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<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by HenryRhenals:<BR><STRONG> ...as principled as Adolf Hitler the world would inevitably become a more comfortable place.<BR> ]</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>I'm something of a 20th century history buff, and from what I've learned of our pal Adolf, he was anything <I>but</I> principled. He played his subordinates off of each other to promote infightingand rivalry among them, in order to secure his dominance. He utterly deceived the german people, the countries he occupied "bloodlessly", the rest of the world, and his subordinates. These are mere examples, and I could cite much more. This may be an example of principle, but I would have to say it's a truly reprehensible principle. <P>Additionally, what good is a principle if it is truly and utterly evil? | <urn:uuid:b67c2f85-860b-49d5-b6f9-51985cf06a43> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beethoven.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=48428 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960849 | 209 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The Money Connecticut Drivers Paid for LI Sound License Plates Will Not Be Used for LI Sound
Several years ago the Connecticut legislature and governor started using money in the state's Clean Water Fund for things other than clean water projects, and it wasn't until a lot of environmental advocates noticed and took umbrage that the politicians in Hartford fully funded the CWF.
That money is for capital projects like upgrading sewage treatment plants on Long Island Sound. Money from the Sound license plate program generally goes to other Sound-related projects.
But if you shelled out $50 or $85 or $100 for a Sound license plate recently with the expection that the state would actually do what it said it would do with the money, the joke's on you. The new state budget takes all of the money -- $143 million over two years -- and sweeps it into the general fund to be used for anything Hartford wants.
Even more of a joke: the state plans to keep selling the license plates, even though the money won't be spent on the Sound.
The Connecticut Post has an excellent story about it, here (although it doesn't talk about the Clean Water Fund raid). Here's an excerpt:
Christopher Phelps, director of statewide initiatives for the nonprofit Environment Connecticut, said the Long Island Sound Fund was an unlikely victim of the budget process this year, since protection of the Sound is a bipartisan issue.
"The Long Island Sound license plate was created and people bought those license plates under the express understanding that extra money they were spending was going specifically to help protect and restore Long Island Sound," he said. "Now that money is just being swept right into the General Fund and the people who chose to paid that extra money for the specific purpose of protecting the Sound are not getting the money to go to that purpose."
Phelps said that over the decades, all the state's environmental protection needs have been chronically underfunded.
"But in Long Island Sound, being the signature natural resource for the state, we have made incredible progress at the state and national level, working in partnership effectively and with New York, cleaning it up over time and obviously, we're nowhere near done cleaning it up," he said. "One of the funding streams that has really helped make that happen has been things like the Long Island Sound license plate, knowing that the broad environmental protection funding in Connecticut has never really gotten where it should be."
And Terry Backer, the Soundkeeper and a member of the General Assembly, bluntly said that people shouldn't waste their money on the plates:
"My sense is they shouldn't buy the plates anymore," Backer said in a phone interview. "The main reason why people bought Long Island Sound plates is they cared about the Sound, they used it, or didn't use it, but they cared."
The Post story also has a good summary of projects the fund has paid for over the years:
All told, the money collected from the "Preserve the Sound" license plate program went to 294 projects since the fund was created in 1993. Here's a list of some of them:
-- $23,000 for the Bridgeport Board of Education's Aquaculture school for raising scallops in 1994.
-- 18,000 for the installation of floating docks at Shelton's Sunnyside boat facility on the Housatonic River.
-- $50,000 to help pay for the demolition of the former Long Beach cottage community in Stratford.
== $1,250 for Derby's Kellogg Environmental Center to create banners portraying drainage basins.
== $25,000 for the Connecticut Audubon Coastal Center in Milford to invest in a salt-marsh laboratory.
-- $4,150 to send water conservation brochures to every home in Darien.
-- $5,775 for a population study of diamondback terrapins by Fairfield University.
-- $13,000 for Seymour middle school students to study the Naugatuck River.
-- $60,000 for the Stamford-based Sound Waters to help with learning labs at Cove Island Park and with after-school programming.
-- $16,900 for Friends of Sherwood Island State Park's nature center displays.
-- $25,000 for a clean boating program by the Norwalk-based Long Island Soundkeeper Fund designed to cut down on human waste in the Sound.
-- $2,500 to help the New Canaan Nature Center Association Inc. establish a Girl Scout and Brownie program.
-- $140,000 in several grants to the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, including $18,614 for a live webcam at the Sheffield Island lighthouse in Norwalk harbor, a $24,000 traveling science show for elementary and middle schools and a $20,000 study of harbor seals. | <urn:uuid:d284a8b3-4280-4e63-a8e1-1bcadb748362> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thissphere.blogspot.com/2009/09/money-connecticut-drivers-paid-for-li.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956146 | 985 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Alain Robbe-Grillet was one of France’s most distinguished novelists and filmmakers, but his first film, L’ Immortelle, remains his most effective, even though the director himself didn’t particularly care for it. It’s difficult to see why, because of all his films, it is the most economical, accessible, and fully realized, and Maurice Barry’s black and white cinematography is immaculate and mesmerically evocative. Even though Robbe-Grillet had much larger budgets for his later films, none of them comes close to the power of this largely unavailable work.
L, a woman (Françoise Brion) haunts the daytime reveries of N, a man (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze), who can’t be sure if he’s seen her before, or ever, and keeps losing track of her in the streets and back alleys of Istanbul, here used for its full exoticist impact. Time has no meaning in the film, which shifts from the present, to the past, and perhaps to the future with trance like abandon; budgeted at less than $100,000, the film nevertheless manages to create a world entirely its own.
As I wrote for Wikipedia of the film, “Robbe-Grillet, who was one of the most successful screenwriters of the French New Wave — for example, Alain Resnais’ 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad — longed to direct a feature film, but no offers of backing were forthcoming. At length, a Belgian producer agreed to let Robbe-Grillet direct a film from his own screenplay on the condition that the film be shot in Turkey, using “blocked funds” (profits from an earlier film that could not be taken out of the country) owed to Cocinor, the French production company. Robbe-Grillet complied, and in his first feature film as a director, created a dreamlike, erotic fantasy.
L’ Immortelle has never been legally available on DVD, and at present circulates only in bootlegs, and in 35mm prints circulated by the French Cultural Ministry, which loans the film to museums and colleges from time to time. Thus, the film is almost impossible to see. Dino de Laurentiis acquired the Italian distribution rights after production, and officially, in the film’s credits, L’Immortelle is listed as French/Italian co-production, although it was shot entirely in and around Istanbul, with a mostly Turkish crew.”
I was able to secure the loan of a 35mm print of the film for my summer film class in 2009, through the courtesy of the French Cultural Ministry, and screened it for my students, who were stunned by the beauty and sensuousness of the film. As one person said, “it’s a shame that our generation doesn’t have any filmmakers like that working today.” Now, that’s an overstatement, as there are many talented young film and digital video artists today, but still, L’ Immortelle remains one of a kind, a film unlike any other. | <urn:uuid:ac9d8d59-54ac-4778-82c3-ebfdec504ee5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.unl.edu/dixon/2011/08/31/iimmortelle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975259 | 665 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Plans to introduce a national pay-as-you-drive road tax have been shelved, the Daily Mail reports.
The new Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said it was ‘not the time’ to introduce the scheme that would see drivers pay up to £1.50 a mile to use the road. The decision was no doubt influenced by the petition against it on the Downing Street website, which attracted more 1.7 million people to sign it.
The plan will not be included in the Labour manifesto in the run up to a General Election and will not be introduced in the next parliament if Labour is re- elected, Adonis confirmed.
Under the controversial scheme, cars would be tracked by satellite and charged for every mile they drive. The scheme was first suggested as a replacement to road tax, to incentivise motorists to drive less and cut emissions from private cars. | <urn:uuid:65b49e66-246b-408f-82ed-f49b385e02d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://clean-green-cars.blogspot.com/2009/06/road-pricing-scheme-axed.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973979 | 179 | 1.5625 | 2 |
LOWELL -- Bob Audet isn't certified to give out flu shots himself. So for the second year in a row, he got the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Lowell to help.
"Corporate pharmacies have pharmacists that are trained and certified to give shots, but they don't have any to give," said Audet, owner of Pawtucket Pharmacy.
The Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Lowell held a flu clinic Friday morning at the Pawtucket Street pharmacy. The nurses came equipped with 100 doses of vaccine but only used 35 of them, a number that may reflect a stabilization of the flu craze.
"We anticipated more because we got a lot of calls and there seemed to be a lot of interest," said Irene Egan, director of community development at VNA of Greater Lowell.
Flu season has been tumultuous already, whereas it usually peaks in early February. An unusually high number of influenza and influenza-like illness cases in Massachusetts, along with a subsequent declaration of a state of emergency in Boston by Mayor Tom Menino, led to long lines at pharmacies and short-term vaccine shortages.
"The publicity seems to have caused a lot of people who might have been hesitant before to get it," said Egan. "As the state says, it's never too late to vaccinate."
The spike looks like it's died down in the past couple of weeks. The weekly flu report by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health stated that 2.4 percent of all hospital visits in the state for the week ending
"The flu season is still severe and ongoing and there are still slammed hospitals trying to handle the overflow," Frank Singleton, director of the Lowell Health Department, said in an email. "Things have died down considerably, although Lowell General Hospital is still very busy."
The demand caused "runs" on the pharmacies. There was no widespread vaccine shortage, but there may not have been any vaccine at one pharmacy at a given time. Target in Lowell just got 300 doses of the vaccine, and the Lowell Health Department has vouchers for people without health insurance to get free flu shots at Walgreens.
The VNA has done about 20 clinics since the fall, mostly at homes for the elderly. Audet, who is on the board of directors for the VNA of Greater Lowell, felt that a free public clinic was important for community health, especially in a year when the flu is so prevalent.
"Theraflu's been flying off the shelves," said Audet. "Fortunately, this year's vaccine is on target. Immunity is so important, so if you get the shot, you will not be getting nearly as sick if you do end up getting the flu."
Health-care professionals agree that getting a flu shot is the best defense against influenza. Nancy Harding, the senior clinic nurse for the VNA of Greater Lowell who has personally administered 400 shots this year alone, said people often mistake the flu for the common cold, which the vaccine doesn't protect against, and that the vaccine doesn't get you sick.
"You'll know it's the flu -- you won't be able to get off the couch," said Harding. "I tell people that it's a coincidence if you get sick after you get the shot. You might have already been infected before you got the shot, and it takes two weeks to go into effect anyway."
Egan said the VNA will use its remaining doses on its patients and may have another clinic before the flu season ends. She said that the best prevention for people who already have the vaccine are washing hands thoroughly, coughing with proper etiquette and avoiding contact with people who may be infected.
"Aside from getting vaccinated, we tell them good hand-washing is the simplest, least-expensive way of preventing the flu," said Egan. "And we all love hugs, but we don't love getting sick."
Follow Pete McQuaid on Twitter @sweetestpete. | <urn:uuid:ec3fdbf4-3163-4b50-ad30-e59230d1f823> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lowellsun.com/green/ci_22409049/flu-vaccine-rush-eases-but-seasons-far-from | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976484 | 809 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Searching for toys in mom’s closet and using chore money to buy more toys was on Erin Timperley’s 12-year-old agenda. In 2001, she and her cousins decided to donate toys to kids who were less fortunate. Little did Erin and her cousins know that their 2001 toy drive effort would blossom into Give to Others, an organization currently run by Erin, her cousin Alie Nelson, both in their early 20s, and their parents. Give to Others is simply run on monetary donations, toy donations, grandma’s love and Erin and Alie’s passion for putting smiles on the faces of sick kids, during the holidays. Since its start in 2001, Give to Others has donated approximately 4,500 toys! In 2007, over 800 toys were donated. To Erin, that particular year was the most memorable. That was also the year Alie won ABC7’s Cool Kid Award for her Give to Others efforts. Erin won the year before.
Give to Others and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
In 2003, Give to Others made its way to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. This year will be Give to Others’ ninth year bringing toys and smiles to young patients at the hospital. The girls work closely with hospital staff to see which age groups need the most toys and peg their coworkers, who have kids, for ideas on what toys are cool that season. Their Facebook page has been a great avenue in seeking support and ideas from the online community. Erin and Alie also do quite a bit of research online to see what’s resonating with kids. Erin explains, “The most challenging part is trying to figure out which toys are IN.”
If you know of any toys that are hot gift items this year, let us know in the comments below!
How You Can Help
Give to Others is a great example of what you can do (without having to start a nonprofit) to make an impact. In the spirit of giving and making kids’ holidays bright, there are a variety of ways you can help the kids and families at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
- Host your own toy drive for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.*
- Make a donation and help us treat kids better.
- Make an appointment to donate blood or platelets. Our young patients rely on these donations during treatment and blood transfusions.
- Send a holiday wish.
Watch and hear about Give to Others, shopping for toys and sharing their enthusiasm for bringing happiness.
*Dec. 14 is the deadline for holiday toy donations. | <urn:uuid:f21e771e-0da4-4923-b906-d973c86829fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wetreatkidsbetter.org/2012/11/two-girls-with-one-mission-bring-toys-and-happiness-to-sick-kids/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969679 | 537 | 1.734375 | 2 |
College graduates across the nation owed an average of $25,000 in student debt in 2010, while Utah grads had the lowest average debt at $15,509, according to a new report from the Project on Student Debt.
Student-loan debt was up nationally by 5.2 percent from $24,000 owed by 2009 grads, according to an LA Times article on the report by the Project on Student Debt at the Institute for College Access & Success. This is the first time the average student-loan debt has topped $25,000.
The debt increase was smaller than expected by some experts who had anticipated a larger increase because of the poor economy, the article reports, but financial aid helped offset costs for low-income students and those with higher tuitions.
Jon Byington is the founder of DosLives.com, a news and entertainment website that reaches the growing number of Latinos in the U.S.
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- Airport TRAX ridership remains strong... 6 | <urn:uuid:08ab9313-44f5-4685-a119-789a602850c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705393655/Report-Utah-grads-have-lowest-average-debt-in-US.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939901 | 378 | 1.5 | 2 |
CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - Some teachers have been contacting officials at the NC Department of Public Instruction about their pay. Teachers are concerned their salary is not reflecting a 1.2% raise the General Assembly approved.
State education officials explained to teachers they will get the raise, but there is some confusion when teachers compare their salary to last year's salary schedule.
It appears some teachers will be paid less. State Education officials say for teachers who are new to the profession, they will be paid less than teachers who had the same amount of experience a few years ago. That's because of a nearly four year pay freeze. Some think that could chase effective teachers away.
"So for recruiting purposes it is less," NC DPI Director of Business Alexis Schauss said. "But the individual teacher, as they work the system,is taking that salary with them."
Schauss is also telling teachers since the General Assembly didn't fully fund teacher raises next year, teachers will be left behind when it comes to their pay. And that is why it looks like teachers are getting paid less.
"The raise doesn't go far enough," NC State Senator Malcolm Graham said. "To put them where they need to be."
State officials have been fielding calls from concerned teachers. They have been explaining the process but teachers are still confused.
"They're disappointed that the General Assembly has not funded that step increase," Schauss said. "To keep them on the salary schedule that was previously funded."
It is advised that teachers check their paycheck to be sure it is correct.
Copyright 2012 WBTV. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:1585a50b-9fe3-4aa3-8980-eaa019b5bcd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbtv.com/story/19037790/teacher | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983511 | 334 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Posts tagged dsm
Posts tagged dsm
[Article of Interest] Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
By Jamie Doward
British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness
There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists.
In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out “reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems”, used by psychiatry.
Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.
“On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. For example, the fifth edition of the book, the first for two decades, will classify manifestations of grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively.
Some of the manual’s omissions are just as controversial as the manual’s inclusions. The term “Asperger’s disorder” will not appear in the new manual, and instead its symptoms will come under the newly added “autism spectrum disorder”.
The DSM is used in a number of countries to varying degrees. Britain uses an alternative manual, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) published by the World Health Organisation, but the DSM is still hugely influential – and controversial.
The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clinical psychologist, welcomed the DCP’s decision to speak out against psychiatric diagnosis and stressed the need to move away from a biomedical model of mental distress to one that examined societal and personal factors.
Writing in today’s Observer, James declares: “We need fundamental changes in how our society is organised to give parents the best chance of meeting the needs of children and to prevent the amount of adult adversity.”
But Professor Sir Simon Wessely, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and chair of psychological medicine at King’s College London, said it was wrong to suggest psychiatry was focused only on the biological causes of mental distress. And in an accompanying Observer article he defends the need to create classification systems for mental disorder.
“A classification system is like a map,” Wessely explains. “And just as any map is only provisional, ready to be changed as the landscape changes, so does classification.”
[Article of Interest] National Institute of Mental Health Abandoning the DSM
by Vaughan Bell
In a potentially seismic move, the National Institute of Mental Health – the world’s biggest mental health research funder, has announced only two weeks before the launch of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual that it will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”.
In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.
This is something that will make very uncomfortable reading for the American Psychiatric Association as they trumpet what they claim is the ‘future of psychiatric diagnosis’ only two weeks before it hits the shelves.
As a result the NIMH will now be preferentially funding research that does not stick to DSM categories:
Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.
As an alternative approach, Insel suggests the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, which aims to uncover what it sees as the ‘component parts’ of psychological dysregulation by understanding difficulties in terms of cognitive, neural and genetic differences.
For example, difficulties with regulating the arousal system might be equally as involved in generating anxiety in PTSD as generating manic states in bipolar disorder.
Of course, this ‘component part’ approach is already a large part of mental health research but the RDoC project aims to combine this into a system that allows these to be mapped out and integrated.
It’s worth saying that this won’t be changing how psychiatrists treat their patients any time soon. DSM-style disorders will still be the order of the day, not least because a great deal of the evidence for the effectiveness of medication is based on giving people standard diagnoses.
It is also true to say that RDoC is currently little more than a plan at the moment – a bit like the Mars mission: you can see how it would be feasible but actually getting there seems a long way off. In fact, until now, the RDoC project has largely been considered to be an experimental project in thinking up alternative approaches.
The project was partly thought to be radical because it has many similarities to the approach taken by scientific critics of mainstream psychiatry who have argued for a symptom-based approach to understanding mental health difficulties that has often been rejected by the ‘diagnoses represent distinct diseases’ camp.
The NIMH has often been one of the most staunch supporters of the latter view, so the fact that it has put the RDoC front and centre is not only a slap in the face for the American Psychiatric Association and the DSM, it also heralds a massive change in how we might think of mental disorders in decades to come.
Fountain House is about the power of community. It was created to relieve the loneliness and stigma that affect so many people who are living with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Serious mental illness disrupts lives - people lose their jobs, they drop out of school, they alienate their families and friends, and they end up alone.
Visit the Fountain House Blog
[Film of Interest] “Running from Crazy”
Mariel Hemingway Tackles Family History of Suicide, Mental Illness in New Doc
The new documentary “Running from Crazy” chronicles the life of actress Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of the great novelist Ernest Hemingway. The film focuses on Mariel’s family history of mental illness and the suicides of seven relatives, including her grandfather and her sister, Margaux.
iThe film is directed by the two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple, whose documentary “Harlan County U.S.A.” has become a classic and won an Oscar in 1977.
By Elyn R. Saks, law professor at the University of Southern California and the author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”
Thirty years ago, I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My prognosis was “grave”: I would never live independently, hold a job, find a loving partner, get married. My home would be a board-and-care facility, my days spent watching TV in a day room with other people debilitated by mental illness. I would work at menial jobs when my symptoms were quiet. Following my last psychiatric hospitalization at the age of 28, I was encouraged by a doctor to work as a cashier making change. If I could handle that, I was told, we would reassess my ability to hold a more demanding position, perhaps even something full-time.
Then I made a decision. I would write the narrative of my life. Today I am a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I have an adjunct appointment in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, and am on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. The MacArthur Foundation gave me a genius grant.
Although I fought my diagnosis for many years, I came to accept that I have schizophrenia and will be in treatment the rest of my life. Indeed, excellent psychoanalytic treatment and medication have been critical to my success. What I refused to accept was my prognosis.
Conventional psychiatric thinking and its diagnostic categories say that people like me don’t exist. Either I don’t have schizophrenia (please tell that to the delusions crowding my mind), or I couldn’t have accomplished what I have (please tell that to U.S.C.’s committee on faculty affairs). But I do, and I have. And I have undertaken research with colleagues at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. to show that I am not alone. There are others with schizophrenia and such active symptoms as delusions and hallucinations who have significant academic and professional achievements.
Over the last few years, my colleagues, including Stephen Marder, Alison Hamilton and Amy Cohen, and I have gathered 20 research subjects with high-functioning schizophrenia in Los Angeles. They suffered from symptoms like mild delusions or hallucinatory behavior. Their average age was 40. Half were male, half female, and more than half were minorities. All had high school diplomas, and a majority either had or were working toward college or graduate degrees. They were graduate students, managers, technicians and professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, psychologist and chief executive of a nonprofit group.
At the same time, most were unmarried and childless, which is consistent with their diagnoses. (My colleagues and I intend to do another study on people with schizophrenia who are high-functioning in terms of their relationships. Marrying in my mid-40s — the best thing that ever happened to me — was against all odds, following almost 18 years of not dating.) More than three-quarters had been hospitalized between two and five times because of their illness, while three had never been admitted.
How had these people with schizophrenia managed to succeed in their studies and at such high-level jobs? We learned that, in addition to medication and therapy, all the participants had developed techniques to keep their schizophrenia at bay. For some, these techniques were cognitive. An educator with a master’s degree said he had learned to face his hallucinations and ask, “What’s the evidence for that? Or is it just a perception problem?” Another participant said, “I hear derogatory voices all the time. … You just gotta blow them off.”
Part of vigilance about symptoms was “identifying triggers” to “prevent a fuller blown experience of symptoms,” said a participant who works as a coordinator at a nonprofit group. For instance, if being with people in close quarters for too long can set off symptoms, build in some alone time when you travel with friends.
Other techniques that our participants cited included controlling sensory inputs. For some, this meant keeping their living space simple (bare walls, no TV, only quiet music), while for others, it meant distracting music. “I’ll listen to loud music if I don’t want to hear things,” said a participant who is a certified nurse’s assistant. Still others mentioned exercise, a healthy diet, avoiding alcohol and getting enough sleep. A belief in God and prayer also played a role for some.
One of the most frequently mentioned techniques that helped our research participants manage their symptoms was work. “Work has been an important part of who I am,” said an educator in our group. “When you become useful to an organization and feel respected in that organization, there’s a certain value in belonging there.” This person works on the weekends too because of “the distraction factor.” In other words, by engaging in work, the crazy stuff often recedes to the sidelines.
Personally, I reach out to my doctors, friends and family whenever I start slipping, and I get great support from them. I eat comfort food (for me, cereal) and listen to quiet music. I minimize all stimulation. Usually these techniques, combined with more medication and therapy, will make the symptoms pass. But the work piece — using my mind — is my best defense. It keeps me focused, it keeps the demons at bay. My mind, I have come to say, is both my worst enemy and my best friend.
That is why it is so distressing when doctors tell their patients not to expect or pursue fulfilling careers. Far too often, the conventional psychiatric approach to mental illness is to see clusters of symptoms that characterize people. Accordingly, many psychiatrists hold the view that treating symptoms with medication is treating mental illness. But this fails to take into account individuals’ strengths and capabilities, leading mental health professionals to underestimate what their patients can hope to achieve in the world.
It’s not just schizophrenia: earlier this month, The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry posted a study showing that a small group of people who were given diagnoses of autism, a developmental disorder, later stopped exhibiting symptoms. They seemed to have recovered — though after years of behavioral therapy and treatment. A recent New York Times Magazine article described a new company that hires high-functioning adults with autism, taking advantage of their unusual memory skills and attention to detail.
I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna about schizophrenia; mental illness imposes real limitations, and it’s important not to romanticize it. We can’t all be Nobel laureates like John Nash of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” But the seeds of creative thinking may sometimes be found in mental illness, and people underestimate the power of the human brain to adapt and to create.
An approach that looks for individual strengths, in addition to considering symptoms, could help dispel the pessimism surrounding mental illness. Finding “the wellness within the illness,” as one person with schizophrenia said, should be a therapeutic goal. Doctors should urge their patients to develop relationships and engage in meaningful work. They should encourage patients to find their own repertory of techniques to manage their symptoms and aim for a quality of life as they define it. And they should provide patients with the resources — therapy, medication and support — to make these things happen.
“Every person has a unique gift or unique self to bring to the world,” said one of our study’s participants. She expressed the reality that those of us who have schizophrenia and other mental illnemesses want what everyone wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, to work and to love.
The list links out to comprehensive neuroscience-focused definitions, treatment options, research endeavors, organizations, and more.
[Article of Interest] Mind-Pops More Likely With Schizophrenia
By Ia Elua, Keith R. Laws, Lia Kvavilashvili
Excerpt: Mind-pops are those little thoughts, words, images or tunes that suddenly pop into your mind at unexpected times and are totally unrelated to your current activity. These involuntary ‘mind-pops’ have become a topic of scientific study only recently even though they were described long ago by novelists such as Vladamir Nabokov.
Almost everyone reports experiencing mind-pops at some time or another, but some experience them more than others according to research conducted by the University of Hertfordshire. In the paper to be published in Psychiatry Research, findings suggest that mind-pop experiences are related to hallucinations in those people suffering from schizophrenia.
[This study] found that all 100% schizophrenia patients reported experiencing mind-pops, compared to 81% of the depressed patients and 86% of the mentally healthy individuals. In addition, schizophrenia patients experienced mind-pops significantly more frequently than depressed patients and mentally healthy people. Professor Laws added: “Mind-pops were more common both in patients who had experienced hallucinations in the past and in those who were currently experiencing hallucinations.”
[Documentary of Interest] Crazy Art
Synopsis: The documentary explores how art can be used by someone experiencing psychotic, depressive and manic symptoms to reduce and manage those symptoms. It also explores how, in the history of art, as with van Gogh, creativity can reach brilliant heights when psychiatric symptoms are peaking, and how that same creativity, when intensified, can itself increase madness..
The role of art as a form of distraction or meditation to tame the savagery of mental illness is discussed by the three featured artists. The “identity journey” — from madman to Artist— forms a focus in seeing how recovery can be constructed bit by bit.
[Article of Interest] Recent developments in borderline personality disorder
By Anthony P. Winston
Excerpt: Despite many unanswered questions, recent developments give grounds for optimism. It is now difficult to sustain the view that all borderline patients are untreatable. Psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy and empirical research are converging, and a coherent aetiological model of the disorder is beginning to emerge. The outlook for this challenging group of patients may be starting to improve.
The apparent success of brief therapies is somewhat at odds with the view held by many clinicians that borderline patients benefit from a relatively prolonged relationship with a therapist or therapeutic team. This view is consistent with the evidence for disordered attachment in BPD, which suggests that a stable therapeutic attachment may be helpful in allowing patients to develop psychologically in a more functional way.
[Article of Interest] Schizophrenia: When Hallucinatory Voices Suppress Real Ones, New Electronic Application May Help
By Elin Fugelsnes/Else Lie; translation by Glenn Wells/Carol B. Eckmann.
Excerpt from the article: “Every one of us hears inner voices or melodies from time to time. The difference between non-afflicted individuals and schizophrenia patients is that the former manage to tune these out better,” the professor points out.
If patients could learn to stifle inner noise it could have a huge impact on our ability to treat schizophrenia, he states. To this end, Professor Hugdahl’s research group has developed an application that can be used on mobile phones and other simple electronic devices, to help patients improve their filters.
Wearing headphones, the patient is exposed to simple speech sounds with different sounds played in each ear. The task is to practice hearing the sound in one ear while blocking out sound in the other. The application has only been tested on two patients with schizophrenia so far. The response from these patients is promising, Dr Hugdahl relates.
“The voices are still there, but the test subjects feel that they have control over the voices instead of the other way around. The patient feels it is a breakthrough since it means he can actively shift his focus from the inner voices over to the sounds coming from the outside,” the professor explains.
[Article of Interest] Psychiatry Manual Drafters Back Down on Diagnoses
By Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Excerpt: The [doctors on a panel revising psychiatry’s diagnostic manual] dropped two diagnoses that they ultimately concluded were not supported by the evidence: “attenuated psychosis syndrome,” proposed to identify people at risk of developing psychosis, and “mixed anxiety depressive disorder,” a hybrid of the two mood problems. They also tweaked their proposed definition of depression to allay fears that the normal sadness people experience after the loss of a loved one, a job or a marriage would not be mistaken for a mental disorder.
“At long last, DSM 5 is correcting itself and has rejected its worst proposals,” said Dr. Allen Frances, a former task force chairman and professor emeritus at Duke University who has been one of the most prominent critics. “But a great deal more certainly needs to be accomplished. Most important are the elimination of other dangerous new diagnoses and the rewriting of all the many unreliable criteria sets.”
[Article of Interest] Death with Honors: Suicide among Gifted Adolescents
By James R. Delisle, Ph.D.
Department of Teacher Development and Curriculum Studies, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.
Abstract: The incidence of suicide and suicide attempts among adolescents has increased markedly during the past two decades. Gifted adolescents, often perceived by others as being immune from problems of depression and emotional upheaval because of their high intelligence, have also shown increases in suicidal behaviors. On the basis of current research, the author contends that gifted young people are especially susceptible to suicide attempts.
Being an ex-drug-addict turned neuroscientist brings a unique insight into the physiological and phenomenological realities of addiction.
Excerpt: For 10 years I spun in and out of an addiction to opiates (and other drugs) that led to despair, crime, and the loss of everything I valued most—including my place in graduate school. After many failed attempts, I finally quit taking addictive drugs 30 years ago. I reentered grad school, got my PhD in developmental psychology, and became a professor at the University of Toronto, focusing on emotional and personality development. I studied these topics for 13 years, but I never quite understood my own personality development. I came to believe that my theories needed help from neuroscience, and that’s why I switched to research on the emotional brain—my focus for the past decade.
When I was in the throes of intense psychological addiction, my thoughts were continuously (and unpleasantly) drawn to drug imagery. It would be so great to have some now! How can I get some tonight?! But attraction to something you are just about to get feels marvelous. Dopamine-induced engagement turns into a headlong rush of triumph when the goal is finally accessible.
This perspective on the dual nature of attraction helps make sense of addiction. Unsated attraction can be a kind of torture, and addicts may seek drugs to put an end to that torture, more than for the modicum of pleasure drugs actually bestow.
Excerpt: Creativity of some artists is fuelled by the unique world view mental illness can provide, but without the completely debilitating aspects of the condition. Instead, the artists are able to direct their creativity into artistic projects.
ABSTRACT: The changing role of the family and how the family unit may help or harm a disturbed and/or disturbing member is examined. The authors use their personal experiences as mental health professionals, user/survivors and family members to inform their critique. A brief history of family involvement – how the family has been perceived and worked with by mental health professionals – is followed by a description of present day practices. The paper concludes with speculation about alternatives in which quality of life for all of the family members may be more possible. | <urn:uuid:f274aa30-bec0-4c81-9cf0-7d6753222449> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seriousmentalillness.net/tagged/dsm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95747 | 4,962 | 1.578125 | 2 |
And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, "Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’" 32 So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. 33 And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, "Why are you untying the colt?" 34 And they said, "The Lord has need of it." 35 And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. 37 As he was drawing near – already on the way down the Mount of Olives – the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, 38 saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" 39 And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples." 40 He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." 41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."
Before we get back to Romans 9 the Sunday after Easter, I wanted to preach a message that is partly an overflow of one of the books I worked on during the writing leave. (It will probably be called Don’t Waste Your Life.) Actually, this message is the overflow of more than the book.
- It’s the overflow of conversations with John Erickson about his vision for ministry in the city.
- It’s the overflow of conversations with my son Benjamin about what it means to be a merciful person on the street.
- It’s the overflow of reading Timothy Keller’s book, Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road.
- It’s the overflow of the seminar I did on Prayer,
Meditation, and Fasting a few weeks ago, as I pondered what it
really means to enjoy fellowship with Jesus and anticipate meeting
him face to face very shortly and giving an account of the way I
have thought, for example, about giving to people who ask for
money. I remember, specifically, in one of those hours asking the
class: Suppose you die and you’re standing before Jesus
Christ, who surrendered his body to spitting and shame and torture
and death so that undeserving sinners (like you and me) might be
drawn into eternal joy, and he inquires how you handled the people
who asked you for money – you know, panhandlers, beggars,
street people, drunks, drifters. What would you say?
I suggested to them, and I suggest to you now, you’re not going to feel very good about saying, "I never got taken advantage of. I saw through their schemes. I developed really shrewd counter-questions that would expose them. So I hardly ever had to give anything." Do you know what I think the Lord Jesus is going to say to that – the Lord Jesus, the consummately, willingly, savingly abused and exploited Jesus? I think he is going to say, "That was an exquisite imitation of the world. Even sinners give to those who deserve to be given to. Even sinners pride themselves on not being taken advantage of." Well this message is a spillover of some of those thoughts.
- And it’s a spillover of a conversation that Noël and I had at Annie’s Parlor a little over a week ago as we assessed our lives how we wanted the next ten years to look – if God gives us ten – in regard to practical deeds mercy. What do we want Talitha to see in the city? What kind of Jesus do we want her to see living through us in Philips neighborhood on 11th Avenue? Do we want her to remember someday when we are gone: my folks were shrewd? Or do we want her to remember: My folks were merciful?
Palm Sunday: An Event of Insight and Misunderstanding
Well, that’s what led me to choose this text for Palm Sunday. It’s a Palm Sunday text. Palm Sunday is the day in the church year when traditionally we mark the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem for the last week of his life. It’s an event of great insight and great misunderstanding. The great insight was that this Jesus really is "the King who comes in the name of the Lord" (Luke 19:38). He was the Messiah, the Son of David, the long-awaited Ruler of Israel, the fulfillment of all God’s promises. But the great misunderstanding was that he would enter Jerusalem and by his mighty works, take his throne and make Israel free from Rome.
It wasn’t going to be that way: he would take his throne but it would be through voluntary suffering and death and resurrection. The first sermon Peter preached after the resurrection comes to an end with the words, "This Jesus God raised up" so that he was "exalted at the right hand of God" (Acts 2:32-33). And the apostle Paul says that he is now King: "He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet" (1 Corinthians 15:25; see Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 3:1).
So Palm Sunday was a day of insight and a day of misunderstanding. The insight gave joy, and the misunderstanding brought about destruction – the murder of Jesus a few days later, and the destruction of Jerusalem 40 years later. And Jesus saw it all coming.
And what I want to focus on this morning is Jesus’ response to this blindness and hostility that he was about to meet in Jerusalem. Indeed, he met it already in this very text. The crowds were crying out in verse 38, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!" But in the very next verse it says, "Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples’" (Luke 19:39).
So Jesus knew what was about to happen. The Pharisees were going to get the upper hand. The people would be fickle and follow their leaders. And Jesus would be rejected and crucified. And within a generation the city would be obliterated. Look how Jesus says it in verses 43-44:
For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.
God had visited them in his Son, Jesus Christ – "he came to his own, and his own received him not" (John 1:11). They did not know the time of their visitation. So they stumbled over the stumbling stone. The builders rejected the stone and threw it away. Jesus saw this sin and this rebellion and this blindness coming. How did he respond? Verse 41-42: "And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.’" Jesus wept over the blindness and the impending misery of Jerusalem.
How would you describe these tears? You can see from the title of this message that I call them, "Palm Sunday Tears of Sovereign Mercy." The effect that I pray this will have on us is, first, to make us admire Christ, and treasure him above all others and worship him as our merciful Sovereign; and, second, that seeing the beauty of his mercy, we become merciful with him and like him and because of him and for his glory.
Admiring Christ’s Merciful Sovereignty and Sovereign Mercy
First, then let’s admire Christ together. What makes Christ so admirable, and so different than all other persons – what sets him apart as unique and inimitable – matchless, peerless – is that he unites in himself so many qualities that in other people are contrary to each other. That’s why I put together the words "sovereign" and "merciful." We can imagine supreme sovereignty, and we can imagine tenderhearted mercy. But who do we look to combine in perfect proportion merciful sovereignty and sovereign mercy? We look to Jesus. No other religious or political contender even comes close.
Look at three pointers in this text to his sovereignty. First, verse 37: "As he was drawing near – already on the way down the Mount of Olives – the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen." Jesus had made a name for himself as the worker of miracles, and they remembered them. He had healed leprosy with a touch; he had made the blind see and the deaf hear and the lame walk; he had commanded the unclean spirits and they obeyed him; he had stilled storms and walked on water and turned five loaves and two fish into a meal for thousands. So as he entered Jerusalem, they knew nothing could stop him. He could just speak and Pilate would perish; the Romans would be scattered. He was sovereign.
Then look, secondly, at verse 38. The crowds cried out: "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" Jesus was a King, and not just any king, but the one sent and appointed by the Lord God. They knew how Isaiah had described him:
Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this." (Isaiah 9:7)
A universal, never-ending kingdom backed by the zeal of almighty God. Here was the King of the universe, who today rules over the nations and the galaxies, and for whom America and Iraq are a grain of sand and a vapor.
Third, verse 40. When the Pharisees tell him to make the people stop blessing him as a king, he answers, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out (Luke 19:40). Why? Because he will be praised! The whole design of the universe is that Christ be praised. And therefore, if people won’t do it, he will see to it that rocks do it. In other words, he is sovereign. He will get what he means to get. If we refuse to praise, the rocks will get the joy.
It is remarkable, therefore, that the tears of Jesus in verse 41 are so often used to deny his sovereignty. Someone will say, "Look, he weeps over Jerusalem because his design for them, his will for them, is not coming to pass. He would delight in their salvation. But they are resistant. They are going to reject him. They are going to hand him over to be crucified." And so his purpose for them has failed. But there is something not quite right about this objection to Jesus’ sovereignty.
He can make praise come from rocks. And so he could do the same from rock-hard hearts in Jerusalem. What’s more, all this rejection and persecution and killing of Jesus is not the failure of Jesus’ plan, but the fulfillment of it. Listen to what he said in Luke 18:31-33 a short time before:
And taking the twelve, he said to them, "See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written [planned!] about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. 32 For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. 33 And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise."
The betrayal, the mockery, the shame, the spit, the flogging, the murder – and so much more – was planned. In other words, the resistance, the rejection, the unbelief and hostility were not a surprise to Jesus. They were, in fact, part of the plan. He says so. This is probably why it says at the end of verse 42, "But now they are hidden from your eyes." Remember what Jesus said about his parables back in Luke 8:10: "To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’" God was handing them over to hardness. It was judgment.
We have seen all this in Romans 9. The mercy of God is a sovereign mercy. "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion" (Romans 9:15). But here is the point I want you to see today: This sovereign Christ weeps over heard-hearted, perishing Jerusalem as they fulfilled his plan. It is unbiblical and wrong to make the tears of mercy a contradiction to the serenity of sovereignty. Jesus was serene in sorrow, and sorrowful in sovereignty. Jesus’ tears are the tears of sovereign mercy.
And therefore his sovereign power is the more admirable and the more beautiful. It’s the harmony of things that seem in tension that makes him glorious: "Merciful and Mighty," as we sing. We admire power more when it is merciful power. And we admire mercy more when it is mighty mercy. And, as I said, my prayer is that as you see his mercy and admire his mercy, you will become like him in his mercy.
There are at least three ways that Jesus is merciful, which we can draw out of this context. And I pray that I will become like him in all of these. I pray that you will too.
Jesus’ Mercy Is Tenderly Moved
First, Jesus’ mercy is tenderly moved. He feels the sorrow of the situation. This doesn’t mean his sovereign plan has wrecked on the rocks of human autonomy. It means that Jesus is more emotionally complex than we think he is. He really feels the sorrow of a situation. No doubt there is a deep inner peace that God is in control and that God’s wise purposes will come to pass. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cry.
In fact, on the contrary, I appeal to you here: pray that God would give you tears. There is so much pain in the world. So much suffering far from you and near you. Pray that God would help you be tenderly moved. When you die and stand before the Judge, Jesus Christ, and he asks you, "How did you feel about the suffering around you?" what will you say? I promise you, you will not feel good about saying, "I saw through to how a lot of people brought their suffering upon themselves by sin or foolishness." You know what I think the Lord will say to that? I think he will say, "I didn’t ask you what you saw through. I asked you what you felt?" Jesus felt enough compassion for Jerusalem to weep. If you haven’t shed any tears for somebody’s losses but your own, it probably means you’re pretty wrapped up in yourself. So let’s repent of our hardness and ask God to give us a heart that is tenderly moved.
Jesus’ Mercy Was Self-Denying
Second, Jesus’ mercy was self-denying – not ultimately; there was great reward in the long run, but very painfully in the short run. This text is part of the story of Jesus’ moving intentionally toward suffering and death. Jesus is entering Jerusalem to die. He said so, "We are going up to Jerusalem . . . and the Son of Man will be delivered up . . . and they will kill him" (Luke 18:31-33). This is the meaning of self-denial. This is the way we follow Jesus. We see a need – for Jesus is was seeing the sin of the world, and broken bodies, and the misery of hell – and we move with Jesus, whatever it costs, toward need. We deny ourselves the comforts and the securities and the ease of avoiding other peoples’ pain. We embrace it. Jesus’ tears were not just the tender moving of his emotions. They were the tears of a man on his way toward need.
Jesus’ Mercy Intends to Help
That leads us to the third and last way Jesus is merciful. First, he is tenderly moved, second he is self-denying and moves toward need. Now third, he intends to help. Mercy if helpful. It doesn’t just feel – though it does feel – and it doesn’t just deny itself – though it does deny itself – it actually does things that help people. Jesus was dying in our place that we might be forgiven and have eternal life with him. That’s how he helped.
What will it be for you? How are you doing in ministries of mercy? How are you and your roommate, or your housemates, doing together? How is your family doing? (That’s what Noël and I asked at Annie’s Parlor.) What is tenderly moving you these days? Is there movement toward pain or suffering or misery or loss or sadness, that means denying yourself – in the short run – and multiplying your joy in the long run? And what help are you actually giving to those in need?
Two prayers: Oh, that we would see and savor the beauty of Christ – the Palm Sunday Tears of sovereign joy. And oh, that as we admire and worship him, we would be changed by what we see and become a more tenderly-moved, self-denying, need-meeting people. | <urn:uuid:3b953dca-d3ae-4475-be6f-b203b64e3f05> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/palm-sunday-tears-of-sovereign-mercy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979706 | 4,034 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The Firemen’s Association of the State of New York (FASNY) provides information, education and training for the volunteer fire and emergency medical services throughout New York State. Since 1872, we’ve proudly supported, informed, educated and trained tens of thousands of volunteer fire and EMS departments.
The FASNY Fund is a program established by FASNY to receive and manage annual gifts needed to offset expenses and support programs that state support and membership alone can’t cover. The FASNY Fund was created to support FASNY in their efforts to provide information, education and training for the volunteer fire service throughout the state. The FASNY Fund represents the areas of greatest need. These include legislative support, training and education, fire prevention and life safety and youth programs, among other important initiatives.
To be a volunteer firefighter, it takes a brave, selfless individual willing to face life-threatening emergencies and put their own life on the line to help another human being. FASNY is committed to providing New York State’s volunteer fire departments and EMS companies with everything they need to aid their personnel and promote awareness about the vital role they play in the safety of our communities. Please help us fulfill our mission: Pledge your support today. | <urn:uuid:7857b3cb-12f8-434c-8618-8cfb02be4068> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fasny.com/index.php/support/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956981 | 259 | 1.625 | 2 |
Sometimes a really big link is required to make cycling convenient. This huge cycle bridge in Nijmegen is one of them, complete with escalators to help cyclists take a short cut.
Note the width of the bridge. It is wide enough to prevent conflict between cyclists travelling in opposite directions.
The bridge is known as the "snelbinder". This is a play on words. The elastic bungie straps that many Dutch people have to attach luggage to their bicycles racks are also called snelbinders, and the word suggests that it is something that provides a quick link. The main span is 235 metres long and the bridge reaches 26 metres in height.
There is a wikimedia photo on the left showing the escalator for bicycles. Click for a larger version. There are also some more photos of the bridge here.
Nijmegen is considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. The city has an urban population of 280000 people.
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A cyclist in a cycling family living in the capital of the cycling province of the world's greatest cycling country.
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I organise cycling infrastructure study tours, run an online bicycle shop, arrange cycling holidays and write a popular blog about cycling.
My email address is email@example.com | <urn:uuid:286d836f-f362-4953-8642-3af894412aa4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2009/11/nijmegens-big-bridge-for-cyclists.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955328 | 471 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Women can be more promiscuous than menMay 19th, 2012 - 11:35 am ICT by IANS
London, May 19 (IANS) A new study has suggested that when it comes to being sexually unfaithful while being away from home, women tend to rack up more lovers than men.
The UK Adultery Survey 2012 found that once women decide to play away, they are far more likely to play the field in search of love.
Research into the behaviour of 4,000 people suggested that women are more promiscuous, having an average of 2.3 secret lovers compared to a mere 1.8 for men, the Daily Mail reported.
While explaining their reasons to cheat, the men say the pursuit of sexual excitement, boredom with their marriages and the need of an ego boost are the main causes. Women say their reasons could be anything from looking for emotional fulfillment, an improvement to their self esteem to romance.
Women adulterers are also far more prone to falling in love with their illicit lovers than their male equivalents.
According to Emily Pope of Undercover Lovers, a dating site for married people seeking affairs with some 600,000 members, the survey’s results challenged the general assumption that men are more adulterous than women.
“Once they have made the huge decision to have an affair, women have far more opportunity to actually find someone to cheat with and are generally in control of deciding if and when to consummate the relationship once they do,” she said.
The survey also found that women are likely to be the first to get itchy feet in a marriage.
- British wives drawn to cheat hubbies - Jun 21, 2011
- Your voice can tell if you are likely to stray - Mar 06, 2011
- High esteem prompts powerful women to stray - Apr 28, 2011
- Want to know if your mate will cheat? Listen to their voice - Mar 05, 2011
- 77pc of divorced man don't regret cheating: Study - Nov 21, 2010
- Men 'more likely to continue dating girlfriends who cheat with women' - Jan 28, 2011
- Men don't mind girlfriends sleeping with other women - Jan 28, 2011
- Only 15pc of Brit women who cheat get caught by partners - Dec 02, 2010
- The 70 ways that boredom can kill a marriage - Apr 25, 2011
- 'Country folk in UK likelier to cheat on partners than city counterparts' - Mar 28, 2011
- Adultery sites reveal secrets of human nature - Oct 31, 2010
- Women more likely to cheat than men, reveals survey - Dec 31, 2010
- Cheating is the norm, not exception, in men - Jan 09, 2012
- Britain turns into a country of snackers - Oct 10, 2010
- Powerful people 'likelier to cheat', irrespective of gender! - Apr 28, 2011
Tags: adulterers, adultery, assumption, boredom, daily mail, dating site, ego, emotional fulfillment, equivalents, home women, illicit lovers, itchy feet, marriage, pope, promiscuous, romance, secret lovers, self esteem, sexual excitement, survey also found that | <urn:uuid:2b7229bc-6ba1-4097-88af-bc117a0b7e92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/women-can-be-more-promiscuous-than-men_100618956.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943346 | 653 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Title III Programs
Serving Tennessee State University
Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965 is a federally funded program designed to support the infrastructure of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and other institutions serving a high percentage of needy students. Tennessee State University receives over $4 million annually to strengthen various academic programs, administrative operations, and student services. In addition, it receives over $2 million to support graduate programs.
The university is funded by the U.S. Department of Education in five-year cycles. Annual funding is based on a Phase I Report indicating the number of graduates, the number of Pell grant recipients, and the number of students attending graduate or professional school, plus a Phase II Performance Report.
Title III Progress Reports and Due Dates | <urn:uuid:1770e997-0cc3-46a5-ad21-bce387bf9d5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tnstate.edu/titleiii/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937661 | 155 | 1.773438 | 2 |
For those of you unaware of the news, Wesabe, an online personal finance information manager that I quite liked because of their strict security methods, is shutting down on July 31 – at least in terms of their personal finance management tools, as their discussion forums will remain open.
In the past, I’ve recommended Wesabe as an alternative to Mint for those (like me) who are very concerned about privacy issues and are hesitant to share their account information and personal data with yet another resource.
So, what alternatives are there to Wesabe? In building this list of personal finance data aggregation tools, I’ve kept three principles in mind.
First, the tool does not require any personal information from you whatsoever. I’m only interested in tools that maintain strict privacy.
Second, the tool makes it possible to see all of your personal finance information in one place. This is really the point of this exercise, after all.
Third, the tool is well-supported enough that you can find assistance for your problems online. In other words, if you’re trying to do something with the program and run into trouble, you can seek help fairly easily.
Here are the five best tools I’ve found that do this.
Microsoft Excel is what I use to manage my personal finance data. It’s simply an incredibly powerful spreadsheet program, capable of generating all kinds of views of my data and whatever charts and graphs I can invent. It makes importing the data pretty easy via copying and pasting or importing CSV files.
There are two big drawbacks to Excel, though. One, to really get the best parts of the software, you have to climb a fairly steep learning curve. Two, it’s costly. There’s no way around it – Excel is expensive. However, there is a ton of support for Excel online – virtually any question you come up with has an answer that can easily be found. Find out more about Excel at http://www.microsoft.com/office/excel.
Quicken‘s inclusion here might surprise people, since it’s usually known for automatic retrieval of account data. However, if you choose to manually enter the data yourself – or import it from downloaded CSV files from your financial institutions – Quicken can operate quite well without having any of your account information.
Quicken is easily the most full-featured option when considering just personal finance data, but it’s also costly, as retail versions of Quicken sell for a variety of prices depending on your exact needs. You can find out more at http://www.quicken.com/.
OpenOffice is very similar to Excel in many ways – it’s a full featured spreadsheet program. Even better, it’s absolutely free, as it’s open source software. Of course, that’s not to say it’s an absolutely perfect alternative to Excel, either. There are some bugs in the software that crop up just often enough to drive me crazy and the interface isn’t as slick.
However, it’s free. This takes away one of the big drawbacks of Excel – the price – and replaces it with a number of smaller ones – a less intuitive interface and some software bugs. I used this for a long time, but eventually migrated back to Excel when bugs frustrated me one time too many. However, one can’t argue with the price and recent reviews have indicated that it’s more stable than in the past. You can find out more at http://www.openoffice.org/.
PearBudget captures many of the features of Quicken in an online service that doesn’t grab your account information, either. In fact, if there’s a successor to the functionality of Wesabe, it’s probably PearBudget.
It’s important to remember, though, that PearBudget pretty much does what it says. It helps you create a budget and track your spending within that budget. It does not help you track investments or income growth. However, if budget management is what you need, PearBudget is probably the best tool for you. You can use the paid online version at http://www.pearbudget.com or try out a free spreadsheet version at http://www.pearbudget.com/spreadsheet.
An old fashioned ledger seems archaic, but it works. I have a lot of readers that simply use a printed ledger to record every dollar coming in and every dollar going out of their home.
A paper ledger is really straightforward to use – just write in the expense or source of income, the amount of that expense or income, and carry forward your new balance. It simply works and it maintains as much privacy as you wish. Frugal Dad has a great article on starting a paper household ledger – it really does work.
What solutions do you use for keeping track of your finances without sharing your account information? (Yes, yes, I know there are a lot of great tools that require account data, but that’s not the focus today.) | <urn:uuid:c5e80749-d262-4055-81bd-b8390ef90735> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/07/01/wesabe-shuts-down-what-are-the-alternatives/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946067 | 1,056 | 1.507813 | 2 |
As if you needed another reason to think twice about your Twitter output, the president of Crime Stoppers International says Canadian cops are tops when it comes to using social media as a crime-fighting tool.
Michael Gordon-Gibson, a 30-year veteran of London's Scotland Yard, had high praise for the country's law enforcement operatives, and singled out Toronto police constable Scott Mills, known informally as the "Lord Voldemort" of social media, for special praise.
"He's passionate about what he does and he makes a difference," Gordon-Gibson said of Mills, who was recently appointed as CSI's new social media advisor, a volunteer position created to network 1,300 Crime Stoppers organizations worldwide.
The three-day conference focused on the growing use of social media outlets — like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — to combat gang violence.
"I think it's fair to say that Canada enjoys a reputation for being enlightened thinkers around the world," he told the crowd, adding that his counterparts at the Canadian branch of Crime Stoppers have used social networking in "very advanced and very effective" ways.
Mills has become somewhat of a pioneer in law enforcement for his fluid ability to incorporate social media into solving crimes.
As one of the Toronto police force's first social media officers, Mills uses Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to appeal for witnesses and track down perpetrators.
He also trains officers on how to use social media strategies to "build bridges through technology" between the police and the greater communities they serve.
Though there are still a number of undefined parameters on how to navigate evolving privacy issues, Gibson-Gordon said he believes social media is crucial when it comes to building relationships with youth.
He pointed out a recent study that said teens are less inclined to feel like they're "snitching" when they pass on a tip using their keyboard.
Recent instances of people identifying rioters in Toronto and Vancouver through video and photos are but one example of this trend.
Mills said he believes social media can be used to thwart everything from schoolyard bullying to terrorist attacks, and hopes his counterparts continue to get on board in using it to fight crime.
"Social media in law enforcement was unheard of even two years ago," he said. "But the more tools we have to reach out and communicate with ourselves and the public, the safer our community will be." | <urn:uuid:31aaf142-5590-4cd3-9199-61cbb42c9b33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/canadian-police-lead-way-fighting-crime-social-media-223254963.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965352 | 489 | 1.8125 | 2 |
On My Birthday, July 21
I, MY dear, was born to-day--
So all my jolly comrades say:
They bring me music, wreaths, and mirth,
And ask to celebrate my birth:
Little, alas! my comrades know
That I was born to pain and woe;
To thy denial, to thy scorn,
Better I had ne'er been born:
I wish to die, even whilst I say--
'I, my dear, was born to-day.'
I, my dear, was born to-day:
Shall I salute the rising ray,
Well-spring of all my joy and woe?
Clotilda, thou alone dost know.
Shall the wreath surround my hair?
Or shall the music please my ear?
Shall I my comrades' mirth receive,
And bless my birth, and wish to live?
Then let me see great Venus chase
Imperious anger from thy face;
Then let me hear thee smiling say--
'Thou, my dear, wert born to-day.' | <urn:uuid:ba6d310d-46f4-4e09-b726-96a1f4c73a4c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/14902/On_My_Birthday_July_21 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957039 | 237 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The force behind one-time music industry nemesis Napster has changed his tune by becoming a guardian of copyrighted songs.
Napster founder Shawn Fanning helped to create SNOCAP, a San Francisco company that uses digital "fingerprinting" of music and an extensive directory of songs to thwart online sales or swapping of copyrighted works.
Globally popular social networking website MySpace recently teamed with SNOCAP to enable musician members to sell their songs on MySpace pages.
Shortly after the announcement, Canadian alternate-rock band Barenaked Ladies made its new "Barenaked Ladies Are Me" CD available for digital download on MySpace for 89 cents a song.
"The landscape has changed for the two biggest constituents of the music industry, the fans and the artists," SNOCAP chief executive Rusty Rueff told AFP.
"What Napster did was bring us into the digital music age. Napster opened the funnel and gave us the chance to touch the music universe. Not in a legitimate way that it should have."
Fanning started Napster in 1999 as a renegade "peer-to-peer" file swapping service that had as many as 70 million members gorging on free online music downloads before the courts pulled the plug in 2001 for copyright violations.
Napster's name was bought and the service reincarnated as a financially-struggling shadow of its phenomenally popular former self, complete with ads and digital music for sale.
Fanning joined with Jordan Mendelson and Ron Conway to establish SNOCAP in 2003.
"When Shawn created Napster, he didn't create it to show the world you could rip off music," Rueff said. "He did it to show off a particular piece of technology."
"It was like plugging in the electricity for the first time and seeing where the electricity came from. When that didn't fit in the copyright laws, Shawn was smart enough to go upstream a bit and work with copyrights holders."
SNOCAP technology matches online music with the owner of its copyright and checks to make sure someone selling it owns it, Rueff said.
The social networking rage led by websites such as MySpace and FaceBook have transformed the peer-to-peer sharing template cut by Napster, Rueff maintained.
"Shawn was clearly one of the guys who kicked the bee hive around how to use peer-to-peer technology," said Rueff. "Others have built it into what social networking is today."
"Our evolution, ironic in some way, is to convert the illegal system and apply it to the new peer-to-peer business model which is social networking."
MySpace lets musicians interact online with fans, get quick feedback for new music, promote live shows, and sell songs.
"We are in a very unique time," Rueff said. "You have not only the chance to discover all this music, but to connect with the artists themselves."
The "next iteration" would likely be deepening the connection between people and content creators, said Rueff.
It was also feasible to sell music in increasingly popular virtual worlds where people live fantasy lives through animated characters referred to as "avatars," according to SNOCAP.
MySpace music download formatting permits sharing by customers, resulting in an honor system that relies on people to respect artists enough not to give music to the masses via old-time Napster-style peer-to-peer networks.
"We are not policemen," Rueff said.
"I think when you buy something from the creator; it is a different purchase obligation from when Wal-Mart sold it to me. I think people care more." | <urn:uuid:c10b8534-9b73-4e24-84f5-7e6d381ab679> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=18168 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970227 | 751 | 1.765625 | 2 |
2012-04-19 / Front Page
Parents of Holman students wait for decision on busing
JACKSON — At a recent meeting of the Jackson School District Board of Education, residents of the 60 Acres development addressed their concerns about the potential loss of bus service for their children to the board and district administrators.
Students from the 60 Acres development attend the Holman School.
According to a district spokeswoman, courtesy busing for children who live in 60 Acres is included in Jackson’s 2012-13 school budget. Courtesy busing is a service the school district is not required to provide to children who live near the school they attend. The board extends the service as a courtesy.
However, in an attempt to be as efficient as possible with its budget, administrators could decide before the start of the 2012-13 school year to eliminate bus service in 60 Acres, according to the spokeswoman.
Parents expressed concern for the safety of their children if the youngsters are required to walk to school.
“We, the residents and board of 60 Acres, are against the elimination of all bus routes to and from the Holman School,” 60 Acres President Robert Skinner told the board. “[The idea] could result in dangers to our children and, ultimately, costly and unneeded lawsuits.”
Skinner said road congestion and other unintended side effects associated with the elimination of busing would have a negative impact on the 60 Acres neighborhood.
Parents objected to the possibility that students would have to walk along a wooded path between their homes in 60 Acres and the Holman School. Some parents said keeping an eye on their children as the youngsters entered the woods would be difficult.
Jackson Superintendent of Schools Thomas Gialanella said no decision regarding the elimination of busing for the children who live in 60Acres will be made until safety concerns about new crosswalks, crossing guard posts and the wooded path are seriously discussed.
Gialanella said a decision regarding courtesy busing for the children who live in 60 Acres could come as early as May. He said parents will know what administrators are planning for the 2012-13 school year before the 2011-12 school year ends.
The issue of busing in 60 Acres initially came up during a school budget discussion in February when the district’s transportation administrator said bus routes in 60 Acres could be eliminated to save money beginning in the 2012-13 school year.
The Holman School serves students in kindergarten through fifth grade.
At the start of the 2011-12 school year, 48 pupils from Jackson’s Flair development lost their courtesy busing to the Holman School. Prior to requiring those 48 students to walk to school, about 400 children were walking to Jackson’s Rosenauer and Johnson elementary schools every day.
Letters to the editor may be sent by email to email@example.com. Letters should be limited to 250 words. | <urn:uuid:c7e258f9-b301-4b35-84c2-fab2e4a48f3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tri.gmnews.com/news/2012-04-19/Front_Page/Parents_of_Holman_students_wait_for_decision_on_bu.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969615 | 613 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Bertha LauryAssociate Dean
School of Social Work
Years at UB: 1972-1996
Bertha Skinner Laury served at UB from 1972 to 1996, and continues to work in the Buffalo community as a mentor and community activist.
Laury earned her undergraduate degree from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia and a master's degree in Social Work from Atlanta University. In 1966, Laury pioneered an infant day care center for Buffalo-area unwed mothers. In 1972, she joined UB as a Clinical Associate Professor and the Director of Field Education, placing hundreds of students in Social Work internships. In 1993, she was appointed to the position of Associate Dean of Community Relations.
Her research and community interests include mental retardation, developmental disabilities, and adolescent pregnancy. Laury worked to develop a successful service to decrease teen pregnancy in Buffalo and Erie County, and served on the Governor's Task Force on Adolescent Pregnancy.
Among her honors and awards, Laury won the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Western New York YWCA and in 1994 was honored by the Women Helping Women/Erie County National Organization of Women for her work in the prevention of teenage pregnancy. In addition, the Buffalo News bestowed upon her the Black Professional of the Year Award. In 2004, the Bertha Laury Dental Center on Main Street in Buffalo was dedicated to serve the local community's basic dental care needs. Laury was the first African American woman to serve as president of the Health Care Plan Board of Directors, and the first chair of the Community Health Foundation in Western New York. She also served on the Board of Directors of Univera Healthcare. | <urn:uuid:996de4d5-4c51-4833-8983-5cef9fd46746> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://library.buffalo.edu/archives/womens_work/bios/laury.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955994 | 339 | 1.71875 | 2 |
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News and Media Releases
Refinery Gets Lean to Remain a Viable Martinez Employer
Mike Taylor, analyzer team leader and a Lean improvement agent
Everybody can help and take ownership. That’s how we’re going to be efficient and get to where we want to get.
Typically Lean encourages the use of fewer resources like water, electricity and chemicals. At the Martinez refinery, the focus is on stripping out wasteful activities and unproductive tasks that take more time than required.
Bonnie Roelofs, organizational effectiveness advisor, developed the refinery’s culture change plan.
She and Joe Hornsby, production specialist, are co-leading a team of “Lean improvement agents” who have been trained in Lean tools. About 200 refinery personnel have been involved in 20 improvement projects that were initially on the roster.
“Our senior leaders are aligned behind the culture change plan,” Roelofs said. “The Lean improvement agents and practitioners are using their new knowledge and skills to start making a difference. As a result, there have been ideas for continuous improvement and for taking waste out of our system, which help to ensure that we remain a viable employer. There are many government and company pressures on the refinery to perform at a high level, and continuous improvement helps to ensure that we will be a long-term player.”
Notable improvements have been made at the sulfur plant, where liquid sulfur is manufactured and later sold for use in fertilizers and household and industrial products. Over time, sulfur plant employees had become accustomed to using too much nitrogen in the unit to prevent pipes from plugging and pressure and temperature instruments from corroding.
“We would overshoot the amount, which was the right thing to do,” said process engineer and Lean improvement agent Steve Bonner. “But long-term, we shouldn’t do that because the extra nitrogen costs more and takes up capacity in the processing unit.”
Bonner, along with the unit operators and maintenance personnel, collaborated on a plan. They consulted with their colleagues at Shell Global Solutions to determine the exact nitrogen amounts to put into the pipes. They also repaired the broken instruments to ensure accurate readings. The improvements reduced nitrogen usage in the sulfur plant and will save more than $750,000 annually.
Another team suggested that the hard copy of the refinery’s business planning document, called the “Journey Book,” be posted on the Intranet to make it easier to find.
“We also save money and environmental waste by not recycling all of that paper,” said Mike Taylor, analyzer team leader and a Lean improvement agent.
Noting that contractors had to drive around the site to sign logs to verify their work time, a team recommended that the sign-in/sign-out books be moved to key locations. That improvement will cut out $250,000 worth of wasted time a year.
“It’s not a big financial hitter,” Taylor said, “but the move made life easier for everybody. People aren’t as frustrated.”
Stamping out wasted time — and the frustrations that accompany certain tasks — also foster safer practices, greater efficiency and higher morale.
“Everybody can help and take ownership,” Taylor said. “That’s how we’re going to be efficient and get to where we want to get. As the refinery gets more effective in eliminating waste, people will be more focused on the job, not on the frustrations. They’re less likely to make a mistake and more likely to go home safe. Production and safety go hand in hand.”
Working with a Lean mindset also can bring greater job satisfaction.
“When this kind of culture change happens, employees enjoy their work more. They feel better about coming to work because they believe that their ideas are making a difference in the site’s performance,” Roelofs said.
Shell Martinez Refinery re-launched its Lean journey in April 2010 after four leaders visited Shell’s Pernis facility in the Netherlands to see successful Lean practices in action. After returning, the leaders selected 21 Lean improvement agents and practitioners from a cross-section of refinery functions. These employees took a three-day boot camp conducted by a Lean expert from Shell’s headquarters in the Netherlands. After the boot camp, the agents and practitioners put their tools to work.
“We’re learning the importance of going into the refinery, where the operational and maintenance work is being done, asking questions, helping people to challenge their own thinking about how work should get done and caring about each other’s success,” Roelofs said. “The role of the leader is shifting from one who is a problem solver to more of a teacher/coach. We’re leaving the projects up to employees. We want the person who has the idea to implement the solution.”
Vendors and contractors doing business with the refinery are also integral in the journey, according to Roelofs. The refinery’s chemical vendor, Nalco, has done an excellent job of waste reduction.
“We will continue to let our vendors know this is a mindset we are bringing into our operations for many years to come. The sooner they understand it, the sooner they’ll be able to offer better products and services that meet our needs,” she said.
Shell’s Global Manufacturing team estimates it will take five years to realize significant results from the Lean culture change, but the Martinez Refinery is trying to achieve success in three years.
-- By Eleanor Hunt | <urn:uuid:7130eebc-1138-4627-b95f-2e5f0be90b4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shell.us/aboutshell/projects-locations/martinez/news/03312011-lean.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955106 | 1,189 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Peru to Finalize $10 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund by 2013: Finance Minister
The pre-requisites for Peru to establish a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund are in place but the mineral rich country wants to see stabilization in global commodity markets before it can finalize its plans, Luis Miguel Castilla, Peru's Finance Minister told CNBC on Friday.
"We have a fiscal surplus, we have low debt levels, and we're thinking of being able to do some asset management on those surpluses that we have," Castilla said in an interview on CNBC Asia's "Squawk Box" on Friday, adding that details will be announced sometime in 2013.
"Given that this world is uncertain, we're still dependent on commodity prices...20 percent of our fiscal revenues come from mineral revenues. So I think once this period subsides we can look into developing our own sovereign wealth fund."
Peru is the world's second biggest silver, copper and zinc producer and the sixth biggest gold producer. In all, mining accounts for 60 percent of Peru's exports.
But the slowdown in global growth and falling commodity prices are likely to hit the country's export earnings this year. Peru's central bank has cut its forecast for this year's trade surplus to $6.7 billion from $9 billion previously.
The narrower trade surplus will contribute to a wider current account deficit, which has been covered by ample foreign investments.
Castilla is currently touring Asia to promote investments in Peru's mining and infrastructure sectors by China and sovereign investors such as Singapore's Temasek Holdings and sovereign wealth fund GIC.
Peru's international reserves have doubled since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and now total nearly $60 billion. The country's net public sector debt load is just 6 percent of gross domestic product, and its public sector surplus in the first quarter of the year was 7 percent of GDP.
Proceeds from mineral exports, deposited in the planned sovereign wealth fund, will be "invested abroad and it will ease appreciation pressures we're seeing on our currency," Castilla said, adding that Chile and Norway could provide the model for a Peruvian sovereign fund.
Peru's central bank has been intervening in the currency market in recent months to ease the appreciation in the Peruvian nuevo sol (PEN) against the U.S. dollar. The central bank bought $151 million on Thursday at an average of 2.629 PEN, Dow Jones reported. The Peruvian sol has gained 4.12 percent against the greenback in the last 12 months.
—By CNBC's Sri Jegarajah | <urn:uuid:4ef724d0-a773-4c74-8a45-bc80d50ece42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/48171261?__source=RSS*tag*&par=RSS | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945307 | 533 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Andrea Welker, PhD, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has received national and regional recognition for her commitment to educating future engineers.
She has been elected as the Secretary and Treasurer of the Civil Engineering Division of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). ASEE is the primary non-profit organization for engineering educators from all of the engineering and engineering technology fields. She is one of eight officers who direct the division. “Participating at this level is an opportunity to share with colleagues who are exploring and evaluating new thinking around improving how we prepare future engineers,” said Dr. Welker. “The issues we discuss at the national level reflect the kinds of questions we ask all the time at Villanova.”
She has also accepted two leadership roles with the Geo-Institute, one at the national level and one at the local level. The Geo-Institute is a specialty membership organization for geo-professionals. It is one of the eight specialty institutes within the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). At the national level, Dr. Welker is the Chair of Continuing Education Committee, which reports directly to the Board of Governors. This committee is charged with ensuring the quality of continuing education products that bear the Geo-Institute logo as well as developing new mechanisms for engineers to continuing learning after their formal education is complete. At the local level, she has accepted the position of Academic Liaison for the Delaware Valley Geo-Institute (DVGI). Dr. Welker previously held this position several years ago and has agreed to serve in this role again. In this role, Dr. Welker will help to bridge the gap between practitioners and academics and work to ensure that students are aware of DVGI activities. | <urn:uuid:2fae66a6-a259-47de-82c6-9ebb18308d00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/engineering/newsevents/newsarchives/2012/welkerLeadership.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96191 | 358 | 1.679688 | 2 |
The soldier of faith
Photo and caption by aslam saiyad
a style of turban , mostlty worn during the Maratha period by the soldiers and the sepoys . This head gear were very popular among the Mawle community. This man is devotee of Lord Panduranga , and his travelling with group of thousands called Dindi , tradition started by Saint Dynaneshwar 700 years back, he will walked 250 kms to reach Pandharpur to meet his beloved Lord Panduranga, playing the Veena the musical instrument.
Location: Taradgaon ,Satara, Maharshtra ,India | <urn:uuid:ba7e4092-d48a-45e1-857c-b04de0f0e4c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/2011/entries/71778/view/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960628 | 132 | 1.828125 | 2 |
NDTV and TimesNow are the two leading OPINION makers in India. They telecast their own opinions which contradict each other. These two channels suffer from a dangerous disease called as Acquired Breaking News Virus.
Little kids usually fight with each other for numero-uno position. I finished eating first. I finished doing the homework first. I finished coloring the book first. I finished my potty time first. The kids fight for everything. Competition is in the blood of every human being. This competitive spirit when it crosses the limit transforms into a disease called ABNV. This disease has hit both these channels. This whole disease was discovered a couple of years ago when Ajmal Kasab and co stormed into Mumbai and warred with India. Both these News Channels were fighting with each other trying to claim that they were the first channel to break the News. After that incident, they are Breaking every day. CNN-IBN and Aaj Tak are also transmitters of the ABNV.
Viewers suffer from Breaking News Syndrome when they watch these channels. Children complain that they are seeing the word BREAKING NEWS on their text books. Corporate employees are also complaining that they are seeing the word BREAKING NEWS on their computer screens.
Viewers also suffer from uneasy sleep and nausea. They get bad dreams of Barkha Dutt, Arnab Gowsami and Karan Thappar Breaking their Sleep with Breaking Dreams. My wife Joan got scared when I woke up in the middle of the night shouting "Breaking News Breaking News".
Some of the Breaking News Caption that comes on TV these days
- Police arrest everyone on February 22
- Man executed after long speech.
- Man accused of killing attorney receives a new attorney.
- Bihaar's literacy program shows improvement. ( See how Bihar is spelt)
- Commissioner of Delhi Police Has Lost His Dog
- Finally Commissioner Dog Came to House
- Ruling Congress Top Leader Rahul Gandhi Lunch Menu was also a breaking news.
- Big B catches a cold. | <urn:uuid:6a7c35a1-b79f-4718-a766-e48ec33579cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chronicwriter.com/2011/10/488-acquired-breaking-news-virus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961521 | 414 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Los Angeles Unified schools failed to meet targets for providing speech therapy and other instructional services to special-education students as required by the settlement of a 1993 lawsuit, according to a report released Wednesday.
The annual update from the Office of the Independent Monitor determined the district fell short of the 85 percent goal for its delivery of specialized services. A sampling of 400 students found that 83.5 percent received their therapy as often as recommended but that sessions lasted as long as scheduled just 70 percent of the time.
The report notes that the independent monitor conducted an online survey of special-education providers and found that nearly one-third of 2,650 respondents felt overwhelmed by their caseloads while more than 40 percent said they had to spend too much time writing reports and documenting their work.
The monitor gave Los Angeles Unified a Feb. 1 deadline for crafting a plan to improve the delivery of services to students with individualized education programs, which create instructional road maps for helping affected students overcome disabilities.
"In developing the targeted strategy plan, the district should examine the impact of existing policies and practices and determination of caseload assignments," the monitor advised. "This should also include an analysis of whether the current staffing level is adequate for meeting the demands at schools."
The delivery of services
The settlement includes 19 performance-based outcomes, including a requirement to increase the number of special-ed students who complete high school. In September, the two sides signed off on the completion rate, although the district was about 12 points shy of its 76 percent target.
The district has now complied with 15 of its targets. It now must work on improving its delivery of services, and transitioning more disabled students to less-restrictive or general education programs.
Officials with the district's Special Education Division and Office of the Independent Monitor, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, did not return phone calls.
The report also detailed a review of charter and magnet schools amid concerns that the campuses may be screening out special-ed students during the application process.
It noted that the district had clamped down on magnets to ensure that students were being treated equitably. However, the monitor gave the district until Dec. 15 to review records from its nearly 200 independent charters to ensure that enrollment applications do not require information on a student's special-education eligibility. | <urn:uuid:30df497e-e025-4a73-a4df-c54b7f7caaeb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailynews.com/lifestyle/ci_21849456/report-lausd-misses-mandated-special-ed-targets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975499 | 472 | 1.664063 | 2 |
I've heard that the sound of moving water actually makes you feel cooler on a hot day. I don't know if that's really true, but who doesn't love the sound of water falling?
This house came with the pond in the front yard. Just the pond, no fountain. I have to admit I was very intimidated about maintaining a pond at first. I had no idea how to take care of it and the whole filter and pump thing really was daunting to me.
Now, three years later I have not just one but two ponds and I'll be in charge of the elementary school pond and courtyard starting in the fall for at least the next six years. (I was nominated by my neighbor.)
A couple weeks ago a friend of mine was having a party/fundraiser in her backyard. I don't know why, but I felt compelled to create some atmosphere for her party by installing a little fountain in the flower bed by her patio.
You don't have to have a pond to have the sound of splashing water. You can create a fountain just about anywhere (you just need a power source). It's a high impact project that doesn't have to cost a lot and can bring so much pleasure to you and the birds-- I encourage you to give it try!
Clearly I'm partial to the urn fountain, but you can create one with any vessel you have that has a hole in the bottom. I've even seen a stack of rocks with holes drilled through them. (That's a little too involved for me, but it looked cool.)
If you want to create a little outdoor atmosphere and possibly cool down while you enjoy it, here's what you'll need.
- Outdoor pond pump
Just determine how high your vessel will be and get one that will pump water that high. This one from Home Depot cost $21 and will pump up to 4ft high. It's the one I used for my friends fountain.
- Just put your water-tight base where you want it to be. You can even bury the basin put chicken wire over it and then cover them with river rocks.
- Place the pump in it.
- Attached the tubing to pump.
- Feed the tubing up through your vessel.
- Fill with water.
- Plug it in and sit back and enjoy the sound of water flowing.
Note: It does start to get a little more complicated if you're going to add fish because then you have to have a filter too. | <urn:uuid:11ddf528-3112-40f7-a94e-dbec5266dbad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://monkeygrasshill.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980981 | 512 | 1.601563 | 2 |
We will love each other as brothers and sisters, honour each other with a mutual affection and respect, together always with Christian courtesy, so that our pupils, having this example before them, will learn to act towards each other with greater love. We will avoid all jokes which, no matter how innocent they may be in themselves, hurt the person who is their object. We will not indulge in ridicule nor take sides against one another. We will keep clear of all kinds of speech which are offensive or disrespectful towards one another. Remember that the eyes of our pupils are on us constantly. We will support each other in our faults and defects and have for each other a ‘solidarity’. Fr Colin, on relationships between the staff.
Within the wider Bedean family, St Bede’s has a strong sense of community among its staff. From this collegial and supportive environment, staff are committed to the development and education of the students.
Staff Email Addresses
The Board of Trustees recognises the essential contribution and commitment that staff make to the College in a variety of areas, and aims for St Bede’s to be a desirable place to both work and teach at. According to the idea of lifelong learning, opportunities for good professional development are seen as key, and the Board is very supportive of staff following their own courses of study.
The College has recently completed the RAFA (Raising Achievement For All) and ICTPD cluster programmes, allowing beneficial collaborative work with the other schools involved. Both of these contested Ministry of Education initiatives complement other aspects of professional development at St Bede’s and allow staff to collaborate with colleagues from other schools. There is weekly timetabled professional development for all teaching staff, and the role of Specialist Classroom Teacher allows further advice and development for individuals.
A database of former staff members has been compiled in the College Rollbook as part Centennial celebrations. | <urn:uuid:254eb1b2-71af-4a6f-ae05-ff968255877d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stbedes.school.nz/welcome/college-staff/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962883 | 390 | 1.515625 | 2 |
BELLINGHAM - A large fire raced through three unoccupied buildings in Bellingham's Old Town district early Monday morning, March 1, and had reduced them to rubble by 5 a.m.
Bellingham Fire Department crews spent hours battling the blaze, which ignited in a vacant complex in the 400 block of West Holly Street. The buildings, owned by development company Trillium Corp., formerly housed antique shops and a clothing consignment store.
People passing by called 911 at 2:41 a.m. to report the fire in the Old Town section of downtown, said Andy Day, Bellingham assistant fire chief. The complex, consisting of one- and two-story wood frame buildings, was originally constructed in the early 1900s.
Thom Morey, a baker at Rocket Donuts on West Holly Street, said he first saw the glow of the fire just as fire crews were arriving.
There were sparks coming out of the front of the building. It looked like a "roman candle or sparkler bomb," Morey said. He and Gabe Tucker, the kitchen manager and head baker at Rocket Donuts, said they both saw the sparks and heard crackling and popping sounds.
"Then the whole top of the building blew up," Tucker said. "The whole top blew at once."
A combination of smoke and heat apparently caused an explosion, which shattered the buildings' windows and sent glass cascading out to the sidewalk and street.
"It looked like something out of a movie," Morey said.
Bellingham firefighters, joined by crews from South Whatcom Fire and Fire Districts 7 and 8, surrounded the complex with large hose streams to confine and extinguish the fire, Day said.
"This is going to be an all-nighter," Bellingham Fire Chief Bill Boyd said in the predawn hours Monday as crews poured water on the buildings. "It's going to burn down slow."
Sporadic electrical outages were reported in the downtown area and traffic was interrupted on the railroad line along the waterfront. West Holly Street also was closed off because of the fire.
By mid-morning, a smoky haze had settled over downtown, with a strong smell of burning.
One building, which was one story tall, was mostly collapsed at 5 a.m.
One two-story structure collapsed at about 3:40 a.m., and the second, also two stories, fell about 10 minutes later. A one-story building had mostly collapsed by 5 a.m.
One of the buildings formerly housed the Wise Buys thrift shop, but that shop relocated to 1224 North State St. last year. Other businesses that formerly occupied the buildings included Eartha Kitty's, Pink Flamingo and Pace's New and Used.
The Old Town antiquing area had been a long established part of Bellingham's downtown. The shops, which sold everything from costume jewelry to antique baby carriages, had been a haven for treasure seekers, bargain hunters, low-income folks and curious passersby.
In March 2006, Bellingham-based Trillium Corp. bought the property for $825,000. The businesses moved out or closed down starting several months later.
Officials at Trillium, which developed projects including Bellis Fair mall and Semiahmoo Resort, did not return a call seeking comment.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Reach ISABELLE DILLS at email@example.com or call 715-2220. | <urn:uuid:9a53e6da-fc25-4865-9458-434ae4cef009> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2010/03/02/1316470/fire-razes-downtown-bellingham.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974936 | 730 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The Center for Literacy hosts several special events each year, including student-focused events and fundraisers. Special events provide opportunities for the involvement of individuals, foundations, and corporations in the form of donations, underwriting, space provision, and volunteerism. CFL events also serve as a means to honor learners and volunteers for their dedication and hard work. Please check back regularly for information on recent events and upcoming events.
Become a volunteer tutor
and make a difference in someone's life!
The old adage, age is nothing but a number rings true, especially if you are Elvie Hill. Elvie is 78 years young and has the vigor, tenacity, and inquisitiveness others half his age admire and aspire to. Elvie embodies the ideals of life long learning and came to the Center for Literacy in his retirement because he needed a challenge, pursuing his GED® was the answer. | <urn:uuid:763fd1f5-fe97-47f0-ab61-0d22bcec7932> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.centerforliteracy.org/events-e26-Oktoberfest_Happy_Hour.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948423 | 188 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Swindon Council praised for broadband plans
According to Chris Marling, the editor of advice website Broadband Genie, the move to introduce widespread Wi-Fi across the area was "great" and showed that some local authorities have the right attitude.
He added that the service will be welcomed by those who may have chosen to take up mobile broadband but may have found it has certain limitations.
The expert added: "It will give the people of Swindon another option to meet their broadband requirements, which can only be a good thing.
"We will follow the progress of this scheme with interest."
Under the plans for Swindon, a wireless broadband network will be installed across the whole borough by the council's first public and private commercial venture.
Free internet connections and line rental will be available through the service, although usage will be limited for residents in the area. | <urn:uuid:a94cf30f-420b-466b-beea-84ddcedda298> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cable.co.uk/news/swindon-council-praised-for-broadband-plans-19475524/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945876 | 179 | 1.648438 | 2 |
If you want to be an online entrepreneur, then you should be ready to deal with various problems. Being an entrepreneur is not that easy, as there will be many things you will need to worry about. In the end it can be very rewarding so it is important not to get discouraged. Since being an entrepreneur is not that easy, you might make some mistakes from time to time. The important thing is to learn from your own mistakes and do not make them again. The longer you will be an entrepreneur, the more experience you will have. This experience should help you deal with any problems you may encounter in the future. | <urn:uuid:19b1acf5-56f1-47f3-a756-3aac80f72322> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.robertdunnabstracts.com/learning-from-mistakes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959642 | 125 | 1.679688 | 2 |
The Chapter recognizes the needs of people who have MS and reside in long term care facilities. They are often younger than the typical geriatric population that live in nursing homes and they require more social interaction, more intellectual stimulation and more attention to their physical needs.
Although long term care facility residents with MS are eligible for all of the Chapter programs and services, the Chapter provides a concentrated effort at reaching out to this underserved population. Programs have been developed specifically to meet their needs. The programs are looked upon favorably by the participants and often tell the Chapter staff that they “look forward to the next one!” A brief description of each outreach event is described below:
- Nursing Home Luncheon – The Chapter offers a luncheon for residents of nursing homes who have MS that live in the northern part of the Chapter. Residents are treated to lunch in a lovely hotel, entertainment, and most importantly, a chance to socialize with residents from other long term care facilities. Transportation is provided if necessary.
- Educational Teleconference Calls – The Chapter sponsors four educational conference calls per year. Topics are chosen by nursing home residents and presented by professionals in the field. Some topics covered in past include: bowel and bladder control, Vitamin D research, depression and spasticity.
- “Day Out” Program – This program gives assistance to any residents in long term care who wish to spend a day with their family or out in the community. The Chapter will provide financial assistance for transportation, equipment needs, home health aides, etc. Holidays at home and birthday and anniversary celebrations are examples of occasions that families want to spend time together, away from the long term care facility.
- E-Mail List – the Chapter maintains an e-mail list for residents who want to communicate with people in other facilities. The Chapter sends monthly e-mail blasts including information about current research trends and other important information to the people on this list.
- In-Service Education –The Chapter is available to provide in-service education to long term care facility staff and home health agency staff about multiple sclerosis. This program is valuable to the participants as they realize there are differences between the MS resident and the typical geriatric resident.
To receive more information about any of these programs contact the Chapter at 800-344-4867 or email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:dc877caf-6f43-407e-9e3a-4ba1437843fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationalmssociety.org/chapters/njm/programs--services/nursing-home-outreach-program/index.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951874 | 477 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Note: This item is more than three months old. Please take the publication date into consideration for any date references.
Feb. 20, 2013
Feb. 21, 2013 — Update: This news release has been corrected to reflect the fact that the fish was a blue catfish, not a channel catfish.
Little Lake Does Not Always Mean Little Fish
ATHENS—The Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center’s main stocked fishing pond, Lake Zebco, covers only about an acre and a half. (A full football field including end zones covers 1.32 acres.) Walking at a brisk pace, you can circle it in three or four minutes.
The lake’s small size does not give a hint of what monsters lurk beneath its surface. On the morning of Valentine’s Day, Jonathan (“Gonzo”) Gonzalez of Kaufman caught a blue catfish measuring 35.25 inches long and 23 inches in girth and weighing 18.6 pounds.
Gonzalez, a frequent visitor to TFFC, is a dedicated fly-fisher who frequently fishes for rainbow trout in TFFC’s ponds. As usual, on this occasion he was targeting rainbows using a five-weight rod and a semi-seal lure in peacock green.
Gonzalez is a prolific fly-tier who demonstrates his skills at the annual Fly Fish Texas event at TFFC, scheduled this year for March 9. “A semi-seal fly is named that because it looks like seal fur,” he said. “It’s bushy.” Gonzalez first saw the fly in Arizona, where it is used for trout, and now ties the pattern himself.
“I had seen trout rising on the upper end of the pond near where the waterfall comes in,” Gonzalez revealed. “I cast just past the trout, and the catfish hit the fly as soon as it hit the water. I suspect he may have been looking for rainbow trout to eat.”
The catfish is his biggest catch on a fly rod, eclipsing the 10.5-pound bass that was his previous best. How big was it? It is a pending state fly-rod weight record for blue catfish as well as a weight record for Lake Zebco. The fish missed qualifying for a state catch-and-release record by just three-quarters of an inch.
“I was pretty lucky,” Gonzalez said. “I fish at TFFC a lot, and this was just icing on the cake.”
For information on how you can submit your catch for a Texas record, visit http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/fishboat/fish/programs/fishrecords/.
Photo Editors: Images associated with this news release are available on the TPWD Web site (http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/newsmedia/news_images/).
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If you have any suggestions for improving these pages, send an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.org and mention Plain Text Pages. | <urn:uuid:251633c8-e4e7-4b19-b8be-285bf1876458> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tpwd.state.tx.us/newsmedia/releases/?req=20130220a | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933671 | 838 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Graduate Medical Education
Graduate medical education has been an integral part of St. Christopher's Hospital for Children for more than 60 years. The goal of our training programs—and our highest priority—is to offer a comprehensive, in-depth and personally rewarding educational experience in one of our many pediatric disciplines, preparing trainees to confidently choose careers in academic medicine, private practice or careers in public health.
A cornerstone of our training is the open and frequent interaction between our trainees and our outstanding faculty, with expertise in all areas of pediatric health and disease as well as a strong commitment to education.
We strive to maintain an appropriate balance between scientific inquiry and humanistic clinical care in training residents and fellows. In doing so, we give them the tools they need to become competent and compassionate physicians for children and adolescents.
A traditional and valued aspect of our programs is their cohesiveness, apparent in the warm relationships between our faculty and trainees, and in the excellent morale and group spirit of the house staff. We promote personal and professional growth by encouraging residents and fellows to participate in designing and implementing their curriculum.
In choosing candidates for our residency and fellowship programs, we look not only for good grades, evaluations, references and a strong clinical performance, but also for excellent interpersonal and communication skills, an intellectual curiosity, willingness to assume increasing responsibility for one's own education, and finally, a genuine and active sense of social awareness and social responsibility. St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children is a teaching affiliate of Drexel University College of Medicine and Temple University School of Medicine.
Through this relationship, we have both third-year and fourth-year medical students on required and elective rotations. Numerous students from other medical schools take elective rotations at our hospital.
Thank you for considering St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in your selection of a residency or fellowship program. We believe we have a great deal to offer, and we invite you to come visit and judge for yourself. For more information, or to reach the GME Office, please call (215) 427-4719. | <urn:uuid:39e1a6b2-4690-4730-8557-be0e69ae32c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stchristophershospital.com/graduate-medical-education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954301 | 426 | 1.515625 | 2 |
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My children currently ride the bus to and from school every day and have enjoyed it for the last 2 years. My sister, on the other hand, won’t let her kids ride the bus because of some of the awful things that can occur on buses. Do you let your kids ride the bus or do you agree that it is a bad place to be? -- Bonnie, StrongMoms Facilitator
My daughter rides the bus to and from school as well. i feel a bus can be a bad place, depends on how they are ran. My daughter is 4, and knows right and wrong. i belive if there is any issue on her bus she will let me know and she will be removed. i dont belive the is anything wrong with a child on the bus, they know when they are in a bad situation. -Haven
I think it's an individual case by case decision. I had never thought about buses being "bad places", outside of kids maybe getting teased in a harmless manner (physically but not necessarily mentally). One of my thoughts is that kids have to have a place to test out their skills in saying "no", in standing up for themselves, in standing up for others, in being safe, in doing something without mom/dad there, ect. So there are many good things about riding the bus. That being said if you have any inclination or gut feeling or information that your child may be at risk-no bus!
You are both right....my kids have to learn to be in difficult situations where they need to stand up for themselves or others. At least I know they are in a safe environment while doing so!
I think one of the difficult issues is the distance to the bus stop. I've just heard too many tragic stories about kids on their way to bus stops and things happening to them. I'd be pretty skittish letting them walk much distance to the bus stop. However, if I was able to go with them, I think that would change things. I'll have to deal with this issues in a couple of years!
Luckily, the bus actually picks them up and drops them off right in front of our house, so I am very lucky!!! | <urn:uuid:c971f723-eedd-455c-86cc-86713db1e312> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://similac.com/community/boards/forums/p/13166/34357.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979491 | 523 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Sewer line is the most common place that passed by water. This line is connected to the entire city sewer in order to make the water disposal centered to one place. All of water disposal is coming from houses, factories, and any other places that use water. House is the place where people commonly use water for bathing, washing, cleaning, and many more. However, some of people may experience plumbing problems. There are also many ways that you can do as the best solution for plumbing problems. Some of them may get stress when they have to fix the problem by themselves. There are many types of plumbing problem such as dripping faucet, broken shower for spraying water, flooded toilets, and many more.
However, the worse and difficult task to fix is sewer problem. New York City sewer often cause plumbing problem such as broken pipe, flooded sewer line, and the other sewer problem. If you want to get rid of sewer problem, you must call Balkan Plumbing. It is the largest company that specialist in sewer and water maintenance in New York City. This company is experienced to handle any sewer problem such as New York City sewer that commonly causes trouble.
Balkan will help you to fix any problem that related to plumbing service such as water dripping, broken sewer line, broken faucet, and many more. This company has a lot of experienced and professional plumbers who can handle any type of plumbing problems. It has an official website that you can visit it by surfing in the internet and the official website is Balkanplumbing.com. There are also many specialty equipment that provided by this company in order to fix any plumbing problem you have. The professional plumbers will help you to get the best job and it will be done in any minute. | <urn:uuid:f2b69a3c-6952-443e-91ed-9cdca86b10ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.housefalls.com/professional-plumbing-company-in-nyc.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974877 | 359 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Promise Fellow Stories
One Wednesday afternoon a new face arrived at Funky Minds Open Gym in Carver, a small town about 35 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Brittany had learned that every week there was a group of middle and high school students that gathered to play dodge ball. She was excited to join us and quickly became a regular — attending every Wednesday and expressing a desire to attend other Funky Minds programs too.
Brittany and I got to talking and I learned that she had just moved to Carver over the summer. Carver is a small city and she was lonely and looking for other kids to spend her time with. When she discovered Funky Minds she was really excited and said, “I thought there wasn’t anything fun for kids to do in Carver! I guess I was wrong!”
Brittany can now be found at most every Funky Minds event– sometimes with her younger sister Maddie, too. It has been fun to build relationships with them and especially fun to see Maddie during the school day at East Union. While we have a lot of fun at Funky Minds we are also really intentional about building relationships. It is great to see kids get excited about spending time together and creating a sense of community in Carver.
A student in my after-school program seemed to have difficulty early on staying on task and bothering or harassing other students in the program. This student has a disability, and I at times think that she behaves in a manner which encourages the other students to laugh in order to gain her own acceptance in the group. I was unsure of how to handle this, but at the advice of some at the Grant Collaborative, I stopped by fifth-grade lunch one day and asked her if she would come and sit down with me for a minute or two. I asked her if she was enjoying Middle Earth, and she nodded yes. We had a brief conversation about how I wanted her to be in the program, but could only allow it if she showed respect to other students. From that day on, things got much better. She is now engaged and enthusiastic most of the time.
I find that firm encouragement, or giving her a bit of extra responsibility goes a long way to help her take ownership in the program. Some of these include things like passing out papers, or leading a discussion on ideas for clubs with the other students. It is my goal to help her realize that she is an incredibly smart, creative, amazing young woman who is more than capable of reaching her goals in life, which she says are “becoming a nurse or a doctor” and “helping out my mom with bills.” It is easy to see already that hers will in fact be a Great Story.
On a more personal note, I just wanted to say that at the beginning of the year, we received a sheet that was full of advice from past Promise Fellows, mostly little quips about taking it one day at a time and remembering that what you are doing will impact someone’s life, etc. I have taped this up in my office and it serves as welcome encouragement at the beginning of each day!
I have been working with one young boy for a year now who’s currently in eighth grade. It has been a challenge to work with him because he seems to have reading and writing comprehension problems. He’s one of the nicest boys I’ve ever met, and his parents are very supportive of him. Each year, he struggles more and more to stay afloat in his classes. He completes all of his school work, yet he routinely gets poor grades. I am frequently at a loss for how to best help him succeed.
One day this fall he came into my room and asked for help writing a paper for his English class. The topic of the paper was to talk about a time when someone said something to inspire and encourage him. He seemed at a loss for how to answer this. I tried to explain to him what the teacher is asking, but he didn’t seem to register it. Minutes went by and he still had a deer-in-the-headlights look about him. It seemed that we were already getting stuck. Just when I thought we had hit a wall, he remarked that his father had recently told him something very encouraging on a hunting trip. I quickly started asking him to describe to me all the details of the experience: the setting, the time, the mood, the importance, the feelings, etc. Before long, we had the whole experience mapped out on the whiteboard.
Next he had to write this into an essay. Once again, he seemed to freeze up. I got the sense that he was afraid to start writing because he might write something wrong and mess up. I really tried to help him see that the paper was already written for him on the board. In order to make him feel comfortable coming up with sentences, I very deliberately validated any attempts he made at verbalizing a sentence. I wanted him to get the sense that in this paper there were no right or wrong things to say. After about 10 minutes he started picking up speed, and he appeared to get the connection that all he had to do was take what was on the board and arrange it on paper. By the end of the class period he had finished the paper, and I felt that he had had a meaningful experience writing it.
Almost a month later he came into my room and excitedly told me that his grade in the English class had gone up from an F to a C. Even I was surprised by this turn of events. We went onto the computer and checked his grades, and sure enough it was true. He had received an A on the paper I helped him write. He pointed to it and said, “It’s all because of that paper we wrote!” He proceeded to jump around the room, pump his fist in the air, and chant “YES! WOO HOO!” I was so proud of him, and I know he was proud of himself. | <urn:uuid:4c850ffa-db41-41cd-a34a-3f86414d9277> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mnyouth.net/promise-fellows/pf-stories/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992879 | 1,254 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Latest update: 20/09/2012
Tensions increase over disputed islands
Depending on where you come from, the tiny islets in the East China Sea would either be known as the Diaoyu or the Senkaku Islands. Both China and Japan claim sovereignty over the rocky outposts and subsequent tensions between the two have been simmering for a while. But the ill-feeling has suddenly reached a new high, after Tokyo announced it had bought the islands from their private owner. The Chinese are infuriated, with shoppers calling for all Japanese-made products to be boycotted. | <urn:uuid:5223d700-21d9-4ec6-b213-344bb9b7a217> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.france24.com/en/20120917-tensions-escalate-in-islands-row?page=6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961898 | 120 | 1.710938 | 2 |
04-28-2009 04:30 AM
Debugging in LabVIEW is sometimes difficult because of the reason that the error happens not in the top level VI we are debugging, but in some of it's subVIs (or maybe a subVI inside a subVI and so on..). We need to run the VI repeatedly to see what's causing the error after doing a 'Retain Wire Values' on subVIs.
Instead, we can have a method by which you can specify to 'Retain Wire Values for the Whole Hierarchy' before running the VI. And then debug the VI and its subVIs without having to re-run everytime you figure out that the erroris happening is one of the subVI. What do you guys think about this and would it be useful to have such a feature?
04-28-2009 05:25 AM
I Personally do not use this feature as it stands however I believe it could be quite usefull for future developments. Although what of sub vi's in multiple places / reentrant. How does this affect performance / memory, obviously something you would only use for debug.
Sounds interesting though and always nice to have multiple debug options
01-21-2010 02:01 AM | <urn:uuid:3280fa38-064a-4282-8be9-161cdcb72345> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Debugging-made-easier-with-Retain-Wire-Values-for-the-Whole/m-p/897487 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943005 | 256 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Some of the websites that make it their business to stalk Bill O'Reilly carried an item about O'Reilly's supposedly offensive "restaurant review" of Sylvia's in Harlem. O'Reilly had apparently taken Al Sharpton to dinner there. The "review" was objectionable because O'Reilly focused on the civil behavior of the patrons about which he was said to be "surprised." Nationally, CNN has picked it up. Locally, Paul Soglin and Eugene Kane repeated the point.
I doubt that either of our local friends actually listened to the segment, It was apparently part of an extended commentary on racial stereotypes and the way in which people respond to the legacy of racial expression. (The excerpted segment left out some of this context.) He followed the reference to Sylvia's with a story about his grandmother's prejudice. (I admit that Bill is fond of the first person narrative.) He argued with her about it as a high school kid but, he said, she was unable to get past stereotypes and the fear that they generated, She expressed this fear, according to Bill, in "irrational hostility." He then went on to say that she was "old school but, today, rap culture creates stereotypes that are not reflective of the larger black community.
I suppose that the criticism will be that O'Reilly said that he "couldn't get over" how Sylvia's was just like any other place. This may be a sin that those who are committed to the aggressive enforcement of a complicated web of mandatory circumlocutions in all discussions of race will never forgive. But what does it mean anyway? Did the scene at Sylvia's stick with him because he was surprised or did it stick with him because it drove home to him that, in a society where we still mostly stick to our side of the racial divide, we are more the same than we are different ? All I can tell you is that he expressly said the latter. ("We're the same.")If this is, as CNN says, his "Don Imus" moment then we simply can't talk about race in this country. Ever.
One would think that people who seem to be convinced that talk radio's audience consists of closeted Klansmen would be happy that someone took the time to set matters straight.
Although recent posts by Mayor Soglin and my erstwhile Backstory colleague Jim Rowen focused on a different R-word (the ubiquitous "rant" although Paul did not actually use it), there seems to be this idea that talk radio hosts (and conservatives generally) must be, among other things, racist or ignorant about race because they disagree with us on certain aspects of racial and urban policy. We know that we are right and that all right-thinking people must agree with us, so there must be something wrong with those who don't. (That Jim offered as a reasonable alternative Joel McNally (a man whose public persona embodies the concept of smug and who doesn't seem to have had a new idea since 1969) sort of drives my point home. I am perfectly willing to believe that people enjoy Joel, but it's not because he engages in open-minded and far-ranging intellectual discourse. It's because he tells them they are right.
In fairness to both Paul and Jim, they were more than willing to engage me in a discussion of urban issues - something that I hope to get back to when I am settled in my new gig. But forums that are far more popular than our blogs, while they are not and cannot be graduate school seminars, are not an intellectual wasteland and the people who populate them are not benighted morons or evil pipers. | <urn:uuid:35623f96-b391-4d8a-88ab-dfcf85b856d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sharkandshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/09/talk-radio-dysfunction.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982308 | 747 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Asia Pacific economic outlook – June 2009
The June 2009 edition of the Asia Pacific economic outlook gives a near-term outlook for China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
China – Despite the slowdown in both the external and domestic sectors, the economy is performing much better than expected on the back of the huge fiscal stimulus spending. There are however concerns that the lending boom may sour and spoil the party.
Indonesia – Indonesia is the most optimistic country in the region and is likely to do perform much better than its neighbors. The central bank is likely to cut rates to ensure that high growth rates are sustained.
Malaysia – The economy is performing much worse than expected because falling exports are impacting the manufacturing sector. The economy is very likely to shrink significantly in 2009. Of potential concern is the possible downgrading of nine undercapitalized banks.
Vietnam – The economy grew at a much slower place in the first-quarter of 2009 compared to 2008. However, it is likely to perform much better in the coming quarters because of loose monetary policy and fiscal stimulus spending.
Page Last Updated | <urn:uuid:a33543fb-4f33-44c8-a9be-4e187bbb4880> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_GX/global/insights/deloitte-research/61d3f6b085912210VgnVCM100000ba42f00aRCRD.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957129 | 222 | 1.5625 | 2 |
During the last week of September our esteemed lawmakers took a much-needed rest from their duties in Washington, D.C. Said holiday lasted until mid-November, well after the presidential election.
But that was more than two months ago, and after all, these boys and girls worked hard for two weeks that September after they took their five-week summer vacation (Forbes, Sept. 22). Apparently they need a periodic rest from their grueling toils on our behalf so they bugged out of D.C. again this week for a 10-day respite. They call it a recess but I can think of other names for it. Boy, it's a good thing there's nothing pressing that needs attention now - like jobs, a farm bill, etc.
Now, with sequestration cuts set to take effect March 1, it looks inevitable that billions of dollars ($85 billion this fiscal year, between March and Sept. 30) will be haphazardly cut from defense (about half) and non-defense areas (federal agencies, et. al.). Sequester was first proposed by the Obama White House during the debt ceiling talks in 2011 (Breitbart, Feb. 16). There will be cutbacks in hiring and possible lay-offs at companies dependent on government business and contracts.
The cuts will even affect our congress, too. That doesn't seem to bother them much, though. Maybe that's because it has been estimated that 47 percent of them are millionaires (PolitiFact.com, Jan. 25) and their $174,000 annual salary is peanuts.
In the meantime, just
If no deal is reached by March 1, the Pentagon would have to start implementing a plan to cut its budget by about $500 billion over 10 years. Another $500 billion would hit non-defense programs. Economists agree the steep, across-the-board cuts would slow the economy (CBS News, Stephanie Condon, Feb. 15).
The White House warns that sequester will hurt the middle class, from slashing education programs to small business loan guarantees. If that is so, then why was it proposed in the first place? Taking $1.2 trillion out of the economy would put close to a million jobs at risk, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated.
As they left town last week Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for the coming potential disaster. Wait a minute! Haven't we heard that tune before?
Ruidoso resident Mike Curran's political columns have been published in American Thinker. He is a two-time New Mexico Press Association award recipient. He may be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:05667841-b470-422f-afcf-320c8285348d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ruidosonews.com/ruidoso-opinion_columnists/ci_22622906/congress-goes-holiday-again?source=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969375 | 548 | 1.5 | 2 |
Neighbors Abroad at a crossroad?
Palo Alto's sister-city program celebrates 50 years — and contemplates its future
Mary Ashley's eyes twinkled. Tall and athletic, with smooth white hair, she wiggled her hands beside her ears as she sang the Små grodorna, Swedish for "The Little Frogs," a traditional dance and song performed midsummer around a maypole:
The little frogs, the little frogs are funny to observe.
The little frogs, the little frogs are funny to observe.
They have no ears, they have no ears, no tails do they possess
They have no ears, they have no ears, no tails do they possess
Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.
Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa."
Ashley learned the frog song while on a summer solstice trip to Linkoping, Sweden. It was arranged through Neighbors Abroad, Palo Alto's sister-city cultural-exchange program that is turning 50 this year.
Palo Altans and others will take part in a Swedish frog dance and other merriment on Feb. 9, at Neighbors Abroad's golden-anniversary festival. It will be held from 2 to 5 p.m. at Lucie Stern Community Center on Middlefield Road. The event will include exhibits, performances and traditional foods of Palo Alto's six sister cities: Palo, the Philippines; Oaxaca, Mexico; Linkoping, Sweden; Enschede, the Netherlands; Albi, France, and Tsuchiura, Japan. The free event is open to the public.
As Neighbors Abroad celebrates its milestone, the organization is also taking stock of how to maintain its relevance in the 21st century. Palo Alto has expanded from a small college town to an economic center with global reach. Times have changed. So too must Neighbors Abroad, some say.
Neighbors Abroad began during the heart of the Cold War as a volunteer program of cultural exchanges and humanitarian projects. It launched on Jan. 18, 1963, as a member of Sister Cities International, which was founded in 1956. President Dwight D. Eisenhower started his Town Affiliation Program to urge U.S. cities to establish ties with other towns throughout the world.
"Eisenhower said, 'People don't kill people they know,'" said Marion Mandell, Neighbors Abroad's liaison with sister city Oaxaca.
The first group to become a sister city with Palo Alto was a city that shared in part of the name: Palo, the Philippines. The adoption won kudos from Gen. Douglas MacArthur the day before it was formalized.
"The people of Palo are, indeed, worthy of this honor. They resisted even to the death the efforts of the Japanese invaders to subdue them during the late war and were of inestimable assistance as I landed with the forces of liberation to redeem their native soil," MacArthur wrote to City Councilwoman Frances Dias on Jan. 17, 1963.
Barbara Evans, Neighbors Abroad president, recalled the climate in which the program began:
"We started in an idealistic time. The Cold War was on. We were a little town, but we were very concerned with non-aligned powers," she said.
In the Bay Area, engineers and scientists were working for the government on projects, many of which were military in nature, and trying to find a way on a community level to address social and cultural issues outside of politics and governments, Evans said.
"It was part of the zeitgeist of the time."
Neighbors Abroad adopted Oaxaca as its second sister city in 1964. It was closer than the Philippines, making it easier for people to travel there. Like Palo Alto, it is also a university town, Mandell said.
Early on it became obvious that there was an unequal relationship, Ashley said. Less wealthy than Palo Alto, Oaxaca had social and educational needs. Palo Altans rallied to provide children with scholarships and build a children's library. They also constructed a planetarium and observatory. Among the most ambitious idea was an orphanage to care for children whose parents are imprisoned.
"There was no foster care, so the kids had to go into the prison with their parents," Mandell said.
The project even caused a social movement of sorts within Oaxaca, where upper-class women found they could leave behind their luncheons and teas and volunteer for a nonprofit organization, she said.
The transformation just five years later was astounding, according to Mandell.
"The first time I went there, there was this muddy field," she said.
Now 55 children live there. The older girls learn sewing skills by making clothing for the younger ones, she said.
Neighbors Abroad also funded the Niño-a-Niño (child-to-child) health program in rural villages, which teaches children to teach other kids about basic health care. The program has had far-reaching results, Mandell said.
Many parents adhere to traditional misconceptions regarding health care, such as the belief in withholding water from children with diarrhea because being drier would stop the discharge. But many children died from dehydration, Mandell said.
"You can't change adults' minds, but you can change a child's," she said.
Kids learned how to mix a rehydration drink of simple ingredients to give to a sick child. The children survived, the parents saw the benefits, and thereafter they incorporated the practice, she said.
"Before this program, 36 percent of children died in the first year. After this, it was 1 to 2 percent," Mandell said.
Other than Oaxaca and Palo, the four remaining sister-city relationships have remained culture- rather than service-oriented, Evans said. Adult and student exchanges have included visits by artists, lawyers, musicians, hikers and chefs, said Betty Gerard, a Neighbors Abroad board member. There have been cross-cultural bicycle tours organized by the local Western Wheelers club and joint concerts between the local Aurora Singers and Albi's Assou-Lezert. The first concert took place at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium to a standing-room-only audience, Gerard said.
"Albi-based Compagnie Evelyne Remazeilhes has performed here several times, recreating the dances of the Moulin Rouge in Paris as depicted in the paintings of native son Toulouse-Lautrec. Palo Alto musical groups that have performed in Albi include the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, the Palo Alto High School Jazz Band and the Paly Madrigal Singers," she said.
But sometimes even seemingly innocuous cultural exchanges have tested the relationship between sisters.
Foreign Friends, perhaps the most infamous example of non-sisterly relations, was an 11-foot-tall, traditional Swedish plank sculpture of a man and woman sitting on a bench with their dog. A gift from Linkoping in 1989, the sculpture sat at the corner of Waverley Street and Embarcadero Road. At first, it was a novelty. The sculpture was dressed up for the city's Black and White Ball and became a destination for photographs, with visitors sitting alongside the sculptures.
But Foreign Friends became the target of multiple assaults. Once it was doused with gasoline and set ablaze; at other times it was defaced with spray paint, according to Palo Alto Weekly reports. There are pictures of the Friends each with a black eye. And the sculptures were decapitated twice.
In 1993, someone removed the heads on Halloween night and left them in the statues' laps. By February 1994, just two months after being restored by a local sculptor at a cost of $3,000, youths allegedly unbolted the heads after getting around motion sensors. The wooden noggins were never found, according to the Weekly.
New heads of redwood were fashioned but seemed incongruous.
Ralph White, chair of the Neighbors Abroad Linkoping Committee, said in a 1997 Weekly article that the sculpture was conceived as traditional Swedish folk art to be climbed and played on. But Palo Altans, who viewed it as high art, objected to the new heads.
The unwanted sculpture bounced from one place to another. By January 2000, its wood rotting, Foreign Friends was unceremoniously carted off to the city landfill, where it was finally put to rest and composted.
Foreign Friends "was like something from the Twilight Zone," said Palo Alto muralist Greg Brown, who traveled to Linkoping in 1991 to paint one of his famous, quirky murals on a concert hall as part of a cultural exchange.
"It was a picture of a fellow coming out of a small doorway on the balcony of the second floor. He was a black-tie character dangling from the balcony holding a violin. The strings were all that was holding him up from the balcony," he recalled. "I was quite pleased to be 'inflicted' on Linkoping, to be known as the guy who paid them back for 'Foreign Friends.'"
The Linkopingers' view of the value of plank sculptures surprised Brown, he said.
He found out that similar works of art had been crafted for 500 years. At a large festival, the sculptures were all over town. But after the festival, nearly all were removed and dumped in a field behind the university to decompose, he said.
"A professor drove me out there to see these things dying in the field," Brown said. "Palo Alto — put away your guilt."
Student exchanges have become a large part of forwarding the Neighbors Abroad agenda, with most of the sister cities participating. The travel goes both ways, with students coming to Palo Alto from abroad, said Keiko Nakajima, a Japanese-language teacher at Jane Lathrop Stanford and Jordan middle schools.
Sixteen students are coming from Tsuchiura, Japan, on March 9 and will stay with host families for one week. There will be a welcoming party and picnic at Mitchell Park, two days of shadowing their host students at school, a visit to Palo Alto City Hall and attendance of a City Council meeting with a commemoration of their visit by the mayor. Palo Alto police will take the students on a tour of the department, and they will visit Stanford and sample American college cuisine in the cafeteria, Nakajima said.
The Japanese students will also cook family recipes for their host families, and they will travel to Yosemite, she said.
Emily Hwang, a Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School eighth-grader, said she hosted a Tsuchiura student in March 2012.
"She was very shy, but it was fun to get to know her a little bit while she was there. Since we were both a little bit embarrassed to speak in the other's native language, there were some awkward silences, but we got over that eventually because we taught each other some stuff. I enjoyed showing her around places in Palo Alto and school and doing a bunch of things that I love with her. I'm glad I met her before I went to Japan. Otherwise, it would have been even more of a culture shock to me," she said in an email to the Weekly.
Hwang's 11-day trip to Tsuchiura with a group of students took place last July. She said she wanted to participate after learning of the program from her older brother, who was studying Japanese.
"My experience as an exchange student was incredible and life-changing. Exposure to such a drastically different culture was shocking but equally exciting. I've made lasting friendships and seen and done things I will remember forever. I feel like participating in an exchange program gave me insight into Japanese life that I will never have the opportunity to experience again, so I am very grateful for that," she said.
The most surprising thing was how nice the people were and how clean the city was, she said.
"I'd heard some things about how polite the Japanese were, but it's actually pretty ridiculous how helpful they are. Everyone there did so much to make sure we felt welcome and had a positive experience.
"My Japanese teacher had told us various things about Japan throughout the year, and my grandma is familiar with Japan, so I thought I had a faint idea of what it was like there in terms of food and culture. However, I learned that you can never compare what people say about something and the actual thing," she said.
Nakajima said the Palo Alto students go to the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima and visit Kyoto. They attend the school in Tsuchiura, where students routinely take off their shoes and clean the classrooms. The weather, unlike Palo Alto's, is very hot and muggy.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson students learn? Tolerance.
Nakajima said if the students don't like aspects of Japanese culture, she tells them: "Too bad."
"It's their culture," she says.
Japanese students were about to travel to Palo Alto in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami hit. The airport was closed, so their trip was canceled, Nakajima said.
But that did not stop Palo Alto from springing into action.
"Neighbors Abroad and host families had to do something. They met that Sunday at Jordan Middle School and established a fundraising effort that collected $14,000. The students sold cookies and wrist bands, and $10,000 was collected in a month," Nakajima said.
Exchange students aren't limited to high school kids.
Johan Lindell, a computer-science student from Linkoping who is an exchange student through Neighbors Abroad, said graduate students at Stanford are so diverse that he also meets many people from around the globe.
"The biggest thing is definitely the passive broadening of my horizons just from being around people with different backgrounds," he said in an email.
Lindell arrived at Stanford last September and will return to Sweden in June. American culture is not unfamiliar in Sweden because U.S. media is imported, and Swedes in general are interested in most things from the United States, he said.
Stanford students' drive to excel has had an impact on Lindell.
"I think most of my surprises come from meeting Stanford people rather than other Americans. Having a population base of 300 million tends to lead to the ... people of the top schools to be very driven. The whole 'aura of ambition' that can be found at Stanford is probably the biggest shift from back home," he said.
Like many organizations founded five decades ago, Neighbors Abroad is struggling for ways to attract younger members.
"It's getting harder and harder," Ashley said. "People are just so busy with their families and working full-time jobs. I look at my own daughter, who was an exchange student in Enschede."
Evans and Mandell said the job of a sister-city liaison is time consuming and requires fundraising and reaching out to people. For now, they don't plan to take on any more sister cities.
But some cities are knocking on the door. One person wanted Palo Alto to adopt a sister city in India, Evans said.
"There have to be a lot of people involved if we are going to add another city. We need to reach out to the broader community."
Palo Alto City Councilman Larry Klein said perhaps the business model of Neighbors Abroad will need to change to attract more people.
"There is a lot of competition and so many different opportunities for young people to travel. When I was growing up there wasn't anybody who went to a foreign country," he said.
Technology has made exposure to cultural ideas and everything else instantaneous.
But Councilwoman Nancy Shepherd, a strong proponent of building business relationships with cities around the world — most recently the city's Smart City Partnership with Yangpu, Shanghai, China (see sidebar) — said the relevance of cultural exchanges such as Neighbors Abroad has not diminished. Social networking has its place, but people still want to meet face to face, she said.
Nakajima said that cultural literacy will always be relevant, and that won't diminish in the global business climate.
But more importantly, she said, Neighbors Abroad still affects students on a basic human level. And it harks back to the core reason the organization was founded.
"It might change their lives. Half of the students say they don't want to go home — they want to go back. They are never going to hate the Japanese.
"They can come home and tell their stories, and it might change the world," she said.
Staff Writer Sue Dremann can be emailed at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:984737c1-c3c8-4822-9847-b7a33a1d078c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=18372 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981625 | 3,518 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Adult Fiction GRUBER
Summary: A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death . . . A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries . . . An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth . . . The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work "a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years." Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet. Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer--or killers--unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one--not family, not friends, not lovers--is to be trusted. Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery . . . or self-destruction.
Question about returns, requests or other account details?
Add a Comment | <urn:uuid:b6d67896-b091-4d6e-96d3-48cdc13d9b04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hclib.org/pub/bookspace/discuss/?bib=3068082&theTab=Summary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939511 | 415 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The fundamental 4-H ideal of practical "learn by doing" experiences encourages youth to experiment, innovate and think independently.
These principles are fully embraced by Jackie Goza, area 4-H/youth extension agent.
She was hired for the position after Isaac Muñoz switched his focus to agricultural projects in Montrose County.
Jackie Goza was involved in 4-H, rodeo and livestock when she was young. Born in Montrose, she grew up in Fruita and attended the University of Northern Colorado after graduating from high school. She obtained a degree in elementary education and taught school for seven years.
Although she's taking a break from teaching, she is still involved in youth development at a different level. She believes her educational background meshes well with the curriculum offered through the 4-H program.
She also worked as a parent educator for Bright Future, planning programming with volunteers and leaders.
"Extension goes hand in hand with what I've done in the past," she said.
She's been on the job since March, getting to know 300-plus 4-H members, about 100 volunteer leaders and all the parents, fair board members and CSU Extension staff it takes to pull off the county fair every year. "I felt my first fair was a real success, and I'm off to a good start," she said.
With strong adult volunteers, Delta County is able to offer 26 4-H clubs and a wide spectrum of curriculum options.
"Anybody can be involved; you don't have to live on a farm," she said.
Goza recently took about 10 4-H members to a state conference in Fort Collins where they had the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and she attended workshops for extension agents. That experience reaffirmed her decision to return to 4-H. "I truly believe in what 4-H represents, and the values it teaches our kids," she said.
They're the same values she is teaching her two young daughters, ages 6 and 2.
In addition to putting names to the faces of 300-plus kids and their parents, she's learning how things are done. Coming up quickly is
4-H Achievement Night, which will be held Oct. 20 in Cedaredge. Awards are presented, but above all 4-H members are recognized for all they've learned during the past year, and the ongoing support from volunteers and businesses which make the program a success is acknowledged.blog comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:c75c313f-172f-40c9-8cbe-a062ca9682e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deltacountyindependent.com/index.php/neighbors/milestones/people-in-the-news/36-milestones/people-in-the-news/2260-extension-agent-values-the-principles-of-4-h | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982412 | 509 | 1.742188 | 2 |
TOPEKA — State officials would require drug tests of any Kansan they have reason to believe may be using controlled substances and also getting unemployment or welfare benefits under a bill a Senate panel advanced Monday.
BY BRENT D. WISTROM
Eagle Topeka bureau
Under the proposal that is now poised for a vote in the Senate, welfare and unemployment recipients who fail a urine drug test would lose state cash assistance until they complete a substance abuse treatment program and job skills training. They would then be subject to periodic tests.
Those who fail a second test would lose state assistance for a year or when they finish treatment. A third failure would ban them from benefits altogether.
Children of those failing could still get welfare through a third party who can pass a drug test.
When someone fails a test, they could request a second independent test. If that one shows up negative, the state will pay the cost of both urine analyses.
Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita, opposed the move. Last week, she told the Senate Commerce Committee that the bill targets women because many women are the heads of households getting state assistance, and she said it allows state officials to essentially profile people for potential drug use based on demeanor, arrest records and other records.
But the measure appears to have strong support among conservative Republicans who dominate the Senate. She said the state can already provide treatment for drug users.
Senate Bill 149 also makes anyone convicted of a first drug felony after July ineligible for welfare for five years. Any subsequent conviction would lead to a lifelong ban from welfare.
The proposed drug testing would force the state to hire four more employees to deal with drug testing and treatment management. The state projects 1,852 people would be tested in the second half of 2014, costing about $92,6000 for the $50 tests. That would increase, costing about $2.2 million in 2014, budget officials say.
But the state could save $1.1 million as result of the 1,475 people the state projects would be kicked off of state assistance.
Drug treatment costs about $6,300 per person, but its unclear what the states share would be after figuring in Medicaid and other programs that might help pay for treatment.
Check back with Kansas.com for updates. | <urn:uuid:56835c0d-73c1-4b69-9704-3df74e8312a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kansascity.com/2013/02/25/4086020/bill-that-requires-drug-testing.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965944 | 473 | 1.515625 | 2 |
After eight days of fighting, ceasefire appears to hold
After eight days of fighting, Operation Pillar of Defense came to a close, and now all that can be done is wait for the results.
During the night following the Israel-Hamas cease-fire announcement, there was sporadic rocket fire for several hours after the 9 p.m. deadline went into effect, but none after midnight. In all, 12 rockets were fired into Israeli territory after the deadline. The Israel Air Force has ceased all activity in the Gaza Strip. If the calm holds, reserve soldiers called up to prepare for a potential ground invasion will begin to be sent home in coming days.
On Thursday morning, residents of southern communities heard warning sirens indicating incoming rockets, but no rockets were found. Officials believe that several rockets may have exploded inside Palestinian territory.
As far as the cease-fire agreement goes, Israel will seek to end the smuggling of weapons and ammunition from Sinai into the Gaza Strip. Hamas will seek a removal of the naval blockade on Gaza and the opening of all border crossings.
The man behind the agreement was Mossad head Tamir Pardo, who traveled to Cairo, presented the Israeli position and returned to Jerusalem with a list of understandings to be presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The three convened the Forum of Nine senior ministers and formulated an outline for the cease-fire agreement.
The Forum of Nine was scheduled to meet at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, but the bombing of a Tel Aviv bus disrupted that plan. Netanyahu and the ministers were furious, and the mediators immediately called UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. For a moment it seemed that the cease-fire agreement was doomed, and that Netanyahu would launch an Israeli ground invasion in Gaza. But then Clinton exerted pressure, and U.S. President Barack Obama also called Netanyahu and asked him to give the truce a chance. You have to give your citizens a normal life, Obama reportedly said to Netanyahu, and it worked.
It was decided that the announcement regarding the cease-fire would come out of Egypt, in order to give the Egyptian leadership the credit and to cement Egypt’s involvement. Egyptian Foreign Minister Kamel Amr said at a joint press conference with Clinton on Wednesday that “Egypt succeeded, after much effort, to achieve understandings that will make a cease-fire possible.”
“This is a critical moment for the region,” Clinton said as she welcomed the agreement. “Egypt’s new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone for regional stability and peace.”
The Forum of Nine was not in full agreement. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Interior Minister Eli Yishai argued that a truce would be a mistake. Sources at the Prime Minister’s Office said that throughout the discussions there was never a vote on whether or not to launch a ground invasion.
The political echelon in Israel explained that this was a calculated move. For Israel, this operation shifted the command over Hamas from Iran to Egypt. Israel is not entirely pleased with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, for failing to stop the trafficking of mid-range Fajr rockets from Sinai into Gaza. But still, there is hope that Egypt, too, will abide by the new rules that have been set.
Lieberman said Wednesday that the operation had been waged on three fronts: military, diplomatic, and public opinion. On the military front, it emerged that the Israel Security Agency has very good intelligence capabilities. The assassination of Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari was a baptism by fire for ISA Director Yoram Cohen, and he came through with flying colors. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz also passed a test, and it was clear that he shared the views of Netanyahu and Barak. The army proved itself once again with a speedy reserves call-up and effective intelligence work, and effective consultations with close legal advisers.
In Israel it was agreed that there were no surprises on the diplomatic front. The European Union did not support any Israeli operation that was anything but surgical, but provided a general moral backing. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon represented the UN’s position that Israel’s actions should be examined closely, and that it did not matter what the target was, it only mattered what, or who, ultimately was hit. Ban arrived in Israel and confronted Netanyahu while drawing comparisons between Gaza civilian casualties and Hamas rockets.
As far as the prime minister is concerned, he oversaw the diplomatic front as well as the military front and the homefront. His approval for every step was constant, and daily. He held 20 conversations with world leaders, four conversations with Obama, and ultimately made a decision that ran contrary to the public's sentiments.
The Palestinians, as expected, declared a “massive victory” on Wednesday. The head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Mashaal, said in Cairo: “Israel was defeated, and has yielded to our demands. The enemy leaders’ adventure is one of the worst and most unusual failures in the history of the Zionist entity. We are committed to the agreement as long as Israel is committed to it.” | <urn:uuid:e80b72c0-51b5-4d38-a689-9092981d7337> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cjnews.com/columnists/your-free-ticket-college?q=node/97821 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971896 | 1,094 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The Rocky Hill Town Council agreed its meeting Monday to place a question on the November ballot asking residents if they would allow the town to appropriate $10 million for acquisition of land or to purchase development rights for farmland preservation and open space.
If the question was approved by voters, the town would be able buy land outright for the purpose of leaving it as open space. The town could also purchase the developmental rights to a farm, which would allow the farmer to continue owning and farming the land. However, it would prevent the land from ever being developed into homes.
"I am not interested in purchasing land," said Councilor Frank Szeps, who did not support the motion during the most recent . "I want development rights."
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Szeps said he is worried about over development after the Planning and Zoning Commission with the developer of a proposed project on Brook Street, which included 144 housing units and 5,750 square feet of office space on a 9.8-acre parcel of land. The commission , saying the housing component was a bad fit for the neighborhood.
"The existing farmland becomes a target because we do not restrict any multi-housing in this town," he said. Szeps said Rocky Hill is an "ideal location for this type of development."
"That is the reason we are bringing it forward," he said. "It is a critical time. It is a turning point in our history."
Szeps said if the farms in Rocky Hill are developed into homes, "the population will skyrocket," which will lead to an increased demand on town services, higher property taxes and more traffic on the roads.
" shows that we are going to be able to do little to improve traffic flow or reduce the amount of traffic," he said. "It is critical that we take action and do it soon."
Councilor Joe Kochanek said for every dollar the town receives in taxes, it costs Rocky Hill between $1.14 to $1.40 to support that person.
"Eventually development does not stop. It ruins the character of town," he said. "We are trying to make this town one that we want to live in."
Councilors made it clear that if the question is approved the money will be set aside and each time that the town would enter into negotiations with a farmer about acquiring their land or developmental rights, there would be a series of public hearing and go in front of Planning and Zoning Commision before any money would be spent. The council would then decide if the town purchases the property or developmental rights.
"This program costs nothing until we do something," Kochanek said.
However, council members have varying opinions on how much the town should budget for acquisition of land or to purchase development rights for farmland preservation and open space. Szeps said he wanted the town to budget for $20 million to prevent the council from coming back to the voters for more money. However, following a , Deputy Mayor Timothy Moriarty suggested a friendly amendment of $5 million, which was the amount originally proposed by Barbara Surwilo at the Land Acquisition and Farmland Preservation meeting.
Some council members discussed the possibly of changing the amount after hearing from the public. Town Manager Barbara Gilbert is looking to see if that is possible.
An attorney for the town is writing of the questions that will be placed on the ballot, which will be reviewed by the council sometime in the near future. A public hearing, possibly in August, will be held on the topic and the councilors will be able to decide if they want to adopt the question for the November ballot.
According to the 2001 Rocky Hill Plan of Conservation and Development, residents surveyed either "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the town doing more to preserve open space. The survey also stated that people would be willing to pay higher taxes to preserve that open space.
Minority Leader Nadine Bell was the only councilor who voted against the motion. She said Monday's meeting was the first time that the "full council" had heard the motion and wanted more discussions on the topic before voting in favor it.
"I would like to hear input from the public before I decide to go to referendum," Bell said.
Bell said the town has "a lot of needs" including the schools, infrastructure and roads and she wants to prioritize what needs get done first.
"I think we need to take a step back and evaluate what the overall needs for the town are," Bell said. | <urn:uuid:364022f7-fadc-4038-85a0-168a3277b0e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rockyhill.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/council-moves-forward-with-question-to-help-preserve-89cd769270 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979187 | 948 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Fair is fair… or is it?
Corpus Juris talks Fair Use with Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US. It’s not about convenience, but content, and she believes that groups like the EFF are “poisoning the well” when it comes to copyright and the DMCA.
The Sony Betamax Supreme Court decision was one of the most important “fair use” decisions of the last 25 years, but it’s been a constant source of frustration for Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US since 1994. As head of the Copyright Office, Peters is in charge of the triennial DMCA anticircumvention review process. And every three years, her office sees the Sony case used as the basis for the most popular requested exemption: DVD ripping.
Each time the Copyright Office deals with the issue, consumer groups contend that fair use rights to use the material on DVDs are being violated by access controls, and they want an exemption in order to back up discs or to use video clips in noninfringing ways. After all, didn’t the Sony case put an official blessing on all recording equipment that had substantial noninfringing uses? Doesn’t this mean that consumers have a right to use DVD rippers and that an anticircumvention exception should therefore be made for all DVDs? The EFF certainly thought so, arguing as much at the first triennial rulemaking back in 2000.
But when I spoke with Peters about fair use, she pointed out that the Sony decision is in fact a narrow one and that fair use itself is often ambiguous unless defined by a judge. The Court’s ruling in the Sony case was limited to “free, over-the-air television for time-shifting,” she tells me. “It is not space-shifting; it’s not anything beyond that. It’s not off cable, it’s not off video-on-demand, and yet if you talk to most consumers, they think that anything they do in the home that comes through their television set is fair use.”
“That becomes a consumer expectation that you hear about that they want enabled,” she continues, “and I don’t disagree with that; that’s what the market is demanding, and that’s what the market should provide, but don’t call it fair use.”
“I don’t want to say it’s a crapshoot”
Her comment points out that fair use in the US can be a vague concept. Section 107 of the Copyright Act allows for the fair use of material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” but speaks in broad terms rather than specific instances. Fair use can extend beyond these listed purposes (note the “such as” statement in the law), but to qualify as “fair,” a use has to pass the famous four-part test, which considers the following factors:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- The nature of the copyrighted work;
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
What this means in practice is that people cannotknow if something is fair use without testing their theory in front of a judge. This has happened on plenty of occasions—like the Sony/Universal case that opened the door to legal VHS recordings from TV broadcasts—but these rulings are generally quite narrow, applying only to the specific circumstances of the case. “Once a court has actually handed down a decision with regard to specific facts,” Peters says, “if you fall within those facts, you’re safe, but once you start wandering away from those facts then—I don’t want to say it’s a crapshoot—but it’s not clear.”
In the minds of many Americans, though, “fair use” means a whole host of things that are not contained in the Copyright Act or outlined in a judicial decision. As Peters puts it, “‘fair use’ has become a shortcut for what ‘I think the balance should be as I look at the copyright law.’”
Take DVD ripping as an example. As noted above, it’s an issue that Peters hears about without fail every three years as users seek a DMCA exemption to the anticircumvention protections that extend to DVDs. Why has the Copyright Office rejected the proposed exemption at each triennial rulemaking to date? In her words, it’s because the widely-hacked CSS encryption on DVDs does not actually prevent fair use at all, and those who think otherwise don’t understand exactly what rights fair use grants them.
I want my fully-backed-up, playable-on-Linux DVDs!
According to Peters, the exemptions only exist to give users access to material that is lawful for them to use and that they cannot get in any other way. While the first part of that test does apply to backing up DVDs or watching them under Linux, the second part generally does not. People don’t really just want fair use, Peters says, they want to “crack a code in order to make fair use of content, but the content, for the most part, they can get in an unencrypted format. But they don’t really want that.”
Much of the material on DVDs can be obtained from other sources—VHS tapes, for instance. Sure, the quality isn’t as good, and sure, it’s inconvenient, but Peters doesn’t see that these are legitimate arguments in favor of crafting a new exemption. “There’s a Second Circuit Court decision that says that convenience is not a reason to do it,” she points out. “Nothing says that fair use says you get to do it in the most convenient form, and the one that is preferable to you. Fair use is really about content, and you shouldn’t be hacking through things to get the most convenient format.”
She also rejected arguments to the contrary put forth by the EFF during the triennial rulemakings in 2000 and 2003 and said that the EFF’s assumptions in those documents were wrongheaded. “Any copyright owner should have their hair standing on end,” she said during a recent conference on DRM, adding that the EFF was “poisoning the well” with some of its arguments by seeking to restrict the applicability of copyright and the DMCA.
The EFF’s senior staff attorney, Fred von Lohmann, not surprisingly takes issue with this characterization. “I think these copyright owners have far more to fear from the Copyright Office than from EFF,” he tells me, pointing out that anyone who composes machinima or creates YouTube videos is also a copyright holder.
“Moreover, copyright law is not concerned solely with enriching copyright owners but rather is enacted for the benefit of the public, which is to say, the fans,” he adds. “Far from ‘poisoning the well’ for fans, [the] EFF is virtually the only voice speaking up on their behalf in copyright debates. The Copyright Office, disappointingly, often views itself [as] an advocate for copyright owners rather than for the public at large.”
After coming to this conclusion in 2005, the EFF declared the triennial rulemaking (PDF) “fundamentally unable to protect the interests of today’s digital media consumers” and has stopped participating in the process.
Ambiguity: it’s a good thing
von Lohmann agrees with Peters about fair use: it’s ambiguous and defined only in retrospect by the courts. He characterizes this as a great strength of the fair use law since fair use becomes flexible enough to encompass all sorts of new uses and technologies. A more rigid law would have been clearer but of much less utility.
This ambiguity is “not a bug, it’s a feature,” he says. “Marybeth Peters is correct that the Sony Betamax case does not clearly establish that space-shifting is a fair use. Neither does it say that it’snot a fair use. That’s a question for a court to answer when the case comes up.”
Peters, despite heading the Copyright Office, does not define fair use. As both she and von Lohmann pointed out, her opinions on the matter are those of an expert, but they don’t carry the force of law. “It’s not Marybeth Peters’ job to tell us what is a fair use, any more than it is mine,” says von Lohmann. “The law leaves that decision to the courts.”
It seems quite likely, based on past court decisions, that DVD ripping would have been found legal in a court, apart from the pesky issue of DRM. Once the DMCA entered the picture and CSS found a place in the DVD spec, the DVD licensing consortium gained a way to prevent all sorts of uses that might otherwise have been decreed as “fair.” And so long as it’s possible to get access to the material in other ways, Peters and others in the Copyright Office have no plans to carve out an exemption. (The recent Kaleidescape caseallowed for some DVD ripping but only covered a commercial media server that retained the CSS encryption and had a license from the DVD CCA.)
Fortunately for consumers (otherwise known as “everyone not in the movie business”), Peters and the studios both know that a backlash has been building on this issue. Regardless of the technicalities of fair use and the DMCA, people have their own sense of what is fair and reasonable and get frustrated when technology imposes additional limits. Peters says that she “believes in DRM” because it keeps the US away from a levy system but says that the market should really work these issues out. And Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA, said in a recent speech that the studios soon hope to bring users a way tolegally rip DVDs, though he was maddeningly short on details (and appeared to endorse a DRM-based solution of some sort).
Unless DMCA reform is passed in Congress, studios and others will continue to use DRM as a way to circumvent the fair use issue, replacing the freedom that the ambiguous law provides with something much more controlled: technology that allows users to do only what rights-holders allow them to do. This undermines a basic point of fair use, which is that permission is not required. The argument that convenience doesn’t matter here may well be true from a legal perspective, but it matters on a daily basis to those who want to do something that would otherwise be legal but don’t have the time, energy, and tools to track down and digitize lower-quality VHS recordings, for instance.
While fair use remains ambiguous and the four-part test can seem esoteric, it has served the US well for decades. Unfortunately, technology now provides a way to enforce limitations that no judge ever would. But the use of such technology is not inevitable; as Peters says, hopefully the market will sort it all out. Until then, try not to scratch those DVDs. | <urn:uuid:4b8a87f2-0c97-4f24-92ed-b77717f334cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecorpusjuris.com/news/item/what-the-us-copyright-office-thinks-about-fair-use.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958796 | 2,444 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Dentist - Lithonia
Amber Jenkins Dabney, DDS
8200 Mall Parkway, Suite #155
Lithonia, GA 30038
Some dental procedures, such as tooth extractions and oral surgery, may call for our office to prescribe medications before or after a procedure. These medications are used to prevent or fight an infection, or to relieve any post-operative discomfort and pain.
For these reasons, it is extremely important that you share your entire medical history - including any medications you are currently taking - with our office. Some medications used in dentistry, and other medical practices, could interact with those medications in a detrimental way. In addition, if you have any allergic reactions to certain medications, it is important for our office to know beforehand.
Finally, if you are prescribed any medication by our office, follow the dosage instructions very carefully, and if instructed, finish your entire prescription even if you are no longer feeling pain. | <urn:uuid:35d55c57-3ea2-4f20-9569-2c97462eff24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beautifulsmiledds.com/library/46/Medications.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930088 | 194 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Ten people died and 45 were injured in India when a bomb hidden in a briefcase exploded in a crowd of people waiting to secure passes to enter the High Court in New Delhi.
The latest attack came nearly two months after terrorists detonated bombs in three crowded neighborhoods in Mumbai on July 13, which left 20 dead.
Judges and lawyers fled from inside the courthouse and passersby rushed to the site to help the injured, the Associated Press reported.
In neighboring Pakistan, twin suicide bombings at the home of a senior military officer in the southwestern city of Quetta killed 23 people, including the officer's wife and at least eight soldiers.
The first bomber drove his explosives-laden vehicle next to a group of Frontier Corps officers standing near the deputy chief's residence. The second suicide bomber hurled grenades as he ran toward the house, detonating his explosives belt once inside.
Wednesday's bombing may have been in response to Monday's announcement by the army of the arrest of senior al Qaeda operative Younis al-Mauritani. The army stressed the prominent role the CIA played in the operation.
"The attack was maybe in reaction to the recent arrests," the AP quoted police officer Hamid Shaki.
According to the report, stressing the role of CIA involvement coupled with praise for the arrest by U.S. officials may point to an improvement in the strained relationship between the two countries.
During confirmation hearings last June before the Senate Armed Services Committee, former CIA Director Leon Panetta called the relationship a "difficult one."
"The relationship with Pakistan is at the same time of one of the most critical and yet one of the most complicated and frustrating relationships that we have," Panetta said. | <urn:uuid:c28e8b6b-4b92-4a77-b32f-8d0164580e9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2011/September/Bombings-in-India-Pakistan-Kill-Injure-Dozens/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976969 | 345 | 1.625 | 2 |
By Matt Krantz, USA TODAY
When eyeing the beaten-up stocks of companies at risk of filing for bankruptcy protection, bargain hunters should beware.
But the reality is much more stark, as shares of companies filing for bankruptcy protection have a horrible history. While sometimes the companies survive, common stock investments usually go up in smoke. "The shareholders tend to lose in these cases," says Philip Russel, a professor of finance at
Reasons to be wary of beaten-down shares of companies heading into bankruptcy protection:
•Investors ended up with nothing in 22 of the 36 publicly traded companies with at least $100 million in assets that had reorganization plans approved in 2008, BankruptcyData.com says.
•Even when shareholders aren't wiped out, they are left with little of the remaining company. Recoveries following approved bankruptcy plans in 2008 were sometimes as little as 5% of the restructured company, BankruptcyData.com says.
This isn't a recent trend. Investors who bought seemingly cheap stocks, with share prices of $2 or less on average, as companies underwent the bankruptcy restructuring process lost all their money 60% of the time and overall wound up with an average loss of about 70% based on data from 1984 and 1993, according to research by Russel and Ben Branch of the University of
Even in cases where a company itself might emerge, as
The underlying problem is common shareholders are last in line when a company restructures. If investors want to speculate on a company's recovery, they may choose to invest in the company's debt or preferred stock, which have higher claims to a company's assets than common stock, says Jack Ablin of Harris
"Bankrupt stocks that are trading for 25 cents used to be $30, so some investors think they have to be cheap," says George Putnam, publisher of BankruptcyData.com. "That's rarely the case."
Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more. | <urn:uuid:6d3ec672-16a2-458c-acd7-8b80d888ab21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-05-31-gm-bankruptcy-stock-value_N.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960827 | 441 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Newspapers on the Rebound?
June 16, 2010 Leave a comment
Not long ago, newspapers were seen as a dying breed. Admittedly, they have seen better days. Advertising is flagging and readers are moving form the papers to the Internet. The Federal Trade Commission set up sessions exploring how to safe the flagging newspaper industry. There was talk of state subsidy and of possibly turning them into some form of charitable corporations. In “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), Philip Meyer, predicts that in 2043, someone will be receiving the final copy of the final newspaper. Yet the demise of the newspaper could have been greatly exaggerated. Many are turning a profit again, admittedly a small profit, but that is certainly better than the nose dive they were experiencing not long ago.
But their survival has come at a steep price. These are not the same newspapers that we read a couple of years ago. Journalists and editors have taken the brunt of the cuts as newspapers have pared down. According to the American Society of News 13,500 positions have been cut in the last three years. An article in the Economist points out that unlike papers in many other countries, American newspapers have traditionally relied heavily on ad revenues. According to the Economist: “Fully 87% of their [American newspapers] ad revenues came from advertising in 2008, according to the OECD. In Japan the proportion is 35%. Not surprisingly Japanese newspapers are much more stable.”
In central Europe some publishers had their most profitable first quarter on record. Brazil now boasts five tabloids and advertising has remained strong. In the U.S., some companies have had remarkable rebounds since mid 2009.
Although most newspapers have raised their prices, and cuts in the cost of paper and in the amount of paper being used have also helped, it is the internal cuts and terminations that have led the way in publishing’s survival of the fittest. In the U.S., newspapers reacted to the recession by cutting not with a scalpel, but with a butcher knife. From film and theatre reviewers, to science, business, reporters in nearly all fields felt the cuts. This approach has reshaped newspapers as we know them. Most now rely on wire services or the larger national outlets to supply them with much of the information and articles on music, film, food, health, cars, business, and foreign affairs. With newspapers now heavily relying so heavily on the wire services for their coverage of the arts and business and foreign affairs, we are losing a great deal. We are left with a homogenized centralized view of the world. We have one or two voices where once there were many.
Newspapers are also morphing; learning from the net, many are becoming more specialized and niche focused. Most are concentrating more than ever on giving readers what they want as opposed to offering a well rounded, vetted, journalistic view of the world, which also has its dangers. Yet, the upside is that, realizing that small papers have overall fared much better than large publications during the recession, many are once again becoming truly local newspapers. An increase on local news and events is a good thing. It is that approach that initially built the newspaper industry.
Copyright © Anthony Mora 2010
For further information visit: | <urn:uuid:e3badc18-54ff-41cd-bf9c-d9e8b8964f5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://topstorypublicrelations.com/2010/06/16/newspapers-on-the-rebound/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981857 | 667 | 1.835938 | 2 |
The Good Life
July 29, 2011
Read: Micah 6:6-8
It is good for me to draw near to God. —Psalm 73:28
Philosophers ponder, “What is the good life and who has it?” I instantly think of my good friend Roy.
Roy was a gentle, quiet man who sought no recognition, who left the care of his life to his heavenly Father, and who occupied himself solely with his Father’s will. His was a heavenly perspective. As he often reminded me: “We are but sojourners here.”
Roy passed away last fall. At his memorial service, friends reminisced over his influence on their lives. Many spoke of his kindness, selfless giving, humility, and gentle compassion. He was, for many, a visible expression of God’s unconditional love.
After the service, Roy’s son drove to the assisted-living facility where his father lived out his final days. He gathered up his dad’s belongings: two pairs of shoes, a few shirts and pants, and a few odds and ends—the sum of Roy’s earthly goods—and delivered them to a local charity. Roy never had what some would consider the good life, but he was rich toward God in good deeds. George MacDonald wrote, “Which one is the possessor of heaven and earth: He who has a thousand houses, or he who, with no house to call his own, has ten at which his knock arouses instant jubilation?”
Roy’s was the good life after all.
Let us be Christ’s true disciples
Looking to another’s need;
Making stony pathways smoother
By a gentle word or deed. —Thorson
No one can know the good life without God. | <urn:uuid:b395dfb3-9bbc-43b2-aa09-2f95aef075fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/forums/showpost.php?p=919394&postcount=1087 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982321 | 387 | 1.75 | 2 |
Hood College freshmen will have an opportunity to pilot one new academic program while continuing two others as they start the 2012-13 school year.
The class of 2016 will be Hood's first to participate in the first- year seminar program, which consists of 13 different seminar courses offered to only first-year students.
Freshmen also received iPads, extending Hood's initiative to integrate the technology into the classroom, and the college will continue its first-year read program, which brings a well-known author to campus.
Hood Provost Kate Conway-Turner said first-year seminars are being offered in a variety of subjects ranging from computer science to history to psychology, but they are interdisciplinary to expose students to one subject from a variety of perspectives.
Seminars are designed to engage first-year students with a strong writing discipline and encourage them to think critically.
"We want to have students thinking in an analytical way," she said.
Conway-Turner said Hood noticed a theme across the best liberal arts campuses was to offer a first-year seminar program.
Sue Carney, chairwoman of the first-year seminar committee, said the pilot is intended to help students improve their writing and become engaged on campus from day one.
Carney, an assistant professor of biology at Hood, said classes will be limited to 15 students, offering them a chance to get to know Hood's faculty.
The seminar pilot is scheduled to last three years, with the committee looking for evidence of students becoming better writers and excelling in later courses.
"We're going to use the data, and hopefully, it will tell us if these classes are making an impact," she said.
The three-credit seminar program is not mandatory this year -- it's only strongly encouraged.
Although it is not mandatory, Conway-Turner said students have flocked to these classes with more than 200 of the 275 incoming freshmen signed up.
For the second year in a row, every Hood freshman has received an iPad, and Conway-Turner said the college is expected to make a decision by the end of this semester on whether to continue the program.
iPads for the class of 2016 were funded through a gift to the college, she said.
An indication that the college is further preparing to move in the direction of more iPads is an opportunity for some upper classmen to receive iPads this year.
According to Conway-Turner, upper classmen in specific courses such as calculus will be loaned an iPad for the semester.
"They will be in a really good position because they'll be taking more advanced courses to give me a good sense of how we can utilize iPads in upper division courses as well," she said.
Hood plans to use faculty and student surveys to help make its decision about whether to continue giving iPads to students.
The main reason that Hood is exploring the iPad option is because technology is here to stay, and students are coming to the college from schools that already use iPads in class, Conway-Turner said.
"We really are wanting to make sure that we're prepared and on the cutting edge to receive students using the kind of technology that they will become accustomed to," she said.
Hood freshmen received their iPads during summer orientation and have already had the opportunity to put them to use.
The college is continuing its first-year read program that began last year. It requires all incoming freshmen to read a book selected by a committee of faculty and students before they arrive on campus.
Instead of picking up a physical copy of the book, students were able to download it to their iPads, according to Conway-Turner.
Students will be asked throughout the fall semester to participate in group and panel discussions about the book and watch movies that relate to the book's themes before the author visits at the end of the semester.
This year's selection is "Factory Girls" by journalist Leslie T. Chang. It describes everyday life for factory workers in China in the early 2000s.
Conway-Turner said Hood chose the book because of its timeliness with the phenomena and troubles of megafactories in China.
It also appeals to a range of students, whether they're interested in history, psychology, social work or technology, she said.
The purpose of the program is to extend student perspectives outside of what they already know, and the reality of working in one of these megafactories is hard for students to imagine, Conway-Turner said.
"The book very much pushes our students to think about something that is very, very different than what they would normally have experience with," she said. | <urn:uuid:1d979c25-3e62-4684-86e0-5173e643fbab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wtop.com/70/3001555/Hood-College-freshmen-receive-iPads-pilot-new-program | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976229 | 953 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Richard Whittington, MD
Last Modified: November 1, 2001
Dear OncoLink "Ask the Experts,"
My father was just diagnosed with prostate cancer and the impression is it's still in the early stage but aggressive. Radical prostatectomy is not recommended due to his past medical history. My father is 57 years old and re-occurrence rate is of major concern. His PSA level was 4, but the Gleason score was 7. I would like to know what are the survival and re-occurrence rates of external beam radiation and external beam radiation used together with radioactive seeds.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Richard Whittington, MD, Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, responds:
First off, this would not be considered an extremely aggressive tumor with a Gleason Score 7 and a PSA of 4.0. However, it can have about a 50% mortality rate at 10 years. The experience with external radiation +/- seeds is very operator dependant. With a dose of 66 to 70 Gy (6600-7000 rads), the overall 15-year survival rate (free of tumor) is about 60%; with doses of 74 to 78 Gy, the rate may rise to 75 to 80%.
External radiation with seeds is associated with a 60% 5-year disease free survival. Some others have even reported that it may be as high as 90% at 5 years in very select patients. There is a trial that shows that the addition of hormones to external radiation, for 6 to 12 months, will increase the standard cure rates by up to 20%. Our experience with adding hormones to seeds is that is that it also raises the 5 yr disease free survival into the upper 80% range. The key is to go to a center that sees a substantial number of men with prostate cancer each year, as experience is very helpful. | <urn:uuid:db9f2307-3014-41cc-8e4c-9a9d13ffd32d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oncolink.org/experts/article1.cfm?id=1318&c=90 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973966 | 389 | 1.773438 | 2 |
To Christians: What is morality to me, an atheist?
To my Christian readers:
By far, the most common argument I see made against atheists is that while they have moral standards, they do not have a defense of morality and therefore are “borrowing” from a Theistic (e.g. Christian) worldview every time they make a moral statement. This is presented as evidence that atheists have an internal contradiction in their worldview whereby they are not allowed to make any moral statements because they cannot account for the origin – or source – of morality.
Before I begin a discussion on what I hold morality to be, I want to carefully outline a series of important concepts that have lead me to my current position. Before that, I want to outline my interpretation of the Christian argument for absolute morality that for many is a compelling reason to believe in an Absolute Moral Law Giver. The latter is just to demonstrate that I do understand the Christian position and am not trying intentionally to set up a straw man argument.
The Christian perspective is generally a top-down approach to morality, wherein God is the source of all morals. While there are many nuanced perspectives on this, most Christians argue that morality extends from God’s nature. God is good, therefore He cannot do anything wrong or He defines what is right and wrong. Common moral laws (or concepts) found among men are evidence that we share a common nature and this common nature is what separates us from other animals and is evidence that we were made in the image of God. In this way, morality is absolute because it “comes from” an Absolute Moral Lawgiver – so to speak. Hence, all we have to do is “look around us” and see that men follow common morals and this is evidence of God and the fact that we are made in His image.
Please forgive me if I have not addressed the view as precisely as you wish, as I have heard many nuanced and sophisticated perspectives on this and do not wish to take the time to address each and every one of them; but I must in some way “sum them up” so that I can move on in my paper. Bear with me if you think I am not addressing your particular perspective on this argument, as I will show that from my perspective the nuances are irrelevant because the presuppositions of the entire argument are not completely accurate. It is not that I just do not believe in God, and so I therefore “interpret” the world through an anti-God bias, it is that I believe there is a better and more comprehensive explanation of all morality found among men than that our morality comes from God. You are allowed to be quite skeptical. Quite honestly, I encourage your skepticism. Just please give me a chance and be respectful of the conclusions I have now reached and before you critique my simple arguments, please demonstrate that you understand my point of view at least to the level that I understand the Christian argument out of respect for the Golden Rule.
So then, to start I would like to try and find some common ground between us. We both agree that some things are wrong and some things are right. Some things are always wrong and some things are sometimes wrong. For example, it is always wrong to murder, but not always wrong to kill. Why? Because murder is more than just killing. Murder is killing with an intention to harm.
Now then, from the atheist perspective, things are bottom-up instead of top-down. If you can for a moment – just for the sake of a thought exercise to “sympathize” with my atheist perspective (no matter how wrong I may be) – consider that there are two possible ways to look at the data.
If a person is trying to find a common thread in a set of data, they will probably find it. On the other hand, if a person is trying to find differences in a set of data, they will probably find those too. Just as a person looking at a set of numbers can both look for a common denominator or look for the differences between those numbers.
So it is with morality. If a person is looking for a common thread of morality in all of mankind, they will find it. If a person is looking for differences in morality among mankind, they will find it too! So the Christian looks at cultures and sees moral consistency. The atheist looks at Christians and sees moral inconsistency. Both groups perceive that what they see is evidence for their particular perspective. The Christian sees all common morals among mankind as evidence of a common moral source for mankind. The atheist sees all moral discrepencies among Christians as evidence that there is no common moral source among Christians.
So, in a sense, I sympathize with both perspectives. Confirmation bias plays a part in both cases. We see what we want to see because we are either looking for discrepancies in the data or looking for consistency in the data. Now, understanding this helps us see why both groups end up at the conclusions they do; but it does not so far help us resolve what is moral.
The Christian argues that without an absolute source of morality, morality becomes relative and therefore makes each person autonomous and without a restriction on human behavior that lies above all mankind, societies will fall into moral chaos. Christian’s then appeal to communism, the falling of Rome, atheist nations that have collapsed, etc. as examples of this.
The atheist argues that despite the claim to an absolute moral law giver, Christians still cannot agree with each other quite often on what is right or what is wrong. Each person who claims to be a Christian firmly holds that their particular understanding of God’s absolute perspective on a moral issue is accurate. Furthermore, those who claim to be Christian look at others who claim to be Christian and argue that since their perspective differs, they must not be a “true Christian”. This produces a sense of moral chaos as well. The atheist then appeals to church splits, the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, etc. as examples of this.
Both sides think the other sides perspective on morality will cause harm. Both sides want to avoid harm.
Consider the atheist dilemma: how are we supposed to determine which Christian interpretation of morality is the accurate one? Indeed, there is a common thread among Christian morality and I will get to this in a bit. However, there are differences and we do not know how to deal with these if the Christian perspective has some truth to it. It is easy to uphold your own personal Christian interpretation and argue that we know “deep down” what morality is, but is that not begging the question and somewhat arrogant on your part to argue that you know us better than we know ourselves? To us, this attitude itself seems immoral and we feel justified in ignoring anything you say after this point.
Despite our understanding of the difference in worldview, the problem still remains: how do we determine what is moral? Even deeper: what is morality? Once we determine what morality is, then we can tackle the issue of where it comes from. Once we have determined these things, we have formulated a hypothesis as an explanation of morality. Then, it is simply a matter of comparing our hypethesis with the data. If the hypothesis fails at any point, we must start over. In other words, I am personally trying to come up with an explanation of all morality that always makes sense and never fails. Only then can we begin to determine what is moral and what is not.
Now, the argument that could be made at this point is that I am beginning my search for morality with an assumption that God does not exist and will therefore inevitably reach the wrong conclusions. Because I am “blinding” myself to the Truth, my search is hopeless.
Now it is obvious that I will disagree with this, and please bear with me as I explain why. As a Christian, surely you know that even those who do believe in God oftentimes have strongly differing opinions on whether certain actions are moral or not. So to me, it seems silly for a Christian to dismiss my entire search for morality on the basis that I do not start with a belief in God because even those who do believe in God apparently lack unity in their perspective on morality – except that they all agree morality comes from the same God! But if morality comes from their same God, why do they disagree on moral issues? So then, if I were to start with a belief in God, which moral framework would you expect me to come to? Your own or that of another Christian you disagree with? How would I know which Christian moral view is accurate? You cannot set me on a search for absolute morality based on a belief in God when even the morality among Christians seems relative to their own interpretation of what God is saying.
So my first conclusion is that it looks like morality is quite relative among those who can only seem to agree on this one point: that morality is absolute. In other words, the consistency among believers is that they believe morality has an absolute basis. But their moral interpretations are inconsistent. This seems quite a strong contradiction and makes me highly skeptical of the claim that morality is absolute.
And this brings us around again to the genuine Christian fear that without absolute morality, society will descend into chaos! At this point, Christians and atheist are basically arguing on the exact same basis (what will reduce harm) but are rapidly spinning in circles around each other by accusing the other of causing harm by their beliefs!
Personally, I think the fear that without moral absolutes society will descend into chaos is both true in one sense and false in another. I believe the premise is close to the truth, but misses one important item. I hold that morality is absolute but it’s absoluteness is found in the laws of nature, not in a moral law giver. Just as we do not daily fear the universe will descend into chaos without an Absolute Source of Gravity, so it is my perspective that if we can define morality in a similar way, we have not only declared a foundational moral absolute, we have solved the riddle of what morality is and now can explain what is moral and what is not in a way that will benefit society and help us solve the most complex moral issues. Just as discovering what sickness is allowed us the ability to fight it, so discovering what morality is will help us to fight the dangerous result of immorality: anarchy.
So keep in mind, I am actually trying to help you, not harm you. If we can find a common ground, it will help us live peacefully together as best as is possible despite our differences of beliefs at that time. But we do have a common ground: we are both trying to avoid harm! But, by trying to impose our perspectives on what is moral on others, we are actually contributing to the problem!
When I look at the morals of men, I see that what one man considers moral another man considers immoral. As a result, both see the other person as evil or deceived to some extent. This produces wars, fighting, bickering, jihads, crusades, suspicions, threats, attempts to convert, etc. All of which cause pain, which is why some people consider it wrong to attempt to convert!
Every man is trying to avoid whatever they perceive to be harmful.
Now at first, it appears that the solution is to get everyone to recognize a common morality. And quite honestly, I believe this is true. If everyone had the same moral code and followed it, mankind would be at peace with each other. But since men are not at peace with each other, either men have different moral codes or men are not following the one moral code they have.
The Christian perspective is that men are not following the one moral code that they have on the assumption that there is one absolute moral code. The atheist perspective is that men have different moral codes on the assumption that morals are based on what a person believes to be wrong, not on any absolute moral code. The Christian perspective is trying to solve the issue by getting men to recognize the one moral code and to follow it. The atheist perspective is trying to solve the issue by getting men to recognize that there is no single moral code and to stop men from trying to impose their morals on others.
But why do men need morals in the first place? Like we have already covered, I think that every person can agree: we need morals to avoid harm. Without morality, men suffer. So then, in some sense, morality finds its basis in keeping people from harm. Theists will normally argue that morals are given by God for our good. Even Moses declared this in Deuteronomy 10:13: “and to observe the LORD’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?” Moral laws are given for our good. This, I believe, all men can agree with – even atheists.
But how do we determine what is good? Some men believe that it is good to worship a particular God. Other men believe it is good to worship no god. Some men believe it is good to lie when it defends a human life. Other men believe it is wrong to lie no matter what. Some men believe that eating animals is not good because it causes harm. Other men believe that it does not cause harm and is therefore morally irrelevant.
From my perspective, this reveals that morality is both absolute in principle and relative in practice. It is absolute in that all moral laws are given on the basis that, if followed, they will help men to avoid harm. However, men have different perspectives on what causes harm: men can agree with each other that avoiding harm is good, but they cannot agree on what will cause harm. So morality is relative to what a person perceives will be harmful and absolute in that it attempts to avoid harm.
Therefore, based on this, here is my definition of morality: morality is the set of rules that are naturally held to by men who perceive a potential intentional threat to harm. A man’s moral framework is dependent upon perceived intentional harm.
This is why atheists consider hurricanes to be examples that God is evil. The atheist sees the hurricane as a threat and believes that if God exists He had the intention of bringing that hurricane. This is a perceived intentional threat to harm. Therefore the atheist sees this as evil.
The theist, however, holding to a belief that God is good and interprets the hurricane differently. The theist says that despite the perceived intentional threat, there must be a beneficial reason for the hurricane. The theist then looks intentionally for any possible way to interpret the hurricane that would be beneficial. The easiest interpretation is that God was enacting some form of justice by bringing the hurricane. At this point, the theist has undermined the atheist interpretation that the hurricane was harmful. By saying the hurricane was an act of justice, the theist can then argue that that the hurricane was for our good, thus justifying God’s intentions. [The atheist, naturally, sees this as post hoc interpretation and anthropomorphizing the source of natural events and as, therefore, a form of animism.]
For example, the Christian naturally believes that hell is a harm that should be avoided. The atheist, however, believes that hell does not exist and therefore the harm is actually found in teaching about hell. So the two clash on which will cause the most harm: a belief in hell or a lack of belief in hell. If the Christian is right, the atheist teaching that hell does not exist will cause inconceivable amounts of harm by causing people to go there. If the atheist is right, the Christian teaching about a hell that does not exist will cause inconceivable amounts of manipulative psychological and emotional damage by teaching people about a non-existent threat that influences their only life.
So then, we cannot determine which moral perspective is correct unless we can determine which truth claim is correct. A person’s natural perspective on what is considered moral is therefore dependent upon what a person believes. What a person believes is dependent upon what a person considers true or not. What a person considers true or not is dependent upon what a person considers valid evidence of truth. What a person considers valid evidence of truth is dependent upon what sources of information a person trusts.
Christians trust the Bible. Atheists do not. Do you see why the moral systems are so radically different?
Morality is dependent upon what is perceived to be truth because the truth informs us as to what is harmful. People, then, develop their sense of morality based on what they trust.
An example. In the middle ages, leeches were considered beneficial to a sick person because people who were trusted – doctors – concluded leeches were beneficial. Today, we know that blood-letting can actually be harmful because people we trust – also doctors – say they can cause blood poisoning! So in the middle ages, refusal to place a leech on a person might have actually been considered evil because it was depriving them of benefit. Today, placing a leech on a patient might actually be considered evil because it could be perceived as harmful. The only thing that has changed is our knowledge about the effect of placing a leech on a person. Our understanding of the truth has changed and that which is considered moral has changed with it.
Another example. A Christian believes that pre-marital sex is harmful because it deprives a person of the potential for God’s perfect marital plan. A non-Christian sees pre-marital sex as irrelevant to harm because they do not believe there is any perfect plan for marriage. The truthfulness of the claim is what determines whether a person perceives pre-marital sex as moral or not. Now consider how Christians will often argue that pre-marital sex is wrong. They will point out happy, successful Christian marriages where both partners waited until marriage to have sex. This become valid evidence to the Christian that Christian marriage is the most beneficial way to go by nature of the fact that it is the least harmful. The non-Christian, however, will immediately point out counter-examples: of Christian marriages that have failed, thus demonstrating that to them this is not valid evidence. Confirmation bias plays a part in both cases; although Christians please consider that good marriages occur outside the faith as well. Perhaps this just means that some marriages work and some marriages do not for reasons which we cannot always explain? The key then, is to determine the truths surrounding relationships and what relationship dynamics are harmful and what relationship dynamics are not.
[Keep in mind, it is not inconceivable to the atheist that authors of the Bible did actually discover moral laws that work, just as Biblical authors may have discovered things about technology that also work, so please expect our morals to sometimes line up with what Biblical authors said. This does not mean we are "stealing" from your worldview, it just means that some of our discoveries as to what causes harm naturally happen to match what Biblical authors also discovered causes harm. And yes, this does mean there is an absolute morality! All morality is based on what causes perceived harm. Atheists I know do not dismiss all Biblical morality, we just hold ourselves to a higher standard as to what causes harm than what a person said 2000 years ago during a period when superstitions abounded. The Biblical authors may very well be right, but we do not hold that they are right just because they said so or claimed to be speaking for God.]
So, now I hope that we can all see how morality works. It is dependent upon what a person perceives is true. Now then, it is ridiculous – and disrespectful – to try and impose your morality on someone else by insinuating that they secretly believe what you do. Why? Because it causes harm: people naturally feel endangered when others insinuate they are lying. Therefore, it is immoral to insinuate that another person is secretly lying when they tell you what they believe in an attempt to manipulate them into a confession in conformance with your moral standards. For example, it would be wrong for atheists to insinuate that Christians secretly do not believe in God in an attempt to undermine Christian morality. On the same token, it is wrong for Christians to insinuate that atheists secretly do believe in God in an attempt to get atheists to confess to Christian immoral behavior. An understanding of another person’s moral system begins with an understanding of what they believe to be true. You can then, based on this, determine what they believe to be harmful and can predict what they will consider morally wrong.
So having a proper means to determine truth (and therefore what causes genuine harm) is the foundation to understanding how to understand and develop our own perspective on what is moral or not and also to understand what others consider moral.
Morality, then is both absolute and relative. It is absolute in principle: it is always against causing harm. It is relative in practice because people have different perspectives on what will cause harm.
Therefore, the foundation of a moral society is a common set of rules to determine what is true, not undemonstrable assertions as to what will cause harm. Therefore, if we want a truly moral society we must conform our understanding of the truth to reason alone, not faith claims. Why? Because faith provides no rules at all to determine truth and is therefore morally bankrupt.
“Just believe” will always lead to moral anarchy and chaos and the crumbling of society because it will never reform itself to new discoveries as to what causes harm.
P.S. I have been asked in presenting this argument what my definition of “harm” is:
Harm is a reduction in perceived value. | <urn:uuid:ee9434c5-5fb9-4192-ba74-1a153608723e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://de-conversion.com/2009/08/08/to-christians-what-is-morality-to-me-an-atheist/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=4ca8fc8c32 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963322 | 4,451 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Welcome to the 13th Military History Carnival, a collection of blog posts on military history from then to (nearly) now and from here to there. There are a growing number of military history bloggers out there and a lot of fantastic material being posted. This post contains just a brief view of some of that material from the past month.
As if to prove the point about the military history blogosphere or historioblogosphere, Brett Holman at Airminded posted his analysis of "that portion of the blogosphere devoted to military history" using the Cliopatria blogroll and Technorati stats. Some very interesting data and analyses - and congrats to the top five military history bloggers.
As in military history carnivals past, I've attempted to divide the following roughly into themes. Many thanks to those who've submitted their posts for the carnival.
American Civil War
Civil War Books and Authors' Andrew Wagenhoffer has written a review of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008) an addition, in my mind, to the growing field of memory studies (thanks to Brett Schulte for submitting this post).
Likewise, Brett Schulte at TOCWOC: The Order of Civil War Obsessively Compulsed has provided an interesting review of Mark Grimsley's The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Meanwhile Rea Andrew Redd at Civil War Librarian brings to our attention the latest from Eric J. Wittenberg, J. David Petruzzi and Michael F. Nugent, One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863 (Savas Beattie Publishing, 2008). Although not a review, the post does contain a lengthy publisher's description of the book.
With Sword and Pen's Paul Taylor writes, not so much a review, but rather a discussion, of Dale Cox's The Battle of Natural Bridge, Florida: The Confederate Defense of Tallahassee (self-published, 2007), including links to Cox's website on the battle and his blogs on Florida during the Civil War.
Alright, something about the American Civil War that's not a book review. At behind AotW, Brian Downey tells the fascinating story of one Union soldier's experience - a member of the Fourth Regiment, New York State Volunteers - of Civil War (and beyond) medicine and his subsequent life with a hole in his skull.
First World War
Alexander Clark at Military History and Warfare provides a lengthy look at how Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Imperial Germany's successful commander in East Africa, wasn't really a master of guerrilla warfare but, instead, truly a product of the traditional German military system.
Mel Hunt, at the Australian War Memorial blog, has posted a fascinating honour roll from the memorial's collection. The document itself is approximately six feet by three feet and contains signatures, unit information and illustrations from more than 1,100 Australian soldiers, sailors and nurses.
Meanwhile, Sceopellen exposes the variations between a draft version and the final poem "Mental Cases" from Wilfred Owen, a very dark, disturbing, and truly sad piece of poetry.
Second World War
Schuylkill County Pennsylvania Military History, penned by J. Stuart Richards, contains some very moving stories from the local wartime press on members of the United States Army Air Corps.
Sticking with the air war, Barbara-Marie Drezhlo over at Voices from Russia has posted a piece on Lilya Litvyak, "The White Rose of Stalingrad", one of the Soviet Union's wartime female fighter aces.
Melisende at Women of History, meanwhile, writes about the release by the National Archives in the United Kingdom of the wartime records of Special Operations Executive member Pearl Cornioley (Witherington), and also links to an earlier post providing more details about this British spy.
Over at the Military History Blog, Daniel Sauerwein has written about Woodrow W. Keeble - his life and career and the recent awarding of the Medal of Honor to this long-deceased soldier for his bravery during the Korean War.
Strange Maps reproduces a Japanese map from 1938 (originally posted on Airminded) graphically depicting the nation's fear of aerial bombardment - what a shock they were in for over the course of the next decade.
Finally, Jason at ExecutedToday recounts the grim details one of the many Nazi reprisal mass executions of the Second World War - that carried out on 24 March 1944 against 335 Italian citizens in retaliation for the killing of 33 German soldiers by Italian partisans.
Canadian military history
As a blogger of Canadian military history (historiography, really), I had hoped to introduce the audience to more than the usual amount of Canadian topics. No dice. I only found one item, further proof that Canadians have a long way to go to catch up with our friends south of the border.
What I did find, however, was very interesting. Dorothy Thompson at The Writer's Life has posted an interview with Canadian military historical fiction novelist William Hay discussing his published and future projects in the genre.
John Phillips at The Word on Employment Law with John Phillips: A blog about legal issues affecting the workplace asks whether the presence or absence of military service experience matters when looking at the ability of an American President to serve as Commander in Chief of the nation's military forces.
And Jennie Weber at American Presidents Blog focuses on one of the more militarily experienced presidents, Andrew Jackson, and his seemingly innate ability to survive assassination attempts.
Over at Historiann: History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present, there is an historical and historiographical discussion of the tragic story of the use of rape as a weapon of war.
Mark Grimsley at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age has unveiled the new Ohio State University military history home page (still under construction), including a core reading list of "100 essentials in military history" and a supplemental list of "additional works of value".
And now, for something completely different, Lafayette C. Curtis, at I, Clausewitz, has scientifically, methodically, and with great precision taken the "breast" out of breastplates.
Well, that's it. I hoped you've enjoyed this military history carnival. I would like to thank Gavin Robinson for his additional list of submissions and all-around excellence guidance on the carnival process.
The next edition of the military history carnival will be going home to Investigations of a Dog on 15th May. This will be a special edition with a theme of Contested Boundaries. As well as territorial disputes, Gavin would like to see posts about how war complicates boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species etc. Above all he wants to question the boundary between peace and war. Submissions don't have to be on these themes - you can still submit posts about any aspect of military history and armed forces. The usual limits apply: wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are not eligible.
E-mail submissions to email@example.com or use the submission form. | <urn:uuid:31f53a60-8b62-4251-adc1-62f205a822c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cmhistorians.blogspot.com/2008/04/13th-military-history-carnival.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939268 | 1,513 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Mario: The Biography Of A Legend
Since its inception in the early 80's Mario has formed an integral part of almost every console addicts gaming cycle and dare I say even family member. But, who exactly is Mario and what is it about him that makes him such a hit? On the surface Mario is a normal nonchalant plucky Italian plumber but it is the exceptional simplicity with class associated with the character that has made it a rousing hit.
Mario lives in the fictional island along with his shorter older brother Luigi as they both go through adventures after adventures in the fictional Mushroom Island. Mario is plucky with a moustache and a sideburn. He has an unusually large nose and it is the unique simplicity of the character that has drawn people to play Super Mario games. Initially Mario had to save his girlfriend Pauline in the initial Donkey Kong series. Later editions saw the adorable Italian plumber salvage the world and rescue Damsel in distress Princess Peach receiving a kiss every time as reward. Mario has an exceptional jumping height and that is used to good effect to move ahead in every single mission of the Super Mario games series. Mario primarily defence mechanism is his ability to knock down opponents upon jumping on them. This manuvore knocks smaller rivals down while stunting the bigger ones. Additionally Mario becomes Super Mario upon taking a special mushroom that allows him to sustain attacks before cutting down to normal size while a special fire Power converts him into a Fire Mario whereby he can gun down his opponents with fire bullets. A feature that makes the Mario games so innovative and original are the different hidden powers in the Mushroom Island which give our Italian hero a wide range of powers.
Most of the relations between Mario and his friends are hidden in the game although Princess Peach does show her appreciation for Mario's efforts with a kiss. Mario has an older brother in Luigi while he has an archrival in Browser but there are instances in which both of them work together to come up with a common solution. In the latest edition of the Super Mario games series, Mario has an evil twin in Wario although their exact relation is still a secret. Mario is not known to talk too much except quipping a phrase of two upon completing a mission. He speaks in a thick Italian accent although he is given full speech capabilities in the Mario sports titles.
Such has been the popularity of Mario that Nintendo has put up the Italian as their mascot. Nintendo has extensively marketed Mario over the past few two decades and it is this legacy that still attracts young and old to this immortal game. Be it through a console, hand held mobiles and PDA or in computers where loads of teenagers log in to play Super Mario games for free, Mario still remains an indispensable part of the gaming world series and will go down as one of the biggest virtual gaming icons ever. | <urn:uuid:e3ca67a5-d078-4bcb-9ac4-e6b3830102a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mariogamesmario.com/mario-the-biography-of-a-legend.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973063 | 569 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is going to develop a Madison River Recreation Management Plan – that seems to be certain.
What is unclear at this point is just what that management plan will look like. Some folks are grumbling about FWP already having a plan in mind and just going through a token public process to appease their own guidelines and a fearful and disgruntled public. I guess that could be the case, but at this point we have no other choice but to participate as much as possible in the process moving forward.
The process looks like this:
- The next step will be the appointment of a citizen advisory committee – probably made up of 12 members – by FWP director Joe Maurier on the advice of local FWP officials.
- The CAC will begin holding public meetings to wrestle over what a river recreation management plan should look like. These meetings will be held around the Madison River region and provide citizens multiple opportunities to comment.
- Once the CAC is done they’ll have a draft management plan and an environmental assessment, which will then be put out for public comment.
- The final plan will go before the five-member FWP Commission for approval.
FWP has said they would like to have this process completed within the year.
No matter your opinion, we can all agree the Madison River is crucial to the economic health of the Madison Valley. And it’s easy to see the economic importance of the fly fishing to the greater Ennis community. I understand those who have concerns that a recreation management plan will limit commercial outfitting on the Madison River. I agree with those who feel it is foolhardy to limit commercial outfitting in a difficult economic climate when there seems to be no evidence it’s having a detrimental impact to the river or the fishing experience.
That said; I believe this planning process could provide an opportunity to create a framework for more and diverse developed recreation along the Madison River corridor that could benefit the local area, both socially and economically.
The Madison River from Ennis Lake to the Varney Bridge has been designated by Montana Audubon as an Important Bird Area. What this essentially means is the diversity and quality of habitat supports a wide variety of bird species from cavity nesters that use the cottonwoods spring and summer for raising babies, to raptors that hunt the waterways, to the waterfowl that use the lake and river as stop over points in their migration south. On any day, any time of year, it’s not uncommon to be able to see close to 50 species of birds all within sight of the river.
Ennis is a hotbed for birding activity. Why not use this recreation planning process to identify areas along the river corridor that could be points of interest for birders. Maybe this planning process could be the first step in developing a birding and nature trail that clearly guides people on a birding and wildlife viewing experience in the Madison Valley.
Other successful birding and nature trails in Montana include the Bitterroot Birding and Nature Trail in Ravalli and Missoula County and the Northeastern Plains Birding and Nature Trail in eastern Montana.
These trails aren’t actual trails, per se. They are wildlife and bird viewing spots delineated on a map, with many accessible by vehicle and completely undeveloped. A trail like this could provide opportunities for a variety of businesses in the Ennis area.
Interestingly enough, more than 20 percent of Americans consider themselves birders, according to a 2009 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. Other interesting facts from that report are that in 2006 birding enthusiasts pumped more than $35 billion into the economy.
Other recreation opportunities could include a series of dispersed camping sites along the public land stretches of the Madison River. These sights could offer floaters a unique opportunity to enjoy extended trips on the river, while providing local guides and outfitters more options for trips.
Maybe there could even be a Madison River Canoe Trail that could be combined with the Birding and Nature Trail allowing birders and outdoor enthusiasts an experience truly unique to the Madison Valley.
This recreation management plan must also address the social problems created by the beer and giggle floaters on the lower stretch of the Bear Trap Canyon. Every year local law enforcement personnel write tickets for drinking and driving, underage drinking and a variety of other violations. Floater parking causes traffic problems; and unfortunately it seems like someone dies in a tragic accident along this stretch of river each year.
Managing recreation on this section of the Madison River is going to be a crucial part of the recreation planning process. The status quo isn’t going to work any longer. But a solution won’t be easily reached.
One thought may be restricting alcohol on this stretch of the river. I cringe at this, because I certainly enjoy a beer while floating the river. However, it could be time to restrict alcohol in the Bear Trap stretch at least during the peak use in summer months.
It may be true that we didn’t ask for this river recreation management plan, but the process has begun and a plan will be developed. It’s important to voice your opinions and concerns, but it’s equally important to steer this process in a direction that will have the most benefit to the local community and economy. | <urn:uuid:2e9faa1f-a607-4ab4-8efc-2ac83f7166b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.madisoniannews.com/madison-river-recreation-plan-economic-ennis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951483 | 1,089 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Friends, family essential in dealing with grief: panel
TORONTO — When you’re dealing with death and grief, it’s important to find comfort in friends and family since they can pull you out of isolation and help you through the grieving process.
That was one of the points made by the four speakers at a Nov. 15 panel at Beth Sholom Synagogue dealing with loss and personal tragedy.
Each panellist approached the topic, “The Many Facets of Personal Tragedy and Grief,” from different angles.
Rabbi Aaron Flanzraich, from the hosting synagogue, opened the evening with a speech in which he described the feeling that comes with loss – a sense of believing that nothing will ever be the same.
“If we can step back and rearrange the words that frame this evening, I would say to you first, there is tragedy, then there is grief,” he said. “Everyone’s grief is different.”
Paul Goldstein of Bereaved Jewish Families of Ontario (BFJO), which is run under the auspices of Jewish Family & Child, said attending grief sessions helped him face the death of his 20-year-old daughter, Shelley, who died in a car crash on her way to visit her sister at Camp Biluim in Mont-Tremblant, Que.
“In our grief, we cannot ever forget those around us who mean so much to us,” he said. “Let friends know you value and need them. You never know who or what will comfort you.”
Although she died almost 27 years ago, Goldstein said that, at times, the pain is still indescribable.
When he was first dealing with the death, he said he wanted to hide from the world and be alone with his emptiness and sadness. However, he learned he could run away from people, but not from his feelings.
Panellist MP Olivia Chow said although being with family and friends was immensely important when she was facing the death of her husband, former New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton, being in the public eye meant she also valued time alone.
“We had the state funeral, beautiful ceremonies, tributes,” she said. “There are different forms of commemoration, and that part, it’s comforting but it’s also really difficult.”
She tried to spend time alone, sometimes exercising, and often swimming. You can cry in the water and no one can tell, she said.
In addition to turning to friends and families, the speakers all agreed there were times when remembering their loved one was difficult, but helpful.
Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, of Beth Tzedec Congregation, said it can be difficult to get back to routine when you know the person isn’t there anymore. Even sitting around a table can be a challenge, he said, since you notice the person’s absence in an empty chair.
“Each of us can remember a particular place where we can see our father, mother, our child,” he said. “And sometimes we don’t want to touch it. But other times we want to sit in that chair. We want to lie down in that bed. We want to feel that person’s presence.”
The pews at Beth Sholom were mostly filled with seniors, many of whom were grieving. Throughout the speeches, some of them cried quietly, nodding as the speakers discussed their own experiences with death.
People nodded in agreement when Chow said she discovered that her grief comes and goes. “It could be an ordinary time and then boom, it comes, just like big waves.”
Goldstein shared a similar experience. He said although the pain, at times, is still indescribable, he realized that death is not the end of a relationship.
“[My family] allows ourselves to remember and think often of Shelley. It brings sadness, but also the warmth of remembrance,” he said. “Now when I think of my daughter, a smile comes to my face, and maybe tears.”
Chow said she’s not convinced that time will heal her sadness, although she added that she doesn’t cry as often these days. The key, however, is to celebrate the deceased person to show that love conquers death, she said.
“How do we do that? By connecting with other people. By celebrating that person’s legacy,” she said.
She thought about Layton as she sculpted a bust of him as a memorial. She said while he was alive, he had asked her to make one, but she joked she didn’t feel it was right to inflate his ego.
However, she found that sculpting it helped her connect with him in a private way, outside of her public life.
“Oh my God, was that ever hard,” she said. “Was it therapeutic? Maybe. I don’t know. It was very hard.”
Rabbi Flanzraich stressed that everyone’s grief is different, and unless you’ve faced such profound loss, you cannot understand the feeling, he said. For many, death can make it seem like nothing will ever be the same again, he added.
But “even though [life] might not be the same again,” he said, “it doesn’t mean life can’t be both beautiful and meaningful.” | <urn:uuid:5e4be6b6-9e7e-4d01-ae82-eddcddd96ab2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cjnews.com/health/friends-family-essential-dealing-grief-panel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983706 | 1,177 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Earlier this week my daughter got to read her new story, Annie and the Swiss Cheese Scarf to her first grade class, as well as the kindergarten class with her teacher from last year.
In honor of this special occasion, I wanted to make some knitting themed treats for her to be able to pass out to the kids.
I couldn't make them as nice as the ones in the tutorial.. but they still turned out cute. These suckers were extremely time consuming! It took me about 10 hours to make 35!!
(I of course chose the signature green from my Never Not Knitting logo... of course.)
And then my husband and father-in-law made these awesome mini knitting needles from wooden dowels and wooden screw hole covers for the ends.
I LOVE THESE.
The last component was 35 freshly baked and frosted cupcakes.
Put it altogether, and we got this...
A cute knitting themed little cupcake.
The great part about it was that after the cupcake is eaten, the knitting needles can be washed and used again for actually learning to knit. They aren't as nice and smooth as regular knitting needles, but they were a great inexpensive alternative to purchasing a set of needles for every student in the class.
Plus they are miniature. And everything that is tiny is just cute. :)
We provided a little ball of "real" yarn and a set of knitting instructions to all of the kids in the class so they could try it on their own.
I was so pleased by how everything turned out. Of course my daughter was so excited to dress up like Annie and to share the story with the other kids. And I was thrilled by how well it was received. The kids seemed extremely enthusiastic about the story, about learning to knit, and of course.. the cupcakes!
And before my daughter read the story, I was able to talk to the class a little bit about knitting and yarn.
That was so fun for me to share a few fiber facts with these little ones. I asked them a few questions to test their knowledge and the answers were adorable and hilarious.
Here are a few of my favorites. :)
Me- Does anyone here know what yarn is made from?
Me- What kinds of things can you make with yarn?
Answer- paper towels?
Me- Has anyone had to practice something a lot before you became good at it, like Annie with her knitting?
Answer- Yes, I tried broccoli.
In the end the story accomplished exactly what I had hoped. All of the kids seemed genuinely enthused about learning to knit. I saw many kids after school holding the yarn and knitting needles trying to make stitches. I wished that I had more time that day to help these future knitters get started.. but hopefully we can do that another time. I can't wait! | <urn:uuid:fa6a5b6a-f47b-4ccc-9213-5846541ccabb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nevernotknitting.blogspot.com/2012/12/knitting-cupcakes.html?showComment=1355541860511 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984991 | 584 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Jon Lord, legendary keyboard player for Deep Purple, passed away on Monday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 71.
Jon Lord was brought up as a classically trained pianist, but it would be heavy organ riffs that would make him famous as he went on to co-found Deep Purple. His explosive style brought keyboard playing back into the forefront of rock, putting keyboardists in the spotlight as musicians who could carry a band. Lord’s classical training would shine through during Deep Purple’s constantly evolving live performances as his rich organ tones snaked through the crowds. Lord's signature sounds could be heard on Deep Purple hits like Smoke on the Water and Hush.
After Deep Purple, Lord went on to play keys in Whitesnake (not yet the hair metal band they are remembered as now), his use of electric piano and Moog synthesizers was essential as accompaniment to the blues sound of the band’s lead guitarists
Jon Lord created magic across his keys, he will be greatly missed. | <urn:uuid:47365719-ea22-4f41-b589-9cb5c9642787> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://moogmusic.com/news/deep-purple-keyboardist-jon-lord-passes-71 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98708 | 213 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The IPKat has probably blighted his standing among US law enforcement officers forever by reporting this, but the BBC got there first with "Wikipedia and FBI in logo use row", posted yesterday on that august institution's website.
Apparently a dispute has broken out between Wikipedia and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over the use of the latter's seal (right). The FBI is reported as having written to Wikipedia's San Francisco office, informing it that unauthorised reproduction of the FBI Seal was prohibited by US law, which states
"Whoever possesses any insignia...or any colorable imitation thereof ... shall be fined ... or imprisoned ... or both".Wikipedia denied that it had done anything wrong when garnishing its wiki entry for the FBI with an image of the seal, saying the FBI lawyers had misquoted the law.
The IPKat thanks Craig Watson (Murgitroyd and Company) for this lead. | <urn:uuid:648d79fb-018e-4c59-82a6-d689d1023f3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2010/08/rogue-seal-runs-rampant-in-wiki-world.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971586 | 187 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Meredith Pierce Hunter
Susan Gilbert Harvey
Hollins Abroad-Paris 1957
Author of Tea with Sister Anna: A Paris Journal
Hollins Abroad-Paris offers courses in French language, literature, art, theatre, architecture, film, economics, politics, and international relations. All courses are taught in French by instructors who are experienced in teaching non-native speakers. Even students who are initially apprehensive about taking all of their coursework in French quickly find themselves at ease in the classroom, and assistance is available for those who need it.
Classes are small and designed to take advantage of the rich resources of Paris. For example, guided visits to the Musee d'Orsay and other museums are an important part of the course on Impressionism. Architecture students travel around the city to study buildings and monuments on site, and each term's syllabus for French theatre is built around the current productions so students can study plays and then see them performed at the city's renowned theatres.
All students enroll in a French language or literature class along with other courses that meet their academic needs and interests. Most courses are open to all students in the program, while selected courses are reserved for advanced students.
Each Hollins Abroad class meets for three hours per week, Monday through Thursday. Fridays are reserved for group trips, museum and other field outings, study, and private exploration of the city.
If your French is very advanced, you have the option of enrolling in a course at any of several Paris universities in your major field of study or another subject in which you have a strong academic background. Hollins Abroad provides a tutorial for readings and written assignments. Independent studies in conjunction with courses taken at Paris institutes can also be arranged for students majoring in applied or performing arts (voice, instruments, dance, studio art, photography, etc.).
If you are spending two terms in Paris, you can also apply for an internship related to your career interests. Our students have interned in international law firms, art galleries, cultural organizations, schools, and many others settings. | <urn:uuid:bd10d2d2-45f6-49a3-9e10-ffe6740006ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hollins.edu/abroad/paris/curriculum.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960865 | 428 | 1.617188 | 2 |
As a major in the English Education sequence, you are required to be knowledgable about all of the information contained in this handbook. All requirements are subject to change by the Illinois State Borad of Education.
For more information, please contact Ryan Gray.
The English Education program at Illinois State University prepares candidates to become successful secondary English language arts teachers in diverse classrooms. It also provides on-going professional development for certified classroom teachers. Our students learn how research and theory support best practices in the teaching of English and gain valuable experiences in applying these ideas to rural, urban, and suburban classrooms. The program provides hands-on experiences through numerous partnerships with communities, schools, and teachers. The program enhances professional growth for teachers at every stage of their careers.
The program emphasizes five core areas of theoretical and practical knowledge.
English Education Information
Important information (deadlines, events, procedures, etc.) is sent out on a regular basis to your ISU Email account. You should check your ISU email account on a weekly basis, at the very least. You may also redirect ISU email to a personal email account, or email us to have a different email address added to the English Education Listserv. You are held responsible for any failure to notice and/or respond to e-mails from faculty and staff. Failure to respond may result in disciplinary action.
Admission to the English Education sequence is limited and is based on space availability and the competitiveness of the applicant pool.
A 3.0 GPA in the major, a 2.5 cumulative GPA, C or better in all required major courses, and adherence to all application procedures and deadlines is required for admission to Professional Studies and Student Teaching. Admission to Professional Studies and Student Teaching is limited and competitive. Deadlines and information about application forms and procedures for admission are available from the Center for Teacher Education and on the English Department website and are strictly enforced.
To continue in the English Education program, a student must meet the Professional-Based Assessment requirements through the College of Education. These consist of Gateways 1, 2, and 3. In the event a student chooses to withdraw from the English Education program, s/he relinquishes membership in a particular cohort of teacher candidates. Should that student seek readmission, continuance will proceed according to application deadlines for student teaching. Students who depart and subsequently return to the English Education program should expect to delay graduation by at least one semester.
A student whose major GPA falls below 3.0 will be placed on immediate probation. If, during the subsequent semester, the student fails to meet this minimum requirement, she or he will be removed from the English Education program and enrolled in the English Studies major. A formal application will be required of any student who achieves minimum GPA requirements and wishes to re-enroll.
During the first semester of their enrollment at ISU, external transfer students must provide evidence of a passing score on either the Test of Academic Proficiency, the ACT, or the SAT. If a student does not pass the test by the conclusion of the first semester, she or he will be removed from English Education program and enrolled in the English Studies major. A formal application will be required of any student who subsequently achieves a passing score and wishes to re-enroll.
Sequence of Coursework
The sequence of English methods, courses Psychology 215, and Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) courses must be followed. There are no exceptions to pre-reqs or to the sequence of the following courses:
This sequence takes 5 semesters to complete. English 296 must be completed with a C or better in order to proceed in Engish 297. English 296 and 297 may not be taken together. All courses must be completed with a "C" or better.
(This sequence will vary if you are participating in the Professional Development School [PDS] program.)
Completion of Gateway 1 is required prior to enrollment in TCH 214, 216. Gateway 1 includes the Basic Skills Test. This test should be taken by the end of the fall semester of your sophomore year. If you are a transfer student, you should take it as soon as possible during your first semester at ISU.
Completion of Gateway 2 is required prior to enrollment in student teaching. The State Content Test in Language Arts, required in Gateway 2, must be completed and passed before you can enroll in English 297.
In addition to your required course of study, you may choose to fulfill requirements for additional state endorsements, which allow you to teach in additional areas. Endorsements frequently earned by our graduates include the following: middle school, foreign language, theater, and Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL). Satisfying requirements for endorsements include either completion of a minor or completion of select courses. In addition, a student must pass the state content test associated with the endorsement. If you wish to add the middle school endorsement, which will change your certification from grades 9-12 to 6-12, you must complete two additional courses, C&I 233.01 and PSY 302 . These courses may be taken at any time. Realize that if you choose to fulfill requirements for a state endorsement, your graduation date will be delayed.
If you have any questions on the endorsements, contact the English Education Academic Advisor.
You are required to complete a certain number of clinical observation hours for English 296 and 297. You must attend these clinical hours at the assigned location. Not all of the locations are in Bloomington-Normal, so you will need to arrange transportation . Failure to complete your clinical hours will halt continuance in the program. For clinical experiences associated with English 296 and 297, leave open a 3-4 hour block of time at least two days per week for your clinical observations.
If you have already been confirmed for student teaching, you may complete the clinicals for ENG 297 at that school.
You are required to complete over 100 hours of clinicals prior to student teaching. Clinical Hours are distributed as follows:
TCH 212: 20 Hours
TCH 214: 20 Hours
TCH 216: 50 Hours
English 296: 10 Hours
English 297: 15 Hours
EAF 228, 231, or 235: 10 Hours
Seventy-five hours of clinical observation are required prior to the start of English 296.
It is the student’s responsibility to arrange transportation to and from clinical sites. You are not to skip any class to take part in a clinical experience. Clinicals must be done out side of scheduled coursework.
You will apply for student teaching three semesters prior to the student teaching semester. You will be notified about a mandatory application meeting that you MUST attend. Failure to attend this meeting will make you ineligible to apply for student teaching. Failure to attend the informational application meeting or to complete application materials will result in disciplinary action. To be admitted to this meeting, you must show proof of enrollment in or credit for TCH216 .
If you plan to do the Professional Development School exeprience (http://teachereducation.illinoisstate.edu/pds/), you must have either passed the Test of Academic Proficiency or achieved the required ACT score in order to apply.
When you apply to student teach, you may indicate preferences for your placement. These preferences in no way guarantee placement at these schools. If you turn down the first placement offered to you, we are not required to arrange another. You will NOT be placed at any high school you attended.
It is recommended that you have grades of "B" or better in all English courses. As an example, if you received a "C" in American Literature, but still have a 3.0 GPA, you should consider retaking an American Literature course. Be aware that school administrators and staff frequently reject student teaching applicants who don't meet this GPA requirement. Your student teaching may be delayed a semester if your academic record does not meet the standards of school personnel. Schools are beginning to turn down student teaching applicants who don't meet this GPA requirement, a practice that is only going to increase.
All major and general education requirements must be completed prior to student teaching. In order to student teach, all English major courses and Professional Education courses must be completed with a "C" or better. Students are not allowed to take any other classes while they are student teaching.
The time commitment required for student teaching is so great, that you should not be working part time while you are student teaching.
It is the student’s responsibility to provide his/her transportation to and from the school site.
Completion of English Education program requirements fulfills state requirements for certification as a 9 – 12 Language Arts teacher, an Illinois Type – 09 certificate. This certificate enables you to teach English, Speech, and Journalism.
Be advised that certification requirements can change at any time according to mandates of the State Teacher Certification Board or the Illinois legislature. Advising you receive will reflect these mandates and may, with little notice, necessitate changes in a student’s course of study.
Foreign Language Requirement
All English Education majors MUST complete a foreign language at the 115 (second year part I) level. This can be done either at ISU or at a community college.
Career Fair, Professional Issues Seminar, IATE
You are required to attend the Career Fair during your senior year. Prior to student teaching, you must return to ISU for 2-3 days to attend the Professional Issues Seminar. You must also attend the IATE and CITE conferences as part of ENG 296 and 297.
Additional Program Requirements
During your final three semesters in the English Education program, you will be required to attend local and state events central to your success as a teacher professional. In the context of ENG 296 and ENG 297, events will include participation in the annual convention of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) and ISU’s Conference for Illinois Teachers of English (CITE). A week prior to student teaching, you must return to ISU for a two-day Professional Issues Seminar. Failure to attend both days will delay your student teaching one semester. | <urn:uuid:5427f4d9-1b33-449c-8228-08b40a4d593f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://english.illinoisstate.edu/undergrad/majors/EngEd/englishEdhandbook.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936934 | 2,077 | 1.5 | 2 |
Feature by Hull City Online
Updated Thursday, 2nd November 2000
Douglas 'Dally' Duncan - Outside left (1928-32)
03.09.28 Oldham Athletic (a) 1-0
Aberdeen Richmond (August 1928)
Derby County (March 1932)
(Derby County) FA Cup Winner 1946
Scotland Youth: 1 - 0;
Scotland: 14 - 7;
Aberdeen Richmond Amateur
A Tiger is an animal of graceful and majestic movement and Duncan epitomised these characteristics fully. In addition he combined them with such talent. Christened 'Dally' by the fans for his apparent nonchalance, it was merely a ploy to hypnotise his opponent. Then, like a Tiger sensing a kill, he would pounce, swiftly moving inside from the touch-line to unleash a shot of enormous power. Although his artistry was often too rich a dish to be served up as Northern Section fare, he made his mark at Hull there is no doubt and his goals were of the highest quality. He played a key role in the Tigers cup run of 1929/30, appearing in every game and scoring the second goal in the first semi-final match against Arsenal.
His talent continued to blossom but with debts mounting, the club were forced to sell him to Derby for £2,000. There his star continued to shine. He gained international recognition, deservedly so, and played with Raich Carter in the Derby team that won the 1946 FA Cup Final.
Throughout their history, the Tigers have been blessed with many players of talent and skill. In the front row of that esteemed group will stand Dally Duncan. | <urn:uuid:a3c8b22b-8b4f-4ffc-92b1-ca1176d09215> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hullcity-mad.co.uk/feat/edy5/douglas_duncan_28045/index.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957304 | 344 | 1.5 | 2 |
Kondinin, WA, 6367
S 32° 29.705 E 118° 16.070
50H E 619109 N 6403977
Quick Description: Another interesting old Post Office in the small southern wheatbelt town of Kondinin.
Location: Western Australia, Australia
Date Posted: 1/20/2012 6:37:36 AM
Waymark Code: WMDJAV
This brick and corrugated iron building is a full service Post Office in the style common in the 1950s and 1960s. I couldn't find anything to indicate the age of the building. In looking at the photos I took it appears that there are two windows open, but it must be just a trick of the light as the photos were taken on 1 January 2012 and the Post Office was definitely closed.
Post Boxes are located in the alcove at the left of the photo.
Post Office Type: Post Office
Post Boxes: Yes
Historical Significance: Yes - Less than 50 years old
Current use: Yes
To post a log to an existing Australia Post waymark, you will need to post a unique picture of the Australia Post sign. Including your GPS device in the picture is not neccesary and wouldn't be cause for disapproval, as long as all other details of your log are acceptable.
|There are no logs for this waymark yet. | <urn:uuid:107686ce-43e8-46dd-866c-feb39744f165> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMDJAV_Kondinin_WA_6367 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946912 | 291 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Date: June 11, 2004
Byline: Gregory Heller and Andrew Hohns
A few suggestions to make skatepark a good neighborLast week, DC Shoes offered Philadelphia $1 million for the upkeep of LOVE Park for 10 years. The condition: The city must lift its ban on skateboarding.
Why would a California company care about LOVE Park? For these reasons: The park arguably is the world's most famous skatepark; there are more under-21 participants in skateboarding than in baseball; skateboarding is a multibillion-dollar industry, with LOVE Park a capital of the sport; and thousands of people travel every year to visit the hallowed grounds of LOVE, as seen in movies, magazines and video games.
LOVE Park is a landmark of youth in a city growing older and losing population by the day. It has brought millions in revenue to a city struggling to find new sources of tourism dollars. Now, Philadelphia has been promised $1 million to take the park's maintenance costs off the shoulders of taxpayers not something to take lightly in a city deep in debt that is closing recreation facilities to make ends meet.
Skateboarders are our children, participating in America's fastest-growing sport, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. Skateboarding is a sport that fosters community, discourages drug use, and requires a high level of skill and commitment. A 1999 sports-injury study said skateboarding is safer than football and soccer, even ranking less dangerous than volleyball.
Skateboarding often is viewed as a white, suburban sport. However, LOVE Park was instrumental in transforming the sport into a diverse, urban one. The world's most famous African American professional skateboarder, Stevie Williams, grew up in Philadelphia, practicing at LOVE Park.
The city is trying to change its image from stodgy and old to hip and progressive, able to compete with New York, Boston and Washington. Among the 8,000 signatures on our petitions are people from 40 countries. There also are dozens of testimonials from students with a choice of universities who chose Philadelphia because of LOVE Park.
Why not move the skateboarding elsewhere? Just as we cannot move Independence Hall, we cannot move LOVE Park. This location is the world-famous mecca. Like it or not, if Philadelphia wants to capitalize on LOVE's fame and tourism, it must incorporate skateboarding into the park's activities.
Skateboarding, like any sport, causes damage and has maintenance costs. The city believes that maintenance and repairs will cost $60,000 a year. However, with the $1 million and tens of thousands in additional promised private and corporate donations, we can easily allocate $100,000 a year, without a penny from taxpayers. Working with experts, we have detailed cost estimates for granite repair and replacement and power washing.
We propose the following solutions to make LOVE Park safe and enjoyable for everyone:
Limit skateboarding to after 3 p.m. on weekdays and all day on weekends. People can enjoy their lunch in peace. Neighbors have told us that after hours, skateboarders bring a renewed vitality and make the park safe at night.
Create a pedestrian-only zone between the grass and the south wall of LOVE Park, reserved for pedestrians all the time. Install "rumble strips" (like on a highway shoulder) so that skateboards will not work here.
Enforce the rules by stationing an attendant paid for by Friends of LOVE Park to make sure that no one skates before 3 p.m. and to make sure everyone follows the rules.
LOVE Park is distinctly Philadelphia and brings us world fame. When skateboarders discovered LOVE Park, this reuse of a city park left us with a treasure of which other cities only dream. Let's seize this opportunity. Let's return skateboarding to LOVE Park and show our children the LOVE they deserve. | <urn:uuid:1a09e0b6-4d9f-45c1-bb36-62e006695391> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ushistory.org/lovepark/news/inq061104a.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944486 | 802 | 1.609375 | 2 |
They were made by the husband of a close friend of mine, a crafty and fit guy who was very inspired by the 2009 bestseller Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, about an Indian tribe in Mexico who run long distances in similar low-tech footwear. A big part of the book is how human beings actually run better without the crazy foot support we’ve come to expect with conventional cushy running shoes.
[UPDATE: My friend's husband finally read this post and clarified he actually runs 5 to 6 miles in these shoes! He's a maniac!]
As far as I know, he hasn’t sustained any injuries because he’s already really fit and took his time acclimating to the new stripped down footwear.
There’s been some controversy abut the barefoot running trend because some runners, accustomed to running long distances in conventional shoes, try to cover similar ground too quickly in “barefoot running shoes,” which can lead to injury.
It kind of reminds me of the yoga trend….young, eager wannabe yogis (me) thinking they ought to be able to fly into a handstand or leap into crow pose because “yoga is good for you” yet lack sufficient muscle strength in the wrists to support their body weight, resulting in wear and tear on the joints. My right wrist will never be the same because of it.
Still, it’s pretty cool my friend’s husband made those shoes and actually runs in them. Cue the theme song for The Last of the Mohicans. (Come to think of it, he does sorta resemble Daniel Day Lewis….) | <urn:uuid:d93cf228-63a8-4e83-8b81-c4ad761d4017> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rurallyscrewed.com/13104/2012/09/27/diy-barefoot-running-shoes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966111 | 342 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The signing went well. Just under forty people, including a few who drifted by, heard parts of the talk and stayed until the end. Then good talks and food at the nearby McMenamin's pub with a few friends.
One of the attendants asked a good question. It's one of those questions that has real depth into some of the underlying issues. The hypothetical: You're traveling out of country, taking pictures. You find yourself triangulated by three people who want your camera and money. What do you do? How do you prepare?
The rote answer is that you give it to them. Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that answer... but it's important that you understand why that is the reflex answer for most instructors, NOT what most people actually do, and the dynamics that underlie the answers that exist, the options that are seen, and the answer that is chosen.
I see six potential responses: To acquiesce, to run, to bargain, to struggle, to fight or to destroy.
1) Acquiesce is what most instructors would advocate, and in many situations it would be the safest thing. In much of the world, violent crimes are investigated more thoroughly than non-violent crimes. Killing tourists drives away tourists. Because the set-up described has all the ear marks of resource predation, it is probably safe to give up the goods... but every situation is different, every place is different.
There is an ego cost to acquiescing as well, and that ego cost drives many of the other options. Being mugged is just resources, on one level, but there is a dominance aspect. Many people, especially young men will feel like they should fight or they aren't men at all.
2) Running- If you're quick, not over-burdened, not cut off (and sometimes even if you are) and there is a safe place nearby (lights and people, generally) a sudden sprint can be a good option. The key is that sudden part. The bad guys expect a little hesitation as you decide if there is enough risk to keep you submissive. They might even expect backing away (and so it is likely, if they are experienced that there will be one behind you)... but taking off like a jack-rabbit with no hesitation usually buys a second of surprise. You might even be able to go through the people cutting you off. Few people do this, but it is on the table.
3) Bargaining is not about stuff. It is about ego. "Okay, I can't fight all three of you, so let me just give the camera and my cash. I need my passport..." This is one of the methods used so that it feels like you have some power in the situation. The power is actually an illusion, but some will let you keep a token if the threats are feeling generous. Not because you had a chance if it came to a fight. There is a similar dynamic in some sex crimes where the victim draws a line, sometimes a non-sensical line (actual example, a woman terribly assaulted and abused but she refused to 'talk dirty') to maintain some dignity.
It can work, or, if you either are disrespectful or the threats are NOT feeling generous, they can throw in a beating to teach you a lesson.
4) Struggling. This happens, for some reason. A bad guy grabs a woman's purse or a tourist's camera and the victim holds on to it, refusing to give it up, but also refusing to do any damage to the attacker-- They death grip on the camera strap but don't bite or punch or kick. Maybe it's instinct. Maybe it works sometimes, it's possible it could draw enough attention to make the bad guy run (witnesses are bad.) But in most cases, it just forces the bad guy or guys to use violence. The snatch becomes a beating. I'm not sure (pretty confident, but not sure) that this is another ego thing, your limbic system trying to prevent you from the "I shoulda done sumthin" blues of merely acquiescing.
5) Fighting. This is the overly-confident alpha male approach and what every teenager fantasizing (and, I suspect, many martial arts and self-defense aficionados) think they will or should do. Make 'em pay. Give 'em a good fight. Stand up, be a man. Sometimes it even works. You hit one or two of them or you get lucky, or you don't go down easy and they may decide the price is too high and scurry away, which will nicely reinforce the tough guy image. It's rare, though. Most three-on-ones, they just beat you down. With weapons (this is cultural, a lot of places in a mugging, the weapon is implied, not shown. It may not be there.) there is almost no chance.
6) Destroy. This goes back to flipping the switch and qualitative differences. Very few people just run. That's what makes the tactic so effective. Even fewer can just explode into violence. Destroying is not the same as fighting. You explode while the threats are expecting you to think, vacillate or agree. You do fast, extreme violence. It is not fighting. You don't defend yourself in anyway, confidant that your attacks will give them no time to react.
It can work. If it is not a simple mugging over stuff but, say, a group taking a hostage for later filming of a beheading, it is one of the few things (along with running) that has any chance at all. At the minimum, with this level of aggression and mindset, you will force the threats to make a choice: they can run or they can kill you then and there. You allow nothing else to work.
It's an alien mindset and there are more people who believe they could do it if necessary than actually can. Many, probably, that will think this is just like #5, fighting, only harder and more serious. It is nothing like fighting. It is slaughtering. And if you go there, you will kill or cripple someone... For a camera.
This is why the question was hard to answer completely in a short session. It's also an example of why prescriptive answers set students up for failure. If I tell him, "Just give up the camera, you'll be okay" that might be the right answer, 70% of the time. But if he is sure it is the right answer, he quits looking for all the little clues that this one is different.
I (or any other instructor) won't be there if he needs to make the decision. We won't see what he sees. He need to show what to look for, not tell what to do. | <urn:uuid:ed96692a-54c7-4fc2-9904-f6419e8de517> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2011/05/good-question.html?showComment=1306786598723 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970377 | 1,411 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The urgency in fighting the Cave Creek Complex fire can be felt at Mesa’s Williams Gateway Airport. Although 50 miles away, the airport is crucial to the efforts in knocking down the 46,000-acre blaze.
There, air tankers refuel and fill up with fire retardant to be dropped in reddish bursts over burning land. From sunup to sundown, large P-3 Orions and nimble single-engine prop planes are coming and going.
Five hotshot crews, each with 20 men and women, arrived Thursday morning from 59-degree weather in Oregon for a two-week tour of duty, and more help is on the way.
"Welcome to Arizona. We left the heat on for you," one man told the arriving quick-response teams as they unloaded luggage from the plane’s belly.
Less than 30 minutes separated the plane’s touchdown from the crews’ departure via buses — sack lunches and drinks in hand.
"You don’t try to run fast; You try to run smooth," said Darrell "Bo" Bohannon, a ramp manager under contract with the U.S. Forest Service. "Smooth and safe."
The Forest Service has designated Williams as the state’s lone mobilization center, where hotshot firefighting crews are flown in from around the West. Scheduled to arrive later Thursday were two more crews, bound for a 28,000-acre fire near Kingman.
Williams has hosted air tankers since 2002, and is one of four airports across the state to do so. But this marks the first time Mesa is the processing point for the firefighters, said Donald Van Driel, group leader for fire and engineering for Tonto National Forest. Before 2005, the crews were flown into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, then taken to the National Guard armory in downtown Phoenix.
Hotshots are best described as the Forest Service’s Marines: They are physically fit, travel long distances to big battles and possess esprit de corps created by their 45-year history and discipline from training for a dangerous job. From the plane to the buses, they walked in single file with a minimum of chatter. All business.
But it didn’t take long for their anticipation to bubble up. The crews trained all spring for fires like the ones burning near Cave Creek, and this is their opportunity to show what they’re made of.
In that respect, the scene on the buses evoked a high school football team en route to their season opener.
Said Mike Muehlbauer, an assistant superintendent with the Redmond crew: "We’re ready to rock, that’s for sure."
Want to help?
Learn more: Call the Red Cross at (602) 336-6497 or visit
For shelter: The Red Cross shelter is at Desert Arroyo Middle School, 33401 N. 56th St., Cave Creek | <urn:uuid:73f7f2d7-a2e0-489c-b94a-d59e14a54ebb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/arizona/article_d183eb42-3fd8-5857-b854-053769e1c1cf.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945246 | 604 | 1.578125 | 2 |
advocate, autism, Autism spectrum, autism spectrum disorder, Child, danger, deception, devotion, divorce, Lorhainne Eckhart, mother, Neurodevelopmental, parents, parents group, special needs child, the choice, the choice of giving, The Forgotten Child
Can you imagine your child who you love more than your next breath—a child who doesn’t fit in with other children. Has meltdowns in public, doesn’t talk, plays alone doing the oddest repetitive movements. Makes odd squeaky noises over and over, and instead of playing appropriately when your friends or acquaintances come to visit, climbs all over the adults latching onto their legs and hoots like an elephant.
You can’t reason with your child, and he/or she doesn’t appear to understand. And you’re at a loss as to how to how to communicate with him.
Of course it’s frustrating, but so are obtaining services for your autistic child. And if you’ve persevered and were lucky enough to get your child diagnosed, and if you were connected with a parents group in your area with autistic children. Then you’ll have valuable information for resources that the highest percentages of parents with autistic children don’t have.
Ask yourself what this does to families? Did you know the divorce rate is upwards of 85%? Ever wonder why? Take a look at the community programs and parent groups, and what you’ll find is they’re mostly driven and led by mothers.
For most mothers their children’s welfare is in the forefront of their mind, along with caring for the needs of other siblings, balancing a job, paying the bills etc. And what happens is Dad checks out–emotionally, and in many cases he’s unable to get with the program.
Take a look at what Mom’s dealing with and you’ll understand maybe Dad’s feeling left out, helpless, emotionally cut off. But who’s the one beating every bush to find therapy for their child and resources? The highest percentage of the time it’s Mom. And what she doesn’t have time to do is hand hold, or make things easier for Dad. That’s not up to her. Frankly she’s exhausted and doing everything imaginable to keep her family together.
But let’s be fair. Do all men checkout? No. In fact there are a few strong amazing men who have stepped up to the plate to advocate, pound on doors, and fight for help for their child. As well as a few strong men, who come together in harmony with their spouse to share the emotional strain that the early stages of autism takes on families.
Ever asked yourself why so many Dads of special needs children are not in the picture, or have any part of advocating for their child? | <urn:uuid:cb6ef4c2-97a3-495a-9bb0-53f259af5a67> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lorhainneeckhart.wordpress.com/tag/the-forgotten-child/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959122 | 603 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Quality bike session: three words guaranteed to give you that sinking feeling when you read them on a training schedule. Whether it's on the turbo trainer or out on the road, those words mean only hard work and pain. However, there is one sure way to make those sessions not only bearable but enjoyable - time trialling.
Time trials will not only improve your cardiovascular fitness, leg strength and speed endurance, they also replicate the bike leg of a triathlon so you can become used to the discipline of riding alone and learn to pace yourself without being distracted by the run to come.
You'll be motivated to work hard because the TT results are published afterwards, and when it's all over you can relax and compare notes with fellow riders about the strength of the wind, the tractor that held everyone up and that annoyingly zealous marshal.
There's nothing new about time trialling in the UK. It appeared in the late 1800s, when authorities banned cyclists from racing on roads because it was deemed dangerous. Races were often interrupted by the police and, according to cycling historian Bernard Thompson, "Horse-mounted policemen charged at racers and threw sticks into their wheels."
Unwilling to limit their activities to closed tracks, cyclists went undercover and competitors set off from a given point at set intervals, dressed in clothes that wouldn't attract attention, and raced the clock rather than each other. Events were kept secret and courses were named using mysterious codes (eg U603) that are still employed today.
Whatever the distance
The sport has flourished ever since and the choice of events is now enormous, which offers great versatility when it comes to fitting them into your training programme. Time trials are held throughout the year, though there is a slight lull in December and January, and when the evenings become lighter they're held during the week as well as at weekends.
The standard TT distances are 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles, so you can find one to suit the triathlon distance you are training for. More often than not they're fast and relatively flat. Hilly events are also organised but these aren't for the fainthearted.
Top age-group triathlete Paul Horsfall uses time trials as part of his training. "A good 10-mile time trial is close to the highest amount of pain I can deal with, so training at this intensity to build lactate endurance helps my bike-leg speed in triathlons," he says.
"When it really starts to hurt it's sometimes useful to play mind games with yourself, for example focusing on a hard effort to a corner in the distance. Then, when you get there, do the same with the next corner and keep going until you are done, but never think too far ahead.'
Time trials also give him the opportunity to practise riding his TT bike in race position, which is very different to training on a road bike. "The TT bike handles very differently, so it's good to make sure I'm used to how it feels, especially using the deep front rim in a range of wind conditions. Even if you have just one bike, it's important to get used to holding a good, streamlined race position.
"A time trial is also a great way to see how effective your training really is. Although the conditions aren't always the same, you generally find the same guys turning up so you can work out who is becoming quicker."
Local v open
Time trials fall into two categories. Local club events are fairly relaxed affairs and often the best way to start. Evening 10-mile series are particularly popular during spring and summer; some organisers invite beginners to come along to try a few races to see if it's for them.
These series are usually held midweek and you can enter on the night - turn up half an hour or so before the start. You'll be asked to pay a small fee, then you'll be given a number and a start time.
The second TT category is the open event, which tends to be bigger than a club event. The standard tends to be higher, with riders coming from all over the county or region. You must enter in advance - the fee may be slightly higher.
Open events are usually held on Saturday and Sunday mornings and often hold out the promise of home-made refreshments afterwards. It's a good idea to recce the route beforehand, butif that's not possible, try to have a drive or cycle round before the start. Events are well marshalled but it's much easier to concentrate on cycling if you know where you're going.
On the next page: Find out how to ride a good time time trial and our top beginner's tips. | <urn:uuid:bac8de3e-f383-4fd9-9477-f69d8b9aad6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/triathlete/triathlon-bike/ride-on-time-time-trialling/6898.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976977 | 961 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures." | <urn:uuid:6522bcd0-48d7-4e48-8b3e-2b7328509d94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/2231237/Universal-Jigsaw-Puzzle-Hits-Stores-In-Japan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972137 | 192 | 1.617188 | 2 |
This camera is placed at the top floor of the Oyster Shell House at Dongshih Fisherman's Wharf. The view encompasses the facilities at the wharf as well as the seaside scenery of a fishing port.
Dongshih Fisherman's Wharf is located in Dongshih Village in Dongshih Township of Chiayi County and at the river mouth of Puzih River. It covers an area of 30.6 hectares, 5 of which are devoted to sightseeing and attractions. Dongshih Fisherman's Wharf has been the focus of tourism development in Chiayi County in recent years. The vision is to begin with elements including wind, sunlight, fish, boats, ocean, and lighthouses and redefine the image of the wharf. On-site facilities include the Oyster Shell House, the First Taste Gallery, the Seabreeze Pavilion, the Seaside Platform, the Dutch Entrance, the Embankment Walking Path, the Wave-breaking Podium, the floating docks, the seaside beaches, and some recreational space. The goal is to offer a variety of choices for the visitors in order to enhance tourist appeal.The design of Dongshih Fisherman's Wharf was based on the unique features of fresh seafood and a beautiful sunset. It aimed to create a wharf attraction with a theme and even introduced foreign successes in the plan. The purpose was to build a recreational tourist attraction in order to transform the fishing industry and boost local development. | <urn:uuid:3dc64398-a4af-4700-8666-0bc6e45ae3ef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://twcam.www.gov.tw/webcam/english/scenery/main.jsp?view_id=mwc7R9hU05AEvqJ2o0S0nVY2bbIi03&belong_id=14&who=view | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956082 | 306 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Sunday Evening Forecast Discussion – 7:25 p.m.
September 23, 2012 Leave a comment
Looking at the weather pattern across the US, an upper level trough is currently set up over the eastern US, with ridging over the west. At the surface, the center of the high pressure is situated over the northern plains. This high pressure will continue to push into Central Alabama over the next several hours, with surface winds out of the north. Northerly winds will continue to allow cooler and dryer air to filter in and lows could dip down into the low 40s in some locations.
The upper level ridge will slowly make its way over the Southeast over the next couple of days, before flattening into a more zonal pattern by midweek. With the ridge in place and a continuous flow of dry air aloft, things should stay fairly dry for the beginning of the work week. Temperatures will really begin to moderate as the pattern becomes more zonal and winds begin to turn more towards the south. By Wednesday, moisture will begin to filter back into our southern areas. Warm air advection will allow temperatures to begin to climb back into the upper 80s with some areas across the south possibly reaching the lower 90s.
Come Thursday, a weak shortwave trough will slowly work its way into the mid Mississippi Valley. Beyond this time frame, models really begin to diverge on their solutions. The GFS brings a cold front into the area by Friday evening with precip pushing into the area. Meanwhile, the Euro pushes the cold front through a little slower with the bulk of the precip occurring late Saturday and into Sunday. With so much inconsistency between the models we can’t say for sure when or if we will see any rain chances. | <urn:uuid:98c8b439-5135-437d-a537-d6240bea902c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sky7weather.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/sunday-evening-forecast-discussion-725-p-m/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945933 | 357 | 1.578125 | 2 |
North Carolina’s Ag Commissioner Steve Troxler is once again encouraging agricultural operations to be prepared in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster:
“First and foremost we need to prepare for our families and workers. After that the equipment. Livestock operations will still need to be looked after.”
After having a plan for the safety of living beings, Troxler recommends a back-up plan for water and electricity:
“Water and electricity always seems to be a problem so be sure to make plans to have those available should we have outages and no access to water.”
2011’s Hurricane Irene’s landfall on the coast of North Carolina showed that agricultural operations aren’t always the first in line for assistance.
Commissioner Troxler addresses that situation:
“I have learned over and over again is that agriculture falls through the cracks. We have implemented a plan to have an emergency response team ready for disaster. We will have trained personnel on these teams that will be outfitted with proper equipment and be available to respond directly to agricultural matters.”
While hurricane season doesn’t officially open until Friday, there have already been two named storms in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific.
To learn more tips on natural disaster preparedness, visit NCDA’s website; ncagr.gov.
Animal Welfare Expert Temple Grandin Comes out in Favor of LFTB
Animal welfare expert Temple Grandin initially neglected to comment on the “pink slime” controversy, but now supports the product after learning more about the process. After watching the process beef moves through to make LFTB Grandin supports the product.
Citing the 15 to 30 pounds of beef wasted when LFTB is off the market, Grandin said educating consumers about the process and labeling products made with the treated beef would have prevented the recent uproar. More than 400 people in three states lost their job after the media uproar earlier this spring caused the plants to close down.
“FFA Rally to Fight Hunger” Planned for 2012 Convention
The National FFA Organization announced plans for an “FFA Rally to Fight Hunger” at the 2012 National FFA Convention and Expo, Oct. 24-26, to help feed children and adults suffering from food insecurity. Launched as part of the organization’s “Feeding the World–Starting at Home” initiative to fight hunger, the rally will engage as many as 10,000 FFA members from across the country and local volunteers. Their goal is to package one million meals at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis to combat hunger.
Working with Kids Against Hunger, a humanitarian food-aid organization, FFA members from across the nation will assemble meals and gather additional supplements to provide relief from hunger and malnutrition. Approximately half of the meals will be distributed in the Indianapolis area. Others will be shipped to designated locations domestically and internationally.
Website Promotes Controversial Egg Housing Legislation
In an effort to promote the passage of legislation that would establish a national standard for hen housing in the egg industry - United Egg Producers has launched a new informational website. Legislators, consumers, foodservice and retail executives and others can learn more about this measure at www.eggbill.com. The bill - introduced by Oregon 5th District Representative Kurt Schrader - would codify the controversial agreement between the United Egg Producers and the Humane Society of the United States that would transition egg production away from conventional cages by the end of 2029. | <urn:uuid:b463103d-f149-4506-93a9-299baad1fdb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sfntoday.com/audio/default.aspx?yyyy=2012&MM=05&audioID=8157 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940971 | 729 | 1.75 | 2 |
Has your PC or laptop seen better days? Are you experiencing loading times that are so slow they can only be measured by seasons? Well, have no fear! Our quick and easy steps will help you to restore your machine to its former glory and leave you more free time to do that thing you keep meaning to do.
Remove all spyware and other nasties from your computer
This is an essential not only from the point of view of computer performance, but also your own safety. Malware, spyware and other similar programs can lurk on your computer and steal person information, bank details, credit card numbers and a lot of other data you want to keep private.
To make sure you stay safe, download a free (or paid, it’s up to you) antivirus program and set it to scan regularly, either a few times a week or every day. The antivirus will trap and delete anything that shouldn’t be there and help to protect you from any future threats. Deleting malicious programs will also help your computer’s performance. Win/win!
To find an antivirus, have a look at CNet’s top antivirus programs here.
Delete unnecessary files
Having a backlog of things you never use slows just about everything on your computer down. Empty your recycle bin, delete your temporary internet files (this will be in ‘options’ on your browser), delete any old video or image files you saved and haven’t looked at since. Freeing up some disc space will make a notable difference to your computer’s performance.
Get rid of unused programs
Have you still got the kids’ games that came preloaded on your computer? Yes? Why? You can uninstall them – and any other programs you never use – if you go to your computer’s Control Panel and click ‘add/remove programs’ (Windows). Make sure you don’t delete anything essential to the running of your computer. If in doubt, leave it.
Turn off automatic loading
Are you noticing that when you start your computer, a lot of programs open automatically? If so, this is seriously hampering the speed of your machine. The next time this happens, go into the options or tools menu of these programs and disable automatic loading. There should be an option that says something like ‘run when Windows starts’. Untick that and you’re good to go.
Turn it off, then turn it on again
In relative terms, personal computers are not very old. And yet, they still have an ‘oldest trick in the book’. Rebooting your computer gives it the chance to put all of the changes you’ve made into effect, and cures more ills than you’d expect.
If all else fails, give us a shout on: 1.866.805.2448 (US) or 0800 107 1175 (UK). You can also visit us online at http://www.virgindigitalhelp.com (US) and http://www.virgindigitalhelp.co.uk (UK). | <urn:uuid:58f42fbc-64c6-4fe6-8ad5-bbfd717235f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://virgindigitalhelp.tumblr.com/tagged/files | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931968 | 651 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Baja SAE Team
Despite brutally challenging courses and a sheared drive shaft, Cal Poly Pomona's Baja SAE Team raced to a first place finish at the 2008 Baja SAE competition in Edwards, Illinois. About 115 teams from around the world built off-road vehicles for the competition, held May 29 to June 1 at Caterpillar's Edwards Demonstration Center.
Formerly called the Mini-Baja, the Baja SAE challenges teams to design and build an off-road vehicle that must survive the severe punishment of rough terrain and sometimes water.
"There were fallen trees, stumps, huge gullies and ruts, and lots of mud. This was the most challenging course I can remember in my 14 years as SAE faculty advisor, and the toll on the vehicles was brutal," said Mechanical Engineering Professor Clifford Stover.
The Cal Poly Pomona team took the overall win thanks to consistently strong performances throughout the three-day competition. In addition, they earned a second-place finish in the endurance race and second place in all combined dynamic events, which includes the Hill Climb and Rock Crawl.
On the last day of competition, the Baja SAE team faced a major hurdle during the all-day endurance race. The team was leading the field when a mistake in a rocky section sheared the vehicle's left drive shaft at the weld and was forced to be towed into the pits. Thanks to a Tig welder from LeTourneau University in Texas, the Cal Poly Pomona team was back in the race in 15 minutes. By the race's end, Cal Poly Pomona was only 5 seconds from the first place endurance race vehicle.
"We are ecstatic with our performance," Stover said. "Our students' performance and professionalism is being commended not only SAE International, but all the corporate sponsors and competing universities alike. We are proud to be a top notch engineering school with exceptional students with excellent team skills."
The Baja SAE is one of the most exciting and popular events of the SAE Collegiate Design Series. It consists of three regional competitions that simulate real-world engineering design projects and related challenges.
In the coming weeks, the Formula SAE Racing Team will compete in the SAE Formula West competition on June 25 to 28 at the California Speedway in Fontana. The competition will include events that test endurance and acceleration, among others. | <urn:uuid:e6724275-6ec4-4c1b-a1cf-5b2cab929461> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csupomona.edu/~engineering/news/baja.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964058 | 490 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Let me start by saying that anyone learning how to play acoustic guitar for beginners should pace themselves and complete one course before starting the next. I could say that you should give each course you take a week or maybe two but the fact is that not all people learn at the same pace.
Learn At Your Own Pace
For a long time I studied every day but found I was not learning as fast as I thought I should be, then someone told I should try studying every other day as it give the brain time to take in the lessons.
In the back of my mind I thought he was a bit off but tried it, just out of frustration.
I was actually amazed that it really worked. It renewed my energy for learning and even though it took me twice as long to do lessons I was learning faster than before. My learning pace increased in speed without the pressure I was feeling before.
Seeing Helps Me Learn Faster
I have to say I love using Youtube.com, Jamorama.com or Jamplay.com to learn more about playing my Yamaha acoustic guitar. I learn the most from the videos I watch, over and over. Watching someone play helps me learn much faster.
I know that when I am at guitar jams I learn to play songs so much faster. I’m pretty sure it’s because I can see finger position, strumming and the timing of each song. The timing is where I have the most stress for some reason and seeing it with my own eyes just makes it work for me.
For the riffs in songs I usually don’t play them unless I can watch someone playing them. Hearing it just doesn’t work for me, although I do better than when I started so maybe over time I will master playing by ear.
With a video tutorial, you would get a systematic instructional on how to read chords, locate the appropriate chords on your guitar, tune your guitar, and play an entire acoustic song. You can definitely learn a lot from these videos and video sharing websites.
Use Guitar Tablature And Chord Sites
Even if you’re a beginner, it’s safe to assume that you have your share of favourite acoustic artists. After all, it’s impossible to embrace a love for the instrument if you didn’t have inspiration.
Try to take advantage of the Internet by searching for a tablature (tabs) that your favourite artist transcribed. Nothing beats the feeling of having to learn the instrument from no less than your favourite artist.
One of the main reasons I like Youtube so much is because of those who cover artist’s songs using an acoustic guitar. Some artists even do acoustic versions of their songs to share with fans.
I have to say that I do find it quite frustrating when anyone plays an acoustic version of a song using a guitar but doesn’t show the hands for strumming and chord changes. I usually give them a thumbs down. Who cares if I can see your face, I want to see your hands.
Learning how to play acoustic guitar should be fun and with not too much stress. I get stressed a bit but that’s just me. When I finally find someone that can show me what I need to know I calm down.
Incoming search terms:
- tagalog songs with guitar chords for beginners
- basic bass chord tagalog
- filipino music chords only basic
- fingerboard chart for all six strings from the open string through them 22nd fret
- understanding find for chord guitar on the song by using feelings | <urn:uuid:7a04befc-f812-4cf4-b6d0-df3e40049a5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thejoyofhobbies.com/category/basic-guitar-chords/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96989 | 738 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has encouraged Iranians to procreate and make more babies. Khamenei has spoken out against the country's contraceptive service, calling it "wrong."
Procreation policy in the Islamic Republic is clearly determined by political need rather than religious doctrine. When Ayatollah Khomeini wanted a vast Iranian army he urged the population to make babies. Fearing a population explosion in the 1990's Tehran changed tack and offered free contraceptive services, and according to Ynet issued "religious edicts in favor of vasectomies."
Now, as Iran faces the prospect of an ageing population requiring support from the young, family planning funding has been cut from this year's budget and the Ayatollah is backing a baby making boom.
Alarabiya reported Khamenei appeared on state television to announce changes in the country's current birth control practices. He said contraceptive policies made sense 20 years ago "but its continuation in later years was wrong." He went on to say “The policy of population restriction should definitely be revised and the authorities should build the culture in order to abandon the current status of one child, two children [per family]."
Khamenei's words were followed with an announcement by the Iranian Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi who said "The budget for the population control program has been fully eliminated and such a project no longer exists in the health ministry. The policy of population control does not exist as it did previously.”
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no truck with contraceptives, believing them to be an ungodly western import. However, Islam allows for most forms of birth control, bar sterilization,providing it is used within marriage.
The decision to encourage procreation for babies comes at a time when the Iranian population is suffering under western imposed sanctions, causing financial difficulties for ordinary people. Iran's population, according to the latest census, stands at 75.1 million people. | <urn:uuid:35c5e21e-d857-4c96-a22f-d3b72985490c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/330123 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956614 | 399 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Innovative ideas are invited to encourage the tourism of wineries and to introduce wine brands to a wider public
The most important wine producers have tried in recent years to introduce their brands to a wider public, not only through advertising their products directly but also through unique architecture designed by internationally Known architects.
This is the case of the Dominus Winnery in the Napa Valley, California designed by Herzog and de Meuron, Bodegas Ysios, the work of Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry’s Bodegas Marques de Riscal, both in La Rioja, Spain.
The competition is an attempt to get the contestants to reflect on these projects and to seek posible alternatives that promote a particular winery and improve the image of its brand.
For more information please see the competition website | <urn:uuid:d17539a8-3640-4236-b90f-645b46e93588> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.bdonline.co.uk/business/competitions/landscape-architecture-and-wine-architecture-competition/5033828.article?fontSize=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937297 | 169 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Tomorrow, January 31st is the feast of St. John Bosco. He is best known for starting a school for boys to help keep them off the streets. He first caught their attention by entertaining them with things like juggling and magic tricks. As an educator myself I admire his commitment to educating the entire person, mind, body, and spirit. His advice to the young boys he taught, "Run, jump, make noise, but do not sin!" would make a wonderful motto for any classroom. Learn more about St. John Bosco here.
When I was subbing at a small Catholic school, I quickly learned that everyone's favorite school lunch day was Bosco Stick day. A Bosco stick is a mozzarella cheese filled breadstick. It would usually come with some marinara sauce for dipping.
In my classroom I liked to write the saint of the day up on the board, and read a short bio about that saint. When St. John Bosco day came around, the kid's first reaction was "did they name Bosco Sticks after him!?" I don't know how the Bosco Stick company decided on their name, but in that spirit I decided to try to make my own "St. John Bosco Sticks" to help celebrate this Italian saint.
St. John Bosco Sticks
- 1 tube thin crust pizza dough
- 4 sticks of string cheese
- Marinara sauce for dipping
Makes 8 breadsticks
First open and unroll your pizza dough. Stretch it or roll it out so it is more or less an even rectangle. Peel the string cheese in half long ways so you have eight sticks. Place these on one half of the dough.
Next fold over the dough and use your hands to seal on the bottom and inbetween each cheese stick.
Next use a knife or a pizza cutter to cut into individual breadsticks. You will end up with leftover dough. You could re-roll it to make more breadsticks, or just shape into plain breadsticks and bake along with the cheese ones.
Bake at 400 degrees for ten minutes. You will probably end up with some cheese oozing out of some of the breadsticks, but hey that just makes it better! Serve with your favorite pizza dipping sauce. I like marinara, but you could also use ranch or garlic butter. I made a large batch for a big group I'm cooking for tommorrow and froze them after I baked them. So check back for reheating instructions later!
A Prayer for St. John Bosco
O glorious Saint John Bosco, who in order to lead young people to the feet of the divine Master and to mould them in the light of faith and Christian morality didst heroically sacrifice thyself to the very end of thy life and didst set up a proper religious Institute destined to endure and to bring to the farthest boundaries of the earth thy glorious work, obtain also for us from Our Lord a holy love for young people who are exposed to so many seductions in order that we may generously spend ourselves in supporting them against the snares of the devil, in keeping them safe from the dangers of the world, and in guiding them, pure and holy, in the path that leads to God. Amen. | <urn:uuid:9f518632-4260-4f7e-a577-933465d00e3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://catholiccuisine.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96022 | 669 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Poet Jack Gilbert, who touched the lives of countless readers through lucid, lyrical poems that explored classic themes such as love, death, and the good life, passed away Tuesday at age 87. Though Gilbert eschewed the literary limelight and would never have considered serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, he came to the Library at least twice: in 1963 to record his work for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, and in 2006 to read his work. His 2006 reading, part of joint program with Miranda Field, was the subject of a recent Paris Review blog post by Drew Bratcher. In his brief post, which is well worth reading in its entirety, Batcher recounts the difficulty—and courage—with which Gilbert, coping with Alzheimer’s disease and failing motor functions, read his poetry to a captivated audience. While some poetry readers place little stock in live events, Bratcher’s account demonstrates that live readings can result in a powerful collective experience and can reveal important insights into the essence of a poet or a poem.
Though Gilbert’s entire reading is available on the Library’s website as a webcast, the recording almost never saw the light of day. Patricia Gray, then head of the Poetry and Literature Center, debated whether to make the recording available online due to Gilbert’s difficulties. Ultimately, she decided that Gilbert’s poignant, awe-inspiring performance deserved to seen by a larger audience.
As I listen again to Gilbert’s halting, determined reading of “A Brief for the Defense,” I marvel at his commitment to embrace the delight of being alive while acknowledging the realities of human suffering and personal tragedy. I’m also reminded of another of his poems, “Failing and Falling,” which rejects the notion that a marriage which ends prematurely is a failure:
…How can they say
The marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
And said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
But just coming to the end of his triumph.
Like Icarus, Gilbert soared to amazing heights in his poetry. His final reading at the Library, and the final years of life, should not be seen as a failing of his powers. Rather, he was just coming to the end of his triumph. | <urn:uuid:7dc645a4-c29f-484f-9261-494b9d2e3155> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2012/11/coming-to-the-end-of-his-triumph/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977968 | 500 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Scientists concluded the storm was a rare and extraordinarily powerful type of twister known as an EF5, ranking it at the top of the scale used to measure tornado strength. Those twisters are capable of lifting reinforced buildings off the ground, hurling cars like missiles and stripping trees completely free of bark.
Parents had a gut-wrenching choice, and only a few minutes to make it. Trust the safety of the seemingly solid school buildings and the protection of trained teachers and staff. Or drive frantically ahead of a massive tornado and attempt to take their children safely home.
Sophomore Kelsey Brass smashed an RBI single to right field to lift Dover to a 2-1 ninth-inning win and the district title over Indian Creek for a second consecutive season at River View High.
The devastating tornado that hit Moore, Okla., on Monday and left as many as 24 people dead has raised awareness of tornado preparedness in communities in other parts of the United States.
An emergency official says Oklahoma has reinforced tornado shelters in hundreds of schools across the state, but the two that were hit by this week’s storms in suburban Oklahoma City did not have them.
Have you gone fishing yet this year? Here’s your chance to show off your big catch for this year’s installment of our Fish Tales gallery. You can upload photos directly to this gallery or send .jpg images to Interactive Editor Joe Wright at email@example.com. Include your name, town, the identifications of those in the photo from left to right and the town where they reside, ages of children in the photo and their towns and when and where the fish were caught.
Are you going to the prom? We want to see pictures of you from this year's big dance. Share your pictures with readers by uploading them directly to this gallery. You also may email .jpg images to Interactive Editor Joe Wright at firstname.lastname@example.org. Include your name and town and the names and towns of the people in the photo, as well as their school and dance date. | <urn:uuid:bab81c43-4c17-4823-a7dc-5ae86e7a858f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timesreporter.com/?ndn=y&lid=home&vid=24277013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967895 | 428 | 1.78125 | 2 |
deserves the title of "the First Lady of Country Music." During the late '60s and early '70s, she dominated the country charts, scoring 17 number one hits. Along with
, she defined the role of female country vocalists in the '70s.
After her father, who was a musician, died when she was just eight months old, Wynette
was raised at her grandparents' home in Mississippi; her mother moved to Birmingham, AL, to do military work. As a child, Wynette
taught herself to play a variety of instruments left behind by her father. When she was a teenager, she moved to Birmingham to be with her mother. At 17, she married her first husband, Euple Byrd, and set to work as a hairdresser and beautician. The marriage was short-lived, but it produced three children within three years. By the time her third child was born, the couple were divorced.Wynette
's third child had spinal meningitis, which meant she had expensive medical bills to pay. In order to earn some extra money, she began performing in clubs at night. In 1965, she landed a regular spot on the television program The Country Boy Eddie Show, which led to appearances on Porter Wagoner
's syndicated show. The following year, she moved to Nashville, where she auditioned for several labels before producer Billy Sherrill
signed her to Epic Records.
"Apartment #9," Wynette
's first single, was released late in 1966 and almost broke the country Top 40 early in 1967. It was followed by "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad," which became a big hit, peaking at number three. The song launched a string of Top Ten hits that ran until the end of the '70s, interrupted by three singles that didn't crack the Top Ten. After "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" was a success, "My Elusive Dreams" became her first number one in the summer of 1967, followed by "I Don't Wanna Play House" later that year.
During 1968 and 1969, Wynette
had five number one hits -- "Take Me to Your World," "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," "Stand by Your Man" (all 1968), "Singing My Song," and "The Ways to Love a Man" (both 1969). In 1968, she started a relationship with George Jones
which would prove to be extremely stormy. Beginning in 1971, Wynette
recorded a series of duets -- the first was the Top Ten "Take Me" -- which were as popular as their solo hits. However, the marriage was difficult and the couple divorced in 1975; they continued to record sporadically over the next two decades. Throughout the '70s, Wynette
racked up number one hits.
In the early '80s, her career began to slow down. Although she still had hit singles, she didn't reach the Top Ten as easily as she had in the previous decade. That trend continued throughout the rest of the decade and into the '90s. Even though she didn't have as many hits as she'd had in the past, Wynette
remained a respected star and a popular concert attraction. In the '80s, she began suffering a variety of health problems, including inflammation of her bile duct. She was hospitalized several times during the mid-'90s before her death on April 6, 1998. | <urn:uuid:cd0e60dc-6f31-4981-ac54-9d41f8701549> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebearrocks.com/Music/Artist.aspx?id=1883 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992081 | 722 | 1.640625 | 2 |
STATE WILDLIFE OFFICER BEGINS DUTY IN LOGAN COUNTY
COLUMBUS, OH –Adam M. Smith, 25, of Lewistown, Ohio was assigned as a new state wildlife officer in Logan County Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife.
Officer Smith is one of the 17 new wildlife officer cadets who underwent extensive training and was sworn in as a commissioned state wildlife officers during recent ceremonies in Columbus.
Following completion of the 16-week Ohio Peace Officers Training course May 1, the cadets were provided with nine weeks of additional specialized training by the Division of Wildlife. In addition to wildlife enforcement procedures and agency policies, the cadets received training in areas such as wildlife and fish management, communications, public relations, administration, education, hunter safety, and special projects.
As a state wildlife officer, Smith will have statewide jurisdiction to enforce wildlife regulations, investigate allegations of waterway pollution and protect state property. He will also conduct educational programs, advise landowners on dealing with wildlife and keep local agencies and conservation organizations updated on wildlife projects and regulations.
“I look forward to serving all Ohioans and I’m eager to begin my career alongside the residents of Logan County,” said Adam Smith, state wildlife officer.
Smith is a 2002 graduate of Botkins High School in Shelby County. In 2007, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in criminal justice from Wright State University. Smith and his wife Jessica will reside in Logan County. | <urn:uuid:2013c8d5-e6e0-4fc6-b536-0b9b15153c3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ohiodnr.com/Home/News/NewsReleaseArchives/tabid/19075/EntryId/1211/State-Wildlife-Officer-Begins-Duty-in-Logan-County.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961228 | 311 | 1.578125 | 2 |
We have all your favorite Valentine candy. Conversation hearts, heart shaped suckers, gobstopper hearts, fudge hearts, sweet tart hearts, heart shaped suckers, chocolate lips and hearts. No better way to say I Love You then with some Valentine's Day Candy.
Try something different this year .Retro and Nostalgic candy makes great gifts for Valentine's Day. Merci Chocolates, Chocolate Ice Cubes, Candy Necklaces, Sugar Daddy Pops or Wax Lips are just a few of the nostalgic candy favorites which are given at Valentine's Day.
We have a great selection of gift baskets to choose from that will also be perfect for the sweet heart in your life.
Our pucker up gift basket, retro gift basket or a classic car will certainly please that special person in your life.
February 14 is the day of love and romance. Candy and gifts are exchanged between those in love all across the country in the name of St. Valentine. Actually the whole month of February is known for the month of romance.|
Who is St. Valentine and how did this holiday tradition start?
There are many different theories on how this holiday started, here is the most popular.
His name is Valentine and he lived in Rome during the third century. At that time, Rome was ruled by an emperor named Claudius. Many did not like Emperor Claudius, as he
wanted to have a big army. He expected men to volunteer to join. Many men just did not want to fight in wars. They did not want to leave their wives and families. Not many men signed up. This made Claudius furious. He had a crazy idea. He thought that if men were not married, they would not mind joining the army. So Claudius decided not to allow any more marriages. Young people thought his new law was cruel. Valentine thought it was preposterous and would not support the new law!
Valentine was a priest and one of his favourite activities was to marry couples. Even after Emperor Claudius passed his law, Valentine kept performing marriage ceremonies -- secretly, of course. It was really quite exciting. Imagine a small candlelit room with only the bride and groom. They would whisper the words of the ceremony, listening all the while for the steps of soldiers.
One night, we did hear footsteps. The couple that was just married escaped in time,however Valentine was caught. He was thrown in jail and told that his punishment was death.
He tried to stay cheerful. And do you know what? Wonderful things happened. Many young people came to the jail to visit me. They threw flowers and notes up to my window. They wanted me to know that they, too, believed in love.
One of these young people was the daughter of the prison guard. Her father allowed her to visit me in the cell. Sometimes we would sit and talk for hours. She helped me to keep my spirits up. She agreed that I did the right thing by ignoring the Emperor and going ahead with the secret marriages. On the day I was to die, I left my friend a little note thanking her for her friendship and loyalty. I signed it, "Love from your Valentine."
I believe that note started the custom of exchanging love messages on Valentine's Day. It was written on the day Valentine died, February 14, 269 A.D. Now, every year on this day, people remember. But most importantly, they think about love and friendship. | <urn:uuid:7f200284-d20b-4879-aa38-6412ee2ca2af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oryans.com/valentines-day-candy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983528 | 714 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Journey into the Heart of Latin American Roots Music with Alegria Real
Interpreting the songs that represent a rich and diverse treasure of living folkloric musical traditions throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, the duo Alegria Real entertains, educates, and embraces audiences with eclectic and captivating sounds. Collectively, their repertoire of songs includes an impressive variety of over twenty-five acoustic string, wind and percussion instruments that interpret particular styles and rhythms ranging in complexity from such regions as Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru and Spain. Songs are sung mainly in Spanish and Portuguese, and also include Native-American languages such as Quechua from Bolivia and Peru. As the name "Alegria Real" (real joy) suggests, for this duo the act of playing live is rooted in deep appreciation of the unique and dynamic spirit of each song and its musical power to transform both musicians and listeners. They intersperse musical selections with stories and information that give the songs cultural, historical, and cross-cultural contexts giving listeners a richer connection to what they are hearing and establishing a rapport with the musicians. As well, audience members are invited to become involved in playing certain instruments or singing on some of the songs creating an impactful and more palpable understanding of the music.
Alegria Real is comprised of Christina Audas and Armando Rivera. The duo also enjoys collaborations with a variety of guest musicians on performances of all types.
Alegria Real has had the pleasure of performing for many private and public events including educational workshops at the University of Oklahoma, performances at the Norman Music Festival and appearance with the Canterbury Choral Society.
Follow Alegria Real on Facebook! | <urn:uuid:9f9c8522-c77c-40d9-9084-67c5938c58d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://enye.com/enyemusic/en/bands/alegria-real/history | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947241 | 353 | 1.734375 | 2 |
House of Riario
In 1488, when the city of Forlì was attacked by the Orsi brothers, Checco and Ludovico, the same pair which his mother had hired to kill his father, Ottoviano was taken prisoner by the two along with his sister, Bianca.
While he and his sister were held captive, Ottaviano was kept at a lighthouse in Romagna, watched by Ludovico. However, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Assassin, soon came to Ottaviano's aid and killed Ludovico, after rescuing Bianca. With this, Ottaviano ran back to his mother at the Rocca di Ravaldino.
When he was 19, Ottaviano entered into the service of the Florentine Republic as a condottiero, at the request of his mother, Caterina Sforza, who wanted to cement amiable relations with Florence. He commanded 100 men from Forlì, but terminated his contract after only a year, since Florence didn't have the money to pay him.
Despite accounts which described Ottaviano as obese, brainless and under his mother's thumb, Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, offered his daughter Lucrezia to Ottaviano, as Rodrigo decided that those were traits which he could tolerate in a son-in-law, as long as they were the key to controlling the territories of Forlì and Imola. Plus, as his viper of a daughter rarely stayed married to one man for long, with them tending to sign declarations of impotence or just simply disappearing, it would suit the Pope's ambitions quite well.
Wisely however, Caterina denied the marriage, enraging the Pope and leading to his son, Cesare Borgia, initiating an assault on Forlì.
When Caterina was ousted by Cesare and entered her exile in Florence, under her guidance, Ottaviano attempted to convince the successor of Alexander VI, Pope Julius II, to give him back the Lordship of Imola and Forlì. Instead, Ottaviano ended up selling the Riario claim to Julius for a delayed payment, with him losing out in the long term.
- Ottaviano, his siblings, and Petruccio Auditore da Firenze were the only non-adult characters to appear in Assassin's Creed II.
- His face model was recycled in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, appearing in the missions Homecoming and Human Cargo. | <urn:uuid:17a3502d-6118-42a9-a2b6-45e88732d480> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Ottaviano_Riario | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97905 | 520 | 1.601563 | 2 |
About half of all Arizona mortgages are under water, meaning owners owe more than the property is worth. This proposal was aimed at helping those who continue to make payments rather than simply walk away. It is a bit complex, involving the state using its power of eminent domain to acquire the property, paying the bank the current market value with money from investors who buy state bonds, and giving the lender a no-interest promissory note for the balance. That buys the homeowner some time for the market to recover.
Attorney General Tom Horne explains how Arizonans will benefit from the state's $1.6 billion share of a nationwide settlement of mortgage fraud charges against five major banks. With him is Carolyn Matthews who represented Arizona in the negotiations.
Arizonans will divide up about $1.6 billion as the state's share of a nationwide mortgage fraud settlement with five major lenders.
The $26 billion national settlement absolves the five claims that banks acted improperly and illegally in dealing with homeowners who sought mortgage relief. The biggest chunk for Arizona -- about $1.3 billion -- will go to directly helping those who are underwater on their mortgages, owing more than the property is worth. | <urn:uuid:523b269f-7e8a-4103-a47c-dd7d2e19ffdf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.knau.org/term/mortgage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964344 | 240 | 1.664063 | 2 |
45 Years Ago – The Who Release ‘The Who Sell Out’
One of the most experimental hard rock groups of the ’60s and ’70s, the Who were rapidly evolving musically when they released ‘The Who Sell Out’ on Dec. 1, 1967.
The group’s third album was an ambitious artistic step toward the concept albums with which they would become most identified, serving as a bridge between 1966′s ‘A Quick One’ and the 1969 rock opera ‘Tommy,’ on which Pete Townshend’s genius for interlinking songs would be fully realized. ‘The Who Sell Out’ was an artistic triumph that helped the band make that transition, as well as a psychedelic pop-rock masterpiece that rivals anything the Beatles ever recorded.
Conceived as a tribute to the pirate radio stations that were operating offshore in the U.K. at the time, ‘The Who Sell Out’ was loosely framed around the notion of lampooning the increasingly crass consumer culture, ‘The Who Sell Out’ featured satirical cover images of the band members using freakishly oversized versions of popular products like Odorono deodorant and Heinz baked beans.
The album interspersed full band songs with spoken-word conceptual interludes that were faux “commercials” advertising all manner of consumer goods, including the aforementioned ‘Odorono‘ (which suggested that the difference between success and failure in life might come down to one’s choice of deodorants) and ‘Tattoo,‘ which proposed that life would be better if only you got the right tattoo.
Opening the record, ‘Armenia City in the Sky,’ was an innovative sonic production that made use of the Who’s instrumental and vocal abilities, along with groundbreaking sound effects that pointed the way to much of the group’s later work. ‘Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand‘ prominently featured their sunny harmonies, as did other psychedelic pop confections like ‘Our Love Was,’ ‘I Can’t Reach You‘ and ‘Relax.’
‘I Can See For Miles‘ became the best-known track from the album, with instrumentation that was a precursor to later Who classics like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ while Townshend’s all-acoustic ‘Sunrise‘ could have almost been a Simon and Garfunkel b-side. ‘Rael (1 and 2)‘ comprised some of the chordal musical elements that would frame the Who’s next album, ‘Tommy,’ on which the group’s ambitious approach to conceptual album-length work would all come together.
‘The Who Sell Out’ was not only a commercial success, with ‘I Can See For Miles’ becoming a Top 10 hit, but a critical smash as well. “The album is as perfect a balance between melodic mod pop and powerful instrumentation as the Who (or any other group) would achieve,” according to Allmusic.com, while Rolling Stone opined,”[The Who] have such a firm grasp of the basics of rock and roll that they, like the Beatles, do not stumble when they move on to newer and more creative endeavors in rock and roll; they’ve learned their stuff and are thus practiced enough to come up with a wholly original instrumental sound.”
The album was re-released in 1995 with bonus tracks, and a Deluxe Edition released in 2009 included more than a dozen additional tracks and alternate takes, as well as an entire disc of alternate mono mixes. | <urn:uuid:f0da8c0c-9e55-41b5-8e23-085a04cce891> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/45-years-ago-the-who-release-the-who-sell-out/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965519 | 787 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Why Opera adopting WebKit as its browser engine is really good for the web
The popular Opera browser has announced it will move to WebKit as its future rendering engine, completing the “transformation” it started last April when it adopted the
-webkit- prefix. The response from the web community has been mixed; some welcome the news enthusiastically, others lament the loss of diversity or express their worry of a browser monoculture. I’m quite happy about it, and I’ll explain why for those in the other camp.
One of the worst things to ever happen to the Web as a platform was the IE5-and-IE6 stranglehold on the browser market between 2000 and 2006. When Microsoft gained such a tremendously dominant level of control over the market, they ceased development and let IE6 just stagnate. If it wasn’t for Mozilla & Opera’s ongoing efforts, and Apple’s entry with its WebKit-powered Safari, the reign of IE would not have ended when it did.
People use this bit of history as an argument against a theoretical “browser monoculture” and warn that WebKit is just the new IE, and we’re repeating history all over again. There are two components to this argument, and both are a flawed comparison. To wit:
1. WebKit is not like IE
Internet Explorer was and is a browser fully owned and controlled by a single company, and its codebase is proprietary. You want to make IE better, or see its source code? Go work at Microsoft.
WebKit, on the other hand, is an underlying browser engine, not a browser itself, used by many different companies, controlled roughly by consensus between competing companies, and is open source. While Apple technically owns the WebKit repository, it doesn’t hold any exclusive ownership over WebKit as a technology.
2. Building “just” for WebKit is not like building “just” for IE was
Back when IE was king, people would build websites and intranet applications that only worked in it, and no other browser. Because, “why bother?”
Today, there are many people who build websites and only properly cater to WebKit-based browsers—most notably mobile sites—and that is a problem. However, it is not the same problem: the degree in which such sites “work” is significantly better than how it used to be with IE6. With Opera’s move to WebKit, that situation will, in fact, only get even better for end users. Furthermore, standards support has come a really long way since the days of IE6, and interoperability is much, much greater between all browsers today.
So what does that mean?
IE6 was a rather good browser at the time it came out. But developers quickly realized that you could do relatively little with it, in terms of both design and application ideas, and it was riddled with bugs—some incredibly infuriating.
The problem of a single browser dominating the market isn’t that it’s a single browser dominating the market; web standards exist and have long been advocated for specifically for the purpose of making it be as if there is only one browser on the market. Standardization, in every industry, has at its core the desire for building and developing only one version of your product, and know it to work no matter how many competitors exist in the market.
The more companies that have a vested interest in WebKit as the underlying engine powering their unique and individual browsers, the less likely it is that any one company will have dominant ownership of a crucial piece of technology that over a billion people use to access the Web with. And the less likely any one company controls much of the market, the less likely development on that engine will be halted or slowed.
As Bruce Lawson, an Opera developer evangelist, puts it in his personal blog post on the news:
[WebKit] isn’t run by a single organisation; a report on WebKit this month says “it is also noteworthy how the diversity of the project is increasing, with new players starting to show a significant activity.”
It therefore seems silly to compete against it. Instead, we’ll join and use our experience and resources to improve it further.
There are many great people who work at Opera. They’ve come up with excellent innovations over the years that I’ve long enjoyed (albeit generally in other browsers as they adopted them as well). I’m excited at the prospect of these people’s innovative ideas, their dedication to accessibility and best practices, and their devotion to web standards, all being brought to WebKit.
I’m sad that the news inevitably means the laying off of a number of people at Opera; however, I won’t much mourn the loss of a closed browser engine I couldn’t visibly report bugs to, one which has given me tremendous grief with its quirky behaviors from time to time (seriously, like IE5 all over again).
Opera users will, eventually, get the best of both worlds: a widely used engine that works great on mobile and receives lots of developer attention, packed in a browser by an innovative company whose vision for UI has earned itself many loyal, devoted customers.
Web developers can
feel less bad about being lazy, making for cleaner source code and more time spent developing great features.
And the Web at large will benefit from more smart people moving a critical technology forward, instead of duplicating efforts in parallel. No one owns WebKit the way Microsoft owns IE, and this move will make WebKit even better for its hundreds of millions of users. | <urn:uuid:55a2aeb4-bffb-48ca-823a-3b9c8df10348> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farukat.es/journal/2013/02/682-why-opera-adopting-webkit-its-browser-engine-really-good-web | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958832 | 1,187 | 1.84375 | 2 |
EMS Program at SUNY Canton Aids in Securing Medical Helicopter Service
SUNY Canton’s North Country Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Program helped bring air medical transportation back to the North Country.
Air Methods Corporation announced that it would begin operating two medical helicopters in Jefferson and St. Lawrence County beginning this June at a press conference held the morning of Wednesday, March 14, at Samaritan Medical Center.
The announcement came after nearly five years of meetings and negotiations with area medical agencies, hospitals, first responders and medical flight services, according to Ann M. Smith, director of the North Country EMS Program.
“This is a big win for us and our area’s first responders,” Smith said. “It’s an even larger win for North Country residents who will benefit from the life-saving services provided by Air Methods.”
The helicopters will extend air ambulance service to more communities and add faster medical response for critically ill or injured patients in need of specialized treatment. The first of the two helicopters will be located in Watertown, and the second will be stationed in Potsdam.
Smith explained patients previously would need to be stabilized locally and transported by ground to advanced specialty facilities outside of the area. “In cases like a heart attack or a stroke, each minute increases the chance of survival,” she said.
In 2007, the Military Assistance to Safety and Traffic (MAST) was removed from service and stopped providing this much-needed service in the area. The Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization worked with agencies to begin replacing the service. The Organization’s research indicated in 2010 more than 500 emergencies at hospitals in the Fort Drum region met the criteria for air medical transport.
The endeavor to re-establish medical flights received backing from Senator Patty Ritchie, Assemblyman Ken Blankenbush, and Assemblywoman Addie J. Russell.
The North Country EMS Program will continue to work with area hospitals and first responders to expedite the process and aid Air Methods Corporation as they begin to provide airlift services. Smith said they would share office space at SUNY Canton with personnel from the company if necessary.
Smith and her staff help facilitate emergency medical services and provide technical support to area volunteer and paid support agencies. The EMS Program also serves as the credentialing agency for advanced life-support personnel in the tri-county area.
Media inquiries should be directed to Gregory Kie, Media Relations Manager, or call 315/386-7527. | <urn:uuid:80fae43f-f266-40b6-89b9-a85c4ccaec11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.canton.edu/news/index.php/2012/03/air-methods/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943315 | 516 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Jewish World Review April 19, 2001 / 26 Nissan, 5761
Sorry, sir, but it's too late for that.
The confessed killer of 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing sought a big audience for his big exit and he will have it. Even if it is not televised, as McVeigh has requested, this execution is big news. The media are obliged to cover it. Media are supposed to cover their government in action, and government takes few actions that are more worthy of public scrutiny than this one.
Hard cases make bad law. So goes an old legal slogan. Sometimes easy cases do, too. Unfortunately, McVeigh's case makes it too easy for many of us to make snap judgments about capital punishment and how it should be covered.
If ever there were a poster child for executions, McVeigh is it. There's no doubt that he's guilty. The government has the evidence, along with witnesses and his confession.
McVeigh's crime is so heinous as to defy belief. His motives were treasonous. He bombed a federal building and everyone inside to get back at the government for policies he did not like.
His attitude is unrepentant and infuriating. He refers to the young children killed by his bomb as "collateral damage," a term he borrows colorfully from the Persian Gulf War, where he served in the Army. The Army was at war in the Gulf and McVeigh was at war against his own country.
McVeigh also wants his execution to be televised. That's as good a reason as any to avoid televising it.
I used to advocate the televising of executions. As an opponent of the death penalty, I hoped that seeing people put to death on live TV would turn enough stomachs to cause Americans to look for alternatives.
In this era of burgeoning reality-TV shows, I am changing my mind. Long before our better angels cause us to get rid of the death penalty, we probably would have copy-cat TV shows built around executions.
In the ratings race, who knows what might happen. Perhaps one channel would bring in the XFL cheerleaders to liven up the competition.
Another would hire that stern woman who moderates the new quiz show "The Weakest Link" to declare in her stern British manner, "You are the weakest link. Goodbye."
Such unsettling prospects help explain why Ashcroft is allowing only the survivors and the relatives of the dead from the Oklahoma City bombing to view McVeigh's execution through closed-circuit television.
They deserve to have "closure," he says. Offered as a justification for execution, "closure" sounds uncomfortably like "schadenfreude," the German word for the pleasure one feels over the misery of others. A lot of people don't get much pleasure from executions or find them to be therapeutic. That explains why many of the survivors who could view the execution say they don't plan to.
Such considerations also help explain why Ashcroft opposes opening that TV signal up to the general public. But he does not stop there. He also has banned in-person interviews with McVeigh. He does not want anyone to be able to "purchase access to the podium of America with the blood of 168 innocent victims," he says.
Sadly, it is too late for that, too. McVeigh has bragged about his need to go out in a blaze of self-styled glory. You can read it in a new book, "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck. They spent 75 hours interviewing McVeigh, among others. At one point he recalls, "If I needed to, I was ready to stay in the truck and protect it with gunfire until the bomb blew up."
Wal-Mart refuses to sell the biography in its 2,600 stores. "Most simply," a spokesman said, "we believe that's what most of our store associates and customers would expect from us."
Be not afraid. It's only journalism. It is Wal-Mart's right to refuse to sell what it doesn't want to sell. But information about McVeigh may help us to prevent tragic stories like his from happening again. If we prevent McVeigh from exploiting the public spotlight, that hurts him. But when that prevention denies information to the rest of us that can prevent future tragedies, that hurts
04/12/01: Not this time, Jesse | <urn:uuid:9608df36-b005-4759-a598-75608f639e31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0401/page041901.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981206 | 924 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Over on The Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein has an interview with Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of the Acton Institute, about his new book, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy:
What is the moral case for capitalism?
The moral case for a free economy (I prefer this phrase over the word “capitalism” which is far too narrow and has Marxist roots) is to be found in human nature: the very reality that all people related to the natural world of scarce resources by the use of their minds to create things that were not in existence prior to human creativity. Men and women require freedom to express this productive creativity.
The sixteenth-century priest St. Francis de Sales, when called upon to give pastoral advice to Christians involved in trades and occupations, gave a different answer from what some might expect from a saint: “Have greater care than worldly men do to make your property profitable and fruitful . . . our possessions are not our own. God has given them to us to cultivate and he wants us to make them fruitful and profitable . . . therefore let us exercise this gracious care of preserving and even of increasing our temporal goods whenever just occasions present themselves.”
The system of profit and loss in a free economy can orient our behavioral compass toward activities that serve others, make good use of resources, and prepare us for the future. It doesn’t stop people from serving evil desires or eradicate original sin, but without the price signals in a free economy, our economic activities would be without order. | <urn:uuid:14edf435-33ea-44fe-9473-5a67025615e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.acton.org/archives/32783-daily-caller-interviews-rev-sirico.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950889 | 320 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Posted By Cliff Tuttle | June 28, 2012
This case raised the question whether Article III of the Constitution permits Congress to authorize a statutory cause of action when the plaintiff has no damages. Under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, there is a prohibition against kickbacks, even when there are no damages.
Here’s what the SCOTUS Blog had to say about the surpass result:
“In First American Financial v. Edwards, No. 10-708, a case regarding Congress’s power to create private rights of action to enforce statutory rights, the Court dismissed the petition as improvidently granted. Thus, the Ninth Circuit’s decision holding that the plaintiff has standing remains intact. The Court did not provide an explanation for why the case was dismissed, and so we are left to speculate that the Justices could not reach agreement on the proper result.”
Here is an analysis of the ruling from SCOTUS.
| Post a Comment | <urn:uuid:72029ed5-6d4b-4532-8fd0-279bc45c94c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pittsburghlegalbacktalk.com/archives/4945 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934665 | 196 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Dawn Evans Radford recently visited several retailers in the Glens Falls area to read from and talk about her literary work. Radfords first novel, Oyster Flats, is a descriptive look at life on the Florida Panhandle. Her often compelling, sometimes humorous cast of characters draws the reader into a world where struggle and sacrifice are a way of life. Radford recreates a moment in history some forty years ago when the world was going through many changes. These changes are reflected in the lives of her characters, though perhaps on a smaller scale. Radford uses three narrators Darlene Duggar, an eleven-year-old girl whos lived in Oyster Flats for all of her life, but is destined for more than her small town could ever offer her, Brother Joshua Herndon, a convicted felon turned preacher and his wife, Miss Venera Herndon. Miss Venera is a certified pastor herself who met Brother Joshua on a community service visit to the prison where he served his sentence. Though she holds a degree from the Methodist College, her devotion to Brother Joshua has kept her from preaching. Each narrator has his or her own style giving the novel many different perspectives. Darlenes story is told through straight, first person narration. Miss Venera has an epistolary style, writing letters to her mother, while Brother Joshuas sermons serve as his contributions to the novel. The changes in narrative style propel the overall story. Both Miss Veneras letters and Brother Joshuas sermons give the reader a unique, insiders view of the plot. With his newly received certification by mail order to preach, Brother Joshua moves to Oyster Flats to start the Friends of the Tabernacle Church. The Herndons move into a small trailer across the road from the Duggars. Darlene quickly becomes their confidant and the Herndons take her under their wings. Darlenes stepfather is a man named Daddy Jook. The Herndons soon see that Daddy Jook is a dangerous man and pay particular attention to Darlene and her siblings. Miss Venera sees Darlenes potential and cultivates her interest in education and reading. She provides an example of a very strong, loving relationship with her husband, which contrasts Darlenes own mothers relationship with Daddy Jook. Darlene regards Miss Venera as an angel sent to her. Darlenes desire to please Miss Venera drives her to learn more about the subjects they discuss. Brother Joshuas sermons are quite convoluted and often very humorous, mixing biblical tales with childrens fairy tales and his own story of redemption. His humor and honesty bring many members of the community to the Friends of the Tabernacle Church and his parishioners quickly multiply. Though he often mixes up biblical stories, this serves as an educational experience sending churchgoers back to their bibles to fact check and keeping the sermons in their minds long after hes finished. Brother Joshua is able to reach his congregation through his openness about his background. He is a living demonstration of his belief that with the right guidance and acceptance of the Hand of God any individual can be redeemed. Though he is not perfect, Miss Veneras unwavering belief in him grants him the serenity he offers his flock. It is Brother Joshua who literally and figuratively saves the people of Oyster Flats. When tragedy strikes the usually placid town, the community must accept that someone among them is capable of murder. The community is torn and families mourn loss they cannot understand. The plot then quickens until motive and deception are revealed in a gripping conclusion. Oyster Flats is an enchanting story of love and redemption. The reader sees through the eyes of a child and understands, as Darlene does, that while some people are capable of greed, violence and harming those around them, others are not, wanting only to love and support the people in their lives. Perhaps the hardest lesson of all is that sometimes this love means sacrifice, while other times it is the most rewarding and redeeming of human emotions. Theresa Studnicky has a Masters in English and can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. Her book reviews will appear regularly in the News Enterprise. | <urn:uuid:72507a00-b119-43be-9e43-8a51c28eca24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denpubs.com/news/2008/sep/06/oyster-flats/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969962 | 873 | 1.695313 | 2 |
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