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The objective with a helicopter is to keep the main rotor rotating at a more or less constant speed. The main rotor is connected to the free turbine, or the N2 speed. Rotor speed and N2 speed are directly proportional. So, that means the objective will be to keep the N2 speed more or less constant, or within the range dictated by the helicopter manufacturer.
(Step 3) Checking the datum
To do that, it needs to check for a pre-programmed value (called datum). The computer compares actual conditions to the datum and makes a decision as to whether we need to increase or decrease fuel flow. It makes this comparison electronically, and it then sends that signal as to whether it needs to increase or decrease it to the next decision point.
But it's not quite this easy. The datum, in addition to having some pre-programmed parameters, is altered by various operating conditions. For example, the position of the collective pitch, or what we call anticipation, biases that decision. That is to say, we've told the computer we want a certain fuel flow to maintain a specific N2, but if I happen to be moving the collective pitch, that's going to affect the rotational speed — so, I have a collective pitch position signal transmitted electronically to the computer saying "you need to bias that quantity of fuel flow I just asked for based on rotational speed to also make allowances for the load (increased or decreased pitch).
Then, there's an N1 speed signal coming from the other engine, which is compared to the N1 speed on this engine, which makes a load sharing decision as to what needs to be done to fuel flow to keep the N1s matched. Keep in mind that the N1 is directly related to Power on these engines.
So, the computer (DEECU) takes all of these things into consideration, and it makes a decision as to what it wants to do to N1 to get the N2 speed that's required based on these conditions.
N1 is the gas generator speed. So now, we're sending a datum as to how much N1 we want to an N1 datum selection memory in the computer. It then takes this information and compares it to the selected control mode in step 1 to check for compatibility. If these numbers are compatible with the control mode, it passes on the information. This information is called the Raw N1 Datum. In other words, this is what we want N1 to do without taking any limitations into consideration.
(Step 4) Checking the limits
The next step for the computer, is a verification step in the decision process. It checks what the pilot is asking for against limits. It looks at the torque limit and the amount of torque. Also checked is the N1 speed, the control lever position, and it also calculates standard day information to correct for atmospheric conditions. The computer then takes the value that is lowest, the limit, or the raw datum, and passes it on through the logic process. For instance, if what I'm asking for is not as high as the limit, that data will go on through. If what I'm asking for is higher than the limit, it will only let the limit go through.
From this point, the signal is referred to as the "limited N1 signal."
(Step 5) N1 control
The limited N1 signal then goes to N1 control. Remember that the N1 is what needs to be changed in order to control N2. You can think of the N1 control and N2 control as governors, but in this case they are electronic memory. In any case, this N1 control takes this limited N1 signal and compares it to the actual N1 — it checks to see if actual N1 speed is higher or lower than the requested value. This determines if we need more or less fuel flow to increase or decrease the speed of the N1.
(Step 6) Fuel flow selection
Having determined what it needs to do, the N1 control sends a signal to the fuel flow selection. The fuel flow selection is made based on the amount of fuel flow requested, the control mode selected, and whether or not we're starting the engine. In every case it checks the control mode, making sure the selections are compatible with what we're requesting. If we're starting the engine, the DEECU will send a different fuel flow signal than if it's operating. Having verified the amount of fuel flow requested and insuring that it is compatible with the control mode selected, it passes the signal on to the next step. | <urn:uuid:d363bd29-29c7-4996-bfbc-d64dc8203a11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aviationpros.com/article/10389080/understanding-turbomeca-deecu-systems?page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949654 | 949 | 3.8125 | 4 |
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman says Tehran plans to take legal action after being rebuked by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over its nuclear program...This Sept. 26, 2009 satellite file image provided by GeoEye shows a facility under construction inside a mountain located about 20 miles north northeast of Qom, Iran.
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GeoEye, Inc. is an international information services company serving government and commercial markets. The Company is recognized as one of the geospatial industry's high resolution imagery experts, delivering exceptional quality imagery products and solutions to customers around the world. Headquartered in Dulles, Virginia, the Company has 534 employees, as of June 30, 2009, dedicated to developing best-in-class geospatial, communications and information products, systems and services. The Company provides support to academic institutions and non-governmental organizations through the GeoEye Foundation (http://www.geoeyefoundation.org). GeoEye is a public company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol GEOY. Additional information about GeoEye is available at www.geoeye.com. | <urn:uuid:e4fc0f8d-fbb7-414c-b772-a953162ae7c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://geoeyeblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/iran-plans-to-protest-international.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930927 | 229 | 1.515625 | 2 |
WASHINGTON, DC (BRAIN) — The League of American Bicyclists has designated nine new schools to its "Bicycle Friendly Universities" list, bringing the total to 44 institutions in 25 states. Among the new names on the list are Ivy League schools Yale and Princeton, League officials noted.
"Just like many students aspire to an Ivy League education, a growing number of college students want their university to be smart about biking, too" said Andy Clarke, President of the League of American Bicyclists. "Young adults want to drive less and ride more -- and they're choosing schools, like Yale and Princeton, that are making bicycling a vibrant part of campus life."
Yale and Princeton each joined the list at the Bronze level.
State schools were honored, too. The University of Utah joined the list at the Silver level in its first application.
The League noted the university's "innovative on-road facilities, bicycle-related academic course offerings, a successful anti-theft campaign, on-campus bike rental and bike collective, and a wealth of pro-cycling policies."
More information: the full list. | <urn:uuid:dcfa7d7d-829b-4a05-91ba-a405c43f7577> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2012/10/25/league-names-bike-friendly-universities | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964839 | 236 | 1.625 | 2 |
It strikes again.
A new poll reveals that 27% of Republicans surveyed think Bartering a Chicken in exchange for Healthcare is a good way for families to lower healthcare costs.
As you may know, Sue Lowden has proposed reducing medical costs by having patients barter with their doctor instead of using health insurance. Under Lowden's barter proposal, patients would negotiate directly with doctors, offering services or goods such as painting the doctor's home or giving the doctor a chicken, in exchange for medical treatment.
QUESTION: Do you think Lowden's proposal is a realistic way to bring medical costs down for most families?
Yes No Not Sure
ALL 14 81 5
DEM 5 91 4
REP 27 68 5
7 87 6 IND
Of course 27% represents the number of any given population that is stark raving mad.
Which is exactly the percentage of Republicans surveyed that believes that bartering Chickens for Health Care is a good idea. | <urn:uuid:cba90634-f12e-445d-8078-46df67fe9527> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecommanderguy.blogspot.com/2010/04/crazification-factor-alert.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948519 | 194 | 1.546875 | 2 |
We've all seen the satellite images of Earth at night--the bright blobs and shining webs that tell the story of humanity's endless sprawl.
These pictures are no longer just symbols of human impact, however, but can be used to objectively measure it, according to a study in the December 2008 issue of Geocarto International, a peer-reviewed journal on geoscience and remote sensing.
Travis Longcore, a USC geographer and expert in light pollution, collaborated with an international team, led by Christoph Aubrecht of the Austrian Research Centers, to develop the index.
"Coral reefs are incredibly importantbut unfortunately they're also incredibly fragile," Longcore said. "Using night light proximity, we were able to identify the most threatened and most pristine spots in an objective and easily repeatable way."
The researchers did this by first classifying the light into three separate sources: urban areas, gas flares and fishing boat activity.
Each of these sources puts stress on reefs: urban areas cause sewage and polluted runoff, oil platforms cause leakages and spills, and commercial fishing boats deplete marine life and impair the ecological balance.
The closer a reef is to one or more of these sources, the higher the index number and the greater the stress on the reefs.
While previous assessments of coral reef health, like the 1998 Reefs at Risk survey, considered more variables, the LPI yields similar results, Longcore added.
"As a first-pass global assessment, light pretty much correlates with human impact on the oceans," he explained.
Light's direct impact on coral reefs
In this way the index uses light as an indirect measure of coral reef health, which could help inform conservation policy.
But the LPI is also a direct measurement of coral reef stress, since light itself also affects marine life, according to the study.
"The lights themselve
|Contact: Terah DeJong|
University of Southern California | <urn:uuid:6dfb4841-6d7e-48c7-adf9-1dec2ce04cee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Light-pollution-offers-new-global-measure-of-coral-reef-health-6017-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926712 | 402 | 3.96875 | 4 |
The riverside is a particularly difficult environment to manage. The diverse needs of biodiversity, aethetics and recreation all have to be balanced and in much of the TLS area any maintainance plan has to account for daily tidal inundation and difficult environments to access.
For these reasons, the Thames Landscape Strategy is working with local councils to produce an annual TLS Towpath Management Plan that covers everything from litter collection, access, tree management to grass collecting. The success of the management plan has been considerable and achieved through developing new ways of working in harmony with the river and in partnership between local communities and riparian owners.
NB For maps of individual reaches showing litter grot spots please contact us as they are too large a file to upload.
Throughout much of London the flood defence walls keep litter largely within the river channel. In the upper reaches of the tideway however, much of the river corridor consists of low laying parks, towpaths and open spaces that are regularly inundated by the high tide.
For this reason the monthly flucuations of the tide have to be accounted for in the development of work schedules. It is during periods of spring tides (usually for 4-6 days each month just after the full moon) that most of the litter found on the towpath is deposited by the high water. The TLS management plan accounts for the natural rythym of the tides in that it allows for the litter to accumulate during the spring tides to be cleared away immeadiatly after the cycle changes to lower water. Signage is placed at key points along the towpath to inform visitors why the riverside is covered in flotsam and jetsum and the dates that it willl be cleared. This approach has seen a staggering 80% reduction in the overall amount of litter and significantly increased enjoyment and understanding of the riverside.
In the town centre areas, the TLS has been working with riparian councils to reduce the amount of litter from riverside users. This was a particular problem at honey pot locations such as Richmond. Small temporary skips are now installed at key locations along side fixed litter bins on warm dry days to increase capacity and recently the introduction of recycling bins has been trailed. Extra litter pickers during busy periods have been employed and early morning refuse collections now clean the riverside before most visitors are even out of bed. In addition, TLS projects are paying for new litter bins at key sites that have been identified as litter hot spots.
The TLS plan includes the mowing of grass, tree and scrub management and weeding of riverside structures. These are now managed in a more sustainable way to account for complex river eco-systems, views and recreational use and is devised to dovetail with regeneration work. In this way projects are intergrated at inception with day-to-day management. Each stretch of the river has to managed differently accounting for local charachteristics and is constantly modified as survey work throws new light on environmental consderations. For this reason the Managemnent Plan is broken into many small site specific sections – there is no ‘one size fits all’ aproach. This has necessitated in close co-operation with Council contractors and the consolidation of management areas.
The plan looks to the long-term establishemnet of a healthy, diverse and natural riverside ecosystem. This approach starts on the river bed and moves up through the river bank to the land and accounts for the diversity found in such environements including aqatic species, plants, insects, birds and mammalls. Traditional countryside management techniques are being re-introduced including native hedge planting (over 2km in 2005), hedge laying (almost 1km in 2005), willow spiling, reed planting and coppicing of trees. Hisoric views are kept open and improved scrub management and hay cutting has seen a considerable increase in the diversity of riverside species. Several trail locations have been established along the river to monitor changes. At one such site the number of native species has increased from 10 to 40 including all manner of flowering plants, reeds and sedges.
A key consideration in the development of the plan has been the recreational use of the river. In certain places, grass is kept short for picnicers or fisherman whilst in others scrub is allowed to grow to mask unsightly views or block the way to a particular site that was regularly vandalised.
Traditional native waterside trees are being planted or encouraged along the riverside including willow, ash, alder and black poplar and are managed in traditional ways including coppicing and pollarding. Dead wood is being left in situ where possible and where it needs to be removed (for example in the tidal areas) is placed nearby or used to create habitat loggeries for insects and stag beetles.
Volunteer work has been factored into the TLS Mnagement Plan and is now an integral part of the management process working alongside council contractors at specified times. Volunteers carry out a range of tasks including weeding, comprehensive litter picks, foreshore clearance, coppicing, hedge laying, structure repair and removal of invasive species such as Himalayan Balsam. In 2005 a staggering 3,200 volunteer days were carried out on TLS projects in Molesey, Kingston, Teddington, Ham, Twickenham, Richmond, Kew and Brentford. Volunteers ranged from local people and families to riverside businesses or large corporations.
The use of community service, probation and prison service workers is being introduced at present to carry out a range of tasks as part of the rehabilitation process. Following a successful pilot scheme at Molesey in partnership with the Swingbridge Community Boat Project and the Surrey Care Trust it is hoped to roll out this approach in Richmond, Ham and Kingston.
The TLS Riverside Mangement Plan looks to the long-term and although there is still a lot more work to do it has been one of the great success stories of the Thames Landscape Strategy’s first decade and has had a considerable influrenece on the appearance, enjoyment and diversity of the Thames corridor.
For information on tide times please follow the links on the Port of London Authority’s website
The Thames Landscape Strategy has been reviewed. Follow the link below for details.
The Thames Landscape Strategy is a 100-year blueprint for the River Thames between Hampton and Kew. To view the full strategy document follow the link below.
View the latest Annual Review, a roundup of all the latest developments in the Arcadian Thames | <urn:uuid:e0c1f2a7-856c-42d5-8ca0-74ab659c9d5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thames-landscape-strategy.org.uk/towpathmanagement | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953899 | 1,328 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Best time to shoe-shop? Late in the day, when your feet tend to be largest. / Hugh Whitaker/Getty Images
Feet rank low on the list of health priorities for many Americans, but nearly 80% of adults have experienced some form of foot ache, pain, itch or other condition in their lifetime, according to a survey from the American Podiatric Medical Association. Toenail problems are the most common, followed by sweaty feet and pain of the ball of the foot and heel. Here are four tips to help sidestep these and other ailments and keep your tootsies in tip-top shape:
Do a daily foot check. Take a good look at your toenails, and not just for polish chips — if they’re thick or discolored, it could indicate a developing fungus. Also, pay attention to changes in skin color or texture, such as cracks, cuts or peeling and scaling on the soles (a sign of athlete’s foot). Any growth on the foot is not normal; neither is pain. Joint stiffness, for example, could mean arthritis; tingling or numbness could be a sign of diabetes. See your doctor or podiatrist about changes in your feet, especially if you have diabetes, which can make you prone to infection and more serious complications.
Trim toenails straight, not curved. Rounded edges increase the chance of developing ingrown toenails, so keep the shape squared and the length even with the tips of your toes. Cut too short and pressure from your shoes may push the nail to grow into the corner of your fleshy toe, causing redness, swelling and infection around the nail, plus pain and tenderness. High heels (particularly the pointy-toed kind) are a leading cause of ingrown toenails, podiatrists at Loyola University Health System reported recently.
Swipe antiperspirant on your soles. It’s a way to keep feet dry and help protect against a number of conditions, including fungal infections, blisters, warts and sweaty, smelly feet (a problem that affects a third of Americans). Rubbing cornstarch on the bottom of your feet helps, too; so does airing out sweaty shoes before wearing them again and choosing natural or synthetic-blend socks that wick away moisture. Also important: After washing your feet, be sure to dry carefully, especially between the toes.
Spring-clean your shoe rack. Every pair should cushion, support and fit properly (with enough room for your toes). Replace well-worn shoes and toss flimsy flip-flops — any pair you can fold in half or easily twist is no good for feet. Instead, look for sturdier flip-flops that have arch support to help prevent pain and are made of soft leather to minimize blisters and irritations. The best time to shoe-shop? Late in the day, when your feet tend to be largest. | <urn:uuid:d6820865-0314-4141-be71-b62514788b80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usaweekend.com/article/20120525/HEALTH01/305250005/If-your-toes-could-talk?odyssey=tab%7Cmostpopular%7Cimg%7CFRONTPAGE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928906 | 615 | 2.34375 | 2 |
“One love, one heart, one destiny” – Bob Marley.
Losing Paradise is a documentary film directed and produced by the multi-talented singer, stage and screen actress Claudja Barry. Ms. Barry, born in Jamaica, moved to Canada when she was seven, but her love and respect for her birth home remained. Performing around the world, the artist recognized a downgrading of the Jamaican culture by the message being sent from performers of Dancehall music. The genre came on the scene after the One Love reggae music of the legendary Bob Marley. The language of Dancehall and the attitude of its performers sends a negative voice to Jamaican youth and to the rest of the world. It’s the Jamaica, known for its weather, laid back culture and upbeat Reggae music that boosted tourism for many years, but lately has taken a hit. Many believe Jamaica has become a culture of violence and sending this message through its music doesn’t help. The documentary Losing Paradise takes a look at Dancehall music and the belief that it contributes to the negativity of the culture. It’s time to look back at Jamaica’s rich heritage, understand it, celebrate it, sing, dance, and let the rest of the world join in. It’s time for artists to take responsibility. Ms. Barry steps up with… Losing Paradise.
The documentary film Losing Paradise aired on the OMNI Channel on February 17th. | <urn:uuid:60621d72-c1b8-48cd-839f-a4a6348b2804> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.examiner.com/article/about-the-documentary-film-losing-paradise-directed-by-claudja-barry?cid=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961574 | 305 | 1.914063 | 2 |
The search for dark matter
U. S. experiment takes the lead in the competitive race to find dark matter.
February 27, 2008
Provided by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
February 27, 2008
This image shows a closeup of a CDMS detector, made of crystal germanium.
Photo by Fermilab
Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, including researchers from the California Institute of Technology, have announced that they have regained the lead in the worldwide race by a number of different research groups to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment, which is being conducted a half-mile underground in a mine in Soudan, Minnesota, again sets the world's best constraints on the properties of dark matter candidates.
Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, are leading candidates for the building blocks of dark matter, the as-yet-unknown form of matter that accounts for 85 percent of the entire mass of the universe. Hundreds of billions of WIMPs may have passed through your body as you read these sentences.
The CDMS experiment is located in the Soudan Underground Laboratory, shielded from cosmic rays and other particles that could mimic the signals expected from dark matter particles. Scientists operate the ultra-sensitive CDMS detectors under clean-room conditions at a temperature of about.04° C above absolute zero. Physicists believe that WIMPs, if they exist, would travel right through ordinary matter, rarely leaving a trace. If WIMPs were to cross the CDMS detector, occasionally one would hit the nucleus of an atom of the element germanium in the crystal grid of the detector. Like a hammer hitting a bell, the collision would create vibrations of the grid, which scientists would be able to detect. The experiment is sensitive enough to hear WIMPs if they hit the crystal germanium detector only twice per year.
The scientists did not observe such signals, allowing the CDMS experiment to set limits on the properties of WIMPs.
Scientists predict that WIMPs might interact with ordinary matter at rates similar to those of low-energy neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles discovered in 1956. But to account for all of the dark matter in the universe and the gravitational pull it produces, WIMPs must have masses about a billion times larger than those of neutrinos. The CDMS collaboration found that if WIMPs have 100 times the mass of protons (about 100 GeV/c^2) they collide with one kilogram of germanium less than a few times per year; otherwise, the CDMS experiment would have detected them.
"With our new result we are leapfrogging the competition," says CDMS co-spokesperson Blas Cabrera, Stanford University. The Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the project management for the CDMS experiment. "We have achieved the world's most stringent limits on how often dark matter particles interact with ordinary matter and how heavy they are, in particular in the theoretically favored mass range of more than 40 times the proton mass."
"The CDMS experiment is unique in bringing so many different disciplines to bear on the search for dark matter, from astro- and particle physics in the expected WIMP signature to low-temperature and condensed-matter physics in the operation of our novel detectors," says Sunil Golwala, assistant professor of physics at Caltech. "Our work continues Caltech's long-standing role in the dark matter story, ranging from the first evidence for dark matter obtained by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 to the detailed maps of dark matter made recently by Caltech astronomy colleagues Nick Scoville, Richard Ellis, and Richard Massey."
"Observations made with telescopes have repeatedly shown that dark matter exists. It is the stuff that holds together all cosmic structures, including our own Milky Way. The observation of WIMPs would finally reveal the underlying nature of this dark matter, which plays such a crucial role in the formation of galaxies and the evolution of our universe," says Joseph Dehmer, director of the Division of Physics for the National Science Foundation.
The discovery of WIMPs would require extensions to the theoretical framework known as the standard model of particles and their forces. The CDMS result, presented to the scientific community at the Eighth UCLA Dark Matter and Dark Energy symposium on February 22, tests the viability of new theoretical concepts that have been proposed.
"Our results constrain theoretical models such as supersymmetry and models based on extra dimensions of space-time, which predict the existence of WIMPs," says CDMS project manager Dan Bauer, of DOE's Fermilab. "For WIMP masses expected from these theories, we are again the most sensitive in the world, retaking the lead from the Xenon 10 experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory. We will gain another factor of three in sensitivity by continuing to take more data with our detector in the Soudan laboratory until the end of 2008."
A new phase of the CDMS experiment with 25 kilograms of germanium is planned for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory's underground laboratory facility in Canada.
"The 25-kilogram experiment has clear discovery potential," says Fermilab director Pier Oddone. "It covers a lot of the territory predicted by supersymmetric theories."
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Learn more » | <urn:uuid:d637502d-97a0-433a-8faa-75852b3d2838> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2008/02/The%20search%20for%20dark%20matter.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924502 | 1,127 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Selecting a stellar word
Four jackpots? Oh, my stars!
“Astronomical” is a stellar word choice in the headline for today’s front-page story of a reclusive woman winning her fourth (yes, you read correctly) Texas Lottery jackpot.
Astronomical is the adjective form of astronomy, a word that is composed of two Greek word parts: astron, meaning star and nomos, meaning law.
Webster’s second definition of astronomical is “extremely large, as the numbers of quantities used in astronomy.”
As the article’s lead paragraph notes, Ginther’s chance of winning four lotteries in the Lone Star State were “as slim as 1 in 18 septillion.” If she had been an astronaut (star sailor) trying to pick just one star out of all the Milky Way, her odds would have been markedly better.
Was this astonishing stroke of luck simply in Ginther’s stars? Inquiring minds may never know, because she reportedly shuns publicity. Surely we can assume, though, that this is one Texan who is thanking her lucky stars ... or maybe just one lucky star. | <urn:uuid:c7c56ad9-8aaa-4033-8587-3d46711de265> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gjsentinel.com/blogs/whats_in_a_word/entry/selecting-a-stellar-word/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949324 | 252 | 2.265625 | 2 |
There is a bill pending that would ensure that children between 4 and 8 are properly restrained in all vehicles.
YOUNGSTOWN -- In support of National Child Passenger Safety Week, American Automobile Association and its Ohio Motorists Safety Foundation will have a car booster seat voucher giveaway Monday through Feb. 16 at the Mahoning and Trumbull County AAA-Ohio Motorists Association offices.
To make children safer in motor vehicles, these offices will distribute Ford's Boost America vouchers to income-eligible families that can be taken to Toys "R" Us to be redeemed for a "Right Fit" low back booster or have $22.99 applied toward the purchase of another choice of booster seat.
All three of these qualifications must be met:
UChild must be present and weigh between 40 pounds and 80 pounds.
UVehicle must have a lap and shoulder type safety belt protecting the seat available for child to use regularly. (Not available in rear seats of most 1988 and older vehicles.)
UIncome eligibility (has WIC or Ohio Medicaid Card or declares number of family members and total household income.)
UIf you have questions, call (800) 845-0375 for assistance.
"When 4-year-olds outgrow their safety seats at 40 pounds, they're still too small for adult safety belts. Kids under 4 feet 9 inches and 80 pounds need to use a booster seat," said Dennis Burke, executive director of Ohio Motorists Safety Foundation. "The booster raises the child so that the lap portion of the belt sits correctly across their hip bones and better positions the shoulder belt."
Legislation: AAA in Ohio strongly encourages passage House Bill 334, aimed at ensuring that every child between 4 and 8 is properly restrained while riding in a motor vehicle.
All of Ohio's 14 AAA Clubs, including the locally based AAA-Ohio Motorists Association, endorse House Bill 334, which was introduced by state Rep. Kevin DeWine, R-Fairborn, and is pending before the House State Government Committee.
Booster seat vouchers will be available while supplies last.
The OMSF, a nonprofit traffic safety foundation, is supported by the voluntary contributions of AAA members and other individuals, groups and organizations. | <urn:uuid:a6008556-a15e-4307-9dd1-1e74dcded631> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vindy.com/news/2002/feb/07/mahoning-valley-group-to-give-away-booster-seats/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941439 | 454 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Doing Your Research
The story and characters are arguably the most important parts of a novel. However, research is just as important. Getting indisputable facts wrong can jolt readers from the narrative, no matter how well written.
Initially, your approach should be similar to writing a research paper. Decide what you want to write about and what you need to know to write about it. The big difference is that when you write a novel you may need to do more than one research project, depending on where you’re going with the story. Historical novels are in some ways the most challenging. You don’t want to inform your readers that George Washington invented the light bulb. Careful research is required to make sure references you make for a particular time period are accurate.
Writing a mystery or crime novel requires a slightly different approach to research. When you get into crime-related or forensics topics, research is especially important. Even those who only occasionally glance at some of the seemingly endless forensic dramas on TV will know you can’t get DNA from fingerprints. This doesn’t mean you need to acquire an online PhD in forensics, but especially careful fact-checking is called for. Many community colleges offer basic introductory classes that will give you enough information to write about criminology and forensics in any reasonable depth. For most writers, a basic knowledge and some background reading should do just fine.
Information available online isn’t always totally solid, of course, and it may show in your writing if you rely too heavily on internet materials. Online research should not be discounted, but it should not be all an author does to prepare for writing a novel. Some real-life forensic experts will be willing to entertain questions. Their insights will not only provide you better information, but might even help you fill out your characters’ authenticity as well.
For a better perspective on specific locations, visit travel websites and read descriptions and comments. Some of the little details travelers add to their accounts may come in handy in your writing. When recent visitors mention out-of-the-way restaurants, distinctive markets, or little-known scenic spots, you can mention or even make them settings to give your novel more specific and realistic depth.
Alternatively, there is a simpler way to approach doing research: pretty much the other way around That is, write your story first. Don’t do any research. Make note of places where you need to know something in detail, and the questions you need answered. When you are finished writing, go back and research the questions you wrote down. This way you’ll only do research directly relevant to what you’ve written.
Of course, this strategy has major downsides. Most basically, leaving the research till after the writing means you’ll probably face heavy-duty revisions to incorporate what you learn and fix whatever may need touching up in light of your fact-checking. On a more subtle level, if you don’t begin with research you may write without realizing you don’t know something or are misinformed. If you don’t know to make note of questions about something as you write it, you may well not even discover your error later. Writing first and asking questions later is really only suitable for when you already have a fair grasp of your subject matter.
It’s tempting to jump right into the writing process, but getting facts about setting, location, time period, or techniques used in your characters’ professions incorrect can quickly distract readers and detracts from the quality of your work. Think of solid research as the icing on the cake. A well-researched, well-written novel can transport readers into another world with characters and settings so real they come to life in the reader’s mind. | <urn:uuid:e1381db4-de2b-4aaf-ad25-1183b4f82333> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/guest-blogger-elaine-hirsch-doing-your-research/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938066 | 780 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Learning While Black: A Message From a Mother to Her Son
Photo Credit: Junial Enterprises | Shutterstock.com
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When you were almost 2, we would drop off your cousin, Sydney, at her K-8 elementary school. The ritual went something like this:
“OK, Syd, have a good day.”
“OK,” she’d groan as she grabbed her backpack. “Bye, Caleb.”
“Bye,” you’d wave and grin with your entire body.
“Bye,” Sydney would say one last time as she shut the door. I’d roll down the car window.
“Byeeeee,” you’d sing.
“Bye,” Sydney would laugh as she caught up with friends.
I’d roll up the window as you said “bye” a few more times, then start to whimper. “It’s OK, sweetie, she’ll be back before you know it. And you’ll be off joining her before I know it.”
And it’s true. Before I know it, Caleb, you will be throwing your backpack on and waving goodbye as you run off across the playground. I think about that moment often and wonder about the condition of schools you’ll enter. I worry about sending you, my black son, to schools that over-enroll black boys into special ed, criminalize them at younger and younger ages, and view them as negative statistics on the dark side of the achievement gap.
Son, my hope for you is that your schooling experiences will be better than this, that they’ll be better than most of mine.
For three years of my K-8 schooling, from 7:40 a.m. until 3:05 p.m., I was black and invisible. I was bused across town to integrate a white school in Southeast Portland, Ore. We arrived at school promptly at 7:30 and had 10 full minutes before the white children arrived. We spent that time roaming the halls—happy, free, normal. Once the white children arrived, we became black and invisible. We were separated, so that no more than two of us were in a class at a time. I never saw black people in our textbooks unless they were in shackles or standing with Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us rarely interacted with a black adult outside of the aide who rode the bus with us. I liked school and I loved learning. But I never quite felt right or good. I felt very black and obvious because I knew that my experience was different from that of my peers. But I also felt invisible because this was never acknowledged in any meaningful way. I became visible again at 3:05 when I got back on the bus with the other brown faces to make our journey home.
Caleb, I want your teachers to help you love being in your skin. I want them to make space for you in their curricula, so that you see yourself as integral to this country’s history, to your classroom’s community, to your peers’ learning. I want your teachers to select materials where blacks are portrayed in ordinary and extraordinary ways that actively challenge stereotypes and biases. Most of all, Caleb, I want your teachers to know you so they can help you grow.
One day a teacher was trying to figure out why I was so angry since I was generally a calm, fun-loving kid. She said to me: “I know you, Dyan. You come from a good family.” But did she know me? She knew that I lived on the other side of town and was bused in as part of the distorted way that Portland school authorities decided to “integrate” the schools. But did she know what that meant? My mom—your grandma—got us up at 6 a.m. in order for me to wash up, boil an egg just right, fix my toast the way I liked it, and watch the pan of milk so that it didn’t boil over, so I could have something hot in my stomach before going to school. You know Grandma, she doesn’t play. We had to eat a healthy breakfast before going to school, and we had to fix it ourselves. Maybe that’s what that teacher meant by “good family.” My teacher didn’t know that we had to walk, by ourselves, four blocks to the bus stop and wait for the yellow bus to come pick us up and take us to school. It took us a half hour to get to school. Once there, I had to constantly code switch, learn how not to be overly black, and be better than my white counterparts. | <urn:uuid:92cc0045-7da8-4d5e-b08f-8dfd1f5df137> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alternet.org/story/154822/learning_while_black%3A_a_message_from_a_mother_to_her_son | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985487 | 1,019 | 1.945313 | 2 |
The holiday season is upon us, Hanukkah begins tomorrow and there are only 21 shopping days before Christmas. In this season of spending and gift giving, economic and social justice groups are asking consumers to pay closer attention to where and how their gifts are made. Many products on the market these days are produced overseas, sometimes under the worst sweatshop conditions.
DEBORAH JAMES, Director of the Fair Trade Program for Global Exchange
U.R. CONNED, THE Ceo OF SWEAT-GEAR
Andrew Boyd of CISPES | <urn:uuid:5138996b-8692-450d-ab1f-64a9c9b9eb83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.democracynow.org/1996/12/4/free_trade_fair_trade_and_sweatshops | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929296 | 115 | 1.570313 | 2 |
This week, nearly 5,000 students will fill the seats of Zankel Hall for the culminating concerts of the Weill Music Institute's interactive Musical Explorers program. Musical Explorers offers a yearlong curriculum in which students engage in skills-based listening and creative work; meet local musicians; learn vocal repertoire from different cultures, languages, and traditions; and make meaningful connections with their communities. Applications for the 2012–2013 school year are available now.
Tuesday's event featured Emeline Michel, The Wiyos, and Eva Salina Primack. Each of these performers have made an impact on audiences throughout the New York City area through Carnegie Hall's Family Concerts, Neighborhood Concert Series, The McGraw-Hill Companies CarnegieKids events, and Musical Connections.
Musical Explorers is now accepting applications for the 2012–2013 school year. The program features the following:
Interested NYC-area elementary schools are invited to apply today. If you're outside the area, visit the Online Resource Center for access to a variety of digital materials, including Musical Explorers program guides. | <urn:uuid:f4ba76cd-f8b5-4234-81f8-560818f7e926> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.carnegiehall.org/BlogPost.aspx?id=4294986334 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919233 | 218 | 1.75 | 2 |
Academic Preparation (AP) Program
- 14-week module
- 24 classroom hours per week
- 2 hours per week of English Language Experience (optional)
- Start in January, May, or September
- Costs: $4,700 Cdn
The Foundations 2 course combines the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking in daily classroom activities. Students will actively practice all aspects of English and focus on building academic writing skills along with practical communication skills. The goal of this course is to develop students’ knowledge, skills and confidence in English so they can move forward in their academic preparation.
» Back to Academic Preparation (AP) Program | <urn:uuid:f399d1c9-e8c2-45b5-8cee-9c26b8e1001f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.viu.ca/esl/f2.asp | 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 | 0.930668 | 137 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Cyrano de Bergerac In Plain and Simple English by BookCaps
Price: $2.99 USD. 91360 words.
Published on October 10, 2012. .
Cyrano de Bergerac has been the most admired play of Edmond Rostand for years; over one hundred years have made many translations of this classic work a little hard to understand. Let BookCaps help with this modern translation.
If you have struggled in the past reading old English, then BookCaps can help you out. | <urn:uuid:06930771-5b61-4869-9d9e-0d57a7846faa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smashwords.com/books/tags/caesura | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930093 | 108 | 1.953125 | 2 |
posted on 03.18.13 by WFIT_Admin
WFIT Mentors in Motion Graduation, 2012
posted on 06.27.12 by WFIT_Admin
A World Fit for Kids! (WFIT) high school healthy behaviors and personal empowerment programming and training equips teens with the knowledge…
A World Fit for Kids! (WFIT) high school healthy behaviors and personal empowerment programming and training equips teens with the knowledge and skills needed to develop emotional, mental and physical fitness. The Mentors in MotionSM (MIM) program consists of physical activity, nutrition, leadership training, community service, and job shadowing. After completing the service-learning component, MiM teens can apply for a 6-month internship as an Assistant Coach-Mentor for WFIT or other youth-serving agencies. As an intern, the teens become trained leaders in healthy behaviors and physical activity-based afterschool programming while they gain self-confidence and valuable work experiencein their own community.
This year, WFIT’s four high school sites each enjoyed a graduation ceremony for their senior students as they prepare for their futures. For many, this involves postsecondary education, with students headed to UC’s, Cal States, and community colleges throughout California.
The WFIT ceremony at Belmont High School took place on June 12th, with 7 MiM students, 5 AP tutors, 5 CAHSEE tutors, and 1 DOTS assistant coach having completed the training and internship program. After graduating high school, the lessons and memories gained as WFIT participants will continue with them. “My experience from being a MiM was really rewarding because I learned a lot about how to become an organizer, a leader, and also how to take care of younger children,” says Felix Ng, 18, who is headed to Cal State LA in the fall.
The Santee Education Complex ceremony for WFIT participants awarded 18 seniors on completing the MiM program. This involved training in Physical Activity Leadership (PAL) and Nourishing MattersSM, a highly interactive workshop on nutrition, health and wellness. Along the way, they gained skills in personal empowerment and leadership in their community that encourage positive habits for their futures.
At Eagle Rock High School, 24 graduating seniors completed the WFIT program that offers students healthy behaviors and leadership training throughout their high school years. Participants that attended the WFIT ceremony received certificates and patches to wear during the high school’s graduation, held at Remsen Bird Hillside Theater at Occidental College. These awards were given to WFIT seniors in recognition of their dedication to bettering themselves and their community with an active lifestyle with sustainable healthy habits.
Miguel Contreras Learning Complex (MCLC) held their WFIT ceremony for graduating senior participants on June 15th, 2012. MCLC students involved with WFIT concluded their experience and celebrated their time with WFIT building lifelong self-confidence and healthy behaviors.
Graduating WFIT students at all four high school sites spent the year with an active commitment to mentoring their peers and younger students in their community. WFIT participants of the class of 2012 will be deeply missed. Belmont High School graduate Eric Noriega, who is leaving for UC Santa Cruz in the fall, said, “One of my most memorable moments in A World Fit for Kids! is working with people who care about each other. It’s like one big happy family.”
The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic
posted on 05.29.12 by WFIT_Admin
The obesity epidemic demands everyone’s attention. Obesity contributes to five of the 10 leading…
The obesity epidemic demands everyone’s attention. Obesity contributes to five of the 10 leading causes of death in America, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and stroke. In the United States today, more than three in 10 children and adolescents, and more than two of every three adults, are overweight or obese.
The Weight of the Nation offers an unflinching look at the severity of the crisis and its crippling effects on health and health care. As a national campaign, The Weight of the Nation aims to mobilize action to slow, arrest, and eventually reverse the prevalence of obesity and bring the nation to a healthier weight.
Take action today! Watch the full films for free by clicking here.
Bringing together the nation’s leading research institutions, The Weight of the Nation is a presentation of HBO and the Institute of Medicine (IOM), in association with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in partnership with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Kaiser Permanente.
Senator Boxer: Supporting Local Afterschool Programs
posted on 05.23.12 by WFIT_Admin
The following information was released by California Senator Barbara Boxer:
The following information was released by California Senator Barbara Boxer:
I recently had the pleasure of joining "Hercules" (actor Kevin Sorbo) and other education activists at the Afterschool Alliance's Breakfast of Champions, an annual event to build support in Congress for continued federal investment in afterschool programs across the country. To see photos of this event, please click here. To read about the Afterschool Alliance, click here.
The Afterschool Alliance strongly supports the Afterschool for America's Children Act (AACA), my bipartisan bill targeting federal investment in programs that improve children's academic performance, keep them safe while their parents are at work, and give them access to physical education, arts, music and other activities that are increasingly cut from the school day.
Count on me to keep working to pass this important bill and ensure strong federal support for afterschool programs that serve working families and keep children learning after the school bell rings.
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer
Pictured (l - r): Senator Barbara Boxer, student Aracelly Garcia, and Kevin Sorbo.
WFIT Supports SparkOpportunity Challenge Contest for Youth
posted on 04.13.12 by WFIT_Admin
A World Fit For Kids! is proud to support the SparkOpportunity Challenge, which launched April…
A World Fit For Kids! is proud to support the SparkOpportunity Challenge, which launched April 12. Musician and member of the White House Council for Community Solutions Jon Bon Jovi is helping to promote this exciting competition that encourages young people to share their solutions for rebuilding pathways to education and jobs.
All solutions are fair game, from entrepreneurial ideas to social change. Submit your solutions, vote for your favorites and help spread the word. Winners receive an iPad, a seed grant and mentoring to see their ideas made real in their communities.
The Challenge was developed by SparkAction, an initiative of the Forum for Youth Investment, and the Youth Leadership Institute, in support of the White House Council for Community Solutions' work on behalf of disconnected youth.
Click the banner below for more information.
This is OUR World…A World Fit For Kids! Public Service Announcements
posted on 04.03.12 by WFIT_Admin
A World Fit For Kids! (WFIT) is asking you to join its movement to create positive change by…
A World Fit For Kids! (WFIT) is asking you to join its movement to create positive change by investing in the health and success of all young people.
Today WFIT launched a 30-second and 60-second version of a public service announcement (PSA) aimed to encourage support and donations from the public to help create ‘A World Fit For Kids!’ The PSA features WFIT spokesperson Kevin Sorbo, team members, coaches and young people as they envision a world where all kids have positive mentors and can themselves become leaders and role models for peers and younger generations.
Since 1993, WFIT has helped create this world by providing healthy behaviors programming and training that empowers kids and adults to develop healthier habits and successfully improve their emotional, mental, and physical well-being.
The PSAs were generously produced and donated by Warner Bros. Studios. The 30-second version is currently being aired on Universal Sports, the premier multi-platform media destination for Olympic-related sports programming in the United States.
WFIT’s CEO Receives ‘Champion of Change’ Gold Award for Her Dedication to Healthy Kids
posted on 03.09.12 by WFIT_Admin
We are proud to announce that our CEO, Normandie Nigh, was recently awarded the ‘Champion for…
We are proud to announce that our CEO, Normandie Nigh, was recently awarded the ‘Champion for Change’ GOLD Award during the Network for a Healthy California’s Statewide Conference held March 5-6 in Sacramento, California. This award is the Network’s top honor and recognizes community leaders who exemplify empowerment, act as change agents and are dedicated to making a positive difference in their communities.
Normandie was recognized for being a long time champion for healthy kids and a leader in advocacy and education efforts for quality physical activity, nutrition and healthy behaviors programs and training—especially for students and families from economically disadvantaged communities of Los Angeles. Her efforts to reduce childhood obesity, increase graduation rates and enhance students’ ability to succeed have set the foundation to create long-term change in underprivileged communities. As the CEO of A World Fit For Kids! (WFIT), Normandie has guided the organization from a small in-school fitness and self-esteem program to a leading provider of transformational healthy behaviors and personal empowerment programming and training for young people and adults.
Using her professional experience and highlighting the data collected from WFIT’s program evaluations, Normandie provides expert knowledge and guidance to local, state and national youth-serving organizations, legislators and policy makers to shift school and community cultures toward healthy behaviors and optimal student health. She strives to create a world where childhood obesity is no longer an epidemic – a world in which young people from low-income neighborhoods are completing high school, ready for the workforce and higher education. Thank you for all you do, and congratulations Normandie!
WFIT Partners Making a Big Difference!
posted on 02.02.12 by WFIT_Admin
Together with these valuable partners, we are working hard to continue providing award-winning programming…
Together with these valuable partners, we are working hard to continue providing award-winning programming and training to youth and families from some of the most economically disadvantaged communities of Los Angeles. Here are some highlights from a few partners who are supporting our cause:
The California Community Foundation has granted WFIT a $130,000 grant through The Preparing Achievers for Tomorrow (PAT) Fund to expand our sports, physical activity, nutrition and leadership programming and training at Santee Education Complex, located in South Los Angeles. PAT is a five-year, multimillion dollar initiative of the California Community Foundation to improve academic achievement, decision-making skills and self-esteem of youth in South Los Angeles through participation in music, sports and recreation. PAT provides grants to nonprofits for direct services for young people and helps strengthen the ability of nonprofits to deliver services over the long-term. PAT has been established by a legacy gift from an anonymous donor whose life was devoted to helping others as a volunteer to nonprofits in Southern California, and who valued the opportunities that music and athletics can provide to young people.
Additionally, WFIT received a grant for $39,927 from The California Endowment to support WFIT's Physical Activity For All initiative. WFIT CEO Normandie Nigh and her team will continue to promote the importance of quality physical education, physical activity and healthy behaviors education for ALL children and youth.
Once again our generous partner, the John W. Carson Foundation, created by longtime Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, has made a $25,000 donation to WFIT. The foundation's contribution will help WFIT build healthy communities that support student health and well-being both in and out of school. Using this gift, WFIT will be able to better impact the fitness, health, educational performance and life-readiness of youth, and enhance the lives of the teens and adults who work with them.
These funders—and individual donors like you—have allowed WFIT to make a lasting, positive change in the lives of young people, just like Edgar, but there are so many more kids who still need our support. Our goal now is to leverage our abilities, expand our reach, and bring our successful model to many more young people and adults across the nation and the world—so they can achieve the same breakthrough results!
You’re Invited to WFIT’s Inaugural ‘Have a Heart For Kids!’ Fundraiser
posted on 01.11.12 by WFIT_Admin
Please join us in downtown LA on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm for good…
Please join us in downtown LA on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm for good wine, music, food and friends…and learn more about the great work of A World Fit For Kids!
The Los Angeles Athletic Club
$75 per person
Valentine's Day Special...Share the Love! Register two people for the event and only pay $60 per person!*
*Valentine's Day Special applicable when two people register for the event by 2/3/2012.
Our Celebrity/Spokesperson, Kevin Sorbo, will be hosting the event, and we will be serving great wine and hors d'oeuvres. Tours of the beautiful Los Angeles Athletic Club will be offered to our guests as well. All proceeds benefit A World Fit For Kids! and help provide healthy behaviors programming and training to underserved kids and families in Los Angeles.
If you’re not able to make it to LA for the event, please consider making a donation or buying a “virtual ticket” to show your support. We accept donations by mail, phone, email or visit the donation page on our Website. Any support helps...click here to make a donation.
Parking garage available: $4.50 per car
See you there! | <urn:uuid:197cd470-23d2-4d2e-96f7-092c9f5b5ed5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldfitforkids.org/newsandevents/wfits_ceo_receives_champion_of_change_gold_award_for_her_dedication_to_heal/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946842 | 2,990 | 1.71875 | 2 |
A French copyright enforcement initiative has made its way through the Chunnel to the UK, and British ISPs less than thrilled about it. Should ISPs and Big Content prove unable to come to an agreement on their own, the UK parliament will reportedly soon consider legislation that would mirror France's planned "three strikes and you're offline" approach to copyright infringement, one that would cut off Internet access to repeat copyright infringers.
Under the UK's plan, first-time offenders would be e-mailed a warning. Those caught sharing copyrighted content will have their accounts suspended on the second offense and cut off completely on the third. According to a report in The Times, Big Content has been in talks with the four largest ISPs in the UK about the proposal for the past six months, while UK trade group BPI has been trying to convince them to take action for a couple of years now.
The IFPI applauded the move in a statement, calling it a boost for its campaign to get ISPs to protect "creative content" alongside the film and music industries. "The UK joins France in providing international leadership on this issue," said IFPI CEO John Kennedy in a statement. "ISP cooperation has been the top priority for the recording industry for the last three years."
The ISPs prefer a voluntary agreement between themselves and the content creation industries to legislation, but expect something in return. The Register reports that the UK industry trade group Internet Service Provider Association is calling on the IFPI to indemnify it against lawsuits in the case that an innocent party loses his or her 'Net access and takes the ISP to court.
The ISPA is very reluctant to take on the "power of judge and jury" over content flowing across its members' networks, according to its position paper on the topic of content liability. It also takes issue with the music industry's view that the Internet is to blame for the drop off in sales over the past several years. "Rights holders have been battling piracy for many years prior to the Internet’s widespread adoption," the group points out in a white paper on P2P. "In fact in the second quarter of 2006, digital sales and downloads helped the UK singles industry record its best results in six years, with the market reaching 58 million units on an annual basis."
ISPs cannot "monitor or record" the nature of the data flowing over their network, argues the group. UK data protection laws make deep packet inspection illegal, according to the ISPA, and even if it wasn't, complete monitoring is impossible. "ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope," says the ISPA.
Still, the ISPA holds out hope that it can come to a mutually-agreeable pact with Big Content. "Every right-thinking body knows that self-regulation is much the better option in these areas," an ISPA spokesperson told The Times. If they are unable to come to an agreement, legislation is expected to be introduced in a matter of weeks.
If the UK decides to follow France down the ISP-as-copyright-cop path, it will come at a significant cost to British 'Net subscribers. ISPs will have to make significant financial investments in deep packet inspection (DPI) and other monitoring gear, costs that are likely to be passed on to subscribers. Those subscribers will also have to deal with the loss of privacy that goes with having their traffic monitored by ISPs. If you live in the UK, this is a good time to let your ISP and MP know how you feel about the three-strikes plan.
- The Times Online broke the story on the three-strikes negotiations coming to a head
- The Register voices the concerns of the ISPs
- The UK ISP trade group ISPA has a position papers on content liability and P2P available. They're not crazy about the concept
- The IFPI's press release praising the report beats the "infringement is killing content" drum. The BPI also weighs in | <urn:uuid:37bec13f-bd04-406e-810b-70e24dee7273> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/report-three-strikes-copyright-enforcement-may-come-to-uk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965619 | 830 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The eco machine that can magic water out of thin air
Ed Pilkington in New York guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 23 2008 00.01 GMT
Water, Water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink. The plight of the Ancient Mariner is about to be alleviated thanks to a firm of eco-inventors from Canada who claim to have found the solution to the world's worsening water shortages by drawing the liquid of life from an unlimited and untapped source - the air.
The company, Element Four, has developed a machine that it hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave. Their creation, the WaterMill, uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water.
The machine went on display this weekend in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, hosted by Wired magazine at its annual showcase of the latest gizmos its editors believe could change the world. From the outside, the mill looks like a giant golf ball that has been chopped in half: it is about 3ft in diameter, made of white plastic, and is attached to the wall.
It works by drawing air through filters to remove dust and particles, then cooling it to just below the temperature at which dew forms. The condensed water is passed through a self-sterilising chamber that uses microbe-busting UV light to eradicate any possibility of Legionnaires' disease or other infections. Finally, it is filtered and passed through a pipe to the owner's fridge or kitchen tap.
The obvious question to the proposition that household water demands can be met by drawing it from the air is: are you crazy? To which the machine's inventor and Element Four's founder, Jonathan Ritchey, replies: 'Just wait and see. The demand for water is off the chart. People are looking for freedom from water distribution systems that are shaky and increasingly unreliable.'
For the environmentally conscious consumer, the WaterMill has an obvious appeal. Bottled water is an ecological catastrophe. In the US alone, about 30bn litres of bottled water is consumed every year at a cost of about $11bn (£7.4bn).
According to the Earth Policy Institute, about 1.5m barrels of oil - enough to power 100,000 cars for a year - is used just to make the plastic. The process also uses twice as much water as fits inside the container, not to mention the 30m bottles that go into landfills every day in the US. But the mill also has downsides, not least its $1,200 cost when it goes on sale in America, the UK, Italy, Australia and Japan in the spring. In these credit crunch times that might dissuade many potential buyers, though Ritchey points out that at $0.3 per litre, it is much cheaper than bottled water and would pay for itself in a couple of years.
There is also the awkward fact that although there is eight times more atmospheric water than in all the rivers of the world combined, it is unevenly distributed. Those areas of the US that are most desperate for more water - such as the arid south-west where ground water levels are already dramatically depleted - have the lowest levels of moisture in the air.
The mill ceases to be effective below about 30 per cent relative humidity levels, which are common later in the day in states such as Arizona. To combat that problem, the machine has an intelligent computer built into it that increases its output at dawn when humidity is highest, and reduces it from mid-afternoon when a blazing sun dries the air. | <urn:uuid:8c8f1802-bf9c-4a68-bc36-847f907f7ce0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blendzpolitik.blogspot.jp/2008/11/making-water-out-of-thin-air.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959391 | 747 | 2.359375 | 2 |
I’ve written a lot about photoshop and real beauty. I covered it for Gender Across Borders last year, and the article was later picked up by the Ms. Magazine Blog. I wrote about it for Care2 recently, inspired by Fair and Feminist’s “This is What a FACE Looks Like” campaign. I even initiated a No Makeup Day with my Fearless Females this winter in order to facilitate discussions about real beauty and why we feel we need makeup.
As a high school teacher, the concept of real beauty is close to my heart. Almost every day, I hear teenage girls talking about diets and idolizing pictures of women in magazines that are so clearly unreal. So when I heard about Miss Representation and SPARK Summit’s Keep It Real Challenge, I was totally on board. Yesterday was day 1, and we tweeted a challenge to magazine editors to use at least one un-photoshopped image in their magazine. Today, we’re blogging. Tomorrow, we’re posting pictures on Instagram with the hashtag #keepitrealchallenge.
I feel like, as a teacher, I have a unique ability – and responsibility – to teach media literacy to my students, especially when it comes to body image. Each February, just after the Super Bowl, I start my persuasive techniques unit, and I begin by showing them Super Bowl commercials. We pick them apart and discuss how they sell what they’re trying to sell. Then, we focus on some commercials for beauty products. The students usually start to realize that the cosmetics industry is making women feel insecure in order to sell beauty products at this part of the unit, but just to solidify the point, I show them the Dove Evolution video:
At this point, my students – male and female – are shocked when they see this video. When it ends, outraged cries of, “Is that real, Miss?” make their way across the room. Some start pulling out magazines from their book bags and pointing to pictures saying, “Is this photoshopped?” or “What about this one, Miss? There’s no way she can be that skinny.” When some of them don’t believe me, I show them the Photoshop Disasters website, and they start to realize that they have seen images like this every day of their lives, and sometimes they don’t even notice something’s wrong with them.
While I feel good about being able to teach my students about media literacy, we still have a long way to go. Most of my students will tell me that they are aware that the images they see aren’t real, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to emulate those images. 32% of teenage girls have starved themselves to lose weight. Three out of four teenage girls feel depressed, guilty and shameful after leafing through a magazine for three minutes. THREE MINUTES. If that’s the case, imagine what happens to them after watching television for half an hour, or a movie for two hours.
It isn’t enough to tell our girls that these images aren’t real. We need to teach about media literacy. We need to show them how the images they see every day are digitally manipulated. We need to teach more about health and nutrition without a focus on the number on the scale. We need to show them more images of women that have not been photoshopped. We need to find ways for them to feel good about themselves, and support and celebrate those feelings.
It’s a tough job, but, for the wellbeing of our teenage girls, we have to do it.
Photo Credit: Photoshop Disasters | <urn:uuid:85fbf08d-a55c-46ec-a280-43516429d9ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smallstrokesbigoaks.com/2012/06/28/keep-it-real-teaching-media-literacy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959145 | 767 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Google is expanding their Chrome browser into an operating system. They will probably distribute it on little netbooks first then move into desktops. I wish them well. I love to see the MS competition. Maybe this will help drive down the cost of windows OS's.
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Google Chrome Os
Posted 01 October 2009 - 10:52 AM
Posted 03 October 2009 - 06:53 PM
However, if Google spent the cash to really work on the Chrome OS, to promote it, market it, make it polished and to get it installed by default on new PCs then Microsoft would have reason to be worried. Most people use Windows not through choice, but because it was there when they bought the PC. If Google can persuade manufacturers to install Chrome instead of Windows then Microsoft will have to seriously think about their options. The question is whether Google has any financial incentive to get Chrome installed by default on new PCs - how much cash will it generate for them?
Posted 04 October 2009 - 08:19 AM
Is it comparable with Microsoft? No, i don’t think so. Microsoft still makes operating system which is usable for both online and offline use. They do plan to have cloud computing services with their new or future released operating system. So comparing Google chrome OS and Microsoft windows is not at equal basis. Both have different user groups targeted. Microsoft wants to target general users which turn out to be all-purpose OS. They can’t even increase price or reduce price because of competition with other operating systems. If they did any move in this price area, they’ll lose customers. Which are already reducing or switching to Mac & Linux cause of instability of windows OS.
Google will surely promote new OS without much effort. Many bloggers and os enthusiastic people will try chrome OS at least for few months. So release period of os will fetch them lot of business. Also applications which are only intended for chrome os will speak for the promotion of OS. More the features, better for the promotion. Chrome needs to come up with something which Microsoft and Linux variants are not launching into the market.
Posted 25 October 2009 - 06:01 PM
The current Chrome OS:
Posted 26 October 2009 - 10:34 AM
Posted 27 October 2009 - 09:04 AM
Posted 28 October 2009 - 04:53 AM
Chrome OS and Ubuntu are a unstable version of Debian, upgraded for each 3rd part organization.
Not exactly, ubunutu is stable version of debian. Most of the ubuntu team members are also part of debian community. Unstable debian version is patched and results are committed back to debian tree by ubuntu. Check debian's role for ubuntu. Ubuntu being derivative of debian is much stable and release cycle's are of 6month. You can read more about discussion on ubuntu's stable version cycle in comparison to debian here.
I was wondering why this topic was posted now, after 1 year (I think) from Chrome/Google OS launch
Chrome OS is not officially launched. There are some developer beta leaked and screenshots are shown on lifehacker blog.There is announcement about ChromeOS being shipped with netbooks. But no official announcement and download site is up yet.
Posted 01 October 2010 - 11:27 AM
Google and Microsoft are both the big guns of the industry. A competition between them will surely result in the favor of the users.
Yes indeed. The competition will be a prolonged activity.
They are both looking for a dominant positions in the internet and Google is expanding which gives MS to be more challenged.
Posted 24 January 2011 - 07:53 PM
Design goals and direction
Design goals for Google Chrome OS's user interface include using minimal screen space by combining applications and standard Web pages into a single tab strip, rather than separating the two. Designers are considering a reduced window management scheme that would operate only in full-screen mode. Secondary tasks would be handled with "panels": floating windows that dock to the bottom of the screen for tasks like chat and music players. Split screens are also under consideration for viewing two pieces of content side-by-side. Google Chrome OS will follow the Chrome browser's practice of leveraging HTML5's offline modes, background processing, and notifications. Designers propose using search and pinned tabs as a way to quickly locate and access applications.
In preliminary design documents for the Chromium OS open source project, Google describes a three-tier architecture: firmware, browser and window manager, and system-level software and userland services.
* The firmware contributes to fast boot time by not probing for hardware, such as floppy disk drives, that are no longer common on computers, especially netbooks. The firmware also contributes to security by verifying each step in the boot process and incorporating system recovery.
* System-level software includes the Linux kernel that has been patched to improve boot performance. Userland software has been trimmed to essentials, with management by Upstart, which can launch services in parallel, re-spawn crashed jobs, and defer services in the interest of faster booting.
* The window manager handles user interaction with multiple client windows much like other X window managers.
Remote application access
In June 2010, Google software engineer Gary Kačmarčík wrote that Chrome OS will access remote applications through a technology unofficially called "Chromoting", which would resemble Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection. The name has since been changed to "remoting," and is "probably closer to running an application via Terminal Services or by first connecting to a host machine by using RDP or VNC."
Hardware support
Google Chrome OS is initially intended for secondary devices like netbooks, not as a user's primary PC, and will run on hardware incorporating an x86 or ARM-based processor. While Chrome OS will support hard disk drives, Google has requested that its hardware partners use solid-state drives "for performance and reliability reasons", as well as the lower capacity requirements inherent in an operating system that accesses applications and most user data on remote servers. Google Chrome OS consumes one-sixtieth as much drive space as Windows 7.
Integrated media player
Google will integrate a media player into both Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, enabling users to play back MP3s, view JPEGs, and handle other multimedia files while offline.
Google plans to create a service called Google Cloud Print, which will help any application on any device to print on any printer. While the cloud provides virtually any connected device with information access, the task of "developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system-- from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices -- simply isn't feasible." However, the cloud service would entail installing a piece of software, called a proxy, as part of Chrome OS. The proxy would register the printer with the service, manage the print jobs, provide the printer driver functionality, and give status alerts for each job.
Link handling
One unresolved design problem related to both Chrome OS and the Chrome browser is the desired behavior for how Web applications handle specific link types. For example, if a JPEG is opened in Chrome or on a Chrome OS device, should a specific Web application be automatically opened to view it, and if so, which one? Similarly, if a user clicks on a .doc file, which website should open: Office Live, Gview, or a previewing utility? The project director at that time, Matthew Papakipos, noted that Windows developers have faced the same fundamental problem: "Quicktime is fighting with Windows Media Player, which is fighting with Chrome". As the number of Web applications increases, the same problem arises.
In March 2010, Google software security engineer Will Drewry discussed Chrome OS security. Drewry described Chrome OS as a "hardened" operating system featuring auto-updating and sandbox features that will reduce malware exposure. He said that Chrome OS netbooks will be shipped with Trusted Platform Module, and include both a "trusted bootpath" and a physical switch under the battery compartment that actuates a developer mode. That mode drops some specialized security functions but increases developer flexibility. Drewry also emphasized that the open source nature of the operating system will contribute greatly to its security by allowing constant developer feedback.
At a December 2010 press conference, Google claimed that Chrome OS would be the most secure consumer operating system due in part to a verified boot capability, in which the initial boot code, stored in read-only memory, checks for system compromises.
Linux shell access
Chrome OS includes a Bash-like shell with minimal functionality called the Chrome Shell or "crosh". In developer mode, a Linux command prompt offering a more complete set of instructions can be opened via VT-2, with a slightly smaller instruction set available via crosh. [47
Posted 24 January 2011 - 07:54 PM
Companies working with Google to develop hardware for the operating system include Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Intel, Samsung, and Dell.
In July 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said a Google-branded Google OS netbook was unlikely, despite Google's having previously negotiated with a couple of hardware manufacturers to produce it, and despite an earlier Google-branded device, the Nexus One Android phone. "Let's see how well those partners do first. My guess is we won't need to. The PC industry is different from the phone industry. The PC industry is used to working with Microsoft, whereas the mobile industry was not used to working with software".
In December 2010 Google showed off a development Google Chrome OS laptop that replaced the Caps Lock key with a dedicated search key
Posted 31 March 2011 - 05:33 PM
You could find it here:
I hate the fact that it basically eliminates some PC-productivity. But then again.. if it supplied some offline support, and basics like a notepad, calculator, etc. Than it wouldn't be so bad.
Guess I just couldn't live without some type of OS platform that doesn't really need the Internet to be sustained. Doubt it's going to really be the next best thing. It might be bought by Google fans though.
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0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users | <urn:uuid:115d8f20-343f-440d-a67a-0bb70ed0e80a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.astahost.com/topic/20943-google-chrome-os/?p=140616 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931599 | 2,146 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Drought draining places to hunt
Marshall, Minn. — With the recent completion of DNR roadside counts in southern Minnesota, there was good news to report: pheasant numbers likely are up from last year.
But as bird hunters await department confirmation – probably in a couple weeks – that there will be more birds on the landscape this fall, they’re also being made aware that the landscape might not be as conducive to hunting as they might have hoped, thanks to drought in much of Minnesota and the Midwest.
The season-long drought in late July triggered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow the emergency haying and grazing of private lands enrolled in conservation programs, most notably the Conservation Reserve Program. In much of Minnesota affected by drought conditions, officials say, landowners have taken advantage of the option, including on some lands enrolled in the state’s pilot Walk-In Access program.
“All over Minnesota, there’s been considerable (haying and grazing) activity (on CRP acres),” said Wanda Garry, chief conservation program specialist for the USDA Farm Service Agency in Minnesota.
Under the emergency order, haying and grazing is allowed, within limits, on lands considered abnormally dry, or worse, she said. Only 50 percent of a specific tract may be hayed; up to 75 percent may be grazed.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, as of Aug. 14 about one-third of Minnesota is included; however, when the order went into effect, only 16 counties in the state were considered better off than D0.
Northwest Minnesota, where most of the state’s CRP acres are enrolled, has been affected most by haying and grazing exemptions. But southwest Minnesota hasn’t been immune, and neither have the nearly 15,000 acres enrolled in the Walk-In Access program, which allows hunters to use private lands enrolled in conservation programs like CRP.
“Hunters will notice the impacts of haying and grazing on Walk-In Access (areas),” said Tabor Hoek, private lands specialist for the state Board of Water and Soil Resources, in Marshall.
Hoek estimates that about 20 percent of the program acres – about 3,000 – has been hayed or grazed under the emergency order. While federal payments on CRP and other conservation acres hayed or grazed will be reduced by 10 percent, those also enrolled in the WIA program will see a 25-percent reduction in their total contract, according to Hoek.
“We don’t want to kick anybody out, and we need to get through this emergency,” he said, adding that the state hopes to retain the existing multi-year WIA contracts. The program exists in 21 southern Minnesota counties.
Hoek said it’s possible more WIA acres could be hayed or grazed before hunters – most of them pheasant hunters – seek them out in the near future. According to the FSA, haying is allowed through
Aug. 31, and bales must be removed from fields by Sept. 15. Grazing must end by Sept. 30.
Dennis Simon, DNR Wildlife Section chief, said he expected only “marginal” interest in haying and grazing on CRP walk-in acres. Many property owners are absentee landowners who’ve had land enrolled in CRP for many years.
Hoek said the DNR, which manages the WIA program, will have identified hayed or grazed tracts on its website, so that hunters will know prior to their travels what’s still available.
Haying, grazing elsewhere
Kelly Turgeon, Kittson County FSA executive director, said of the 1,500 CRP contracts that exist in the state’s most northwest county, haying or grazing requests have been made for about 200 of them.
While there have been emergency haying and grazing allowances made in the past, “This is the highest we’ve ever seen due to conditions drought has caused, not only in pastures but in forage crops,” Turgeon said earlier this week.
Unlike southern Minnesota, where farmers expect three good alfalfa crops, northwestern Minnesota farmers might get one good and one marginal crop of a “mixed forage,” which includes some alfalfa and some grasses, he said. This year the first crop was 30 to 50 percent less productive than normal, and in some places, there was no second cutting.
Turgeon said haying and grazing on CRP lands in the northwest could affect sharptail grouse hunting, and possibly deer hunting, but he doesn’t foresee a large effect, he said.
And where haying and grazing has taken place, he expects better regrowth in coming years.
“The activity can have some positive effects,” he said. | <urn:uuid:6cb9e416-7950-4835-b89f-5ffb38b40d54> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.outdoornews.com/August-2012/Drought-draining-places-to-hunt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965583 | 1,024 | 2.125 | 2 |
Don't forget the birds at World Heritage
22 June 2011 | News story
IUCN is happy to welcome a number of its Members in to its delegation at the World Heritage Committee in Paris, including Bird Life International. Helen Byron is an International Site Casework Officer with Bird Life International and The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
She explains why it's important for her to be at the meeting in Paris.
World Heritage Committees can be a strange experience for the novices amongst us. Helen Byron gives her impressions so far.
But what does Bird Life want to get out of the meeting? Byron tells us more about her expectations. | <urn:uuid:a5d0f16a-3223-4c15-927b-40f079fd9cf8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cms.iucn.org/news_homepage/news_by_date/2011_news_gb/june_2011/?7715/Dont-forget-the-birds-at-World-Heritage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921842 | 132 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Whenever you hear someone pronounce "Print is dead," point to the growing number of 3D printing options and remind them that, in fact, printing - no longer just to paper - remains an incredible human invention. Or you, perhaps, you can point to the Trimensional iPhone app, which thanks to its latest update, now lets you scan and then print a 3D model of your face.
Trimensional describes itself as a 3D scanner for iPhone, and before you make plans to use the app to scan and print all manner of 3D models, it's worth noting that the app only works with faces right now. Trimensional uses the screen and the front-facing camera on an iPhone to detect patterns of light reflected off your face in order to build a 3D model.
An update to the app that hit the App Store this week lets you send a movie or animated GIF file of the rotating 3D model to friends. And with a $5 in-app purchase (the app itself is a dollar), you can send the scan to a 3D printer. "Within about half an hour, " says Grant Schindler, a research scientist at Georgia Tech, "you can go from scanning yourself to having a physical copy."
OK, I don't actually own a 3D printer, but I want one, particularly if, as this app certainly portends, someday I'll be able to snap photos with my iPhone and then print the image as a three-dimensional object.
Via Popular Science | <urn:uuid:387195ee-15a3-4d93-bc38-9b7651689512> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://readwrite.com/2011/04/14/iphone_app_takes_a_3d_scan_of_your_face_prints_a_3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952533 | 306 | 1.875 | 2 |
Everyone knows how much I love Annette Gordon-Reed and her award winning book on the Hemingses. I recently found a video of her speech at Monticello about the book, and it was incredible. It’s lengthy–there are 7 segments, but I watched every one. Although I had previously posted a link to the videos, the owner has decided to disable the embedment option. I do hope you will go to YouTube, put in “Annette Gordon-Reed” and take a look anyway.
Posts Tagged ‘Annette Gordon-Reed’
I have to tell you all about this book that I am reading and finding positively mesmerizing. There’s no other word for it. Now, I read alot of books on slavery. Alot. I was already a voracious reader before the genealogy bug hit, so now it’s just insane. There are many that stand out in my mind, but I was just sitting down reading this and I felt compelled to tell you all about it. Literally, to get out of bed and come tell you about it.
I read Annette Gordon-Reed worked on it for 10 years. It shows. She’s now won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and another big award a few weeks ago I can’t remember. That’s something. She has a terrific interview up on Amazon.com that you can read.
This is what strikes me about the book: Her depiction of the system of slavery, as it was lived, day by day. The intricate laws and customs that developed around it. The family dynamics it created. How 17th and 18th century Virginia society was irrevocably shaped because of it. I think as a genealogist I tend to think about individual slaves and their stories, but the pictures Gordon-Reed paints and the narratives she weaves often make me just stop in mid-sentence. She makes me think about aspects of slavery I have never thought about before. I didn’t think that was possible.
I want to quote a passage from her chapter called “The Children of No One”, a tour-de-force of a chapter about interracial mixing between slaves and slavemaster:
The fictions and presumptions about bastardy and marriage served definite purposes in a legal system seeking easy ways to determine who was eligible to inherit property, who had the right to a child’s labor and who could be liable for support of a child. …why would slaves have known who their fathers were when those men were black, but not know when the man was white?…When demonstrably mixed-race people speak of their white father or forefather, at most the white man is portrayed as the “alleged” father or the “said to be” father, as if there had been some white “Mr. Nobody” out there impregnating all the enslaved women in America.
I love that! There is something about her analysis of the entire Hemings family, going through several generations that paints a more complete picture–a more complex picture of the diabolical nature of it all.
This is a great book and I hope you’ll run out and get it. (I’m enjoying reading her footnotes too, like any good genealogist I am interested in her sources;)) | <urn:uuid:163e8485-0e18-41f4-9092-fae78a3e44df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://msualumni.wordpress.com/tag/annette-gordon-reed/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982965 | 709 | 2.203125 | 2 |
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Student Grievance Policy and Procedure
It is the intention of this policy to encourage and facilitate resolution of a grievance that a student may have with a faculty member, supervisor, administrator, member of the staff, or another student. The desire is to resolve the grievance in the early stages of the procedure. However, the procedure does provide for full mediation in a fair, equitable and timely manner.
A student who believes he or she has a legitimate grievance should meet promptly with the person immediately involved (i.e. the faculty member, administrator, supervisor or member of the staff with whom the student has an issue.) (Should the student not be comfortable with initiating such a meeting on her or his own, the Academic Dean is available, on a strictly confidential basis, to assist the student.) The procedure is concluded if an acceptable solution is reached between the student and the other party. Should either person wish written documentation of the resolution, the two parties shall write such and each person will sign, date and retain a copy.
If the grievance is not resolved, the student may pursue the matter as follows:
Within seven (7) days of the meeting, the student should send a written statement to the Academic Dean clearly stating:
- the nature of the complaint
- the steps already taken
As soon as possible after receipt of the written statement, normally within ten (10) working days, the Academic Dean will:
- Meet with each party separately.
- Meet with the parties together to attempt to resolve the grievance.
If the grievance is resolved, provide a written summary of the resolution within seven (7) working days (of the meeting with both parties together), which each party will sign. Copies will be retained in the Academic Dean’s Office.
If the grievance is not resolved through the steps above, the student may make a written request, within seven (7) working days, to the Chair of the Academic Policy Committee (APC.)
The Chair will convene a meeting to hear and resolve the grievance. The committee may request that additional persons be present for the hearing as it deems necessary and relevant (such as an administrator’s or staff person’s immediate supervisor, the Human Resources person), etc.).
The committee’s recommendations and action for resolution will be presented in writing to each party in the grievance within seven (7) days of the hearing, which each party will sign.
Copies of the resolution will be retained, along with a written record of the hearing, in the Academic Dean’s Office (and by the Director of Administration, if appropriate.)
In all cases, the Committee’s recommendations and action for resolution will be final. In the event a member or members of the APC are involved or named in the grievance before the APC, the Dean will appoint a replacement in kind (faculty or administrator.) In the event the Academic Dean is involved or named in the grievance, the President will appoint a replacement for the Dean.
Credit Hour Policy
Federal regulation defines a credit hour as an amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that is an institutionally established equivalency that reasonably approximates not less than: (1) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or (2) At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.
Hartford Seminary follows the common understanding in academia that “one hour of classroom” or a Student Hour is equivalent to a 50-minute session. Therefore, 3-credit courses require the equivalent of 37.5 clock hours of instruction and 75 clock hours of out-of-class student work per term. The courses at Hartford Seminary require approximately 42 clock hours of engaged time and approximately 70 clock hours of out-of-class student work per term. | <urn:uuid:08d4513a-f827-432c-8ac0-5162d09b831b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lmosher@hartsem.edu/seminary-policies | 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 | 0.928829 | 2,178 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Family: Falconidae, Falcons view all from this family
Description ADULT Tundra race (ssp. tundrius) has dark blue-gray upperparts and pale, barred underparts. Note the dark facial mask (dark "mustache" extends well behind eye and borders white cheek) and powerful, yellow legs and feet. In flight, from above, looks rather uniform; from below, pale underparts are barred, and contrast between pale cheeks and throat, and dark "mustache" is usually striking. Interior ssp. anatum is similar, but underparts are flushed peachy buff. Pacific race (sometimes released in east, outside its normal range) is similar, but pale elements of underparts are flushed buff, and dark on head is more extensive (white on cheek is reduced). JUVENILE Similar to adult, but upperparts are brownish while paler underparts are suffused with buff.
Dimensions Length: 15-21" (38-53 cm); Wngspn: 3' 4" (1 m)
Habitat Once widespread in open habitats, pesticides decimated interior populations in 1960s by thinning eggshells. Reintroduction program is aiding recovery here. Tundra populations, less affected by pollution (except in winter), remain stable and these birds winter further south and are those most usually to be seen in coastal east. Many large towns and cities in east also have resident, breeding pairs.
Observation Tips Panic attacks in winter flocks of waders and ducks may mean that a hunting Peregrine is nearby.
Range Florida, Southwest, California, New England, Western Canada, Alaska, Great Lakes, Southeast, Rocky Mountains, Northwest, Eastern Canada, Texas, Plains, Mid-Atlantic
Voice Utters a loud kek-kek-kekÖ call.
Discussion Robust and stocky falcon. Soars on broad, bowed wings, but stoops at phenomenal speed with wings swept back after prey, such as pigeons. Often perches for long periods on clifftop outcrops or manmade structures, such as pylons or tall buildings. In flight, long, broad-based and pointed wings, stocky body, and long tail are good features. Striking head pattern and contrast between dark upperparts and paler, well-marked underparts are useful in identifying perched birds. Geographical variation in plumage confuses matters but, given this, sexes are similar, although female is appreciably larger than male. | <urn:uuid:f7b0900b-107f-46a5-92cb-71288f15c1fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/detail.asp?curFamilyID=213&curGroupID=1&lgfromWhere=&curPageNum=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930369 | 519 | 3.34375 | 3 |
By Mano Ganesan
The victims of human rights violations during the 1989 period are activists, supporters and family members of JVP. It was a well known fact. Mahinda Rajapakse fought on behalf of their plight. That did not make him a member of JVP. He fought for the human rights of the people. JVP attacked sacred Dalada Maligawa. They threw bombs inside the Parliament. They killed Buddhist monks, politicians, police, security forces and their family members. But nobody accused Mahinda of dealing with JVP and supporting JVP’s terrorism against security forces. Today the victims are Tamils and most of them are accused of LTTE affiliation. People who struggle for political solution and stand against war are also condemned as LTTE supporters. If there are LTTE members, they must be dealt according to the law of the land instead of extra legal punishments. That is what Mahinda Rajapakse wanted for JVPers in 1989. Today, there are many innocent people who are punished for being Tamil from north and east. There are Sinhalese who speak against war are also condemned as ‘Sinhala Kotiyas’. Irrespective all these facts my fight is for the protection of human rights of the victims. It is similar to then struggle of Mahinda Rajapakse. Can anybody produce one reasonable difference between my today’s campaign and Mahinda Rajapakse’s campaign of 1989? Can anyone of those government politicians, their extremist allies in JVP and JHU, cronies and members of hardliner private and state media who accuse me of treachery and abating terrorism come up with the answer, challenged Western Peoples Front Leader and Civil Monitoring Commission Convener Mano Ganesan MP during his address to WPF politburo.
Ganesan said further in his deliberation,
Mr. Mahinda Rajapakse as a SLFP Parliamentarian championed human rights during the late 1989 period. He campaigned against extra legal killings, enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests and detentions. He documented (symbolically or otherwise) incidents of abuses and took the issue to the international community. He traveled to Geneva , as some of our human rights activists travel to Geneva today to make cases at UN human rights council.
Democratic Left Front general secretary and presidential advisor today comrade Vasudeva Nanayakara worked along with Parliamentarian Mahinda Rajapakse in this mission. I am told that Vasudeva accompanied him to Geneva and both of them faced government screening and intimidation at the Katunayake airport.
Notwithstanding this respectful, commendable and exemplary past HE Mahinda Rajapakse today heads a government which is the guilty party and cause to the grave human rights violations occur in this country. There are other actors, LTTE and various Para-groups are also in the scene as offenders. But they are non state actors. HE Mahinda Rajapakse heads the government and the Sri Lankan state. The government is bound by the national and international laws and conventions.
[Mano Ganesan MP]
This government accuses human rights defenders on two counts.
(01) Human Rights defenders are accused of ‘discrediting’ the country by taking the subject matter issues out of Sri Lanka to the international community.
(02) Human Rights defenders are accused of ’supporting and working’ for the LTTE.
This killer campaign has now reached great levels. It is targeting all members of human rights defender community. The human rights defender community in Sri Lanka consist Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sri Lankans and foreigners. There are men and women. All of them are targeted. Government politicians, their extremist allies, cronies and hardliner private and state media are doing overtime in this merciless offensive killer campaign.
I am under this willful attack very often. The reasons are there. I am an ethnic Tamilian by birth and I have a political face.
I am accused of bringing ‘discredit’ to the country by ‘complaining’ to the United Nations and other players in the international community or rather keeping this campaign alive. I am accused of ‘telling and talking’ to the international media. I am accused of ‘traitorous disservice’ to my country. I am accused of ‘dealing with and working for LTTE’. I am accused of ’supporting terrorism’.
These are activities; I will never do even in my wildest dreams. But the accusers never wanted to listen and understand.
I am very much confident of the fact that what I am doing now is that Mahinda Rajapakse did in late 80s. Can anybody dispute me? On the strength of my confidence I have very often asked few simple questions inside and outside the parliament.
Can anybody produce one reasonable difference between my today’s campaign and Mahinda Rajapakse’s campaign of 1980s? I challenge anyone of those government politicians, their extremist allies, cronies and members of hardliner private and state media who accuse me of treachery and abating terrorism to come with the answer.
But I have some answers to my own questions. Yes, there are some basic differences.
On the one hand, Mahinda Rajapakse is a Sinhala man by birth. I am Tamil man by birth. He is member of the numerical majority community. I am member of the numerical minority community. On the other hand, those who faced human rights violations in the forms of extra judicial killings, enforced abductions during 1980s are mostly members of the Sinhala community. Most of the victims today are members of the Tamil community.
Are these the differences? You disregard and even approve these abductions, extra judicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, extortions because of the fact that the victims are Tamils and in some cases Muslims?
The victims during the 1989 period are family members, activists and supporters of JVP. It was a well known fact. Mahinda Rajapakse fought on behalf of for their plight. That did not make him a member of JVP. He fought for the human rights of the people. Nobody accused him of dealing with JVP and supporting and JVP terrorism. Today the victims are Tamils and most of the time they are accused of LTTE affiliation. People who struggle for peace and stand against war are also condemned as LTTE supporters. There may be LTTE members. They must be dealt according to the law of the land. There are many innocent people who are punished for members of the Tamil community. Irrespective all these facts my fight is for the protection of human rights the victims. It is similar to the struggle of Mahinda Rajapakse.
Those who did not and cannot put JVP label on Mahinda Rajapakse are today unfairly putting LTTE label on me. This is the sad fact when the defender and the victims happen to members of the Tamil community in this country.
This is yet another typical example of the prevailing ethnic discrimination in this country.
I cannot understand this logic and peculiar reality.
UNP was the ruling party during the 1980s which was accused of state terrorism. UNP today supports our campaign for the protection of human rights. SLFP was the party which championed the human rights. Especially non other than the president headed the campaign. This party is the ruling party today. SLFP led government practices state terrorism against Tamils. This does not end here. There is another dimension. The victims of 1980s are the JVPers. This party supports the military campaign and justifies the human rights violations against Tamils.
36 comments March 5th, 2008 | <urn:uuid:eecd0f1c-73ea-49a7-930b-dee4d6dda143> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://transcurrents.com/tamiliana/archives/date/2008/03/05 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969496 | 1,609 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Supervision, Staff, and Student Employees
The Child Development Center is a University department under the supervision of the Associate Vice President for Administration, Director of Human Resources. The program is administered by a full time qualified child care director who holds a degree in early childhood education or child development. An assistant director also supports the administration of the program full time.
Each group of children is staffed by a lead teacher and one or more assistants who are University employees and work a regular schedule. The staff members are persons who have a background in early childhood development and/or education and have demonstrated dedication in caring for children and participating in their learning. Many of the staff hold a bachelor's degree in education, psychology, or Human Development.
The director, assistant director, and each caregiver must complete at least 12 in-service hours of child care and education training each year and have a yearly physical. All are members of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Each person on the staff is certified in CPR and first-aid.
Students and volunteers supplement the core staff. The student employees are often education, nursing, occupational or physical therapy, or psychology majors who have an interest in working with young children. Each student employee and volunteer receives training from the Center staff. | <urn:uuid:775aaa63-4685-42d8-990e-0f94dde305c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.creighton.edu/childdevelopmentcenter/supervisionstaffstudents/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95669 | 255 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Whole Foods is a wonderful store because of all of the variety. Their produce section is the largest in the our community, and the health area offers a wide variety of products.
Being a new Vegan, I have to read labels with great suspicion, because "Whole Foods" does not mean Vegan.
I can't recommend their deli, because all of the foods seems to sit out in the open air too much, and there is a possibility of contamination with non-vegan choices. Further, too much sodium is used for deli foods. They do have some great choices in their canned and frozen departments, but I must repeat that Whole Foods is simply wonderful for their Produce.
Cons: Labels, Deli | <urn:uuid:302a9298-4f8d-40ea-8255-f6ba7191f6b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.happycow.net/reviews.php?id=12877&sortBy=date&order=a | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974404 | 149 | 1.5 | 2 |
With the language being designed with value semantics in mind, you would imagine that some optimizations are in place to avoid unneeded processing. In this category you can find things like [Named] Return Value Optimization, or copy elision in the current standard, or move semantics in the upcoming C++0x. Understanding what they mean, and when the compiler can or cannot apply them will improve efficiency and readability in the code.
There are quite a few of articles, blogs and what not about how to make your code more efficient. Most of them are good and offer sound advice, but you find out after a while that even the best advice is often misinterpreted. And sometimes the advice is wrong or at the very least misleading (you can try and find some in my last post now as an exercise). As important as the advice is understanding under which circumstances it applies, and when it doesn't. But lets start from the beginning, what does NRVO mean?
[Named] Return Value Optimization
We can start with a small code sample, and a drawing of the objects in the program:
The exact contents of
typedo not really matter much, the fact is that it is a user defined type which might potentially be expensive to copy. The drawing on the right represents the layout of the objects that exist in the program. The blue box represents the
Xresides. The grey box represents the code in
function, where variable
Yis created. According to the standard, the
returnstatement copies the value from
returnedobject, an agreed location where the data is to be handed from
functionto its caller. Where those objects are really depends on the calling convention, you can think of them as decreasing addresses in the stack if you wish, but what matters is that they are somewhere, and data must be copied from one to the other.
The standard explicitly allows the implementation to avoid the creation of temporaries, including
_R. But how is that done? Actually quite simple. When processing
functionthe compiler knows that
Yhas as only purpose in life to serve as the seed from which
_Ris copied, and the lifetimes of the two objects are intimately bound: destruction of
Yand construction of
_Rare basically simultaneous. The compiler can avoid creating two separate objects, and just use the same memory location for both.
_R. None, or both of them, or maybe it does not matter.
_Rcannot be removed from the program, as it is a contract with the callers of the program its location is outside of the control of the compiler when processing the function. But all the code in
Yso it cannot be removed either, unless the object called
functionis located over the agreed location of the
_Robject. The single object is both
The case of RVO is similar, in the case where the object that is being returned by the function is a temporary itself (without a name). The fact that the temporary does not have a name does not mean that it does not exist, it will take the place of
Yin the discussion above.
When can the compiler apply this optimization
The (unnamed) Return Value Optimization can basically applied mostly anywhere. The creation of the temporary inside
functioncan be done in place of the returned object. In the more complex case of Named-RVO, it all depends on how the function is implemented. Compilers are quite smart and can apply the optimization in many different cases, but not always.
To perform the optimization, the compiler needs to know that
Ywill be returned before deciding the location of the object, so that it can match
_R. In the most general case, this means that if a function has a single return statement, or all return statements refer to the same named variable (or possibly a temporary), then the compiler can merge
_Rinto a single object.
In this case, the compiler must create both variables
Yand it must do so before calling
should_return_first. Until that function returns the compiler does not know which of the objects is to be returned. It cannot merge either with
In this last case, there are two local objects might be returned by the function, but the compiler does know which of the two objects will be returned, and can turn the code into the equivalent:
In which in each branch of the if the compiler can place either
Yin the place of
_R(for what matters, the compiler might even be able to avoid the creation of the other variable). Still, your best chance is to keep code simple, create the objects only when you need them and keep your functions simple for the compiler to analyze.
What about the receiving end?
Originally we started with three objects and the compiler optimized with NRVO one of them out. But what about the other? In our program we only need one object, we added a function to factor out some of the complexity into its own reusable piece of code, but we do not want to pay for an extra
typeobject that we do not need.
As with RVO, when processing the caller, and in this particular case where the temporary object
_Ris used to copy-construct a local object, the compiler can follow the same line of reasoning: since the only purpose of the temporary is to serve as the source for
Xand the lifetimes only overlap during the copy, it can merge
X. Now or program has a single object:
Summing it up
C++ is a language with value semantics, and that means that there might be potentially many objects in your program being copied here and there, in particular across function calls. This does not mean that you should not factor out code into functions, or that you should refactor your function signatures to avoid return copies in favor of references, this might actually have a negative impact in behavior. The compiler is there to help you avoid the costs of copies, and it does a good job at it. Never depend on side effects from copy constructors, as small changes in the code inside a function might allow or inhibit NRVO.
Value semantics is a hot topic in the language, more so with the inclusion of r-value-references and move semantics to the upcoming standard. Expect to read more on the subject.
What about arguments to functions (rather than returned values)? Can copies be optimized there? Under which circumstances? Can the interface of the
numbertype in last week's post be improved to allow for some optimization? Is there anything that won't help? | <urn:uuid:d20f84d1-0846-44c8-a1fe-db05fe37b33b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://definedbehavior.blogspot.com/2011/08/value-semantics-nrvo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940688 | 1,351 | 2.984375 | 3 |
An investigation into paint ingredients found that limestone, a source of calcium, is
often a key ingredient in paint. Scientists theorize that Blue Jays are eating paint chips
for the calcium. Deborah Jasak and others found that offering eggshells, another good
source of calcium, stopped the paint-chipping behavior.
the Birdscope article was published, more reports came in, and new information
about the relationship between acidic soil and calcium availability in the northeast came
to light. An updated article, published in the January/February 2003 issue of Bird
Watcher's Digest, incorporates the new information and points out that Lab
scientists believe the Blue Jays are stashing away, or caching, calcium for spring.
Scientists theorize that the Blue Jays, especially in the northeast, may cache calcium
before the breeding season because naturally occurring calcium may be in short supply.
As snow covers the ground throughout much of the northeast during
the 2002-2003 winter, we are again hearing numerous reports of Blue Jays eating house
paint. If Blue Jays are chipping the paint on your house, consider offering them
eggshells. You can learn how to provide eggshells safely in our About Birds and Bird
Feeding Section (scroll down the What to Feed Birds
page to the section on grit).
You can learn more about calcium consumption in birds from research
conducted by the Lab in 1997 and 1998, as reported in BirdScope.
Learn more about the Lab's research on acid rain and it's effects on
breeding birds here. | <urn:uuid:67cdc1c2-7f29-498b-8b5f-fb8ab3d79990> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://birds.cornell.edu/pfw/News/Paint-eatingBlueJays.htm | 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 | 0.928665 | 319 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Where in history did we first see the value and beauty beheld in diamonds. Will it be mainly a storage space for your jewelry. Then you may want a tall chest of six to eight drawers with sides that swing open to hang your pearls and necklaces.
Explanation of Cut, Color and Clarity of This Diamond
Cut Quality Cut quality is calculated based on simplified formulas that take into account diamond proportions, depth and table. If some of this information is not available we are unable to estimate the quality of the diamond's cut.
Color Color grade I is in the middle of the near colorless category. Typically a trained professional will be able to discern the presence of color. Some people prefer warmer colors like I. When I color diamond is set in yellow gold jewelry used with yellow gold bezel, the diamond will appear as gorgeous as any of the higher graded stones.
Clarity Inclusions and external blemishes in diamonds of SI1 clarity may be easy to spot under 10X power magnification. Location of the inclusions greatly affect their visibility to the naked eye. SI1 diamonds of good color produce as good of a sparkle as the more expansive VS graded stones of lower color. Excellent bargains may be fond in this category. | <urn:uuid:b36bf361-c6be-44c5-8bd8-1579cfbd34ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gold-custom.com/Loose-Diamonds/Loose-Diamond_ItemTag_LD-011.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933737 | 256 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 9:57 AM
The U.S. Department of Education is throwing its financial weight behind a new program aimed at connecting Cleveland history students to the world outside of the classroom. ideastream's David C. Barnett has more.
Kristine Cohn of the U.S. Department of Education was in town yesterday to present a check to the Cleveland Schools in support of the “History First” program, developed at Kenyon College. The grant, which totals nearly a million dollars, will fund a three-year exercise aimed at improving the classroom skills of 5th and 8th grade history teachers.
Will Scott of Kenyon College says the teaching of history has been degraded over the years by poorly trained faculty members who often double as athletic coaches at many schools.
Will Scott: There are some national polls rating, from the students point of view, the classrooms that they seemed to learn the most from. And social studies and history, almost always, tend to hit in the bottom third.
Scott says the History First program will work to turn that around by focusing on the teaching skills of 90 Cleveland instructors. Emphasis will be made on making history relevant by taking students on projects outside of the classroom and demonstrating the connections between events of the past and their lives today. David C. Barnett, 90.3.
Please follow our community discussion rules when composing your comments. | <urn:uuid:c73dc402-42f1-4e8e-9671-86351350278f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ideastream.org/news/feature/4600 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972247 | 286 | 2.125 | 2 |
Can depression be inherited? I was just wondering because I have depression, along with my mom, sister, and aunts. - Shane*
A person might feel depressed for many reasons, and sometimes genetics plays a role. Having parents or other family members who are depressed can increase the likelihood that someone may become depressed. But even when depression may be partly due to an inherited tendency, it usually takes a combination of factors for a person to develop depression.
Stressful events, family conflict, big disappointments, or grief can all trigger depression. Relationships with people who criticize more than they show affection can lead to depression because they may teach a girl or guy to become self-critical and to feel inadequate, two feelings often associated with depression. For some girls, hormonal changes might play a role in depression and irritable moods. And in some people, certain medical conditions can cause low energy and a depressed mood.
It's important to remember, though, that having family members with depression does not necessarily mean that someone will become depressed. And people with no family history can become depressed, too.
Whatever the contributing factors may be, depression is a very treatable condition. If you feel depressed or are concerned, discuss your symptoms with a health professional who can evaluate you and recommend treatment. If you ever feel extremely depressed or like you might hurt yourself, get help immediately. | <urn:uuid:4b4518bd-845d-4563-914d-f5cf5d19b26a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kidshealth.org/PageManager.jsp?dn=K_HovnanianChildrens_Hospital&lic=184&cat_id=20769&article_set=35433&tracking=T_RelatedArticle | 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 | 0.967504 | 279 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Carnegie Mellon, Tokyo University of Technology's Katayanagi Prizes
Carnegie Mellon, in collaboration with the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT), is honoring two leading computer scientists this month with the first Katayanagi Prizes.
Endowed by Koh Katayanagi, the founder of TUT and a leader in computing and academia for the past 60 years, the prizes recognize excellence and leadership in the field of computer science and technology.
"As the founder of the Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science, I am personally very pleased to learn that the first prizes are awarded to two distinguished researchers," said Koh Katayanagi, chairman of the Katayanagi Institute.
In recognition of outstanding, sustained achievement in research, the first Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence will be awarded to David A. Patterson, E.H. and M. E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Patterson's career encompasses all aspects of computer system design. His developments have been a force behind multibillion-dollar industries and his project-oriented research style has served as a model for many academic computer scientists.
The recipient of the first Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize will be Takeo Igarashi, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.
Igarashi has created much excitement among computer graphics researchers with his novel ways for creating complex animated objects using simple graphical interfaces. His work points to a future where animation design will be much more intuitive and less labor-intensive than it is today.
Patterson and Igarashi are being honored with ceremonies at Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh campus on March 20 and 22. They were also honored at TUT on March 12 and 13. The prizes carry an honorarium of $20,000 for a senior researcher and $10,000 for a junior. | <urn:uuid:96880491-e2e2-4e04-9f80-fd0e46339341> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/global/2007/winter/excellence-in-computer-science-.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950287 | 389 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Attendance by Users - Computers
The Attendance by Users – Computers report shows a combined information on the time spent by users on their PCs. The report consists of a single table. The table lists all data sorted by active time.
The Attendance by Users – Computers report allows you to quickly see who (user), where (PC) and for how long time was working. To view reports from different points of view, use additional filtering parameters described in the Report Controls section. | <urn:uuid:9c90eff6-c474-454e-adad-ad5b6a3b7071> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.workexaminer.com/help/attendance-by-users-computers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946854 | 101 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Eliza’s makeover in Old Globe’s Pygmalion mirrors Reality TV
By Diana Saenger
The Old Globe Theatre starts the year with a 100th anniversary production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” Shaw penned his romantic comedy in 1912 and named it after the mythological Pygmalion, a sculptor in Cyprus who fell in love with a statue he had carved. The play is a sharp parody of the rigid British class system of the day.
In 1938, Shaw adapted “Pygmalion” for the big screen with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. It is best known, however, as the 1956 Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews — who was replaced by Audrey Hepburn for the 1956 film version.
Nicholas Martin directs The Globe production, which stars Tony Award-winner Robert Sean Leonard as Professor Henry Higgins, Charlotte Parry as Eliza Doolittle, Kandis Chappell as Mrs. Higgins, Don Sparks as Mr. Doolittle, Deborah Taylor as Mrs. Pearce and Paxton Whitehead as Colonel Pickering.
The story is about a young woman who sells flowers on the streets of London and who ends up being the prop of a bet between Professor Higgins — who believes teaching her how to speak properly will change her life — and a gentleman, Colonel Pickering.
Assessing “Pygmalion” as “a brilliant play with great characters,” Parry said she has always wanted to play the role of Eliza Doolittle.
“Eliza is a sensitive, kind of put upon flower girl … but confident in her own way,” Parry said. “She makes quite the journey in this story, ending up at Higgins’ house with a dream of being a lady in a flower shop. She wants to get away from the life she’s trapped in.”
At the time the play was first written, it was viewed as an observation on female independence.
“At Higgins’s home, where she’s being tutored, she grows into a sophisticated and confident young lady who realizes she has choices and even learns to stand up to Professor Higgins, who constantly puts her down,” Parry said. “At one point, she tells Higgins that the difference between a flower girl and a lady isn’t the way she behaves, but the way she’s treated.
“It’s a true rags-to-riches story, but always reminds me of the movie ‘Trading Places’ (1983 starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd) where if a poor person switches lives with a rich one, they are still the same people inside and a reflection on prejudice,” Parry said. “Today, we love watching reality TV shows and makeovers where people’s lives are transformed; it’s human nature. That’s the basis of ‘Pygmalion,’ but it’s also a really funny classic that will entertain the audience.”
If you go
When: Matinees, evenings Jan. 12–Feb. 17
Where: 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park
Tickets: From $29
Phone: (619) 234-5623
Insights seminar: 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 14. Free. Production thoughts from panel of the artistic company. Reception at 6:30 p.m.
Post-show forums: Jan. 22, Jan. 29 and Feb. 6. Free. Discuss the play with members of the cast and crew after curtain calls.
- Eugene O’Neill classic ‘Anna Christie’ opens at The Old Globe
- The Rocky Horror Show dares Globe audiences not to laugh
- Let’s Review: Dark humor + dysfunctional family = oddly appealing drama ‘August: Osage County’ at the Old Globe
- Playhouse has fun creating musical ‘The Nightingale’
- Young actors thrilled to be part of Old Globe’s ‘Grinch’
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Santa Clara, Calif. - Intel today released three new chipsets with integrated USB 2.0 capability enabling PCs to be ready 'out of the box' for the new data interface.
The new chipsets are the 845G, 845E and 845GL. USB 2.0 is forty times faster than USB 1.1 enabling external CD burners and hard drives to operate much more efficiently.
The 845G is designed for the higher-end Pentium 4 processors and will sell for $46 in sets of 1,000. The 845E, $41 in 1,000 unit quantities, is also for the lower speed P4 chips and the 845GL is for Celeron processors and cost $33 when bought in 1,000 unit lots.
In addition, all of the chipsets enable surround sound and 20-bit audio. | <urn:uuid:b30bbe07-51c5-4154-ba44-6c7be70b1ff0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.twice.com/news/intel-intros-usb-20-ready-chipsets-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904295 | 177 | 1.5 | 2 |
The cost of regulation to businesses in America is $1.75 trillion (according to a study done by the SBA’s Department of Advocacy). That is $1.75 trillion in costs to businesses, which end up in prices paid by consumers. In other words, to fund compliance with regulations, American consumers pay an additional $1.75 trillion for the goods and services they buy.
This is a hidden tax on every consumer. The poorest of the poor are paying it when they purchase something. There’s no refund or a way to avoid it.
In addition, not included in the $1.75 trillion price tag, is the direct tax dollars spent on the bureaucracies that enforce these regulations. The budget for them does not come out of compliance costs to companies, it comes from the taxpayer. So, while everyone pays the $1.75 trillion in a tax hidden in the price of goods and services, the 50% of people in the country that pay taxes also pay for the privilege of supporting the bureaucracies responsible for hiding that tax in the prices.
Does this $1.75 trillion paid in compliance actually add to wealth and prosperity? Freeing that $1.75 trillion for other purposes would enable it to be used in ways that are actually productive, ways in which it produces more wealth, not more forms being properly filled out.
Again, there are useful regulations and there would inevitably be some cost of compliance. However, it is difficult to believe that by eliminating redundancy, simplifying procedures, and trimming away the useless regulations, we could not trim the compliance costs by at least half and return nearly $900 billion into the economy to be used in productive ways, not the least of which could be simply lowering prices and giving the consumer some extra jingle in his pocket to be spent on other things or saved.
$1.75 trillion pulled out of the economy every year (and rising). Seems like a lot of money to me. Does the benefit justify that cost? What cost does justify the benefit? More importantly, what is the benefit? Washington simply does not do cost/benefit analysis. They just have good ideas and we pay for them. Rich, middle class, and poor. Again I ask, who is harmed the most (answer, in case you’re a Democrat and have never considered such things, the poor and middle class are harmed the most by this hidden tax resulting from the good ideas of big government elites). | <urn:uuid:9d857d8f-d90b-43f6-b4af-5e58337ce68a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freemktproject.com/?p=1221 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966113 | 504 | 2.25 | 2 |
- Vidimus - http://vidimus.org -
Posted By ltempest On December 15, 2012 @ 8:56 pm In | Comments Disabled
For medievalists the stained glass of Lincoln Cathedral is ‘the one that got away’. Despite owning ‘the most important collection of English 13th-century glass after Canterbury Cathedral’, masterful detective work by one of the contributors to this admirable book shows that it once had much more: a succession of figure windows similar to those of its world-famous French contemporary at Chartres in northern France. This alone is enough to make readers of Vidimus visit Lincoln Cathedral; the great advantage of this attractively presented book that it provides a wealth of other reasons for doing so.
The book begins with a short introduction chronicling the history of the building. Written by the cathedral’s education officer, Carol Bennett, it describes how the present cathedral took shape in the thirteenth century, after fires and earthquakes had destroyed most of the earlier buildings. An interesting part of her introduction cites a contemporary account of 1220, which explains why the two great rose windows in the north and south transepts are called the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye respectively: ‘The twin windows that offer a circular light are the two Eyes of the cathedral: and rightly the greater of these is seen to be the bishop and the lesser the dean, for north represents the devil, and south the Holy Spirit and it is in these directions that the two Eyes look. The bishop faces the south in order to invite in, and the dean the north in order to avoid; the one takes care to be saved, the other takes care not to perish. With these Eyes the cathedral’s face is on the watch for the candelabra of heaven and the darkness of Lethe [the river of oblivion in Hades].’
Thereafter her narrative plunges into despair as the impact of the Reformation and the English Civil War wreak colossal damage on the fabric of the church, beginning with the dismantling of the golden shrine of St Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln who had initiated the rebuilding of the cathedral after his consecration in 1186, followed by the destruction of ‘superstitious’ windows. More outrages followed in the seventeenth century, when parliamentary troops armed themselves with axes and hammers and smashed tombs and windows, paintings and sculpture. Although huge sums were spent between 1660 and 1666 repairing broken windows, probably with clear glass, it was not until the nineteenth century that the cathedral’s windows began to recover as visual works of art.
The second chapter in the book is by Professor Nigel Morgan, whose ground-breaking study on the medieval glass of the cathedral, The Medieval Painted Glass of Lincoln Cathedral (CVMA (GB), Occasional Paper III, London, 1983) was published nearly thirty years ago and has now become difficult to find. As mentioned earlier, the cathedral was extensively glazed in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, work continued throughout the middle ages, and culminated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when new chantry chapels (private chapels where prayers were said for the individuals and/or the families who built them) were added. Following the destruction mentioned above and other changes to the building, most of this glass has either been lost or moved to new locations within the church. Despite the problems this causes for historians, Professor Morgan does a brilliant job of showing both where this repositioned glass was originally installed within the church and what it showed. The thirteenth-century figurative schemes included narrative windows of Old and New Testament stories; the lives and miracles of the Virgin Mary and the saints (including St Hugh); standing figures of the prophets and apostles; angels engaged in a range of activities; and, as at Chartres, a huge depiction of the Last Judgement in the west window There was also a large amount of ornamental glass, which perhaps outstripped the figurative glass in quantity; this included both coloured and grisaille designs.
The third chapter is equally fascinating. Written by Dr Jim Cheshire, a leading expert on nineteenth-century glass, it details the glazing of the church during the Victorian years. There are excellent sections on the role of Charles Winston and the search for glass with ‘body’, a way of describing glass with sufficient impurities and variations in tone and tint to prevent windows from looking flat and monotonous or admitting too much strong light. The author is equally at home in discussing the work of firms like Ward & Hughes and Clayton & Bell as the contribution of the Sutton brothers, the Revd Augustus and Frederick, who made nearly thirty windows for the cathedral. Neglected features of glazing schemes are also discussed fully: the process of reconciling conflicting opinions about designs for new windows, the subjects depicted, the drawing styles, and the colour balances.
The final chapter focuses on the conservation of the cathedral glass and the role of its in-house studio. Written by Tom Küpper, the studio team leader, it focuses on the restoration of the Dean’s Eye window, which is 8m in diameter (between 1989 and 2005), and the restoration of five apostle windows made by the Sutton brothers between 1858 and 1862 (in 2008–2009). Such work is, of course, never done. Shortly after the publication of this book it was announced that a £550,000 project to protect some of earliest stained glass in the Cathedral would begin in 2013. Revolutionary protective glazing will be fitted to four thirteenth-century lancet windows beneath the Bishop’s Eye. The project will take four years to complete.
No review of this book would be complete without mentioning the contribution of Gordon Plumb. As stained glass brings life to a building, so his photography brings life to the text. His detailed images are a fabulous record of the cathedral’s treasures and make the book a visual, as well as a scholarly, triumph.
For visitors in a hurry, the cathedral has also published a shorter and very informative guide to the stained glass, which can be bought from the shop.
This is yet another outstanding volume in the Harlaxton medieval symposium series, and once again it contains plenty of interest – and importance – to historians of stained glass [Fig. 1].
Three essays immediately stand out. The first is by David Griffith and concentrates on images of the Seven Works of Mercy in parish churches before 1540. The subject had been introduced in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, when a great assembly of bishops adopted plans to teach the laity the fundamental tenets of Christian ideas and living. As this campaign intensified over the next 150 years, images of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, and burying the dead multiplied in stained-glass windows and wall-paintings, with at least twenty recorded in the former medium and another forty or so in the latter. Among the best-known extant windows are those at Chinnor (Oxforshire), dating perhaps from as early as c.1326, while fifteenth-century versions survive at All Saints Church, North Street, York (1429, Fig. 2) and at Tattershall (Lincolnshire). Lost examples include a window at Coughton (Warkwickshire) commissioned by Sir Robert Throckmorton, who died in 1510 en route to the Holy Land. The author explains that patronage of this subject was a practical expression of Christian living and was often accompanied by gifts of money and possessions, such as clothes, to the poor. He also discusses the inscriptions that accompanied these images. The chapter concludes with a helpful appendix listing representations of the Seven Works of Mercy in medieval English and Welsh churches. To this list may be added a wall-painting at Toddington (Bedforshire); it should also be noted that the representation at Ringshall (Suffolk) does in fact survive.
The second essay is by the CVMA (GB) author David King, who uses his unsurpassed knowledge of medieval glazing schemes in Norfolk to chart the history of the John Wighton workshop in Norwich from the middle of the fourteenth century to the early years of the sixteenth. Employing contemporary records and decorative motifs, particularly the estoile (a star with wavy rays, Fig. 3) used by the Wighton glaziers, he lists the leading members of the workshop and details their œuvre, which includes famous schemes at St Peter Mancroft church in the centre of Norwich and places such as Salle. A noticeable feature of the workshop was its craft genealogy with the business being handed down within the sane family.
Richard Marks’s contribution completes the trio. He extends and revises an article that he wrote for Vidimus no. 30, in June 2009 about the will of Robert Hunt (d.1500), who left money for the making of a window at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster in 1499. A key feature of the will is that a contract had already been drawn up for the work with a London glass-painter called Adrian, who lived in Southwark, on the south side of the River Thames. The precise identity of Adrian remains uncertain, as new evidence has come to light since 2009 that suggests that it might have been either Adrian Andru, a member of a team of glass-painters who worked between 1500 and 1502 with Barnard Flower (the King’s Glazier, probably from the 1490s) at the Tower of London, Westminster Hall, and the royal palaces at Eltham and Greenwich, or a newly discovered glazier, Adrian Joys/Joos, who was also a resident of Southwark. Both men must have been among the craftsmen from either the Netherlands or German-speaking lands who settled in Southwark in the late fifteenth century, beyond the jurisdiction of the London craft guilds. Among the many issues raised by the author is the light Hunt’s will sheds on the glazing of parish churches around 1500 and the relationship between the patron, the artist, and other interested parties, such as the church wardens and patrons of St Margaret’s.
Other essays in the book include exemplary contributions by Nigel Saul and T. A. Heslop, and some welcome contributions by Continental scholars.
Article printed from Vidimus: http://vidimus.org
URL to article: http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-64/books/
Copyright © 2011 Vidimus. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:3a92f7ea-8ad7-4d0a-b435-2d213655e875> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-64/books/printpage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960258 | 2,206 | 2.765625 | 3 |
January 28, 2013
Non-residential construction will sustain industry
Private sector investment in new non-residential construction is expected to keep construction workloads stable in Canada in 2013, which will offset a slowdown in residential activity.
“Private sector investment in the energy, mining, and commercial sectors will complement major ongoing and new infrastructure projects to keep construction workloads stable as new residential building cools in most of Canada,” said a report released by BTY Group.
A Canadian market intelligence report by BTY said Canada will record substantial investment and a steady flow of immigrants in 2013, which will help to sustain construction levels and help meet a growing need for skilled labour.
BTY forecasts that Gross Domestic Product in Canada will grow by 2.1 per cent in 2012 and 2.0 per cent in 2013, despite a slower than expected U.S. recovery, recession in the European Union and lower growth rates in Asia.
The report said strength in both residential and non-residential construction in B.C. will generate economic growth, which is above the national average.
“Major new investments in commercial-retail, as well as mining and energy, will lead the way in B.C.,” said Joe Rekab, managing partner at BTY Group.
“The province’s residential sector, bolstered by continued strong in-migration, will buck the national cooling trend. Metro Vancouver will see the highest concentration of new commercial and residential activity.”
The report said investment in the oil and gas, and mining sectors is especially strong, led by the $4.7 billion Kitimat Liquid Natural Gas Terminal and Pipeline and Rio Tinto Alcan’s $3.3 billion modernization of its Kitimat smelter.
Earlier this month, Chevron Canada Limited signed a deal with Apache Canada Ltd. to hold a 50 per cent interest in the construction and operation of the facility in Bish Cove, about 650 kilometres north of Vancouver.
The largest single investment in B.C. is the federal government’s $8 billion order for seven non-combat ships, which is an eight-year contract.
In the commercial and retail sector, five new office towers, with a total value of $1.6 billion, are underway in downtown Vancouver.
Discount retailer Target will revamp 26 Zellers stores across B.C. over the next two years at a cost of $10 million a store.
However, construction cost escalation is estimated to be between one to two per cent in 2013.
Record levels of oilsands investment in Alberta between 2010 and 2012 is fueling strong and sustained construction activity.
GDP growth in Alberta for 2013 is estimated to be between 2.6 per cent and 3.6 per cent.
Drawn by jobs in the oilsands, net migration has been projected to reach 57,800 in 2012 and remain elevated at 48,500 in 2013.
Growth will be driven by increased capital spending in both public and private sectors, including transportation, social infrastructure and commercial and retail projects.
Calgary alone has nearly three million square feet of new office space under construction for delivery by 2014.
Retailer Target’s arrival in Alberta alone will see a $232 million investment in revamping Zellers stores and building a warehouse/distribution centre.
High levels of sustained investment in oilsands and energy, as well as high net migration will generate construction cost escalation between 3.0 and 5.0 per cent in 2013.
Saskatchewan is forecast to be Canada’s growth leader in 2013, with GDP increasing between 2.7 per cent and 4.0 per cent.
Major drivers are continuing strength in the oil and gas sector and $12 billion in ongoing investment in potash mining, despite some scaling back in response to softening global demand.
Net migration in 2012 has been projected to surpass 2011’s record of 11,742, and then slip back to 11,000 in 2013.
Strong investment in mining and resources, as well as high net migration will generate construction cost escalation between 5.0-6.0 per cent in 2013. According to Statistics Canada, investment in non-residential building construction amounted to $12 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, up 1.0 per cent compared to the previous quarter.
This was the third consecutive quarterly increase and was led by higher spending for commercial and industrial buildings.
Commercial building investment increased 1.7 per cent to $7.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, which is the fifth consecutive quarterly gain. Industrial investment was up for the fifth consecutive quarter, rising 3.3 per cent to $1.6 billion.
Spending in the institutional component totalled $3.1 billion in the fourth quarter, a 1.8 per cent decline from the previous quarter.
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|ALEX’S ECONOMICS BLOG|
Reed Construction Data Canada’s Chief Economist Alex Carrick discusses current developments in the North American economic environment with emphasis on the construction industry.
- An Overview of Prices and Sales in the Diverging U.S. and Canadian Housing Markets (April 25, 2013)
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- Twenty major upcoming residential and transportation terminal construction projects - April 2013 (April 15, 2013) | <urn:uuid:4516e723-d771-466c-a879-93797d6e835e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.joconl.com/article/id53739/green | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928338 | 1,378 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The uniqueness of classical education lies not with the particular subjects pursued nor the specific curriculum employed, but primarily with the method by which knowledge is acquired. The classical method seeks to develop in the student (1) a body of knowledge essential to educated men and women, (2) sound thinking and reasoning skills, and (3) the capacity for beauty and clarity of expression. At FCA, we base our educational approach on the classical teaching model known as the Trivium, which divides the educational life of the child into three stages (grammar; logic, or dialectic; and rhetoric) and takes advantage of the student’s natural capacity for certain types of learning at each of these stages. This method develops logical thinking and reasoning skills which will serve to equip students for a lifetime of learning.
By teaching students how to learn, we provide a solid foundation for mastering the specific subjects encountered throughout their formal education. The subject material and curricula at FCA are carefully chosen to prepare students for a variety of post-secondary educational experiences, but our primary objective is that students gain the skills of learning for themselves. In the end, our teachers strive to instill in students a genuine love and enthusiasm for learning that will remain with them throughout their lives.
The Grammar Stage:
In the grammar (elementary school) stage, the classical approach takes advantage of a young child’s innate capacity to memorize and retain information by teaching the underlying facts and relationships of each subject. Teaching methods often used at this stage of learning include chants, rhymes, and songs that make the facts easier to memorize and remember, as well as hands-on learning experiences that nurture curiosity and creativity. During this period the focus will be on “the basics,” that is the fundamental teaching of Holy Scripture, phonetic reading, mathematics, history, language studies, the arts, and introductory science. Students begin the study of Latin in third grade because of its great value in building English vocabulary, in developing precision in grammar and syntax, in accessing modern foreign languages, and in stimulating cultural literacy. Latin study continues throughout the grammar school and junior high years.
The Logic (or Dialectic) Stage:
The logic stage begins in middle school when the capacity for abstract thought starts to emerge. During this stage students continue to expand on the knowledge base acquired during the grammar stage, but now emphasis is placed on using these facts to create proper sentences, to define terms and eliminate ambiguity, and to detect fallacies. Students at this age love to question and debate. To equip them to argue correctly, we teach them the construction and critique of valid arguments. In this stage we introduce the study of formal logic which equips students to recognize logical fallacies, to identify critical underlying assumptions, and to develop sound reasoning skills. In an age-appropriate fashion, we begin introducing students to controversial ideas and issues that they will encounter throughout their lives.
The Rhetoric Stage:
In the rhetoric (high school) stage, students are formulating their own worldviews and are largely concerned with how they come across to others. Therefore, we develop their capacity for beauty and clarity of expression. Students in this stage take positions on issues and argue for these positions using cogent, articulate, and persuasive communication. In particular, discussion and analysis of controversial and fundamental issues and philosophies will continue, and students will be required to critically examine the assumptions and conclusions intrinsic to their own philosophies and those of the world around them. The students will study the best in literature, the arts, history, theology, science, and philosophy. They will refine their ability to articulate their knowledge. They will learn how to share and defend their faith. | <urn:uuid:5388bb1f-413d-40d2-bf7b-a4b0e25ce159> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fcaclassical.com/academics-2/the-classical-approach/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947878 | 750 | 3.609375 | 4 |
About the House of Delegates
The House of Delegates of the AAPG is made up of delegates from affiliated societies and international regions throughout the world. They are selected by popular vote from within their respective areas and serve a three year term. Alternates are often selected in the event that an elected delegate is unable to perform the duties to which they have been elected. In turn these delegates elect a Chairman-Elect and a Secretary/Editor who serve for one year. The Chairman-Elect serves as Chairman the next year and as a member of the AAPG Executive Committee.
Duties of the delegates include:
- Being familiar with the Association's Constitution and Bylaws;
- Being acquainted with the Association's current policies and programs;
- Informing the leaders of their society or region regarding the Association's program of activities, especially as it relates to cooperative participation and service;
- Processing requests from the Executive Committee for information regarding eligibility of applicants for membership in the Association;
- Serving as local Certification committeemen by processing requests from the Board of Certification for information regarding applicants for Certification by the Association;
- Actively soliciting applications from eligible geologists for membership in this Association. | <urn:uuid:6bdec5d9-9088-4166-8eb3-255e6f95a22d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aapg.org/business/hod/about.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965854 | 243 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Schlesingers restore name of historic Selling Building
By JEWISH REVIEW
article created on: 2009-04-01T00:00:00
The Schlesinger Companies have restored the Oregon National Building to its original name, the Selling Building, in honor of Ben Selling a former state legislator who served briefly as Governor and who was named Portland’s first “First Citizen.”
The name restoration represents a unique relationship between the Selling family—who played a major role in Portland’s progress at the beginning of the 20th century, including the building of the Neighborhood House, which was intended to help Jewish immigrants arriving in Portland—and the Schlesinger family, who have been local real estate investment, management and development company in Portland for the last three generations.
The Schlesinger family has a longstanding commitment to the Jewish community. Various family members have been active members of Temple Beth Israel and Congregation Neveh Shalom. The Schlesingers have been active in Oregon Area Jewish Committee and in the Jewish Educational Service of North America.
The Schlesinger Companies, a full-service real estate investment, management and development company in Portland, restored the original name of their headquarters location to the Selling Building.
Changed to the Oregon National Building in 1967 to reflect the name of a major tenant, the property at 610 SW Alder in Portland was originally known as the Selling Building. It was added to the National Historic Register in 1991.
“We were approached by John Selling, the 92-year-old grandson of Ben Selling, and asked if we would consider bringing the name back in honor of his family,” said Josh Schlesinger, vice president and asset manager for the Portland-based Schlesinger Companies. “Oregon National Insurance has not been a tenant for quite some time, and we liked the idea of restoring and preserving the building as a Landmark. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
The original brass lettering has been refurbished and now adorns the front granite façade of the building over the entrance. A plaque from the U.S. Department of Interior, indicating the Selling Building’s designation on the National Historic Register, was added next to the doors
Ben Selling was a former state legislator and served briefly as the governor of Oregon while the then current governor was ill. In 1928, Ben was named Portland’s “First Citizen” in the inaugural year of the award, which is given out annually by the Portland Associations of Realtors.
“To have his name on this Portland landmark is a reminder of all Ben Selling stood for. The extraordinary effort of Schlesinger Companies, especially in getting this building designated a historic landmark, means a great deal to the Selling family,” said Joel Selling, Ben’s grandson.
Built in 1910 and designed by noted architect A. E. Doyle, the building has glazed terra cotta facade with a roof cornice, Venetian windows, pilasters and column-and-spandrel facings. The Selling Building was originally developed as a medical office building and was renovated multiple times over the years to accommodate office tenants. The Schlesinger Companies acquired the Selling Building in 1966 and have remained as on-site management.
The approximately 90,000-square-foot office building has street-level retail, including Moonstruck Chocolate’s flagship store and an office tenant mix that includes Kittelson & Associates and Leland Consulting Group. The office tower is centrally located directly across from the recently renovated Macy’s and Nines Hotel and a block from Pioneer Courthouse Square. | <urn:uuid:c6722d6d-eca2-4a38-b301-c0dbb4e71e99> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishreview.org/money/Schlesingers-restore-name-of-historic-Selling-Building | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968847 | 752 | 1.5625 | 2 |
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By Jeff Green Students at Farwell Middle School in Detroit are learning about germs. But they aren't just studying them in a textbook. Using a program called Cooties on a Palm handheld computer, they're beaming infrared messages back and forth to simulate contacts they might have meeting kids on the playground. After a half-dozen "meetings" among the simulated healthy and infected Palm classmates, the students check to see if they are sick. They can even trace their meetings among the other Palms to determine just when they were infected and how many other students they are infecting.
This isn't just an idle high-tech game. It's part of a concentrated effort between Palm and education partners to duplicate the success that Apple had in its early days planting its computers among school districts, says Mike Lorion, vice-president for education with Palm. Lorion ought to know. Before joining Palm, he worked on Apple's school-computer program for four years.
Palm has been working with University of Michigan Professor Elliot Soloway for five months on a demonstration program at several middle schools in the 167,000-student Detroit district. The Michigan program is one of several experiments under way across the country.
E-ENVIRONMENTALISTS. The working theory is that computers have reached about maximum concentration in the classroom. It's just not realistic to expect schools to spend $1,000 apiece to equip every student with a computer, so administrators are left with a ratio of about six students per machine at even the best schools, Soloway says. But Palm units can cost as little as $150, which makes it much more affordable to equip every student with a handheld, Soloway says.
In addition to using the Palms to simulate the spread of germs, students in Soloway's program are plotting the results of environmental studies, sharing information on research programs, and otherwise learning to collaborate with assistance from a handheld. Some students have even started using them to keep journals, Soloway says.
The Detroit students recently used their Palms to catalog an environmental survey of a local river. They plotted graphs and completed work sheets, all on the Palm. After projects are completed, they share their work and even sync with a classroom computer to get a final class tally.
In some classrooms, students who are assigned Palms are responsible for bringing them to class each day. In other settings, students rotate the handhelds and keep them at school. But so far, not one unit has been lost, Soloway says. Palm has been granting so-called Pioneer Grants, like the one in Detroit, to districts around the country, supporting 100 programs so far, according to Palm's Lorion.
FUTURE CUSTOMERS. Of course, Palm isn't just being altruistic. So far, about 13 million Palms have been sold, mostly to adults. The 53 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students, already familiar with Game Boy handheld games, represent future Palm consumers. So the company would like to get them interested as early as possible, much like Apple was able to influence generations of students and teachers with its products.
In Orland Park, Ill., outside Chicago, four high schools distributed 2,000 Palms to advanced-placement students in September. The students use the handhelds for math and science. The Palm has even replaced graphing calculators for the students. They also use it as a study planner to plot assignments and test scores. In all, about 500 applications have been written for classroom use, Lorion says. In Florida, Palm hopes to have 10,000 teachers trained to use the devices in the classroom in two years.
In the next few weeks, the company plans to roll out a program giving away one Palm for every two a district purchases, Lorion says. "We see this eventually [as leading to a situation where the Palm is] just another tool they're carrying around in their backpacks," Lorion says. If the company can reach even a fraction of those 53 million backpacks, they'll have learned Apple's lesson well. Green , a BusinessWeek correspondent based in Detroit, is crazy about handhelds. Follow his perspectives on Palm-based technologies, only on BW Online | <urn:uuid:221c3919-fcec-4a49-a5f8-22cb93037b95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-05-02/taking-a-leaf-from-apples-textbook | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971288 | 879 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Virtually everyone who’s ever seen an aircraft fly overhead has probably wondered just how to
become a pilot. Sadly, only a minuscule slice of the population ever pursues an answer to that question. In addition, an extremely high percentage of flight training prospects quit without obtaining a license. Why the high dropout rate? One opinion is that many of them dive into training without fully understanding the commitment necessary to earn their wings.
So, want to know how to become a pilot and succeed where so many others fail? The secret can be summed up in one word: planning. Before you can hope to succeed, you need to understand what you’re up against. To do this, you need to ask the right questions before beginning your quest for a pilot certificate. | <urn:uuid:37b41682-4572-4b28-a910-780fa285f269> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brownaviationlease.com/blog/?Tag=pilot | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954569 | 161 | 1.804688 | 2 |
IN MY State of the Union Address nearly 2 years ago, I outlined a program which I described as "a new American revolution--a peaceful revolution in which power [is] turned back to the people...a revolution as profound, as far-reaching, as exciting as that first revolution almost 200 years ago."
The signing today of the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972--the legislation known as general revenue sharing-means that this new American revolution is truly underway. And it is appropriate that we launch this new American revolution in the same place where the first American Revolution was launched by our Founding Fathers 196 years ago-Independence Square in Philadelphia. It is appropriate that we meet in this historic place to help enunciate a new declaration of independence for our State and local governments.
Just outside the Oval Office of the President at the White House hangs a picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is an unfinished picture. The artist has sketched in some of the figures only lightly and left many spaces blank.
I have always believed there was an important moral in that picture. For the American Revolution is also an unfinished enterprise. Each generation must do its part to carry on the work which began in Philadelphia.
As we sign this historic document today, we are carrying on the work which started here in Independence Square--where independence was declared, where the Constitution was written, and where the Bill of Rights was formally added to the Constitution.
Even as we return today to the place where our Nation was founded, we are also returning to the principles of the Founding Fathers.
They came here in the 18th century to establish the federal system. We return here in the 20th century to renew the federal system.
They came here to create a balance between the various levels of government. We come here to restore that balance.
They came here "to form a more perfect Union." We come here to make it more perfect still.
After many years in which power has been flowing away from those levels of government which are closest to the people, power will now begin to flow back to the people again--a development which can have an enormous impact on their daily existence.
--In many States and localities, it will mean lower property taxes or lower sales taxes or lower income taxes than would otherwise have been the case. Revenue sharing can provide desperately needed tax relief for millions of Americans.
--In other places, revenue sharing will mean better schools or better hospitals.
--In some communities, this money will be used to put more policemen on the beat or to start new drug control programs.
--In still other instances, it will be devoted to job training or to recreational facilities or to public transportation.
But the most important point is this: In each case it will be local officials responding to local conditions and local constituencies who will decide what should happen, and not some distant bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.
The American people are fed up with government that doesn't deliver. Revenue sharing can help State and local government deliver again, closing the gap between promise and performance.
Revenue sharing will give these hard-pressed governments the dollars they need so badly. But just as importantly, it will give them the freedom they need to use those dollars as effectively as possible.
Under this program, instead of spending so much time trying to please distant bureaucrats in Washington--so the money will keep coming in--State and local officials can concentrate on pleasing the people--so the money can do more good.
This is why I am determined to keep red tape out of this program. States and cities will not have to worry about filing complicated plans, filling out endless forms, meeting lots of administrative regulations, or submitting to all sorts of bureaucratic controls. When we say no strings, we mean no strings. This program will mean both a new source of revenue for State and local governments and a new sense of responsibility.
As State and local governments are revitalized, I believe that our people will begin to feel once again that they are in control, that they can shape events rather than being shaped by events, that they can make things happen rather than always having things happen to them.
Thomas Jefferson believed in local government because he believed every person needed to feel that he is a participant in the affairs of government. By revitalizing grass roots government, revenue sharing can make it possible for more people to be participants in events that make a difference.
Under revenue sharing, more decisions will be made at the scene of the action-and this means that more people can have a piece of the action. By multiplying the centers of effective power in our country we will be multiplying the opportunities for involvement and influence by individual citizens.
The enactment of general revenue sharing would have been impossible without the strong support of hundreds of State and local officials--from both political parties--and I extend to them my profound thanks. The Vice President has also played a leading role in the battle for revenue sharing--and I salute him for all that he has done. And, of course, the Members and leaders of the Congress have my deep appreciation--and that of all Americans--for the constructive way in which they pursued their deliberations on this matter and for the favorable action which they have taken.
We expect great things from this program--and we are going to be watching for them. I am asking the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations to monitor and evaluate the results of revenue sharing so that we can all know its full impact as we follow up on this initiative. And follow up we shall. For the enactment of general revenue sharing represents only the first part of our comprehensive design to reform the institutions of government so they can respond to the needs of the people.
It is my earnest hope that the next Congress will move on to enact other crucial parts of this design--including our six special revenue sharing programs, our proposals for streamlining the Federal Government, and our recommendations for welfare reform.
On the last day of the Constitutional Convention at Independence Hall in 1787, Dr. Benjamin Franklin looked at the President's chair--which still can be seen in the Assembly Room--and observed that he had wondered throughout the long, hot summer whether the sun which was painted on that chair was rising or setting. "But now at length," he concluded, "I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."
Many people have suggested in recent years that America's sun was setting, that our glory was behind us. One reason was the government was not responding well to people's needs. But today as we come back to Independence Hall we do so with confidence that we are giving our government back to the people again. And like Franklin, we can be confident, as we approach our 200th anniversary, that the sun is rising for America. | <urn:uuid:0305d4c8-99cb-45d9-9312-4fa2fb2b15b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3636&st=revenue+sharing&st1=Philadelphia | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962754 | 1,385 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Liberals have declared that there is a “war on women” in the United States but is that really true? A little bit of international perspective on women’s rights goes a long way. The truth is this: there is a war on women in the world – and here’s what it looks like:
Last week in Morocco, 16-year old Amina’s al-Filali committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist. After charges were filed against the rapist by al-Filali’s parents, a local judge determined the best route to be marriage — in order to “resolve” the impurity of sexual violation against her. For Amina, it was too much.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Honorata Kizende was kidnapped and raped by armed militias, then forced to be a sex slave for a year. After being released, her family rejected her due to the stigma of rape. In a place where violent rape is rampant, many women live without the support and comfort of family due to the shame cast on rape victims.
A recent Oscar-winning Hollywood documentary, “Saving Face,” documents the horrifying trend of acid attacks on females in Pakistan. Simply disrespecting or divorcing their husbands is the usual justification for such action. Most abusers go unpunished.
Last year in Afghanistan, the Taliban forced a woman to abort her baby – then shot her dead, for alleged adultery. Chinese women are routinely forced to abort their babies due to the country’s reprehensible one-child policy.
In Saudi Arabia, women are still fighting for the right to drive, to be seen in public alone, to be educated and to play sports.
So is there a war against women? You bet. And the United States has an opportunity to address the horrific injustices against the world’s women by promoting freedom through our foreign policy and encouraging the respect and care of women throughout the world.
As Heritage’s Grace Melton wrote, “The U.S. should work conscientiously to identify and address the real needs of women around the world, such as advancing maternal health, preventing and treating disease, securing legal rights, and seeking greater economic empowerment.”
It’s time liberals recognize that the real fight for women’s basic human rights is happening in places like Morocco, Saudi Arabia & Afghanistan – where women are treated like second class citizens and worse. The women in that war need all they help they can get. | <urn:uuid:7fc1074d-ddc6-4df2-a782-c40609d63b44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.heritage.org/2012/03/19/the-real-war-on-women-abusing-basic-human-rights/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961518 | 523 | 2.4375 | 2 |
ARTS ARE AN INTEGRAL PART OF OUR CULTURE
Welcome to Learning through the Arts! These videos are intended to support classroom teachers by demonstrating how they can implement the revised Arts curriculum. They are examples of how teachers have integrated the arts into their programs to best meet the needs of their learners.
The videos are organized into five subject areas, Visual Arts, Dance, Drama, Music and Media Arts. Videos are also clustered as Elementary and Secondary. | <urn:uuid:e7f1a4f5-9c7e-459a-a0c8-905f307e7288> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://resources.curriculum.org/arts/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968768 | 93 | 2.8125 | 3 |
What Is the Difference Between Weather and Climate?
It’s a sweltering midsummer day. “It must be global warming,” mutters someone. But is it the Earth’s changing climate that has made the day so warm? Or, is it just the weather that is so unbearable?
Weather is the mix of events that happen each day in our atmosphere including temperature, rainfall and humidity. Weather is not the same everywhere. Perhaps it is hot, dry and sunny today where you live, but in other parts of the world it is cloudy, raining or even snowing. Everyday, weather events are recorded and predicted by meteorologists worldwide.
Climate in your place on the globe controls the weather where you live. Climate is the average weather pattern in a place over many years. So, the climate of Antarctica is quite different than the climate of a tropical island. Hot summer days are quite typical of climates in many regions of the world, even without the effects of global warming.
Climates are changing because our Earth is warming, according to the research
of scientists. Does this contribute to a warm summer day? It may, however
global climate change is actually much more complicated than that because
a change in the temperature can cause changes in other weather elements
such as clouds or precipitation.
Explore weather and climate!
Click on links to the left to explore how dynamic forces within the atmosphere change our weather and climate. Learn what causes weather events and climate change and how NCAR scientists are exploring our atmosphere through scientific research. | <urn:uuid:68cc0d5b-57b9-4412-bf5c-46b0755daedc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946931 | 318 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter
It’s a big rover, so nothing but a big event is appropriate. NASA is going to hold the first-ever multi-center “Social” (formerly known as Tweetups) in conjunction with the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover on Aug. 6 EDT (Aug. 5 PDT). In case you’re not familiar, NASA Socials are in-person meetings with people who engage with the agency through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks.
You can register to attend events at one of six NASA centers: Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.; Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Johnson Space Center in Houston; Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. JPL will be having the main event, and each of the other centers will be connected via a multi-center NASA Television simulcast with JPL, home of the Curiosity rover.
If you live close to any of these centers or are willing to travel, and are at all even remotely interested in space exploration, you should register for the chance to attend.
Tweetups NASA Socials are incredible events (some attendees have called them life-altering) where you get behind-the-scenes looks at the centers, tours that aren’t normally given to the public, and presentations by scientists, engineers and managers. The events also will provide guests the opportunity to interact with fellow social media users, space enthusiasts and members of NASA’s social media team. Participants will learn about the Mars Science Laboratory mission and their respective NASA field center. They are encouraged to share their experience with others through their favorite social networks.
Registration for the five new NASA Socials opens at noon EDT, Friday, June 29, and closes at noon Tuesday, July 3. NASA randomly will select participants from online registrations. People may register for NASA Socials to be held at multiple locations, but selectees will be chosen for one event only. Each field center’s social and number of guests allowed varies. For more information on each center’s activities and rules pertaining to NASA Social registration, visit:
Curiosity is currently scheduled to land at Mars’ Gale crater at approximately 1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6 (10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5), so be prepared to stay up late! But it should be worth it.
During the two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the selected area of Mars offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life or if evidence of it existed. Find out more about MSL at this website: http://www.nasa.gov/msl | <urn:uuid:c895f2b0-95eb-4c01-8b43-e2faa01971b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.universetoday.com/95986/nasa-holding-big-events-for-curiosity-rover-landing-register-for-chance-to-attend/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914015 | 584 | 2.0625 | 2 |
So Microsoft has applied for a new patent on the IS NOT operator in Visual Basic. I hope it is accepted, so I can openly and flagrantly violate the patent in my language, Heron.
It is hard for me to put into words the sheer absurdity of patents on algorithms. It both infuriates and amuses me. I think the best thing to do is to not give in to the fear that companies attempt to instill in us through abuse of the legal system. The only way to fight tyranny is to challenge it.
To this end, I plan on incorporating the IS NOT operator into Heron if Microsoft succeeds in patenting it. Let them come after me. Mind you they might have trouble dragging me across the border ;-)
Patenting algorithms, syntactic constructs or non-tangible things such as ways of performing actions or doing business is absurd. Personally I hope that few attempts like these will succeed. Although in my limited ability to parse legalese wording from the application, I would suspect that patent would be applicable to only BASIC derivate languages. How would you violate it with Heron? | <urn:uuid:ed6b451a-0ca1-41c4-93b0-e420c81792e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=81592&start=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95888 | 229 | 1.523438 | 2 |
"He's got a tough task, with the House still Republican and not having 60 votes in the Senate," said Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, who said the likelihood of continued gridlock makes it probable that Obama's second-term goals will be fairly modest.
Indeed, experts are divided over whether Washington's inertia will worsen over the coming years or whether the fact that Obama won't be on the ballot in 2016 sets the stage for compromises that before this moment were not possible.
"He's freed from concerns about re-election - so perhaps he'll have more flexibility in how he deals with the Republicans," said Paul Brace, the Rice University political scientist and presidential historian. "And the Republicans may be more flexible in how they deal with him."
Many suspect that Obama will try to seal his domestic legacy by trying to engineer what's known as "the Grand Bargain," a sweeping long-term deal to close America's budget gap that would include both the preferred deficit-reduction tools of Democrats - higher taxes on the rich and defense cuts - as well as tighter domestic spending and changes to Social Security and Medicare sought by the GOP.
But other domestic programs that are popular with progressives - including infrastructure spending and alternative energy, both of which should have been boosted by Superstorm Sandy's devastation, as well as the slow pace of economic recovery - are still not likely, because of the strength of the tea-party caucus in the House.
Ironically, the biggest domestic achievement of Obama's re-election may come when he takes the oath on Jan. 20 - and ensures that health-care reform cannot be repealed for the next four years. Indeed, the major expansion of insurance coverage under the law is slated for 2014, and now it will be Obama appointees ironing out those details.
Because of their lame-duck status and, quite frequently, an oppositional Congress, second-term presidents often look to foreign policy to make their mark. Clinton tried and failed to broker a Middle East peace deal at the end of his term, and there's no reason to think the 44th president has better odds.
"I think every president in the last 50 years has tried to do something with Israel," said James Hilty, Temple University history professor emeritus and expert on the presidency. He said Obama may turn to the more volatile conflict in Syria, besides managing the hoped-for end of the conflict in Afghanistan.
Hilty and the other experts say that a lot of Obama's boldest actions may come with the stroke of a pen through executive orders - along the lines of his recent move to halt the deportation of children of immigrants after Congress failed to address that issue through the stalled Dream Act.
But another area in which he may have the greatest impact received surprisingly little attention during the fall campaign: Three Supreme Court justices will turn 80 during Obama's second term. Two of them are members of the conservative bloc - Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy; the other is liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It may be that fate and Father Time determine the longest-lasting legacy of Barack Obama's eight years in office.
Contact Will Bunch at email@example.com or 215-854-2957. Follow him on Twitter @Will_Bunch. | <urn:uuid:668507e6-4252-4596-9c96-26b50eb4822a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.philly.com/2012-11-08/news/34974494_1_president-obama-george-w-bush-2nd-term | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97127 | 673 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Pentagon Has New Strategy for Monitoring Deployment Health Care
By Sgt. 1st Class Doug Sample, USA
American Forces Press Service
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11, 2003 The Defense Department has changed the way it will track and assess the health care given military personnel before, during and after deployments, a senior Pentagon health official said recently.
DoD's new strategy emphasizes health care surveillance of deployed personnel, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director, Deployment Health Support Directorate, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Health Protection and Readiness.
Officials, he said, want no repeat of 1991 Gulf War health care problems, referring to widespread instances reported of deployed personnel returning home with incomplete and poorly maintained medical records and improperly monitored illnesses.
| Sperm Bank Deposits Are Your Personal Business |
American Forces Press Service
Some news media are running stories about men in uniform opening accounts in sperm banks in case they're deployed and come home infertile or worse.
The Defense Department takes no position on cryobank facilities and has no programs or policies encouraging or discouraging their use, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick of DoD's Deployment Health Support Directorate. Further, the department doesn't intrude on individuals' private family planning decisions.
In other words, he said, freeze your sperm for a rainy day if you want. If you do, though, chalk it up as a personal choice and not to it being necessary because of evidence from the Gulf War. There isn't any "Gulf War evidence," he added.
Citing just a few statements from DoD's comprehensive GulfLINK Web site:
- Of the more than 200 Gulf War studies and research projects done over the past 12 years by the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs, none has surfaced medical indications that infertility or birth defects should be a concern to deploying service members.
- A 1995-98 Department of Veterans Affairs study of 15,000 male Gulf War veterans and 15,000 male nondeployed vets revealed that more Gulf War vets became fathers (2,236) than those who hadn't deployed (1,689).
- Research today shows the rate of birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans is comparable to that of nondeployed vets.
- Reproductive health study summaries can also be found on the GulfLINK Web site.
Kilpatrick said DoD is concerned with taking care of the health of its military personnel and their families. "To do that optimally, we need to provide preventive care," he said. "And if a service member becomes ill or is injured, we need to provide treatment for them."
After a deployment, he added, personnel need to know that the Department of Defense will provide them with care for any medical problem they may develop.
This Force Health Protection strategy is designed to help the department track service members' diseases and injuries and to provide them comprehensive follow-up treatment for deployment-related health conditions, he said.
Kilpatrick directs the DoD effort to protect the health of deployed service members He noted there was no unique screening being done prior to deployment during the Gulf War. "If you were on active duty, you were generally assumed to be deployable," he said.
Now, he said, the Defense Department plans to see that force health is closely monitored through a series of medical assessments before and after deployment and that health concerns are documented and closely monitored.
Kilpatrick said the pre- and post-deployment health assessment is a brief series of questions that look to see if troops are physically and psychologically prepared to deploy. The forms can be found on DoD's deployment Web site at www.deploymentlink.osd.mil.
"(The assessment is) an opportunity for them to bring up any medical conditions that occurred to them in the last several months or in the period since their last physical examination. It's a quick check to make sure they are ready to go," he said.
The health assessments are done on paper and checked by a physician "to see if there are any changes in service members' health or condition that may require attention before or after they deploy," Kilpatrick said. Later, the forms are sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where they are scanned electronically and retained for analysis.
The Defense Department has established three deployment health centers, one each for health surveillance, health care and health research. They focus on the prevention, treatment and understanding of deployment- related health concerns. Two centers are at Walter Reed; the third is at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego.
The department will improve deployment-related medical record keeping through its Composite Health Care System II and the Theater Medical Information Program, which is still being tested.
Kilpatrick said the two systems will collect immunization data electronically through a centralized data bank, along with computerized medical files currently being gathered on deployed military personnel from all the services in order to document deployment-related health problems.
He noted that Special Forces soldiers deployed to remote areas can now use handheld computers to gather and store medical data on soldiers and then later transmit the data to rear operations headquarters.
Still, pre- and post-deployment health assessments and electronic record keeping are only part of the force protection strategy. Kilpatrick said broader initiatives to protect deployed personnel are expected, and more research is being done.
The plan includes improving health risk communication and medical intelligence; providing environmental risk assessments to commanders on the battlefield; giving medical threat briefings; and distributing pocket-sized health guides to deployed personnel. Kilpatrick's office also has created deployment-focused Web sites, such as DeploymentLINK.
In addition, the Defense Medical Surveillance System has created a database on diseases military personnel may encounter in deployed areas. Another plan is to deploy preventive medicine and environmental surveillance teams to forward-deployed areas to evaluate health threats on the battlefield.
Another measure calls for improved biological and chemical warfare detection and alarm systems. And the Pentagon is researching current vaccines and anti-malarial drugs and exploring next-generation vaccines and drugs, he said.
Kilpatrick said the new program shows how seriously DoD regards force health protection.
"We've learned a great deal from deployments over the past 12 years since the Gulf War and we intend to use those lessons to benefit those who serve today, Kilpatrick concluded. "That's what this program is all about." | <urn:uuid:b53fd22e-3d61-44ce-bc73-7eebe139a9a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=29445 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958332 | 1,326 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Posted in C-Sections, Child Safety, Childbirth, Parenting, Sleep and Your Child, tagged Caesarean section, Childbirth, Infant, Internet safety, pregnancy, Sleep on February 24, 2012 |
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Links of the Week:
The Internet has opened up an exciting new world filled with benefits for everyone. It has also opened the door to many potential dangers for children.
via Deep Fear of Childbirth Drives Some C-Sections | Healthland | TIME.com.
The mere idea of pushing a fully grown baby into the world the natural way can give even the bravest expectant mother pause. But a small number of women are so terrified of childbirth that it dramatically raises their odds of delivering by emergency or elective cesarean section, according to new research to be published in the international journal Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica AOGS.
via Why Sleep Is the Ultimate Parental Bugaboo: Go the F— to Sleep Offers a Clue | Healthland | TIME.com.
For all the lead-up to having a baby, newborns don’t do much: eat, sleep, poop. Pooping happens without any parental intervention. Eating is a function of breast or bottle. But, ah, sweet slumber — that is the wild card.
It is a “snowy day” here in Chicago but the sun is trying to make an appearance.
Have wonderful weekend!
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Banning early C-sections is a very interesting headline…I am not sure how hospitals in Oregon are going to actually enforce this hard line control on early, elective Cesarean sections.
Having a c-section for other than true medical necessity is never a good idea…the baby is still developing during the last weeks of pregnancy. Certainly it is not a great thing for a newborn to be shuttled off to the NICU for respiratory problems due to an early elective c-section…not to mention the added cost of the NICU care.
- After delivery if a baby is in the NICU the bonding that is so important is difficult because mom is dealing with her own post-op pain and restrictions.
- Breast feeding then becomes more difficult as well and cannot be established as early in the postpartum period as it generally is after a vaginal delivery.
It will be very interesting to watch how all this ‘plays out’ in Oregon and how it influences what is happening in other states as well.
Starting next week, many hospitals in Oregon will be taking a stand against early and elective Cesarean sections, MSNBC.com reports. C-sections have become commonplace, and federal statistics now show that surgical deliveries account for more than 30 percent of all U.S. deliveries.
However, Oregon officials are now working toward the goal of giving “babies more time for important development and to reduce costly complications after birth,” MSNBC reports.
Seventeen Oregon hospitals (including all nine birthing hospitals in the Portland area) are implementing a “hard stop” on these elective procedures, says the March of Dimes’ Oregon chapter, as quoted in the MSNBC report. According to a 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 1 in 3 C-sections is performed before 39 weeks (37 to 41 weeks is considered full term).
via Oregon Plans Ban on C-Sections – Parenting on Shine.
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Posted in C-Sections, Uncategorized on August 23, 2011 |
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Oregon wants to restrict elective C-sections.
C-sections are being chosen by women for convenience and now Oregon is stepping forward and taking a stand on this practice.
What do you think?
Oregon Plans Ban On C-Sections – Fit Pregnancy.
Read Full Post » | <urn:uuid:29498bb1-e015-436b-b6ef-c563b66c42dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://parentingintheloop.wordpress.com/category/c-sections/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924251 | 817 | 2.203125 | 2 |
THE Government is asking holders of public debt to take up to a five percentage point reduction on interest rates.
It is also asking them to accept a deferral on the repayment of their principal for at least another three years.
What's more, the finance ministry is saying that it won't be able to secure a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without full participation.
"Without reaching this target we will not meet cost-saving targets required by the IMF," it said in a Q&A pamphlet. "We expect virtually all holders to accept the transaction, based upon the community interest in achieving the shared benefits. We will actively address non-participation if there is any."
The sequel to the Jamaica Debt Exchange (JDX) of 2010 — called the National Debt Exchange (NDX) — aims to lower the annual finance costs by $17 billion by shaving an average of two percentage points off interest rates on $860 billion of government's domestic debt.
Importantly, if the programme is successful, the Government won't have to fork out some $90 billion in cash, including US$290 million in debt, which becomes due for repayment in nine days.
The NDX, which opens today and runs until next Thursday, is seeking to swap 27 of the 30 JDX benchmark notes for new NDX notes, leaving $38 billion of debt untouched, apparently because they already carry coupon rates of seven to 8.5 per cent.
The reduction in interest rates on fixed rate notes start at five percentage points for bonds due within the next 12 months, or about $113 billion of the debt, while the rate cut declines to one percentage point for longer maturities.
But smaller interest rate cuts require longer tenors. For instance, the offer requires that $38 billion in notes, which become due next year, take a 4.5 percentage point cut in rate, while adding three more years to its maturity date.
On the other hand, $45 billion in bonds that mature in 2019 would only take a 1.75 percentage point cut in the rate (from 12.75 per cent to 11 per cent), but would be swapped for a note that matures in 2024.
Variable rate notes, US dollar denominated bonds and special consumer price index bonds, which combined were valued at $546 billion at the beginning of 2013, will see interest rates shaved by 0.75 - 2.0 percentage.
While the Government needs full participation in the programme, it is offering a special retail note to holders of $25 million or less in government paper, or US$200,000 or less of US dollar notes, which becomes due for repayment by 2014.
They may opt ot take a new fixed rate note that matures in 2014, but the notes carry interest rates that are 0.25 - 0.5 percentage points lower than the new notes, which will expire in 2016.
For financial sector firms that might face problems after taking a significant drop in net interest income, Bank of Jamaica Governor Brian Wynter said that the Financial System Support Fund (FSSF) will be revived in order to ensure sector stability.
"Our technical team has reviewed the debt exchange offer in detail and has run various stress tests that assure us that the temporary impact on financial institutions' profitability and capital adequacy will be manageable," said Wynter.
The FSSF, which was established with US$650 million funding in 2010 after the JDX, will be administered by the Financial Regulatory Council, and the form of support that will be provided will be repo-based funding.
Even though the NDX claims to avoid any haircuts to principal amounts owed, a special mechanism, called a fixed rate accreting note (FRAN), aims to lower the amount owed to certain state-owned agencies by 20 per cent.
The FRANs, which carry interest rates of 10 per cent and which mature in 2028, would gradually see the principal amount climb back to 100 per cent — starting in 2015 — but they would immediately lower the Government's debt by billions of dollars.
It is not clear how much of the debt can be converted to FRANs, but public sector bodies, including theNational Insurance Fund, owned 19 per cent of the domestic debt.
The Bank of Jamaica (BOJ), which by itself holds 10 per cent of local government debt, said that it will be "participating in the exchange with 100 per cent of its holdings".
Apart from lowering interest payments and the nominal debt amount owed (at least in the first instance), the NDX would also dramatically ease domestic borrowing requirements for at least a year.
Instead of having to pay back $407 billion by 2016, the Government will only be required to fork out $102 billion over that period. | <urn:uuid:02d645ec-a5b7-4a1f-8972-343eb3226d5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/-JDX2--seeks-five-point-cut-in-interest-rates_13629423 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957685 | 974 | 1.976563 | 2 |
LONDON.- The Art Fund
has helped Bradfords National Media Museum buy a rare vintage photograph by acclaimed British photographer Roger Fenton (1819 1869).
Pasha and Bayadère depicts a dancing girl (bayadère) performing for the enjoyment of a high ranking official (pasha), who watches her intently. Seated on the floor on the left hand side of the Pasha, a musician plays a stringed instrument.
The exotic tableau was taken in 1858. It captures the contemporary fascination with the Orient and is part of a series of photographs Fenton took after an expedition during the Crimean War.
Despite appearances, it is not a documentary image taken by Fenton during his travels. The work is in fact a carefully staged tableau photographed in Fentons north London studio using costumes, props and a hired model. Fenton himself appears as the Pasha. The musician is played by the English landscape painter Frank Dillon.
Pasha and Bayadère is widely regarded as one of Fentons finest works. The photograph is one of only two examples of this image, the other being in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Gettys version is uncropped and believed to be a proof, making this version, cropped for exhibition, unique. The photographs provenance makes it even more interesting. It was passed down from the painter, Dillon, via his descendents to the previous owners.
Art Fund director Stehpen Deuchar said: This captivating tableau is of huge importance to the display and study of photography in the UK. The intriguing interplay between the characters and Fentons visual trickery are sure to fascinate viewers, helping bring a wider understanding of nineteenth century art and culture. Were thrilled that weve helped the museum raise enough money to acquire Pasha and Bayadère for its collection where it will be appreciated alongside other masterpieces by Fenton and his contemporaries.
Roger Fenton (1819-1869) is one of the most important and highly regarded British photographers of the nineteenth century. Best known for his photographs of the Crimean War, his output was extremely varied, ranging from landscapes and architectural views to portraits, still lifes and tableaux vivants. During a photographic career which only lasted just over a decade he mastered every genre which he attempted. | <urn:uuid:376f6b50-e162-4260-b6c2-3e2013affec7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=42833&int_modo=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963228 | 477 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Grocery Deals 2/9-2/15
3-Month Supply Goal: Write down all the meals your family enjoys and make an ingredient list from those meals. You will notice a pattern of similar ingredients, and your goal is to purchase those ingredients this month. When I went through my recipes I noticed we used cream of mushroom soup in quite a few recipes. This month my focus would be to purchase a 3-month supply of that soup.
Water Storage Goal: You will need to have 1 gallon of bleach per person to treat contaminated water. Bleach will only last about 6-12 months for water treatment, so make sure to rotate!
Financial Reserve: Take one week this month and write down every penny you spend. This will show you exactly where you could be saving and also how much you could be saving. Use your new found savings to purchase food storage!!
Long-Term Storage Goal: Our goal for February is to store vegetables. This is a tricky topic because I know that most people like fresh veggies versus the canned version. Your task is to find out which canned versions your family will eat and store those. Don't forget about dehydrated and freeze dried options. I use my dehydrator to dry my extra produce and then seal in a mason jar using my Food Saver. I won't last 30 years but does give me more options than having canned veggies. There are many options at emergency preparedness and even at some grocery stores for you to have dehydrated and freeze dried veggies in your storage.
Check out Emergency Essentials HERE or Honeyville Grain HERE.
They both have great options and sales on #10 cans of dehydrated and canned veggies.
Emergency Preparedness Goal:
This month you need to store fuel and a heat source. It can be a Mr. Buddy heater (click here to read more about Mr. Buddy), fireplace, kerosene heater, newspaper logs etc. The fuel needs to be stored outside of your home or basement!!! There are also limits on how much you can store!
Utah State Code for Fuel Storage
Quantities of flammable & combustible liquids not exceeding 10 gallons can be stored in proper containers. Gasoline should not exceed 30 gallons and will need a fuel stabilizer if storing more than 30 days. Do NOT store fuel in your home or garage!!! Store in a shed in the backyard. Keep an ABC fire extinguisher on your property!!
To read an AMAZING hand out on fuel and heat sources, CLICK HERE. There is a section on lighting in an emergency, but we will focus on that in December. Heating information starts on page 8!
Enjoy the Journey!
Enjoy the Blessings!
Feel the Peace! | <urn:uuid:e34ad445-27e7-4a7b-a9ff-fe758484c436> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://preparetodaywardnewsletter.blogspot.com/2011/02/grocery-deals-29-215.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942188 | 562 | 1.796875 | 2 |
|Apinda Mpako, Pan Africa ILGA|
|Apinda Mpako, Pan Africa ILGA(French)|
For Zimbabwe’s gay community, voting season is a time of dread. As political temperatures rise ahead of expected elections next year, gays and lesbians are being targeted by police in an apparent strategy to win over voters.
On 11 August 2012, police raided a book launch at the headquarters of the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), an NGO based in Harare that promotes the rights of sexual minorities. The police arrested 44 people, and although none were formally charged, the incident followed a familiar pattern of harassment, beatings and threats against people who openly identify as gay.
The group was released the next day, but not before being “profiled” - a term used by police to describe information gathering. Detainees’ names, addresses, places of work and even details about friends and family were recorded.
With this information, police have been pursuing these individuals as well as people close to them. “We are in for a protracted campaign of harassment; it is going to be a very rough time,” Chesterfield Samba, director of GALZ, told IRIN. “People are being tracked down in clubs and bars, at their jobs and homes, because they are suspected of being gay.”
Same-sex relationships are considered a breach of the traditional family structure, in which marriage and procreation help perpetuate a system of care for elders. In Zimbabwe, regard for tradition is used to stir up populist sentiment during elections.
Usually when anything political is happening, the vilification of the [gay] community begins“Usually when anything political is happening, the vilification of the [gay] community begins,” Samba said. “It is a fearful time, and it becomes difficult to go about daily life as normal.”
Two key political events appear to have triggered the latest round of harassment: the expected presidential election - in which President Robert Mugabe will likely square off against his rival in the unity government, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai - and the referendum on a draft constitution, which, if adopted, could limit the powers of the presidency.
Tsvangirai has called for presidential and parliamentary elections to take place in March 2013. The current session of parliament ends in June 2013, and, according to the 2009 unity government agreement, the polls must be held by October 2013.
The constitution was drafted by a joint committee consisting of members of the main political parties, which formed a power-sharing government in the aftermath of the violent 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party wants to dilute provisions of the constitution that curb presidential powers, while opposition parties see it as a tool to rein in presidential authority.
By raising the visibility of gay rights advocacy and linking it to the constitution - which makes no mention of the issue - Mugabe supporters hope to swing the referendum vote in their favour, indicating that, unless there are changes to the draft constitution, they will campaign for a no vote.
“The constitution does not mention homosexuality at all, and they are spinning its silence to mean that it embraces homosexuality,” said David Hofisi, an attorney with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), which has been acting on behalf of a number of those arrested at the book launch.
At a rally celebrating his birthday earlier this year, Mugabe alleged that supporters of gay rights were attempting to insert a clause protecting same-sex marriage into the draft constitution. "We won't accept that," he said, according to media reports. "You don't have the freedom for men to marry men and women to marry women. You have the freedom for men to marry women. That's God's freedom. That's what created you and me."
Since the August arrests at GALZ headquarters, the police have continued their investigation into the 44 “suspects”.
“Police used the information to visit their homes, including the parents of people that were arrested,” Samba said. “They also went to the places of work of some of our members, so effectively ‘outing’ them. Some were kicked out of their homes. Others face disciplinary action from their bosses who are homophobic.”
“Usually, police conduct an operation from time to time against the gay community, then move on, but this time it’s a sustained campaign and we have no idea when it will end,” Hofisi told IRIN.
An attempt to obtain a court injunction against the police was halted earlier this month, when a group of youths stormed the courtroom in Mbara, a poor neighbourhood south of Harare, forcing lawyers and plaintiffs to flee. “We are now asking the court to transfer proceedings to a different court that is in a less volatile area,” Hofisi said.
An intolerance of gays is shared across the political spectrum, and although homosexuality is not specifically illegal, sodomy is deemed a criminal act. This has not stopped police from arresting lesbians, Hofisi said, nor from arresting people who are deemed gay, even if there is no evidence that they have engaged in homosexual acts.
“We know Mugabe always uses this subject to divert attention away from other issues like poverty, lack of jobs and corruption,” Monica Tabengwe, a lawyer and researcher for Human Rights Watch who has written several papers on the plight of Zimbabwe’s gay community, told IRIN.
“You would think that under other circumstances these would be the things that people are concerned about. But the subject of homosexuality gets people’s attention ... The moral panic this creates always works,” she said. | <urn:uuid:11052eda-cae2-44c0-98db-842dcf4e75cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/nKdOdMt1AL | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972554 | 1,197 | 1.90625 | 2 |
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States
considered to be smallpox was mentioned in Chinese writings dating to the third century A.D. (Fenner et al., 1988).
Smallpox probably originated in either Egypt or India and over the ensuing centuries became endemic in both countries. The disease spread, eventually becoming pandemic, as explorers, soldiers, and others infected by the smallpox virus traveled to all parts of the globe. Smallpox was introduced into Mexico by the Spanish army in 1520, killing 3.5 million Aztec Indians (more than half the population) during the brief span of two years. By the late 1500s, the disease had also decimated the populations of South America. In Europe alone, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, smallpox killed about 400,000 persons every year (Fenner et al., 1988; Behbehani, 1991). As late as the 1950s, there were some 50 million cases of smallpox worldwide each year. By 1967, the year that saw the start of the worldwide smallpox eradication program, between 10 and 15 million cases were reported annually (Fenner et al., 1988).
North America was not spared. The disease was introduced into Massachusetts by European settlers in 1617 and spread rapidly. Between 1636 and 1698, six major epidemics in Boston had caused a substantial number of deaths. Native Americans, like indigenous populations in other parts of the world, had never been exposed to the smallpox virus and were particularly hard hit; between one-half and two-thirds of the Plains Indians had died of smallpox by the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The practice of quarantine, instituted for the first time in the American colonies in a misguided effort to prevent the spread of yellow fever, was used with some success in the seventeenth century in the battle against smallpox. Nevertheless, epidemics during the eighteenth century sometimes affected as much as a third of the population. By 1785, smallpox had spread west to California and north to Alaska (Fenner et al., 1988).
The observation, perhaps as early as the tenth century in China, that uninfected people could be protected against smallpox infection by a process termed "variolation" offered the first hope that the disease could be controlled. In variolation, material from the pustule of an individual with smallpox was scratched into the skin of an uninfected person. In most instances, this procedure produced a self-limiting disease and, importantly, an immune reaction that protected those who had been variolated from future smallpox infection. Occasionally, people who were variolated would develop severe disease and die; furthermore, they could transmit the disease to others. Overall, however, variolation was blamed for only about a tenth as many deaths as were caused by naturally acquired smallpox. Variolation was introduced into the American colonies by Cotton Mather and was used extensively during the Revolutionary War.
Edward Jenner, an English physician, was aware that persons who worked with cows developed cowpox (a mild disease) but did not get smallpox. In | <urn:uuid:2573673a-be75-4d24-b9d2-9c9c61d0a745> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=2008&page=24 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981026 | 682 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Mathematically, it is impossible to validate a regular expression using a regular expression. This is so because (formal) regular expressions can only recognize regular languages. A language is any set of strings. For example, the set of all decimal numbers is a language (which by the way can be described using a regular expression); the set of all valid regular expressions is also a language. Regular languages are languages that require only fixed finite memory (not a function of the input size) to be recognized.
The language that contains all valid regular expressions is not a regular language; hence it is impossible to recognize a regular expression using a regular expression.
To understand this, notice that regular expressions contain parentheses in them that must match. Hence, if an "(" has occurred, a ")" must occur later on. This is impossible to describe with a machine that has only fixed finite memory. For, if there were a way to do it, and your regular expression had a finite memory of K different states (for some integer K), an expression with K opening parentheses followed by K closing parentheses, though a valid regular expression would have been unable to be recognized by that machine -- a contradiction (notice that in formal languages, our assumption is that text processing occurs one character at a time, from left to right, which is the same for applied regular expressions). We call languages such as the one that describes regular expressions context-free and not regular.
(It is trivial to prove that regular expressions do not form a regular language using the Pumping Lemma)
So, there is a fundamental computer science problem in recognizing regular expressions using regular expressions: It is mathametically impossible to do so.
Regular languages are possible to be recognized by finite-state automata, i.e. machines with finite states but without memory. To overcome your problem, you need to add some memory which is dependant on the input size. Regular expressions, as they are context-free (fortunately they're not some obscure, hard-to-recognize type of language) can be recognized in linear time using a push-down automaton. This is a "for" loop that goes through the expression one token (usually a character) at a time and keeps track of what it's seen on a stack, i.e. it "pushes" data that it laters "pops" in a first-in-last-out fashion. (Example of data pushed to the stack: "I need to remember to find a matching `)' later on!"; you can "push" this as many times as you need; you can "pop" it later, when you need to check if you actually needed to have matched an opening parenthesis previously).
Of course, writing your own recognition engine for regular expressions would be a bit of an overhead -- but if you want to do it, you should know the above limitations. It would be more wise to employ an already existing mechanism to do it -- I suspect you could give that job to a regular expression library or a language that is more keen on handling regular expressions such as Perl; but the @-method doesn't sound like too bad of an idea after all: It may be slow, but your users may input terribly slow regular expressions anyway; and it may be a bad practice, but in your case it seems the best possible solution available.
Some related articles in Wikipedia:
I hope this helped! | <urn:uuid:a9e7fe85-9075-434d-9234-efa6406379b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2789407/regular-expression-for-regular-expressions/2789467 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940046 | 697 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Prof. Joan Thomas-Spiegel
Life Span Psychology: From Infancy to Old Age
1. Logging on from any of the Los Angeles Harbor College Labs
In order for you to access the lab computers on campus you have to be registered for the semester. To log on in the computer labs you need to follow these steps:
For username type the first 3 letters of your last name and first letter of your first name followed by the last four digits of your social security number. Here is an illustration using John Smith as an example: smij3435
For password type the month and day you were born (mm/dd). An example for John Smith would be 0101
2. Logging on from home to access the library online databases and online catalog
To access the library resources from home you will need to come to the library reference desk and ask the librarian for the passwords for the online databases. Please remember that when you are logged on from the campus labs you do not need a password.
3. Printing in the library computer lab
You need to purchase a printing card that is available from a machine in the library. The printing card can be purchased for as little as a dollar and you can add money to it as needed. Please remember that this card is only used for the library and does not work in the other labs on campus. If you have any questions on printing please ask the library staff. If you are printing in the library lab there are instructions next to the printer on how to print. The cost for printing is 10 cents per page.
4. How to find articles from journals and magazines for your topic using Infotrac
To find Infotrac type http://www.lahc.edu/library click on databases, then Infotrac
5. Searching the web for information related to your course using any of the following popular search engines: | <urn:uuid:8743a961-aea2-46f0-9e92-9190556c7d34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lahc.cc.ca.us/library/psych41.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906125 | 385 | 2.171875 | 2 |
I was in Marine Corps boot camp early in 1970 and developed a bad case of jock itch. My drill instructor, although an extremely harsh and seemingly uncaring guy, had warned us all of this possibility and suggested using Listerine.
It worked beautifully, and the rash cleared up in just two days. Old-fashioned amber Listerine does burn a bit going on, but it works well. It also is good for athlete's foot.
I play the cello in a chamber group. It is becoming increasingly difficult to enjoy my passion since my finger joints have developed arthritis. I recently read an article about using topical gels to relieve pain. What do you think of them for my painfully arthritic fingers?
We are enthusiastic about topical NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). Such products have been used around the world for decades to treat arthritis, bursitis, sprains, strains and muscle pains. They have not been widely available in the U.S. until recently.
Oral NSAIDs can cause diarrhea, heartburn, stomach ulcers, high blood pressure, liver toxicity, kidney problems, anemia and heart trouble. Appropriate use of topical NSAIDs is much less likely to cause a systemic reaction.
I have had horrendous leg cramps at night. Quinine tablets usually gave relief within 10 minutes. However, on one particularly bad night, I took a second tablet within 30 minutes of the first. When I awoke in the morning, I was totally deaf — no clock chimes, no dog collar jingling, nada.
At first it was actually a nice experience — my own world. But that wore off when I couldn't hear the phone ring or listen to the radio. By late afternoon, I had my hearing back, but I will not take quinine again.
You experienced "cinchonism," or quinine toxicity. In addition to temporary deafness, symptoms may include headache, ringing in the ears, nausea, dizziness, rash and confusion. The Food and Drug Administration banned quinine for treating leg cramps because it can cause life-threatening blood abnormalities.
Joe Graedon is a pharmacologist, and Teresa Graedon is an expert in medical anthropology and nutrition. http://www.peoplespharmacy.com. | <urn:uuid:bd204f84-9b8d-49c5-b8c7-2122a001d41d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wask.com/waskfm/la-he-pharmacy-20100920,0,6707460.column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964534 | 475 | 1.5 | 2 |
sascha-ml-reply-to-2011-1 at silbe.org
Sun Jan 30 07:10:16 EST 2011
Excerpts from Gary Martin's message of Sat Jan 29 16:09:43 +0100 2011:
> > I don't have an XO laptops but I do have a VirtualBox Fedora and Ubuntu VMs running sugarlabs. What do you use as a Python editor- I was hoping to use eclipse but I have used a basic introduction to VIM in my classes so it can be anything. I played around in the SugarLabs Pippy editor but I was hoping that I could write another machine and import.
> The first things I usually yum install to a new Sugar image are vim and git, that way I can git clone an Activity repository into the ~/Activities directory, tinker with it using vim, and easily git commit and git push changes back to the main repository after testing. If I'm going to be making large source changes or starting something new I'll often just work on my Mac using Xcode (my source editor of choice) and scp the Activity directory over to various Sugar builds for testing.
FWIW, I'm increasingly using sshfs to hack on code that's inside a VM.
sshfs allows you to "mount" a "remote" file system that's accessible via
ssh/sftp and access it as if it were a "local" file system. That way you
can use all the editing / VCS / whatever tools you're used to, without
having to install them inside the VM. Because the tools are running on
your "real" machine, they work as usual - including things like
copy&paste across applications (which requires special "guest additions"
in VirtualBox and doesn't work at all in KVM).
IIRC I've successfully used a special port of sshfs on MacOS X some time
ago. There are also tools for Windows that seem to provide something
similar, but I haven't tried them myself.
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amako, where my quest to understand these processes began, sprawls unprepossessingly on both sides of the Niger River. Few houses are taller than one story. The city seems more like a big village, an anarchic collection of bougous, or neighborhoods, where Mali's various ethnic groups live in vast extended families -- the Bamana with the Bamana, the Songhai with the Songhai, the Peulh with the Peulh. The women cook on charcoal braziers in the courtyards. The charcoal smoke mingles with diesel fumes and the Sahara dust, so the pall over Bamako is particularly thick.
The latest United Nations Human Development Report, released in 2005, ranks Mali as the 174th-worst country in the world (out of 177) in terms of its annual per capita income ($994), literacy rate (19 percent among adults), average life span (48 years), and infant mortality rate (122 out of 1,000 live births). Yet Mali's art -- particularly its music and wood sculpture -- ranks high among the world's cultural treasures. And perhaps because there is so little to steal, there is very little crime in the country's Sahel region (although there are bandits and Islamic terrorists in the north). Mali's government, though cash-strapped, is one of Africa's most promising new democracies. Many people have a family member in New York or Paris who wires money home, which bolsters the economic picture. But many villages are barely surviving.
There were once two schools of thought about desertification. The "degradation narrative," as it is referred to by one of its critics, attributed it primarily to rampant deforestation, which is still going on: When the trees go, the soil is quickly eroded by runoff from storms and by wind. The more current school of thought, drawing on recent studies of climate data, attributes desertification primarily to "the remote influence" -- a cyclical shift in the world's climate, exacerbated by the accumulation of greenhouse gases warming the earth's atmosphere. In fact, most experts now agree that both factors are involved: The remote influence is the main cause, but it is aggravated by deforestation.
One morning, I went to the Institute of the Sahel, which was founded in 1976, after the first famine took a quarter of a million lives. Its members are eight Sahel countries (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Gambia, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal) as well as Cape Verde, the islands in the Atlantic that are desertifying because the Sahara's dust clouds are suppressing the winds that bring them rain. I was taken down a dark, empty corridor the length of a football field to the office of Boubacar Diallo, the institute's economist and coordinator of food security, who laid out the degradation narrative.
"Malians have always had droughts to contend with," he explained in such calm, measured tones that a listener could be forgiven for not grasping the gravity of the situation. "There were droughts 6,000 years ago and in the thirteenth century that made the Sahel uninhabitable. But now there is also the population problem. The Sahel's population is currently 50 million, and it is growing by 2.7 percent a year. By 2050 it will conservatively hit 100 million. This is because the women continue to have seven children. Before, there was equilibrium because of infant mortality and sickness, but now, with the availability of modern medicine, population growth is unchecked.
"For the people in the villages," Diallo went on, "wood is the main fuel and an important source of income, and the forest also provides traditional plant medicines, the first line of defense against disease. So there is a lot of harvesting. And in Bamako almost everybody cooks with charcoal, which produces only one-third of the energy that raw wood does [though it has the advantage of being lighter and more transportable]. So abandoning the countryside doesn't alleviate deforestation. It actually accelerates it."
The institute tried to "politicize" the villagers: "We showed them pictures of what it was like 30 years ago and now, so they could see the degradation," Diallo explained. "But it hasn't worked. They keep cutting and having lots of children. The same piece of land that used to feed five people now has to feed 20, and it has deteriorated, so farmers are venturing into more marginal, waterless land." The institute is now concentrating on raising the productivity of land already under cultivation by introducing improved strains of millet and other crops, fertilizers, and anti-erosion and water-retention techniques. This has slowed down the clearing for farming but hasn't stopped the clearing for firewood.
"Stopping desertification is impossible," Diallo concluded. "All we can do is try to slow it down. It isn't caused only by local deforestation. Global climate patterns are implicated. The whole world is slowly becoming a desert. That is why everyone should be concerned about what is happening here. This is the future."
According to the United Nations Environment Program, half of the world's land surface -- 28 million of its 57 million square miles -- is "dryland": plains, grasslands, savannas, steppes, or pampas with a modest water supply compared to that of the world's forests. Four million square miles are hyperarid desert, and another 19 million are becoming desert or are threatened with desertification. Desertification is proceeding at a faster rate than perhaps any other time in recorded history, with disastrous implications for vegetative cover, biodiversity, and the existence of 1.5 billion people in more than 100 countries. Twenty-eight percent of China is desert, and the country's deserts, including the Gobi and Taklimakan, are expanding at a rate of 3,800 square miles a year despite the most extensive tree-planting campaign ever undertaken (42 billion trees have been planted since 1982). So what is happening in the Sahel is a frightening model, an advanced case of what much of the earth's land surface is going to become. | <urn:uuid:86eef78b-e0a0-4743-9de7-995aefbc0eec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/06win/mali2.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965805 | 1,267 | 2.578125 | 3 |
A dead fisherman, a disputed land deal and anti-Japanese sentiment fuel this courtroom drama set on a fictional island in the Pacific Northwest. [Warning, plot points revealed.] In the winter of 1950, a Japanese man stands accused of murdering a white man over land sold out from under his family. It just so happens that the defendant's wife, Hatsue, was the childhood friend and first love of young Ishmael Chambers. Chambers is the son of a compassionate newspaperman still bitter that the only woman he ever really cared for went on to marry another man after being seized from him by a post-Pearl Harbor climate of racial fear and paranoia. Ishmael's love for Hatsue is tested when his own investigation turns up some new evidence that could shed light on the case.
Positive Elements: This cinematic translation of David Guterson's best-selling novel raises important issues involving racial prejudice. It focuses on the unfair treatment of Japanese-Americans unfortunate enough to have lived in the United States when their ancestral homeland bombed Pearl Harbor. And that tension isn't totally one-sided. Even before that fateful December day, Hatsue's mother warns her to "stay away from white boys" and marry a Japanese husband. Ishmael's journalist dad goes out of his way to project the humanity of his Asian neighbors, acting so sympathetically at one point that his son complains, "That's not journalism. That's propaganda." When a bigoted woman takes advantage of a Japanese family within the bounds of the law, it presents an argument for grace—the moral imperative to act decently even when you don't have to. In a discussion of human nature and redemption, a lawyer tells Ishmael, "It takes a turning point to free someone up of any obsession, be it hate, prejudice or love." Elsewhere, a man's death is treated with respect and great consequence as the sheriff must inform the widow that her husband—and the father of their young children—won't be coming home (a subtle, yet powerful statement about the preciousness of human life and how the loss of it impacts others). Ishmael and Hatsue's forbidden puppy love leads to a first kiss, which leads to preadolescent passions that, fortunately, go no further. Still, the bond that results from even that much intimacy illustrates how physical affection raises the emotional stakes in a relationship. The legal system goes under the microscope when characters debate the fairness of the trial (Hatsue states, "Trials are not only about truth, even though they should be"). That leads to broader issues of people being treated fairly, romantic, business and other kinds of relationships. Sensing Ishmael's resistance to growing up in the shadow of his father's nobly lofty reputation, the young man's mother points out to him, "It's not such a terrible thing being your father's son." She also reminds a pining Ishmael that his childhood crush now has a husband, reinforcing the sanctity and permanence of marriage. Even mature themes are handled tactfully.
Spiritual Content: A small statue of Buddha is among the items confiscated from a humble Japanese family.
Sexual Content: A preadolescent boy and girl share first kisses and, as they grow a bit older, more passionate petting. Years later, in a farewell letter to Ishmael, Hatsue speaks of their "bodies moving against each other" feeling wrong, though it is implied that the two never actually had sex. Hatsue and her husband are shown in bed on their wedding night with a brief upper-body shot of the pair consummating their commitment. The audience shares a widow's recollection of the last morning spent with her husband as the pair embrace intimately in the shower (activity and any nudity is distorted through glass door).
Violent Content: Flashbacks to war are implicitly violent, though not gratuitously so, without glamorizing battle. A Japanese-American soldier tosses a grenade into a German machine-gun nest, then fires several rounds inside. Ishmael loses an arm while storming a beach (the gruesome severed limb is handed across an operating table). He also recalls frantic exchanges of gunfire, and the surf being littered with the bodies of fallen troops (the scene is bloodless and not gory). A drowned man's pale body gets snagged in a fishing net and pulled up by authorities.
Crude or Profane Language: You can count the profanities on one hand, but a shell-shocked Ishmael utters a pointlessly offensive phrase that includes a racial slur, nasty slang for a woman and the f-word. Innocent Japanese-Americans are demeaned with the racial slur "Japs."
Drug and Alcohol Content: None
Summary: If not for one egregiously offensive and pointless phrase, Snow Falling on Cedars would be worthy of high praise for mature audiences. It's almost as if director/co-screenwriter Scott Hicks so feared a PG rating that he rallied his colleagues to find out what would earn them a PG-13—a brand likely to attract a more adult crowd to the box office and garner greater respect come Oscar time. I can almost hear the conversation: "This is a serious work of art, not light family entertainment. I don't want to be lumped in with Iron Giant and Stuart Little. What can we do to lose the PG?" "How 'bout adding an f-word?" "But there's hardly any profanity in this entire movie. Wouldn't an f-word seem out of place?" "Who cares? It'll guarantee us a PG-13 and give us the credibility we want with older audiences." "Won't it seem out of character?" "Not if we stick it in a flashback right after Ishmael loses his arm on the battlefield. He's delusional, not in his right mind. Who can blame the guy for venting verbally?" And it was done. They turned a beautifully photographed, brilliantly cast, smartly acted, well-told story into a movie demanding the disclaimer, "It was great except for . . ." Really disappointing considering the film's wealth of positive content. When Snow Falling on Cedars is eventually edited for television, it's definitely worth a look. | <urn:uuid:b0718005-1fae-4b8c-99a9-5e1e6fd15364> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pluggedin.com/videos/2000/q1/snowfallingoncedars.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958896 | 1,276 | 1.757813 | 2 |
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An analysis of the prospects for improving alignment of various HDV efficiency programs worldwide, with the aim of accelerating technology development and promoting technology adoption in the global market.
A workshop for the technical team behind China’s light-duty vehicle fuel consumption regulation and major Chinese auto manufacturers focusing on technologies and costs to reduce car fuel consumption to meet China’s 2020 target.
Amendments to Europe’s FQD and RED will address indirect land use change and limit support for food-based biofuels.
Regulations to reduce GHG emissions are driving a flood of investment in industries and innovative technologies that fuel economic growth while attacking the global problem of inefficient use of expensive, polluting oil.
Provides background information on U.S. heavy-duty vehicle fleet characteristics and identifies issues relevant to the design and implementation of fuel economy and GHG regulations.
Distills best practices in heavy-duty emissions controls from the EU, U.S., and Japan into a single regulatory program suitable for adoption by interested countries.
An initial assessment of the current situation and regulatory environment for two- and three-wheeled vehicles, and options for control. | <urn:uuid:f4e2195b-f288-4229-b425-c181c3c4ae37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theicct.org/taxonomy/term/117/all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907626 | 251 | 1.875 | 2 |
Author: Matthews A Ojo
Category: Prosperity Gospel
Since the 1980s, the Prosperity Gospel has become one of the doctrinal emphases of contemporary Christianity. Although it is found widely in some continents and countries, however, is often associated with leaders and preachers associated with the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. The newness of this emphasis stems from the fact that biblical metaphors of success and material prosperity have taken on new meanings within the competitive modern market economy. Besides, this emphasis shows how Pentecostalism has responded to popular demand of Christianity for economic relevance in the modern world. Using proofext reading of the Scriptures as a method, Pentecostals and Charismatics have taken certain passages (e.g. III John 1:2; Joshua 1:8; and Deut 8: 6-9) as support for the prosperity Gospel.
As we begin our reflection on the Prosperity Gospel, it is necessary to recapitulate the content of this teaching. There are different refinements about prosperity among Pentecostal preachers, but generally the following represents the consensus within the constituency.
Some prosperity preachers insist that the emphasis flows from the concept of salvation, while others argue that prosperity is part of the blessings available to believers as part of God’s covenant with Abraham. Generally, preachers of the Prosperity Gospel insist that Christians ought to have access to material wealth and live life on a big scale, and not experience any financial hardship nor contemplate poverty. Consequently, many preach and teach that failure, poverty, unhappiness, and all forms of difficulties are considered as curses which should not be the lot of Christians. They equally insist that God created men and women for a better life than many are experiencing, hence God’s abundant goodness is supposed to be enjoyed by Christians who ‘discipline themselves, become decisive, bold, adventurous, believing, daring, risking and determined.’ In practical terms, prosperity connotes material prosperity or financial prosperity, defined as having enough resources, which can be money, houses, cars, children, promotion, jobs, etc.
Prosperity preaches also insist that Christians enter into the realm of prosperity based on individual understanding of the God’s promises because God has given humans access to the Abrahamic covenant. Hence, one’s salvation launches one into the realm of God’s abundance. However, Christians who are not prospering could be harbouring unbelief or are unaware of God’s promises and the laws of success or have accepted the lies of the Devil or are bogged down by sin.
Most preachers of Prosperity Gospel often encourage their members to give testimonies of how they have been materially blessed or have their finances transformed as evidence of the genuineness of this doctrinal emphasis.
As we begin our discussion on this issue, preparatory to the Lausanne Congress, we need to reflect deeply on the questions listed below and many more that will be raised later. | <urn:uuid:5328a020-71b4-49c3-ba4a-927b2a4ef14a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://conversation.lausanne.org/en/resources/detail/10048 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944103 | 612 | 2.171875 | 2 |
The overall objective of the National Society of Conservationists (NSC)
is to protect nature as a whole and to promote the implementation of
The Society was founded in 1989, currently it has 113 member associations with almost 33 000 members in the 16 counties and the capital of Hungary.
Two-third of the member groups are smaller, local organisations which main activitities include environmental education, attitude-forming, participation in uncovering and solving local environmental problems, environmental advisory work and nature conservation tasks.
The greater regional, supra-regional organisations give 1/3 of the membership, their activities include all known environmental- and nature protection topics.
The NSC is operated by a Board with 9 delegate members representing the member groups and there are 13 staff working in the Head Office. | <urn:uuid:720c9e83-fa5c-4031-a414-8e7fd21a705f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foei.org/en/who-we-are/member-directory/groups-by-region/europe/hungary.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963486 | 159 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Both CD4 and coreceptor binding sites on gp120 form potential targets for antibody-mediated intervention. The primary isolate-neutralizing antibodies identified thus far that are specific for gp120 are directed to epitopes that appear to be present on the oligomeric Env complex before contact with CD4. They are believed to act, at least in part, by binding to the virion surface and sterically obstructing the interaction between virus and target cell (37
). For these antibodies, the larger whole antibody molecules are more effective than the corresponding Fab fragments at neutralization due to greater steric obstruction but probably also because of increased avidity (bivalency) (57
). Antibodies to the CD4i epitopes generally do not display primary isolate neutralizing activity at relevant concentrations.
The major finding of our study is that, for some HIV-1 isolates, the size of CD4i-specific (antibody-derived) neutralizing agents is inversely correlated with neutralization efficiency. Thus, antibody fragments are more effective than whole antibody molecules in neutralization. Further, scFv (25 kDa) are generally more effective than Fab (50 kDa) fragments. The temperature-regulated (Fig. ) and SOS-arrested (Fig. ) neutralization data presented here are consistent with a model in which CD4i scFvs or Fabs, but not IgGs, can neutralize after attachment of the virus to CD4 (43
). Because the difference in size is expected to have limited effects on the diffusion rates of the CD4i antibody fragments, these results strongly suggest that the restriction against CD4i antibody neutralization is steric, not temporal. Therefore, the likeliest explanation for the observed sensitivity of neutralization to antibody size is that, after CD4 binding to the virus, the available space between the virus and the target cell surface is not enough to accommodate a whole antibody molecule but is sufficient for antibody fragments. This is consistent with the estimated size of the antibody fragments and predictions of the distance between the CD4i epitope on the CD4-bound envelope glycoprotein trimer and the target cell membrane (Fig. ). Recent findings demonstrating the inaccessibility of the 17b epitope at the fusing cell interface are in agreement with this hypothesis (10
FIG. 6. Steric restrictions on CD4i antibody neutralization after CD4 attachment. (A) HIV-1 viral spike attached to cell surface CD4. The gp120 trimer (brown) (27) is shown with the threefold axis oriented perpendicular to the target cell surface. Cα (more ...)
The higher sensitivity to CD4i MAbs observed for some isolates is most likely a reflection of the exposure of the CD4i epitope on the oligomer prior to CD4 binding, as suggested previously (37
). In addition, our data suggests that when the CD4i epitope is exposed, any advantage of Fab or scFv fragments disappears (Tables and ). It is, however, noteworthy that exposure of the CD4i epitope, through deletion of the V1/V2 stem-loop structure, not only facilitates virus neutralization by the whole IgG molecule but also increases the potency of the Fab and scFv fragments (Fig. ). Comparison of the relative neutralization potencies of 17b antibody and antibody fragments under different assay conditions (Fig. ) implies that the V1/V2 variable loops continue to play a role in obstructing antibody binding even after CD4 attachment. Thus, our results suggest that CD4i MAb-mediated neutralization is biphasic, with (i) a “preattachment” phase that may not be antibody fragment size dependent but is dependent on the accessibility of the CD4i epitope on the resting oligomer, primarily governed by the V1/V2 variable loops, and (ii) a “postattachment” phase that is antibody fragment size dependent due to steric restrictions imposed by the cellular membrane and the V1/V2 variable loops. The fact that we observe more effective neutralization by X5 of HIV-1JR-CSF/IR
cells than on CXCR4+
cells (Fig. ) and the fact that scFv X5, but not scFv 17b, was more effective than the corresponding Fab fragments in neutralization of HIV-1HxB2
(Table ), however, indicates that there are additional variables influencing these mechanisms. One could speculate that the precise orientation of the epitope may influence the susceptibility of the antibody fragments to steric constraints by the surrounding protein and carbohydrate structures at the virus-cell interface.
Attempts to improve Env immunogens include strategies to better expose the coreceptor binding site and the overlapping CD4i epitopes (11
). It is argued that increasing CD4i epitope exposure may elicit more-potent CD4i MAbs or higher serum antibody titers. Our data, however, suggest that the inability of CD4i MAbs to neutralize primary isolates is not due to lack of potency per se but to spatial constraints. Since non-syncytium-inducing, R5 HIV-1 variants establish primary infection in humans (39
), the inability of CD4i-specific whole antibodies to neutralize the majority of R5 viruses used in the present study raises concerns as to whether the CD4i epitopes would be useful targets for antibody neutralization in vaccine design.
In conclusion, we show that CD4i-specific MAbs do not neutralize some primary isolates due to steric constraints. We propose that HIV-1 can exclude whole antibody molecules from the CD4i epitopes due to the close physical proximity of the cellular membrane and obstruction by the V1/V2 variable loops. The constraints were especially apparent for the primary R5 isolates tested. This raises questions about the utility of CD4i epitopes as targets for antibody-mediated neutralization in vaccine design. Understanding these viral defenses may suggest new strategies to circumvent them. The fact that the smaller antibody fragments were able to neutralize does, however, suggest that the CD4i epitopes could be used as targets for small molecule entry inhibitors. | <urn:uuid:167c9bc6-43ae-4501-955b-36f520be8ce8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC228502/?lang=en-ca | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921342 | 1,284 | 1.515625 | 2 |
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Tech Valley High School plan gets support from local chambers
The boards of both the Albany-Colonie, and Rensselaer County regional chambers of commerce voted unanimously Tuesday to support the creation of a Tech Valley High School.
James Barba, chairman of Albany Medical Center and chairman of the Albany-Colonie chamber's board, said it is crucial to take full advantage of the high-technology developments in the region.
"Tech Valley High School would play a vital role in ensuring the development of a future work force that supports both the growth of existing companies and the attraction of new ones," Barba said.
State Senate Republican Majority Leader Joseph Bruno has filed legislation that would establish a Tech Valley High School as a charter school authorized by the state Board of Regents.
The school would be a joint venture between the Capital Region BOCES and the Questar III BOCES. Organizers estimate that about 400 students would attend in grades 9 through 12 and that the school will be established on a business campus.
The school will provide special instruction in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology and other high-tech fields.
It would draw students from 48 districts within the two BOCES districts.
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- Director of Patient Services People 2.0 - Premier | Utica, NY | <urn:uuid:36a3b7fb-0c93-4d58-a6f5-0e1ff1eb0f1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2005/06/13/daily27.html?jst=b_ln_hl | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916625 | 579 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Sailing, also called yachting, has been practised since antiquity as a means of transport. In the modern sense, yachting probably originated in the Netherlands, and the word seems to come from the Dutch "jaght" or "jaght schip," a light, fast naval craft.
The sport was brought to England by King Charles II in the mid-1600s after his exile to Holland. International yacht racing began in 1851 when a syndicate of members of the New York Yacht Club built a 101-foot schooner named America. The yacht was sailed to England where it won a trophy called the Hundred Guineas Cup. The trophy was renamed The America's Cup and it is the oldest trophy in sport.
Sailing started to attract sailors with a disability in the 1980s and the first intenrnational sailing competition for athletes with a disability was held in Switzerland.
In 1988 the International Handicap Sailing Committee (IHSC) was founded and began working to organise competitions and forums to promote sailing for persons with a disability. Two years later, in 1990, sailing made its debut as an exhibition sport at the World Games for the Disabled.
In 1991 the International Sailing Federation recognised the IHSC which was renamed later that year as the International Foundation for Disabled Sailing (IFDS).
Sailing appeared as a demonstration sport at the 1996 Atlanta Games and in 2000 was included in the Paralympic Games Competition programme as a medal sport with events for the Sonar (three person keelboat) and the 2.4mR (single-person keelboat).
The same events were on show at Athens 2004 before the SKUD18 was introduced for the Beijing 2008 Paralympics Games as the equipment for the two-person dinghy outlining the evolution of sailing at the Games. | <urn:uuid:1ea6e961-f251-4ff5-a467-bba95ecdad83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sailing.org/paralympics/london2012/basics/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980743 | 378 | 3.15625 | 3 |
|Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary|
1:21-31 Neither holy cities nor royal ones are faithful to their trust, if religion does not dwell in them. Dross may shine like silver, and the wine that is mixed with water may still have the colour of wine. Those have a great deal to answer for, who do not help the oppressed, but oppress them. Men may do much by outward restraints; but only God works effectually by the influences of his Spirit, as a Spirit of Judgment. Sin is the worst captivity, the worst slavery. The redemption of the spiritual Zion, by the righteousness and death of Christ, and by his powerful grace, most fully accord with what is here meant. Utter ruin is threatened. The Jews should become as a tree when blasted by heat; as a garden without water, which in those hot countries would soon be burned up. Thus shall they be that trust in idols, or in an arm of flesh. Even the strong man shall be as tow; not only soon broken, and pulled to pieces, but easily catching fire. When the sinner has made himself as tow and stubble, and God makes himself as a consuming fire, what can prevent the utter ruin of the sinner?
Verse 22. - Thy silver is become dross. Primarily, "thy great men have deteriorated." From pure silver, they have become mere dross, the vile refuse of the smelted ore, only fit to be cast away as worthless. But per-Imps there is some further reference to all that was once precious in Jerusalem; there had been a general deterioration - all the silver was now a debased metal of no value. Thy wine mixed with water. A parallelism; but (as so often happens) a weakened iteration of the preceding sentiment.
Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible
Thy silver is become dross,.... Meaning either that such persons, who had the appearance of goodness, looked like genuine silver, were now become reprobate, and, as the wicked of the earth, like dross, Jeremiah 6:30 or that the word of God, which is as silver purified seven times, was now corrupted with false glosses and human traditions, which were as dross:
thy wine mixed with water (m); the wine of the divine word, which was mixed and blended with the inventions of men, as before; so the roof of the church's mouth, which is no other than the ministry of the word, is compared to the best wine, Sol 7:9.
(m) It being usual to mix water with wine, and drink it, and this being not at all reproachful, but commendable, Gussetius thinks such a version does not express the sense of the words; he therefore thinks that is the same as contracted, which signified "infatuated"; and so the words should be rendered, "thy wine is infatuated into water"; is degenerated, and has lost its spirit and sprightliness, and is become insipid and tasteless. So Jarchi mentions a Midrash, which interprets it by the same word in Ecclesiastes 2:2. It is a word only used in this place. Joseph Kimchi says that in the Arabic, language has the signification of mixture, but without giving any instance. Indeed, according to Castel, it is used for the lees of oil.
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
22. Thy princes and people are degenerate in "solid worth," equivalent to "silver" (Jer 6:28, 30; Eze 22:18, 19), and in their use of the living Word, equivalent to "wine" (So 7:9).
mixed—literally, "circumcised." So the Arabic, "to murder" wine, equivalent to dilute it.
Isaiah 1:22 Parallel Commentaries
Isaiah 1:22 NIV
Isaiah 1:22 NLT
Isaiah 1:22 ESV
Isaiah 1:22 NASB
Isaiah 1:22 KJV
Bible Hub: Online Parallel Bible | <urn:uuid:c3847ed7-1342-48f7-877a-e0a1b5de5cbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://biblehub.com/isaiah/1-22.htm | 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 | 0.975305 | 862 | 2.390625 | 2 |
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More Bristol schools are closing the gap in reading
Fourteen more Bristol schools have achieved the Bristol Every Child a Reader standard, bringing the total number of schools to 30.
The Bristol schools are Bannerman Road Primary, Millpond Primary, South Street Primary, Two Mile Hill Primary, Hareclive Primary, Parson Street Primary, Victoria Park Primary, Whitehall Primary, Cabot Primary, Glenfrome Primary, Knowle Park Primary, St Peters Primary, St Annes Infant and St Teresa’s Primary.
The Every Child a Reader programme identifies children struggling to get to grips with reading and offers intensive one-to-one support to help them get back on track.
The programme helps children by giving one-to-one reading support with a specialist reading recovery teacher.
Around 1,794 children in Bristol primary schools benefited from the scheme last year. Of these children, more than four out of five (87 per cent) were successfully helped to achieve the reading level appropriate for their age after taking part in the scheme.
Nearly half the children who received Reading Recovery in 2011-12 in Bristol were from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, compared to 25% of children at Bristol primary schools overall.
The programme also resulted in nearly 188 children being removed from the Special Education Needs register following support and progress through the Reading Recovery programme.
Tracking of children who received Reading Recovery at the start of primary school six years ago because their reading was below expected levels for their age, shows they continued to maintain the gains made during the programme, with 90% achieving the level expected for their age at the end of KS2 (age 11).
Published on: Mon, 23/07/2012 | <urn:uuid:4a1b36da-982f-4ebb-b83f-4d25edc27a8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://recovery.team@bristol.gov.uk/page/our-city-news/2012-07/more-bristol-schools-are-closing-gap-reading | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949652 | 456 | 2.203125 | 2 |
South Pacific Eclipse
Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 12, 2010
It's every vacationer's dream: You stretch out on a white sandy beach for a luxurious nap under the South Pacific sun. The caw of distant gulls wafts across the warm sea breeze while palm fronds rustle gently overhead. You take it all in through half-closed eyes.
Could Paradise get any better? This weekend it will.
On Sunday, July 11th, the new Moon will pass directly in front of the sun, producing a total eclipse over the South Pacific. The path of totality stretches across more than a thousand miles of ocean, making landfall in the Cook Islands, Easter Island, a number of French Polynesian atolls, and the southern tip of South America.
"It's going to be a beautiful sight," says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington DC. She herself has witnessed more than eight solar eclipses in a variety of environments from busy cities to lonely deserts to remote mountain peaks. "The South Pacific eclipse could top them all."
She imagines how the event will unfold: First, the Moon's cool shadow will sweep across the landscape, bringing a breeze of its own to compete with the sea's. Attentive observers might notice shadow bands (a well-known but mysterious corrugation of the Moon's outermost shadow) rippling across the beach as the temperature and direction of the wind shift.
The ensuing darkness will have an alien quality, not as black as genuine night, but dark enough to convince seabirds to fly to their island roosts. As their cries subside, the sounds of night creatures come to the fore, a noontime symphony of crickets and frogs.
Next comes the moment that obsesses eclipse chasers: The corona pops into view. When the Moon is dead-center in front of the sun, mesmerizing tendrils of gas spread across the sky. It is the sun's outer atmosphere on full display to the human eye.
"You can only see this while you are standing inside the shadow of the Moon," says Guhathakurta. "It is a rare and special experience."
Because the sun's atmosphere is constantly shape-shifting, every total eclipse is unique. Predicting what any given one will look like can be tricky.
Nevertheless, Guhathakurta is making a prediction. It's based on a new development in solar physics. For the first time, NASA has two spacecraft stationed on opposite sides of the sun.
"STEREO-A and STEREO-B are giving us a realtime 3D view of the solar corona, something we've never had before," she explains. "This helps forecast the appearance of the corona during an eclipse."
Inspecting images from STEREO and also from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), she predicts observers could see four ghostly-white streamers, two on either side of the sun. They will stretch out two to three degrees, forming a gossamer "X" in the sky with a black hole at the crossing point.
"I'm prepared to be wrong," she confesses. "This is the first time anyone has tried to make such a forecast using STEREO data. It will be interesting to see if it works."
Share This Article With Planet Earth
NASA's eclipse home page
Solar and Lunar Eclipses at Skynightly
Remote Easter Island braces for total solar eclipse
Hanga Roa, Chile (AFP) July 11, 2010
Tourists and scientists poured onto remote and mysterious Easter Island Sunday to watch a rare total eclipse of the sun, a mixed blessing for the Pacific community. An estimated 4,000 tourists, scientists, photographers, filmmakers and journalists flocked to the remote Chilean outpost of only 160 square kilometers (60 square miles), doubling the population of the barren island that already s ... read more
|The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2010 - SpaceDaily. AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by SpaceDaily on any Web page published or hosted by SpaceDaily. Privacy Statement| | <urn:uuid:876b2b94-db8d-4923-9cce-91689f22865c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/South_Pacific_Eclipse_999.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909905 | 936 | 2.40625 | 2 |
What to do with a dream that's too big for reality? Among many other things, you could map it. Such a representation could serve as an exhortation - This is the plan, get going! But if the gap between cartography and reality remains unbridged, the exhortation becomes a souvenir of the road not taken, the map of an alternate reality where the fork in the road was negotiated differently.
Strangely enough, public transport systems seem particularly susceptible to the sort of dreams that can only live on maps. Two examples were discussed previously on this blog: the Uruguayan obsession with the non-existent metro of its capital, Montevideo (#590), and the Ghost Subway of Rochester, NY - a resurrected and expanded version of the metro that ran underneath the town until 1956 (#376).
This map adds a third - and much bigger - transport system to that list: A putative map of what a high-speed rail network across the United States could look like. It was created by Alfred Twu. Mr. Twu is not just a designer at MWA Architects, a Bay Area bureau, he also a bit of a train nerd. "Having worked on getting California's high speed rail approved in the 2008 elections, I've long sung the economic and environmental benefits of fast trains", he says in a recent op-ed piece in The Guardian.
The US High Speed Rail Map sprang from the overlap of Mr. Twu's designer and trainspotter personae. It was born out of a frustration familiar to all fast train fans in the U.S.: the building of a high-speed rail network requires more money and political will than the American political system can seem to muster. The Obama Administration's proposals for a non-integrated collection of high-speed rail corridors across the country were killed off, and in 2011, high speed rail in the U.S. was declared dead, now and forever.
Exactly the kind of intolerable cruelty that this map seeks to remedy. But the map does more than right that wrong, it also reflects Mr. Twu's personal preferences: " [It] comes […] from the heart. It speaks more to bridging regional and urban-rural divides than about reducing airport congestion or even creating jobs, although it would likely do that as well. [High-speed rail] is duct tape and string to reconnect politically divided regions. Its colourful threads weave new American Dreams."
Let's have a look at those threads:
- In Mr. Twu's universe (a.k.a. the Twuniverse), two high-speed lines connect both coasts. The Red Line runs from Los Angeles to Boston via Chicago and New York, with spurs to Anaheim (from L.A.) and Salt Lake City (from Green River).
- The Yellow Line links San Francisco to Miami, via L.A., Houston and New Orleans. Branching out across the Bay from San Francisco is a spur towards Sacramento and Reno.
- Two coast-hugging lines connect major cities along a north-south axis. The Green Line has termini along the West Coast in Vancouver and Tijuana, passing through Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, L.A. and San Diego.
- The Blue Line starts in the other Portland, ending in Miami, via Boston, N.Y.C., Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Raleigh, Charleston and Daytona Beach (where passengers can switch to the Yellow Line to San Francisco).
- Boston is the northern end of the Dark Blue Line, which stops at Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Oklahoma City, Dallas and San Antonio before ending at Monterrey, across the Rio Grande in Mexico.
- It's also the eastern terminus of a Purple Line, straying into Canada by way of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto before re-entering the States in Detroit, continuing past Chicago.
- A Light Green Line connects Minneapolis to Miami via Chicago and Atlanta, providing an easy pathway south to all those Minnesota snowbirds heading to Florida in winter.
- An almost-circular White Line criss-crosses the eastern half of the U.S., from Pittsburgh via Chicago, Memphis, Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta, Raleigh, D.C., New York City, to end at Quebec City.
- The shortest route, a Grey Line links Cheyenne in Wyoming via Denver and Albuquerque to Juarez in Mexico.
Zipping along all these lines are trains travelling at 220 mph (355 km/h), transporting the passengers in this alternate universe from L.A. to Las Vegas in under two hours, and from San Francisco to New York in about 20. New York to Boston would take under an hour, while D.C. to Boston would take about three.
In the unlikely event America ever gets a high-speed rail network, it is even more unlikely to look exactly like this one. Still, this map is plausible enough for train nerds (and map nerds) to do some armchair travelling. All aboaaaard the Mirage Express!
One detail seems out of place, though: Why does the Purple Line terminate at Quincy? That Illinois city counts less than 60,000 souls. Among its more notable attractions is the annual Catfish Anglers Tournaments, America's largest annual fishing contest; it is the birthplace of P.W. Tibbetts, Jr., the pilot of Enola Gay, the plane (named after his mother) that dropped history's first A-bomb used in warfare. Neither fact seems to merit the smallish town's elevation to the terminus of a high-speed train line. Perhaps this is Mr. Twu's way of indicating when hell will freeze over: when the high-speed train rolls into Quincy, Illinois…
Update 17 February 2013: Many thanks to Bob Fleck for sending in this link to a map competition hosted by Greater Greater Washington, a DC transit and urban planning blog, encouraging people to send in alternate maps of the DC Metro system, covering upcoming new routes. | <urn:uuid:d628a1e0-8aab-4db8-900e-5c28f8042bbf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/598-fast-train-to-quincy-a-mirage-map-of-us-high-speed-rail | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945515 | 1,236 | 2.28125 | 2 |
From Dwight Henley, White Lake Township:
Ithaca Superintendent Nathan Bootz and Clarkston Community Schools Superintendent Rod Rock have recently voiced their opinions over harsh educational cuts. Bootz even proposed that his district be turned into a prison. Bootz’s reasoning was that prisons receive $30,000 per prisoner each year, while schools receive only $7,000 per pupil. Rock suggests educational reforms for limiting the impact of educational cuts. Both Bootz and Rock have the solutions to educational cuts in their hands but fail to recognize them: Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) inefficiencies.
The MDOC’s yearly budget is approximately $2 billion, taking about 23 percent of our state’s general fund. Policy makers, MDOC officials, and Gov. (Rick) Snyder justify the ridiculous MDOC budget on a need to maintain public safety. Who would argue with maintaining public safety? But what these officials are doing is framing the issue in a manner that distracts citizens from our real problem and the obvious solutions. The problem is not about adjusting the prison population level, but the unnecessary cost to maintain the current incarceration level.
Bootz was right in pointing out the ridiculous cost of $30,000 per year per prisoner, but he is ill-founded on the true cost basis (prisoner computers, Internet access, exercise equipment, food, etc.) for the $30,000. Contrary to Bootz’s belief, Michigan law specifically prohibits prisoner’s Internet access except for educational programming. Prisoner exercise equipment is purchased through prisoner funds that are generated from prisoner store profits. The cost spent on meals is now only $1.97 a day for each prisoner and staff wages constitute a large portion of the $1.97. Though prisoner computers are purchased by the state, these computers offer programming that brings a $2 savings for every $1 invested — based on the drastic reduction of recidivism associated with these programs. The problem is not prisoner expenditures; it is staff expenditures and MDOC inefficiencies.
Over the past couple of years, the MDOC has reduced the prisoner population from 53,000 to 44,000, or approximately 17 percent. During the same time, the MDOC budget was reduced only 10 percent, from $2.2 billion to approximately $2 billion. Were this same correlation to continue, the MDOC could release every prisoner and still have $1 billion budget! So what are the problems? Can anything be done to cut the ridiculous MDOC budget while maintaining public safety?
Numerous means exist for reducing the MDOC budget while maintaining current prisoner population levels and public safety standards. First, our state officials are using the MDOC as a government subsidy, refusing to close the most expensive prisons when they are the only prison in the community. By closing Ojibway, Newberry, Alger, and Barraga prisons and reopening more centrally located prisons such as Muskegon, Ionia Temporary, Standish, etc. the state would save millions in transportation costs. Second, the MDOC does at least 20,000 prisoner transfers per year. Some statistics show that each transfer cost approximately $500 per prisoner. Despite this cost, many transfers are performed out of staff convenience, not necessity. Even at a cost of $300 per prisoner transfer, reducing transfers by 20 percent saves $600,000 per year. Third, the average hourly salary of transportation officers is around $25. Privatizing our entire prisoner transportation system would save millions, especially with a more centralized MDOC. Fourth, the number of MDOC administrative staff is excessively high, creating unnecessary layers in its bureaucracy. Removing unnecessary administrative layers such as regional prison administrators and unnecessary regulatory practices would save millions.
Fifth, the MDOC could completely privatize the prisoner store and eliminate numerous high-paying MDOC positions. Prisoners currently order food every three months from Access; orders could be placed monthly and all MDOC store staff could be eliminated. Sixth, MDOC could turn back its prisoner clothing practices, again allowing prisoner’s families to order clothes (for) their incarcerated loved ones. This could save $1 million or more each year. Seventh, the MDOC could designate 4-5 prisons as the only GED facilities, thereby increasing prison classroom sizes and reducing staff. Some MDOC facilities have GED classes with only 6-12 prisoners in each class period. Yet K-12 schools are now looking at 40-60 students per class. Finally, the MDOC could capitalize on its intra-institutional television programming station and offer college courses and Advanced Placement (AP) testing. These college courses are free (donated) and AP testing is free for prisoners. This would allow prisoners to earn college credits at absolutely no cost. The effect of such education is prisoners progressing from 40-60 percent recidivism categories into the 5-20 percent categories. So long as prisoner participation is properly incentivized, the increased number of educated prisoners could save tens of millions over a 5-8 year period.
Making the above changes within the MDOC would reduce the MDOC budget by at least $75 million per year within 5 years. These savings can plug the holes in our state’s budget and enhance our children’s quality of education. But unless our citizens start demanding that our governor and state officials implement the mentioned changes for a more efficient MDOC, wasteful MDOC practice will perpetuate and our children’s education will continue too suffer. Let’s solve the budget shortfalls in education by demanding a more efficient MDOC. | <urn:uuid:cecef454-b55f-407e-80ec-c529dda3b5fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spinalcolumnonline.com/2011/07/20/doc-budget-reform/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949787 | 1,137 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Robert Van Order, George Washington Univ. School of Business Department of Finance Chair
Topic: Congress passed the Mortgage Debt Relief Act in the early days of the housing crisis, aiming to help distressed homeowners by waiving taxes on up to $2 million in loan forgiveness. Typically, forgiven debt is taxed as income.
Bradford Fitch, Congressional Management Foundation President & CEO
Topic: Guest is President & CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, which conducts orientation sessions for senior aides of Members and Members-elect in the U.S. Congress, advising them on a variety of issues including how to set up a congressional office, selecting staff, lobbying for committee assignments, etc. CMF has published the 13th Edition of Setting Course: A Congressional Management Guide.
Ari Ne’eman, Autistic Self Advocacy Network President & Co-Founder
Topic: Guest – who is an autistic adult – will talk about the federal role in supporting autistic adults and children. Guest testified before Congress earlier this week on the issue. | <urn:uuid:05f2e24c-3071-4d63-9c28-10313a02bcd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.c-span.org/Events/Washington-Journal-for-Saturday-December-1/10737436230-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948144 | 206 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Size 11-12cm. Australiaís smallest Kingfisher and the second smallest Kingfisher in the world. With the Azure Kingfisher, the only Australian members of the Alcedo Kingfishers which are specialists at exclusively deep diving into water for their prey. They have three toes, two of which point forwards.
A tiny, aquatic Kingfisher with large, heavy bill and short tail, dark, glossy blue above and white below. White spot before eye and on each side of the neck. Black legs, feet and bill.
Call a thin, shrill whistle, higher pitched weaker than the Azure Kingfisher and often inaudible to humans. Flight is fast, direct and low over the water.
The Little Kingfisher is a bird of lowland rainforest streams, preferring dark, narrow spaces with overhanging vegetation. May also inhabit lakes, estuaries and coastal mangroves. It perches low, plunges into the water for fish and small crustaceans and returns to perch. It will often bob itís head and wings while watching for prey. An uncommon resident of coastal north-east Queensland and the Top End.
Breeding is through the Wet Season, particularly January. The nest is in holes in the banks of streams or in rotten logs and at the base of epiphytes or in mangrove roots. Nesting tunnels are 15cm or less long and have a small terminal nesting chamber. Eggs are white and round, with 4-5 being laid. Little is known about incubation. Both parents feed the young.
An uncommon, but sedentary kingfisher, and one targeted by many birdwatchers to North Queensland. For those birdwatching in Daintree, the Little Kingfisher can be found in the pond of the garden at Red Mill House and on the Daintree River most of the year. | <urn:uuid:6c10f0f0-4e54-4bb6-b9bd-d1fcf931e9aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redmillhouse.com.au/birds/little_kingfisher.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942385 | 387 | 3.109375 | 3 |
The S.L.E. Lupus Foundation, the nation’s leading organization providing patient services, education and funding for lupus research, has named Mark J. Shlomchik, M.D., Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology, its scientific honoree for the year 2006.
Shlomchik studies the role of B cells, immune system cells produced in bone marrow, in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and other autoimmune diseases.
Normally B cells help to protect the body from infectious agents, but in SLE unknown environmental or genetic factors cause these cells to go awry and to produce antibodies to DNA, RNA and other proteins found in every cell in the body. For this reason lupus affects many of the body’s own organs, especially the heart, joints, skin, lungs, blood vessels, liver, kidneys and nervous system. These “autoreactive” B cells also cause the immune system’s T cells to target these organs, leading to further damage.
SLE is a chronic condition with a vicious cycle: as the body’s damaged tissue becomes inflamed, more auto-reactive B cells are produced. For reasons that are not fully understood, the symptoms of lupus—joint pain, fever, skin disorders and fatigue, among others—wax and wane, occurring in intermittent bursts known as “flares.” The most common treatments used during flares are corticosteroids or other drugs that suppress the immune system. But these drugs have serious side effects, including increased susceptibility to infection, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, hypertension and cataracts, so there is an urgent need to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that cause flares and to develop new drugs to prevent them.
As part of this effort, Shlomchik, professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology, has focused his recent research on the so-called toll-like receptors (TLRs) of the innate immune system (see related story, “Immunology Comes of Age”). It had long been suggested that B cells might become autoreactive by somehow recognizing DNA or RNA in the cells that form the body’s organs. During the past five years, it was shown that TLR9 and TLR7, both of which are expressed on B cells, are specific, respectively, for DNA and RNA.
Following up on this work, Shlomchik and his colleagues reported in 2006 in the journal Immunity that lupus-prone mice lacking TLR9 and TLR7 did not generate antibodies against DNA and RNA, and that lupus-like symptoms in mice lacking TLR7 were far less severe. These findings suggest that developing drugs that target TLRs could be valuable new treatments for lupus and other autoimmune diseases.
After receiving his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Shlomchik joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor in 1993 and rose through the ranks to become professor in 2004.
He serves on the scientific advisory board of the S.L.E. Lupus Foundation’s Lupus Research Institute and is co-chair of its Novel Research and Peer Review task forces. He is also Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Blood Bank.
The foundation paid tribute to Shlomchik at its annual gala, held last December at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York City, saying that he had brought “invaluable insight, encouragement, and direction to the Lupus Research Institute, helping to take it to new levels of scientific excellence.”
The event’s master of ceremonies was NBC Sports and HBO sportscaster Bob Costas, and entertainment was provided by soprano Barbara Cook, a star of the musical theatre for over 50 years.
The foundation also honored James D. Robinson III, M.B.A., chairman of the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb, for his company’s development of abatacept (Orencia), a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent. Abatacept has won Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and is now in being tested in a multicenter Phase II trial for treating and preventing lupus flares. | <urn:uuid:8a079791-101d-4a48-8799-6b60e8da2c57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://medicine.yale.edu/publications/medicineatyale/marchapril2007/people/peoplearticles/55878 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955996 | 911 | 2.84375 | 3 |
edited by Jon Bard
In this special issue of the Update, we'll answer some of the top questions we get from aspiring children's writers!
1. Our #1 Most Frequently Asked Question: Do I Need an Illustrator?
This one’s for the newbies…..
I have a story I've written for children. Do I need to find someone to illustrate it before I can send it to a publisher?
In fact, in cases where the author of a picture book is not also an artist, the publisher prefers to find its own illustrator for the book. The reason for this: often a publisher will match up a new author with a more experienced illustrator who has some name-recognition among book stores and teachers. Also, publishers have a stable of illustrators they have cultivated, and are always looking for new manuscripts for these illustrators to work on.
Finally, publishers have a certain “look” they have developed for their individual lists, and the illustrator you choose for your manuscript may not have a style that fits with other books already published by that house.
If you do know an artist that you want to work with, you can submit illustrations with your manuscript, but be prepared that the editor may like only the writing or only the illustrations and won’t want to buy the entire package.
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and 1,000 Copies of Published Book
2. Point of View and Picture Books
Could you address point of view and the picture book? I’m working on a picture book story, with several characters a lot of action. It seems more economical word-wise to write it from the omniscient view point, although that is often cautioned against. But in the picture book, there is scarcely enough time to introduce one character well before the end of the story would be near, and the other characters wouldn’t get as fleshed out as they could be.
The omniscient viewpoint can work in a picture book, and it’s used there more often than in longer books. If you have several characters who are crucial to the story, it’s probably the best way to go. Also, since picture books deal with action and dialogue, rather than the internal thoughts of the characters, using the omniscient viewpoint won’t be as confusing in this format as in novels where the reader can see inside a character’s head. But still make sure one character takes center stage as your main character. Your readers have to have one character with which to identify, one character to sympathize with, and one character who has a clearly defined problem that he/she solves during the course of the story.
3. Should I Query a Specific Editor?
When sending a query letter, many resources I read say to choose an editor from a market directory and send it to him/her personally. This seems counter-intuitive to me. My first thought would be to send it as the publisher’s submission guidelines instruct–which often does NOT list editors by name. Should a secondary source really be favored over a primary source for this information?
This is a tricky one, and most authors go with what feels right to them. Publishers’ guidelines (especially with larger publishing houses), often don’t list the names of specific editors because if that editor leaves or gets promoted to a different position, all the guidelines would have to be reprinted. However, the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market is updated every year, so the staff names are current at least for a few months after each edition comes out.
The prevailing wisdom is to, whenever possible, address your query to a specific editor. So I’d start with the name listed in CWIM, and give a quick call to the publisher just to verify that that person is still there before mailing your manuscript. If the listing in CWIM says to address to “Submissions Editor,” then honor that. Some publishers’ guidelines do state that they don’t want manuscripts addressed to particular editors, but rather to the Children’s Book Department in general, and in those cases that’s what you should do.
The bottom line: Do your best to write a professional letter and follow the submission procedures as closely as you can. I don’t think a terrific manuscript would be rejected because you put a person’s name on the letter when it should go to a department, or vice versa.
4. So, Are You a Fightin' Bookworm Yet?
The CBI Clubhouse is rocking! We've got lots of new members who are meeting one another on the message boards, plenty of new videos and audios, our free children's writing course (The CBI Challenge), exclusive publishing opportunities just for our members and much more.
And all of it is free for paid subscribers to Children's Book Insider, the Neewsletter for Children's Writers!
Here's what Fightin' Bookworm Irene Roth has to say:
Before I joined the CBI Clubhouse, I was completely lost as a freelance writer. I knew that I wanted to write for kids, but I didn't have the first idea about what I should do to achieve this.
I sent out a few articles to magazines, and they all got rejected. This went on for two years. I was devastated and ready to give up! Then I was talking to a friend of mine who suggested that I check out the CBI Clubhouse. I did. And I have never felt better in my whole life as a freelance writer.
There are weekly instructional videos by Jon Bard on different aspects of the writing process. These are invaluable. There are also videos by Laura Backes. She has become my personal mentor. I listen to her videos every few days. Some videos I listen to over and over again.
Then there is the CBI Challenge. It is absolutely chock full of information on finding your passion in writing to the nuts and bolts of publishing. I am on Module #2 and I have learned more than I could have ever imagined.
Lastly, if you have any questions or concerns, you can email either Jon or Laura at any time. They are also willing to help and are encouraging. Finally, I don't feel so alone as a writer!
So what are you waiting for? Join the CBI Clubhouse for a small, small fee every month. Skip one latte and you have your monthly membership which will give you a lot more value that your latte.
Join The CBI Clubhouse now (for less than the cost of a latte each month) and you'll get:
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If you're at all serious about writing children's books and getting them published, you really need to hop on board with the Fightin' Bookworms of The CBI Clubhouse. All the education and inspiration you need to make it is waiting for you for just pennies a day. Plus, we have lots of fun while we're at it.
Here's the link to the Clubhouse!
See you 'round the Clubhouse, future Fightin' Bookworm!
5. What Makes a Picture Book Memorable?
What are the qualities that make a memorable illustrated children’s book?
Many things make a picture book memorable. Well-defined characters with whom young children can identity, and who have a problem or goal that young children can understand and find important. A well-paced plot that inspires the child to turn the page and see what happens next. Lyrical, rhythmic text that sounds appealing when read out loud. Engaging illustrations that contain details not found in the text, and also add another layer to the story. And finally, an original, imaginative story that the child, parent and editor haven’t seen before!
If you think about your favorite books from your own childhood, they are probably stories that made you feel something: wonder, joy, excitement, surprise, or even sadness. Those stories that speak directly to a child’s emotions are always the most memorable.
6. What's in October's Children's Book Insider?
If you're new to the Update, you may not know that we publish a monthly subscription-only newsletter for aspiring and working children's book writers that's jam-packed with market leads, advice, inside info and much more.
It's called Children's Book Insider, and we've been sharing it with subscribers across the globe since May, 1990! (And remember, every subscriber to Children's Book Insider gets total access to the incredible CBI Clubhouse website AND The CBI Challenge!)
Here's a look at what's in the current issue of Children's Book Insider, the Newsletter for Children's Writers:
* Publisher Seeks Nonfiction on Nature, Western Culture, History
* Electronic Publisher Seeks Submissions
* University Press Seeks Picture Books with Regional Themes
* Deadlines Approach for Three Contests
* Exclusive Publishing Opportunity for Fightin' Bookworms!
* How to Write Supernatural Thrillers
* In-Depth with Literary Agent Turned Author Laura Rennert
* How to Create a Book Trailer to Promote Your Work
* The CBI Challenge, Part 6: Creating a Strong Antagonist
If you enjoy the information offered in this e-mail update, wait 'til you see what we've got in store for you each month in the pages of CBI!
A subscription to CBI and full access to the CBI Clubhouse and CBI Challenge costs about the same each month as a latte!
For more information and to order, go to http://cbiclubhouse.com/non-members
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7. Can I Have an Adult Lead Character in a Children’s Book?
Is it possible or advisable to have a lead character who is an adult, rather than a child, in a novel for kids ages 8-12? It seems to me that many successful books involve a lead character who is approximately the same age as the audience, unless the book involves animals as characters. Is it a generally accepted convention or a rule that the character who experiences the main conflict and changes in a children’s book should be a child? Or is it possible to have an adult as the lead character if the supporting characters are children and if the problems faced by the adult involve issues which are relevant to children? Do you know of any examples of any successful books for ages 8-12 in which the lead character is not a child?
Your questions are very perceptive. You’ve noticed that most books have children as main characters, and that the conflict needs to be something relevant to a child. As a result, it’s hard to have the main character be an adult, though not impossible. Everything that comes to mind as examples feature a prominent adult character, but the story’s still told through the viewpoint of a child. For example, The Pigman by Paul Zindel is about an eccentric loner, but the story’s told by two kids who befriend him. Even in these books the adult is facing problems that are relevant to the middle grade readers. So to give you a firm answer to your question, I believe it would be difficult to successfully make an adult the main, viewpoint character, though he/she can be a very strong secondary character or even the focus of the book as long as a child is the one telling the story.
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October 22, 2009
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Children's Book Insider, LLC | <urn:uuid:f3e45aff-f04a-40fe-ab49-eb0a5c74c41d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.write4kids.com/update.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947876 | 3,916 | 1.929688 | 2 |
If your child is biking to school alone, are you guilty of child neglect? Tennessee mom Teresa Tryon is facing this very accusation.
Tryon lets her 10-year-old daughter to ride her bike to school by herself.
The route her daughter takes is about a mile long, and takes about 7-9 minutes.
Last month, a police officer saw Tryon's daughter riding her bike to school. The officer says that several cars had to swerve to avoid hitting the girl, and that the girl was biking into oncoming traffic.
Officers subsequently warned Tryon that it was too dangerous for her daughter to bike to school alone, according to Fox News.
Police have also notified the District Attorney's Office. Tryon could face charges of child neglect if she continues to allow her daughter to bike to school, Fox News reports.
Is this extreme?
On one hand, the police say that a child was killed after getting struck by a car when biking on the same street a few years ago, reports Fox News.
On the other hand, Tryon's daughter's commute is relatively short. If it really only takes 7-9 minutes for her to bike to school, should the mother face child neglect charges?
Child neglect charges can be levied against parents who fail to provide adequate supervision for their children.
In Tryon's case, is letting her child bike to school failing to provide supervision for her child? Many parents let their children walk or bike to school alone.
However, a child biking to school alone could amount to child neglect in certain cases. For example, a child could be too young to safely get to school by themselves. In Teresa Tryon's case, it seems that police - and prosecutors - simply believe that the 10-year-old's biking route is simply too dangerous.
- Arrested for Riding Bike to School (Bike Walk Tennessee)
- What is child neglect? (FindLaw)
- Child Obesity as Child Neglect: Is the Standard American Diet Dangerous? (FindLaw's Writ)
- Ferret Eats Baby's Fingers: Parental Neglect? (FindLaw Blotter) | <urn:uuid:97dc79b1-ffbf-4397-a8ed-3d3064691b2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2011/09/tn-child-biking-to-school-alone-child-neglect.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978724 | 442 | 1.976563 | 2 |
In response to the UK government’s decision on 1 March 2013 to re-programme £16 million aid to Rwanda, Christian Aid has welcomed the fact the assistance will once again be reaching the poorest and most vulnerable in the African country.
The churches' global development agency says it is also pleased that DfID (the Department for International Development) has recognised that Rwanda has breached the principles that guide the UK-Rwanda long-term partnership.
Chantal Daniels, Great Lakes Policy and Advocacy Officer at Christian Aid, commented: "We encourage the re-programming of aid (straight to local groups rather than via the government) so that it reaches those in need and most affected by aid cuts. But we would stress that any decision on aid to Rwanda should come with a clear signal that violations by the Rwandan Government are unacceptable."
"The Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Rwanda needs to be strongly monitored so that both sides adhere to it. The UK Government should continue to publicly condemn any violations of that agreement," she added.
"As a major donor, the UK needs to use its influence to contribute to solutions to the unrest in the DRC and the Great Lakes Region, by actively supporting the Peace and Security Framework that was signed last Sunday in Addis Ababa. It takes into account DRC specific and regional commitments.
"These efforts need to come with a redefined relationship with Rwanda that not only focuses on dealing with Rwanda’s involvement in the current crisis in DRC, and its role in the region, but also examines the internal political situation, in which democratic space and respect for human rights are increasingly under pressure.
"We are pleased to hear [minister] Justine Greening’s statement, which sets out how the money will reach the poorest but we would also welcome a timeline on future aid decisions and the conditions for resumption of general budget support to Rwanda," concluded Ms Daniels. | <urn:uuid:6224cb95-1454-4a59-bdf5-48eedb9e3eac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/18112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961727 | 398 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Can't Hardly Wait
AT&T just got a contract from the city of Riverside, Calif., to set up a municipal Wi-Fi network. AT&T has agreed to provide Wi-Fi as an extension of its wired network, in exchange for the promise from the city of $4 million worth of business over the ensuing five years. AT&T has contracted with Metro-Fi to actually install the network.
Municipal Wi-Fi is, of course, bad. No matter how you look at it, muni Wi-Fi is a waste of taxpayer money.
Service providers will eventually blanket their service areas with their own wireless mesh networks, which will tie into their wired networks. These commercial networks are guaranteed to outperform municipal systems from the get-go, making those muni systems almost instantaneously obsolete.
Furthermore, it is bad for governments to compete with free enterprise. Verizon actually instigated a law in Pennsylvania barring cities in that state from offering for-pay Internet service unless a local service provider actually refused to do it. It is a fact that corporations are more efficient than governments.
Just look at Enron and Adelphia and AOL Time Warner and Global Crossing and Halliburton and Qwest and Tyco and Arthur Andersen and United Health Group and Comverse Technology and Nortel and…
…Okay, okay, it's unfair to bring all that up, because there were improprieties and illegalities involved, and that's the exception, not the rule. Every other company is its own separate paragon of efficiency, with nary a paperclip's worth of waste, and never making a bad decision.
I imagine every reader above the level of general manager is now nodding sagely, while every reader below is snorting milk through his or her nose. But I digress…
The philosophical niceties of the free market are not of interest to city councils who want an inexpensive, widely accessible, unified information and communication system for municipal rescue and emergency. Competing with the local service provider isn't even on the list of concerns for mayors competing with each other to attract business, industry, and residents to their cities.
A Wi-Fi network that exists by definition works better than one that doesn't.
Philadelphia (exempted from the Pennsylvania no-compete law), San Francisco, half a dozen cities in Silicon Valley, Tempe Ariz., Anaheim Calif., Portland Ore., Aurora Ill., and dozens of others are either building municipal Wi-Fi systems or plan to do so for one reason, and for one reason only: they are tired of waiting.
They want a Wi-Fi network with blanket coverage and they want it now. Not after their local service provider is done splitting nodes, or installing new DSLAMs to increase the speed of DSL, or completing the transition to digital, or stringing fiber to every home, or rolling out VoIP. Now.
There may be a lot of reasons for a city to not install its own Wi-Fi network, but every one of those reasons is thoroughly moot if any given city's local service providers are not building wireless access networks of their own. Don't talk to me about hotspots either. Hotspots don't cut it. If there's an emergency, responders should not have to drive to the nearest hotel lobby to connect.
Muni Wi-Fi is now a bona fide trend, and the way you can tell is that it has its own trade show. The MuniWireless conference will be held next week (October 22-24, in Minneapolis). Sponsors include a line-up of heavyweight companies: IBM, Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Nortel, along with muni wireless system experts Earthlink, Strix Systems, Tropos Networks, InspiAir and Civitium.
Companies like AT&T and Cox are contracting with various cities to provide muni Wi-Fi.
This really is a put-up-or-shut-up issue. And since most service providers aren't putting up, muni wireless is going to continue to gain momentum. I live in a city about to get muni Wi-Fi. The limited-government bloggers here are apoplectic, but me? I'm looking forward to using it.
* That's a reference to "The Replacements," not the Jennifer Love Hewitt movie. Just wanted to mention that.
Telus and Symmetricom are in synch
Canadian telco Telus is enlisting a network-wide "synchronization upgrade" with equipment from Symmetricom.
Telus will equip more than 250 offices to handle a range of new services, including IPTV and VoIP. Those offices will keep time with Symmetricom's TimeHub 5500 Synchronization Supply Unit, TimeProvider (for network access synchronization); TimeSource 3000 Primary Reference Source, and TimePictra, a synchronization network management system.
Telus will install the upgrade throughout 2008.
SaskTel's HD IPTV safe with Widevine
Sasktel went back to Widevine Technologies for content security for the HDTV service it just began over its IPTV network. Last year, SaskTel contracted with Widevine to provide security for its video-on-demand (VOD) service.
SaskTel's is offering 27 HD channels, including sports, news and movies from Warner Bros. International, Paramount, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures. SaskTel said its ability to sign long-term contracts with the studios was predicated on its relationship with Widevine.
"To acquire the highest quality and earliest release windows for our HDTV service, SaskTel had to demonstrate we had the content security to persistently encrypt SD & HD content throughout the entire video distribution chain," SaskTel President and CEO Robert Watson said. "We chose Widevine because they are highly regarded by Hollywood for HD content protection and are the only company that could scale to the numbers of subscribers we need to support. Additionally, Widevine meets our emerging needs to expand the secure delivery of content to the PC and mobile video platforms.
SaskTel's Max service is based on Alcatel's iMagic middleware platform, Motorola's VIP 1200 HD/H.264 set top box and Kasenna's MediaBase media streaming and distribution platform. SaskTel said it will invest more than $310 million over the next 5 years to bring fiber optic cable closer to the home.
AT&T single-stream HD trial has liftoff in Houston
AT&T has launched an IP-based high-definition television trial in the Houston area, reports Dave Burstein of DSL Prime. Initially, AT&T is offering just a single stream, and "shortly thereafter" will deploy a second HD stream.
"When this happens, customers will be able to use two streams of HD and still have two SD streams to either watch or record," AT&T's Wes Warnock explained, in a note to the electronic news outlet.
While there was no doubt that AT&T would offer HD, "The promise of the second HD stream is intriguing," Burstein wrote in his analysis. Intriguing, he said, because AT&T, with its current encoders, won't be able to pipe in two HD and two SD streams, plus a 20-25 Mbps DSL service, plus overhead, without compromising HD video quality.
Burstein added that customers within 3,000 feet won't have capacity issues, but customers outside that threshold "will need more speed than provided in the original Lightspeed design."
Warnock told the publication that one option is VDSL2 copper pair bonding, which he called "relatively cheap." Another, more expensive option, is shortening loop lengths by splitting the distribution area.
Despite rampant rumors that AT&T will upgrade Lightspeed before deployment, "my best guess is that they will not choose to spend the capital dollars" on an upgrade, Burstein wrote.
Yahoo! to start spreading the CBS news…
Yahoo! is now posting news clips each from 16 local CBS affiliates. The pair said the syndication agreement is exclusive. CBS and Yahoo will share revenue from advertising sold adjacent to daily clips on the Yahoo! news site.
Yahoo! will highlight the local video to users who select a city or zip code within a CBS owned station market. The video will be station-branded and can be found on the Yahoo! homepage and throughout Yahoo! News. On Yahoo!'s local news pages, video will also include links to the station's website where users can view additional local video and stories.
CBS Television Stations is offering content from 16 of its affiliated stations. The group has 39 stations, including 21 CBS, 11 The CW, three MyNetworkTV and four independent stations not affiliated with major networks.
Internap to acquire VitalStream
Internap Network Services will acquire VitalStream Holdings, which specializes in audio and video streaming services. Internap said the combination of its intelligent route control solutions with VitalStream's content delivery services will create a platform its customers can use to distribute rich media content and advertising. The approximate value of the stock deal is approximately $217 million.
Got FTTH? If your house has this seal,
there's a good bet that it does.
gets FTTH seal of approval
The Reedsburg Utility Commission has qualified for The Fiber-Connected Home certification from the FTTH Council.
The certification recognizes service providers that install fiber to the home, and is used as a marketing tool for the service provider as well as for home sellers. Reedsburg Utility Commission has deployed fiber to more than 4,000 homes and businesses in Reedsburg, Wis.
Horizon Chillicothe Tel to use Tandberg headend for IPTV
Horizon Chillicothe Telephone in Ohio will use the iPlexT video head-end from Tandberg Television for an expansion of the channel line-up for its TV over VDSL ATM network. Horizon plans to add more than 45 new video channels, in both high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD), including The Outdoor Channel, Food Network, Starz, ESPN and National Geographic. The iPlexT video head-end is a compact solution designed specifically for regional distribution, headend expansion and smaller-scale IPTV deployments.
Siemens policy server gets the PCMM nod from CableLabs
Siemens Networks received CableLabs PacketCable Multimedia (PCMM) qualification for its PCS-5000 policy server.
The PCMM specification was devised to enable cable operators to support a wide range of multimedia applications, such as IP telephony, multimedia conferencing, interactive gaming, and streaming video. In the PCMM scheme, policy servers are a key element used to regulate the delivery of such services.
Dynamic policy control is essential for complex real-time applications such as video streaming, interactive games, instant messaging, and Push and Talk.
Siemens PCS-5000 not only supports the PCMM standard for cable networks, but it is also an access-independent policy server that supports standards from different standardization organizations (3GPP, 3GPP2, CableLabs, ETSI/TISPAN). The PCS-5000 provides a single policy control for multiple access technologies, as well as seamless policy control for mobile, fixed, and converged networks.
MetaSwitch signs on two more customers
MetaSwitch has added BroadStar Communications and Norlight Telecommunications to its customer roster, which now numbers more than 20 competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs).
MetaSwitch's Secure IP Migration Platform for the Local Exchange (SIMPLE) solution, integrates IP Next-Generation Networking (IP NGN) technologies from Cisco Systems, to provide carrier-class IP-based communications services, with a clear migration path to IMS.
BroadStar operates in the Southeastern United States, targeting luxury residential properties, including condominiums. BroadStar implemented Cisco integrated access devices (IADs) and Cisco 7600 Series Routers with a flexible softswitch application server platform from MetaSwitch to deliver the triple play over an all-IP access network.
MetaSwitch and Cisco helped Norlight, which serves wholesale and business customers, re-engineer its network and launch a suite of new IP voice services in less than four months.
Teledata calls Radvision for SIP VoIP technology
Teledata Networks will integrate SIP VoIP technology from Radvision into its gateway products.
Teledata's BroadAccess Multiservice Access Gateway (MSAG) currently conforms to H.248, the media gateway protocol that allows gateways to transfer data between circuit-switched and packet-switched networks. Teledata will add SIP capability from Radvision to strengthen its support for VoIP services.
The SIP and H.248 protocols are both elements of the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) industry standard, which enables the conversion of all voice and multimedia communications to flexible IP based technologies.
Minacom introduces 24-hour VoIP stress testing
Minacom has begun long-duration stress-testing for VoIP services. Service providers can go to Minacom to test speech-quality with test calls up to 24 hours in duration.
VoIP quality has steadily improved over the past year, Minacom attests, yet is still found to suffer several minutes into a call as jitter buffers in telephone adapters, session border controllers and media gateways fill to capacity and begin dropping voice packets.
Also, Minacom said, excessive network traffic can cause short-term VoIP quality problems when frequent routing changes result in delayed, lost, and out-of-order packets.
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Telkonet, EarthLink plan BPL trial in D.C.
Telkonet, a company that specializes in providing broadband access over existing electrical wiring, is said it will hook up nine apartment complexes in or near Washington, D.C., where Telkonet also operates a communications backbone. The company is working with EarthLink, which will provide Internet access.
EarthLink obviously remains sanguine about the prospects of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology, especially in urban areas, despite expectation that BPL would be most suitable in rural markets. EarthLink had a long-running trial with Ambient and Con Ed in New York City.
Telkonet's iWire System will be the platform used to enable high-speed Internet and data access to EarthLink as part of a voice and broadband Internet and home networking package that includes features such as caller ID, voicemail and three-way calling bundled with high-speed Internet access. EarthLink will be responsible for marketing.
Level 3 to buy Broadwing for $1.4 billion
Level 3 Communications, continuing its acquisition spree, will buy Broadwing Corp. in a cash and stock deal. Level 3 said it expects to pay approximately $744 million in cash and issue approximately 122 million shares. The stock is worth over $670 million at yesterday's closing price of $5.55, for a total value of about $1.4 billion.
Broadwing, delivers data, voice and media solutions to enterprises and service providers over its 19,000 mile intercity fiber network. Approximately half of Broadwing's revenue comes from the wholesale market, with business customers comprising the remaining revenue.
Level 3 said it expects to eliminate duplicative network and reduce operating costs, while expanding its Business Markets Group.
In the past year, Level 3 has purchased WilTel, TelCove, Looking Glass, and now Broadwing.
Centillium chips qualified for DSL remote management
Centillium Communications' Atlanta and Palladia chipset families were proven compliant with the DSL Forum's TR-069 WAN Management Protocol standards and its TR-104 provisioning parameters for VoIP customer premises equipment. The standards help providers of services such as IPTV, VoIP and advanced home networking to remotely activate, support and upgrade CPE in consumer homes. entillium's silicon was tested with Motive Inc.'s Home Device Manager (HDM) software.
NTT West to create
Access/One Network OWS
wideranging wireless mesh network
NTT West is going to build what will be among most extensive wireless mesh networks in the world, covering over 100 cities in Japan. NTT West will use the Access/One Network Outdoor Wireless System (OWS) and Indoor Wireles System (IWS) from Strix Systems. NTT West intends to deliver broadband wireless voice, video, and data services primarily to enterprise customers and municipalities in Japan.
Strix claims to be the only wireless mesh vendor that supports the Wi-Fi 802.11j protocol, which operates in the 4.9 to 5.0 GHz frequency. 802.11j addresses the need for a high-performance mesh solution for use throughout Japan, where 802.11a is prohibited outdoors.
Strix says its systems will provide throughput of 35 Mbps over multiple hops.
to Cisco's IP NGN Architecture
Charter Communications, a long-time customer of Cisco Systems, confirmed it will stick with its supplier and upgrade its network to Cisco's Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture.
"The growth of high-speed data, voice, video-on-demand and Gigabit Ethernet multimedia services make the IP delivery network the most critical technology in Charter's delivery of rich content to our customers," said Marwan Fawaz, Charter Communications executive vice president and chief technology officer.
Charter uses the Cisco uBR10012 cable modem termination system (CMTS) for data and telephony services. It also utilizes the Cisco ONS 15454 multiservice transport platform (MSTP) with reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) for the backbone.
ROADM technology enables optical network operators to add, drop or pass through any combination of available wavelengths remotely without the requirement for signal conversion equipment. | <urn:uuid:28467887-7a34-4cb4-990a-7345f238e218> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cedmagazine.com/news/2006/10/ip-capsule-e-newsletter%2C-october-19%2C-2006?qt-recent_blogs=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929319 | 3,772 | 1.65625 | 2 |
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Location: entire Fraser Basin
The Collaborative Watershed Governance Initiative Phase 2 is intended to focus on the engagement of a Leadership Group, to broaden partnership in the Initiative, develop relationships among governments and resource sectors, to research and report on governance models and best practices, and to facilitate information sharing and dialogue that will be used to develop a Collaborative Watershed Governance framework.
Following the November 2008, the CWGI Working Group met in January 2009 to identify next steps in developing a collaborative framework. The immediate priority is for the Working Group to continue its efforts in establishing the CWGI Leadership Group and assisting the Leadership Group in developing and implementing it’s 2009/10 work and business plans.
In addition to 2009 funding requested from the Fraser Salmon and Watersheds Program, it is anticipated that the Living Rivers Trust and the Living Rivers - Georgia Basin/ Vancouver Island (LR-GB/VI) will be approached to request continued financial support of the initiative as it moves forward with this critical phase.
The impetus for this initiative came in early in 2008, when the Living Rivers Advisory Group (LRAG) requested the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the Fraser Basin Council and the BC Conservation Foundation to plan, coordinate and host a workshop that would report on the innovation, best management practices and new governance models beneficial to salmonids and their watersheds as a result of investments made by the Living Rivers Trust Fund, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Pacific Salmon Endowment Fund, and others in the Fraser Salmon and Watersheds Program (FSWP) and Living Rivers - Georgia Basin/ Vancouver Island (LR-GB/VI).
Over 2008 and under the direction of the Working Group, Phase 1 of the Collaborative Watershed Governance Initiative was designed to scope the critical elements of collaborative governance frameworks necessary to achieve watershed sustainability.
In November 2008, representatives from the four orders of government and a number of industry sectors convened at a workshop to explore the issues, benefits and challenges related to watershed management in British Columbia and to determine the level of interest in developing a Collaborative Watershed Governance framework. The unifying consensus at the workshop was a call for collaborative action to achieve watershed sustainability, and agreement among participants to continue the dialogue and engagement.
Future broad engagement will depend on several key factors identified by participants:
* Clarity that the initiative will focus on achieving environmental and economic health in our watersheds, and the social and cultural benefits that flow from this. This can be achieved through collaborative decision-making and management of land and water uses. This is important for the positive engagement of First Nations, stakeholders and other interests, who participate because they see the benefit, not to protect their positions.
Formalizing participation in a CWGI Leadership Group will signal Government, First Nations, Resource Sectors and the Public’s commitment to achieving integrated and collaborative watershed governance in BC. In February 2009, the CWGI Working Group sent letters to a number of potential Leadership Group members to determine their interest in participating in the Initiative.
Over the next 3 - 6 months, the Working Group will be meeting with CWGI partners and prospective Leadership Group members to formalize their participation.
Using information and input gathered during Phase 1, the Working Group will seek direction from the Leadership Group to draft a Collaborative Watershed Governance Initiative Terms of Reference and 2009/10 Work Plan for their approval.
Develop CWGI Business Plan to secure financial support from project partners, governments, industry and other sources.
By creating a collaborative framework for improved watershed governance would accommodate the continued use of watershed resources in a sustainable way, using clear and collaborative decision making processes that support healthy watersheds and healthy communities. | <urn:uuid:28728fc1-844c-45e6-8203-952f22ffaee5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thinksalmon.com/projects_products/item/collaborative_watershed_governance_initiative2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918864 | 751 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Case Study: A successful channel partnership requires management, but helps partners and customers alike.
Channel partnerships provide a way for a technology provider and channel partners to expand their business by banding together to provide new products and services and, in the process, build or enhance relationships with customers.
In the best situations, the shared customer gets a unique solution while the partners feed off one other in a symbiotic relationship that provides qualified leads, marketing expertise, and increased sales and revenue.
Like any relationship, however, channel partnerships require work and careful management to keep the relationships moving forward, to avoid political wrangling and to make sure that the client gets exactly what it needs. Following is an overview of what goes into a successful channel partnership and how partnerships can help you increase your business.
What are channel partnerships?
Channel partnerships can be tricky to define because the nature of these partnerships is always evolving. But it is clear that channel relationships involve a company, large or small, that partners with another solutions provider, a VAR or an SI (systems integrator), to provide customers with a product or service they couldnt have delivered alone.
John Calhoun, director at Mercer Management Consulting, in Toronto, said the nature of a channel partnership also has to do with the level of integration between the two businesses.
Click here to read about how one IT services company chose a partner to fit its business.
"The channel partnership tends to be something where you are proactively trying to control and manage [the partnership] in an important way, and trying to some extent to be highly integrated with the business model of the [partner] organization," Calhoun said.
This means, according to Calhoun, the technology provider agrees to help the channel partner identify opportunities and has a stake in helping it be successful as a business.
Calhoun said he sees a difference between how VARs and SIs approach a channel relationship. When a VAR comes on board as a channel partner, he said it becomes almost an extension of the technology provider, often providing a single solution geared toward the technology providers business. The SI, on the other hand, could be offering a similar solution but may also bring other vendor solutions to the table.
"Systems integrators have a channel relationship, but they are not reliant on your offering in any way," Calhoun said. "They are going to respond to what the customer wants, as opposed to, Im going to build a certain skill set on a certain offering and that is what Im going to go sell."
But Calhoun said that as customers develop a better understanding of product offerings and what they want, the distinction between channel partnerships with VARs versus SIs is beginning to blur.
Donn B. Atkins, general manager for IBM Global Business Partners, in White Plains, N.Y., said he sees SIs and VARs as part of a single channel partner system and he does not differentiate between the two. In fact, Atkins said he sees them working together to build a total solution for the customer.
"We define partner relationships in the broadest sense," Atkins said. "My role really talks to all our distribution partners, resellers and solution providers in that value chain but also our systems integrators (from largest global systems integrators to local and regional systems integrators) and ISVs. My vision is that the total solutions ecosystem is the real key to success in delivering value to customers."
IBM is recruiting ISVs and partners for the software-as-a-service industry. Read more here.
Atkins also said that when you have parties working together toward a solution for a customer, it benefits everyone, and he works to advance a situation where that can happen.
"I really focus on how we can tie [all the parties] together and create an environment for identifying where opportunities are and helping those different partner types work together to come up with the most complete solution [for the customer]," Atkins said.
Michael Wilding, senior vice president for technology solutions and training at Computer Generated Solutions, a New York-based VAR, said that when he looks for a company to partner with, he looks for a channel partner such as what Atkins describes.
"When youre looking for a channel partner, you are really looking for a great solution. But the other thing that is critical is that you are looking for a company that has a way to create awareness in the market and create leads and opportunities for your company," Wilding said.
How big is channel marketing?
One thing is clear, as Atkins pointed out: The channel provides an outlet for tremendous opportunities and gives companies access to revenue streams they might not otherwise have. Atkins said that IBM has more than 90,000 partners around the world, and they accounted for $32B, a full third of IBMs revenue, in 2004, and an increase of a whopping $29B from 2003 partner revenues. He said that is why IBM is betting on the channel, and, so far, it is paying off.
Richard Flynn, director of the Worldwide Partner Program at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., reports that his company has more than 600,000 partners worldwide. Of those, Flynn said 300,000 are actively engaged with Microsoft, with 5,000 achieving the Gold Certified ranking, the highest ranking in the Microsoft partner hierarchy. Although Microsoft has an enterprise staff to help service partners in larger client settings, Flynn said the company relies on partners almost exclusively for their sales.
Whats in it for each partner?
Clearly, technology providers benefit from increased sales when they take on channel partners, as IBMs $29B increase in one year bears out. VARs and SIs also clearly gain by getting better support, training and marketing dollars. In fact, Wilding said he looks to the technology provider to provide his staff members with the background and training they need to deliver solutions with the partner companys product. He said he also knows that his company must deliver sales to justify that investment by the channel partner.
"Our partner might supply training for my technical or sales team, or they might give us marketing funds," Wilding said. "They could give us software and hardware for internal use and development. That always helps us do a better job. But, in return, they want to know [that] if they invest money in us that we are going to commit [to selling their products]. If we are going to train 25 engineers in their products, we are building a skill base to [sell and] service their product."
Flynn said that Microsoft also views the partnership as a two-way street. Microsoft supplies a variety of tools to help the partners succeed, and the partners sell Microsoft products in the channel and add value for the customer in the process.
Can anybody work in the channel?
Large companies are not the only ones taking advantage of the channel. Small companies are increasingly getting in on the act, too.
Calhoun said many small companies get into channel partnerships for the same reasons that larger players do; its only the scale thats different.
"I think they need to look at it the same as bigger players. Its a different level [in terms of numbers], but its the same mentality," Calhoun said.
Managing the relationship. | <urn:uuid:0c93f9a4-9338-4e2f-b8ff-ec1345f1e262> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Partners-Cash-in-on-Channel-Opportunities/ | 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 | 0.967933 | 1,488 | 1.695313 | 2 |
(Original title: “From the Central School’s tower, a view of Seattle’s future”)
My introduction to this panorama that David Judkins recorded from the bell tower of Central School (a detail of the 12-room school’s fancy carpentry shows bottom left of the ‘Then’ photograph) has been followed by a quarter century of fidgeting with photographs, old and new.
In the intervening years I have learned some things about the developing cityscape included in Judkins’ look toward Lake Union, although not a confident date for the photograph itself. Still, I’ll venture that it is most likely 1887, or perhaps early 1888, not later. Central School burned down in April of that year.
The 1887 Polk Puget Sound Directory noted that the town has “filled up considerably during the last two years,” rising to a population conservatively estimated at 12,000 people.
Judkins had arrived in 1883, the year Central School opened as the largest school building in Washington Territory. He maintained a studio at Second Avenue and Columbia Street, but also built a darkroom with living quarters on a scow that he towed around Puget Sound, fulfilling the urge for portraits in waterfront towns otherwise neglected by “art photographers.”
While a good photo portraitist could make a living at the time, Judkins really preferred to do speculative “outside work” like this sweeping view across the Cascade and Westlake neighborhoods to Queen Anne Hill on the left horizon, Lake Union below it and the future neighborhoods of Fremont and Wallingford on the lake’s far north shore. Until distracted in 1897 by the gold rush to Alaska, the energetic Judkins contributed some of our better historical cityscapes to Seattle heritage. | <urn:uuid:312831e1-c269-4e9c-85db-fbb184e0b800> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pauldorpat.com/seattle-now-then-archive/2008-11-30-a-view-from-central-school-tower/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956704 | 373 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Overall rating 4 out of 54 (1 rating)
Last updated 28 December 2011, created 16 December 2011, viewed 1,381
students know that some foods contain chemicals put there by people and that these are called additives.
Please provide a rating.
A brilliant resource, includes everything you need for that topic! thanks!
TES Editorial © 2013 TSL Education Ltd. All pages of the Website are
reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any material on the
Website for any commercial purposes. TSL Education Ltd Registered in England (No 02017289) at 26 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4HQ | <urn:uuid:d09741be-d180-4727-b91e-fc63446ffe9e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/how-can-we-test-food-and-see-what-is-in-it-6155782/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929032 | 136 | 3.25 | 3 |
Herbert Nitsch freedives towards an 800-foot record
Herbert Nitsch, airline pilot and extreme record man, went down in history on June 14th 2007, off the Greek island of Spetses, by freediving to a depth of 700 feet (-214 m). This incredible feat put him way ahead of his nearest competitors and has yet to be superseded. Since then, he has kept right on pushing his limits. Closely linked with Breitling, "The Flying Fish" is currently engaged in the preparatory phase for his next record: freediving to 800 feet (-244 m), scheduled for summer 2012. To test his physique and nerves of steel, he has once again chosen the waters of the Aegean Sea, in the magnificent setting of the isle of Santorini. The highly successful trials have provided the opportunity to check the performance of the "torpedo sled" facilitating the champion’s descent and ascent, complete with its underfoot ballast system, as well as the overhead inflatable buoy for bringing the diver back to the surface – all on a single breath. This is super high-tech and ultra-reliable equipment, exactly like the Breitling that partners his accomplishments. Highly focused on safety, Herbert Nitsch intends to perfect his physical and mental training during the next few months, and finalize the development of the whole procedure of diving to the 800-foot threshold, before setting the "Breitling Extreme 800" record next year. All of which will bring him one step closer to his ultimate objective of breaking the legendary 1,000-foot (-305 m) barrier. | <urn:uuid:249027a1-639b-44f7-a8e1-cdb7e09c7464> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://coresectorcommunique.blogspot.com/2011/12/breitling-news.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958917 | 332 | 1.601563 | 2 |
You are heavily involved in genomics. In some of your recent work, you and your colleagues conducted genome-wide association studies of P. falciparum genomes. What did you learn about the population structure of P. falciparum from this study?
The populations of P. falciparum can be clustered according to their continental origins. Parasites from South America, particularly from the Amazon area, are very similar, which could be the result of drug (chloroquine) selection. Parasites from Africa are diverse, reflecting an older population and a high rate of genetic recombination. Parasite populations in Southeast Asia, particularly the Thai-Cambodia border, can be complicated. For example, we found 2-3 unique populations in Cambodia, with one population that appears to be highly resistant to many antimalarial drugs.
You’ve also used a high-throughput strategy for studying malaria traits related to the response to potential antimalarial drugs. How did that work and what did you find?
One of the purposes of studying parasite populations is to provide population structure information for genome-wide association studies. Studying drug resistance or identifying drug resistance genes can also be done using genetic crosses [of P. falciparum]. However, performing a genetic cross of P. falicparum is quite expensive, requiring a non-human primate (chimpanzee).
In one of our recent studies, we developed a high throughput microarray to genotype thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs. We then used the array to genotype 189 P. falicparum isolates. We also tested parasite responses to seven antimalarial drugs. We identified candidate genes that were associated with responses to artemisinin, mefloquine, as well as the well-known genes conferring resistance to chloroquine (pfcrt) and pyrimethamine-salfudoxine (pfdhfr). We are testing some of the candidate genes experimentally, e.g. genetic transformation of parasites such as gene knockout. We would like to see how the parasite responds to the drugs after gene knockout. Preliminary results are promising.
What is your lab working on these days?
Our major focus is on using genetic and genomic tools to study drug resistance, pathogenesis, and parasite development. One of the projects following this direction is to study parasite response to small molecules using genome-wide association and high throughput chemical screening. One of the issues that bothers me a lot is the lack of malaria traits or phenotypes to study even though we have all the tools we need. It is like I have a hammer, but no place to nail or to build my projects. Malaria parasites are very small; we cannot tell much difference between individual isolates or ‘strains’ under a microscope. Use of chemicals will help to display the differences between individual parasites.
Drugs are small chemicals. If parasites can be resistant to antimalarial drugs, they will show differences in their responses to other chemicals too. So the idea is to use large numbers of chemicals to display as many differences as possible between parasites, and then use genetic/genomic tools to locate the genetic differences. Hopefully we can study gene function after locating the genes.
We also work on a rodent malaria parasite, Plasmodium yoelii. We are studying parasite virulence, drug resistance, and differences in host immune response in this mouse parasite model.
If you had to change careers today and you could do anything, what would you do?
I guess I would still be working on parasites. Another parasite I would like to work on is Schistosoma.
What’s your favorite science book?
“Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution” by Dan Graur and Wen-Hsiung Li. I learned a lot from the book when I read it. It actually got me into some studies of the molecular evolution of malaria parasites and population genetics. I don’t read a lot of books; too many papers to read and write.
What is something about you that most people don’t know?
I like to play and watch basketball, hike, and fish. | <urn:uuid:6b595770-51b1-4e6d-b1f9-fd83687d7174> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asm.org/index.php/fellows-academy/news-views/interviews-with-fellows/91191-xinzhuan-su | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937119 | 873 | 2.296875 | 2 |
On today’s date it’s been a Century since the Titanic was lost…
On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she sailed, her passengers were a mixture of the world’s wealthiest basking in the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packed into steerage.
She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe that she carried only 20 lifeboats – enough to provide accommodation for only half her 2,200 passengers and crew. This discrepancy rested on the belief that since the ship’s construction made her ‘unsinkable,’ her lifeboats were necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. Additionally, lifeboats took up valuable deck space.
Four days into her journey, at 11:40 P.M. on the night of April 14, she struck an iceberg. Her fireman compared the sound of the impact to ‘the tearing of calico, nothing more.’ However, the collision was fatal and the icy water soon poured through the ship.
It became obvious that many would not find safety in a lifeboat. Each passenger was issued a life jacket but life expectancy would be short when exposed to water four degrees below freezing. As the forward portion of the ship sank deeper, passengers scrambled to the stern. John Thayer witnessed the sinking from a lifeboat. ‘We could see groups of the almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle.’ The great ship slowly slid beneath the waters two hours and forty minutes after the collision
The next morning, the liner Carpathia rescued 705 survivors. One thousand five hundred twenty-two passengers and crew were lost. Subsequent inquiries attributed the high loss of life to an insufficient number of lifeboats and inadequate training in their use.
…more at EyewitnessHistory.com
- Titanic, 100 years on, Apr 10th 2012 (learningfromdogs.com)
- 100 years later, tragedy of the Titanic still resonates (vancouversun.com)
- Titanic History Revised (lewrockwell.com)
- The Titanic at 100 years (boston.com)
- The Canine Casualties of the Titanic Disaster (newsfeed.time.com)
- Titanic still captures imagination 100 years on (entertainment.inquirer.net)
Posted on April 11, 2012, in Announcement, Education, event, history, News, Opinion, quote, World News and tagged John Thayer, lifeboat, New York City, RMS Carpathia, Southampton. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment. | <urn:uuid:b80d049b-54a4-43c2-8567-da417867c3b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/on-todays-date-its-been-a-century-since-the-titanic-was-lost/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949041 | 621 | 3.328125 | 3 |
The success of wind power is usually measured by the growth in installed capacity. This capacity, however, is peak power: the maximum power at optimum wind speed. The average output of a wind turbine is always lower.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine expresses the ratio of average power output to peak power. Many national and European targets assume a capacity factor of around 30%, while the world’s average capacity factor in 2005 was only 19.6%.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine is determined by:
1) Operation at less than maximum output. Most wind turbines have their maximum output power at wind speeds between 12-15 m/s and 25 m/s. Below that range, the power output decreases by the third power of the wind velocity. In other words, at half the optimal wind speed (7.5 m/s), power output is only one eighth of peak power.
2) Shut down due to excessive or inadequate wind velocity. In general, wind turbines shut down when wind speeds drop below 3-4 m/s or rise above 25 m/s.
3) Other shut downs. These may occur due to scheduled maintenance, equipment failure, or for safety reasons during a grid incident. These same events also determine the capacity factor of conventional fossil fuel power plants, which varies roughly between 50% and 90%.
The average capacity factor differs significantly between countries. Countries with well exploited wind resources tend to have a lower capacity factor. Germany, for instance, has a capacity factor of only 16.9%. That is because the best sites get developed first, and subsequent development goes onto sites with poorer wind characteristics, thus reducing the average capacity factor. The U.S. have a large installed capacity, but a high capacity factor (28.8%), meaning that it still has a large wind development potential left to exploit.
Given this perspective, the target of the European Wind Association seems rather unrealistic. It aims to reach the figure of 180 GW installed capacity in Europe with an average capacity factor of 31.7% by 2010. It is argued that a large part of the growth in the European wind sector in the next two years will be achieved by off-shore wind parks, which are believed to have higher capacity factors. However, figures from the UK from 2005 indicate that this is not necessarily true. The UK on-shore wind park (1,651 MW) has an average capacity factor of 27.4% and the off-shore wind park (304 MW) a capacity factor of 27.2%. Wind characteristics tend to be better for off-shore turbines, but off-shore wind turbines also require more maintenance. This could explain why the UK capacity factor turns out to be similar than that of the on-shore turbines. | <urn:uuid:e2463739-f62a-4db4-ad59-d459a2841603> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.leonardo-energy.org/capacity-factor-wind-power | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95041 | 559 | 3.921875 | 4 |
Our best episode yet!
In this episode we discuss the parts of a bowling ball and the symbols on the surface.
Starting with the Coverstock (The surface of the bowling ball), you will find 2 or 3 symbols. The Pin, Center of Gravity (CG), and if the core (also known as the weight block) is assymmetrical there will be a Mass Bias symbol.
The Pin is a circle created with colored plug material and designates the top of the core. During manufacturing the core is suspended in the bowling ball by a hanger pin. Once removed there is a void in the bowling ball. Manufacturers used to fill the hole with the same color as the ball so that you didn’t know where it was. As ball drilling became more of a science, it was necessary to “see” where the core was. Filling the hanger pin hole with a different color allowed ball drillers to essentially “see” inside the bowling ball.
The CG is the point on the ball where all four quadrants are in balance. As you move the CG mark left, right, up, and down, you start creating imbalances in the static weight of the ball. The USBC limits the amount of imbalance to 1 ounce left or right of the center line and 1 ounce up or down from the midline.
The Mass Bias is only noted on assymmetrical cores. This point denotes where the core is closest to the cover stock. It is the second most important piece of information used when laying out your bowling ball.
Information that is not listed on the bowling ball itself is the Radius of Gyration(RG). The RG determines how fast or slow the ball will be able to spin. A great example is that of an ice skater. When they do a spin and hold their arms out, they are create a higher RG and spin slower. As they bring their hands in towards their body, they create a lower RG and spin faster. The RG of bowling balls do not change, as if the ice skater’s arms were in a cast.
We are offering TalkBowling Viewers a discount, but you will have to view the episode for details… | <urn:uuid:0a9a9fcd-4e9e-4da3-b1f8-40b8eeef12e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.talkbowling.com/talk-bowling-0004/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933637 | 456 | 2.5 | 2 |
Press contact: Matt Raymond (202) 707-0020; Sheryl Cannady (202) 707-6456
August 27, 2008
National Treasure's "Book of Secrets" on Display at the Library of Congress Through Sept. 27
DVD Bonus Feature “Inside the Library of Congress” Also Showcased
Shortly following the release of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," millions of moviegoers might have left theaters around the world believing that the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, was home to a book that holds all of the U.S. presidents’ secrets from alien autopsies to the truth about the JFK assassination, as well as the location of buried treasure. That was fiction, but the real story and the "reel" story merge a little when the "Book of Secrets" movie prop and a bonus feature about the Library and its formidable collections went on display this summer in the South Orientation Gallery on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Visitors to the Jefferson will have an opportunity to see the display through Sept. 27.
Joining the "Book of Secrets" in the display case is another prop from the movie, John Wilkes Booth’s diary. However, unlike the "Book of Secrets," a Booth diary actually existed.
The display also includes two "bonus features" that Disney created for some versions of the film’s DVD release. One highlights the making of the "Book of Secrets" prop, detailing the intricate work by designers to make the book look authentic. An expert calligrapher even used antique writing tools to copy the handwriting of actual presidents.
The other bonus feature, "Inside the Library of Congress," takes viewers on an extraordinary behind-the-scenes tour of the Library, including the Great Hall and rarely seen areas in the Main Reading Room. There are also interviews with the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and curators from the Library’s custodial divisions, including Collections Access, Loan and Management; Geography and Map; Manuscript; Preservation; Rare Book and Special Collections; and Prints and Photographs, which houses rare photographs of Booth’s co-conspirators.
"Maybe the most extraordinary buildings in the world are St. Peter’s Church, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Library of Congress," said the film’s director, Jon Turteltaub, on the nearly nine-minute featurette.
The video also includes interviews with members of the movie’s cast and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. "It is an historic building," said Bruckheimer. "It is an historic place for all of our great literature and everything else about this great country and around the world."
The Library has the largest collection of American and foreign-produced films in the world. Although it has played a major role in collecting and preserving the nation’s film heritage, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution has itself played multiple roles on the big screen.
In addition to appearing in "National Treasure" in 2004 and playing a pivotal role in its sequel, the Library was showcased in several movies dating back to the silent film era. Perhaps the most famous of these films were the 1951 version of "Born Yesterday," starring Judy Holliday and William Holden, and "All the President’s Men," starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. As the world’s largest repository of knowledge and creativity, the Library is a symbol of democracy and the principles on which this nation was founded. Today the Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site, in its 22 reading rooms on Capitol Hill, and through its award-winning Web site at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a new, personalized Web site at www.myLOC.gov.
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Barring significant rainfall, the Lloyd Park boat ramp in Winnetka could be closed this boating season due to the low water level and sand accumulation, park officials said recently.
The water near the ramp must be at least three feet deep for the Park District to allow boat launching. If the ramp is closed, boaters would be forced to take their vessels north to Waukegan or consider other closer, but more costly options, such as Lake Forest.
A new report says fish and wildlife in the Lake Superior basin face a looming climate crisis.
The National Wildlife Federation in the U.S. says radical change is ahead for the world’s largest freshwater lake because it's heating up rapidly. The overarching theme of the report, called "Wildlife in a Warming World: Confronting the Climate Crisis," is that climate change is the biggest threat wildlife will face this century.
NEW BUFFALO — The New Buffalo CIty Council moved forward with plans to dredge shallow areas of the Galien River used by boaters to travel in the federal channel between the city’s harbor, boat launch and Lake Michigan during its Feb. 19 meeting.
The council unanimously approved a $6,500 bid for “Launch Access Channel” dredging engineering and a $7,138.75 bid for the launch channel dredging permit modification, both from Wightman & Associates.
TRAVERSE CITY — Toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie may form more often unless farms and cities do a better job of controlling runoff of nutrients that feed them, a scientist said Tuesday as specialists developed proposals for confronting the threat.
About 40 experts met for two days in Windsor, Ontario, to compare research findings about the lake's struggles with algae and work on a report for government policymakers. The gathering was convened by the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian agency that advises both nations on issues affecting shared waterways.
LUDINGTON -- As the S.S. Badger prepares for its 60th season, a federal ruling could determine the future of the last coal-fired steamship.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the S.S. Badger to stop dumping coal ash into Lake Michigan.
The 410-foot ferryboat discharges more than 500 tons of ash slurry each season on its runs between Ludington and Manitowoc, WI. Company officials say they're researching new fueling technology but need more time.
The increased carbon dioxide changing the water chemistry and ecology of oceans may also be affecting freshwater and the organisms that live in it.
It’s called ocean acidification. But some researchers suspect it will impact the Great Lakes.
“Based on our preliminary modeling and understanding of carbon cycles, we think similar acidification trends will take place in the Great Lakes to the degree that researchers are expecting in the oceans,” said Galen McKinley, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Federal and state officials have had success in finding plentiful environmental DNA of Asian carp in waters from the Chicago area to Western Lake Erie over the past two years. They have yet, however, to capture a live silver carp or bighead carp in the expansive Great Lakes.
When Scandia, a Norwegian wind company, announced its plans to install 200 turbines in Lake Michigan four miles from the tourist town of Ludington, Michigan, in 2009, they likely didn’t anticipate the controversy that would erupt.
After all, the project would be delivering domestically produced renewable energy to replace planet-warming fossil fuels. It would create local jobs installing and operating the turbines. A nearby pumped-hydro facility for storing backup energy sat in the nearby dunes, complete with substations and high-voltage lines they could use to move electricity from their offshore turbines to the grid.
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation's (RBFF) Take Me Fishing(TM) campaign is bringing attention to the growing winter sport of ice fishing, and congratulates Team USA for taking fourth place at this year's World Ice Fishing Championship (WIFC) held February 16 - 17, 2013 near Wausau, Wisconsin. The new WIFC/Take Me Fishing(TM) partnership comes in conjunction with the expansion of ice fishing content on TakeMeFishing.org, where members from the award-winning team share personal tips and tricks for the sport that they've participated in all of their lives.
In the last 50 years, things have been looking pretty murky around Lake Ontario’s shoreline and Dr. Joseph Makarewicz wants to know why.
Makarewicz has been studying the reason water around the shoreline is so murky and has been awarded a two-year $189,884 grant by the United States Geological Survey to aid in the continuation of his work. The grant will be divided between the college and contributing groups at RIT and Niagara University and will contribute to his latest study “Lake Ontario Nutrient Study.” | <urn:uuid:b6592c7e-92ac-4381-99c9-56b260f8179d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greatlakesboating.com/archive/201302?page=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947715 | 1,054 | 1.921875 | 2 |
Stricter Laws on Drugs After “Zombie” Attack
After the widely-publicized, possibly drug-related attack in Miami, Florida state officials are looking again at the legality of certain drugs and considering outlawing more of them. Rudy Eugene, the attacker, had apparently gotten high on “bath salts,” before abandoning his car, stripping naked, and wandering through Miami. Under a highway bridge, he found a homeless man named Ronald Poppo, and attacked him. Police found Eugene gnawing on Poppo’s face—half his face was already chewed off—before warning Eugene to stop or they would shoot. Eugene ignored them and was fatally shot.
“Bath salts” is a generic term for designer drugs—that is, drugs designed to fit into loopholes in state and federal laws. Under such laws, many drugs are actually legal, from MDMA to sativa to premazepam. Now, Florida state officials are considering cracking down on the legality of many drugs in order to avoid their wide distribution and abuse. State officials had already outlawed 92 compounds last spring in order to keep one step ahead of drug manufacturers. Regardless, the Florida state government is intending to protect its citizens from the harmful effects of dangerous drugs, and their sometimes-tragic consequences.
Some people think that designer drugs are okay, but they have proved equally as dangerous as clearly-illegal drugs. Thankfully there is good help available. Medications and cognitive-behavioral therapy have proven to be effective in treating drug addiction. At Seabrook House, we customize our treatment plans to each individual patient’s needs, so you can rest assured that you’ll be getting the right remedy for yourself or for a loved one. Seabrook House has rehabilitation centers in New Jersey (NJ), Pennsylvania (PA), and an outpatient center in New York (NY). Contact Seabrook House today for any questions about drugs, addiction, and treatment. | <urn:uuid:e4cf792c-5124-4a69-9ac6-67c6066c1fa5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seabrookhouse.org/archives/3097 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96298 | 404 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Narrator: This is Science Today. Engineers at the University of California, Riverside are working on developing a comprehensive image database of insects, but the actual technology used for such a database could be further commercialized for a number of other uses, including e-commerce. Eamonn Keogh, an associate professor of computer science, explains.
Keogh: People are very interested in essentially copying the style of celebrities, so you might see Paris Hilton with a new pair of shoes, a new handbag, whatever it is. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could simply click on that handbag and say, find me something like this? Or click on the pair of shoes and say, find something like this?
Narrator: Keogh says in a sense, this is the Holy Grail for e-commerce because consumers tend to be impulse buyers and are heavily influenced by celebrities.
Keogh: This idea of actually pulling out information from videos, from still images and finding similar objects on Amazon.com is quite a hot topic right now and several companies and universities are working on it, including ourselves.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin. | <urn:uuid:b08eaf0e-8ed1-4ba0-9125-424a87211448> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ucop.edu/sciencetoday/article/18597 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940422 | 238 | 2.4375 | 2 |
Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting spacecraft, used by the astrophysicists has unearthed an “unusual duo” of extra solar planets.The strange pair of planets have orbits near each other’s doorstep. The bigger of the two planets emerges to be more than two times the magnitude of the full moon found in the second “odd” planet’s night sky.
These planets discovered by the astronomers have contrasting densities looming very near each other and a temperature ranging from 1200- 1300 degree Fahrenheit. The “overcrowding” planets are inhabitable because of their close proximity to their star. Journal science reports corroborate that they do not fall in the “habitable zone” as liquid water may not be found on their surface even though they have the closest orbits as reports confirm till now.
Eric Agol, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle and the head researcher Josh Carter, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass mapped out results collected from The Kepler Space telescope that gauges falls in the brightness of nearly 150,000 stars to rummage about for planets in space. He said "One of the most exciting things about this system is that maybe these planets are straddling a line".
The planet on the inside named Kepler -36b tracks around its host star in 13.8 days, the planet on the outside called Kepler 36c orbits around it every 16.2 days. At the closest point of crossing each other the distance between the duos is just about 1.9 million km /1.2 million miles. This is roughly 20 times nearer to each other than any other “planet couple” in the Solar system and is five times the distance between Earth and moon.
Kepler -36b has a rocky surface with a radius 1.5 times, and a mass 4.5 times, that of the Earth. Kepler-36c is a gigantic gaseous planet, 3.7 times the radius that holds its head high with eight times the mass, of our planet Earth. The planet has a “significant atmosphere” infused with hydrogen and helium gases.
The terrestrial odd pair of planets course around a star 750 light years from Earth. The star is of a higher temperature and a few billion years older, than our own sun. The two planets are positioned 1,200 light-years away from the Earth.
Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis is managed by Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and Kepler’s mission development is by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
The Kepler spacecraft is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and is duly funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. It’s a strange discovery to dig up two unusual planets with unique compositions and orbits that are so “friendly and close”. | <urn:uuid:4f712ce9-0ed3-4447-a476-f904e55cf791> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.themoneytimes.com/node/1701711847 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925884 | 613 | 3.859375 | 4 |