in place.
The Eyre Peninsula draws most of its drinking water from underground basins, which progressively became depleted through drought and high consumption, prompting the State Government to introduce water restrictions on the entire region from 6 December 2002, apart from Whyalla. The water restrictions for the peninsula remain in force as of 2008.
Conversely, the areas in the south east of the State, south of the town of Keith, are subject to the permanent water conservation measures.
Other areas in the state are not subject to water restrictions. These areas include Murray Mallee, areas north of Port Augusta, Kangaroo Island, Cockburn, Hawker, Melrose, Ororoo, Parachilna, Quorn, Warooka, Wilmington, Terowie, Yunta, Olary and Manna Hill.
The different levels of residential water restrictions which have been applied to different regions of South Australia by SA Water are as follows:
Permanent Water Conservation Measures Eyre Peninsula Level 2 Level 3 Reticulation sprinklers: 5pm-10am (6pm-10am in DST) 6pm-8am (8pm-8am in DST) 8pm-8am, 3 days/week Prohibited Hand-held hose watering and drippers: Any time 1 day/week with trigger nozzle, 6-9am or 5-
Usually, there are no water restrictions for domestic consumption.
Periodically, however, restrictions will be placed on how water can be used in domestic, commercial or rural areas. Examples of such restrictions are:
- watering with a hose is permitted but not using a fixed sprinkler system,
- being able to use sprinkler systems only during certain hours,
- the initial wetting and final rinsing of a car may be done with the hose but washing must be done using a bucket,
- washing a car is permitted using a bucket of water but not using the hose,
- watering of sports grounds allowed only during certain hours,
- watering stock is acceptable but not irrigating.
One purpose of such restrictions is to keep the dam levels up and ensure adequate water pressure for the fire department's needs in the event of fires.
The different stages of water restrictions which apply in different areas of Victoria are based upon the Victorian Uniform Drought Water Restriction Guidelines, however they have been modified by the inclusion of a "Stage 3a", to reduce the likelihood of needing to impose Stage 4 restrictions in metropolitan Melbourne.
|Stage 1||Stage 2||Stage 3||Stage 3a||Stage 4|
|Watering lawns:||Manual: Any time, any day with the use of a trigger-nozzle hose or bucket. Automatic: 6am-10am and 6pm-10pm on alternating days||Watering lawns is banned||All outside watering banned|
|Reticulation watering days:||Alternating days||Drippers only, 2 days/week|
|Manual reticulation:||6-8am & 8-10pm||6-8am|
|Hose watering/ buckets/ watering cans:||Any time||2 days/week, 6-8am & 8-10pm||2 days/week, 6-8am|
|Hosing hard surfaces:||Banned at all times|
|Car washing:||Bucket/high pressure cleaner or trigger nozzle hose||Bucket/high pressure cleaner only||Buckets only to clean windows, mirrors and lights|
|Swimming pools:||Filling or topping up pools/spas up to 2000 L permitted. Over 2000 L, permit required||No filling|
The status of water restrictions in different regions of Victoria is as set out below:
- Bairnsdale - now off water restrictions and on permanent water saving rules as of 24 August 2007
- Ballarat - stage 3 from 1 January 2010, stage 1 from 1 August 2010.
- Bendigo area - stage 3 from 1 January 2009
- Broadford - stage 4 from 1 February 2007
- Geelong - stage 3 from March 2010, stage 1 from 3 October 2010
- Central Gippsland - All Towns on Permanent Water Saving Rules
- Coongulla & Glenmaggie - stage 4 from 24 February 2007
- Horsham - Stage 1 from 14 October 2009
- Mansfield area - stage 4 for Mansfield from 16 December 2006; other areas nearby on stage 1 and 2
- Melbourne - stage 1 from 28 August 2006, stage 2 from 1 November 2006, stage 3 from 1 January 2007, Stage 3a from 1 April 2007, Stage 3 from 2 April 2010, stage 2 from 1 September 2010. As of 1 December 2012, Melbourne was taken off water restriction stages, but new permanent water restrictions were implemented.
- Mildura - now off water restrictions and on permanent water saving rules as of 3 October 2010
- Omeo - stage 2 from 11 December 2006
- North east region - Bright reverted to stage 2 and Springhurst reverted to stage 1 on 10 September 2007. Most of the Murray towns went to Stage 4 on 1 July 2007 (e.g. Wodonga, Yarrawonga, Rutherglen etc.), and on 11 July 2007 Devenish, St James and Tungamah went to stage 3. As of 2010, most towns/cities in the North East have moved to Permanent Water Saving Rules thanks to flooding rain over winter and spring.
The different stages of water restrictions which can currently be applied in Western Australia are as follows:
|Stage 1||Stage 2||Stage 3||Stage 4||Stage 5||Stage 6||Stage 7|
|Reticulation sprinklers:||Daily||Alternate days||3 times/week||Twice weekly||Once weekly||No sprinklers|
|Sprinkler times:||Before 9.00am or after 6.00pm|
|Hose watering of gardens:||Any time||No hose watering|
|Swimming pools:||No restriction||No over-filling||No topping-up||No filling|
|Car washing:||No restriction||Bucket only|
Water restrictions have been employed in various Western Australian towns when poor rainfall has led to water shortages. For instance, in the summer of 1977-1978, Perth was subject to a total sprinkler ban. Newman and Nullagine experienced water restrictions from 1991 and 1992 onwards as the result of drought. Similarly, the resort towns of Yallingup and Dunsborough experienced water restrictions in 1997 during a heatwave, and Kalgoorlie-Boulder had temporary water restrictions imposed during 1998 due to shortages in its reservoirs (which contain water pumped through the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme).
A Stage 1 ban on using reticulation sprinklers between 9.00am and 6.00pm was imposed on Perth residents in 1996, and remains in place to this day. This was the first water restriction imposed on the state's most populous city since the total sprinkler ban in 1978. From September 2001, users of the Integrated Water Supply Scheme (covering Perth, its surrounds and towns on the Goldfields pipeline) were subject to Stage 4 restrictions, only permitted to use reticulation sprinklers two days per week, according to a roster.
The town of Northampton in the Mid-West encountered a water shortage in 2006 where its underground aquifer could not meet demand. Stage 5 watering restrictions were imposed, and the Water Corporation resorted to carting tankers of water to the town to maintain the supply.
On 1 October 2007, water restrictions were expanded to cover the entire state, including those towns serviced by utilities other than the Water Corporation. Under the new system, all areas of the state in the region south of Kalbarri and Kalgoorlie (including Perth and most of the state's population) which use scheme water are subject to Stage 4 restrictions. Areas north of the dividing line are subject to Stage 2 restrictions. Furthermore, whereas the water restrictions had previously only restricted the use of mains water to water gardens and lawns by sprinkler, under the new water restrictions unlicensed bore operators in Perth and its surrounds are restricted to watering their gardens three times per week. This was to slow the depletion of underground aquifers from which Perth sources much of its drinking water.
Efforts are being made to secure alternative water sources to ease water shortages in the Integrated Water Supply Scheme. Integral to the Government's strategy is the construction of desalination plants to service Perth. One has already been constructed in Kwinana, which supplies 17% of the city's water consumption and is the largest desalination plant in both the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. A second desalination plant near Binningup was completed in 2011. A trial has also been announced to treat wastewater and pump it into underground aquifers to undergo natural filtration as it returns to the dwindling groundwater supply.
Water storage levelsEdit
|Location||Dec 2005||Sep 2006||Oct 2006||Nov 2006||Dec 2006||Jan 2007||Feb 2007||Mar 2007||Apr 2007||May 2007||Jun 2007||Jul 2007||Aug 2007||Sep 2007||Oct 2007||Nov 2007||Dec 2007||Jan 2008||Feb 2008||Mar 2008|
Water restrictions have been criticised for hampering the economy and the lifestyles of people. The National Water Commission chief has argued that Australia needs a source of water that is independent of the rainfall. Water desalination is touted as the solution for potentially unlimited water use. Former Australian Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull says that it does not make sense to have permanent water restrictions just as there are no electricity restrictions.
- Living with Drought 20/3/2011
- SCHEME OF TEMPORARY RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF WATER FROM ACTEW CORPORATION WATER SUPPLY SYSTEM
- When were water restrictions introduced
- Water Restrictions
- Stephanie Peatling; Jacqueline Maley (1 October 2003). "Water-watchers Stalk The Streets As We Learn To Drip The Lawn". Sydney Morning Herald. p. 2.
- NSW goes against flow on water law, Sydney Morning Herald
- Sydney Water - Water Wise Rules
- Goulburn wins water-saving award, ABC News 29 November 2006
- Goulburn - Level 3 Water Restrictions
- Griffith City Council - Water Restrictions
- Leeton Shire Council - Water Restrictions
- Braham, Emily (24 October 2008). "Level 2 change on way". Fairfax Media. The Irrigator. Retrieved 2008-11-08.
- Qld Water Commission : Restrictions
- Staff writer (13 May 2005). "Tap tightened on water use". The Courier-Mail. News Limited. p. 1.
- Dudley, Jennifer (1 October 2005). "Water crackdown toughest yet". The Courier-Mail. News Limited. p. 11.
- Griffith, Chris (13 June 2006). "Water crisis to hit new depths". The Courier-Mail. News Limited. p. 3.
- Level 4 restrictions start 1 November, Queensland Water Commission
- "High level restrictions" (PDF). Retrieved 13 February 2015.
- Water Restriction Document from Kingaroy Council
- Kelton, Greg (14 October 2006). "Words flow even if the water doesn't". The Advertiser. News Limited. p. 32.
- Kelton, Greg (13 October 2006). "LAST DROPS Tougher water controls". The Advertiser. News Limited. p. 1.
- Peddie, Clare (30 December 2006). "RESTRICTIONS New round of cuts in force on Monday Record low flows into the Murray". The Advertiser. News Limited. p. 35.
- Greg Kelton & Nathan Cross (5 December 2002). "Constraints on gardens, parks and washing cars Peninsula hit with water restrictions.". The Advertiser. News Limited. p. 7.
- Restrictions Policy.pdf.aspx Stages of Water Restrictions
- Restrictions Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment
- Victorian Uniform Drought Water Restriction Guidelines
- Our Water, Our Future - Stage 3a Water Restrictions
- (23 June 2010). Ballarat water restrictions eased. Jacqui Peake. ABC News Online. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
- Stage 1 water restrictions introduced, South East Water
- Stage 2 Water Restrictions From November, South East Water
- Melbourne Water
- Schedule 2, Water Agencies (Water Use) By-Laws 2007 (WA)
- Amalfi, Carmelo (19 August 1998). "Winter Rain Fails To Fill WA Dams". The West Australian. p. 7.
The sprinkler ban was introduced in 1996, the first restriction on Perth's water since the summer of 1977-78.
- Ruse, Ben (13 October 2001). "Total sprinkler ban warning". The West Australian.
But Minister Assisting the Treasurer Nick Griffiths said a total ban - not seen since 1977 - would be put in place only if people were not able to save water.
- Amalfi, Carmelo (5 October 1996). "Drought Towns 'used To Water Restrictions'". The West Australian. p. 31.
- Amalfi, Carmelo; Pennells, Steve (4 January 1997). "Heatwave Runs Course". The West Australian. p. 11.
- Watts, Kristen (31 March 1998). "Water restrictions in Kalgoorlie-Boulder may be lifted this week". The West Australian. p. 26.
- Jerrard, Suellen (12 October 2006). "Tough sprinkler bans hit SW towns". The West Australian. p. 42.
One-day-a-week sprinkler restrictions have already been imposed in Northampton, in the Mid-West
- Jerrard, Suellen (18 December 2006). "Country in crisis as water tanks run dry". The West Australian. p. 13.
The Water Corporation has started carting water to Northampton, one of the areas hardest hit by the drought, because its ground water aquifer could not meet demand.
- reg 6, Water Agencies (Water Use) By-Laws 2007 (WA)
- reg 5, Water Agencies (Water Use) By-Laws 2007 (WA)
- Waterwise Ways for WA - FAQs
- , Western Australian Government Gazette 14 November 2013
- , Water Agencies (Water Use) Bylaws 2010
- , Water Services Regulations 2013 - See part 5 and schedules 1, 2 and 3
- Integrated Water Supply System
- Southern Seawater Desalination Project
- Perth tests treated sewage for drinking The Age, 2 January 2007
- (28 May 2007). Restrictions off in five years, says usage report. David Rood. The Age.
- (18 May 2007). 'Unlimited' water could be on tap. Ben Doherty. The Age.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20060820071310/http://malcolmturnbull.com.au/news/Article.aspx?ID=495. Archived from the original on 20 August 2006. Retrieved 27 May 2007. Missing or empty
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There is something we find beautiful about fractals, those curious geometric structures with repeating shapes that seem to go on for infinity (see video below). Perhaps it is because these mathematical oddities remind us of nature; river networks, ferns and Romanesco broccoli are all examples of natural fractals.
The most famous fractal is probably the Mandelbrot set, named for Benoît Mandelbrot, the French-American mathematician who coined the term "fractal" in 1975. The Mandelbrot set is a 2-dimensional object created through a mathematical equation. Mathematicians had first pondered how to turn it into a 3-dimensional object, a "Mandelbulb," more than 20 years ago, but they didn't figure out how to do it until recently. The result is above. Quite pretty, don't you think?
(Hat tip: Bad Astronomy)
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A welding line is the line created when two flow fronts meet. The fronts don’t weld or knit themselves together properly, which causes locally weak areas in the product.
A welding line occurs when the mold or material temperatures are set too low, so that the materials are too cold when they meet to bond perfectly. Another way welding lines form is when oxide forms on the corner of the weld preparation. If the welding arc can’t reach the area to clean the oxide, the welding line appears.
Prevention is best; if welding lines can be prevented, then they don’t need to be removed. However, if a welding line is causing a weak area, a deburring robot can come to the rescue!
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Affecting up to one in four urban children and causing approximately 21 million missed school days per year, asthma is the most prevalent chronic disease among children. There is no cure, but asthma can be controlled and effectively managed with asthma education, medication, environmental trigger avoidance, and other things like peak flow monitoring. Common asthma triggers include dust mites, pet dander, mold, and pollen. With the help of a few products, exposure to these common triggers can be reduced, thereby reducing asthma attacks and related symptoms.
Helpful Information for Asthma Sufferers
|Asthma FAQ||Asthma Statistics||Air Purifier Buying Guide|
|Vacuum Cleaner Buying Guide||Allergy Relief Bedding Buying Guide|
What is Asthma?
Asthma is a disease of the lungs that causes the airways to narrow and tighten, often in response to a trigger such as exposure to an allergen, exercise, or emotional stress. As with allergies, an over-sensitive immune response leads asthma symptoms, with the main symptom being difficulty breathing. All asthma sufferers have chronic inflammation and excessive airway sensitivity to various triggers. The prevalence of asthma in our society is rapidly increasing with asthma affecting up to one in four urban children.
Asthma is a form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) since it obstructs the airways. Chronic bronchitis and emphysema are other forms of COPD, and while there is no cure for asthma, it can be controlled with proper treatment including medication and avoidance of triggers.
What Causes Asthma?
Scientists do not know exactly what causes asthma. Most likely, several factors contribute to the development of the disease. Some people have a genetic predisposition to developing asthma. If one parent has asthma, each child has a 1 in 3 chance of developing asthma. If both parents have asthma, chances rise to 7 in 10. And though research continues, exact causes continue to elude us. People who have hay fever (allergic rhinitis) or eczema are also at higher risk for developing asthma.
The environment also plays a role in the development of asthma. Asthma attacks are reactions to triggers like environmental irritants or allergens. Asthma prevalence is increasing in the United States and many other parts of the world, perhaps because people are spending more time indoors, breathing in more indoor allergens. At the same time, rates of asthma are highest in places where air pollution is the worst, like areas of California and communities located in areas of heavy congestion, traffic and vehicle emissions. So the environment can play a double role, not only causing asthma but also asthma attacks.
Common asthma triggers include:
- tobacco or wood smoke
- polluted air
- allergens like mold, dust mites, & animal dander
- respiratory infections
- cold weather
- emotional stress
- physical exercise
- cockroaches and other pests
- stomach acid reflux (GERD)
- sulfites (additives in some foods and wines)
- menstruation (in some, not all, women)
Asthma affects more than 20 million adults in the United States. Over 10 million U.S. children have been diagnosed with asthma, and it's the most prevalent chronic condition among children. The prevalence of asthma increased approximately 4% FROM EACH YEAR TO THE NEXT from 1980-1996, but has since largely plateaued. Among ethnic groups, asthma prevalence is 39% higher in African Americans. Asthma is a major cause of missed work and school days.
Asthma symptoms include coughing, wheezing, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and difficulty speaking.
An asthma attack is much like an allergic reaction, and so asthma is sometimes referred to as reactive airway disease. When immune cells mistake an asthma trigger for an invader, a series of reactions produce the mucus and bronchospasms characteristic of an asthma attack. Bronchioles (airways) swell, and the muscles tighten, making it harder to breathe.
You should not take cough medicine to treat asthma; it will not help and may cause side effects. Do not take non-prescription medicines or natural or herbal remedies without first consulting your physician; some of these remedies may interfere with your medications. Take your medication exactly as directed. If your medication is not working, do not take more than you have been prescribed, as overuse can be dangerous.
Successful asthma treatment revolves around taking asthma medication as directed and avoiding environmental asthma triggers.
Some asthma medications are for long-term relief, while others are for quick relief.
Long-term asthma medications are normally taken every day and include corticosteroids (usually inhaled) to reduce swelling and mucus production. Corticosteroids are the most effective medicine for the treatment of asthma. However, inhaled corticosteroids may affect the growth of some children and increase the risk of bruising.
Please note: When using corticosteroids in a metered dose inhaler, it is very important to use a spacer, or holding chamber, and gargle with water afterward. Spit out the water to reduce the amount of the drug that's accidentally swallowed. If you don't use a holding chamber, you increase the risk of side effects like mouth and throat irritation and oral thrush (oral yeast infection). Examples of inhaled corticosteroids include Flovent, Pulmicort, Azmacort, Aerobid, and Qvar. Advair is an inhaler that combines a corticosteroid with a long-acting beta-agonist.
Long-acting beta-agonists are bronchodilators that help relax the muscles of the airways. In 2005, the FDA issued a public health advisory for Advair Diskus, Foradil Aerolizer, and Serevent Diskus, warning that these medications may increase the risk of severe asthma episodes and possibly death from an asthma attack. Long-acting beta-agonists should never be used for quick relief.
Leukotriene modifiers come in tablet form and serve as an alternative or supplement to corticosteroids. They are anti-inflammatory in nature, and examples include Singulair, Accolate, and Zyflo.
Theophylline, another bronchodilator, helps prevent nighttime symptoms and may cause side effects like nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, acid reflux, confusion, irregular heartbeat, and nervousness. Theophylline prescriptions are less common now than in the past.
Nedocromil and cromolyn have anti-inflammatory effects and may be used to treat mild asthma. Cromolyn is available for use in a nebulizer and therefore often used in treating young children.
Quick relief asthma medications, also known as rescue medications, provide relief of asthma attack symptoms and include short-acting beta-agonists, which work as bronchodilators and relax the muslces around the bronchial tubes (airways). Albuterol is the most common short-acting beta-agonist and is the active ingredient in Airet, Proventil, and Ventolin. Levalbuterol is a new, purer form of albuterol available as Xopenex. Other short-acting beta-agonists include Tornalate, Maxair, and Brethaire.
Ipratropium bromide, an anticholinergic and also a bronchodilator, is used by people who cannot tolerate short-acting beta-agonists; it's also used among those whose asthma is triggered by beta-blocker heart medication. Atrovent is an example of ipratropium bromide.
Systemic steroids (oral or intravenous) take longer to act but help prevent additional attacks. Examples include prednisone as Deltasone and Orasone, Prelone, Pediapred, and Medrol. Long-term use of systemic corticosteroids could cause serious side effects like cataracts, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, decreased immune function, and high blood pressure.
Asthma medications are either taken orally or inhaled using a metered dose inhaler (MDI), dry powder inhaler (DPI), or nebulizer.
Xolair, a new medication for allergy-induced asthma, is given by injection under the skin every two to four weeks. Xolair is an anti-IgE monoclonal antibody that blocks the antibodies which lead to inflammation. Xolair risks include the possibility of a severe reaction soon after getting the shot, blood-clotting problems, and a possible link to cancer.
Nebulizers for Asthma Medications
Nebulizers are devices that administer medication in the form of a liquid mist into the airways. Nebulizers pump oxygen through liquid medicine, turning it into a vapor which can be inhaled. As with inhalers, if nebulizers are used to administer an inhaled corticosteroid, you should rinse out your mouth with water to avoid oral thrush.
One type of nebulizer is the the small, lightweight PARI TREK Nebulizer. Some nebulizers are made specially for children, like the quiet and easy-to-use PARI Vios Pediatric Nebulizer. The PARI Ducky Mask is also made specially for children to use with nebulizers to minimize aerosol loss and make treatment time more fun.
Holding Chambers or Spacers for Asthma
Medications As stated above, you should always use a holding chamber or spacer for inhaled corticosteroids. Holding chambers are tubes that increase the effectiveness of inhalers by slowing down the delivery of the medication. Using a spacer also reduces the risk of side effects from corticosteroid residue in the mouth. Young children who don't understand the timing of inhalers normally use holding chambers.
Asthma MDI Inhaler Changes
MDIs traditionally used chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to propel drugs like albuterol into the lungs. However, CFCs harm the ozone layer. Since December 31, 2008, you are required to use a hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) inhaler instead of a CFC inhaler. HFA inhalers have been available since 1996, and they may feel or taste a bit different than CFC inhalers.
Peak Flow Monitoring
Peak flow meters help you detect subtle increases in airway obstruction. A low reading may be a sign of an oncoming asthma attack or that control medications need to be changed. Discuss peak flow monitoring in more detail with your doctor, and don't forget to keep your peak flow meter clean using hot water and soap.
Asthma Trigger Avoidance - Asthma Prevention
The best way to prevent an asthma attack is to identify all of your triggers and avoid them. See our allergy solution guides and learn how to avoid the following common asthma triggers: dust mites, mold, pet dander, and pollen.
Allergy bedding is the most effective first line of defense against allergens. Air purifiers eliminate allergens as well as airborne toxins like cigarette smoke and chemical fumes. Window, furnace, & vent filters also trap allergens in the air, as do allergy relief masks. Cold weather masks help prevent asthma attacks triggered by cold weather. Dehumidifiers curb mold and dust mite growth, and HEPA vacuum cleaners pick up allergens in carpet and upholstery.
Asthma is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases among children and affects up to one in four urban children. Asthma is the most common cause of missed school due to chronic disease. Approximately 80% of childhood asthma sufferers develop symptoms before the age of five. If you think your child may have asthma, look for coughing, wheezing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath, and see your doctor for a diagnosis. All children with asthma should have asthma management plans and know what to do in case of an emergency.
"Planning is the key to overcoming panic," says James Li, M.D., an asthma and allergy specialist at the Mayo Clinic. "A written plan can give you and your child the confidence to treat asthma signs and symptoms promptly."
See Disarming Asthma - A Mother's Perspective for more information about childhood asthma.
You should go to a hospital if you have an asthma attack with severe shortness of breath. To learn more about what to do during an asthma emergency, see Are You Prepared for an Asthma Emergency? for expert advice from a certified paramedic.
Click here to Shop all of our Asthma Treatment Products!
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Archaeologists recently confirmed that the Tarkhan Dress (which has decayed to just being a shirt at this point) is between 5,100 and 5,500 years old. This dates it to near the beginning of Egyptian society. Of course, it was a shock to find a (mostly) intact garment of such an age, since normally linen is destroyed by the ravages of time fairly quickly. (Fun fact, one of the major forces contributing to clothing falling apart over long spans of time is the friction caused by particles of dust coming into contact with it.)
The Dress was originally found in an Egyptian cemetery in the early 1900’s. Its significance was largely overlooked by the academic community, until 1977, when it was sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The long sleeved garment was found inside-out, and had significant creasing, suggesting that it had been actually worn, likely by one of the tomb’s occupants. At the moment, the dress stops at the midriff, but evidence such as similar, slightly younger garments, and images on nearby tombstones indicate that it would originally have been floor-length.
The Dress has long been suspected to date back to the time of Egypt’s First Dynasty, but this was recently confirmed by radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating is a process that we’ve only known about for around a century. It uses the decay of a certain Carbon isotope (isotopes are a type of particle that share chemical properties with each other, but slightly differ in mass) to measure how much time has passed. Carbon-14 is the one carbon isotope that is radioactive — which doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, just that it emits energy — and by finding the amount of it in a substance, we can tell how old it is. Since we have lots of evidence from very old things, like trees, we can use those as reference points to get very accurate dates, to within a few centuries.
What would the ancient Incans have needed with thousands of holes, all around three feet wide, and two to three feet deep? This question has plagued archaeologists ever since an aerial photograph, pictured above, publicized the phenomenon in 1931. When archaeologists got there in person, they found that the holes had been constructed by people, either by creating a pile of soil and digging a hole in that, or by piling stones in a circle. While this dispelled the rumor that the holes had been created by ancient aliens, it provided absolutely no hint as to who did make them, and why.
One of the earliest theories was that they were in fact all empty graves, and that the bodies had been destroyed by various natural phenomena over hundreds of years, but another man named Charles Stanish, an archaeologist working at the University of California, Los Angeles, wasn’t convinced by this explanation.
In 2015, Charles Stanish took a team down to the Band of Holes, where they created a more detailed map of the holes, numbering 6,000, and became increasingly convinced that the holes dated to the time when the Incans conquered the Chinchan people. Based off of that belief, he hypothesized that the holes were actually a way of measuring the tax a Chinchan family would have to pay to their new overlords. There is circumstantial evidence for this — Monte Sierpe, the location of the Band of Holes, lies close to an administrative center of the Incan Empire, the place where taxes would have been collected, and the Incans had used similar schemes in other locations. They have yet to find conclusive proof, but Stanish plans to return, and look for microscopic evidence that would have been left behind. For the time being, the Band of Holes remains mysterious.
Horseshoe crabs. The living fossils who have barely evolved since before the age of the dinosaurs likely aren’t a constant presence in your mind, but they play an important role in the medicine that keeps you healthy.
These crabs have lived on Earth in their present form for over 450 million years, living long before the dinosaurs were born, and long after the last of them died. They’ve played a fairly substantial role in human life, as they make excellent bait, and have edible eggs.
However, an alternate use for them was recently (by the crabs’ standards) discovered by Fred Bang in 1956, who found that a cell in the blood of horseshoe crabs would cause it to harden when exposed to bacteria. This cell is called an amebocyte, and serves a similar role as white blood cells do in humans. This reaction naturally serves to insulate the crabs from bacteria, but Bang realized that it could be used as an easy way to detect the presence of bacteria in medicine. This allows scientists to easily determine which batches of a product pose health risks to humans, replacing a much slower practice of experimenting on rabbits to achieve the same results.
This blood is extracted by scientists who trap crabs on the shore and extract some of their blood, before releasing them back into the waters they were taken from. Currently, there is some debate on whether this method is humane enough, as the species is considered at risk and this method unavoidably leads to death in a small number of the crabs.
Today NASA announced its plans to contract with SpaceX, a private company headed by Elon Musk, to transport astronauts to the International Space Station for the second time. This signals the beginning of a new age of space travel, as private companies begin to take on a role previously held exclusively by government agencies such as NASA, with SpaceX leading the pack.
SpaceX made headlines in 2012 when it became the first private company to make a manned trip into space, two years after it became the first private company to successfully return a rocket from low-Earth orbit. Its CEO, Elon Musk, is famous for his goal of getting humans living on Mars sometime in the next two decades, a timetable far ahead of most other feasible projects.
Getting a human colony on Mars has been a tenet of science fiction ever since the genre began, but it’s finally starting to seem like it could become a reality in the future, as SpaceX recently announced plans to begin its program by landing its Dragon module on Mars by 2018. Its collaboration with NASA is also seen as a good sign, with scientists such as Philip Metzger saying that “I believe it is completely feasible. No miracle inventions are required. No new physics. Just straightforward engineering and a modest budget for the development cost.”
As SpaceX continues to expand its manned missions, we should look forwards to beginning to see how feasible this quintessential human dream might become in the near future.
It was long a well known truth that our solar system had nine planets, until scientists realized that Pluto was, in fact, a dwarf planet. Dwarf planets are planetoids which meet two of the criteria for a planet — being an object large enough to crush itself into a sphere, but not large enough to cause thermonuclear fission — but has failed to clear its domain of space debris. For a few years after our conception of the solar system was shocked, all was well and stable, but then astronomers started noticing a strange attribute of five objects in the far reaches of our universe: they all had strangely eccentric — meaning elliptical instead of circular — orbits which aligned into a plane, and they all orbited in the same direction.
Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology and the leader of the team who discovered these objects, came to the conclusion that there was less than a one percent chance that all five orbits would align without some outside force influencing them. To solve the mystery, he enlisted the help of Theoretical Astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin.
The answer they came up with was that there must be some massive object in the solar system that affects their orbits. The thing is, when they started to look at possible orbital paths that would allow them to interact and cause that pattern, they realized that this hypothetical Planet Nine would only be close enough to these five objects every 50,000 years or so. If this is the case, then Planet Nine would have to be truly huge — at least ten times the size of Earth.
While the scientific community has generally been skeptical about claims to have found a new planet in the solar system, for obvious reasons, it seems like this time is different. This time, the math actually checks out, and it points astronomers to the supposed location of this new planet. As of now, the two scientists are using a telescope named Subaru to scan swathes of the sky, but it could still take over five years for them to scan all of the potential ninth planet’s expected location. Keep an eye on your favorite source of science news, and wait to see if this pans out!
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Page two of eleven
St. Peter's Basilica is a monument to Peter whom Jesus tapped as the chief apostle, declaring that Peter was the rock on which he would build the church.
Because Rome was the capital of the empire, Peter, along with the apostle Paul, came to the city to spread the faith, early in the first millennium.
But early Christians were often persecuted for their beliefs and, according to church tradition, in A.D. 64, the apostle Peter was arrested, brought to one of the great imperial circuses in Rome and martyred on an inverted cross.
His body was taken outside the walls of the arena and there, on the side of what was called the Vatican Hill, he was buried, perhaps in a small roofed grave.
Almost three hundred years later, Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, declared that a great church be built on the site of the tomb of St. Peter which had evolved from a simple grave to a small shrine.
Anchored on the grave of the apostle, the first St. Peter's Basilica incorporated the original shrine into the altar floor. But twelve hundred years later, when the first basilica was replaced, the details of Peter's burial had been forgotten.
The Vatican had long held the tradition that Peter was buried under the basilica, but even as late as the 1930s, they didn't really have any proof.
Then, in 1939, workers renovating the grottoes beneath St. Peter's, the traditional burial area of the popes, made a stunning find. Just below the floor level, they discovered an ancient Roman grave. It soon became clear that there wasn't just one grave, but an entire city of the dead.
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
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The Flow Meter Demonstration Unit is a self-contained facility to demonstrate the important characteristics of flow meters. The main elements are a service module and flow meter support stand.
A self-priming centrifugal pump draws water from the sump tank in the service module and delivers it to a flow meter test pipe. Industrial-type flow meters mounted in test sections can be fitted into the test pipe quickly and easily. These meters have been chosen to give a variety of different metering principles and degrees of sophistication and accuracy. Some of the meters are calibrated directly in units of flow, while others involve the use of calibration charts.
The pressure drop across each of the flow meters can be measured by using either the one-metre pressurised water manometer or the 0.5-metre mercury manometer supplied. Ported manometer connection valves ensure rapid bleeding of all manometer pipework. A facility exists to admit air into the hydraulic stream to demonstrate the effect on the meter’s accuracy. The discharge from the test section is controllable and is fed through a diffuser into the channel of the service module. A V-notch and rectangular notch weir can be fitted into the service module.
An auxiliary channel (C9-15) accommodates the broad-crested and crump weirs, as well as the ‘H’ flume and Washington flume. Levels in the channel can be determined by using the hook and point gauge (H1).
Water discharging from the flow meter on test is collected in a volumetric tank where the flow may be determined absolutely. This tank is stepped to accommodate high or low flow rates and incorporates a stilling baffle to reduce turbulence. A remote sight tube and scale connected to a tapping in the base of the volumetric tank enable an instantaneous indication of water level. Water is returned to the sump tank by a dump valve. The basic system incorporates a reference flow meter, which has been chosen for reliability and accuracy. This meter remains installed whereas other meters are selected from their storage position on the apparatus and tested as desired.
In addition to being a valuable teaching aid, the apparatus brings to the laboratory a selection of instruments that can be used to support student project work. A full set of instructions is provided, including details for testing and comparison of flow meters.
A self-contained apparatus to demonstrate the characteristics of flow meters used in measurement of water flow through pipes or open channels
Service module with reservoir, volumetric measuring tank and pump
Reference turbine flow meter permanently fitted
Metering devices available in various combinations to suit coursework
Selection from 14 devices:
Volumetric rotary piston
Quick and easy removal of test meters for evaluation and inspection
Air entrainment facility
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The man who has steered Afghanistan out of decades of civil war has been declared the first popularly elected president of the country. Hamid Karzai, who took 55 percent of the vote in October 9 elections, spent many years in exile before leading the interim government for the past three years.
Hamid Karzai was chosen to lead Afghanistan's transitional government soon after a U.S.-led alliance removed the Islamic Taleban from power in late 2001 for harboring international terrorists. The 46-year-old Afghan leader speaks several languages and comes from the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Mr. Karzai has long supported efforts to establish a multi-ethnic government to solve Afghanistan's problems caused by three decades of war - including poverty, corruption and uncontrolled private militias.
Mr. Karzai says he has tried to address some of these problems during his three years in power.
"The greatest achievement of Afghanistan, of the Afghan people, has been the remarkable smoothness with which the political process went forward, that the political process delivered everything on time, and that the Afghan people participated fully in the political process," he said.
President Karzai comes from the powerful Popolzai tribe in southern Afghanistan, which helped run the nation for centuries, until the 1979 Soviet invasion forced them to take refuge in neighboring Pakistan. He was deputy foreign minister in the early 1990s, when Islamic parties ruled the country. Initially, he supported the fundamentalist Taleban, which took control of the country in the mid-1990s, in the hope it would end chaos and lawlessness. But within a few months he denounced the Taleban as being manipulated by Pakistan.
Mr. Karzai and his father Abdul Ahad Karzai began campaigning against the regime from exile in Pakistan. Suspected Taleban supporters killed the president's father. Soon after United States invasion to oust the Taleban in 2001, Mr. Karzai entered Afghanistan with the support of American troops to stir a revolt among Pashtuns in the southern Afghan provinces. U.S. backing helped Mr. Karzai win the support of the international community at a conference to create an interim government after the Taleban fell.
Three years later, Mr. Karzai says his policies have not only encouraged more than three million Afghan refugees to return home, but also have earned Afghanistan international respect and recognition. But he acknowledges his efforts to disarm private militias and tackle corruption have not met with success.
"The progress towards disarmament has been very slow," said Hamid Karzai. "We have not been able to remove militia forces from the country that keep harassing our people and Afghan people are really upset about that. We have not been able, so far, to handle corruption and probably that is something more difficult to do."
The presidential election was due in June, but security concerns, including an ongoing insurgency led by Taleban remnants, forced Mr. Karzai to delay the poll.
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The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was initially published in serial format starting in autumn 1910; the book was first published in its entirety in 1911.
Its working title was Mistress Mary, in reference to the English nursery rhyme Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. It is now one of Burnett's most popular novels, and is considered to be a classic of children's literature.
The author, Frances Hodgson Burnett, was a practitioner of Christian Science due to the premature death of her son as well as personal illness.
The garden is the book's central symbol. The secret garden at Misselthwaite Manor is the site of both the near-destruction and the subsequent regeneration of a family. Using the garden motif, Burnett explores the healing power inherent in living things.
Maytham Hall in Kent, England, where Burnett lived for a number of years during her marriage to Stephen Townesend, is often cited as the inspiration for the book's setting. Burnett kept an extensive garden, including an impressive rose garden. However, it has been noted that besides the garden, Maytham Hall and Misselthwaite Manor are physically very different.
The Secret Garden was first serialized,...
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“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” ~ Star Trek title sequence
Perhaps some of the most famous words uttered in regards to space and it comes from a science fiction television series. However, they capture the spirit of discovery and exploration. Space may be the final frontier but exploration and discovery is as old as humanity itself. One could argue that it began the moment Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, or, if you are so inclined, when mankind first left the proverbial cave or walked out of the jungle. We have been exploring ever since. Jesus spoke of exploration when he says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8, NIV)
In the History Channel miniseries “America: The Story of US”, the narrator states in the introduction, “We are pioneers. We are trailblazers…” That is the story of America, but not just America, but of all civilization. From Eric the Red to Zheng He to Columbus to Neil Armstrong and current astronauts and oceanographic explorers we have sought new lands, new routes, and new knowledge.
Curiosity is at the core of exploration and discovery. We are curious about what is around the next turn, beyond the next rise, hill, mountain, or behind the next building. Without curiosity, an infant would not crawl, would not eventually get up and toddle around a room touching everything it can touch. Birthdays and holidays would hold no meaning. It is all part of discovery and exploration. Curiosity motivates us to seek that which is greater. It inspires us to pursue goals for the benefit of all mankind. It makes us better people. Exploration is not just the sphere of the ship’s captain, the diver, or the astronaut. It is also the domain of the scientist, the doctor, the artist, and anyone who has two working brain cells.
In preparing this, I began by trying to research the concept of exploration in lofty, idealistic terms and was reminded of something Ronald Reagan said when memorializing the Challenger disaster in 1986. He said, “…they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'” He later noted that he remembered this from a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a young 19 yr old American aviator who died during World War Two on a training flight in England. Reagan had heard this poem during World War Two. The poem’s title is “High Flight”. Anyone who is a pilot will recognize it. Allow me to post the entire poem for your edification:
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Exploration is continually striving for the unattainable. Not because we cannot attain it, but because once we attain it, we seek the next challenge. We never stop. Nor should we ever stop.
Here’s to all the explorers: from the newborn infant to the person on their death bed and all those in between. For the next few weeks, we will be exploring quotes on exploring, space, discovery, curiosity, and other related topics. May your thirst never be quenched. May your eyes always be set upon the next star.
New quotes will begin Sunday, September 29th, 2013. I hope you join me in this adventure.
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Quickcrop Seedling Tray Variety: Ishikura Bunching
Spring onions tend to be treated as an afterthought by most gardening books yet they are a popular crop and very useful, possibly because they are really easy to grow. Salad onions, also properly called scallions are not just easily grown, they can provide a useful substitute for bulb onions if stocks are low as you await the new crop.
Feeding Spring Onions
They like a rich well drained soil but being a useful crop to fill into gaps in the summer, they tend to get what they are given. It’s a good idea to give some general purpose fertiliser a week before and rake the soil into a fine tilth before sowing them.
Cultivating Spring Onions
Conventionally spring onions are grown in rows 6" (15cm) apart but they can more easily just be thinly scattered in a patch and either raked in or covered with half an inch (1.5cm) of fine soil.
They do not need a great depth of soil and a winter crop can be grown in the greenhouse in an ordinary seed tray filled with compost. Salad onions are ideal for container growing and even if you have a vegetable patch or an allotment, growing some salad crops by the back door where they'll be handy is always a good idea.
Successionally sow each week or two from early March for a continuous supply throughout the summer.
You can over-winter spring onions outdoors as well. Late sowings in August, September and a fine October will provide an early crop by late spring. Always use a winter hardy variety for this.
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Manipulative therapy or manual therapy has its roots in the early years of physiotherapy when it was used as a means of promoting healing and relieving pain. Today manipulative therapy is a highly specialised area of the profession, however it may exist in different forms among other professions. Manipulative therapy is the term used for special handling techniques to promote healing of soft tissue. These techniques may include myofascial release, craniosacral techniques, joint mobilisation and massage therapy to name a few. This article takes a brief look at the first three. Myofascial release is a form of what is called bodywork that seeks to re-balance the body. It is a type of massage that stretches the fascia and releases bonds between the fascia in order to relieve pain. The fascia is the thick band of tissue beneath the skin that covers muscles, organs and bones. The connection between muscles and fascia is what is called the myofascia system. The fascia can become tightened or restricted by stress, injury, inflammation and poor posture. There are two forms of myofascial release – the direct and the indirect method. The direct method gets to the deep tissue to stretch and elongate the fascia. The indirect method is a gentle stretch that brings blood to the tissues and allows the fascia to ‘unwind’ itself. Joint mobilisation is a common practice among physiotherapists where a joint is moved passively to achieve a therapeutic effect. It is indicated with restriction of motion or pain due to tightness in the muscles and/or tendons. It can also assist in the reabsorbing of scar tissue, speed muscle healing and promote joint mobility by facilitating accessory motions. These are the involuntary movements of tendons and ligaments that bring about full range of motion. Joint mobilisation should not be carried out in the presence of infection, recent fracture, inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis or other chronic illnesses. Orthopedic Manipulative Therapy uses hands-on treatments, joint and soft tissue mobilisations and continual assessment of treatment effectiveness with each application. It is effective in the rehabilitation of a number of sports injuries such as knee injuries and other orthopedic cases. Bone setting is a form of orthopedic manipulative therapy in which bones are set after a fracture. Splinting, casting and bandaging are also part of this treatment. Massage therapy is often used successfully in treating sprains and strains by manipulating specific muscles, tendons, ligaments and connective tissue. Take care when considering manipulative therapy, as nowadays it is being offered by non-professionals and persons who are not properly trained. Contact us to discuss the suitability of this treatment for you.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) systems provide business owners with the strategy, system and tools to help them interact with their customers. In the late 1990s, the Internet and electronic commerce changed CRM, and a new term, electronic customer relationship management (ECRM), was born. Today there is little difference between the two. ECRM is typically considered to be the natural evolution of CRM and not the separate business strategy it once was.
The Relationship Between Business and Customer
The role of CRM in business is to define the processes and systems that enable a business to form, manage and track relationships and communications with its customers.
Electronic commerce and the Internet contributed to a change in CRM and the relationship between the customer and the business. From obtaining customer support to making a purchase online, consumers wanted options to communicate with a business electronically over the Internet.
ECRM was forged to meet the growing needs of businesses wanting to build and manage Web-based customer communications and support.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM is not a new technology; it was a standard business process long before people used the Internet to communicate. The phrase “customer relationship management” is used to mean the strategy used by a business to interact with anyone it conducts business with, including customers, clients and sales prospects. CRM systems define the way a business handles its sales, marketing and support projects to meet the goal of nurturing existing customer relationships and forming new ones.
Traditionally, CRM is a set of processes and systems used in physical business locations, such as offices or a physical retail space (also called “brick and mortar” business).
Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ECRM)
In the late 1990s it was evident that the Internet would change the brick-and-mortar business model. The onset of Web-based communications and electronic commerce (e-commerce) changed not only how business was conducted but also the way in which a business could communicate with its customers.
This change required a business to invest in new hardware, systems and Web applications. There was a need to develop new processes to manage customer relations, marketing, and sales and support using the Web for those business processes.
The terminology was updated to Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ECRM) to reflect the new hardware and systems required by a business to make use of new Web-based technologies, such as self-service customer support, email and online sales.
The Difference Between CRM and ECRM
The lines that once defined CRM and ECRM as two different business strategies barely exist now, leaving the names themselves to be the biggest difference. ECRM was a popular term when the shift to e-commerce and Web-based customer self-service applications was on the horizon, but today, many industry experts believe that ECRM as a separate term is not necessary.
This is because ECRM implies processes that are a natural evolution of CRM. Most industry experts and CRM vendors today do not use ECRM to describe systems, but rather use CRM -- which in newer systems incorporates ECRM strategies, tools and applications.
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Virtual and augmented reality seem to be on everybody’s lips nowadays, both promising to revamp the tech scene and change the way consumers interact in the digital space. Despite the hype and media attention, the two often get confused as some people use the terms interchangeably. While there are many similarities between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the two are definitely distinguishable. Let’s dive into these differences.
What’s Virtual Reality?
Virtual reality is a computer simulated reality in which a user can interact with replicated real or imaginary environments. The experience is totally immersive by means of visual, auditive and haptic (touch) stimulation so the constructed reality is almost indistinguishable from the real deal. You’re completely inside it.
Marked by clunky beginnings, the idea of an alternate simulated reality took off in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when personal computer development exploded and a lot of people became excited about what technology had to offer. These attempts, like the disastrous Nintendo Virtual Boy which shut down after only one year, were marked by failure after failure, so everyone seemed to lose faith in VR.
Then came Palmer Luckey, who is undoubtedly the father of contemporary VR thanks to his Oculus Rift. Luckey built his first prototype in 2011, when he was barely 18, and quickly raised $2 million with Kickstarter. In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Other popular VR headsets include Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard.
What’s Augmented Reality?
While VR completely immerses the user in a simulated reality, AR blends the virtual and real. Like VR, an AR experience typically involves some sort of goggles through which you can view a physical reality whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. In augmented reality, the real and the non-real or virtual can be easily told apart.
Wearing Google Glass — the biggest effort a company ever made to bring AR to mass consumers — you can walk through a conference hall and see things ‘pop to life’ around the booths, such as animated 3D graphics of an architecture model if the technology is supported. The goggles aren’t even necessary since you can do this via mobile apps which use a smartphone’s or tablet’s camera to scan the environment while augmented elements will show on the display. There are other creative means, as well.
Unfortunately, Google Glass didn’t take off and the company discontinued the product in 2015. Instead, AR apps on smartphones are much more popular, possibly because they’re less creepy than a pair of glasses with cameras.
Perhaps the most revealing example of AR is Pokemon Go, a viral phenomenon which amassing more than 100 million downloads in a few week. In Pokemon Go, you use your smartphone to find pokemons lurking in your vicinity with the help of a map that’s build based on your real-life GPS signal. To catch the pokemon you have to throw a pokeball at it by swiping on your mobile’s screen and when you toggle AR on, you can see the pokemon with the real world in the background.
Despite the hype, Pokemon GO has a minimal and basic AR interface. Some more revealing examples include:
- Sky Map — a mobile app that lets you point your phone towards the sky and ‘see’ all the constellations you’re facing in relation to your position.
- Word Lens — A Google app that allows you to point your phone to a sign and have it translated in your target language, instantly.
- Project Tango – another Google project which aims to create a sensor-laden smartphone that can map the real world and project an accurate 3D picture of it.
“I’m excited about Augmented Reality because unlike Virtual Reality which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently… That has resonance.”
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple
Virtual reality vs augmented reality
- enrich the experience of a user by offering deeper layers of interactions;
- have the potential to transform how people engage with technology. Entertainment, engineering or medicine are just a couple of sectors where the two technologies might have a lasting impact;
However, the two stand apart because:
- virtual reality creates a completely new environment which is completely computer generated. Augmented reality, on the other hand, enhances experiences through digital means that offer a new layer of interaction with reality, but does not seek to replace it.
- AR offers a limited field of view, while VR is totally immersive.
- Another way to look at it is once you strap those VR goggles, you’re essentially disconnected from the outside world. Unlike VR, an AR user is constantly aware of the physical surroundings while actively engaged with simulated ones.
- virtual reality typically requires a headed mount such as the Oculus Rift goggles while augmented reality is far less demanding — you just need a smartphone or tablet.
What’s sure is we’re just barely scratching the surface of what AR and VR can do. In a report earlier this year, BCC Research estimated the global market for both virtual reality and AR will reach more than $105 billion by 2020, up from a mere $8 billion last year.
If you’re still confused, you can always use a cinematic analogy. For instance, the world of The Matrix corresponds to virtual reality while augment reality is akin to The Terminator. Another way to look at this is to think about scuba diving versus going to the aquarium. In virtual reality, you can swim with sharks and with augment reality you can have shark pop out of your business card through the lens of a smartphone. Each has its own pros and cons, so you be the judge which of the two is better.
Bonus: What’s Mixed Reality?
We just made things pretty clear on what VR and AR are and where the boundary between the two lies. It’s Following innovation in the two fields, a third distinct medium has surfaced: mixed reality (MR).
What MR does is mix the best of augmented and virtual reality to create a … hybrid reality. I confess it gets confusing, partly because the technology is very new and it might innovate itself into something different, but the best explanation I can offer is that mixed reality overlays synthetic content over the real world. If that sounds familiar, it’s because MR is very similar to AR. The key difference here is that in MR the virtual content and the real-world content are able to react to one another in real time. The interaction is facilitated by tools you’d normally see in VR like special goggles and motion sensors used to control.
For the sake of clarity, perhaps the best way to explain MR is to see it in action — enter Microsoft’s Hololens as demoed with Minecraft.Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2017 ZME Science
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Breast Cancer Symposium
September 6, 2011
Two recent studies showed that women younger than 40 with breast cancer who had a lumpectomy had a similar risk of recurrence (cancer that comes back after treatment) and lived as long as those who had a mastectomy. A lumpectomy (also called breast-conservation therapy or surgery) is the removal of the tumor in the breast and some of the surrounding healthy tissue. A mastectomy is the removal of the entire breast. Being diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age is considered a risk factor for breast cancer recurrence, and studies have shown that more young women are choosing mastectomy instead of lumpectomy even though research has not shown that women who choose mastectomy live longer than those who choose lumpectomy.
In the study on breast cancer recurrence, researchers analyzed medical records from 628 women age 40 and younger with breast cancer who either had a lumpectomy or a mastectomy and found almost no difference in the number of recurrences. For the women who had a lumpectomy, researchers found that 5% had a recurrence within five years and 13% had a recurrence within 10 years. For the women who had a mastectomy, 9% had a recurrence within five years and 11% had a recurrence within 10 years.
In the study that evaluated treatment and survival information from 14,760 women, ages 20 to 39, with early-stage breast cancer, researchers found that the women had similar survival rates about six years after treatment whether they received lumpectomy or mastectomy. Of these women, information from a smaller group of 4,644 women whose treatment was matched based on the size of the tumor, the grade of the tumor (how much the cancer cells look like normal cells), and the number of lymph nodes that had cancer also showed no difference in survival between the women who had lumpectomy or mastectomy. Specifically, after five years, 93% of the women who received a lumpectomy were alive, compared with almost 92% of the women who had a mastectomy. After 10 years, about 84% of women who received a lumpectomy and the women who received a mastectomy were alive. After 15 years, 77% of women who received a lumpectomy were alive, compared with 79% of women who received a mastectomy.
What this means for patients
“Previous research has suggested that breast-conserving therapy leaves women at greater risk for local recurrence. However, we found no significant difference in the rates of local recurrence between women who received breast-conserving surgery or mastectomy. These results suggest that advances in chemotherapy, imaging, and radiation have reduced local and distant recurrence risks and have made breast-conserving therapy a safe option for many young women,” said Julliette Buckley, MD, lead author of the study on breast cancer recurrence and a fellow in breast surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Usama Mahmood, MD, lead author of the study on breast cancer survival and a fellow in radiation oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said, “our findings show that breast-conservation therapy leads to similar survival rates as mastectomy. These findings can provide reassurance to younger women with early-stage breast cancer who are considering less aggressive surgery.”
Questions to ask your doctor
- What stage of breast cancer do I have? What does this mean?
- What is my prognosis (chance of recovery)?
- What are my treatment options?
- Can you explain the risks and benefits of lumpectomy and mastectomy?
- What is the chance that the cancer will recur?
For More Information
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Fabio Ciulla from Northeastern University, Boston, USA, and his colleagues demonstrated that the elimination of contestants in TV talent shows based on public voting, such as American Idol, can be anticipated. They unveiled the predictive power of microblogging Twitter signals--used as a proxy for the general preference of an audience--in a study recently published in EPJ Data Science¹.
The authors considered the voting system of these shows as a basic test to assess the predictive power of Twitter signals. They relied on the overlap between Twitter users and show audience to collect extremely detailed data on social behaviour on a massive scale. This approach provided a unique and unprecedented opportunity to apply network science to social media. Social phenomena can thus be studied in a completely unobtrusive way. Previously, Twitter has already been used to forecast epidemics spreading, stock market behaviour and election outcomes with varying degrees of success.
In this study, the authors demonstrated that the Twitter activity during the time span limited to the TV show airing and the voting period following it correlated with the contestants' ranking. As a result, it helped predict the outcome of the votes. This approach offers a simplified version helping to analyse complex societal phenomena such as political elections. Unlike previous voting systems, Twitter offers a quantitative indicator that can act as proxy for what is occurring around the world in real time, thereby anticipating the outcome of future events based on opinions.
Ciulla and colleagues also showed that the fraction of tweets that included geolocalisation information enabled to internationally map the fan base of each contestant. They identified a strong influence by the geographical origin of the votes, suggesting a different outcome to the show, if voting had not been limited to US voters.
1. F. Ciulla, D. Mocanu, A. Baronchelli, B. Goncalves, N. Perra, A. Vespignani (2012). Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol. European Physical Journal Data Science; DOI 10.1140/epjds8
For more information, please visit www.epj.org
The full-text article is available to journalists on request.
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Late last year I had the opportunity to review College of William and Mary History Professor Robert Vinson’s remarkable new book, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Vinson details both physical and intellectual journeys between South Africa and the United States in the decades before apartheid. His characters are sailors and preachers, political leaders, teachers and conmen. His work reveals the intellectual history of the African diaspora during critical years that saw the tightening of white supremacy, massive dislocation and urbanization and remarkable political creativity in both the United States and South Africa. Over the course of February, Vinson and I exchanged emails about his book, beginning with a discussion about the man who was perhaps the era’s most important black political leader, Marcus Garvey.
How was Marcus Garvey important in African history?
Vinson: Marcus Garvey was important to African history in several ways. He led the largest black-led political movement in world history, and his movement’s “Africa for the Africans” slogan exemplified its primary mission of African politico-economic independence, black control of religious, educational and cultural institutions and an audacious worldview that linked the destinies of Africa and its diasporas. Of course, Garvey was part of a centuries-long history of diasporic blacks that sought re-connection with, and return to, the African continent. For continental Africans, Garveyism became a vehicle to express popular discontent with white rule, to animate and, in some cases, reinvigorate their political organizations, their trade unions, etc., to create and control black-led churches and schools and to spark a prophetic liberationist Christianity that placed godly black people at the center of a divinely-ordained historical drama that would lead to African redemption. It is so ironic that Garvey’s extensive travels throughout the Atlantic World did not include Africa (though it should be noted several colonial states in Africa banned him), since Garveyism became such a vital ideology that linked continental Africans with diasporic blacks as they constructed transnational racial identities in their attempts to eliminate the global color line. Garveyism was also an important bridge between the post-1890 African resistance movements and nascent Pan-African movements associated with diasporic blacks like Henry Sylvester Williams and the post World War Two anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist movements exemplified by future African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Jomo Kenyatta, all of whom were influenced by Garvey and Garveyism in their respective youths. For historians of African history, Marcus Garvey and Garveyism illustrates how African history can be fruitfully studied beyond continental borders, how Africa and Africans should be more central in African Diaspora Studies and how African American and Caribbean history remained linked to African history long after the Atlantic Slave Trade.
It’s notable that Africanist scholarship has generally failed to note the vitality your book reveals, and that you’ve sketched here. Why do you think this is? And how do you explain the contrast with African American history, which, as Robin Kelley and others have long argued, has always been attuned to Atlantic crossings? Is this simply a matter of diaspora vs. homeland? Or does it speak to the political culture of African history and politics?
On one level there is a diaspora vs. homeland dynamic at work here, complemented by, and related to, how the fields of African American history and African history have developed in the academy. In many ways, African American history has been informed and animated by centuries-long African American engagement with Africa. These include cultural, linguistic retentions, spiritual and naming practices, etc., the gradual transition from ethnic to racial identities and the making of a people known now as African Americans, the perpetual search for ancestral rootedness in Africa (including continual African American journeys to West African slave dungeons/castles) while buffeted about in an often hostile American homeland, back-to-Africa movements, and a general sense among some African Americans that the general fate of African Americans is tied in some fashion to the perceived state of Africa (oftentimes hostile whites justified slavery and Jim Crow by claiming blacks came from ‘barbaric’ Africa, are thus inferior and should be grateful to slaveholding/dominant whites for ‘civilizing’ them). Of course, Robin Kelley, Earl Lewis and others rightly pointed out in the 1990s that the then increasing interest in African Diasporas were part of a much longer popular and academic African American engagement with Africa (that included the work and practice of people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, J.A. Rogers, Katherine Dunham, George Washington Williams, Lorenzo Turner, William Leo Hansberry, etc.) were attuned to African history, both on its own terms, and as an essential component to African American history, culture and politics. Garvey and others simultaneously exhorted diasporic blacks to lead the charge in ‘redeeming’ contemporary Africa, to restore the continent to its former glories. So, yes, Africa was central to the identity of diasporic blacks, particularly African Americans. Instead of being peripheral, inferior 2nd class citizens in hostile homelands, they were leaders of a divinely ordained mission to restore Africa to its former glories. Oftentimes, part of that mission involved actual return to Africa. In the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans reveled in the newly independent African nations; African independence helped fuel black freedom fighters, including King (his Birth of a New Nation speech after his return from Ghanaian independence celebrations is my favorite speech of his), Malcolm X (his African tours and the formation of his OAAU, patterned after the OAU), or those, like Pauli Murray, who offered tangible skills to the African nation-building project. African American multi-level engagement with Nyerere’s Tanzania and with anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements in southern Africa also show that Africa has loomed large in African American consciousness than diasporic blacks in the consciousness of Africans in the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. So all of this history has informed African American historical scholarship that has often been organically transnational (without using that trendy word) in outlook, particularly with Africa. It is why in the 1990s, I could go to Howard for graduate school to study Africa and the African Diaspora and African American history in an integrated, holistic way whereas at other schools that had a firmer sense of separation between Africa and other parts of the world, I would have been trained very well as an Africanist, and might have had African American history as a cursory secondary field, but l would have had to declare very clearly where my allegiances truly were-Africa or African American. Jim Campbell has talked about his graduate student days when senior scholars expressed incomprehension that he wanted to build a bridge between African and African American history. Fortunately for me, I studied with Joseph Harris, oft-cited as the godfather of modern African Diaspora studies, who himself had been a student of Hansberry’s. At Howard, an African American institution, there was a wide open space, resulting from all that I described above, that accepted as normal and natural that I would want to write integrated histories of Africa and Afro-America.
Conversely, I think African history/studies has been borne from experiences of continental Africans who had their own particular concerns in the Atlantic Slave Trade era that they often did not perceive as having direct connection with African Americans. Though continental Africans who lost loved ones in the Atlantic Slave Trade never forgot their kin, most of course could not know where those loved ones ended up, much less have a sense of the Americas and the people eventually known as African Americans. This is not to deny that some diasporic enslaved folk and their descendants did find their way back to the continent, helping to establish Liberia and Sierra Leone while others were engaged in Atlantic World Trade, etc., but it was not until the colonial period that there would be sustained African engagement with diasporic blacks, particularly African Americans. And even then, African kin, ethnic, local, or regional identities, their general political fortunes and their sense of rootedness were not tied to African Americans to the same extent that African Americans felt linked to Africa. Of course, as my work, and the work of others show, African identification with African Americans could be very strong — here too is the supreme importance of Garvey and the UNIA in fostering these linkages –, particularly as the 20th century progressed and African American cultural production and general achievement is beamed around the world in print media, oral transmission, film, television and other forms of mass entertainment. But Africa obviously is a huge continent that dwarfs the US and there are so many local, regional, national and continental issues that draw people’s attention. I understand some Africanists who resist the diasporic turn by noting correctly that Africa has such a varied and dynamic history on its own terms, that it remains understudied in its own right, and that funding, publications, and general institutional support should not be unduly influenced by the level of engagement with diasporic peoples. Nor should African Studies Centers find themselves competing for scarce funds with African American / African Diaspora / Africana programs that tend to elide Africa and Africans themselves.
The different levels of engagement of African Americans with Africans vis-a-vis African engagement with Africa is illustrated well in Saidiya Hartman’s book, Lose Your Mother. She discusses the coastal Ghanaians who were obviously aware of the streams of African Americans coming back to the slave dungeons, but she noted that many were puzzled by the desire to remember slavery or their slave histories. Some local Africans were alternately offended and amused by what they considered African American self-absorption and victimization when they — Africans — had very pressing immediate concerns and could not imagine having the material wealth needed to travel back across the Atlantic and stay in five star hotels.
Unlike the genesis of African American history, modern academic African historical scholarship derived largely from the works of early 20th century anthropologists, colonial officials and scholars of empire and colonialism, some of whom relied on collected oral histories of African peoples or travel narrative of European explorers, slave traders, missionaries, adventurers, etc. Most of this work was continental based. But as the vast post-1965 African Diaspora continues to fan out across the globe, the academics within this diasporic stream will lead the charge in placing Africa and Africans at the center of African Diasporic studies and placing African history in dynamic global contexts.
US-based Africans like Emmanuel Akyeampong and Paul Zeleza write extensively about the experiences of the post-1965 African diasporic communities outside of Africa. These scholars are obviously well placed to write about processes that reflect their own experiences-this personal interest animates their scholarly interests in ways very similar to African Americans writing about Africa. These scholars, defined by the processes of diaspora apparent in Atlantic Slave Trade diaspora, and aided by the hegemonic nature of the US, the US academy, and publishing industry, will be the vanguard of these new dynamic histories.
It’s remarkable the extent to which Garveyism was able to build these intellectual bridges across the Atlantic. How do you explain its apparent success? Was it a matter of context — it took root here, but not there? Or was it the content of Garvey’s (and others’) ideas? The confluence of events at the end of the 1910s and World War I?
Garveyism was successful because it was within a longer geneology of black-nationalist and Pan-African intellectual exchange, and organizational activity as well as a general black mobility around the Atlantic World, from enslaved people to labor migrants, to sailors, missionaries, students, entertainers etc. Garvey’s eloquent articulation of an African antiquity that disseminated ‘civilization’ beyond the African continent, his vision for a regenerated, redeemed independent Africa, and his claim that diasporic blacks, linked with western educated Africans, were a providentially designed liberationist vanguard, his fierce assertion that Egypt and biblical Ethiopia represented classical African antiquity, and his prophetic jeremiads that warned of an imminent apocalypse for white racists for their profoundly un-Christian behavior were familiar ideas for so many of his followers around the world. Most Garveyites had some familiarity with the ideas that became associated with Garveyism, particularly the emphasis on black psychological liberation as a necessary precursor racial advancement and the importance of building autonomous black religious, cultural, educational, fraternal, and socio-economic (particularly mutual aid) institutions. As Wilson Moses shows in much of his work, all of these ideas had circulated, albeit unevenly, around the black world. I am thinking now of David Walker’s Appeal, the prophetic religiosity (i.e. Nat Turner) and broad diasporic nature of slave revolts (i.e. Denmark Vesey), in Harriet Tubman leading hundreds of black out of slavery to the Promised Land, among Caribbean-born intellectuals like Edward Blyden and many diasporic religious leaders like Henry McNeal Turner, in the fierce anti-lynching campaigns of Ida Wells in the U.S. and England, in the pioneering Pan-African activity of the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams and in the writings of West African intellectuals like James Africanus Horton and J. Casely Hayford.
So, it was the enduring attractiveness of these ideals, made more so by the many manifestations of brutal racism along the global color line, that is one factor in Garvey’s success.
But there was something about Garvey himself that mattered — otherwise anyone else could have harnessed these same ideas to similar effect. Garvey’s unique genius was to take familiar ideas, and repackage them to fit the immediate post World War I world — and having the good sense to radicalize a rather staid initial UNIA program that centered on a Jamaica Tuskegee, and to instead build on the more aggressive political program of mentors like Hubert Harrison so that he and the UNIA became the political vanguard of the transnational New Negro movement. Garvey’s personal charisma, passionate oratory, visionary boldness, and unerring ability to articulate the deepest fears and highest aspirations of his listeners mattered. More so than anyone else of his era, he crystallized and channeled the frustrations, the despair, the anger and the dreams of so many blacks who had hoped that the close of World War I would usher in a more racially and economically egalitarian world, where American Jim Crowism and European colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean would end. That envisioned world had motivated many blacks to participate in the war effort. That envisioned world was one reason the Japanese pushed for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter. What the denial of that clause meant, what the continuance of European colonialism meant, what Red Summer and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan meant to blacks was a firm denial of their individual and collective freedom dreams. So 1919, as Barbara Foley notes, was an explosive year and Garvey seized this moment better than any of his more learned and more experienced peers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Hubert Harrison. With righteous indignation, he framed white supremacy in global terms and moved beyond the language of protest to be bold enough to offer an institutional solution to the global color line and the problem of presumed black inferiority.
An underrated quality of Garvey was his use of history, not just for his personal knowledge, but also for the projection of a usable past that provided context, lessons and inspiration to his followers. Because he had some sense of relevant historical precedents-including a fascination with the historical development of European empire-building — he used the language of nationalism, empire and racial destiny to imbue his movement with a sense of dynamic progress and promise that electrified his followers. He learned from his mentor Robert Love many things, but particularly the importance of printing a newspaper to disseminate his views widely and to use as a common site where his far-flung followers could be in conversation and collaboration. His multi-language Negro World traveled throughout the world particularly by black sailors, and young Africans memorized its contents and spread the word orally. Again, within the longstanding tradition of ships being central to back-to-Africa movements (i.e. Paul Cuffee, Chief Sam) the Black Star Line stood for a while as a powerful symbol of black economic power and as a tangible vehicle for diasporic blacks to return to and regenerate Africa. It failed, yes, but part of the reason it failed is because Garvey ordered the BSL ships to stop frequently in ports so that it could be the effective propaganda vehicle it was, to sell more stock, to enroll more members and to encourage the idea among many followers that Garvey was the new Moses primed to lead blacks to the Promised Land, either in Africa or in improved conditions in their respective homelands. Even as some followers melted away after the Black Star Line fiasco, Garvey’s conviction and jailing and the interminable UNIA infighting, Garvey intimate understanding of the importance of propaganda was part of his effective portrayal of himself as a Christ-like martyr; notions that his followers in particularly Central and Southern Africa came up with on their own as well. And even though Garvey was not as deeply religious as some of his followers, he adroitly understood the importance of religion, particularly biblical prophetic language and imagery, and the central place of African sites like Ethiopia and Egypt in the minds of so many blacks worldwide. This prophetic religiosity was another key component for bringing so many diverse constituencies in the black world under the broad Garvey/UNIA tent.
What do you want readers to take away from The Americans Are Coming!?
For one, that Garvey and the UNIA presided over the largest black-led movement in world history, bigger than the American Civil Rights movement. The book demonstrates the influence of African Americans and Caribbean peoples in energizing African politics, religions, trade unionism, education and print media AND the crucial facts that Africa was the primary site of the action and Africans were the active agents in adapting malleable Garveyist ideas to varied local contexts. The book places African, African American and Caribbean history in transnational contexts, seeks to re-center Africa and Africans in African Diaspora studies, and demonstrates that Garvey and Caribbean-born maritime communities in South African port cities were part of an important Caribbean diaspora as well. I hope readers see The Americans Are Coming! as a tangible example of truly transnational history that highlights the circulation and connection of people, ideas, institutions across national borders and thus moves beyond comparative history that often separates historical subjects in abstract parallel universes instead of in dynamic, interactive connection with each other.
I hope readers see the importance of Africa to Garvey and Garveyites. We see that importance, for example, in prophetic Garveyist thought, as in the Psalms 68:31 quote that appeared on the Negro World masthead, “Princes Shall Come Out of Egypt and Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God,” in the passionate assertions of ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian civilization, in the clarion calls for African redemption, the persistent attempts for diasporic re-settlement in Liberia and present-day Namibia and the vigorous and sustained correspondence between diasporic Garveyites and Africans. While many are aware of Garvey’s engagement with Liberia, I hope my book reminds us of Garvey’s extraordinary reach throughout the African continent, in southern Africa surely, but also throughout central Africa and East Africa as well. While it remains important to pay close attention to the rapidly shifting fortunes of the remarkable Garvey and the American UNIA, we can better appreciate the kaleidoscopic nature of the many articulated Garveyisms by looking carefully how Africans used Garveyism as a perceived common language to forge Pan-Africanist ties to diasporic blacks and to fight against a global color line, and also adapt Garveyist thought and action to local contexts. The Americans Are Coming! is part of a recent wave of exciting scholarship on the Garvey movement written by a newer generation of scholars like Claudrena Harold, Mary Rolinson, Ramla Bandele, Natanya Duncan, Adam Ewing, and others, but none of us could have done much without the foundational work and mentorship of pioneering Garvey scholars like Rupert Lewis, the recently deceased Tony Martin, and the incomparable Robert A. Hill, whose multi-volume Marcus Garvey and UNIA papers represents only a fraction of his global pursuit and collection of Garvey-related primary documents.
Do you see a role for Pan-Africanist ideas like Garvey’s today?
Yes, certainly. Just as Garvey drew upon pre-existing Pan-Africanist ideas to forge his UNIA, African anti-colonial leaders like Nkrumah, Azikiwe and Kenyatta drew inspiration from this Pan-Africanist geneology to help forge new African nation-states, which in turn inspired diasporic Pan-Africanists like Malcolm X. As you know in expert detail, Pan-African ideas animated both the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the global anti-apartheid movement. But Pan African ideas are particularly relevant today because many of the political, socio-economic, educational, penal, etc. conditions that have historically generated Pan-Africanist thought and action are still in existence. There is tremendous movement and interaction among diverse groups of black peoples today, from the post-1965 African diaspora, and the continuing Caribbean diaspora particularly to the United States and Europe, and a growing African American diaspora in Africa, all of which facilitates deeper interactions, connections (and conflicts) between diverse black peoples who often share, along with their many other identities, a heightened racial consciousness borne from broadly similar historical and contemporary experiences with various forms of white supremacy. Despite very demonstrable examples of black advancement and achievement, black institutions like my alma mater Howard, which has been such an important crossroads for black peoples worldwide, and as an incubator of Pan-Africanist thought, are struggling to stay afloat financially. In some ways, Howard is a metaphor for the black world; a symbol of black achievement and pride against the odds, but also reflective of the very fragile state of much of the black world today. True, the vast majority of the world is in struggle mode. But as long as black peoples collectively remain in such perilous conditions, and there remain substantive evidence that at least some of this fragility is due to historic and contemporary racial exclusion, discrimination, hostility and indifference, there will be a role for Pan-Africanist ideas as a generative ideology to seek the alleviation of these conditions on a global scale.
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The Carillon Tower is located at the Canadian entrance of the Rainbow International Bridge on Falls Avenue. The Carillon is 50.3 metres tall and consists of a set of 55 tuned bells, weighing a total of 43,000 kilograms, within this tower.
The bells were cast and tuned by the John Taylor & Company of Loughborough, England. The bells cost $48,000 to make and the inaugural performance took place on July 1st 1948.
The “Bourdon” is the largest bell, producing an E note. It weighs 10,000 kilograms and has a diameter of 2.4 metres with a height of 2 metres. The bell clapper for the Bourdon weighs 147 kilograms. The smallest bell weighs less than 4 kilograms and produces a B note. It has a diameter of 14.6 centimetres and a height of 13.3 centimetres.
The Rainbow Tower Carillon is played form a piano type keyboard by the carilloneur. Gloria Werblow of Williamsville, New York had been the carilloneur since 1986 until she retired in 2002 and the Carillon became automated.
To play the bells of the carillon one had to push down on a series of 55 oak batons, each spaced 5 cm apart, along with using a series of 30 foot pedals.
The keyboard, otherwise known as the clavier, is nine storeys above ground level in a tiny room. Above this ninth floor are the smallest 45 bells while the largest 10 bells are located below.
The batons and foot pedals are connected to stainless steel cables. Each cable connects to each individual bell clapper. The clappers are positioned 5 cm away from the wall of the bell. When the hand batons and foot pedals are pushed, the clapper strikes the bell. The clappers are balanced with springs so that even the 147 kg clapper can be easily rung.
In 1998, the Carillon Tower underwent extensive renovations to both the exterior and interior. The Carillon was silenced until completion of construction in April of 2001.
The Carillon is played daily from at:
- 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
- 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
- 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.
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This all seems so simple if you gloss over the underlying mechanisms, but it becomes a lot more convoluted as you delve deeper into the morass.
One of our younger community members -- we'll call him Ryan (because that's his name) -- is desperately eager to learn more about all aspects of electronics. Every now and then, an email will "ping" its way into my Inbox with a new question. The problem is that there's rarely an easy answer, because there are typically myriad underlying assumptions and potential areas for confusion.
Recently, Ryan has turned his attention to computers. Just a few minutes ago, for example, he sent me an email asking: "Can an operating system be created in assembly language? Also, what is the need for assembly in these days of languages like C/C++ and Java when memory is so cheap?"
Now, I must admit that I was tempted to send a short, quick, and easy (on me) answer, but I remember how confusing things were for me at the beginning -- plus I'm a bit obsessive-compulsive about this sort of thing -- so I responded as follows; I would be interested to hear your thoughts as to the way I presented all of this.
Hi Ryan -- as usual, there's more to your question than meets the eye LOL. Let's start with the fact that a processor (we'll focus on microprocessors/MPUs or microcontrollers/MCUs, but this applies to everything up to mainframe computers) ultimately executes what are called "machine code instructions." These are basically numbers representing instructions or data, where number 'x' might indicate an "Add" instruction, number 'y' might indicate a "Compare" instruction, and so forth.
Continue reading on EE Times' sister site, Embedded.com.
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The idea for this fun and easy activity came from wikihow at http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Boat-in-a-Nutshell.
Step 1: Gather Your Materials:
• Crayons or markers to decorate your sail
Step 2: Crack the Nut in Half
• Hazard (If using a nut like walnuts, cracking will require a hammer or knife, so be sure to crack nuts for children)
Step 3: Cut a Triangle Shape From a Piece of Paper for Your Sail
• Cut the sail according to the size of your nut. The smaller the nut, the smaller the sail.
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Undesirable variants preferentially thrive — and cross with cultivated rice, transforming the crop into weeds
There has been a lot of research, recently, showing how global change — especially warming — can alter the habitat and preferred range of marine and terrestrial species. But rising levels of greenhouse gases can also, directly, do a number on agricultural ecosystems, a new study shows. At least for U.S.-grown rice, rising carbon dioxide levels give a preferential reproductive advantage to the weedy natural form — known colloquially as red rice (for the color of its seed coat).
Agriculture Department scientists raised rice in controlled lab environments. They grew some in
The result was a diminishing of the value and quality of the cultivated rice — essentially transforming it into a weed, explains Lewis Ziska of the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md. “That’s sort of the science fiction aspect of this,” he says. Likening it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, “Whatever [seed] the good plant produces is now going to be bad seed.”
In theory, this flow of genetic traits could go in the opposite direction as well — moving genes from crop plants to the weedy rice. But in the new trials that didn’t seem to happen. It was a one-way gene transfer from the weeds to the crop plants, Ziska and his colleagues report May 23 in PLoS ONE.
And because some half of cultivated rice grown in the United States has been bred to resist the effects of the most widely used weed killer, any hybrid offspring — the bad seed — can now carry this trait as well.
Ziska’s group grew conventional rice crops in: 300 parts per million
For instance, the weedy rice began flowering earlier. Now its pollen production was in sync with crop plants (where previously, most feral rice had flowered too late to pollinate cultivated rice). In addition, the red rice grew taller stems and more flowers — each conferring additional reproductive advantages, since pollen production increased and its release from unusually tall stems allowed it to travel beyond the plant that produced it (most rice tends to be self-pollinating).
The ability of the feral rice to successfully cross with the crop plants tripled between the lowest and highest
In addition, hybrids in the new tests retained the crop plant’s genetic immunity to a weed killer. Indeed, Ziska says, the latter feature may partially explain the diminishing value of herbicide treatments on rice in recent years.
Last year, Carol Mallory-Smith and Elena Sanchez Olguin of Oregon State University in Corvallis reported that resistance to the widely used weedy-rice-killing herbicide imidazolinone was being witnessed in commercial U.S. fields. Moreover, the Oregon State team noted, the lifetime of dormant red-rice seed in soil far exceeds that of cultivated rice, allowing the resistant hybrids to easily survive to infest the next season’s crop.
“But we’re going to try to make lemonade out of lemons,” Ziska vows. If the weedy red rice outperforms currently cultivated rice in high-
C.A. Mallory-Smith and E. Sanchez Olguin. Gene flow from herbicide-resistant crops: It’s not just for transgenes. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Vol. 59, June 8, 2011. p. 5813. DOI: 10.1021/jf103389v.
L.H. Ziska, et al. Recent and projected increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration can enhance gene flow between wild and genetically altered rice (Oryza sativa). PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, published online May 23, 2012, p. e37522. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037522.
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Books & Music
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Gravity - Cosmic Glue
We all know gravity. It's what makes things fall if you don't hold onto them.
Gravity also keeps our feet on the ground – and provides the ground itself, since gravity holds planets together. Stars form by the gravitational collapse of huge clouds called nebulae, so we can thank gravity for our life-giving Sun. Beyond the Solar System, galaxies stay together through gravity and form clusters. It seems as though gravity is the glue that holds the Universe together, but what is it?
Aristotle: Perfect heavens and imperfect Earth
If we were living at the time of Aristotle (384-322 BC) – or even for about eighteen centuries afterward – no one would have asked what gravity was, let alone been able to answer. Gravity is a relatively modern idea, and so is the idea that physical laws apply to the heavens as well as the Earth.
According to Aristotle and his centuries of successors, the Earth was imperfect, but was still the center of the cosmos. It was surrounded by the perfect heavens which were based on spheres and circles, the perfect geometrical shapes.
Heaviness related to falling, an earthly phenomenon. Aristotle had said that heavy things fall faster than light ones, and no one saw any reason to doubt it. You could easily demonstrate it by dropping a feather and a hammer, which makes sense if you don't think about air resistance.
Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo: a new cosmos
Although the old worldview persisted for well over one and a half thousand years, it became ever harder to reconcile it with what people were actually observing.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1642) used the careful observations of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) to test Solar System models. What worked was the idea of Copernicus (1473-1543) that planets orbited the Sun, but not if they followed circular orbits. The orbits had to be ellipses (squashed circles).
Galileo (1564-1642) experimented with falling bodies and discovered that they all fell at the same rate. By the way, he didn't do it by dropping cannonballs off the Tower of Pisa, though that makes a good story! He would have loved seeing astronaut David Scott drop a feather and hammer together on the Moon.
Isaac Newton describes gravity
It needed Isaac Newton (1642-1727) to bring the new findings together and describe gravity mathematically as the force of attraction between all the masses in the Universe. His theory was published in 1687 as Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (known as "the Principia"). By the way, a scientific theory isn't a good guess. It's a well thought out explanation that accounts for existing evidence and makes testable predictions.
Newton's theory applied to heaven and Earth. He was prompted to connect apples falling to the ground (not on his head) with the movements of heavenly bodies. His equation says that gravitational force increases with mass, so the Sun's force is stronger than the Earth's. However it decreases rapidly with distance. If Earth were three times farther from the Sun than it is, the gravitational force wouldn't be one-third of its current strength, but one-ninth.
Newton's equations work – NASA sent men to the Moon using them. But it isn't the whole story. Even Newton was unhappy that his theory was based on a force that acted everywhere in the Universe instantaneously. How could that work? It took over two hundred years for someone to do a complete rethink of gravity and space.
Einstein takes up the challenge
In the General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) shows that what looks like a force is actually an effect of the geometry of space.
To Newton, space was the flat unchanging nothingness between things of interest like stars and planets. This is a good fit for the way most of us experience the world.
However Einstein said that space and matter affect each other. Matter curves the space around it and the greater the mass, the greater the curvature. But then matter moves along the easiest path through the curved space. It's expressed as "Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move."
To imagine curved space, it's often suggested that we imagine a rubber sheet held flat in a frame. If we put a bowling ball on it, the sheet sags. The surface is no longer flat. If you rolled a marble along it, it would fall into the depression. If you couldn't see the rubber sheet, it might look as though the bowling ball were pulling on the marble.
At last, a way of looking at gravity that removes the problem of universal instantaneous action! But it's rather strange. Does it work? Yes, the theory has been tested and has passed all of the tests, starting with a famous one.
One consequence of mass curving space would be that everything would move along the curved paths – including light. That means that light should bend a certain amount as it passes by the Sun.
English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington successfully tested this prediction during a total solar eclipse when, uniquely, the stars on the far side of the Sun are visible. He compared his photographs of the star positions with ones taken six months before when the Sun wasn't in the way. When the results fit the predictions, world media reported the story and Einstein became an international celebrity.
We know that Newton's theory of gravity works, but is incomplete. It's contained in Einstein's more comprehensive theory. We know that Einstein's theory works – your GPS system has to take it into account to work correctly. However scientists realize that it too is incomplete. I wonder if it will take another century for someone to include Einstein's theory in an even more amazing one.
Content copyright © 2015 by Mona Evans. All rights reserved.
This content was written by Mona Evans. If you wish to use this content in any manner, you need written permission. Contact Mona Evans for details.
Website copyright © 2016 Minerva WebWorks LLC. All rights reserved.
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Children who are subjected to short-term hearing loss, a condition often caused by ear infections, ear wax, and exposure to loud noises, could be at risk for what can be referred to as a “lazy ear.” Similar to a lazy eye, this condition is caused when different signals are sent to the brain from each ear for an extended period.
The first five years of a child’s life are integral in teaching the brain to understand and interpret auditory signals. To better understand why these issues can cause permanent damage, think of a child’s brain like a computer being booted up. It analyzes the surrounding environment to load different programs and understand new things. If the brain receives an inconsistent image of the surrounding environment, it does not learn the proper methods of interpreting the data that’s coming in. This is how a child develops a “lazy ear.”
Daniel Polley, Ph.D. has begun to study the effects of this issue in mice.
According to Dr. Polley, the goal of the study is to mimic the short-term hearing loss that can be caused by ear infections and to study how and when the auditory signals are disrupted as a result.
This study found that creating a temporary hearing loss in young mice disrupted basic alignment of sound frequency, and interfered with the neural computation of loudness differences between the ears, depending on the age of the mouse.
Dr. Polley believes this demonstrates his theory about the lasting effects of short-term, asymmetric hearing loss. Approximately 12% of children in the United States alone will experience at least one middle ear infection severe enough to cause a brief, mild hearing loss before age five, according to Dr. Polley.
To learn more, click here.
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Report reveals a big dependence on freshwater fish for global food security
Freshwater fish play a surprisingly crucial role in feeding some of the world’s most vulnerable people, according to a study published Monday (Oct. 24) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It was eye-opening just how many people are deeply dependent on freshwater fisheries as sources of protein,” says Pete McIntyre, a lead co-author of the study and professor of zoology in the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Many people in poor nations do not get much animal protein to eat, and freshwater fish provide protein for the nutritional equivalent of 158 million people around the world.”
By creating a map of the world’s fisheries documenting where people catch freshwater fish at the highest rates, and then linking it to data about fish biodiversity, ecosystem health, and human nutrition and socioeconomics, McIntyre’s team hopes the study helps put freshwater fish on the radar for decision-makers around the globe.
“When making big decisions, for instance when the World Bank is considering funding a dam project, we think the collateral damage done to freshwater fisheries should be explicitly listed as a quantifiable impact,” McIntyre says.
Freshwater fish provide the majority of the animal protein consumed in countries like Cambodia, Congo and Bangladesh, where large numbers of children under age 5 are considered underweight, the study finds.
McIntyre and study co-lead Catherine Reidy Liermann of UW–Madison, along with co-author Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy, found that 90 percent of fish caught worldwide are harvested from rivers facing higher-than-average levels of environmental stress from chemical pollution, invasive species, land use change, and other human factors.
And the rivers where fish are most heavily exploited — for instance, in Asia and Africa — are also where the potential consequences for reduced fish biodiversity are highest, the study team found.
Originally, McIntyre, Reidy Liermann and Ravenga set out to gather a better accounting of the role that fish biodiversity plays in the number of fish capable of being caught in the world’s rivers.
“With population and climate change, human dependency on freshwater systems is increasing dramatically in many parts of the world,” says Reidy Liermann. “At the same time, freshwater species are being lost at faster rates than marine or terrestrial species. We wanted to explore the intersection of these trends. How do species diversity and fishery production relate? So we built a model to find out.”
Ecological theory and experimental data from other studies suggest that diverse ecosystems are typically more productive than less species-rich environments. The researchers expected to find that rivers with high fish biodiversity would also be more productive.
Using the best available data — national statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — combined with powerful statistical methods, the researchers looked at the relationship between fish catches and fish diversity, ecosystem health threats and human nutritional needs.
To their surprise, McIntyre and his team learned that greater biodiversity does not provide a clear boost to fishery productivity. Rather, the study found that the link between fish catches and species richness is indirect: Catches increase with the size of the river and with human population density, while biodiversity also happens to increase with river size.
The finding actually contradicted earlier results McIntyre gathered but he continued to improve his methods and he is confident in the latest results.
“A few years ago, we thought we had a different take-home point,” he says. “But we continued to refine the statistics and came to the conclusion that the global data don’t show strong evidence that declines in fish diversity will lead to lower fish catches in the future.”
However, McIntyre is quick to point out: “Although our study does not suggest that modest losses in fish species diversity is a pressing threat to fisheries, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of the importance of biodiversity.”
What is clear, the study authors say, is that society should safeguard freshwater ecosystems for the sake of both fish and people.
McIntyre was motivated to pursue these questions, in part, because of the time he has spent living in villages and towns in the developing world while conducting field studies. Over years of research in Venezuela and Tanzania, for example, he has noted that the mesh in fishermen’s nets has become smaller and smaller as the availability of large fish has diminished.
“I have played witness to the demise of several fisheries,” he says. “Once I started making observations like that, I began to ponder what happens to these people if their fisheries collapse. If you ask any fisherman if the fishing is as good now as it was when he or she was a kid, the answer is almost always no.”
The study represents a longstanding collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and The Nature Conservancy, and contributes to the bioDISCOVERY project of Future Earth. It was funded by the University of Wisconsin, Packard Fellowship and the National Science Foundation.
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15 000 space rocks and counting
The international effort to find, confirm and catalogue the multitude of asteroids that pose a threat to our planet has reached a milestone: 15 000 discovered – with many more to go.
The number of catalogued asteroids approaching Earth has grown rapidly since the count reached 10 000 only three years ago.
Near-Earth objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres whose orbits come close to ours, meaning they could hit our planet.
The discovered NEOs are part of a much larger population of more than 700 000 known asteroids in our Solar System.
“The rate of discovery has been high in the past few years, and teams worldwide have been discovering on average 30 new ones per week,” says Ettore Perozzi, manager of the NEO Coordination Centre at ESA’s centre near Rome, Italy.
“A few decades back, 30 were found in a typical year, so international efforts are starting to pay off. We believe that 90% of objects larger than 1000 m have been discovered, but – even with the recent milestone – we’ve only found just 10% of the 100 m NEOs and less than 1% of the 40 m ones.”
ESA is contributing through its Space Situational Awareness programme, setting up the centre in Italy to combine new and existing European telescope data and support a new network to distribute information.
Maintaining the European risk list
“The centre maintains the European Risk List, containing all objects for which an Earth-impact probability cannot yet be ruled out, however low,” says Detlef Koschny, heading the NEO element of the Space Situational Awareness office.
“There is only a tiny impact probability for any known object in the next 40 years, but all NEOs bear close watching to refine and understand their orbits.”
The coordination centre is also the focal point for scientific studies needed to improve warning services and provide near-realtime data to scientific bodies, international organisations and government decision-makers.
In recent years, astronomers working with or sponsored by ESA have concentrated on follow-up observations, confirming new objects and obtaining more reliable orbits. Some of this work was done with ESA’s own observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
Others have been instrumental in imaging or confirming the orbits of particularly interesting objects, such as asteroid 2016 RB1, which grazed our planet on 7 September 2016 by 34 000 km, within the orbit of many telecom satellites.
ESA is developing new ‘fly eye’ telescopes to conduct automated nightly wide-sky surveys with their very large fields of view. These are expected to begin operating around 2018. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, being built in Chile, is set to begin hunting space rocks in the near future.
These future telescopes offer the almost complete sky coverage and depth needed for humanity to be sure that as many NEOs as possible are discovered and identified before posing any threat.
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Benign Blood Diseases & Disorders
- Bleeding disorders – blood disorders and diseases like von Willebrand disease and hemophilia that prevent the blood from clotting as it should due to a lack of clotting factors or platelets
- Blood clot issues – the tendency for the blood to clot where it shouldn’t, such as in the middle of a vein, potentially blocking the flow of blood and causing complications like a pulmonary embolism
- Low blood counts – an abnormally low number of white or red blood cells or platelets, which can result from certain diseases, infections, and medications, and contribute to poor immune defense, anemia, or ineffective clotting
- High blood counts – the presence of too many white or red blood cells, or platelets, due to a bone marrow disorder, poor heart or lung function, kidney malfunction, dehydration, or other abnormalities
Each type of blood disorder must be addressed with a different type of treatment. For example, the treatment for someone with a blood clotting issue might include administering clotting factor into their bloodstream. Someone with a certain type of anemia may benefit from taking an iron supplement. Tampa General Hospital’s Hematology/Oncology Clinic has the resources necessary to provide comprehensive treatments for all types of benign blood diseases, as well as cancers of the blood and blood-forming organs. Our multidisciplinary team includes physicians from TGH, USF Health and Moffitt Cancer Center who can guide patients through diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment for their individual blood diseases and disorders.
To make an appointment at TGH’s Hematology/Oncology Clinic, please call (813) 844-7585. The clinic accepts appointments from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
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Many of us like to please others our supervisor, our spouse, our children but how many of us would take that as far as confessing to a serious crime that we did not commit?
In a study completed by the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in 2008, a researcher discovered 53 cases of serious felonies to which people with intellectual disabilities confessed and were later legally exonerated. These exonerations were based on significant evidence such as DNA tests or eventual confessions by the real perpetrators. In some cases, the crimes to which the suspects confessed never even occurred. In many cases, the person with a disability already had served significant jail time before being exonerated.
The examples, spanning years from 1924 to 2007, came from across the United States (no cases from Colorado were included in the study.) They include such cases as a 2002 case in Georgia, in which a man with intellectual disabilities confessed to being present at the murder of a 15-year-old girl, even though the man was with his family in Brazil for the three days before and eight days after the murder.
A 1979 case in Florida recorded a man with an IQ of 56 who confessed to the murders of six women. After the man spent 22 years in prison, he was released when DNA evidence excluded him from all six of the murders. In a 1985 case in New Jersey, a man with an IQ of 57 confessed to beating his girlfriend to death with a stick. The woman died from alcohol poisoning.
What was clear from all 53 cases was that people with intellectual disabilities can be unduly susceptible to interrogation techniques used by some law-enforcement agencies. Intellectual disabilities can affect a persons ability to perceive a situation correctly and affects the ability to make good judgments.
People with intellectual disabilities frequently strive to please others, especially those in authority. Often, this is a survival technique learned by a person who is dependent on others to meet his or her basic needs. In this study, those characteristics led to wrongful convictions. In other situations, it can make a person with a disability vulnerable to abuse or exploitation.
As a community, we can address this problem. La Plata County already has led the way in preventing wrongful convictions of people with disabilities by instituting a Crisis Intervention Team training for law enforcement and first responders in our area. The CIT training offers tools for working with people with mental illness and other disabilities. Since CIT was implemented in 2003, 230 law-enforcement officers and community members have graduated from the program.
La Plata County also has an active Adult Protection Team, programs like Alternative Horizons and the Violence Prevention Coalition to reduce violence, and programs to support and advocate for people with disabilities such as Community Connections and Axis Health Systems. By supporting these programs and others like them, we help make La Plata County a safer place for everyone.
Tara Kiene is the director of case management with Community Connections Inc.
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Beets can seem like somewhat mysterious specimens – especially the gelatinous canned variety. But these bright-red root vegetables are a sweet addition to any edible garden and every vegetable lover should know how to grow beets.
Named among the world's healthiest foods, beets are rich in phytonutrients called betalains that have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and detoxification effects in the body. They're also a great source of folate. Quartering unpeeled beets and steaming them for fifteen minutes preserves nutrients and makes them deliciously soft. In addition to the crimson flesh of beet roots, the chard-like greens are edible and often eaten in salad. In fact, chard – a beet cousin - is sometimes called “bottomless beets.”
Beets love cool weather, so they're best planted in early spring and in late summer for fall harvest. They can be planted up to 30 days before the last frost of the spring season, and flourish in soil temperatures between 65 and 75 degrees. Beets perform well when planted alongside bush beans, onions, kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli and lettuce.
Types of Beets
Though most people are familiar with red beets, you may not know that beets actually come in white and golden-fleshed varieties and in an array of shapes from spherical to flat and long. Though the 'garden beet,' Beta vulgaris conditiva, is the type grown for food, there are two other types – sugar beets, which are grown for refined sugar, and fodder beets, used as animal feed.
There are a wide variety of garden beet cultivars that offer different advantages. Ruby Queen and Sangria are picture-perfect, round and red; Sweetheart is extra-sweet; Little Ball is small and tender and Golden has a buttery color and a mild flavor. If you plan to grow your beets for their greens, some good choices include Green Top Bunching, Crosby Egyptian and Early Wonder.
How to Plant Beets
- Choose a planting site that gets full sun throughout the day.
- Amend the soil with compost and loosen to a depth of at least 12 inches. Beets are at their most tender when grown in loose, sandy soil.
- Plant each beet seed – which is actually a cluster of seeds in a bit of dried beet flesh – at a depth of one-half inch, about one inch apart in rows spaced 12 to 18 inches apart.
- Water well and keep the soil moist throughout the season, but protect the soil from hard rain that could cause the surface of the soil to harden.
- Thin seedlings to one to three inches apart. Thinned plants can be eaten raw in salads.
- Weed the garden bed frequently to prevent weeds from stealing nutrients and disturbing beet roots.
- Pull up one beet to check the size about 60 days after planting. Beets are suitable for cooking, canning or pickling at about one and a half inches in diameter.
- Cut off the tops about one inch above the roots before storing.
- Store harvested beets at 32 degrees and 95 percent humidity. They will keep for several weeks if stored in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.
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- Mothers, Käthe Kollwitz, woodcut, 1922.
As Nosferatu crept his long-nailed fingers around the frame of the doorway in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film of the same name, little did the vampire realize that he was ensconced in an influential artistic movement. German Expressionism sought to change society with the power of art—its surreal and exaggerated artistic forms were a rebellion against the constraints of a materialistic society. Though the early-20th-century movement is primarily associated with film, expressionism began with painting and emerged in many art forms: sculpture, literature, drama, stage design, dance, and woodcut. Woodcuts from the movement will be exhibited at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from August 22 though October 26 in “Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints.”
The exhibit begins chronologically, with images from the first expressionist community to emerge in Germany in 1905 Berlin, Die Brücke (The Bridge), a name that indicated the group’s faith in the art of the future, which their work would provide passage toward. The group of mostly self-taught artists—founded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff—sought inspiration from primitive art, in particular, the woodcut. Their dramatic color contrasts and bold, simple forms often blended foreground figures with the backgrounds, defying academic standards of craftsmanship and traditional ideas of illustration. “So many of these artists did rebel and confront what they considered to be a stifling society, so they felt compelled to create worlds that were lively and vital and rebellious,” explains Patti Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus curator of prints and drawings at the Loeb. A prime example of the style of this group is the bold and abstract Head of a Woman (1916), Schmitt-Rotluff’s black-and-white woodcut on wove paper in which a woman’s face “has been reduced to a set of crude geometric shapes—a tribal mask rather than a portrait,” as described by critic John McDonald.
As the exhibit progresses, it features works from Die Brücke’s successor, Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), which lasted until the beginning of World War I. Founded primarily by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, artists in the movement were not as united stylistically as a group than Die Brücke. Their art ranged from the colorful abstractions of Kandinsky (The Archer, 1908) to the romantic imagery of Marc. But all the artwork produced in this group maintained the focus of expressing spirituality through art.
The exhibit concludes with works from two groups that merged after the war in 1919, the Arbeistrat fur Kunst (Working Council for Art) and Novembergruppe (November Group), as well as the group Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity). The artists in these movements, affected by their personal wartime experiences and societal upheaval, often depicted urban and industrial scenes. Images from these groups include workers shaking their fists (George Grosz, Life after World War I), and a huddled crowd of frightened mothers, produced after the artist’s son was killed in World War I (Käthe Kollwitz, Mothers, 1922). In response to these images, expressionism and almost all modern art was suppressed by Hitler’s Third Reich in the 1930s, as the “degenerate art” was seen as a propaganda tool of an inferior race.
“Impassioned Images,” a traveling exhibit from Syracuse University, will be on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center August 22 until October 26. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 5. Following the reception will be a lecture by Barbara C. Buenger, a specialist in 20th-century German art history. (845) 437-5632; http://fllac.vassar.edu.
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The Hall of State debuted in 1936 as part of the Texas Centennial Exhibition.
Its original name was the State of Texas Building.
Eventually designed by Donald Barthelme, the building is a premier example of Cret’s Modernism. That is a reference to noted designer Paul Cret, who was the design consultant for the project. The design blends classicism and Art Deco – with a few Texas motifs (cacti, oil wells) tossed in for good measure.
Crafted from Texas limestone, The Hall of State was, at a cost of $1.2 million, the most expensive building per square foot built in Texas at the time.
The signature element of the building’s exterior is the 11-foot-tall statue of a Tejas Indian poised above the main entrance. Artist Allie Tennant made the statue of bronze and covered it with gold leaf. Meanwhile, the bronze doors feature designs that represent Texas industries and activities – a cowboy’s lariat, cotton bolls and wheat sheaves, among others. 59 Texans are honored in the frieze around the top of the building.
Fair Park, Texas
Keywords: 1936, Allie Tennant, America, American, Archer, Archery, Architecture, Arrow, Art Deco, Blue, Bow, Bow and Arrow, Bronze, Building Exterior, Centennial Exposition, center, City, Color, Columns, Dallas, Dallas Fair Park, Dallas TX, Day, dfw, Donald Barthelme, Entrance, Fair, Fair Park, Fairgrounds, Fine Art Photography, Freedom, Gold, Hall of State, History, Human Representation, Indian, Lone, Lone Star, Lone Star State, Low Angle View, Male Likeness, Monument, Mosaic, Native American, Native American Statue, Native-American, No people, Outdoors, Republic of Texas, sculpture, Sky, South, Southern, star, State, State Fair of Texas, States, Statue, Tejas Warrior, Texas, Texas Motif, tile, Travel, Travel Destinations, TX, U.S., United, urban, USA, Yellow
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https://stephenmasker.com/PROJECTS/DALLAS/28
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Aspirations, views and opinions on all aspects of life differ greatly between many individuals. This difference of opinion is further emphasised in many instances between the generations. This contrast is due to a myriad of different factors: changes in an individual’s upbringing; alterations within a society and varying moral values all play a major role in defining a person. In the past thirty years, China has undergone significant changes with regards to the ‘young generation’. Pop culture, fashion, music and the internet have lead to more individualism within this generation which is believed to be widening the gap between their predecessors. In turn, this has lead to a host of new aspirations, views and opinions which are driving modern day China forward.
This growth of individualism is impacting upon millions of modern day Chinese families. A recent Channel 4 documentary followed Gok Wan, a famous British fashion designer, on his first trip to China in order to discover his ancestral roots. This documentary raised some interesting points regarding the relationship between the generations in China. In a conversation with his father, who grew up in a rural village outside Hong Kong, we are shown a similarity which still exists between the generations. He believed that the typical Chinese work ethic was that more money equalled a better life. With the majority of Chinese families still earning very little pay this statement can be seen as true, after all Deng Xiaoping – the late leader of the Communist Party in China – said “To get rich is glorious”.
It can be seen that public opinion on the acquiring of wealth has not changed a great deal in China’s history. Nonetheless, there are many aspects of life that this ‘young generation’ are coming to their own conclusions on. Duncan Hewitt, author of Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, talks in detail about the opening of the first IKEA store in China and of its influence over young couples in the area. A young woman who worked there claimed that the older generations have been through tough times and have therefore never had the pleasure of being engaged in the style or design of home appliances and furniture. This is evidence of an increase of individualism within the young families of China. In addition, she goes on to say ‘…many people have simply thrown out their traditional Chinese furniture- sometimes including antique family heirlooms – in their desire to embrace a modern way of life.’ This, it could be argued, is a drastic change in opinions towards family ancestry in China. Family heirlooms which have been passed down from generation to generation are sometimes cast aside in order to encourage modernity into their lifestyles. This ‘young generation’ no longer want to be tied down to the past; they want to embrace their future.
Hewitt goes on to describe another such divide between the generations, this time concerning dating. He explains that a man named Mr Chen had a son (around 12 years of age) who was in his second year at senior high school and had a girlfriend. Hewitt describes the father’s distress by saying ‘For Mr Chen the idea of teen romance was completely unimaginable’. This is no doubt a very young age to be dating, even in the West. However this was completely unheard of in China only twenty years ago. This is further evidence that the young generation has much more freedom and the rules and regulations pressed onto them by their parents and society alike are not as strict as they have been previously. Moreover, this widens the gap between the generations in the country.
It is not only the easing of the rules and regulations placed on young children and teenagers in China which is causing this increase in individuality and freedom. Hewitt states that some parents in China believe that youngsters are being more disobedient. One parent he interviewed states, ‘young people these days have less respect for authority figures…now we’re the ones who have to learn from the kids…’ Parents’ authority in China was something to be feared by the children, however now better education coupled with more outlets to express ones individuality has lead this dynamic to shift. This can be tied to government reforms and protests within the country: individuals within China are becoming more independent and are more willing to take steps to positively affect their future. Although many aspects of life in China have remained the same with regards to views and opinions towards them, the ‘young generation’ have started to make some changes.
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There are many different theories about the origin and history of April Fools Day. However, most of them are just theories. There is no real evidence to point to any single individual or event.
The 16th Century French Calendar
One theory is that it originated in France. In 1564, the government decided to move the New Year from March 31 to January 1. Whether it was by decree or just something the people thought of, jokes and pranks were concocted on those who refused to adjust or forgot the new date.
The most popular prank was to place paper fish on the rear of these folks. They were known as Poisson d’Avril (April Fish). The history of April Fools Day thus began in France, according to this theory.
Some researchers feel that its origins can be traced to the spring festivals celebrated by various ancient cultures. In ancient civilizations it was marked by playfulness, merry-making and jokes. Roles of masters and servants were reversed and the roles of parents and children interchanged. These practices may have originated in Roman times. Eventually it spread to Europe and became the event we know today.
There are some researchers who trace the history of April Fools Day in mythology. One theory is that it originated in Roman myths. Some have suggested that when Persephone (Proserpina) was abducted by Hades, she screamed for her mother Ceres. Ceres didn’t realize that her daughter was in the Underworld and searched for her fruitlessly on Earth. Thus the foolish search became the basis for the event.
Some believe that the practice began in Britain. In the 1630s, the law stated that wherever King John walked, the land would automatically be turned into a public property.
One day the King was headed for the town of Gotham. The citizens were terrified to lose their lands. When the King sent soldiers ahead of him, they reported strange activities. According to this version of the history of April Fools Day, the locals pretended to be insane. The King fell for their antics and decided not to go there anymore. According to legend, their jokes became widely known and copied.
There are some who suggest it began in Germany. In 1530 financial leaders were supposed to meet and discuss monetary issues in Augsburg. It never happened. But some people had wagered it would happen and lost a lot of money. They were laughed at.
Another theory places its origin in the Netherlands. On the first day of April in 1572, the Dutch were able to take back the town of Den Briel away from the Spaniards. According to lore, pranks were played by the Dutch to recall the embarrassment of the Spaniards in losing.
The origin and history of April Fools Day is complex. Studying it can lead one into blind alleys. Regardless of how it started, it seems destined to become even more popular around the world.
Did you know?
- In France, April Fools day is called “Poisson d’Avril” meaning April Fish. The tradition is that French children will tape paper fish to the backs of their friends. When they would discover the fish on their back, the prankster would yell “Poisson d’Avril!” The origin of this is unknown.
- In Scotland the April fool is called April “gowk” which is Scottish for cuckoo. The Cuckoo is an emblem of simpletons.
- In Canada, CHEZ FM fooled the listeners one April Fools Day making listeners believe that it was the last day that the treasury would honor all the two-dollar bills still in circulation. The same year they had people going through their change looking for the mysterious two-dollar coins that had mistakenly been minted from real gold.
- One newscaster on the news show CBO Morning announced that the clock in Ottawa’s Peace Tower was being switched to digital.
- On 1 April 1957 on BBC’s show Panorama opened with a line about Spring coming early this year, prompting the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland to be early as well. In the normal news manner, spaghetti’s oddly uniform length was explained as the result of years of dedicated cultivation. The report stated that the ravenous spaghetti weevil had been conquered.
April Fools’ Day is also called All Fools’ Day, the traditional folk festival in both American and other countries in the west. April Fools’ Day is similar to Hilaria from ancient Rome and Holi from India. Seen from the view of time, the weather changes suddenly so it seems that it is the nature play a trick on human beings. As to the origin of April Fools’ Day, there are many statements. A statement says that it comes from a festival in India on which people can make fun of each other and play tricks on each other, regardless of male or female, elder or youngster.
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Smithsonian Magazine reports that studies show that sarcasm enhances problem solving. An inability to understand it can be an early warning sign of brain disease, which could explain why some have trouble understanding this blog:
“Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”
Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.That extra work may make our brains sharper, according to another study.
Maybe this could also explain the Pensacola City Council’s problems.
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The difference turns on the meaning of identity, which philosophers have long pondered and debated, especially in regard to individual humans (i.e. the question "Who am I really?"). The answers fall into two rough categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. Unsurprisingly, the dividing-line can be fuzzy.
- In the extrinsic category, a thing's identity is tied to sensations and ideas about that thing. This would be like identifying my phone by its shape, color, model, and so on. Based on extrinsic identity, if any of these "extrinsic" propositions about my phone ceased to be true, my phone would therefore no longer have the same identity. The phone would not only appear but be a different phone. Its identity is dependent. When someone meets a new acquaintance, his or her identity is generally rather extrinsic. "I don't know this person, but his name is Fred and he works in Human Resources."
- The opposite of extrinsic identity is intrinsic identity, which is independent of sensations and ideas about a thing. A thing with intrinsic identity "wears" sensations and ideas but is "itself" regardless. This would be like disassembling my precious phone piece by piece and then continuing to call the pile of pieces my phone. Transformations of all kinds don't change intrinsic identity. When someone has maintained a long-term connection to another person, his or her identity is generally rather intrinsic. "She's changed her residence, weight, politics, and career over the last several years, but she's still Betty to me."
- If the object's identity consists of a particular combination of attributes, then its identity is extrinsic. Two objects of the class with identical attribute values are indistinguishable (for the purpose of the domain). These are known as value objects. Each instance is a "value" similar to a number or a string of characters. Since extrinsic identity is by definition fully dependent on a thing's parts, a value object never changes. But someone often creates a new value object using the attribute values of preexisting value objects. This is just like adding two numbers to yield a third number. Modelers and developers can exploit the unalterable nature of value objects for various advantages, such as avoiding the need for storage. Possibly, there could be a highly reusable "mathematics" of the value object in which all methods are "operations" that 1) operate on and return value objects and 2) are completely stateless (free of side effects).
- Instead, a domain object's identity could be persistent throughout arbitrary transformations, which indicates intrinsic identity. Instances of the class probably have vital "history" and might not represent the same physical domain item despite identical or near-identical attribute values. These are known as entities. Normally a nontrivial entity will aggregate one or more value objects but along with a mechanism of unique identification. That mechanism could be a GUID or something else as long as no two instances can contain the same identifier by accident. Unlike value objects, (long-lived) entities change and correspond more directly to physical domain items, so a storage strategy for the entity and its associated value objects is necessary. (The advice of DDD is to keep the entities' code as purely domain-driven as possible by abstracting the storage details in a repository object.)
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http://ripplingbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2010/06/ddd-and-intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-identity.html
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Get an introduction to the basics of 3D modeling, which can then be used for design, animation, games, virtual reality and 3D printing. Learn how to make simple 3D scenes, add depth to imported vector artwork, sculpt with virtual brushes and use Photoshop to paint textures. Explore concepts using industry standard programs such as Maya, Cinema 4D or Blender to see how the techniques apply across a variety of software and styles. Additional topics include file formats and how to prepare your models for use in other software or for export to 3D printing. Prerequisite: 56101 or 56211 or 56311 or equivalent experience.
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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http://dcereg.com/index.cfm?method=ClassInfo.ClassInformation&int_class_id=81960&int_category_id=20&int_sub_category_id=200
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Toys play a significant role in baby's understanding of the world. Toys use its bright colors, beautiful, exotic styling, smart activities, sweet sound to attract children's curiosity and attention. The actual toy is a specific object and can meet the children hands-on, brain, manipulating and playing with desire. Various types of toys can cause children's interest, good toys that stimulate children's desire to make the game, and also a loved good companion of their lives.
First, toys can mobilize the activity enthusiasm of kids. Physical and mental development of children is developed in activities. Any toys for young children can be free to play with, manipulate and use, in line with children's psychological preferences and ability level. Toys can meet their needs of activities and improve the activities enthusiasm. Such as "Rocking Horse" toys, children will naturally ride, back and forth, not only to meet the requirements of their activities, but also enable them to have a positive pleasant emotions. Another example is the "doll" toys, can cause children to do a variety of activities for all ages of children according to their life experience and to do the doll games.
Second, toys can promote a variety of sensory activities and enhance the perceptual knowledge. Toy has the characteristics of visual image and conducive to a variety of sensory training of children. Such as colored sets of towers, blow toys, dolls and toys of various animals, which are conducive to visual training; octave Bear, a small piano, tambourine, small puncture pit, etc. can be used to train hearing; building blocks, plastic film plot, structure model can develop space perception; various puzzles, inlaid toys, soft plastic toys, etc., may exercise the touch feel; pull duck cars, trolleys, tricycles, two wheelers etc. help the development of motion perception.
In the development of sensory and motor ability, toys not only enrich the children's emotional knowledge, and help to consolidate children get the impression in life. When children fail to extensive contact with real life, they understand the world through toys.
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http://toyswan.blogspot.com/2011/11/
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Foundation is typically the base of your home, on which often it stands. The sole goal of the foundation is usually to receive the loading regarding the building and propagates it evenly onto typically the ground on which that stands. The ground by itself is considered the key foundation, usually referred to because the natural foundation. There are different modes on which the building’s reloading is distributed to the surface. These different modes are referred to as sorts of foundations and they will include the following. Foundation settlement can cause doorways and windows to be misaligned. This can be observed when observing the sides round the windows or entry doors, where they close. Appearance for gaps larger about one side compared to some other. This can help decide the location where the settling is happening. Foundation length computations are performed by measuring the particular time needed for different frequencies to travel from a foundation’s top to be able to its bottom. The duration so determined reflects the condition of the basis in the following way. Foundation surveys are finished ahead of construction of a brand new building in order to be able to gather the positional info of a foundation that provides already been cemented in addition to cured. Foundation surveys are usually a very important component of the construction process for any new constructing. It ensures that virtually any building you are placing up does not encroach on any neighboring terrain and that you are usually obeying the restrictions as set on your web site strategy and by your regional government. Foundation Contractor in New Orleans LA says foundation surveys variety in cost, determined by the variety of factors. The size of your foundation will probably be the primary contributing aspect – as obviously bigger plots will take a lot more time to survey. Other factors can include the location of the foundation, plants surrounding the foundation, time regarding year (including weather conditions) and the condition of the foundation. Foundation style types vary geographically. Local soil conditions, climate, plus material and labor supply influence foundation design styles. Many homes in the Midwest and northeastern portion of the U. T. have basements, while southern and western U. T. homes tend to be built atop solid tangible slab-on-grade foundations systems. Each foundation types are practical and respond to the needs of the locality. Foundation performance varies from house-to-house, and from building-to-building. Foundation failure will not appear in order to be related to geography or locality. Often, a residential district with expansive soils can be interpreted as a good area having a higher than average risk of basis failure, where the disappointment is attributed to typically the poor soil conditions. Inside reality, the failure is appropriately located after beginner level design, construction plus foundation assessment techniques. Foundation and wall cracks may advise impending problems such as abnormal water infiltration or other structural irregularities. If the foundation is too rigid or too flexible, an individual may see signs associated with distress like brittle substance fractures on the inside of or outside of your home. This does not necessarily mean your foundation will be physically broken. It might be that your basis performs poorly due to improper design and building. Foundation location surveys are designed to locate enhancements on a property which have been made horizontally or perhaps vertically, with respect to be able to the property boundary at heart. This survey is not necessarily typically combined with the recorded boundary survey since that information is generally already known. Basically, this collects info on the positioning regarding the foundation that has been poured and that has been cured. This assures that the foundation will be in the right place and that it will be designed with the proper methods in mind. Think about exactly where to put a base, there are rules in addition to regulations to follow, in addition to surveys will make sure all those rules are met. Base location surveys are turning into much more popular with the increase in new construction. Being able to have got a professional surveyor find the foundation and make sure that it was built appropriately is a necessary part of having a foundation poured for new construction or a entire home restoration or addition. Whether the basis is a concrete slab or a full or partial basement, surveyors have got to take notes and measurements to determine the scale the structure, make sure that proper pouring and healing methods were used, plus make sure the foundation really does not exceed the dimensions of the land package. The second biggest trouble with stress on the foundation is cause by simply the plants and trees and shrubs growing up and drawing the moisture away through one section of the slab in addition to leaving another part associated with it dry. This can also happen when a shrub dies or is reduce thereby upsetting the moisture and structural balance. When you plant a tree, place it at least half associated with its mature height aside from the house. The foundation of home is required to aid the considerable excess weight of the home and also to provide the level surface in which usually to place the residence. A powerful, well-built foundation is usually essential for any tough in addition to secure home. This is true whether you are building a traditional or even modular home. Slabs, cellars and garages ., and crawl spaces are usually the three main basis systems used for many houses. Each system has its own unique rewards that make it attractive to home builders and home-buyers. When picking a foundation regarding your home, you must get time to consider each of the options.
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Remembering WWI this Memorial Day
Memorial Day is dedicated to remembering those citizens who died in our various wars.
But most of the focus now is either on the Civil War, when the tradition of decorating graves began, or on World War II. Between them was “The War to End All Wars,” known now as World War I. It is frequently called “the forgotten war.”
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into that war.
It is forgotten, perhaps, because about 25 years later we were involved in a much larger war.
Although the war began in Europe in 1914, the United States didn’t enter until Aug. 6, 1917. The war ended Nov. 11, 1918. That date was known as Armistice Day for many years, but changed to Veterans Day to honor those who had fought in wars since then.
World War I was the start of the Selective Service and a variety of home-front organizations, bond drives, savings stamp programs in schools and civil defense programs. People were encouraged to have gardens and raise their own food.
One of the legacies of that war is the American Legion. (The VFW, Veterans of Foreign Wars, was founded in 1899.)
In Wilton, Roy Bent Post 10 was formed on July 25, 1919. Bent, the only Wilton boy to die in the U.S. service, died of disease in Oregon, where he was stationed with the Air Force. Two other residents are believed to have died while serving in the Canadian army.
Bent was buried in Vale End Cemetery with full military honors conducted by the Lafayette Artillery Company, the only military organization available.
Wilton’s memorial to Veterans of All Wars was dedicated on May 30, 1924, on land donated by Henry L. Emerson, a veteran of the Civil War. The monument is in a tiny park between Forest Street and Stoney Brook, and now contains several other monuments.
The two trench mortars beside Town Hall were given by David Barry in 1932.
The Legion Post home on Maple Street is the former Liberty Christian Church.
In Milford, Ricciardi-Hartshorn Post 23 was formed on July 15, 1919, named for the first two Milford men who died: Rosario Ricciardi and Louis Sumner Hartshorn. Seven men gave their lives, four in battle and three from illness.
The war is also known for the worldwide influenza epidemic that killed thousands of people.
Milford’s World War I Memorial was erected on the town common in 1927 to honor all of the men. In 1925, a little triangle at the junction of Union and Beech streets was dedicated to Louis Hartshorn.
The Legion met in various places until it built its post home on Cottage Street in 1956.
The Lyndeborough Monuments Committee, which oversaw the placement of the monuments on the common when they were moved from the library, is currently raising funds for a new stone placed between the World War I and World War II/Korea stones. This one will honor Vietnam veterans, plus those who served in “all the little wars since.”
Lyndeborough’s World War I Memorial monument was erected in front of the Tarbell Library in 1926 by the Village Improvement Society. The list was compiled soon after the war, but grew to include men who had served in other places and men who were living in town at the time. It lists 22 men, none of whom died in the war.
May there be no need for any more monuments.
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This course assumes CS170, or equivalent, as a prerequisite. We will assume that the reader is familiar with the notions of algorithm and running time, as well as with basic notions of algebra (for example arithmetic in finite fields), discrete math and probability.
General information about the class, including prerequisites, grading, and recommended references, are available on the class home page.
Cryptography is the mathematical foundation on which one builds secure systems. It studies ways of securely storing, transmitting, and processing information. Understanding what cryptographic primitives can do, and how they can be composed together, is necessary to build secure systems, but not sufficient. Several additional considerations go into the design of secure systems, and they are covered in various Berkeley graduate courses on security.
In this course we will see a number of rigorous definitions of security, some of them requiring seemingly outlandish safety, even against entirely implausible attacks, and we shall see how if any cryptography at all is possible, then it is also possible to satisfy such extremely strong notions of security. For example, we shall look at a notion of security for encryption in which an adversary should not be able to learn any information about a message given the ciphertext, even if the adversary is allowed to get encodings of any messages of his choice, and decodings of any ciphertexts of his choices, with the only exception of the one he is trying to decode.
We shall also see extremely powerful (but also surprisingly simple and elegant) ways to define security for protocols involving several untrusted participants.
Learning to think rigorously about security, and seeing what kind of strength is possible, at least in principle, is one of the main goals of this course. We will also see a number of constructions, some interesting for the general point they make (that certain weak primitives are sufficient to make very strong constructions), some efficient enough to have made their way in commercial products.
1. Alice, Bob, Eve, and the others
Most of this class will be devoted to the following simplified setting: Alice and Bob communicate over an insecure channel, such as the internet or a cell phone. An eavesdropper, Eve, is able to see the whole communication and to inject her own messages in the channel.
Alice and Bob hence want to find a way to encode their communication so as to achieve:
- Privacy: Eve should have no information about the content of the messages exchanged between Alice and Bob;
- Authentication: Eve should not be able to impersonate Alice, and every time that Bob receives a message from Alice, he should be sure of the identity of the sender. (Same for messages in the other direction.)
For example, if Alice is your laptop and Bob is your wireless router, you might want to make sure that your neighbor Eve cannot see what you are doing
on the internet, and cannot connect using your router.
For this to be possible, Alice and Bob must have some secret information that Eve ignores, otherwise Eve could simply run the same algorithms that Alice does, and thus be able to read the messages received by Alice and to communicate with Bob impersonating Alice.
In the classical symmetric-key cryptography setting, Alice and Bob have met before and agreed on a secret key, which they use to encode and decode message, to produce authentication information and to verify the validity of the authentication information.
In the public-key setting, Alice has a private key known only to her, and a public key known to everybody, including Eve; Bob too has his own private key and a public key known to everybody. In this setting, private and authenticated communication is possible without Alice and Bob having to meet to agree on a shared secret key.
This gives rise to four possible problems (symmetric-key encryption, symmetric-key authentication, public-key encrpytion, and public-key authentication, or signatures), and we shall spend time on each of them. This will account for more than half of the course.
The last part of the course will deal with a fully general set-up in which any number of parties, including any number of (possibly colluding) bad guys, execute a distributed protocol over a communication network.
In between, we shall consider some important protocol design problems, which will play a role in the fully general constructions. These will be commitment schemes, zero-knowledge proofs and oblivious transfer.
2. The Pre-history of Encryption
The task of encoding a message to preserve privacy is called encryption (the decoding of the message is called decrpytion), and methods for symmetric-key encryption have been studied for literally thousands of years.
Various substitution ciphers were invented in cultures having an alphabetical writing system. The secret key is a permutation of the set of letters of the alphabet, encryption is done by applying the permutation to each letter of the message, and decryption is done by applying the inverse permutation. Examples are
- the Atbash ciphers used for Hebrew, in which the first letter of the alphabet is replaced with the last, the second letter with the second-to-last, and so on. It is used in the book of Jeremiah
- the cipher used by Julius Caesar, in which each letter is shifted by three positions in the alphabet.
There are reports of similar methods used in Greece. If we identify the alphabet with the integers , where is the size of the alphabet, then the Atbash code is the mapping and Caesar’s code is . In general, a substitution code of the form is trivially breakable because of the very small number of possible keys that one has to try. Reportedly, former Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano used Caesar’s code to communicate with associates while he was a fugitive. (It didn’t work too well for him.)
The obvious flaw of such kind of substitution ciphers is the very small number of possible keys, so that an adversary can simply try all of them.
Substitution codes in which the permutation is allowed to be arbitrary were used through the middle ages and modern times. In a 26-letter alphabet, the number of keys is , which is too large for a brute-force attack. Such systems, however, suffer from easy total breaks because of the facts that, in any given language, different letters appear with different frequencies, so that Eve can immediately make good guesses for what are the encryptions of the most common letters, and work out the whole code with some trial and errors. This was noticed already in the 9th century A.D. by Arab scholar al-Kindy. Sherlock Holmes breaks a substitution cipher in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.
For fun, try decoding the following message. (A permutation over the English alphabet has been applied; spaces have been removed before encoding.)
Other substitution ciphers were studied, in which the code is based on a permutation over , where is the alphabet and a small integers. (For example, the code would specify a permutation over 5-tuples of characters.) Even such systems suffer from (more sophisticated) frequency analysis.
Various tricks have been conceived to prevent frequency analysis, such as changing the permutation at each step, for example by combining it with a cyclic shift permutation. (The German Enigma machines used during WWII used multiple permutations, and applied different shift on each application.)
More generally, however, most classic methods suffer from the problem of being deterministic encryption schemes: If the same message is sent twice, the encryptions will be the same. This can be disastrous when the code is used with a (known) small set of possible messages
This xkcd cartoon makes this point very aptly.
(The context of the cartoon is that, reportedly, during WWII, some messages were encrypted by translating them into the Navajo language, the idea being that there was no Navajo speaker outside of North America. As the comic shows, even though this could be a very hard permutation to invert without the right secret information, this is useless if the set of encrypted messages is very small.)
Look also at the pictures of the two encodings of the Linux penguin on the Wikipedia page on block ciphers.
Here is an approach that has large key space, which prevents single-character frequency analysis, and which is probabilistic.
Alice and Bob have agreed on a permutation of the English alphabet , and they think of it as a group, for example by identifying with , the integers mod 26.
When Alice has a message to send, she first picks a random letter , and then she produces an encryption by setting and . Then Bob will decode by setting .
Unfortunately, this method suffers from two-character frequency analysis. You might try to amuse yourselves by decoding the following ciphertext (encoded with the above described method):
As we shall see later, this idea has merit if used with an exponentially big permutation, and this fact will be useful in the design of actual secure encryption schemes.
3. Perfect Security and One-Time Pad
Note that if Alice only ever sends one one-letter message , then just sending is completely secure: regardless of what the message is, Eve will just see a random letter . That is, the distribution (over the choice of the secret key ) of encodings of a message is the same for all messages , and thus, from the point of view of Eve, the encryption is statistically independent of the message.
This is an ideal notion of security: basically Eve might as well not be listening to the communication, because the communication gives no information about the message. The same security can be obtained using a key of bits (instead of as necessary to store a random permutation) by Alice and Bob sharing a random letter , and having Alice send .
In general, is Alice wants to send a message , and Alice and Bob share a random secret , then it is perfectly secure as above to send .
This encoding, however, can be used only once (think of what happens when several messages are encoded using this process with the same secret key) and it is called one-time pad. It has, reportedly, been used in several military and diplomatic applications.
The inconvenience of one-time pad is that Alice and Bob need to agree in advance on a key as large as the total length of all messages they are ever going to exchange. Obviously, your laptop cannot use one-time pad to communicate with your base station.
Shannon demonstrated that perfect security requires this enormous key length. Without getting into the precise result, the point is that if you have an -bit message and you use a -bit key, , then Eve, after seeing the ciphertext, knows that the original message is one of possible messages, whereas without seeing the ciphertext she only knew that it was one of possible messages.
When the original message is written, say, in English, the consequence of short key length can be more striking. English has, more or less, one bit of entropy per letter which means (very roughly speaking) that there are only about meaningful -letter English sentences, or only a fraction of all possible -letter strings. Given a ciphertext encoded with a -bit key, Eve knows that the original message is one of possible messages. Chances are, however, that only about such messages are meaningful English sentences. If is small enough compared to , Eve can uniquely reconstruct the original message. (This is why, in the two examples given above, you have enough information to actually reconstruct the entire original message.)
When , for example if we use an 128-bit key to encrypt a 4GB movie, virtually all the information of the original message is available in the encryption. A brute-force way to use that information, however, would require to try all possible keys, which would be infeasible even with moderate key lengths. Above, we have seen two examples of encryption in which the key space is fairly large, but efficient algorithms can reconstruct the plaintext. Are there always methods to efficiently break any cryptosystem?
We don’t know. This is equivalent to the question of whether one-way functions exist, which is probably an extremely hard question to settle. (If, as believed, one-way functions do exist, proving their existence would imply a proof that .)
We shall be able, however, to prove the following dichotomy: either one-way functions do not exist, in which case any approach to essentially any cryptographic problem is breakable (with exceptions related to the one-time pad), or one-way functions exist, and then all symmetric-key cryptographic problems have solutions with extravagantly strong security guarantees.
Next, we’ll see how to formally define security for symmetric-key encryption, and how to achieve it using various primitives.
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Solve times for this jigsaw puzzleShare your solve times with your buddies
Dice are small polyhedral objects, usually cubical, used for generating random numbers.
It is traditional to assign pairs of numbers that total seven to opposite faces.
The oldest known dice were excavated as part of a 5000-year-old backgammon set, at the Burnt City archeological site in south-eastern Iran.
Share this Jigsaw Puzzle
Sat Brugmansia Pink BeautyFri Peruvian Hairless DogThu Horse Leg WrapsWed Ice Cream ConeTue Urn Gate PostsMon Glass FlowerSun Angel Sword StatueMore Previous Puzzles
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Des Moines, Iowa – Studies find five out of every seven Iowa homes have elevated radon levels and state health officials are urging residents to have their houses checked for the odorless, colorless radioactive gas. Mindy Uhle, executive officer of the Iowa Department of Public Health, says radon causes no immediate health symptoms, but long-term exposure may cause lung cancer.
While radon levels are varied, every one of Iowa’s 99 counties is considered at high risk for elevated levels.
Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers and the second leading cause of lung cancer in smokers. Easy-to-use test kits can reveal the amount of radon in any building.
Buildings with high radon levels can usually be fixed, she says, with simple and affordable venting techniques. While five out of seven homes in Iowa have elevated radon levels, an E-P-A study finds the national number is only one in 15 homes. To learn more, click here.
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Don’t get shocked and awestruck; yeah! You heard it right Rome too has a pyramid. Rome has a pyramid of Cestius which is a 2000year old pyramid which stands close to Porto San Paolo in Rome. Gaius Cestius Epulo built a pyramid shaped tomb for his family members and for his own; he was the court official and a member of the College of Septemviri Epulones. This pyramid is a sturdy piece of construction. However the pyramid lay uncared and even the Romans forgot who was buried inside, but then in 1660 the pope had the pyramid restored and at this particular time they found an inscription on the exterior naming Gaius Cestius and stating that it had taken 330 days to build. Further, if we talk about the pyramid it has frescoes which depict Roman mythology and panel carvings of female figure. In 2013 the pyramid has gone under much awaited restoration in 2013 March. It is old, but it is still well maintained unlike the other ancient structures because it was used as a part of the city’s fortifications. The pyramid has a height of 37 meters and is 30 meters wide. The point at the top is unlike Egyptian pyramids; and is a bit sharp. This pyramid is built with concrete, brick and then covered with marble slabs. It is the only pyramid in Europe.
Explore its History
When Egypt was conquered by the Romans in 30BC; the Romans were inspired to construct the copies of Egyptian structures and at the time of construction there were two pyramids but later only one survived. The Pyramid of Romulus was destroyed in 1500 due to some reason. The origin of the pyramid is forgotten during the middle ages. This pyramid was much admired by the architects and many poets as well. Percy Bysshe Shelley described this pyramid in Adonias in which he wrote “one keen pyramid with wedge sublime” and English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, who has written the poem “Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the graves of Shelley and Keats”. Proper restoration of the pyramid started in 2013.
Appearance, Design and Modern developments
This Roman Pyramid is made up with cement and brick and with white marble coating. Earlier there were number of interior frescoes which show scenes from life, but now not much of this art is present, however the detailed descriptions survived. This pyramid has a deliberate design choice. One reason for the uniqueness might have been the Roman invention of concrete, which gave the engineers much more flexibility in the construction.
This pyramid has received two restorations, first in the 1600’s which actually did not necessarily respect its history and significance. In 1999 again a restoration took place which was much more careful and respectful. The tomb as of now is under special protection and is not usually open for public visits. If you also have a keen interest in exploring the ancient monuments, pyramids and lot more and further looking forward to get the amazing deals you can check out EaseMyTrip.com. This travel website will not only ease your journey, but will save your money too because they care for you and your savings.
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Transparency is the key to many technologies. Thin conductive films, like those made from ITO (indium tin oxide) for example, can carry currents or create electric fields critical for displays or solar panels without blocking all the light. The most powerful brain implants being built today have exactly this same requirement. Namely, they need to record fast electric signals with conductive arrays while permitting light to pass out through them for high-resolution imaging — and just to take it up a notch — let light pass in to permit optogenetic control directly under the implant for the icing on the cake.
Unfortunately, ITO is generally too stiff and too brittle for brain implants. Even if it could be made flexible, the high temperatures required to process it are incompatible with many of the materials (like parylene) that are used in the implants. Furthermore the transparency bandwidth of ITO is insufficient to fully exploit the wide spectrum of new UV and IR capable optogenetic proteins that have researchers fairly excited. The solution, now emerging from multiple labs throughout the universe is to build flexible, transparent electrode arrays from graphene. Two studies in the latest issue of Nature Communications, one from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the other from Penn, describe how to build these devices.
The University of Wisconsin researchers are either a little bit smarter or just a little bit richer, because they published their work open access. It’s a no-brainer then that we will focus on their methods first, and also in more detail. To make the arrays, these guys first deposited the parylene (polymer) substrate on a silicon wafer, metalized it with gold, and then patterned it with an electron beam to create small contact pads. The magic was to then apply four stacked single-atom-thick graphene layers using a wet transfer technique. These layers were then protected with a silicon dioxide layer, another parylene layer, and finally molded into brain signal recording goodness with reactive ion etching.
The researchers went with four graphene layers because that provided optimal mechanical integrity and conductivity while maintaining sufficient transparency. They tested the device in opto-enhanced mice whose neurons expressed proteins that react to blue light. When they hit the neurons with a laser fired in through the implant, the protein channels opened and fired the cell beneath. The masterstroke that remained was then to successfully record the electrical signals from this firing, sit back, and wait for the Nobel prize office to call.
The Penn State group used a similar 16-spot electrode array (pictured above right), and proceeded — we presume — in much the same fashion. Their angle was to perform high-resolution optical imaging, in particular calcium imaging, right out through the transparent electrode arrays which simultaneously recorded in high-temporal-resolution signals. They did this in slices of the hippocampus where they could bring to bear the complex and multifarious hardware needed to perform confocal and two-photon microscopy. These latter techniques provide a boost in spatial resolution by zeroing in over narrow planes inside the specimen, and limiting the background by the requirement of two photons to generate an optical signal. We should mention that there are voltage sensitive dyes available, in addition to standard calcium dyes, which can almost record the fastest single spikes, but electrical recording still reigns supreme for speed.
One concern of both groups in making these kinds of simultaneous electro-optic measurements was the generation of light-induced artifacts in the electrical recordings. This potential complication, called the Becqueral photovoltaic effect, has been known to exist since it was first demonstrated back in 1839. When light hits a conventional metal electrode, a photoelectrochemical (or more simply, a photovoltaic) effect occurs. If present in these recordings, the different signals could be highly disambiguatable. The Penn researchers reported that they saw no significant artifact, while the Wisconsin researchers saw some small effects with their device. In particular, when compared with platinum electrodes put into the opposite side cortical hemisphere, the Wisconsin researchers found that the artifact from graphene was similar to that obtained from platinum electrodes.
At this point both groups are busy characterizing the performance of their new devices in exacting detail. If workable as more permanent brain implants they may offer a nice compliment to other new approaches we have recently seen — flexible materials like silk for example. Where silk may offer biodegradability and reversibility, graphene may offer biocompatible permanence and reliability. The significant hype regarding optogenetics, well-founded in our opinion, seems to have died down for the moment. New advances like those just described may help refocus general attention on the huge potential benefit optogenetics holds for humans.
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So many of the books we come across focus on tracing one’s ancestry to Europe. And why not? For hundreds of years Europeans represented the majority of immigrants into North America. Ellis Island alone saw 12 million enter this country from 1892 and 1954. Of course, not everyone is descended from European immigrants, or at least not Europeans alone. Immigrants have come to the U.S. from just about every country in the world. Not all in mass migrations or by the millions; yet, here they are. One country from which many millions have immigrated to the U.S. lies not across oceans, nor even from another continent, but rather it shares a common border, Mexico.
Fortunately, Mexican American genealogists aren’t without help. There are experts and authors to help family historians trace their Mexican ancestry. Mexican-American Genealogical Research: Following the Paper Trail to Mexico, by John Schmal & Donna Morales, was written to help descendents find records of their ancestors from governmental sources and through the Family History Library.
According to the authors, “Mexico probably has the most detailed records in the world, stretching back more than 400 years.” This is a great boon for researchers focused on Mexican research. This book focuses on helping genealogists find and access this wealth or records.
The authors declares the most important piece of information to obtain is the location name from were one’s ancestors in Mexico came from. The book helps you discover these locations by covering such records as Naturalization papers, alien registration forms, border-crossing documents, death certificates, obituaries, and mortuary documents. Through samples and explanations, the book also details the information one may find among Mexican church and civil records. There is even a discussion over the problems associated with racial classifications found in documents prior to the 1822 independence
Table of Contents
Table of Illustrations
Chapter 1 — Following the Paper Trail
Chapter 2 — Finding Vital Records
Chapter 3 — Other Sources of Vital Information
Chapter 4 — Naturalization Records
Chapter 5 — Alien Registration Records
Chapter 6 — Crossing the Border
Chapter 7 — Best Records in the World
Chapter 8 — Passengers to the Indies
Chapter 9 — The Indians of Mexico
Chapter 10 — In the Service of Their Country
Chapter 11 — Getting Prepared
Mexican-American Genealogical Research: Following the Paper Trail to Mexico is available from Family Root Publishing; Item #: HBS2139, Price: $20.58.
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When a relationship is formed between a teacher and a museum, it can take education to the next level, and make a learning unit more memorable for the students who experience it.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Inspired by Origami
The Museum of Art and Science in Macon, GA currently has a wonderful exhibit of New York artist, Gloria Finklestein's work from the 80's and 90's. The pieces have titles related to Japanese culture, such as "Obon" (the sash one wears around a kimono) and "Hanabi" (which literally translate's into "fire flower" and means "fireworks"). The title of the show was "Origami Interpretations," so to prepare my students for our field trip, I had them make several origami objects. We started very simply with a cat and/or dog and tried to use tactile methods of making it more believable and meaningful for my blind students. They then chose whatever they wanted to make: boats, cootie catchers, balloons, boxes. We also watched Robert Lang's Ted Talk "Flapping Birds and Folding Telescopes" about new origami methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNdD5Kxdkpg
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Liverpool riot of 1916
The Liverpool Riot of 1916 also known as the Battle of Central Station was an event in Sydney, Australia where a large group of Australian soldiers rioted through the streets of Sydney and surrounding areas.
Following Australia's entry into World War I, many Australian men volunteered to fight in Europe and were stationed in camps around Australia to receive military training before being shipped to the front. At 9.00am on 14 February 1916, at Casula Camp in Liverpool in Sydney's south west, it was announced to the recruits that the current training session would be extended into the evening, meaning a 27-hour stretch for some of the recruits. Five thousand recruits refused to accept extra duty and went on strike to protest the poor conditions at the camp. The soldiers left the camp and marched towards the centre of Liverpool, where they were joined by other recruits from camps around the area. The number of protesters now reached as many as 15 000. They invaded a number of local hotels, drinking the bars dry, refusing to pay and started to vandalise buildings.
The soldiers then gained control of Liverpool train station, overpowered the engineers and commandeered trains heading towards Sydney, where they began rampaging drunkenly through Sydney streets, smashing windows and targeting anyone with a foreign-sounding name, including Italian restaurants, even though Italy was an ally of Australia in the war. Shops and hotels were looted and people were forced to take refuge in churches to avoid the soldiers. Police reinforcements were called in and began battling the soldiers in the streets of Sydney.
At Sydney's Central Railway Station, armed military guards found a group of over a hundred drunken soldiers destroying a toilet block and demanded they surrender. A shot was fired by a rioting soldier over the guards' heads and in response the guards returned fire, killing one soldier and seriously injuring eight others. This incident had a sobering effect on the soldiers and many began surrendering to police and military guards, although small bands of soldiers continued to cause damage throughout the night.
Following the riot, described as the "most disgraceful episode in our military history", about a thousand soldiers were court-martialled and either gaoled or discharged from the army. However, Australia was desperate for recruits to fight the war, so many soldiers escaped punishment and were sent overseas while the government, anxious to keep the image of the Australian digger as positive as possible, discouraged the media from covering the event.
As a result of the riots, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania introduced 6.00 p.m. closing of hotels to guard against a repeat occurrence, matching South Australia's introduction the previous year. It was not until 1955 that New South Wales closing was extended to 10 p.m.
- "Built Heritage Assessment for the Southern Sydney Freight Line" (PDF). Caldis Cook Group.
- "THE LIVERPOOL RIOT.". Maitland Daily Mercury. NSW. 25 February 1916. p. 7. Retrieved 28 December 2014 – via National Library of Australia.
- "SENTENCES FOR MUTINY.". The Maitland Weekly Mercury. NSW. 29 April 1916. p. 16. Retrieved 28 December 2014 – via National Library of Australia.
- Cockington, J. (2003) History Happened Here, ABC Books, Sydney ISBN 0-7333-1241-1.
- Freeland, J.M. (1966) The Australian Pub, Melbourne University Press, Carlton.
- 30 October 2014, In search of platforms 26 and 27: Central station’s mysterious underground world, The Daily Telegraph
- C. Reinecke, 30 May 2010, , Griffith REVIEW Edition 28: Still the Lucky Country?
- National Archives of Australia, A471, 1444. Sydney Tanner court martial.
- National Archives of Australia, A471, 1143. Cecil E Madden et all court martial.
- National Archives of Australia, A471, 1196. F Short and J Sutcliffe court martial.
- National Archives of Australia, A5522, M466. Commission of inquiry – Liverpool military camp.
- National Archives of Australia, AWM34, 105/1/1 – 203/1/4. 2ND Military district gazette.
- The Bulletin, The Army that Came to Town, 24 February 1916.
- Daily Telegraph, 15 February 1916
- Sydney Morning Herald, 15 – 18 February 1916
- State Records NSW: Colonial Secretary; 5/2641-5/2643 A-Z 1916, no. 798.
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Air pollution has already been linked to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease. Now scientists have got dirty air particles on the brain.
Presenters shared research potentially connecting air pollution to neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s at this week’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
After exposing mice to two weeks of magnesium oxide, University of Rochester toxicologist Allison Elder found manganese in the olfactory part of the brain and wondered how it got there. Further research showed that the inhaled particles resulted in brain inflammation that persisted over time.
She next focused on welders.
When it comes to fine particles, welders breathe in more than their fair share. When working only a few minutes, they don’t always wear masks. Elder found that Parkinson’s disease was considerably higher in welders because of their exposure to highly concentrated manganese fumes.
In her research on diesel fumes, researcher Michelle Block of Virginia Commonwealth University found that after lungs are damaged, the brain isn’t far behind. Once lungs are damaged by diesel, they send a signal upstairs—to the brain.
“[Particles] seem to be poking these neurodegenerative pathways,” she said, adding that damaged paranodes, the transmitting fibres of the neuron, make the hypothesis that air pollutants are detrimental to the brain “entirely possible.”
This is difficult to study, however, because air gets crowded tons of different particles and complicated on a small scale. According to Elder, looking at specific air particles is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Block also described how lots of “other stuff” attaches to particles and sneaks in like Greeks on the Trojan horse.
“We’re still in the process of weeding out what matters,” said Block. “I don’t think we’ll ever find out it’s just one air pollutant.”
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All of the gloomy reports about newspaper circulation rapidly dropping, network news ratings declining and reporters being laid off might lead you to believe that journalism itself is dying. But journalism is alive and well. It is just that the way reporters do their job is changing.
With the growing popularity of the Internet, gone are the days of print-only or TV-only newsrooms. Media companies no longer have to wait for the evening broadcast or tomorrow’s edition to report the news. Almost all media outlets are breaking stories on their Web sites, and the news cycle has become 24-7.
Journalists need to change, as well. Instead of thinking of themselves as only print journalists or broadcast journalists, they need to think of themselves as journalists, period. And they must be able to report the news in publication, online or in front of a microphone.
But while the way journalists do their job is changing, the fundamentals remain the same and as pertinent as ever. Journalists today still need to be able to gather information and tell a story. Most importantly, they need to be able to think.
A journalist’s most important tool is not a notepad, tape recorder, digital camcorder, computer or even the ability to write a story. A journalist’s most important tool is her brain. As a writer for the masses, journalists have to cut through the flab of all the information around. They need to question, question, question. What happened? Who does this affect? Why is this important? Critical thinking precedes good writing. So, future journalists need to learn how to think. They also need to learn how to learn.
The media isn’t the only thing changing. The world of work is changing. More and more, people are becoming multi-skilled workers. They are having to manage lots of projects and priorities and develop new skills all the time.
A graduate today can expect to still be in the world of work in 2050. The one thing that young journalists can be certain of is that they will be applying skills that haven’t even been thought of today. They will have to relearn and relearn and relearn.
Think you’ve got what it takes? Here are a few other things you’ll need to break into journalism:
Attitude is Everything
There are some fields that almost any semi-intelligent and college-educated person can get a job in. Journalism is not one of them.
You don’t have to be the next Hemingway, but a career in the media does require a certain talent. More than anything, it requires passion. You’ve got to really want to be a journalist.
If you think you’re going to go straight from college to the foreign desk of the New York Times or to sideline reporting for ESPN, you’re delusional. Glamorous jobs like that require lots of hard work, experience and some lucky breaks.
You may toil for years and earn peanuts working at a tiny newspaper in the middle of nowhere before you get to the next level. From there, you may have to make a few stops before you finally reach your destination publication or broadcast station. But, before you can even get an entry-level job, you may need to do a couple unpaid internships. In order to get just one internship, you may have to send out 50 or more resumes.
If you’re unwilling to do all of that, step aside. With 200,000 students majoring in journalism at the moment — the most ever — there’s a long line of people who happily will do the scut work.
That’s why it’s important that you see journalism as being more than just a job. There are definitely easier and higher-paying jobs. But unlike other fields, journalism gives you an opportunity to expose lies, explain dangers, inform the uninformed and, occasionally, make a difference. At its best, journalism can be a lot of fun and very rewarding.
But don’t take my word for it. Find out for yourself. “I would visit some newsrooms — in several media — to see whether you think you could fit in,” advises Joe Grimm, a longtime newspaper recruiter and journalism career advice columnist. “While you’re there, ask the newsroom managers what they are looking for in new hires. Interview some reporters about the rewards and frustrations of the job.”
In order to distinguish yourself from all the other applicants going after the positions you want, you need skills and training that employers want. Being a good writer alone is not enough. Newspapers are currently laying off Pulitzer Prize winners. So, if you want to get a journalism job, you’re going to need to be able to offers skills your employer needs — namely, multimedia skills. All newspaper reporters now entering the profession will have to do online work.
If your college isn’t teaching you new media skills — and many aren’t — there’s nothing stopping you from teaching yourself. Recruiters will be impressed by such entrepreneurial activities and weigh them the way they do clips and a resume.
So, take a web design class or pick up a book like Building Web Sites for Dummies. Purchase a digital camcorder — which costs less than an iPhone — and toy around with video editing software that comes standard on your computer — iMovie, if you have a Mac, or MovieMaker, if you have a PC. Expand your repertoire and expand your skills from there. It’s really not as scary or difficult as you think.
Of course, it’s impossible to become an expert in everything. There’s so much to know: how to record sound, how to shoot video, how to edit sound and video, how to write using search engine optimization, how to create slideshows, how to put it in Flash, how to create a webpage for all your content, etc. And, if you try to do all of that in addition to reporting, something is bound to be substandard.
So, be realistic. Try to become a master of one or two multimedia tools, but knowledgeable of all. Your specialty may be Flash. You might not be able to shoot video particularly well, but you should at least be able to recognize when footage is too grainy to be used.
It’s kind of like a liberal arts education. You study all kinds of different subjects, including art history. If you go into a museum, you may not know that painting is Cezanne from his dark period, but you should at least be able to recognize that it kind of looks like Impressionism.
Equally important is experience. If you’re interested in working in the media, doing an internship while you’re in college is an absolute must. You can likely get academic credit for it. You may even get paid for it. Most importantly, you will gain valuable hands-on experience that will impress prospective employers and give you an edge over other applicants when you’re applying for your first job.
“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of summer internships,” says Randy Hagihara, recruitment editor for the Los Angeles Times. “The more the better. In a competitive job market, editors will want to know that their entry-level hires will be able to hit the ground running — on a wide variety of assignments.”
Journalism internships are offered by many newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations and websites, large and small. Students can intern as reporters, bloggers, photojournalists, production assistants, copy editors, multimedia producers and designers.
Summer is the popular season for internships, although some media outlets offer them throughout the year. Some internships are part-time and last as little as a few weeks, while others are full-time and may run for several months.
Many media outlets have a formal application and selection process while others arrange internships on a case-by-case basis. Some internships may target students from certain regions, schools or backgrounds. Check with each media outlet to find out its requirements.
One final piece of advice on landing a journalism internship: apply early and apply often! Some applications are due several months before the internship starts. And competition is fierce.
Don’t Fear the Future
If, after reading all this, you decide to pursue a career in journalism, be prepared for significant changes. But don’t be afraid of what the future may bring. The media is in a state of flux right now. That’s nothing new.
The history of journalism is a history of technological change. Don’t be scared away from the field by doomsayers who predict newspapers and network TV will soon die. Sure, the way journalists do their jobs may change, but there will always be journalism and a need for journalists.
And, you can always use your journalism degree to do something else. The skills you learn as a journalist (researching, efficient writing, listening and observing, interpersonal communication, critical thinking, etc.) are easily transferable to and valued by many other professions.
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Read this post from Ari Daniel. Or listen to the podcast above.
According to experts, “uh” and “um” are somewhat different beasts. “It does seem to be the case that ‘um’ generally signals a longer or more important pause than ‘uh,'” says Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. At least that’s what he thought.
Liberman has been studying these so-called “filled pauses” for almost a decade, and he has made a rather curious discovery.
“As Americans get older, they use ‘uh’ more,” he says. “And at every age, men use ‘uh’ more than women.”
If you look at “um,” exactly the opposite is true. Younger people say “um” more often than older people. And no matter the age, women say “um” more than men. Nobody, not even the linguists, were expecting this result; until they studied these hesitations, they thought it was more about the amount of time a speaker hesitates than who that speaker is.
Then, late last summer, Liberman attended a conference in Groningen in the Netherlands. During a coffee break, Liberman was chatting with a small group of researchers. He brought up his finding about the age and gender differences related to “um” and “uh,” which prompted the group to look for that pattern outside of American English. They scanned British and Scottish English, German, Danish, Dutch and Norwegian.
The result, says University of Groningen linguist Martijn Wieling, is that, “in all cases, we find the same thing.” Just like the Americans that Mark Liberman analyzed, women and younger people and younger people said “um” more than “uh.”
Wieling’s conclusion is that we are witnessing a language change in progress, “and that women and younger people are leading the change.”
The future of “um”
This pattern of women and young people leading us forward is typical of most language changes. But why is “um” our future, across at least two continents and five Germanic languages? It’s still a puzzle.
Josef Fruehwald, a sociolinguist at the University of Edinburgh, agrees that “um” and “uh” may be used slightly differently. But as far as he is concerned, they are pretty much equivalent.
“When you have two options, you can start using one more frequently and maybe replace the other one so that it’s no longer an option,” he says. “So why ‘um?’ It’s just one of these things. There’s always a little bit of randomness to the whole situation.”
By random, he means that we do not know why changes in usage like this happen, or when the next one will be. Fruehwald admits linguists are terrible at predicting the future — worse than meteorologists! Language, he says, is even more chaotic than the weather.
As for how such a linguistic trend might have jumped from one language to another, Fruehwald says “there are some documented cases of that kind of thing happening, usually where people can speak both languages and borrow features of one into the other.”
English is the most likely to be influencing the other languages, but we still don’t know whether that’s actually what’s happening with “um.” More research and more linguists are needed.
And as for the future, “um” and “uh” may yo-yo back and forth in terms of their popularity. Or we may well be watching the extinction of “uh” from our lexicon.
So would Fruehwald would miss “uh?”. “I don’t have a really strong emotional connection to either of these,” he admits. “Although based on my age demographics, I’m likely a high ‘um’ user. So maybe that’s where I should throw my loyalties.”
Patrick Cox adds: Also in this podcast episode, a conversation with Michael Erard, editor of Schwa Fire and author of “Um…:Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.”
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Find more Cryse relatives and grow your tree by exploring billions of historical records. Taken every decade since 1790, the U.S. Federal Census can tell you a lot about your family. For example, from 1930 to 1940 there were the same number of people named Cryse in the United States — and some of them are likely related to you.
What if you had a window into the history of your family? With historical records, you do. From home life to career, records help bring your relatives' experiences into focus. There were 8 people named Cryse in the 1930 U.S. Census. In 1940, there were 0% more people named Cryse in the United States. What was life like for them?
In 1940, 8 people named Cryse were living in the United States. In a snapshot:
As Cryse families continued to grow, they left more tracks on the map:
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Dives Akuru is a script that was once used in the Maldive Islands. It developed from the Grantha script and the earliest known inscription, found on Landhū Island in Southern Miladhunmadulhu Atoll, dates back to the 8th century AD. The script is thought to have been in use before then, however evidence of this has yet to be found.
The early Madivian scripts were divided into two variants, Dives Akuru, "island letters", and Evēla Akuru, "ancient letters", by H. C. P. Bell, who studied the Maldivian linguistics after retiring from the British colonial service in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the early 20th century.
Dives Akuru developed from Evēla Akuru and was used mainly on tombstones, grants and on some monuments until about the 18th century, when it was replaced by the Thaana script. However in some of the southern Maldive islands, Dives Akuru continued to be used until the early 20th century. Today only scholars and hobbyists stil use the script.
Dives Akuru is also known as Dhives Akuru, Divehi Akuru or Dhivehi Akuru.
Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhives_Akuru from images drawn by Xavier Romero-Frias
Information about Evēla Akuru and Dives Akuru
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Under pressure : looking into practice : cases of science teaching and learning
When the author decided to explore boiling water in a syringe with her Year 7 class she discovered the real lessons were learning not to compress childhood and to allow free play in the secondary classroom. The class was studying the particle theory of matter and changes of state and boiling water in a syringe promised to introduce interesting scientific concepts and an exciting, hands-on approach. What ensued was a very different outcome, with the students exploring, asking questions, discussing and playing with the syringes, squirting water both inside the classroom and out for 80 minutes. The author's experience made her remember what she believes about teaching and learning and how that influences her purpose in practice: to try to embed relevance and 'unanxious expectation' in her classroom based on the beliefs that the learning process is not linear; students must construct their own meaning for true learning to take place; and we all need the opportunity to form and ask questions in order to learn. [Author abstract, ed]
This document is currently not available here.
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The Dawn of the Armored Fighting Vehicle
On the morning of Sept. 15, 1916, soldiers of the German 1st Army rushed to their defensive positions between Flers and Courcelette, on the Western Front. The lifting of the Allied artillery barrage typically presaged an infantry charge, and the defenders made their machine guns ready to cut down advancing British and French troops. But this time, instead of onrushing infantry, from the smoke and mist emerged grinding mechanical contraptions, spewing bullets and shells. The Germans poured machine-gun fire onto the strange, new vehicles lumbering across the ragged mud and wire of no man's land, but the bullets had little effect. The day of the tank — a concept that would go on to define land warfare in the 20th century — had arrived.
The Battle of Flers-Courcelette was part of the ongoing Battle of the Somme in France and the first time that modern armored fighting vehicles were deployed in combat. Yet despite triumphant claims in the British press of a new weapon that would turn the tide of war by breaking the impermeable German lines, the tank's initial deployment was largely inauspicious. Those first tanks were rushed into service and woefully underpowered for the terrain they would encounter while saddled with the weight of armor. Riddled with developmental problems and manned by crews with almost no training, of the 49 original Mark I tanks deployed to France 100 years ago, 36 set off from the British line of departure Sept. 15. Only 27 made it as far as German forward positions, and a meager six trundled as far as the secondary and tertiary objectives. Mechanical failure plagued the new invention, but the concept had been proved, and successive generations of tanks and tank tactics would turn a "mobile pillbox" into a battle-winning asset.
The Evolution of the Tank
The appalling conditions of static trench warfare in World War I made life miserable for the fighting troops, and the incessant mud and rain also presented severe logistical problems. Moving large amounts of men and materiel by sea and rail was efficient. But getting ammunition, supplies or replacement troops from the railhead or port to the front lines was not. The constant passage of foot traffic and light vehicles made the largely unpaved roads and dirt tracks impassable. The wheeled vehicles of the time were inadequate for the conditions. Engines lacked the power to cope with broken terrain, and wheels simply sank into the muck. As a result, most armies continued to use horses and horse-drawn artillery for the duration of the war.
Innovators of the industrial age prided themselves on finding mechanical solutions to man's problems, and the answer to moving heavy supplies to the front lines was continuous track technology — already prevalent in agriculture. That innovation was initially ignored by the British military establishment, but worsening battlefield conditions eventually resulted in trials of vehicles such as the Holt Caterpillar tractor, which was deemed suitable for hauling heavy artillery — but little else.
In a conflict known for its technological innovation and rapid prototyping, it is somewhat ironic that the inception of the tank was such a fraught and painful process. Early designs for armored fighting vehicles failed to capture the interest of the British or French hierarchy, and it fell to the Royal Navy to nurture the imaginatively titled "landships" project. At the insistence of Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, the Landships Committee sought to develop an armored fighting vehicle prototype. The aptly named "Little Willie" was tested Dec. 3, 1915, but was found insufficient for the breaching and crossing tasks envisaged. This led to the development of the now-classic rhomboidal tank design, which serves to this day as the insignia of the British Royal Tank Regiment. Following a successful demonstration during which the fledgling Mark I (christened "Mother") defeated a number of typical Western Front obstacles, including low wire entanglements, cratered ground, trench systems and parapets, an initial order of 100 vehicles was made…
The tank was originally conceived as an infantry support platform and moved at walking pace. Able to traverse trenches and breach wire obstacles, tanks relied on intimate support from ground troops. The steel armor offered some degree of protection from small arms, and the tanks' weapons were effective in knocking out German gun positions. Successive generations of tanks, most notably the Mark V, sought to rectify the mechanical problems that plagued the early designs. Even so, tanks remained prone to mechanical failure throughout World War I. Crew comfort was an afterthought, and conditions inside the first tanks were infamously bad. It was not uncommon for a tank to stop midattack because its crew had passed out from internal fumes.
In September's Battle of Flers-Courcelette, the Allies gained substantially more ground with about half the casualties than in a similar attack that they had staged in July. Though the addition of tanks to the attack was one factor in increasing their success, a general revision of battlefield tactics was underway, and other technologies were having a larger impact on the war. Better integration between infantry and artillery, aided by aerial spotters, was to prove pivotal. A more decentralized approach to command and improved liaison between formations also improved operational effectiveness on the ground. And in terms of troop tactics, the first major update to prewar methodology had been disseminated in May 1915. This paved the way for an updated training manual in February 1917 that effectively did away with "traditional" infantry tactics — namely, forming up in an extended line and advancing slowly toward the enemy. Several techniques from the revised manual are still employed by modern infantry platoons.
The infantry support tank served its purpose, and massed assaults combining armor and infantry continued. Spurred on by French and British innovations, the German army proceeded to make its own heavy tank. But it was the advent of the "cruiser" tank by the British in the 1930s that best illustrated where the future of armored warfare lay. Cruisers were lighter and faster than heavy tanks (often at the expense of protection and firepower) and operated more like traditional cavalry — exploiting battlefield gains and pursuing fleeing troops. Lighter tanks also proved useful for reconnaissance, and the British continued to experiment with tank design and tactics in the postwar years. Though the Allies led in the field of tank design in World War I, after the war, the Germans and the Russians recognized the untapped potential of armored warfare and invested heavily in design and employment.
The holy grail of tank design is a highly mobile platform with excellent protection and formidable armament, embodied by the German Tiger series of World War II. Tank technology and battlefield tactics matured during the years between the two wars, but the masterstroke was to fully utilize radio communications as an aid to command and control, leading to more effective maneuver and shock action. The German high command in World War II realized that an integrated force comprising infantry, armor, artillery and air assets operating in concert was devastating on the battlefield.COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM
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Today there is a Vision and a huge effort among across the state of Massachusetts to link hundred’s of open spaces to parks and trails, natural resource areas, and important community features.
The towns of West Bridgewater, MA and Bridgewater, MA embrace this vision with the goal of linking town owned conservation areas to the nationally recognized Bay Circuit Trail on the historically important Town River in order to satisfy diverse environmental, economical, educational, recreational, and social needs.
Greenways are corridors of land and water that link together natural, cultural, and recreational resources – a riverfront walkway, a bicycle path, an urban walking trail connecting historical sites in neighborhood parks; wildlife migration corridors and a series of open spaces joined by trails are all examples of greenways.
The Nunckatessett Greenway is a network of trail spurs connecting the Town River and the Bay Circuit Trail to municipal and state conservation areas, historical sites, urban centers, school districts, Bridgewater State University, the Hockomock Swamp, and the Wild & Scenic Taunton River. Set aside for passive recreation by the towns of West Bridgewater and Bridgewater, the Nunckatessett Greenway connects people to the natural world.
Known today as the Town River, the Nunckatessett River originates in the Hockomock Swamp. This meandering, 14-mile river corridor is one of the earliest areas of colonial settlement dating back to the mid-1600s. Before then it was home to the Pokanoket Tribe and other ancient American civilizations that flourished in southern New England for thousands of years. The Town River, with several Colonial era industrial sites on the National Register of Historic Places, flows through the centers of West Bridgewater and Bridgewater before converging with the Matfield River to form the Wild & Scenic Taunton River, now federally protected under the National Park Service.
Use the links below or the menu above to explore each of the areas in detail.
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Atlantic Canada is moving toward major changes in electric generation and has opportunities to develop more efficient and economic regional electricity exchanges.
With the addition of Muskrat Falls hydropower, the development of wind generation, and new transmission links, the region’s electricity profile is being reshaped. The use of fossil-fuel generation will be reduced by the end of the decade, as older units reach retirement age.
In varying degrees, provinces have adopted policies to push the development of renewable resources. Newfoundland and Labrador will be almost entirely reliant on renewables. Nova Scotia will use more imported hydro. P.E.I. seeks to buttress its already strong position in wind power. New Brunswick is pushing efficiency and conservation.
For the first time, Newfoundland and Labrador will be part of the region’s electric sector. The Maritime Link between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia will assist in the reduction of coal-fired generation, promote a sharp increase in the use of renewable resources, and increase system reliability.
The hallmark of electricity policy in the region has been the reluctance of provincial governments to accept regional arrangements. Concern about losing control of the electric sector has been the underlying cause of the inability of provinces to co-operate to realize the full benefits of their resources.
The benefits of new transmission links and more renewable supply can be of greater value if the provinces increase their co-operation. Though each province has been reluctant to yield any control over its electricity policy, regional measures can be taken to produce increased reliability and economic use of resources without undermining provincial authority.
Each province can decide for itself if it wants to create a competitive electricity market. New Brunswick has abandoned its attempt to allow such a market, while Nova Scotia appears to be moving toward a system designed to favour the competitive supply of renewables. Still, the dominant role of a single electric utility in each province is unlikely to change.
The provinces no longer feel pressure from the American markets to create competitive trading arrangements in Atlantic Canada. But Emera, the Nova Scotia energy company, is expanding its reach into New England markets. Nalcor, the analogous company in Newfoundland and Labrador, plans to seek new U.S. markets as well.
The development of hydro and wind power in the region can be complementary. Because the availability of wind power may be intermittent, its benefits can be improved by operating it in conjunction with hydro, whose flow can be adjusted to produce a reliable combination product.
The provinces have been co-operating through the federally supported Atlantic Energy Gateway in exploring co-operation in the electric sector. But, despite pledges to move forward, little progress has been made.
Concerns about loss of provincial control may be exaggerated. Much can be accomplished through voluntary co-operation. Measures can be adopted progressively as provinces become comfortable with regional initiatives.
One area ripe for more integrated operations is transmission. Proposals to create an arrangement to provide reliable service at the lowest cost by sharing reserves have made no discernible progress. Co-ordinated transmission planning, now lacking, could also produce greater efficiency and resulting savings for customers.
Divergent and sometimes conflicting regulation could be harmonized without any province giving up its complete control of the regulatory regimen. And separating regulators from the political process, an area in which there has been some recent progress, could yield greater stability and predictability.
Much of what might be done co-operatively, as new electric supply develops, has been tried elsewhere in North America. Greater interaction among provinces and utilities can thus draw lessons from experience elsewhere.
In short, major change is coming in the Atlantic Canada electric sector. Benefits to customers will flow from the increased use of hydro and wind power, plus the more efficient use of electricity.
But progress will come at a price to consumers, because new renewable resources and related transmission will cause rate increases. That makes it important for provincial governments and utilities to seek all the economies they can achieve, while protecting their right to govern their own utilities and resources.
Political considerations will always be present, but policy objectives need to be defined with the customer always in mind. The goal should be to benefit customers in terms of reliable service at reasonable rates. Increased co-operation between the Atlantic provinces can help achieve these objectives, ensuring that consumers realize the full benefits of the opportunities that will be available in the years ahead.
Gordon Weil is the senior fellow in electricity policy for AIMS, and the author of “Taking Stock of Atlantic Canada’s Energy Sector”
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Port Henry, NY (POH)
Built in 1888 for the Delaware and Hudson Railway, the picturesque Romanesque-style depot houses a small passenger waiting room and the Moriah Senior Citizens Center.
20 Park Place
Senior Citizen Center
Port Henry, NY 12974
Annual Station Ridership (2016): 2,395
- Facility Ownership: D&H Railway
- Parking Lot Ownership: D&H Railway
- Platform Ownership: Canadian Pacific Railway
- Track Ownership: Canadian Pacific Railway
For information about Amtrak fares and schedules, please call 1-800-USA-RAIL (1-800-872-7245).
The stone Romanesque Revival station at Port Henry was built in 1888 by George Sherman for the Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H). The station building, which was entered into the National Register of Historic Places on June 1, 1995, houses the Moriah Senior Citizens Center as well as a passenger waiting room. A caretaker from the Senior Center opens and closes the station for travelers.
Sited on the western bank of Lake Champlain, the village of Port Henry is part of the Moriah Township of mountainous Essex County. Europeans first came to the region when Champlain and his companions arrived in 1609. The conflict between the French and English over this territory delayed settlement by those of European descent. The English King empowered colonial governors to issue land grants in 1763 and soldiers were granted these lands as compensation for their services in the French and Indian War.
This part of the Adirondack Mountains, both in Vermont and New York, is rich in both iron ore and lumber. While a mill was built there in 1766, the first permanent settlement came in 1785, when William McKenzie settled in what became Port Henry. The St. Regis and Oswegatchie tribes also lived in the area, and were noted as living at Moriah Corners as late as 1804. At first, the docks built at Port Henry shipped lumber from the heavily forested hills as early as 1820, where it was rafted north to Canada and when the Champlain Canal opened, to markets downstate.
Iron ore being plentiful in the area on both sides of the lake, nearly every landowner had a try at mining. The Cheever bed north of Port Henry began to be worked seriously in 1853, as well as a number of other smaller beds. The first Port Henry blast furnace was built in 1824, and it took in ore from nearby Witherbee and Mineville to ship out on the lake. By 1869 the Lake Champlain & Moriah Railroad was carrying ore to the port, and Port Henry shipped out 230,000 tons of ore in 1868 from the beds in Moriah Township.
The Witherbee-Sherman and Company mining company made its headquarters in Port Henry, where the Sherman family had prominence and built their waterfront complex, which is still used. The Iron Center Museum is housed in a former carriage house, ice house, and laboratory for testing iron ore. The main office, built in the grand French Second Empire style in 1875, now houses the Moriah town offices. The remains of the steel trestle, built in 1929 for loading ore, can be seen along the waterfront. However, all that remains of the huge Cedar Point Blast Furnace and Foundry, which produced 200 tons of iron per day in 1892, is the concrete block warehouse now used by the marina. Outdoor displays include a Lake Champlain and Moriah locomotive, ore car, and caboose.
Nearby Ironville, on Crown Point, claims to be the “birthplace of the electric age,” as it is the site of the first industrial application of electricity. Allen Penfield purchased large electromagnets from its inventor, Joseph Henry, for use at the ironworks in 1831, where it was used to separate crushed magnetite ore from its quartz matrix.
Amtrak does not provide ticketing or baggage services at this station, which is served by two daily trains. Service on the Adirondack is financed primarily through funds made available by the New York State Department of Transportation.
- 10 Short Term Parking Spaces
- 10 Long Term Parking Spaces
- Accessible Platform
- Enclosed Waiting Area
- Wheelchair Lift
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We’ve heard about Google’s self-driving cars a few times, but information has generally been limited. It’s something a number of us are curious about — who wouldn’t want to have the convenience of their own car without the hassle of driving — and a technology that could have a serious impact on our lives within a relatively short time period.
TED speaker, Sebastian Thrun, mentioned some interesting facts about the driverless cars that you might not know, such as the fact that they’ve driven over 200,000 miles since testing began and that the cars navigate not only during the day in optimum conditions, but also at night, and down difficult roads like San Francisco’s infamously windy Lombard Street.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the video for me was the visualization above. It’s a representation of what a driverless car senses as it’s making a lefthand turn at an intersection. We can see that the car clearly senses obstacles and the lines in the road, though it’s not clear that it sees a stoplight or not (it would clearly have to recognize them if the cars work as well as they seem to, though). Some of the technology packed into these cars includes radar, LIDAR, GPS, and an array of cameras.
The speaker raises an interesting point towards the end of his talk, one that you might not have considered while pondering driverless cars. That is the case of efficiency. This comes down to the fact that the average person just is not as good a driver as a computer. This relates not only crashes — which are almost always due to human, as opposed to mechanical, error — but also inefficacy, as humans weave around the highway, lacking the precision of a driverless car. Within a matter of years we might be relaxing in the back seat playing around on our internet-connected tablets while a computer drives us home in a both a safer and more efficient manner than we would ever be able to.
In addition to the video, which was recorded in March 2011, Thrun has an article on the Huffington Post where he further explains his experience and motivations. He also notes that the cars have driven nearly 200,000 highway miles. That’s up from 140,000 he mentioned in the video. This staggering number might reveal just how close this technology is to, one day, becoming commonplace. And that would just be the start of the change — driverless cars would inevitably lead to changes in the types of cars we drive, the laws of the road (you’ll need the latest firmware to pass inspection at the DMV), and other major changes in our driving habits.
via Huffington Post
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Seldom indeed can a discovery in the field
of physics have given rise to such intensive research work as did
that of Röntgen in 1896,
when he proved the existence of a new form of rays which had
hitherto been unknown and which, owing to their remarkable
characteristics, have since achieved a position of the greatest
importance, not only in the field of pure physics but also in
connection with research work throughout the other
Notwithstanding the considerable number of tests which have been carried out since their discovery and directed toward investigation of the true nature of X-rays, it was not until over a decade had passed that their true nature had finally been elucidated.
Already during the first tests it was established that not even the strongest magnetic fields were able to alter the direction of the rays. It was equally impossible to prove the existence of a refraction on transfer of the rays from one medium to another. If the X-rays were of a corpuscular nature they could not, therefore, be carriers of an electrical charge, as is the case with other known rays of corpuscular nature. If, therefore, we wish to disregard matter which has no electrical charge, it is necessary to assume that the particles, whose motion is characteristic for the X-rays, bear two charges of opposite sign, one of which neutralizes the other. On the other hand, from the fact that there was no evidence of refraction of the X-rays, it was possible to assume that, should they consist of a transverse wave motion - as is the case with light waves - the relevant wavelength would have to be very small, as for very small wavelengths, according to the theory of dispersion of light, the refractive index would approach unity.
After hurriedly discarding an hypothesis which had been expounded initially, according to which X-rays were believed to consist of longitudinal wave motions in ether, opinions as to their actual nature were divided according to the above two alternatives. Nevertheless an objective presentation could only describe them as a type of impulse of an unknown nature.
On the basis of an hypothesis expounded as early as 1896 by Stokes and Wiechert this impulse was believed to consist of a disturbance which occurs in the ether when the cathode-ray particle, i.e. a forward-rushing electron, is impeded on colliding with molecules of matter. This disturbance or impulse was believed to propagate in all directions at the speed of light from the ether surrounding the electron. In each part of the space this disturbance was maintained for a period of identical duration to that in which the electron was impeded. This period of time, multiplied by the speed of light, was described as the impulse width, a quantity which, if the nature of the X-rays were the same as that of the light rays, would coincide with the wavelength.
According to that theory the X-ray impulse, which originates perpendicular to the cathode-ray bundle by which it is excited, is alleged to be completely polarized. The evidence of this type of polarization was first produced by Barkla in 1905, but, contrary to the theory, the polarization was not complete but only partial. While it was possible to explain the causative factors of this aberration the characteristics of the polarization were not adequate to prove the existence of a transverse undulation.
Once Dorn had succeeded, in 1897, in determining the fraction of the energy of the impeded electrons which is converted to X-rays, W. Wien was able to calculate the impulse width which, according to his figures, amounted to approximately 10-10 cm, or only one hundred-thousandth of the shortest known wavelengths of light. The short impulse width thus determined could explain the lack of success with previous diffraction tests which had been carried out on slits with X-rays, for even with the narrowest slit the diffraction phenomenon, which is produced by such small impulse widths or wavelengths, would have to lie just about at the limits of possible observation. And it may, in actual fact, only be said even of the most accurate of these tests conducted by Walter and Pohl that they render diffraction highly probable. From the research carried out by these scientists it would meanwhile seem to follow that the upper limit for the impulse width of X-rays lies at 4 x 10-9.
This was the situation when von Laue placed a research medium of the highest import at the disposal of science by virtue of his epoch-making discovery of the interference of X-rays and, at the same time, proved that X-rays, as is the case with light rays, consist of progressive transversal waves.
Previous research had indicated, as is mentioned in the foregoing, that it was highly probable that, if X-rays are wave motions of the same type as light rays, then their wavelengths would have to be of an order of 10-9 cm. In order to obtain clear interference phenomena of the same type as those which are caused when light rays pass a grating it was necessary for the distance between the grating slits to be of an order of 10-8 cm. But this is approximately the distance between the molecules of a solid body and it was in this manner that von Laue arrived at the idea of employing, as a diffraction grating, a solid body with regularly-arranged molecules, e.g. a crystal. As early as 1850 Bravais had introduced into crystallography the assumption that the atoms composing the various crystals are arranged in regular groups, so-called three-dimensional lattices or space-lattices, whose constants could be calculated with the aid of crystallographic data.
However, the theoretical basis of a space-lattice was unknown and thus it was first necessary for von Laue to develop this theory if else the investigation were to have a value. This he did mainly according to the same approximations as those conventional to the science of optics as applied to normal one-dimensional lattices.
Von Laue left the execution of the experimental work in the hands of W. Friedrich and P. Knipping. The apparatus which they employed consisted of a lead box into which they admitted a thin bundle of X-rays which they directed so as to fall upon a precisely oriented crystal. Sensitized film was positioned both behind and at the sides of the crystal. Already the preparatory tests showed that the intensity maxima which had been anticipated by von Laue became evident in the form of blackened spots on the film positioned behind the crystal.
From the grouping shown by these intensity maxima in accordance with the requirements of the theory, as established, for such photograms of various crystals and from the degree of clarity with which they have been reproduced, it follows that they are an interference phenomenon. Absorption tests have shown that the rays which give rise to the points of interference are actually X-rays, and from this von Laue has deduced with a high degree of certainty that the X-rays which cause intensity maxima on irradiation of a crystal have the character of a wave motion. However, the same is required also for those rays employed for irradiation purposes, for, as he says, were they of a corpuscular nature, coherent oscillations could only arise from those atoms set into motion by the identical corpuscle and these atoms would have to form together one whole agglomerate whose dimensions would tee largest in the direction of radiation. However, contrary to what was indicated in the experiment, this would result in the intensity maxima consisting of irregular concentric circles.
As a result of von Laue's discovery of the diffraction of X-rays in crystals proof was thus established that these light waves are of very small wavelengths. However, this discovery also resulted in the most important discoveries in the field of crystallography. It is now possible to determine the position of atoms in crystals and much important knowledge has been gained in this connection. We can anticipate further discoveries of equal note in the future. It is thus rendered likely that experimental research into the influence of temperature upon diffraction will provide the solution to the question of a zero-point energy, or will at least be of some assistance in arriving at a solution to this problem, as the temperature factor assumes a different value according to whether a zero-point energy exists or not. However, the direct results of this discovery of diffraction are of no less importance: it is now possible to subject the X-ray spectra to direct examination, their line spectra can even be photographed, and science has thus been enriched by a method of research whose full implications can not yet be fully appreciated.
If it is permissible to evaluate a human discovery according to the fruits which it bears then there are not many discoveries ranking on a par with that made by von Laue. If one reflects further on the fact that only a few years have passed since his discovery was first published it may surely be said that, when awarding the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Academy of Sciences will presumably seldom, if ever, be in a position of such close agreement with the letter of the Testament as on this occasion in deciding to award the Nobel Prize for Physics for the year 1914 to Professor Max von Laue, for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays in crystals.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1914
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Diabetes is the fastest growing health threat of our times with the number of people living with diabetes doubling since 1996. It is estimated that if nothing changes there will be over 5 million people in the UK with diabetes. There are two types of diabetes, Type 1, more commonly linked to genetic factors that can be triggered by a viral or other infection and Type 2, which usually affects middle aged to older people and is linked to lifestyle factors such as being overweight.
What are we doing about this in North Durham
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in County Durham and Darlington have agreed that Diabetes care is a priority area. They have worked closely together with clinicians in primary and secondary care, patients, carers and their families in order to understand what needs to happen so that people living with diabetes keep well and live life to the full.
To find out more about the work that is happening in North Durham you can watch our animation:
By 2017 County Durham and Darlington will have a new community based diabetes service that places the patient at its core. This will be a seamless service, from local clinics and GPs, through to hospitals which will support and enable individuals to take more control of their health.
You can see further information here.
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Do you remember the days when Google was simply a search engine? The company that Larry Page and Sergey Bin first founded in 1998 has since evolved into one of the world’s most dominant companies. But how exactly did Google come to this point? In this blog we’ll cover Google’s timeline and evolution over the years and look into some of the most profound steps Google has taken to date.
Larry Page and Sergey Bin founded Google while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford. The two started the search engine after they discovered a new way to determine a webpage’s relevance to the search, which they called PageRank. Google was first run under Stanford’s website before later being incorporated in 1998 and went public in 2004.
Beyond a Search Engine
Today Google is apparent in every aspect of life. Although it’s still best known as a search engine, as the term “google” is now a verb, the company has expanded and become Alphabet. Alphabet contains the following:
- The core search engine (Google)
- Productivity software (Google Docs)
- Email (Gmail)
- Cloud storage (Google Drive)
- Social networking (Google+)
- Music streaming (Google Play)
- Web browsing application (Google Chrome)
- Navigation (Google Maps)
- Photo editing (Google Photos)
- Note taking (Google Keep)
- Video chatting (Google Hangouts)
- And much, much more
In addition to this expansion, Google has acquired a number of large companies that helped them expand their dominance. The list is almost endless but some of the largest companies are:
Everywhere you look Google is exerting its dominance.
One of the most incredible things about Google is the brainpower they are able to harness and continue to push the boundaries of technology. One aspect they’re exploring is robots as they have acquired numerous robotics companies integrated into their semi-secret research branch Google[x]. They are also exploring self-driving cars which currently are just used for mapping and such but in the future will be an option for those with health disabilities. Project Tango is another interesting idea as it focuses on 3D mapping and Tilt Brush allows you to paint in 3D via virtual reality. Google continues to push forwards in terms of innovation, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.
Nate Trimmer is a Co-Founder of Omnibeat. As a social media enthusiast with a background in organizational development and computer technology, he strives to help businesses understand and embrace social media.
Omnibeat is the digital marketing outsource solution for growth in Los Alamitos and the greater Long Beach area.
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That thing you might have heard, about women’s work, income and property ownership — it’s not true. (And yes, I really am a feminist.)
If you’re a feminist you’ve probably seen this. You may have even repeated it: verbally, on your blog, on a flyer, on Twitter, in your book or an academic article. It goes something like this: “While women represent half the global population and one-third of the labor force, they receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than one percent of world property. They are also responsible for two-thirds of all working hours.”
That’s how it appeared in 1984, on page one, in Robin Morgan’s introduction to the classic collection called Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. That’s more or less how it was tweeted by untold numbers of people a quarter-century later, on #IWD 2011 (a.k.a. International Women’s Day). And that’s how it was graphically presented in a slick Google video promoting IWD events this year.
But that wasn’t where it started, of course.
Where did it come from?
I don’t know what it is, but some concepts come to mind: meme, virus, legend. I’ll just call it it.
Usually, it is repeated without real attribution. But there are three bonafide sources offered by real scholars.
- A report called “World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace,” from 1980 (U.N. buffs might call it A/Conf. 94/20); or to the “Programme of Action” that emerged from Copenhagen. That Copenhagen document was released under the name of Kurt Waldheim, who (before his Nazi past was revealed) was Secretary General to the United Nations at the start of the U.N.’s 1975-1985 Decade for Women. This is not the true source.
- The footnote from Morgan herself says: “Statistics from Development Issue Paper No. 12, UNDP.” Produced under Decade-for-Women impetus, this was titled “Women and the New International Economic Order” (I’ve placed a copy here). Unfortunately, this is just a restatement, without substantiation. It is not the true source.
- The Copenhagen report contains a footnote to a 1978 edition of a Decade-for-Women-inspired journal published by the International Labour Organization, called Women at Work (1978/1). This, I now believe, is the true source.
The Women at Work reference, the oldest of the three, occurs in an editor’s introduction. Unfortunately, the sum total of what it provides is this:
A world profile on women, using selected economic and social indicators, reveals that women constitute one half of the world population and one third of the official labour force; perform nearly two-thirds of work hours; but according to some estimates receive only one-tenth of the world income and possess less than one-hundredth of world property.
There is no information on the indicators used or their sources, or what is meant by “some estimates.” That is where the trail goes cold — the oldest source, completely unsourced.
However, in 2007 Krishna Ahooja-Patel, the editor over whom’s initials that editorial appeared, published a book called Development Has A Woman’s Face: Insights from Within the U.N.” In that book she attributes the formula to herself, and offers an unsourced sketch of the methods used, “based on some available global data and others derived by use of fragmentary indicators at the time, in the late 1970s.”
The figures used for the formula were: women were 33% of the world’s formal workforce, and they were “only on the low income level in the pyramid of employment,” where — even in those lowly jobs, based on data from “several countries” — they earned 10% to 30% less than men. Therefore, “one could assume that women’s income is only one-third of the average income of men.” Since they were one-third of the workforce, and earned one-third as much as men, their total income was .33 * .33, or 11%. (She rounded it down to 10%.) In short, a guess based on an extrapolation wrapped round an estimate.
What about the dramatic conclusion, that women “possess less than one-hundredth of world property”? She offers only this explanation: “if the average wage of women is so low, it can be assumed that they do not normally have any surplus to invest in reproducible or non-reproducible assets.” Hence, less than 1%. That’s it. In fact, she adds, “In reality the figure may be much lower.”
Source? “Various UN Statistics.”
These things are hard to measure, hard to know, and hard to explain. Setting aside the problem that the data didn’t (and still don’t, completely) exist to fill in the numbers in this famous sequence of facts — the first and perhaps greatest problem is that we can’t easily define the concepts, which is part of the feminist problem. Even in 1970, how could women own only 1% of property, when most women were married and in many countries had at least some legal claim to their families’ property? Similarly, what claim did women who worked in homes and fields have to their husbands’ cash incomes? And what about socialist countries (which were a big deal back then), where a lot of payment was in the form of in-kind transfers, and where various forms of collective ownership were pervasive?
Underneath it all, the universal problem of accounting for unpaid, and underpaid, work. (This was one of the core insights that inspired the Decade for Women, and fueled its most progressive elements.) And so on.
So it’s too simple to say the famous facts are wrong. The burden of proof is not on us (me) to show they are wrong, but rather to point out that they were never demonstrably true, so we shouldn’t use them. (I’m not sure the truth will set you free, but I’m pretty sure this won’t, either.)
As an exercise, though, consider one of the facts. With a combination of arithmetic and basic knowledge of a few demographic orders of magnitude, it’s straightforward to conclude that, whether or not women only received 10% of the world’s income in the 1970s, they receive more than that now.
Here: In the U.S. in 2009, the 106 million women who had incomes averaged $29,700 each. I think that’s $3.2 trillion. The whole world’s gross domestic product — a rough measure of total income — is $58.1 trillion. So, it looks to me like U.S. women alone earn 5.4% of world income today. Ballpark, but you see the point.
One of the potential negative consequences of this is also one of its attractions: The claim that, for all women do, they own virtually nothing, is a call to global unity for women. But it is undermined by the fact that a large number of women are — lets face it — rich. So if global feminist unity is to be had, it won’t be built on a shared poverty experience.
Why is this thing, which never had many legs to stand on, so pervasive even today, 33 years after it was devised? It has been used by legislators in South Africa, international universities, feminist NGOs, journalists, humanitarians, activists, sociologists, economists — and, amazingly, UN organizations such as UNIFEM and UNDP, speaking today in the present tense.
There is a great, much longer story here, that I hope I have forestalled investigating by getting this much off my chest. It has to do with access to information; and deference to, and cynicism about, statistical authorities — in the context of statistical and demographic (sorry to say) illiteracy; the relationship between feminism and science; and even the role of Twitter in social movements.
And debunking it won’t hurt feminism.
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The Millionaire Who Took on McCarthyRoundup
tags: McCarthy, William Benton
A melodramatic mix of half-truths, rants, and innuendoes made Wisconsin’s junior Senator Joseph P. McCarthy powerful and intimidating. By 1951, he had cowed some of the Senate’s all time all stars, including Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver, Robert Taft, J. William Fulbright, and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
The rare senator willing at that time to confront this “hit and run propagandist of the Soviet type” was a rookie senator from Connecticut. For introducing a resolution to expel this blathering bully, William Benton suffered McCarthyite blowback, including a $2 million libel suit. Many also believe Benton’s heroism lost him his Senate seat in 1952. Still, Benton insisted: “Somebody had to do this job.” Years later, as his legend grew, he would demur: “Well of course I like to think I did a lot of things that showed courage in the Senate.” But he admitted, it may have been “in part because of my political inexperience.”
This political amateur also had something his other colleagues lacked: a real life awaiting back home. As a millionaire adman, publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and owner of the Muzak Corporation, Benton could afford to be daring. Professional politicians, he would lament, “too often underestimate the long-range values of boldness and stubbornness in defense of an ideal.” As America’s new leaders take office, they should remember William Benton’s courage, deciding what ideals they will champion, no matter what.
Born in 1900 in Minneapolis, Benton was a true child of the 20th century who would master the business of mass communication. He was also the kind of preacher’s kid like Woodrow Wilson and John Foster Dulles who retained their parents’ puritan moralism even in the dirty world of politics. At Yale, class of 1921, he often felt treated like a Midwestern rube. After learning how to sell at the National Cash Register Company, Benton entered the world of secular American evangelism—advertising—working for 1920s’ legendary agency, Lord and Day.
In 1929, Benton launched Benton and Bowles with his former assistant Chester Bowles. Among the first to use consumer research surveys and radio advertising intelligently, they gave the world radio soap operas—and jingles. Six years later, despite the Great Depression, “rags-to-riches” Benton sold his share in what was now America’s sixth largest agency for $1 million. ...
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Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law
An exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum
England’s own claims to maritime sovereignty ran counter to both Spain and Portugal’s and to Holland’s. Even during the reign of Queen Elizabeth – and notwithstanding her rebuke to the Spanish ambassador – England claimed sovereign rights seaward. During her reign these rights extended to the waters immediately adjacent to its coast, but her successors extended them out into the Atlantic, from Cape Finisterre in Spain around the British Isles, and in the North Sea to the coast of Norway.
The first British treatise on the law of the sea appeared in 1590. Written by William Welwood (fl. 1566-1624), a professor of mathematics and then law at St. Andrews (Scotland), The Sea Law of Scotland defended royal dominion over the seas out to a distance of eighty miles off the Scottish coast. The work pleased the king of Scotland, James VI, who had objected strongly, though ineffectively, to what he regarded as the intrusion of the Dutch herring fleet into Scots waters, and who happily rewarded Welwood for lending legal support to his cause.
When James succeeded to the crown of England, following Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, he issued a proclamation claiming all fisheries along the British and Irish coasts, and prohibiting foreign vessels from fishing in these waters without a royal license. To support his position, he asked Welwood to refute Mare liberum directly.
This Welwood did in two treatises: An Abridgement of All the Sea-Lawes (1613) and, in an amplified Latin version inspired in part by James’s wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, De dominio maris (1615). Quoting extensively from biblical sources and Roman lawyers, Welwood rejected Grotius’s claim that the waters of the world had always been regarded as indivisible; and defended the right of a coastal state to fish and to navigate – and to impose taxes with respect to either – in the waters adjacent to its coasts. Welwood is said to have been the first to clearly enunciate a coastal state’s authority over living resources adjacent to its shores. What is more, and of more than passing interest, he based his argument, at least in part, upon the risk of exhaustion of fisheries posed by otherwise unregulated promiscuous use.
– Notes by Edward Gordon
Welwood, William (fl. 1578-1622). An abridgement of all sea-lawes (London, 1613).
Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.
“Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law,” curated by Edward Gordon and Michael Widener, is on display October 2009 through January 2010 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.
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The long-term physical and behavioral impact of childhood abuse and neglect is something that has been a Pro-ACT discussion point for many years. Unfortunately, the issue is no less relevant now that it was in 1995 when the CDC and Kaiser Permanente began the ACES study, an investigation of the influence of childhood abuse and neglect on adult well-being.
With over 17,000 participants, this study continues today to provide insight on the physical and emotional impact of childhood trauma. As care provider, whether working with children or adults, understanding this complex problem is a step towards change. For complete information see the Aces Study.
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The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is generated from the U. S. Social Security Administration's Death Master File and it is used by the Social Security Administration for coordinating benefits. The Social Security Death Index is a perfect starting point for your family history research and a wonderful resource for genealogists because it contains information on millions of deceased individuals who had social security numbers and whose deaths were reported to the Social Security Administration. The SSDI includes entries from every state in the United States and covers deaths in the United States between 1800 and 2013.
The Social Security Administration does not guarantee the accuracy of the DMF file. Therefore, the absence of a particular person on the file is not proof that the individual is alive. If a person is missing from the index, it may be that the SS death was not reported to the Social Security Administration (SSA), the SS death benefit was never requested or the possibility that an error was made when entering the information into the SSDI.
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WHEN DOES A LIFE BEGIN?
Does a life start at conception, birth, some time in between, or at a different time altogether? Does this also apply to non-human lives? Heated ethical arguments about such issues can arise when some kinds of research or practices or legislation are contemplated. In this discussion I will attempt to unravel the matter by looking at some aspects of the concept of life, the history of life on Earth, and some characteristics of organisms from the very simple to the very complex.
What is Life?
Life is the property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter. But this simple description omits to say how to make the distinction. Some life forms seem inanimate at first sight, for example spores or slime. And continued argument about how to decide exactly when human death occurs, with such concepts as brain death replacing earlier concepts such as cessation of heartbeat or breathing, shows that the criteria for being alive are uncertain.
A common biological definition is that living organisms possess four properties:
Different definitions reflect different views about what life is. Some people think certain types of things are alive that other people think are not. Bacteria, fungi and plants are always included as life forms. Things, such as fire, machines, virtual life and viruses, all of which can have some lifelike characteristics, are commonly excluded. Viruses have no metabolism: they neither take in nourishment nor grow. They do not reproduce, but may be replicated if their DNA or RNA gets into cells of living organisms. However, they are given identification by the use of biological names and can be mutated and evolved into new strains, and hence they appear to act as if they are alive. Because of these characteristics, in the practice of medicine viruses are treated in the same way living organisms.
Whatever the precise details of the definition may be, if life is to perform at least some of the four basic functions, then it must depend on a functioning system, that is, a sustainable arrangement of interworking parts. This means that, for a typical specimen of a form of life, its parts, and their interaction must be able to sustain the temperatures and other conditions that act on it in its usual environment.
Origins Of Life on Earth
How did life originate on Earth? Three suggested processes are evolution, intentional creation and reincarnation. (I use the term intentional creation rather than intelligent design for two reasons. A design is not a production process nor the thing designed but only a plan. And also, I want to emphasise the contrast between a deliberate act of intention and the processes of nature where every outcome is just the necessary result of the available materials and conditions of the particular environment they happen to be in.)
From a different perspective, these three suggested processes could be expressed as:
Some types of self-replicating chemicals occur in nature and others have been manufactured. Scientists have been using them to produce new living organisms. (This is not the same as putting DNA (either modified from another organism or artificially generated) into a living organism.) But if they were to succeed, this would not be a re-enactment of how life originally emerged from inanimate matter but a process of intentional creation – but not by the creator envisaged by creationists. It might, however, demonstrate the feasibility of the evolutionary concept, and lead to further research into how life could have evolved through natural processes. There is no accepted scientific theory of how living organisms came to exist: Darwin’s theory of evolution addresses only how there came to be different life forms.
It has been speculated that viruses, which display some life-like characteristics, might be an intermediate stage in the emergence of life from inanimate matter. It has also been speculated that viruses began as live cells that mutated. Both of these suggestions seem improbable: all viruses are synthesised inside the cells of living organisms, and all viruses are coated with a very different kind of material from the membranes that cover living cells.
It is often assumed that any extraterrestrial life, such as life on other planets, would have similar origins to life on Earth. Organisms developing in very different environments might need to be structured around different chemicals, such as ammonia instead of water or silicon instead of carbon, or using structures different from DNA. This would make them different from "life as we know it", but, to be life, they would just need to be compatible with the biological (and the thermodynamic) definition.
Some people claim that a life force, is a necessary part of all organisms, so that while natural processes can produce the body, something else is needed to "switch it on", ie., to give it life. The late Australian biologist Charles Birch, suggested that this force is an aspect of the material world. Others say it is supernatural.
Proponents of intentional creation assume a transcendent creator for all life on Earth, and attribute some supernatural (spiritual) aspect to all or some living organisms. This may mean that the creator produced only the very first organism, or the first of each of the different forms which then reproduced naturally, or that each new individual is separately created. There is often the implication that what is alive in each particular organism is the supernatural spirit not the material body, with the spirit usually continuing after the death of the biological body.
Reincarnation means that every life is a spiritual entity that inhabits a succession of material bodies (not necessarily all human) each of which is born (or comes alive) and dies. The beginning of the biological body is of no great concern. The spiritual entity may exist in waiting between the death of one host and the birth of the next. In this concept it is the spirit that gives life to the body. The spirit does not meet the biological criteria of growing, reproducing and having a metabolism. It is thought of as the intelligence and conscious driving force of each body, sometimes with claimed memory of previous incarnations.
In some traditions, reincarnation implies that each serial life remains as a separate entity until such time as it reaches a condition of perfection when it can merge into some universal spirit. There is no explanation of how new sequences of reincarnation come into being as the number of living bodies on Earth increases, nor, if population decreases, whether a sequence can cease without achieving perfection.
Development of Life on Earth
Views about how life originated on Earth have their counterparts in the various views about how it subsequently developed. The evolutionary view, that natural processes produced the diversification and development of life on Earth, is derived from the findings of biological and geological science. The other views either accept some role for natural evolution, including evolution being occasionally nudged onto a new path by the supernatural, or claim that, while variation occurs within species, all species are the consequence of specific creation.
Geological evidence points to bacteria and other forms of life existing at least 2.7 billion and possibly 3.5 billion years ago, but these are thought to be by no means the earliest. Very early living entities would probably have been something like individual microscopic films enclosing RNA or DNA which controlled the organisms’ functioning and reproduction. They diversified into multitudinous forms of bacteria that proliferated and occupied many parts of the earth’s surface. Evidence also points to the appearance, perhaps about two billion years ago, of eukaryotes, ie., organisms with their genetic material enclosed in a nucleus. (The earlier organisms, bacteria and archaea, are known as prokaryotes) There are no multicellular prokaryotes, but there are signs of multicellular eukaryotes at about 700 million years ago. These developed into increasingly complex organisms – animals, plants, fungi and protozoans.
In simpler types of single-cell organisms, reproduction consists in the cell growing and then splitting into two cells that are like smaller versions of the original cell. This is referred to as cell division. Cells resulting from the division are occasionally slightly different from the parent cell, which can lead to the development of new species.
Cell division also occurs within most of the cells of multicellular organisms, in fact this is the main process in the growth of these organisms. During these organisms’ lives, cells are continually dying and being replaced by the division of other similar cells.
Parts taken from the bodies of some plants and animals can be grown to become mature organisms or body parts. Small parts from some animals, for example planarium worms and some jellyfish, can regenerate into complete organisms provided that they contain some of each type of the animal’s tissue. New plants grow from cuttings or from the culture of individual cells. Organs can be transplanted between compatible animals of the same species. This suggests that the individual cells of multicellular species are separately alive.
In reproduction by division, each "daughter" cell is a half of the parent. Each succeeding generation is, in a sense, just a continuation of its predecessor. All individual organisms have arisen from being parts of previously existing organisms.
Unity of Life
The processes of reproduction, mutation, separation and combination of all life forms on Earth are controlled by DNA and/or RNA. Many types of micro-organism readily exchange segments of their DNA, sometimes incidentally giving recipients new abilities or features. In genetic engineering, segments of DNA are deliberately transferred from one species to another – often very remotely related – species to provide the recipient with some specific characteristic. There is evidence that exchange of DNA continually occurs between eukaryotes (including us) and bacteria and viruses, with the progeny acquiring, and passing on to further generations, characteristics of both "parent" species. Most eukaryotes have other types of organisms living within their bodies, some providing essential processes for the hosts, and some parasitic. There are very many more "non-human" organisms in a human body than cells of the body itself. It appears that eukaryotes arose as a result of single-cell organisms becoming functionally incorporated into the bodies of other single-cell organisms.
Sexual reproduction employs the fusing of very different types of parts of two biologically compatible but distinguishable organisms, usually of the same species. However, the concept of species, in fact the whole concept of classifying life into domains, kingdoms and so on down to families, genera and species, while very useful, does not mean that life is actually divided into these categories. There are many cases where the distinction between species and between other classifications is not clearly definable.
Most biologists think that all life on Earth is probably descended from the same ancestor, and it seems that all life on Earth has been one biological unity since then. From this point of view there are new arrangements of living matter, but no new beginnings of life.
Notwithstanding biological unity, there is a distinction between life and a life. Organisms can be seen to be spatially separate from each other, distinctly recognisable from each other, independently capable, and differently intelligent and emotional. They are individual lives that come into being and die.
But what exactly is an individual life and when does it begin? Is a fully grown cell the same entity that it was before it started to grow? Is it still the same entity after it has split into two? Most people would probably agree that a single cell organism is one entity before it splits, but two new separate entities afterwards, able to go their separate ways. So for single cell organisms that reproduce by division, life as an organism begins (and ends) at the moment of splitting. But what about multicellular organisms, which usually do not reproduce by splitting into parts that are each similar to the parent?
Multicellular organisms can be thought of as associations of cells whose interactions make the unit a new living entity. But there are degrees of coherence in associations. Slime moulds are types of single-cell organisms that normally hunt as a herd, feeding on other microorganisms. Under stressful conditions the individual slime microbes form coherent associations looking and acting like slugs or fungi, with differentiated body parts. Then some individual members may become spores, that awaken and produce new colonies when conditions improve, while many of the other members die. These and other types of associations – such as corals, for example, which are polyps symbiotic with algae – are loosely held together, and the members are still separate organisms.
Some loose associations may cease to exist without any of the members dying, as when a stressed slime mould structure disassembles when favourable conditions return. In more complex associations, the members form differentiated groups (ie., organs) that depend on each other for survival Failure of an organ such as the heart or kidneys can cause the whole association, ie., the body, to die. The more strongly members depend on each other, the greater the likelihood that all will die if the association ceases to exist. Very complex (multicellular) organisms, including humans, are strongly interdependent associations, and usually all cells die from lack of support when the organism dies. But as mentioned earlier, it is possible for individual parts to be artificially kept alive, to divide and to grow. Also, the association itself can survive if it loses larger parts that are useful but not essential, in animals for example, a leg or an eye
Most complex multicellular organisms reproduce through the sexual process – the uniting of two dissimilar cells, such as a sperm and an egg. This seems to be a reverse process to cell division, but the new cell is significantly different from either of the cells it was formed from. Sperm cells do not have the functionality that allows them to exist as organisms. Fertile egg cells and seeds and spores initially lack these functions, but they may have the constituents of workable systems that could by "switched on" by some environmental condition.
New multicellular bodies develop from single fertile cell eggs that continually divide into more and more cells which remain coherently associated. And the cells become differentiated into specialised organs. The functioning of all these cells into an organised unit develops bit by bit. By being closely interdependent, the cells in complex multicellular organisms have lost their ability to exist separately. They are alive but are not organisms. So the life of the multicellular organism is the life of the association not of its members.
The process by which eukaryotes reproduce from fertilised female cells differs across the range of species. Plants form from seeds that have to depend on being in a suitable location and supplied with water. Many species, such as some fish, produce sperm and eggs that are fertilised when external agents bring them together outside the bodies of the parents. Many more species produce eggs that develop and hatch outside the body of the mother. The time of the beginning of the life of individual members of these species would probably be arbitrarily assigned to the time that the start to emerge from their birth shell. The remaining discussion will consider the beginning of the lives of only those species that develop to birth within the body of the mother, with emphasis on mammals.
A newly fertilised mammalian egg may be an association of members, but it is unable to survive independently as an organism. It depends on the active intervention of its environment. If properly protected and nurtured it can continually divide, until at some stage of division and differentiation it becomes a separate functioning adult.
So, while the life of a new (single cell) prokaryote may be said to
begin with the division of its parent cell, different criteria are needed
to identify the beginnings of mammalian lives.
What Identifies the Beginning of an Individual Mammalian Life?
From a biological point of view, some possible criteria for identifying the beginning of a mammalian life are:
Separation means that the new life is physically separated from or not a part of any other organism. The obvious example is a baby at or soon after birth. But being separate does not necessarily mean that something is, or is yet, a new life. A kidney removed for transplant is not a life, even though it is living. Conjoint twins are not separate but are separately alive and have individual lives.
No form of life is completely independent: all are dependent on their environment for food and energy, and often for cooperative assistance. But there is a difference between passive dependence where all the action to sustain life is taken by the environment, as with a new foetus which is completely supported by its mother, and "active dependence" where the organism takes action to secure from its environment its own food and safety. We usually regard such active dependence as independence. But there are different stages of how much a developing body actively takes and how much the environment, including other organisms, actively gives. So if independence is to be a criterion for the beginning of a life, the decision of when it is sufficiently attained must be arbitrary. It might, for example, be claimed that the beginning is the time of achieving capability to independently develop the four biological functions. This could be some time after birth.
Activity comprises self-generated motion of all or part of the organism or its interior processing. Seeds and spores are quite inactive and have not yet begun their lives before they begin to germinate. But apparent inactivity does not necessarily mean absence of life. A bacterium that had been locked beneath a Greenland ice sheet for more than 120,000 years was recently revived by scientists at Pennsylvania State University by slowly warming it in an incubator over a period of 11 months. After being placed in a nutritious environment it began producing fresh colonies. When discovered it had been under three kilometres of ice.
Stage of development
Stage of development refers to the progressive acquisition of new faculties and capabilities such as mobility, intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness.
To survive, all organisms must be able to distinguish between what is food and what is not, and whether an environment is safe and favourable or not. Survival also requires responding appropriately in each event. Organisms we would regard as extremely simple or primitive have a range of faculties in a form sufficient for their needs. Having such faculties, at any degree of complexity or sophistication, amounts to intelligence. The gut bacterium Escherichia coli (which we all have living inside us) has at least 30 different sensory systems, for food sources, oxygen, light, pressure and the presence or absence of other E. coli. And it has short-term and long-term memories. We see a gradient in intelligence among life forms (immodestly putting humanity at the top).
Intelligence can be distinguished from consciousness, with things like computers being in some way intelligent but not conscious. Consciousness often but not necessarily includes the ability to feel pain and emotions. And, just as there can be grades of intelligence, there seem to be grades and types of consciousness.
The stage of development that requires consideration from the point of view of morality may not be the beginning of a new life but the beginning of being aware and able to feel pain. This would make virtually all of the species of animal that we eat more worthy of moral consideration than a human embryo or an early foetus.
If stage of development is to be a criterion for deciding when a life begins, it implies a gradation between being alive and having a life – that a particular, arbitrary, degree of being alive is necessary before a new life begins.
Degree of being alive
We usually think of bacteria as being very much less alive than most animals. Individual cells of multicellular organisms must be even less alive than bacteria, even though they grow, divide, self-destruct and also perform the specific functions of the organ they are part of. But they have lost some of the functions that single cell organisms need to survive independently.
When someone dies, although the complex organic whole is dead, many of the organs, limbs and cells are still alive, and can be kept alive for some little time. These body parts would be considered to have a lower degree of life than say a bacterium. A newly fertilized egg (or a virgin egg for species where fertilisation is not always necessary) is no more an individual life than a freshly amputated organ or limb. It is entirely dependent on the actions of a nurturing environment to begin its process of dividing and growing. It may be argued that while an egg may have a lower degree of life than an organ ready for transplant, it has more potential. But as genetic technology advances, any living cell might be potentially developed into a living organism. Cloning is an example. But there is a significant difference between being a life and having the potential to be one.
The crucial question is assessing the degree of life as it increases during the process from fertilised egg to adult, and making a choice from that assessment. I don’t know of any objective way of measuring a degree of being alive, but. intelligence and consciousness may be indicators of it. I don’t know of any objective way of measuring a degree of being alive other than the criteria already discussed. If there is a life force that pervades all things, then a measure of the complexity of an organism might be also a measure of this force, and a proxy measure of the organism’s degree of being alive. But this criterion, like the others, does not give a clear answer.
So none of the proposed biological criteria seem to give a clear-cut answer.
If the reason for making a choice is to enable a decision about issues of morality, the choice is likely to be influenced by pre-existing beliefs. I would suggest that any biological criterion for choosing a time of beginning of a life must be arbitrary but it must be at some time after conception. Also, some of these criteria would put the beginning at a time after a developing organism had acquired the ability to feel pain, and feeling pain might be the more significant moral issue.
This may seem unsatisfactory as an answer: it just shifts the question. But I think the foregoing arguments have shown that the concept of a life is unable to be sharply defined. So the idea of a precise moment of a biological beginning is meaningless.
The biological views of life are based on observation of the world around us. They accept the rigour of scientific method. But science has nothing to say about spirit. Spirit, for those who believe in it, it is accessible only subjectively – through intuition, or specific exercises of the mind such as meditation, or unsolicited revelation. This does not in itself discredit belief in the existence of spirit nor its significance for life – scientific observation and explanation must also contain a degree of subjectivity. But there is no apparent way of resolving differences of opinion on issues relating to spirit. And these are many.
Two issues may be relevant to the role of spirit in deciding when a life begins.
The case of non-human species is probably more of an issue for reincarnation where the spirit might inhabit other animals. But some people who do not believe in reincarnation think (some) animals, particularly their pets, have souls. But if the previous incarnations or the pets were, for example, insects or fish, different criteria would have to apply.
There is no unambiguous way of deciding what life is. Life occurs in many forms, and changes continuously at all its levels of complexity. There is a difference between life as the particular condition of a piece of living material, and a life as a coherent individual living entity. But where is the dividing line between the two, and when does an individual life begin? This discussion has suggested some possible answers:
Biological considerations suggest that the beginning is some time after conception.
I know of no way of demonstrating that any answer is valid or invalid. The one you pick will depend on your religious and other beliefs, and on why you want a decision.
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What is autism?
Autism is a general term for a group of complex disorders of brain development. These disorders are characterized, in varying degrees, by difficulties in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and repetitive behaviors.
DID YOU KNOW? Research released last spring from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that one in every 65 American children fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. This is a ten-fold increase in prevalence in just the last 40 years.
When you stop to think about it, we all know someone affected by autism. The good news is that with more widespread early diagnosis, children can receive the behavioral therapies and educational support they need to thrive. However, access is often limited and cost-prohibitive (especially in rural areas) and, in many cases, not covered by insurance or Medicaid. It is for this very reason that Ag For Autism exists.
Do your part to spread hope to those affected by autism in our area by donating to Ag for Autism.
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Turns out, the inner workings of neural networks really aren’t any easier to understand than those of the human brain. But thanks to research coming out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), that could soon change. They’ve devised a means of making these digital minds not just provide the correct answer, classification or prediction, but also explain the rationale behind its choice. And with this ability, researchers hope to bring a new weapon to bear in the fight against breast cancer.
The scientific community has made tremendous strides in developing neural networks, computer systems that are built to operate like the human brain. Researchers have managed to get these systems to beat the world’s best Go players, identify images and shrink their file sizes. Neural networks now power keyboard apps and photo editors. Heck, we’ve even taught them to write like Philip K Dick. Most incredibly, Google recently taught two nets to design their own encryption algorithm.
The problem, however, is that even the researchers that designed these systems aren’t particularly sure how they actually work. It isn’t so bad with image-recognition nets because researchers can suss out the reasoning based on the images, but it’s far more difficult to do with text-based systems.
So, to illuminate the computer’s decision-making process, the CSAIL team split their network into a pair of smaller modules — one for extracting segments of text and scoring them according to their length and coherence. Short segments pulled from lengths of consecutive words score highest. The second module predicts the subject of the segment and attempts to classify it accordingly.
For their test, the team used online reviews from a beer rating website and had their network attempt to rank beers on a 5-star scale based on the brew’s aroma, palate, and appearance, using the site’s written reviews. After training the system, the CSAIL team found that their neural network rated beers based on aroma and appearance the same way that humans did 95 and 96 percent of the time, respectively. On the more subjective field of “palate,” the network agreed with people 80 percent of the time.
After some more development and tuning, the MIT researchers hope to eventually unleash their machine learning system in the fight against breast cancer as a means of extracting and analyzing the explanations pathologists give for their diagnoses.
Source: MIT CSAIL
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Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/28/2014 13:59 -0500
Fractional Reserve Banking
While we have covered the aberration that is a negative gold GOFO rate previously and in extensive detail in this post, an abridged version of what negative GOFO means comes courtesy of Deutsche Bank's recent discussion on what a successful Swiss gold referendum. To wit: "It is interesting to note that benchmark gold-dollar swap rates have recently traded negative, meaning investors are paying to borrow gold. This is unusual as gold is traditionally used as a source of collateral for cash financing.... [A] number of factors may play a role, such as excess dollar liquidity or an increased demand for collateral on the back of the global regulatory developments." In short a gold shortage at the institutional, read commercial and central bank, level. And not just a shortage but the biggest shortage in history, judging by today's latest plunge in the 1 Month GOFO which just dropped to -0.5% and , worse, 1 Year GOFO that just hit its lowest print in the 21st century, and is also about to go negative: something that has never happened before further suggesting the gold shortage could go on for a long, long time!
To be sure, GOFO has printed negative in the past, although the two most prominent historic plunges were due to acute events which promptly renormalized, and were not the result of what has now become a chronic gold collateral shortage via the swaps market.
The best known example of a complete collapse in the GOFO rate, is the September 1999 Washington Agreement on Gold, which was an imposed "cap" on gold sales (mostly European in the aftermath of Gordon Brown's idiotic sale of UK's gold) to the tune of 400 tons per year. The tangent of the Washington Agreement is quite interesting in its own right. Recall the words of Milling-Stanley from the 12th Nikkei Gold Conference:
Read More (with images)
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Since the 1950s, many expected that it would happen in the 21st century. In fact, it was a preoccupation expressed in books, amusement park exhibits, TV shows and movies.
The question of whether our homes — the place where we lay our heads and charge our gadgets — will get to move the tassel and graduate to the distinction of being “smart” was put to a group of 1,000 experts, observers, and critics. And the result was an even split on whether the home will have a brain in addition to a heart.
The Pew Internet report, in conjunction with Elon University, found that 51 percent of survey participants agreed that by 2020, the connected household will have “become a model of efficiency, as people are able to manage consumption of resources (electricity, water, food, even bandwidth) in ways that place less of a burden on the environment while saving households money.”
“Homes will get more efficient because it will cost more and more to waste energy — the devices will become simpler because no one likes being outsmarted by their thermostat,” says David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, according to the release.
Not everyone is sold on this future view. The survey found that 46 percent agreed that, due to consumer trust issues and service complexities, “the home of 2020 looks about the same as the home of 2011 in terms of resource consumption and management.”
“In nine years, smart systems will still be experimental and we’ll only see them existing in reality among a handful of elites,” says Danah Boyd, senior researcher with Microsoft Research. “This will be aggravated by the socio-economic instability that began in 2008 and continues to plague Western communities. … I still want my jetpack, by the way; I was promised a jetpack 50 years ago.”
Much of the future foreseen in the 1950s is now reality. While jetpacks haven’t hovered into our present, there’s a robot to vacuum our floors — though its name is Roomba, not Rosie. We can make video calls, summon information on just about anything, and stream music and movies seemingly from the heavens using phones we carry in our pockets.
Those same phones can start our car engines and unlock our front doors from afar. And although our homes are decidedly still terrestrial and not yet hanging in the sky, a lot of our data are in the cloud. And that’s not considered all that radical.
The stuff around us is getting smarter and processing faster. But do consumers really want the fridge talking back when they reach for the sweet potato pie instead of the sweet potato?
“Nobody really wants a smart home,” says product user experience evangelist Tracy Rolling of Nokia in the Pew news release. “They like for their homes to be dumb.”
Rolling also notes that, for the most part, today’s smart devices aren’t smart enough to communicate with one another. They all speak their own proprietary language.
A better question to ask than when it will happen is where this intelligent convergence will take place — where do we really live?
The answer: Home is where the data lives, and the majority of our digital life is lived on our phones, those ever-present, nearly omnipotent pocket-sized personal computers we rely on more and more every day.
“You have a super-powerful computer in your pocket,” Calvin Carter, CEO of application maker Bottle Rocket, told the Los Angeles Times in talking about the possibility of the smart home. “Why do I need another one in the living room, in my TV and in the den? I don’t. I have one with me all the time.”
©2012 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by MCT Information Services
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Why Does the New Testament Cite Extra-biblical Sources?
Dr. John Piper
“Sometimes we talk about textual matters. Joe from Santa Barbara, writes, “Jude 9, 14–15 confuse me. Where is Jude getting the information from in these verses? Paul usually quotes the Old Testament (and it tells us where he is quoting from on the bottom of our Bibles), but I have no clue where Jude gets his info. I have asked others about these texts and they usually say something like ‘Paul quoted pagan prophets,’ but it seems to me that Jude is actually quoting Scripture. What do we know? What do we not know?”
Here is what we know and what we don’t know: Jude is not quoting Scripture. That is pretty plain. He doesn’t claim to be quoting Scripture, but we will get to that in a minute. Here is what we know and what we don’t know: We know that Jude was in the middle of rebuking some arrogant opponents in the church, and we know that in verse 9 he does this by contrasting their willingness to blaspheme what they don’t understand with the archangel Michael’s unwillingness even to pronounce a blasphemous judgment against the devil. So, that is the point: to rebuke their arrogance and presumption.
So, he says this in Jude 9–10: “But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’ But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand.” So, we know that Jude refers to a situation at the burial of Moses where Michael the archangel and the devil are disputing over what can be done with Moses’s body. And we know this is a story that is not in the Old Testament. Nothing is said. God took care of the burial up there in the mountain. Nobody knows where Moses was buried.
What we don’t know for sure is exactly where this story comes from according to verse 9. There is more in Jude 14–15 that we do know, but here we don’t know where it comes from. There is a Jewish book called the Assumption of Moses written between the Old and New Testaments which has a story like this, but Jude doesn’t seem to be giving an exact quote. We can’t say for sure that is where he is getting it. So, the answer so far for verse 9 is this: We just don’t know where he got that story. But he got it from somewhere, and he doesn’t make any claim to get it from Scripture.
Here is a further issue in Jude 14–15: Jude is still criticizing the ungodliness of his opponents, and this time he actually quotes a source outside the Bible. He doesn’t say what it is. At least, it looks like a quote. Most people think it is a quote, namely, from 1 Enoch. That is a Jewish book written about 300 B.C. and not regarded as inspired or Scriptural by Protestants or Catholics, and it was not in the Old Testament that Jesus used and endorsed. Jude 14–15 are a fairly close rendition of this verse. That is why most people think it is a quote.
These verses go like this: “It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying” — so, he is quoting now this prophecy that Enoch gives — “‘Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.’” So, Jude quotes Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam, as prophesying, and he turns his words against the opponents as a judgment on them. And that is the judgment they can expect.
Now, here is the question: What does this mean for Jude, who cites this from outside the Bible? Where did he get it? What is he doing? Here are two possibilities:
1. He believed that even though these sources — 1 Enoch and wherever he got the verse 9 idea, the story — these sources, though not inspired, contain truth that he is willing to use. That is one possibility.
2. A second possibility — and I kind of lean toward this one, but it is impossible to prove — namely, that Jude knew that his opponents in the church, the people that he is so upset with, his opponents in the church loved to make use of 1 Enoch and maybe the Assumption of Moses, these books. And they were their favorite books to use, and so he is citing their own documents in an ironic way to bring them back on their own heads.
Now, that is where this issue about Paul quoting the poets becomes relevant, because that is what Paul did when he quoted the poets in Acts 17 from the pagan authors. He said that God “is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:27–29).
So, Paul reached into sources that he didn’t believe were inspired, saw something that was written there, drew it out, used it in a Christian way, and turned it back, as it were, on his conversation partners there in Athens. So, even though we don’t know for sure, my inclination is to say that Jude chose to cite these extrabiblical sources because his adversaries put such a high premium on them, and then he turned them around and used them to indict the very pride that was using them.
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The well-being of a population cannot only to be achieved by treating illnesses. Other range of factors such as people’s social, cultural and economic environments plays a significant role in their health and it cannot be ignored. On October 19th WHO is convening the World Conference on Social Determinants of Health in Rio de Janerio. The aim of the conference is to foster dialogue among Member States and stakeholders on policies and strategies aimed at reducing health inequalities. The event is also meant to engage Member States on strategizing on how recommendations of the WHO Commission of Social Determinants of Health (2008) could be taken forward. According to the commission, “the marked health inequities between countries are caused by the unequal distribution of power, income, goods, and services, globally and nationally, the consequent unfairness in the immediate, visible circumstances of peoples’ lives – their access to health care, schools, and education, their conditions of work and leisure, their homes, communities, towns, or cities – and their chances of leading a flourishing life.” The Commission’s overarching recommendations are:
- Improve daily living conditions
- Tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources
- Measure and Understand the Problem and Assess the Impact of the Action
The Brazilian government has shown stewardship in beginning to address social detriments in improving its peoples’ lives. Even prior to offering to host this conference, the Brazilian government has endorsed health care practitioners decades ago that understood the correlation between socioeconomic conditions and health such as Vera Corderio. Corderio, a physician at Hospital du Lagoa, a public hospital in Rio founded Associação Saúde Criança Renascer in 1991. She could not bear to see the hospital discharge children into the same conditions that produced their diseases. They were often readmitted to the hospital only few weeks later. As a response to this vicious cycle, Renascer’s objective is to help mothers of vulnerable children learn how to prevent recurrences of illnesses and minimize crises.
Renascer employs doctors, nurses and social workers to identify poor children before they are discharged from the hospital. The families are encouraged to work with Renascer by being offered incentives such as free nutritional supplements and medicine for six months. In exchange for these incentives the families work with Renascer team in designing treatments plans and setting specific, time-bound goals. The goals range from fixing a roof to acquiring the documentation to be eligible for government assistance. By addressing these underlying social detriments, the risk of child’s readmission is reduced and the mothers adopt healthier habits. Due to the success of the program and the financial support of Ashoka and the Brazilian government, this model has been replicated to sixteen public hospitals throughout Brazil. Corderio and the Brazilian government are examples that regardless whether our approach is bottom-up or top-down, addressing social detriments to health are key to ensuring the long-term well-being of our society.
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A lots of things are said about “the birth of fukamushi-cha,” but I would like to speak about this phenomenon in a broader way, in order to try to get a deeper understanding of it.
My main source is a work with a title that can be translated as The Roots of Fukamushi-cha. It is the fruit of a major study conducted in 2013 and 2014 by Professor Y. A., with the help of the Shizuoka Tea Research Group. The inquiry was done in the face of an urgent situation, namely, that it was important to record the accounts of those involved in the birth of this type of Japanese tea before there were none left. This is the foundation of reflection on the present state of Japanese tea, and its future.
Here, far from providing such a structured, rigorous scientific article, I would like to present a few points that I think are essential to understand.
First, here is how “fukamushi-cha” is usually defined. The familiar story is that futsumushi sencha (standard steamed, also known as asamushi sencha) is steamed for 30 to 40 seconds, in accordance with the traditional method for making sencha, and that fukamushi sencha is steamed 2 to 3 times longer.
The term “fukamushi” can be translated as “deep steamed.” Indeed, almost all Japanese green tea is steamed (mushi-sei 蒸し製), in other words, heated with vapour, before being rolled and dried, in order to stop the leaves from oxidizing. This operation is called “sassei” in Japanese, and “shaqing” in Chinese. However, the term fukamushi is criticized by some specialists because the idea of steaming more or less “deeply” is in fact purely fanciful. Either the leaves are steamed, oxidation is 100% stopped and we have a green tea, or it is not, and oxidation continues, and we will not be able to get anything out of the leaves. Consequently, it is physically impossible to have different levels of steaming.
It is important to understand the principle of tea steaming. It means heating the leaves with water in its gaseous form (vapour: colourless and invisible). In fact, it would be more accurate to say that it is with the latent heat created when gaseous water at 100°C (212°F) condenses into the state of liquid water in suspension (tiny condensed droplets that are visible like smoke). At the precise moment it changes states, from a gas to droplets, 540 calories per gram of water are released. In comparison, when liquid water in suspension goes from 100°C to 99°C (212°F to 210°F), only 1 calorie per gram is released, and when water vapour (water in gaseous form) goes from 101°C to 100°C (214°F to 212°F), only 0.5 calories per gram is released. Thus, the heat produced at the exact moment when water changes states makes it possible to stop the oxidation of tea leaves almost instantaneously. The machine used to steam tea might be a few hundred centimeters (a few yards) long, but there is only one point, not far from the opening where the leaves go in, where the vapour comes out of the boiler in gaseous form and then passes into the state of a liquid in suspension. It is at the moment when the leaves pass over the mouth of the boiler that the enzymes are deactivated, that ”shaqing” is 100% performed, in only a few seconds. All the rest of the time the leaves spend in the machine, they are simply bathing in the steam that we can see coming out, in what is never anything more than very hot water in suspension. In sum, the leaves are simply being boiled, and in addition they then retain excessive humidity that only creates problems for the next phases (rolling and drying). This is why some producers prefer to take off the top of the machine to avoid “boiling” the leaves too much, and especially to prevent them from absorbing too much humidity, using this phase for cooling down leaves temperature.
In short, the steam times actually correspond to how long the tea leaves spend in the steaming machine.
Of course, we could simply say that this is only a vocabulary problem since even though there cannot be anything such as stronger or weaker steaming, the difference in the time the tea spends in the machine does indeed have an influence on it. However, when we read on the back of many Japanese packages of fukamushi tea things such as “this tea has been carefully and deeply steamed right to the heart of the leaves,” we can see the problem that this term can create. When average consumers read that, they may think that other teas are not “carefully steamed.”
Moreover, there are no rules concerning the different “-mushi” denominations, and the time the tea spends in the machine is sometimes called “fuka” and sometimes “futsu,” depending on the producer and region.
An interesting question is why is tea steamed in Japan whereas everywhere else green tea is made by heating it directly on a hot surface (kama-iri)? What is the advantage of this method?
While this method is more difficult to employ, unlike kama-iri, it makes it possible to apply a large amount of heat uniformly to all leaves in a single instant. “In principle,” this makes it possible to stop 100% of the enzymes responsible for oxidation, whereas the kama-iri method takes longer because the entire of the surface of all of the leaves is not in contact with the hot surface (so oxidation continues during the process) and therefore sometimes the oxidative enzymes are not 100% deactivated.
Clearly, the term “fukamushi” designates products in the commercial sense, but does not correspond, strictly speaking, to a production method. Yet, at the origins of this tea, there were producers, wholesalers and retailers who worked very hard to perfect “fukamushi-chas” (there is no other word to designate them) of which many would now say “they used to be a very fine teas but today they are not good.”
Indeed, it seems that there was already “long steamed tea” before World War II. (Let’s keep in mind that the idea of long- or deep-steaming is completely inaccurate, but that it actually refers to the time the tea spends in the steaming machine.) However, at that time tea was sold by weight and it was placed on the scale in front of the consumer. The way the leaves looked was extremely important and, in the end, this very broken tea with rather yellow leaves did not last long.
The idea was taken up seriously again a few years after the war, when neither sencha nor kama-iri cha were being exported anymore. (Remember that Japanese green tea had experienced a boom in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as a product exported to the United States.) In short, Japanese tea was undergoing a serious economic crisis.
According to the account given by Mr. W. (88 years old), who took over the family tea farm in Makinohara when he returned from China in 1947, tea exports began to pick up in 1949. The first harvest was used to make sencha, and the second tamaryokucha or black tea.
However, beginning in 1952, tea exports began to decline because China and South Asia had come back onto the scene. This meant that first spring harvest tea had to be sold on the domestic market.
In the part of Makinohara where Mr. W. had his farm, the earth always made the tea astringent and bitter. (It has to be said that the plateau’s strong exposure to the sun also contributed to this.) Relationships between tea wholesalers and retailers encouraged him to “steam more,” without really knowing how to do it. In 1952, he was thus asked to reproduce the very mellow taste of an old-time tea called “yudôshi-cha” (“boiled tea”). Blindly, he went about attempting to reproduce “yudôshi-cha,” and after many tries and experiments managed to make a tea that certainly tasted very good, but really did not have a very presentable colour or look. How could such a tea be sold? How could it be reproduced using a classical steaming machine? By making minor alterations to the drum of the machine and leaving the tea in it longer, he managed to produce a tea with a taste that was very close: it was Mr. W.’s first “fukamushi-cha” prototype. He sold the very broken, brown tea that he produced the following year to a retailer in Yokohama, who then tried to sell the new tea by gambling everything on the taste.
The challenge for Mr. W., and finally all of the producers in the Makinohara, Kikugawa area, who took up the endeavor at the same time, was thus to do something to improve the look of this “fukamushi-cha.” (**This tea should not be seen as the invention of just one person, but as the result of experiments in the same direction by many people over the same period.**)
I will not go into the details, but for the next three decades, the machines and production lines had to be improved. The art of teapot making also had to change in order to adapt to the new tea. (It is probably obvious to everyone that this concerned filters in particular.)
Thanks to improvements, as well as perseverance, this tea finally came to be loved and sought after in major consumer areas, in other words, in Tokyo in the first place, because it could be good even when made with Tokyo tap water, which was still very bad in the 1960s and 1970s. It could also be prepared quickly and simply, and produced a strong colour.
At the end of the 1960, following the international tea trade liberalization in Japan, Japanese black tea production collapsed when Japanese industry was allowed to buy foreign black tea without having to acquire an equivalent quantity of Japanese black tea. The latter was no longer attractive because it was too expensive and too low quality.
In the southern plains of Shizuoka, there was the custom of using the first harvest to make green tea, sencha, and the second for black tea. It was difficult to obtain a good sencha with the second harvest, which produced a very astringent, bitter green tea with brown liquor. This is why the second harvest was used for black tea.
Now that there was no longer anyone to buy the black tea, More and more producers started to make fukamushi with this second harvest.
In 1969, fukamushi-cha appeared in competition for the first time, in the “free style” category open to all sorts of teas. Fukamushi is the only free style tea that lasted, and in 1977 the “sencha–fukamushi” category was created.
What is important to understand is that this “fukamushi-cha” was born, on one hand, of the need for change owing to a serious crisis threatening tea’s very survival, and, on the other hand, of the idea of making a tea that would be simply good, mellow, with no astringency or bitterness. This seems rather puzzling today, given that many “fukamushi-chas”, especially in this Shizuoka plains area, are very astringent and bitter.
We can imagine many reasons for this.
Fukamushi-cha developed in the early 1950s, when botanical varieties (zairai-shu) of tea were mostly used. Yabukita began to be grown in significant quantities only at the end of the 1960s. Zairais are generally much less rich in various molecules than cultivars.
Another major change was the size of the production lines. It is clear that one cannot work in the same way on a 60 kg (130 lb) line as on a 300 kg (660 lb) line. Moreover, it is primordial to find a balance between the amount of leaves entering the steaming machine and the quantity of vapour. If there are too many leaves, fukamushi or not, some leaves will not be 100% steamed, and the tea will be bad.
Furthermore, in the case of fukamushi, the longer time spent in the machine creates excessive humidity that hinders the rolling-drying stages, despite the invention of an additional machine to remove the excess moisture from the leaves. Add to this the fact that rolling machines may not be appropriate for processing the very broken leaves of fukamushi-cha. The result is drying defects that can be seen and tasted in the final product.
This does not mean that all fukamushi-chas are bad teas. Far from it. Nonetheless, we have to wonder about the current situation, in which these teas have become the norm. They comprise the majority, especially in so-called “specialized” chains of boutiques offering mediocre fukamushis that are more or less all the same. At a time when Japanese tea is going through an unprecedented crisis, and its very future is in question, we have the right to ask whether it is a good idea to continue promoting these mediocre teas, even if this is what the average consumer wants. The immense work done on the original fukamushi-cha in order to revive Japanese tea made it possible to sell it on the domestic market, but this began with no market survey. It was imposed by the sellers at the time (as the only good way to deliver quality and quantity?). Today, similar effort needs to be put into changing things. In what direction should we work? That is a completely different question, on which everyone seems to have a different opinion.
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The magnetron is constituted by a cylindrical, composed anode of socket, these if they find in the axle of a heating cathode. The anode and the cathode are separate for a space which if of the o name of interaction space, being in vacuum. These sockets, said ' ' socket ressonantes' ' , they can have different forms in accordance with the considered magnetron. Two magnets also meet that are fixed perpendicularly in relation to the axle of the pipe. A continuous electric field is applied between the anode and the cathode. The set free electrons for the cathode are sped up by the continuous magnetic field.
Had to the magnetic field created by two perpendicular magnets to the axle anode/cathode, gets a circular movement around the cathode, with similar trajectories the cycloids. The magnetic field servant, with the electronic cloud, serves to speed up the waves. These loads that flow between the anode and the cathode they go to enter in interaction with the resonant sockets of the anodic block that if becomes the support of the electromagnetic oscillations. According to Pear tree (2002, et al) an important point in the project is the definition of the number of magnetrons to be used in the processing. A valve of high same power can be used or several of lesser power.
A valve of high power is normally more efficient than a less powerful set. However, the last one is cheaper, more easy to acquire in the market, needs less accessory for its operation, beyond that in an eventual imperfection of the valve, the process as a whole will not be paralyzed, therefore the others will be operating. These valves, however, beyond the inconvenience of the generation of harmonic, harmful to other electronic equipment that is in the neighborhoods, are also sufficiently susceptible to the mutual interference. Magnetrons the antennas of the type can be on bugle that offer to a good diretividade and focus.
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Our worksheet was all about identifying what we ate and used at lunch time and whether it was Reusable, Recyclable, Compost, or Landfill. We had students list everything from the juice box to the plastic fork and try to come up with alternatives to the landfill items. After we finished we had students head up to the field for Decomposition Tag.
We had the whole class play this fun twist on Freeze Tag. A few students were the character of 'Death' who wore brown string to ID them. We had about 1/5th of the class act as decomposers who wore yellow string. All other students were plants or animals of their choosing. Death could freeze any of the plants or animals. If frozen, a decomposer could run around the frozen plant three times to unfreeze/decompose them. This game has no natural end, but we would stop every so often to have students change roles. This fun P.E. inspired class enforces the idea that the progression of life, death, and decomposition is a circle. We must have all of the elements for life to continue.
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