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Posted: Thursday, January 31, 2013 12:00 PM
The Oregon Department of Education has announced it has awarded 11 Oregon school districts $189,140 in grants for farm-to-school and school-garden programs.
Grants are being used to purchase locally grown food for school lunches, plant gardens and host activities that educate students about food.
Awards range from just over $1,000 for the Sherman County School District, where a greenhouse will become the home of a hydroponics vegetable garden, to just under $30,000 for the Douglas, Centennial and Lane County 4J school districts.
Highlights of this year's grants include a program in the Ontario School District where Ontario farmer Rene Corn will teach students about grain, show them how to mill it and make whole grain breads, rolls, pizza dough and buns for the district through a local bakery.
In Gladstone, the school district will purchase food directly from a local vegetable farmer, laying the groundwork for what could develop into a long-term relationship.
The grants are a product of House Bill 2800, which lawmakers passed in 2011.
Rep. Brian Clem, D-Salem, and House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, have said they are seeking $5 million for the program in the 2013 session. | <urn:uuid:0bacf67f-19b3-4a03-8b60-5d7d2bf6a623> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://capitalpress.com/content/ml-school-lunch-program-012813 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956126 | 272 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Does Dry-Cleaning Shrink Clothes?
Real Simple answers your questions.
Q. Can dry-cleaning shrink my clothes?
New York City
A. It’s rare but possible.“Shrinkage is normally induced by water, but there’s no water added during the dry-cleaning process,” says Brian Johnson, the director of education at the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute, in Laurel, Maryland. So there’s little risk of having your favorite cashmere sweater come back sized for a Shih Tzu.
However, if you notice that your sleeves are two inches shorter, water is probably to blame. When clothing is dry-cleaned, it’s placed in a machine with a liquid cleaning agent. “Heat is then used to dry the fabric,” says Mel Jacobs, a co-owner of Cameo Cleaners, in New York City. The cleaning process doesn’t use water, but the machine is hooked up to a water source (for other functions besides dry cleaning). If any water leaks in and gets the clothes wet, they can shrink during the heat cycle. Here’s why: As the heat causes water molecules in the clothes to evaporate, the fibers draw closer together. (If the garment wasn’t properly preshrunk before you bought it, shrinkage is even more likely, even if the dry-cleaning machine isn’t malfunctioning.)
If your clothes seem to be shrinking with each trip to the cleaner, you might want to find a new one that uses a liquid carbon dioxide method (ask at an eco-friendly cleaner). This process uses pressure, not heat. And without heat, the chance of shrinkage, well, shrinks to zero.
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(For questions about your subscription, please visit the Customer Service Help Desk. | <urn:uuid:b4187a70-f413-4b77-923c-3befab6cb49a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.realsimple.com/beauty-fashion/clothing-care/dry-cleaning-00100000087651/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915305 | 484 | 2.25 | 2 |
Don’t Let the Door Hit You Onunload and Onbeforeunload22 April 2008
Many people attempt a last ditch effort to save page state in the browser by using the onunload or onbeforeunload events. This has been studied at great length by Patrick Hunlock, who uses the perhaps now common knowledge of using a Synchronous Ajax call to perform the page state save.
Another use for the onbeforeunload event to allow the user to cancel the action that initiated the user leaving in the first place. Gmail uses this technique when the user is in the middle of writing a draft of an e-mail and attempts to leave the page.
Gmail pops up this prompt when the user attempts to leave the page while drafting an email.
Worthy to note, however, is that Opera doesn’t fire the unload event when the browser refreshes the page, or uses the back/forward buttons to browse off of the page (I had no success with the fix posted in the comments on that page). What’s worse, Opera never fires the onbeforeunload event. This creates a serious problem with attempting to save page state prior to a user leaving your page.
Browser support aside, I believe that the onbeforeunload prompt is not an ideal way to protect the user from lost work (or unsaved page state). Humanized has argued, and I agree, that an undo operation is much easier on the end user than a warning message. The strange thing is, Gmail could save the draft in a synchronous Ajax request in the onunload event. They aren’t using the prompt to save Opera users from losing their drafts, since the Opera web browser doesn’t even fire the onbeforeunload event. (Interestingly enough, they are using some sort of browser history management to fire a warning to the user when they press back, or forward, in Opera — but Reload can’t be caught using this method, so your draft email could be lost).
From a User Interface design standpoint, I would recommend just sticking with onunload. You can still perform your synchronous Ajax call in the method to save the state of your page, so that the user can later resume their state or undo the operation. (Except for Back/Forward/Refresh in Opera, until they support a better onunload or any onbeforeunload). The onbeforeunload prompt is an unnecessary evil, and doesn’t do much besides annoy the end user with another warning message and a mouse click. | <urn:uuid:4d27cb0e-20d9-414d-9ae6-20c420af7a92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zachleat.com/web/dont-let-the-door-hit-you-onunload-and-onbeforeunload/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912236 | 527 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Monday, July 30, 2012
Family History Through the Alphabet – L is for …Straying
Frustration now sets in when ever I start to write an article for publication in a printed format.
I have become used to writing for digital publication and I just love that I am able to include links to other resources that provide my readers with additional information or clarification of subject specific terminology.
When I am reading in an eformat I relish the extra information I am able to glean from following such links. I have written recently that I am a tangential genealogist who regularly strays off my chosen path to follow links or leads.
The purpose of this post today is to encourage you all to move off that straight and narrow path that you have chosen when doing your genealogy research. Take some time to stray from that path and move laterally by following the links in online articles that you read.
You don't know what treasure you will unearth by engaging in some Link Love. | <urn:uuid:171f9818-d022-4b19-8440-52fddbb9cf93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://geniaus.blogspot.com/2012/07/family-history-through-alphabet-l-is.html?showComment=1343733197024 | 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 | 0.954139 | 203 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Why use a doula?
DONA International doulas mother the mother
Women have complex needs during childbirth and the weeks that follow. In addition to medical care and the love and companionship provided by their partners, women need consistent, continuous reassurance, comfort, encouragement and respect. They need individualized care based on their circumstances and preferences.
DONA International doulas are educated and experienced in childbirth and the postpartum period. We are prepared to provide physical (non-medical), emotional and informational support to women and their partners during labor and birth, as well as to families in the weeks following childbirth. We offer a loving touch, positioning and comfort measures that make childbearing women and families feel nurtured and cared for.
Numerous clinical studies have found that a doula’s presence at birth
- tends to result in shorter labors with fewer complications
- reduces negative feelings about one’s childbirth experience
- reduces the need for pitocin (a labor-inducing drug), forceps or vacuum extraction and cesareans
- reduces the mother’s request for pain medication and/or epidurals
Research shows parents who receive support can:
- Feel more secure and cared for
- Are more successful in adapting to new family dynamics
- Have greater success with breastfeeding
- Have greater self-confidence
- Have less postpartum depression
- Have lower incidence of abuse | <urn:uuid:3eb1a3df-d887-4fd0-b952-bf5e3f381fd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dona.org/mothers/why_use_a_doula.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941192 | 291 | 1.59375 | 2 |
October 21, 2009 | 1:04 pm
Posted by Jonathan Kirsch
A rare opportunity to see and hear one of the world’s great historians—and a participant in the historical events that he studies—is coming up on at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 5, 2009, when Saul Friedlander appears at the UCLA Faculty Center to deliver an address on “Pius XII and the Holocaust: Some Further Reflections.”
I was first introduced to Friedlander’s work by Gene Lichtenstein, founding editor of The Jewish Journal, who urged me to read Friedlander’s memoir, When Memory Comes. It’s a compelling and deeply challenging account of his experiences as a child in wartime France, where he was baptized and raised in a Catholic boarding-school after his parents were sent to die in the camps, and the rediscovery of his Jewish origins and identity when he arrived in Palestine aboard the ill-fated Altalena during the War of Independence.
Friedlander won a Pulitzer Prize last year for The Years of Extermination, the second title in his ground-breaking two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. His UCLA talk actually harks back to his first published work of history on the Holocaust, Pius XII and the Third Reich (1966). But if Nazi Germany and the Jews is the crowning achievement of his work as a historian, his brief but searing memoir remains his masterpiece.
When Memory Comes is achingly intimate, and his recollection of his last encounter with his parents—- restrained in the telling, but deeply poignant nonetheless—- turns out to be one of the most shattering passages in the vast literature of the Holocaust. Then, too, we can be grateful that a man with a genius for the study of history was himself an eyewitness to history in the making. That’s why When Memory Comes is such an important work, one that transcends the experiences of a single Holocaust survivor and addresses the destiny of the Jewish people and, really, all people.
“Sometimes when I think back on our history, not of these past few years, but rather its entire sweep,” writes Friedlander in When Memory Comes, “I can make out a perpetual movement back and forth, a search for roots, for normality and security, forever threatened down the centuries, and I tell myself that the Jewish state may perhaps be only a step on the way of a people whose particular destiny has come to symbolize the endless quest – ever hesitant, ever begun anew – of all mankind.”
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11.25.09 at 7:12 pm | My very first experiment in the deconstruction. . . (12)
10.19.10 at 9:59 am | The very first photograph of a nude woman that I. . . (8)
10.29.11 at 6:29 pm | My next book is a biography of an early Jewish. . . (4)
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JewishJournal.com reserves the right to use your comment in our weekly print publication. | <urn:uuid:faccac21-8297-45b9-b1d8-198e1ac66456> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve/item/when_memory_comes_39091021_Saul_Friedlander_Holocaust_Jewish_history_Kirsch | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931105 | 824 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Lego men take on Hollywood
LITTLE yellow men are invading the internet.
The famous Lego man – or Minifig as it is officially known – has just turned 30 years old.
The very first Lego character was a plastic policeman who appeared in August 1978 and has since been included in 104 different sets of the building blocks.
The Danish company has made more than FOUR BILLION of the tiny toys since then. Four are sold every second – that’s 122 million a year.
So it’s no surprise to see the little fellas become movie stars as animators recreate their favourite film or music moments using the tinny toy.
From Monty Python to the A-Team, we’ve found the finest of these fan films on video website YouTube.
Click on the images above to watch the fan-plastic spoofs. | <urn:uuid:556be453-4f19-4274-8321-cf27ec57625d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article1633980.ece | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964033 | 180 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Painful and cracked nipples are not a normal part of breastfeeding. Nipples become damaged and sore if the baby is not positioned and attached effectively. If feeding is painful and/or if at the end of a breastfeed the nipple seems flattened or pinched then the position that the baby is held in and/or the attachment needs to be adjusted and improved. Ineffective positioning and attachment will not only cause painful feeding, but will also result in the baby not taking enough breastmilk, which in turn will result in a baby who is unsettled after feeds. In addition, feeds can take longer and the mother will become at risk of developing engorgement, blocked ducts and mastitis.
Whilst poor positioning and attachment is the cause of the majority of sore nipples, it is possible that thrush may be the cause, especially if the pain starts after a period of trouble free feeding. A symptom of thrush is pain that continues after the feed has ended.
How can sore nipples be prevented?
Making sure that the baby is attached effectively will mean that the nipple reaches the rear of the mouth close to the soft palate. At this point it is protected from being squashed and rubbed by the tongue during the feed. If the baby is not well attached and the nipple is further forward in the mouth, it will be pinched against the hard palate causing pain in the first instance, and ultimately the skin to break down and a crack to form.
Treating sore and cracked nipples involves removing the cause by improving the positioning and/or attachment. Often this will require help from a health professional or trained volunteer. Even very sore nipples can feel comfortable during feeding once the attachment is improved. Many creams and sprays are available, however care should be taken – they will not work unless the cause is treated and some can cause allergic reactions in the mother or baby.
For a cracked nipple, it is possible that applying a small amount of purified lanolin may assist with healing by a process called moist wound healing. Expressing a few drops of breastmilk onto the damaged area after each feed may also help, as breastmilk contains substances which aid healing and counter infection.
More information is available on the Breastfed Babies website. | <urn:uuid:165c93b1-cf0b-4b6b-b0e3-249d82c54b42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://live.unicef.org.uk/BabyFriendly/Parents/Problems/Sore-nipples/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95684 | 456 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Moon Rocks Missing Since 1973 Finally Returned To Alaska
Author: Jessica Rawden
published: 2012-12-09 18:26:43
Way back in 1969, some moon rocks from the Apollo 11 mission were given to then Alaskan Governor Keith Miller who passed them along to the Alaska Transportation Museum. The moon rocks were tiny, encased in a bit of acrylic and attached to a plaque. By 1973, however, Alaska’s moon rocks were lost after an arsonist’s fire claimed many of the items inside, despite witnesses stating they had believed the plaque was intact after the fire. Nearly 40 years later, the moon rocks have been returned to the Alaskan government and their rightful place.
In 2010, Coleman Anderson, the foster son of the transportation director and a Deadliest Catch alum, claimed ownership of the moon rocks, stating he had “rescued” the items from the rubble of the 1973 fire. According to MSNBC News, Anderson and his lawyer sued for ownership of the rocks, stating they were rightfully his but he would be willing to sell the rocks back to the Alaskan government. Maybe the man did “rescue” the rocks from the rubble, but that still doesn’t mean they are his to own.
Apparently, the Alaskan state government believed so, too, and to prove the rocks were those the state lost in the 1973 fire, using FBI expertise and photos. Eventually, Anderson owned up and relinquished his claim on the rocks, noting they were picked up for “safekeeping” after the fire occurred. Anderson was 17 at the time. Nearly four decades later, Alaska will have to find a new place to house the moon rocks and put them on display. | <urn:uuid:031de752-de2f-4c26-8865-20eea9950808> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cinemablend.com/pop/Moon-Rocks-Missing-1973-Finally-Returned-Alaska-50235.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978174 | 359 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Competition Encourages Students, Alumni to Become ‘DifferenceMakers’
LOWELL, Mass. – UMass Lowell students will get a hands-on chance to solve real-world problems during this semester’s $25,000 DifferenceMaker
Idea Challenge. The challenge begins today with the first in a series of events leading to the selection of the winners in April.
Challenge participants will come up with products, business or service ideas that help tackle major social problems affecting the region, such as access to health care, cyber security, unemployment, support for the arts and more. Students with different majors but a common goal will work in teams and pitch their ideas before a panel of alumni judges for a chance to win a share of $25,000 in seed money to help implement the best plans. Teams, which may also include alumni who have graduated within the past year, will be mentored by UMass Lowell faculty from across the university.
The DifferenceMaker $25,000 Idea Challenge is a part of UMass Lowell’s new DifferenceMaker Program, which encourages students to hone their problem-solving skills and find their place as innovators in an ever-changing world. Involving students and faculty from all of UMass Lowell’s six colleges – from engineering
to liberal arts
to health and environment
– the program offers academic and extracurricular activities that expand students’ understanding of entrepreneurship and how they can make a difference in their professional and personal lives. DifferenceMaker programs exclusively for freshmen engage them at the start of their UMass Lowell careers in an effort to guide their studies and help them work toward a future of civic engagement.
“In addition, the university has many successful alumni who have made a significant difference in their respective professions and communities. DifferenceMaker is an effort to link our students’ interest and involvement in innovative problem-solving with the success and support of our alumni,” said Prof. Steven Tello
, UMass Lowell’s vice chancellor of entrepreneurship and economic development, who is heading the program. The $25,000 in DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge prize money is donated by one such successful UMass Lowell graduate.
Starting today, Idea Challenge participants will work with UMass Lowell faculty to build their teams and form a plan akin to a business plan to flesh out their ideas. Key dates for participants are:
- Information sessions - 5 p.m. Monday, Jan. 28 in Alumni Hall, North Campus, 84 University Ave., and 5 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 29 in the O’Leary Library Learning Commons, South Campus, 61 Wilder St., Lowell;
- Idea application deadline - 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15. Applicants accepted to participate will be notified by Wednesday, Feb. 20;
- Idea plan due - 5 p.m. Friday, April 12;
- Finals round and judging - Wednesday, April 17 at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, 50 Warren St., Lowell.
UMass Lowell is a national research university located on a high-energy campus in the heart of a global community. The university offers its more than 16,000 students bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in business, education, engineering, fine arts, health and environment, humanities, sciences and social sciences. UMass Lowell delivers high-quality educational programs, vigorous hands-on learning and personal attention from leading faculty and staff, all of which prepare graduates to be ready for work, for life and for all the world offers. www.uml.edu | <urn:uuid:18c75627-5b8c-4695-9f6b-55ab52c11856> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://martin_margala@uml.edu/News/press-releases/2013/DifferenceMakersreleaseJan2013.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941411 | 742 | 1.625 | 2 |
In February, when First Lady Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to help end childhood obesity, Jamal Williams, 23, was knee-deep in creating his KIDFIT application (available in the iTunes store; $1.99) in hopes of doing the same. The app, which works on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices, features more than 150 different exercises for children, with an emphasis on strength training, conditioning, coordination, and flexibility. Additionally, parental controls ensure that children are properly monitored.
Williams says the inspiration for the program came from everyday observations and personal experience: “I live near three elementary schools; in D.C., if one of every three kids is obese, and they have P.E. [physical education], then something is not working. I wanted to figure out innovative ways to bring fitness to kids.”
Before creating KIDFIT, Williams first searched the iTunes store, where he says he found “absolutely no child fitness app.” Further, he says, “Nobody liked the idea [for KIDFIT] when I first started.” Currently, the KIDFIT application is selling at the rate of 15 to 20 per day, says Williams, and he expects revenues of $65,000 by year-end. Williams worked with Apollo Matrix to develop the KIDFIT source code, which he owns.
A Howard University graduate with a degree in physical therapy, Williams is also founder of Washington, D.C.-based Personal Training Solutions, which provides personal training and education to private clients and groups. He is working with the principals of three local elementary schools to get the KIDFIT program implemented. “We do recognize that not everyone can afford an iPhone or an iPod touch, so we are looking for ways to get the schools equipped through various media, preferably, the iPad. As of now, the application can be run on the Apple platform and can be easily streamed to a TV with a single cord,” he notes. | <urn:uuid:7ecef677-72ca-428a-9555-efb90a217b67> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blackenterprise.com/mag/shape-up/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957096 | 422 | 1.992188 | 2 |
By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY
Looked at one way, a spike in hospital stays for a rare and deadly lung disease is a bad thing.
Or it may reflect progress in diagnosing and treating a disease that has thwarted medical science for at least a century.
Which is it?
"I don't know," says Claudia Stein, a senior research physician at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, who supervised a new study showing the rise in hospitalizations for pulmonary hypertension. Stein says the data didn't explain why it has occurred, though one possibility is that the population is aging and more prone to heart disease.
Whatever the cause, Stein says, the findings are troubling, because pulmonary hypertension is so often fatal. If untreated, about half of patients die within three years.
The disease occurs when there's too much resistance in arteries that carry blood to the lungs from the right side of the heart, typically in patients with heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia. In about 1.5% patients, doctors can't identify a cause.
As of Dec. 14, 205 patients with primary pulmonary hypertension were awaiting lung transplants. That makes the disease the most common reason for lung transplantation after scarring from pulmonary fibrosis, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.
The study, led by Chaya Merrill, found that hospital admissions for pulmonary hypertension increased more than 50% from 1997 to 2005, from 301,400 to 456,500. The average cost for each hospitalization in 2005 was $4,300 higher than the average for all hospital stays, $12,400 vs. $8,100.
Many patients also had heart disease, which was listed as the first diagnosis in 70% of admissions that listed pulmonary hypertension. Indeed, doctors stumble on many diagnoses of pulmonary hypertension during ultrasound tests used in heart disease, says David Roberts of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "Ten years ago, doctors didn't commonly consider it," he says. "People died, and that was that."
The good news is that doctors are not only better able to diagnose the disease, but they're also better equipped to treat it. When the study began in 1997, Roberts says, there was one treatment. Now there are five.
"There aren't many diseases in which five drugs were approved in a few years, many of them in new classes," he says. "More people are likely to be looking for this, because there are better ways to treat it."
There's still plenty of room for improvement, Roberts says. Most of the drugs won approval based on their ability to relieve symptoms, not their power to prolong life.
We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. Read more. | <urn:uuid:27ebc14a-23cd-490e-bda6-ec58e0aa9feb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-01-pulmonary-hypertension_N.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975108 | 586 | 2.421875 | 2 |
Liposuction surgery involves the removal of fat beneath the skin using a hollow metal tube that passes through the excess fatty tissue. The fatty tissue is then removed with the assistance of a powerful vacuum. Liposuction surgery is a popular option for those who lack an even body surface or tone due to pockets of fat caused by aging, pregnancy, heredity or other factors. These areas usually cannot be corrected with diet and exercise alone. Areas commonly treated include the abdomen, buttocks, thighs, hips, upper arms and neckline/chin area.
There are a large number of liposuction techniques used to obtain optimal results. The best approach will be determined for you by your body shape, the condition of your skin, and the goals you and Dr. Loghmanee or Dr. Cerio discuss.
Am I a good candidate for a liposuction surgery?
One or more of the following may indicate you are a good candidate for a liposuction;
- You are in good physical condition and near average weight
- You wish to gain a more even, toned body after weight loss, pregnancy, natural aging, or inherited factors
- You have pockets of fat that are not in proportion with the rest of your body and cannot be eliminated with diet and exercise
- The areas of fat do not have an associated amount of abundant excess skin, and elasticity of the skin is still good
Dr. Loghmanee or Dr. Cerio will conduct an examination and discuss with you your expected outcome and determine whether your desires can realistically be achieved. You must come prepared to discuss your full medical history, including any medical conditions, previous surgeries or treatments, drug allergies, current medications, and use of alcohol, tobacco or illegal substances.
Medical conditions: This procedure is not recommended for those with diabetes, heart problems, or a weak immune system. These factors can complicate surgery and interfere with optimal recovery.
Weight: It is important that you complete any weight loss prior to surgery, otherwise the problems may reappear. Afterward, it will be essential to maintain your weight, gaining weight after liposuction will affect the long-term results.
Pregnancy: It is also important to inform Dr. Loghmanee or Dr. Cerio if you are considering having children in the future. Pregnancy can cause unpredictable body changes.
Surgery and Recovery
Liposuction is commonly an outpatient surgery, performed with general anesthesia or local anesthesia and sedation. After a few hours to one day recovery you will be permitted to go home. Your incisions will be wrapped in gauze dressings and will likely wear a compression garment used to help keep light pressure on the operated sights while you heal. You will be given detailed information from Dr. Loghmanee or Dr. Cerio detailing normal symptoms, signs of complications, and instructions for recovery.
You should be able to walk immediately following surgery and will be up and about within a day or two after surgery. Your incisions will be tender to the touch for the first few days, and you must not lift, pull or push anything and do not engage in any strenuous activity for at least one week. Small incisions are used to allow access for the metal tubes to the fatty tissue, and absorbable stitches are normally used. Bruising will occur, but typically resolves itself within two weeks. Swelling can occur as well, and it may take many months to see final results. Dr. Loghmanee or Dr. Cerio will recommend follow up visits to evaluate your healing process. It is important to follow your doctor’s orders for the best outcome. | <urn:uuid:c9a6c301-b5eb-45ee-be36-b8c49220d147> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ecaplasticsurgery.com/procedures-plastic-surgery-operations/body-plastic-surgery/liposuction-surgery/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935742 | 742 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Fishes of the Open Ocean
A Natural History and Illustrated Guide
Between the surface of the sea and depths of two hundred meters lies a remarkable range of fish, generally known as pelagics, or open-ocean dwellers. These creatures are among the largest, fastest, highest-leaping, and most migratory fish on the entire planet. Beautifully adapted to their world, they range from tiny drift fish and plankton-straining whale sharks to more streamlined predators such as tuna, marlin, sailfish, and wahoo.
Fishes of the Open Ocean, from leading marine biologist and world authority on the subject Julian Pepperell, is the first book to comprehensively describe these fishes and explore the complex and often fragile world in which they live. In what will be the definitive book on the subject for years to come—and, with over three hundred color images, the most lavishly produced as well—Pepperell details the environment and biology of every major species of fish that inhabits the open ocean, an expanse that covers 330 million cubic miles and is the largest aquatic habitat on the Earth. The first section of the book introduces the various evolutionary forms these fish have taken, as well as the ways in which specific species interact and coevolve with others in the food web. A chapter on commercial and sport fisheries explores the human element in this realm and considers such issues as sustainability, catch-and-release initiatives, and the risks of extinction.
The second section of the book provides species accounts of open ocean dwellers organized by group, with overviews and general descriptions that are inclusive of range and distribution, unique physiological and morphological attributes, and the role of each species within its ecosystem. Global distribution maps, original illustrations from renowned artist and scientist Guy Harvey, and truly stunning images from some of the world’s leading underwater photographers round out this copiously illustrated volume.
“In this gorgeous book, ichthyologist Pepperell introduces famous and lesser known fish to the general reader. Part One describes the general environment of the open ocean, the role the fish play in the ecology, their general biology, and their importance to humans as sport or food fish. Part Two is a guide to the fish—and what fish these are! How many of us know that a blue marlin can weigh over 1,800 pounds? Also covered are mackerels, jacks, sharks, rays, and other lesser-known species.”
“For beginning scholars and avid anglers, this volume will undoubtedly teach them about the biology and ecology of the diverse assemblages of open ocean fishes. But for all, including seasoned researchers, the detailed illustrations and color photographs are much more than just a delight to look at, they offer the opportunity to differentiate the closely related species without compromising the innate beauty of each. Taken together, this book will be a wonderful resource for anyone generally interested in these fishes.” | <urn:uuid:d72b7705-ea27-4bf0-99ff-7179a55e6ee6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo8748573.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934532 | 604 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Secretary McNamara's 20 July 1965 Memorandum for the President [Doc. 261] spelled out the troop requirements for Vietnam as follows: The forces for 1965 should be brought up to about 175,000, and "It should be understood that the deployment of more men (perhaps 100,000) may be necessary in early 1966, and the deployment of additional forces thereafter is possible but will depend on developments."
This 100,000-man possible addition was broken down in a cable from COMUSMACV to CINCPAC as providing 27 maneuver battalions with associated battalions to 61 sometime in 1966. The question arises as to how this 100,000 man 27-battalion figure was reached. In the absence of documentary evidence, it seems simplest to assume that Westmoreland was given pretty much what he asked for. However, the 61 battalion figure comes very close to the number of battalions the Secretary of Defense was thinking about earlier in July, when a memorandum for the record dated 12 July shows a proposal to strengthen U.S. forces by 63 battalions through a combination of calling up reserves, extending tours of duty, and increasing the draft. In fact, the 63 battalion figure appears again in the Secretary's 20 July memorandum to the President, allowing one to speculate that the size of the build-up had already been fixed in early July prior to the trip.
In either case, the result was that Phase II was recommended to the President at a level of roughly 100,000 which when added to the then current estimates for Phase I of 175,000 gave a total estimate of 275,000 by the end of 1966. Secretary McNamara envisioned that the employment of U.S. forces would be as follows:
. . . Use of forces.The forces will be used however they can be brought to bear most effectively. The U.S. third-country ground forces will operate in coordination with South Vietnamese forces. They will defend their own bases; they will assist in providing security in neighboring areas; they will augment Vietnamese forces, assuring retention of key logistic areas and population centers. Also, in the initial phase they will maintain a small reserve-reaction force, conducting nuisance raids and spoiling attacks, and opening and securing selected lines of communication; as in-country ground strength increases to a level permitting extended U.S. and third-country offensive action, the forces will be available for more active combat missions when the Vietnamese Government and General Westmoreland agree that such active missions are needed. The strategy for winning this stage of the war will be to take the offensive to take and hold the initiative. The concept of tactical operations will be to exploit the offensive, with the objects of putting the VCIDRV battalion forces out of operation and of destroying their morale. The South Vietnamese, U.S. and third-country forces, by aggressive exploitation of superior military forces, are to gain and hold the initiative keeping the enemy at a disadvantage, maintaining a tempo such as to deny them time to recuperate or regain their balance, and pressing the fight against VCIDRV main force units in South Vietnam to run them to ground and to destroy them. The operations should combine to compel the VCIDRV to fight at a higher and more sustained intensity with resulting higher logistical consumption and, at the same time, to limit his capability to resupply forces in combat at that scale by attacking his LOC. The concept assumes vigorous prosecution of the air and sea anti-infiltration campaign and includes increased use of air in-country, including B-52s, night and day to harass VC in their havens. Following destruction of the VC main force units, the South Vietnamese must reinstitute the Program of Rural Reconstruction as an antidote to the continuing VC campaign of terror and subversion.
. . . Evaluation. ARVN overall is not capable of successfully resisting the VC initiatives without more active assistance from more U.S. third-country ground forces than those thus far committed. Without further outside help, the ARVN is faced with successive tactical reverses, loss of key communication and population centers particularly in the highlands, piecemeal destruction of ARVN units, attrition of RVNAF will to fight, and loss of civilian confidence. Early commitment of additional U.S. third-country forces in sufficient quantity, in general reserve and offensive roles, should stave off GVN defeat.
The success of the program from the military point of view turns on whether the Vietnamese hold their own in terms of numbers and fighting spirit, and on whether the U.S. forces can be effective in a quick-reaction reserve role, a role in which they are only now being tested. The number of U.S. troops is too small to make a significant difference in the tradition 10-1 government-guerrilla formula, but it is not too small to make a significant difference in the kind of war which seems to be evolving in Vietnam a "Third Stage" or conventional war in which it is easier to identify, locate and attack the enemy.
The plan is such that the risk of escalation into war with China or the Soviet Union can be kept small. U.S. and South Vietnamese casualties will increase just how much cannot be predicted with confidence, but the U.S. killed-in-action might be in the vicinity of 500 a month by the end of the year. The South Vietnamese under one government or another will probably see the thing through and the United States public will support the course of action because it is a sensible and courageous military-political program designed and likely to bring about a success in Vietnam.
It should be recognized, however, that success against the larger, more conventional, VCIPAVN forces could merely drive the VC back into the trees and back to their 1960-64 pattern a pattern against which U.S. troops and aircraft would be of limited value but with which the GVN, with our help, could cope. The questions here would be whether the VC could maintain morale after such a setback, and whether the South Vietnamese would have the will to hang on through another cycle. | <urn:uuid:66503cd1-b7a6-48e8-8846-894ccf11a15e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://isc.temple.edu/hist249/course/Documents/summary_of_secretary_of_defense_.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962011 | 1,248 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Service Dog Supplies
An emotional support animal (ESA) is a US legal term for a pet which provides therapeutic benefit to its owner through companionship and affection. Emotional support animals are not specially trained to ameliorate disability as psychiatric service dogs are. They require only as much training as an ordinary pet requires in order to live peacefully among humans without being a nuisance or a danger to others. In the U.S., two federal laws grant special rights to some owners of emotional support animals.
The Air Carrier Access Act establishes a procedure for modifying pet policies on aircraft to permit a person with a disability (including emotional) and a letter from a physician to travel with a prescribed emotional support animal so long as they have appropriate documentation and the animal is not a danger to others and does not interfere with others (through unwanted attention, barking, inappropriate toileting, etc.).
The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 (42 USC 3601, et seq.) establishes a procedure for modifying "no pets" policies in most types of housing to permit a person with a disability to keep a pet for emotional support. The qualified applicant may either make a verbal request, or send a written request of reasonable accommodation to the landlord, in either case with a letter from a physician. If the landlord refuses the request for accommodation, a complaint can be filed with the department of Housing and Urban Development or with the U.S. Department of Justice. In housing that allows pets but charges supplemental rent or deposits for them, these fees must be waived. The ESA's owner can be charged for actual damage done by the animal, but they may not require the applicant to pay a fee or a security deposit in order to keep the animal.
Emotional support animals do not have the right to go anywhere other animals are not allowed with the exception of the two examples above.
You get two Emotional Support Animal ID cards with your order, one for your companion and one for you to carry in your wallet so you can easily show others what the law says. These cards make it easy to educate the uninformed of your rights. Your Emotional Support Animal ID Tags clearly identify your companion as a Emotional Support Animal with his or her picture on the tag.
The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act protect the right of people with disabilities to keep emotional support animals, even when a landlord's or Association's policy explicitly prohibits pets. Because emotional support and service animals are not "pets," but rather are considered to be more like assistive aids such as wheelchairs, the law will generally require the Landlord or Association to make an exception to its "no pet" policy so that a tenant with a disability can fully use and enjoy his or her dwelling. In most housing complexes, so long as the tenant has a letter or prescription from an appropriate professional, such as a therapist or physician, and meets the definition of a person with a disability, he or she is entitled to a reasonable accommodation that would allow an emotional support animal in the apartment, condo or townhouse.
Whether you choose a tag, a vest or a bandana, a properly identified dog will receive less hassles than one without. We think tags are best because:
|Each ID tag has your dog's picture, name and owner's name|
|Emotional Support Animal ID Tags are not as hot as vests|
|Unlike bandanas, tags look professional not cute|
The Proof You Need for your Emotional Support Animal
Service Dog ID badges Referred by
Our Emotional Support Animal ID Tags clearly identify your animal as an Emotional Support Animal with his or her picture on the tag. We provide two cards with each order, one for your dog and one for you to carry in your wallet so you can easily inform businesses you ar an Emotional Support Animal owner. These cards make it easy to educate the uninformed of your rights.
Traveling with your Emotional Support Animal
All U.S. airlines are required to accept most emotional animals for carriage in the cabin for no additional cost (which can exceed $100 each way) and emotional support animals never travel in cargo. . In accordance with federal safety regulations, the animal must be positioned so as not to obstruct a passenger’s evacuation in the unlikely event of an emergency. To bring an emotional support animal into the cabin, passengers should expect to provide current documentation (not more than one year old) on a mental-health professional’s letterhead stating: (1) the passenger has a mental-health-related disability; (2) having the animal accompany the passenger is necessary to the passenger's mental health or treatment or to assist the passenger with his or her disability; and (3) that the individual providing the assessment of the passenger is a licensed mental-health professional and the passenger is under his or her professional care. Emotional support animals must be trained and behave properly within the airport and on the aircraft. Passengers traveling with an emotional support animal cannot sit in an emergency exit seat. Emotional Support Animal ID tags can help make your airline travel hassle free. Our customers have flown without confrontation on these airlines and many more...
|American Airlines||United Airlines||
If you cant view the Letters get Acrobat here
With or Without a Vest, ID Tags Give You the Proof You Need
By themselves, our tags easily identify your pet as an Emotional Support Animal and are not as hot as a vest. Even if you do use a vest and patches our Emotional Support Animal id tags have your animals's photo and information on it. Unlike cheap laminated cards, ours are made of durable plastic thicker than credit cards with the ink infused into the plastic so it can't chip off. Our regular size tags measure 3.375" x 2.125" (85.6mm x 54mm) - standard credit card size. Our new small tags are just the right size smaller dogs and measure 2 1/8" x 1 1/8".
Order a spare set now to keep on hand just in case one gets lost or damaged. Get FREE shipping on each additional set. Order Now
Showing reviews 1-10 of 13 | Next
Posted by maria mastrangelo on 21st May 2013
In this day and age it is difficult to find people and a company that truly stands up to what they represent. Thank you for making my process and order important. I will pass this information to everyone I know and will be ording again.
Posted by Unknown on 11th Dec 2012
Service dog tags are better than advertised very impressive
Posted by Bob on 12th Oct 2012
The tags are just as advertised and I was very surprised at how quickly we received them. Their price and quality relative to other sellers is outstanding. Do not hesitate to do business with servicedogtags.con
Posted by Mikaelaa on 9th Oct 2012
I love that this is a smaller family operation & you can tell by their wonderful customer service. The shipping was incredibly fast and we were pleased by the quality in the tags. Thank you!
Posted by Unknown on 27th Sep 2012
I received my tags very quickly.
The photo and printing was excellent and
just as advertised.
All information was correct.
Plastic connector for collar should hold up
for a long time
Posted by Unknown on 2nd Sep 2012
These tags are very easily seen and help the airport process go much smoother.
Posted by Unknown on 24th Aug 2012
The tag is noticable for persons needing to see if she is a service dog. I did get the tags for a large dog though.
Thank you for the cute picture.
Posted by Catherine and Dudley on 8th Aug 2012
The badge is beautiful and of very high quality. I was impressed with the speedy delivery after ordering (2 business days). I love that it is made in America by a family-owned company. I have shared this site with service dog community friends and will definitely fulfill future needs for my service dog tags here. Thanks for the terrific service.
Posted by Justin on 13th Jul 2012
The tag was made promptly and delivered early. It gave me great pride to buy from a family run business and an American made product. Next time I'm going for the deluxe options on the tag. Great Job guys.
Posted by Unknown on 8th Jul 2012
Idid not realize how much add'l stress I was under constantly explaining the "dog By my side".
The highly visable tag has helped to relieve me of that burden.
Showing reviews 1-10 of 13 | Next | <urn:uuid:5900f6c7-ac35-46cb-8164-2c2d670d55f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.servicedogtag.com/large-emotional-support-animal-tags/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95369 | 1,772 | 2.59375 | 3 |
BEVERLY — Mike Malewicki didn’t know he had a such a rare catch when he hauled in his lobster trap 12 miles offshore earlier this week.
“Stevie (fellow lobsterman Steven Hinchman) said, ‘What are you, blind?,’” Malewicki said. “I didn’t even notice.”
But there it was, crawling among the usual load of brown and green crustaceans — a cobalt blue lobster.
How rare is a blue lobster? Rare enough that Malewicki’s will soon go on display at the New England Aquarium.
The Aquarium has agreed to take the lobster and exhibit it along with the other two blue lobsters in its collection.
“He’s going to be seen by millions of people,” Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said.
LaCasse said lobster scientists estimate that only one in about 5 million lobsters is blue, although that number might be revised downward after a number of recent reports of colored lobster finds. The Lobster Institute of Orono, Maine, puts the ratio of blue lobsters at one in 2 million.
A blue lobster was found by a Rockport lobsterman this summer; it was donated to Maritime Gloucester.
Albino lobsters, which present with no color at all, are estimated to occur once in 100 million lobsters; several were found off Cape Ann this summer, including one freed by a reality TV star. One was found off Gloucester in 2010, and was also returned to the sea.
Malewicki, who has been lobstering for 30 years, gave his blue lobster to Rowand’s Seafood Market in Beverly so it could put the shellfish on display for kids to see.
“It’d be a shame to just sell it for somebody to enjoy it,” he said.
Rowand’s called the Aquarium, which plans to pick up the lobster in a couple of days. In the meantime, Rowand’s manager Aly Dupont said people are welcome to come down to the store to see it.
The lobster weighs 1.1 pounds and is about a foot and a half long.
LaCasse said it’s not easy for colored lobsters to survive. Most lobsters are a green-brown color (before they’re cooked) so that they blend in at the bottom of the ocean and avoid predators, he said. All lobsters except white, turn red when cooked.
“It’s a testimony to that little guy that he’s gotten this far,” LaCasse said. “He’s got to be pretty smart, too.”
Like all animals that go to the Aquarium, the blue lobster will be quarantined for a month before it goes on exhibit, to make sure it has no diseases.
Despite their rarity, blue lobsters aren’t worth a lot of money, according to LaCasse.
“People generally don’t want to eat them,” he said.
Staff writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2675 or email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:152a71da-05d5-4c64-995e-5f87dfa6cf3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gloucestertimes.com/local/x1475176415/Lobster-catch-was-out-of-the-blue | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955234 | 690 | 2.25 | 2 |
An introduction to the Science Fiction Foundation
The aim of the Science Fiction Foundation is to promote science fiction, and bring together those who read, write, study, teach, research or archive science fiction in Britain and the rest of the world.
We have published a Call for Papers for Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference which will take place in Liverpool 28 June – 1 July 2013.
Support our work by subscribing or donating here.
We publish the journal Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. We support the research library The Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool. We organise events that bring those interested in science fiction together by running conferences and masterclasses, and events at British and international science fiction conventions. We also publish critical works. You can find information about all of these activities elsewhere on this site.
The four main objectives of the SFF are:
- to provide research facilities for anyone wishing to study science fiction;
- to investigate and promote the usefulness of science fiction in education;
- to disseminate information about science fiction;
- and to promote a discriminating understanding of the nature of science fiction.
The Science Fiction Foundation (Registered Charity No. 1041052) was founded in 1970 by the writer/social activist George Hay and others as a semi-autonomous association of writers, academics, critics and others with an active interest in science fiction. Ursula K LeGuin and the late Arthur C. Clarke were the first patrons. Our current patrons are Ursula LeGuin, Neil Gaiman and Prof. David Southwood. | <urn:uuid:416f8f38-6977-4f38-b83e-f191cdeed03f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sf-foundation.org/ | 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 | 0.915724 | 335 | 1.75 | 2 |
By Ken Bolton, University of Wisconsin Extension
The primary financial stressor facing the dairy industry during late 2008 and throughout 2009 was the challenge to pay the bills with less than adequate Cash Flow (CF). While related, CF and Profit are distinct and separate issues. It is possible to experience CF shortages while profitable and to generate sufficient CF when profit is lacking. The needed level of CF for a particular business depends on levels of income generated, expense incurred and whether or not the farm manager can sleep at night.
Liquidity is the financial ability to pay the bills as they come due without unduly disrupting business operations. The action which most often disrupts business operations is the selling of production assets to generate cash to pay for short term production inputs.
Liquidity is typically measured in two terms; Current Ratio and Working Capital. Current Ratio (CR) is the relationship between cash plus near cash items and, bills plus operating debt plus the annual portion due on long term debt within the fiscal (financial) year. Near cash items include feed and other products of production in inventory which hasn’t yet been sold or fed to produce milk and animals which will be sold. Working Capital (WC) is the dollar value difference between Current Assets and Current Liabilities. WC is a snapshot in time representing the sum effect of CF up to that specific point.
WC may be compared to a peaceful looking static bee hive. Looks can be deceiving. Within and underlying this single dollar value is a literal colony of activity throughout the fiscal year that is far from static. Preceding this single value snapshot is each of the varying incomes from day to day and month to month. Additionally are all of the ebbs and flows in input costs including the current portion of debt due within the same fiscal period. In contrast to the snapshot in time single value of WC, CF is the difference between each of the variable incomes and expenses up to the time WC is calculated. Both CF and WC are indicators of the Liquidity of the business.
WC and CR are indicated on the Balance Sheet and CF on the Statement of Cash Flows (CF). Profitability is reflected in the Farm Earnings (FE) Statement.
All three are related and are thus referred to as "Integrated" financial statements. The CF Statement tracks all sources of cash including operating, investing and financing. The FE Statement accounts for all sources of cash incomes and expenses from production operations including the differences between those held in inventory (current ) and livestock (Intermediate) from one year to the next plus changes in prepaid and accounts receivables minus depreciation.
Two additional measures of Liquidity often considered in non-agricultural businesses are the relationships between WC and revenue as well as WC and production expenses. We address these ratios as well as those mentioned above in the new "Planning for the Next Swing in Milk Price" program. You may find them instructive as they report the percentage WC represents of total revenue and of production expenses.
The Balance Sheet is the source for determining Solvency, the ability to pay off debt from the absolute liquidation of business assets. CF affects FE which effects Liquidity which effects Solvency. Each must be considered in projecting business performance, typically in the form of an annual business plan.
The integrated financial statements detailed above along with an annual Business Plan direct you to answering the "Will I be able to pay the bills" question so often asked. According to industry sources lenders are increasingly requiring the above statements and an annual plan as well as monthly comparisons between the plan and actual performance. Even without an outside requirement, managers who have and use these reports in management decisions have established a competitive advance in the dairy industry for themselves. Is it time for you to take advantage of the same? | <urn:uuid:6e3b8026-043c-4b7b-ad39-cb91e8348e18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agweb.com/topproducer/article/will_you_be_able_to_pay_the_bills/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95825 | 762 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Protein and your cat
Protein is one of the most important nutrients in a cat’s diet. It provides “the building blocks” a cat needs to grow and stay healthy. It is also a source of energy for a cat. Protein is responsible for keeping skin, hair, muscles, and more in healthy working order. Amino acids in protein are used to make most enzymes, which are necessary for proper metabolism.
WHISKAS® food for cats has the highest level of protein,* They are an
excellent choice to make sure your cat is getting the protein he/she
needs. * Based on average on pack declared protein levels of comparable
Canadian dry cat food varieties across leading brands (based on Nielsen | <urn:uuid:496ca78b-1f9e-45cc-9bce-182f6676170c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whiskas.ca/en-ca/Nutrition/Cats-Diet-101/Protein-and-your-cat.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957142 | 152 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Kane’s first novel begins in London in 1943, with Brits wary of retaliation for a recent and devastating bombing of Berlin. In this heightened state, a siren sends them toward tube station shelters with a particularly quick step. At the Bethnal Green station, something happens in the crowd, a disturbance that leads to a crush. This real-life incident, which killed 173 people, provides the basis for Kane’s gentle, smart reimagining.
The official word from the government is that the shelter took a small hit from the sky. But the reader knows the shelter took no hit at all, and the book’s characters are suspicious: “The East Enders knew what death looked like. Three years of aerial bombardment — the specter of firestorms, collapsed buildings, charred and crushed bodies — had made everyone a coroner, and this quiet compression at Bethnal Green, in which some died and others lived, was, frankly, hard to believe.”
We flash forward to 1972, when Laurence (“Laurie”) Dunne, the magistrate who had been charged with investigating the tragedy and writing its official report, is visited by a young man making a documentary about the historic event. The parallels to 9/11 and its resulting report are clear without being spoken, but also somewhat beside the point — Kane is interested in how both events resemble any and all attempts to understand tragedy and assign blame for it.
The short chapters alternate between the past and present, a tactic that could have been jarring but instead neatly echoes one of the book’s themes: the way the past and present are never as far apart as we like to imagine. Kane, an American, has written of the skepticism some British readers bring to her book, but if anything, her unrushed, occasionally elegiac tone can seem more British than American. Bertram Lodge is a 22-year-old character kept out of the war because of his flat feet, and Kane writes: “It seemed impossible to Bertram that his feet would be the reason he was home watching sparrows instead of fighting.” It’s a lovely and indicative sentence.
Laurie’s inquiry yields voluminous and often contradictory information. The details of the night come to seem as hopelessly knotted as the people on the stairs were, “jumbled together, like fingers clasped in wretched, twisting prayer.” The resolution of the mystery, which I won’t give away here, is not central to the book’s project. For one thing, there’s enough foreshadowing that the answer is given gradually rather than as a eureka moment. But Kane is less interested in suspense than in mood. Her wartime London is grim but affectionately evoked — as seen in one well-chosen image, a churchyard that used flowers that “grew well on bomb sites.”
The Report by Jessica Francis Kane
Graywolf, 256 pp., $15.00 | <urn:uuid:5a725f42-cc24-444e-ac14-68d6eb998cd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thesecondpass.com/?p=7624 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969601 | 628 | 1.679688 | 2 |
By: Angela Wendler
The Los Angeles Times article, "Behold the trendy Mini-Me," was written with the inverted pyramid structure. The information is well organized with clear intention.
The writer used the nut graf concept very well. She lured her reader in with a little celebrity content before turning to the real content of the story.
The writer summarized the information well and presented the "whole picture" behind the story. She made me understand why I should care through the use of additional background information; she made the article relatable.
The article could have been structured differently, but I think the author chose the best structure to present this information. By using the inverted pyramid design, the writer allows the reader to get the gist of the article very quickly; if the reader is interested in the article he/she can continue reading, but if not the reader can move on without missing the most important information. | <urn:uuid:c1c4c6a1-424a-4876-9a0c-26d88f8058b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wendl074/3101newsfall2011/2011/10/analysis-structure-on-fashion-forward-toddlers.html | 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 | 0.946496 | 187 | 1.554688 | 2 |
At the close of 2011, the editorial staff at the Tribune Chronicle looked at the stories and newsmakers that it believed would grab headlines in 2012. They were:
Natural gas drilling and the money it could bring to the Mahoning Valley was a big story in 2011 that got bigger throughout 2012.
Kristi Gittins of Chief Oil and Gas shows a core sample of Marcellus shale that was drilled in Salladasburg, Pa.
Among the highlights were the hundreds of millions on dollars in mineral rights that landowners leased to energy giants BP America and Houston-based Halcon Resources, among others. Those deals were followed by BP's announcement that it is making North Jackson home to its Utica Shale Operations and plans to start drilling experimental wells by April 2013.
And just days before the new year, the first drilling rig in Trumbull County was erected in Hartford.
Along with the shale activity came protests, numerous town hall meetings and rallies against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is the process used to extract the natural gas from the shale rock. Opponents claim that the millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals injected under high pressure into the wells could potentially destroy the fresh water.
Large-scale protests and demonstrations were staged at Mosquito Creek Reservoir in May and the future site of a horizontal well in North Jackson in October.
2. Doug Franklin, Mayor of Warren
The City of Warren said goodbye to Michael O'Brien, who was mayor for eight years, and welcomed Doug Franklin.
Franklin was chosen over Jim Graham during the primary election in 2011 and then ran unopposed in the general election to become the city's first African-American mayor.
Among the issues his administration has dealt with in the past year are the shuttering of eight massage parlors; the debate over whether to issue a new bond to finance the consolidation of city operations into a one stop building; the planned $3.1 renovation of the Kresge Building for the Tech Belt Energy Innovation Center; the idling of the former RG Steel and layoff of more than 1,000 steelworkers; and a house fire that killed a family of four.
3. 2012 elections
The Mahoning Valley was a hot bed of political activity both on the national and local level.
Like it does every four years, the race for the White House brought well-knowns such as Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House John Boehner, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, his running mate, Paul Ryan, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, among others.
A few area races also featured familiar faces ... and foes.
In the 64th District State House of Representatives, Tom Letson was challenged by Republican Randy Law - whom Letson, a Democrat, originally beat for the seat. And farther south, former U.S. congressman, Charlie Wilson challenged Rep. Bill Johnson for his old 6th District seat. The incumbents won in both cases.
The frenzy of the political season was evidenced by the increased number of voters who couldn't wait until Election Day to make their picks. In Trumbull County alone, nearly 29,000 voters cast early ballots, compared to about 25,000 in 2008.
4. V&M Expansion
V&M Star, Youngstown's new state-of-the-art pipe mill along U.S. Route 422, produced its first pipe and remains on track for sales production to begin by early 2013.
The seamless pipe to be produced in the mill will support the long-term development of shale exploration in the United States and especially northeast Ohio's Utica Shale.
Company officials have said the initial production capacity will be 350,000 tons of seamless pipes per year.
To build the pipe, the company has hired a work force needed to staff the new $650 million facility, creating a payroll of more than $46 million.
5. CSB Investigation
The story of child abuse and rape that led to an investigation of the Trumbull County Children Services Board culminated in the conviction of husband and wife Cody and Felicia Banks Beemer and the exit of the agency's director.
The rape occurred during what was supposed to be a supervised visit at the CSB office in April 2011, and the acts were reported after being recorded on a cell phone.
Felicia Banks Beemer was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, and Cody Beemer was sentenced to 25-to-life.
CSB executive director Nick Kerosky was given a buyout in February, leaving his position amid the controversy.
6. Future of the Cruze
With the ongoing success of the Lordstown-built Chevrolet Cruze in 2011, expectations were high for GM going into 2012.
In November, the Cruze posted a 27 percent increase over sales in November 2011, helping the General Motors Co. record its highest November U.S. sales since 2007.
Prior to that, in August GM announced a $200 million investment to retool its Lordstown complex, a move that indicated increasing success for the Cruze.
Most of the investment is aimed at body retooling in the Lordstown plant, but also includes $20 million for upgrades to the Parma stamping plant, and GM officials have said the investment will help retain 5,000 jobs in Northeast Ohio.
According to a December report, Chevrolet remained the top-selling local make, with the Cruze outpacing all other models.
7. Raider football
Eyes were on new Warren G. Harding football coach Steve Arnold toward the end of 2011 and throughout 2012 as the Raiders made an impressive turnaround.
The team went from 2-8 to 9-1 in one season, earning a return to the Division I, Region 1 playoffs.
Arnold has said he wasn't surprised at the team's performance.
"Some people I saw in the summer and the fall said success would be 5-5," Arnold said. "I didn't take this job to go 5-5. I expect to win."
Arnold, a Warren native, had been the school's basketball coach since 2002 and assistant football coach from 1990 to '99.
The Raiders' improvement tied the biggest single-year turnaround in Harding's 120-year history.
8. Amish attacks trial
In a story that gained national attention, 16 Amish men and women from nearby Bergholz were tried and convicted of hate crimes - one of which was committed in Trumbull County.
Convicted of cutting the hair and beards of nine Amish men and women were Sam Mullet Sr., the leader of the group, and 15 other Amish, including Johnny S. Mullet, Daniel S. Mullet, Levi F. Miller, Eli M. Miller, Emanuel Shrock, Lester Miller, Raymond Miller, Freeman Burkholder, Anna Miller, Linda Shrock, Lester Mullet, Elizabeth A. Miller, Emma J. Miller, Kathryn Miller and Lovina Miller.
The attacks were said to have been committed due to religious differences between the victims and Mullet's breakaway group.
Sentencing is set for Jan. 24.
9. Valley horseracing
Plans to build a horse racetrack and video slot terminals in Austintown got a little giddy-up in 2012.
In July, Penn National Gaming Inc. filed an application with Ohio's racing commission to move its track from Toledo. It also applied with the state's lottery commission for the necessary licenses to have video slots on site.
The company, which plans to begin the education, training and hiring process early in 2013, has estimated the track could bring about 1,000 construction jobs as well as 1,000 more direct and indirect jobs.
The local track - to be known as the Hollywood Slots at Mahoning Valley Race Course - is expected to be open for business in early 2014 off Lanterman Road.
10. Execution on hold
Charles Lorraine was set to be executed in January for killing Raymond and Doris Montgomery in their Trumbull County home in May 1986.
Lorraine's execution was stayed, however, by a federal judge over concerns that the state deviated too often from its own rules for lethal injection.
A later ruling opened the door for other death row inmates to be executed. But for Lorraine to get back on the list, the stay would have to be lifted and the state Supreme Court would have to issue a new execution date.
In July, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said he was optimistic that the Ohio Attorney General's Office would soon file a motion to lift the stay still in effect for Lorraine. | <urn:uuid:0eb5f9f2-4fa1-449e-a66a-122af149572e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tribune-chronicle.com/page/content.detail/id/581141/Predictions-2012.html?nav=5021 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971891 | 1,785 | 2.09375 | 2 |
"Youth Say..." Lessons on Learning, Teaching, and Motivation from Young People
Youth say they want respect, voice, value, safety, support, challenges, and a sense that they are making a contribution to something good in the world, so what can we learn from young people about what motivates them to engage and learn new skills?
Based on interviews with and observations of youth media producers in the Philadelphia area, this resource explores what motivates these youth to engage in the programs and what advice they have for educators who want to foster more engagement from students. As part of my Stoneleigh Junior Fellowship with Research for Action in 2010-2011, I listened to radio and video producers from the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) and Chester Voices for Change (VFC) to see what they think is interesting and motivating about media and how that could be applied to other learning environments.
This resource highlights my finding that these media literacy programs draw heavily from the intrinsic motivations of young people and encourage the development of mastery goal orientation, both of which help to encourage deep and sustained learning. I try to show this by:
- summarizing key shared motivations for why youth spend time creating media;
- highlighting what drives students to master skills; and
- sharing advice from the youth themselves about what educators should do to better engage students.
This is part of a set of resources based on my year of research as a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow. The other resources on Digital Is include "Educators Offer..." Literacies are..." and "Youth Practice..." You can find more details about all of this work on the Research for Action website.
Motivation & Media
This video talks about what motivates young people to engage in Chester Voices for Change, and many youth participants in the Philadelphia Student Union shared these motivations for their own involvement in PSU. These shared motivations, like a desire to raise their voices and something positive in their communities, drew students into media programs because it connected to some of their intrinsic motivations. In addition, by drawing on students' interests, their plans for the future, and the reality of creating a product for a real audience, VFC and PSU also helped students develop goals focused on mastery, sustaining their interest and dedication to the program and work. These ideas and suggestions from youth to teachers will follow the video.
As noted earlier, the media programs at PSU and VFC draw heavily on students' intrinsic motivations to:
RAISE THEIR VOICES, which youth said over and over again. They want their stories to be heard. One producer from VFC explained, "The main thing teenagers look for is just for someone to listen to everything you have to say." This desire to be listened to was shared by other young producers, like another VFC member who explained how great it was to write about her own life and what she wanted to write about, and PSU producers who talked about their desire to "write the news and not be the news" by highlighting the real stories and perspectives of youth in their communities.
DO SOMETHING POSITIVE, which was another shared goal between the programs.One PSU member explained, "If I'm gonna dedicate my time to something, it should be something positive. And to me, this is as positive as it gets." Other youth producers talked about how making media contributed to their communities, helped them serve as role models for younger siblings or neighbors, and raised awareness of positive activities, programs, and other happenings in the community.
Youth were drawn to PSU and VFC because the media production in those programs connected to their intrinsic or internal desires to be heard and contribute to their communities. In addition, other key aspects of the student' motivations helped them to engage in sustained learning focused on mastery, so that they would persevere through difficulties until they mastered a skill or created a product that met their own high standards. The goals or motivations that helped spark this drive included:
CONNECTING TO EXISTING INTERESTS AND FUTURE PLANS, which many of the students expressed in their interviews. Many youth, especially those in VFC, were already interested in media or communications. For most youth, media is a part of their culture, it's something they interact with every day, and so learning about media was in some ways, a kind of culturally-relevant pedagogy for all youth. But beyond that, there were also participants who wanted to be journalists, radio hosts, actors, music producers, and talk show hosts. Their future plans and existing interests brought youth into the programs and because they were learning skills and using tools that had a clear purpose in their futures, they were willing and determined to master what they learned.
CREATING PRODUCTS FOR REAL AUDIENCES, which pushed the youth to create quality products of which they were proud. You knew that their final piece would be played on air or available for anyone in the world to listen to or watch online, and that challenged them to give their best. They knew their name would be associated with this product that others could see and they wanted it to be perfect. Producers in both programs volunteered to come in for extra or longer hours in hopes of putting their final touches on a piece, and this recognition that their work was for an audience beyond just their teacher or their parents was exciting and motivating.
These connections to existing interests, future goals, and real audiences encouraged youth to pursue perfection and push through difficulties in order to master the skills and tools involved in the process. This dedication to a task, project, and learning process is something that educators should strive for with all of their students because it supports them to persevere through mistakes and truly master a skill or knowledge set. As such, PSU and VFC members also provided their own advice for educators about how to support students:
RESPECT STUDENTS AND THEIR EXPERIENCES. This came up repeatedly throughout the interviews. Students felt disrespected by teachers, which made them less likely to want to learn because they didn't feel valued as a person. The main piece of advice students had for adults working with young people was to respect them, value their experiences, and understand that they have important contributions and knowledge to share.
VALUE STUDENTS' VOICES. Given that one key motivation for joining media literacy programs was for youth to be heard, it should be clear that educators must value and find ways to share the voices of their students. By listening to what students, honoring and valuing their stories, and recognizing the important things that youth share, educators can go a long way in supporting their students and encouraging them to participate because the youth feel valued and empowered.
PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES TO CREATE PRODUCTS WITH REAL AUDIENCES. By sharing their products with an audience beyond their teachers or classrooms, students felt motivated to revise their work and dedicate time to create a quality product. These kinds of opportunities help students connect to their communities and push through difficulties they encounter while learning and creating. Educators who provide more opportunities to reach a real audience will likely reach more students, too.
Although good teachers have been doing these things for years, I find it is always a helpful reminder to hear what students think - to understand what they see as most important, useful, or motivating. There are still, however, some questions that must be thought about in more detail:
- As important as student voice seems to be for encouraging student engagement in learning, how can student voice be effectively used and incorporated in today's educational climate that is so focused on reaching high test scores? This emphasis is clearly influencing today's classrooms and out-of-school programs as teachers are focused on test preparation and support for arts programs is being cut drastically. In this climate, how can educators in and outside of classrooms effectively support student voices?
- Since connecting to students' interests and future goals can help them develop mastery-oriented goals for learning, how can educators help all students to connect learning to their own interests and goals? This may be especially difficult when working with large classes that have a wide range of interests and goals within it or when students are forced or required to participate in a class or program. Having only worked with students in voluntary afterschool programs, I wonder how educators manage a variety of students with different interests, plans for the future, and initial levels of motivation. Is there a way for educators and peers to help every student connect with material in a more meaningful way?
- Although sharing work with a real audience is incredibly important, there are a number of ethical issues that must be thought about when doing so. At what stage is appropriate to share the work? How should youth, who are minors, be recognized or associated with their products? How might that change based on the content, audience, and mode of sharing? Who owns the final products when created in a group and for a particular class or organization? There are, undoubtedly, more questions along these lines that educators must consider when working with young people.
This is not meant to deter anyone from trying to use these techniques, but rather to note the difficulty and complexity of teaching and working with young learners and producers. If anyone has further ideas, suggestions, or responses, I'd love to hear them.
Don't forget to check out the details of this research on the Research for Action website. | <urn:uuid:50b57c5b-28a1-4994-9a7f-605781ad1427> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/2500 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975156 | 1,896 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Welcome to OscarTrivia.com, your #1 source for all the trivia and minutiae from the 85-year history of the Academy Awards. Here you'll find interesting facts and statistics about the most coveted award in show business: the Oscar statuette.
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A Note on Year Notation
The Academy Awards are presented annually in February for the artistic achievements of the previous year. It is for this reason that—unless otherwise noted—all dates referenced throughout the site refer to the year of awards eligibility (in most cases, the year the film was released), not the year in which the awards were presented (e.g. The 2012 Academy Awards will be held on February 24, 2013).
Additionally, from the Academy Awards' inception in 1927 until 1933 the awards' eligibility period did not match a calendar year. For this reason films that were nominated or won Oscars before 1934 indicate the eligibility period rather than the exact year or release. For example, Wings is listed as the Best Picture winner for 1927/28. | <urn:uuid:72a15465-eb0d-4bc1-9d46-6cbd65d9d2b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oscartrivia.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9535 | 236 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Apparently, the teachers were planning on using the Boston Tea Party as an example of how propaganda works to twist our view of events. My problem with it is, they really need to make a clear image of exactly what the Boston Tea Party in the student's minds first for this to not completely backfire. I can very easily see this as teaching that terrorism could be any act or attitude in defiance of the government (which is a false definition), to justifying how it's okay to kill those who harbor terrorism, or even to show how it's understandable for foreign nations to protect the terrorists. In a society and a culture with a clear moral standard, this exercise could work, but I wouldn't trust it in public schools today.
"Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice." -- Thomas Paine
Want DP delivered to your inbox daily? Subscribe here: | <urn:uuid:5a755c10-f854-4107-bfc2-2c7be2edf95e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailypaul.com/comment/2846540 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958627 | 183 | 2.328125 | 2 |
We are approaching the first decennial review of CDQ entities after 2006 changes to the law governing the Community Development Quota program and entities took effect.
UgaVic and I hope to talk about a number of the issues surrounding CDQs and the upcoming review in the coming weeks.
We thought it might be best to start with a very basic overview of the CDQ program- to refresh the memory of those who know about it already, as well as provide a framework for those who have never heard of it.
Setting the blade on high and risking leaving some very rough patches as I blaze over the subject but hoping to be somewhat inclusive of any folks who have never heard of CDQs I will make a flying run at it all.
CDQ, Community Development Quota , is the federal legislative response to concern by small communities on the Bering Sea in relation to their ability to partake in the catch share programs in federal waters off the coast they live on.
The law established that a percentage of yearly allowable catch , in multiple fisheries, be set aside for these villages who could not and would not be eligible for shares under the rules established for allocation of shares otherwise because of their historical lack of presence in the fisheries . (Their lack of presence , the whys, hows, and wherefores is a piece of the whole but needs a post by itself) )
Six regional non-profits were organized to manage the monies derived from the profits the sales of the set aside quota made. The ones I’ve had occasion to cross paths with are organized as 501(c)(4)s -social welfare-but I have never checked to see if all six are. Member villages have representatives in the regional corporations. Each CDQ entity has bylaws governing how those representatives are chosen.
As often happens, the term CDQ began to stand for the organizations themselves as well as the program so there’s a lot of flinging around of the term which gets confusing.
The law required that all CDQs have Community Development Plans and limited investments , outside of monies earmarked for education opportunities for stakeholders in their villages, to fishery infrastructure and support related projects.
It also required yearly state oversight of the CDPs to see if intent and reality matched
Within a few years , some of the CDQs started fishing their own quota rather than receiving the monies from sale of their quota, by investing as partners in other companies or buying their own boats/ships/processor companies. This was hailed as win-win as they were then in the position of being able to provide employment opportunities to their stakeholders as well.
Along the way , the law was changed to drop yearly state oversight, lengthen reporting time between CDPs, and allow for some non-fisheries related investment amongst other changes.
Some CDQs now have large for-profit corporations which operate as “feeders” of monies to the parent non-profits.There have been wrangles over how much information the “feeders” do or do not share with their parent non-profits and stakeholders, as well as how much information the CDQ entities must share with their stakeholders .
People ask about what the real benefits to CDQ communities are/ might be – it’s not simple to answer.
Many of the metrics used to measure benefit fall into what I think of as taking the temperature of the picture of the people on the box the thermometer came in.
They are measures of dollars piled up, spread around, employment figures without full context, glossies of completed projects, and so on.
The current law says :
(H) DECENNIAL REVIEW AND ADJUSTMENT OF ENTITY ALLOCATIONS.—
(i) IN GENERAL.—During calendar year 2012 and every 10 years thereafter, the State of Alaska shall evaluate the performance of each entity participating in the program based on the criteria described in clause (ii).
(ii) CRITERIA.—The panel shall establish a system to be applied under this subparagraph that allows each entity participating in the program to assign relative
values to the following criteria to reflect the particular needs of its villages:
(I) Changes during the preceding 10-year period in population, poverty level, and economic development in the entity’s member villages.
(II) The overall financial performance of the entity, including fishery and nonfishery investments by the entity.
(III) Employment, scholarships, and training supported by the entity.
(IV) Achieving of the goals of the entity’s community development plan.
At this point, the State of Alaska is attempting to develop a way to evaluate performance and looking to funding to perform the review.
Many stakeholders in member villages feel that the weaknesses identified in this 1999 report have never been addressed and should be integrated in meaningful measure in the upcoming evaluation process.
“Perhaps the greatest weakness of the CDQ program as implemented is lack of open, consistent communication between the CDQ groups and the communities they represent, particularly a lack of mechanisms for substantial input from the communities into the governance structures. There has also been a lack of outreach by the state to the communities to help ensure that the communities are aware of the program and how to participate. Some controversy has surrounded the uncertainty about the intended beneficiaries of the program—essentially, whether the program is intended primarily for the Native Alaskan residents of the participating communities, and, if not, review the governance structures to ensure that non-native participation is possible. “
I think stakeholders are correct here. Accepting what these CDQ entities say about their own performance, weighted at their own discretion, creates a very narrow window on what might be called “success” .
With that in mind, I do not think we will be able to judge clearly whether the CDQs are really benefitting their communities if we cannot extend or adjust the way we measure success and benefit to include criteria for judgment not normally employed by “blue ribbon panels” or self interested self-reporting.
Stakeholders and their communities , the supposed beneficiaries of “success’ must have a place at the table, a part in the evaluation process, for the process to be credible.
I have skipped right on by anything to do with the uproar over CDQs participating in trawl fisheries which are suspected of damaging other fisheries including subsistence fishing but it is an important aspect of questioning real benefit as well | <urn:uuid:c9ed2bb1-bb5b-4da6-8d4b-3288ffdfe033> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://anonymousbloggers.wordpress.com/2012/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964786 | 1,333 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Hello, I'm Mark Pearson.
According to the National Turkey Federation, some 46 million turkeys will be eaten this week in celebration of Thanksgiving. At an average weight of 15 pounds, the federation calculates that 690 million pound of turkey will be consumed by Americans this week alone.
That's good news for turkey producers who have spent much of their time in recent months tracking the spread of avian influenza, or bird flu.
The virus in its many forms has not reached American shores just yet, but the same thing may not be said by this time next Thanksgiving. Carried by migratory fowl, bird flu is spreading from continent to continent, with Asia seeing the most cases thus far.
This week, the focus is on China, where new outbreaks have spurred a nationwide campaign to stop the disease from causing further damage.
China's Ministry of Agriculture this week announced three new outbreaks of bird flu. At the same time, the country pledged to step up measures to fight the deadly virus-- destroying nearly 175,000 birds in the western and southern areas of the country where the most recent outbreaks occurred.
The report from China comes on the heels of a Canadian report of one duck on a poultry farm testing positive for the avian flu virus. But officials said it was not the form of the virus circulating in Southeast Asia that has been blamed for more than 60 deaths.
No matter the strain of virus, poultry imports from the province of British Columbia now have been banned in the U.S., Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.
Hong Kong -- which also fears the disease will jump the border from China -- has been on hyper alert for signs of bird flu. The country does not want to suffer the economic devastation it did with the 2003 outbreak of SARS ... which killed nearly 300 people in the city.
Slug Senate hearing
The U.S. is also preparing, as a senate agriculture committee learned last week.
Sync: Dr. Ron DeHaven, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, USDA: "Given the risks APHIS's safeguarding system against avian influenza is robust encompassing, among other things, trade restrictions on poultry and poultry products from overseas, anti-smuggling programs, targeted surveillance in commercial poultry operations and the live bird marketing system in the northeast United States, cooperative efforts in information-sharing with states and industry and outreach to producers regarding the need for effective on-farm bio-security measures." | <urn:uuid:eaf80d16-7b9c-4ff0-af63-26580a9399b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iptv.org/mtom/story.cfm/lead/6196/mtom_20051125_3112_lead3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947687 | 497 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Sometimes the opening of the penis where urine passes can become blocked and can cause various problems with urination. The following information should help you understand this condition and how it can be treated.
What is meatal stenosis?
Meatal stenosis is an abnormal narrowing of the urethral meatus in males. This refers to the size of the opening at the tip of the penis. This condition is usually acquired but can exist from birth.
What are some risk factors for meatal stenosis?
Meatal stenosis is most commonly associated with circumcision and is rarely seen in uncircumcised males. It is likely that the newly exposed tip of the penis (including the meatus) suffers mild injury as it rubs against a diaper or the child's own skin. Over time this chronic irritation can result in scarring and a narrowing of the meatus. It can also result from mild ischemia that occurs with circumcision. Meatal stenosis can also occur after hypospadias repair. While this is uncommon, it can present in up to 4% of patients undergoing surgery to correct hypospadias. Injury to the tip of the penis, inflammatory skin conditions (including balanitis and BXO), or prolonged use of urinary catheters can also increase the risk of meatal stenosis.
What are symptoms of meatal stenosis?
Meatal stenosis can present with many different symptoms related to a partially obstructed urinary stream. These include pain or burning with urination, urgency of urination, frequency of urination, as well as a urinary stream that sprays or is difficult to aim, or a small drop of blood from the meatus at the time of completion of urination.
How is meatal stenosis diagnosed?
Physical exam will reveal a small, narrowed meatus. This should correlate with urinating symptoms of urinary obstruction. Upon close inspection, the lower surface of the meatus is often adhered. Measuring the meatus is often unnecessary and will expose the patient to further risk of injury.
How is meatal stenosis treated?
Surgical intervention with a meatotomy, an incision to enlarge the meatus, is the most reliable treatment. This procedure involves sharply dividing the lower surface of the meatus. Recurrence of stenosis after meatotomy is rare, as long as appropriate care is provided by the parent. Dilation of the urethral meatus can result in tearing of the meatus. While this may provide short-term improvement in symptoms, the resultant scarring usually causes more severe symptoms and a narrower meatus.
What can be expected after treatment?
Meatotomy is a very effective treatment for meatal stenosis. Pain at the tip of the penis can be managed with oral analgesics or warm baths. Bleeding is rare and usually controlled with direct pressure. Recovery time is rapid, typically one to two days. Applying a lubricating ointment or petroleum jelly to the tip of the penis can aid in patient discomfort and wound healing.
Reviewed January 2011 | <urn:uuid:3bf8dd0f-8b46-4e65-8595-11d1e27d8a74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urologyhealth.org/urology/index.cfm?article=121 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950867 | 622 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Faux Bas Relief
Historic downtown Huntsville has some examples of an illusionary technique called trompe l'oeil (which is French for "trick of the eye.") by Richard Haas. There are three murals depicting Sam Houston's life facing east on the corner of U.S. 190 and University Avenue. They rise approximately two stories and depicts "Houston as Colonned the Cherokee," "Houston's at Woodland Home" and "Battle of San Jacinto 1836."
The fourth picture show the architectural details of a bygone era in a fake relief on the elegant 19th century Gibbs Building. Richard Haas is apparently a currently practicing muralist and artist. For some reason I assumed that because the murals were in the historic district that meant that they were themselves historic. But according to this website, he did his Huntsville work in the early to mid 1990s
Sam Houston's Statue
I had thought of going to Huntsville, but had not planned to go this particular day, so I didn't have the info with me. Huntsville was Sam Houston's bailiwick. General Sam Houston was the President of the Republic of Texas after they won their war with Mexico.
Not only is there the Sam Houston State University, and a museum dedicated to him and a cemetery with his grave in it, but there is also a 77 foot high statue (the tallest statue to an American hero anywhere in the world). I knew about the statue, but according to what was written in the AAA book I thought it was at his gravesite. I thought I would surely be able to see it since it was so big.
But it is NOT at Sam Houston's grave (which we eventually did find). At the cemetery I found directions to the museum (which was closed when we got there) and the visitor's center where the statue is. We stopped at the visitor's center anyway and walked down the path to see the statue (last two photos). Since we visited Huntsville coming from the east, we didn't have the benefit of seeing the statue from the highway. When we approached that way, it definitely was visible from a long way off (first three photos).
The name of the statue is “A Tribute to Courage” by the artist David Adickes. The statue was dedicated on October 22,1994. It is actually only 67 feet tall but they include the 10 foot granite base.
Forget the parka and snoeshoes
Whatever meets your needs East Texas is prone to unexpected rain showers. Dress cool, it can be hot and humid in the summer. Shucks, folks. We got a Wal-Mart. You can buy it here. Sure! Lot's of great nature, wildlife and historical sights to remember. Huntsvills State Park offers swimming, hiking, paddleboats, canoe rentals, primitive to plug-in camping sites, etc.
Oakwood Cemetery Walking Tour
Prior to Texas winning independence from Mexico, Huntsville was founded in 1835 by Pleasant Gray. Twelve years later he deeded this land to Huntsville for "a place of burial, free to all persons." This cemetery, however, was in use before Gray's deed. The oldest headstone has the date 1842, but earlier graves were either unmarked or the markers have long since disappeared.
The Oakwood Cemetery is the final resting place for many people of historical prominence, also in Oakwood are buried 8 Union soldiers, 123 Confederate soldiers and possibly more.
Just inside the entrance to the cemetery is a covered rack with brochures which lead you step-by-step to 31 gravesites and/or points of interest. A light rain was falling when I was there, but I still found the place fascinating.
To find the Oakwood Cemetery from Huntsville's downtown square, travel east on 11th Street and turn left on Spur 94. This is Sam Houston Memorial Drive, which is Texas' shortest highway. It will lead you one block to the cemetery, at the corner of I and 9th Street.
Solid and practical
The kitchen being a separate building altogether from the home had many practical reasons. First it reduced the chance of fire moving on to the main home. Second it reduced the heat in the overwhelming humid summer. | <urn:uuid:79b48a28-e1df-4b0c-8bb7-e1bbd9eb235a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.virtualtourist.com/hotels/North_America/United_States_of_America/Texas/Huntsville-878343/Hotels_and_Accommodations-Huntsville-Super_8_Huntsville-BR-1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981318 | 869 | 2.015625 | 2 |
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An industrial wireless network is essential for any sort of “PlantBerry” reporting, Lambright adds. “Smart phones and PDAs rely on cellular networks. You can’t tie that into a system of record, so you have to create a wireless network that’s secure and high-performance, and it’s unlikely that’s going to be cellular. It’s going to be Wi-Max or 802.11 or some standard designed for the purpose. You’re going to want to create a dedicated network, so you’re not creating a risk in the plant.”
And that dedicated network is one of the sticking points for some process manufacturers. “Putting wireless intrastructure in an industrial facility is not at all like installing one in an office,” says Motorola’s Eriksen. “We’re not talking about just putting in a bunch of hot spots. You have to take into account battery life, security, issues about pre-emptive roaming. Getting coverage is much more challenging than in an office. You need to do a much better job of surveying the facility and designing the infrastructure.”
Once we start talking about installing wireless architecture, the potentially ugly conflict between IT and plant operations looms. The way to avoid the conflict—or at least minimize its negative effects—is to take a holistic view, says Eriksen.
“Too many companies will deploy wireless and handhelds separately. Then they find out they’re not as compatible as they thought,” he says. “We’ve seen too many cases where one group puts in wireless, and another group puts in handhelds, and they’re not talking to one another.”
The challenge is that in an organizational hierarchy where the plant is Level 3 and IT is Level 4, the wireless system and accompanying handheld deployment falls at Level 3.5. “Who’s going to own 3.5?” asks Eriksen. “It has to be decided. It’s another battleground between plant and IT, but plants are in a better position to know.”
Taking a holistic approach means addressing not only that “who gets to say” issue, but looking at all the ramifications of the implementation for deployment. Eriksen says this means understanding a number of things; for example, that security standards should be supported by the devices and that battery life is related to how the devices are used on the network. “Properly designed, you can easily get a full shift off of one battery, but if you set up your device in such a way that the device doesn’t know how to interact with the network in a battery-efficient way, you’ll run down your battery in no time,” he says.
Another factor to consider is that most handhelds are based on Windows mobile software, but most wireless deployments are 802.11 standard-based technology. Taking a holistic approach to deployment means making sure these things work together. “It’s not to say you can’t mix and match,” says Eriksen, “but you have to think about that before you put [the system] in. You should have the same group responsible for both.”
So how close are we to “beach blanket control?” Not very.
“It’s not a driving demand,” says NI’s Jackson. “It’s by no means a game-changing technology. We’ll see slow adoption.”
Transpara’s Saucier concurs, up to a point. “The adoption is all over the map,” he says. “It’s never going to be used for control purposes. You’re not going to be phoning in setpoints.” Adoption is also a matter of country and culture, he says. “In Japan it’s already there. Europe is in second place for cultural readiness. It will be 10 to 12 years in the U.S.”
But then, look out. “One good thing about the graying workforce is that the next generation will adopt it immediately,” says Saucier.
Information delivery is where handhelds are coming into their own in process operations. In real-world work situations they have three major applications, says Robert Jackson, of product marketing at National Instruments.
At a large process manufacturer on the Gulf Coast, Apprion and systems integrator Rapid Solutions USA, a subsidiary of systems integrator Rapid Technologies in Calgary, Alberta, are implementing a system supporting all three of those goals. This company needs to increase its equipment uptime and produce more with less, explains John Lindsey, executive vice president at Rapid. The machinery needs to be kept up longer and operate accurately in order to produce better product and more of it. The company also needs to capture “near-miss” details of accidents that almost happen for reporting to OSHA. It also wants to use the data to reduce such incidents and their accompanying risk.
“Basically the goal is to put accurate information into the hander of workers and replace sticky notes and pads. When people don’t have the correct information, they get hurt, says Lindsey.
To achieve these goals, all the operations and maintenance engineers and capital projects staff are begin given handhelds. “Real-time wirelss components can deliver everything on the PC out to the field workers, explains Lindsey. “CMMS for parts and work orders, information from the ERP system, pump operation conditions, etc. Workers can document everything they’ve done and feed it back to all the systems.”
Power to the Power People
One of the early adopters of mobile reporting technology—the power generation industry—came as a surprise to Michael Saucier, founder and CEO of Transpara.
“I thought power would be laggards, but deregulation has set these guys on fire,” he says. “They’re fighting for their lives. So they’re using these [systems] big time. Some of them have a clear focus on fleet-wide performance management. It’s not just a matter of making one physical plant work well, but coordinating all activites to optimize corporate goals. They’re looking at assets as part of a portfolio instead of standalone. By having a transparent view of the data, people understand why these decisions are made. This doesn’t just lead to better performance, but boosts morale because people can see why certain decisions are made.”
Saucier says that half of his power clients don’t use the mobile technologies, but the other half are putting them on all their mobile devices. “It doesn’t matter whether you use big screens or small screens,” he says. “The secret sauce is the composite nature of the data. How you deliver this transparency is role-dependent. Executives want to look at different things than the engineers, but the underlying data is all the same.”
ControlGlobal.com is exclusively dedicated to the global process automation market. We report on developing industry trends, illustrate successful industry applications, and update the basic skills and knowledge base that provide the profession's foundation. | <urn:uuid:b504ba01-97b7-4085-9336-dc3033efc752> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2008/240.html?page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944053 | 1,600 | 1.648438 | 2 |
The Highly Effective Habits of Millionaires
CNBC.com News Editor
Millionaires are more optimisticabout the economy but unlike the rest of us, they don’t blow their whole paycheck on videogames and Little Debbie snack cakes.
Instead, they keep their eye on the prize: Keeping their money — and making more.
A recent survey of wealthy Americans revealed what millionaires plan to do with their money this year.
Their priorities are still to pay down debt and save money: The average millionaire household saved over $39,000 last year, and plans to save the same or more this year, according to a recent survey by Spectrem Group.
But they’re also ready to increase their bets on the recovery: Forty-five percent plan on increasing the amount they have invested in the stock market, the survey showed. The biggest area they plan to invest in is technology (58 percent), followed by the pharmaceutical industry (48 percent) and health care (47 percent).
And the gold rush isn’t over: Forty-one percent said they plan to invest in gold and 24 percent were considering other precious metals.
They may be poising themselves to cash in as the economy grows but they maintain the discipline of monks: Eight-one percent said they don’t believe the recession is over and just two percent consider themselves “aggressive” investors.
That discipline not only applies to how they spend their money but how they live their life and how they navigate business.
Millionaires only have 24 hours in a day, just like the rest of us. What separates them from us is time management. While the rest of us go home and flop on the couch in front of the TV, the wealthy are reading and doing things that contribute to their success.
As a teenager in Seattle, Bill Gates used to sneak out of his house at night and on the weekends to go down to the computer lab. He was doing real-time computer programming by eighth grade. He didn’t spend his high school years watching television and dreaming of studying computer science in college, he spent it actually working on computers. Knowing that, it makes more sense that he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft — he was just a guy ahead of schedule!
Apple founder Steve Jobs, in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, explained his daily ritual to make sure there isn’t any grass growing under his feet:
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” (Watch the speech in this YouTube video.)
Another highly effective habit of the wealthy is that they are decisive.
One of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s business tenets is “Never Suck Your Thumb.” That means that, at a certain point, you’ve got to stop thinking — and start acting.
In his 1989 annual report, Buffett explained how he learned the thumb-sucking lesson the hard way: "It's no sin to miss a great opportunity outside one's area of competence. But I have passed on a couple of really big purchases that were served up to me on a platter and that I was fully capable of understanding. For Berkshire's shareholders, myself included, the cost of this thumb-sucking has been huge."
At a certain point, you just have to ask yourself: How’s that couch working out for you?
- The World's Coolest Jobs 2011
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Questions? Comments? Email firstname.lastname@example.org or drop a line in the comment box below.
More from The Pony Blog: ponyblog.cnbc.com | <urn:uuid:b6e2af8f-633c-499a-b251-da2e94cee092> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/41967495 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97052 | 891 | 2 | 2 |
The committee with seven government lawmakers and four opposition party members was appointed to look into the charges against chief justice Shirani Bandaranayake.
Minister Anura Yapa who chaired the parliamentary select committee (PSC) presented the report which is widely believed to find the lady chief justice guilty.
The leader of the House and senior minister Nimal Siripala de Silva said the reports would be printed.
Opposition legislator John Amaratunga when asked for a debate on the issue was told by the Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa that a debate could be HELD within a month.
The PSC report was submitted despite opposition members walking out of the PSC yesterday calling it a hurried process. Bandaranayake herself and her lawyers walked out of the proceedings on Thursday.
They called the process unfair and accused the government members of turning personally abusive towards her.
The lady chief justice faced impeachment for her removal from office based on 14 charges of private and professional misconduct as the top judge.
She denied all of the charges and stated she was capable of proving her innocence but the PSC whose majority is from the government was bent on not giving her a fair trial, opposition had said.
Colombo: A Sri Lankan committee looking into charges against the country's first woman chief justice Saturday presented its report to the Parliament despite opposition lawmakers withdrawing from the panel saying the process was flawed and unfair.
First Published: Saturday, December 08, 2012, 13:29 | <urn:uuid:47a99bf1-4f78-4fa4-9dd9-243abfe64715> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/lankan-top-judge-s-impeachment-trial-report-presented-to-parliament_815466.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979184 | 301 | 1.625 | 2 |
National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority
The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) commenced operations on 1 January 2012.
NOPSEMA has regulatory responsibility for occupational health and safety, structural integrity of facilities, wells and well-related equipment, environmental management, and day-to-day operations of offshore petroleum facilities in Commonwealth waters, and in coastal waters where regulatory functions and powers have been conferred under State or Northern Territory legislation.
NOPSEMA is accountable to the Commonwealth Minister for Resources and Energy, and provides nationally consistent safety and environmental regulation across the offshore petroleum industry to deliver world-best practice safety and environmental regulation for Australia.
2011 NOPSA Operational Review Report
In accordance with section 695 of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006 (OPGGSA), in 2011 a panel of experts with backgrounds drawn from across industry, government and corporate sectors undertook a review of the operations of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority (NOPSA) (which expanded to become NOPSEMA from 1 January 2012).
The government responded to the 2011 NOPSA Operational Review in May 2012, following consultation with NOPSEMA, and those organisations that provided submissions to the Review Panel. The Minister for Resources and Energy, the Hon Martin Ferguson AM MP, released the final Government Response to the 2011 NOPSA Operational Review on 25 May 2012.
In its response, the government has considered and accepted all of the Review Panel’s Recommendations. Implementation of many of the recommendations will be the responsibility of NOPSEMA, with a number to be jointly implemented by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism and NOPSEMA. A comprehensive implementation plan accompanies the final response, and outlines the timeframe for implementing the accepted recommendations from the Review (see Related documents).
The first review of NOPSEMA will relate to the three-year period beginning 1 January 2012. Subsequent reports will relate to successive five-year periods.
For more information about NOPSEMA, or for resource material relating to regulation of safety, well integrity or environmental management, see the NOPSEMA website.
Further information about the review, including the Terms of Reference, submissions and information on the Review Panel are available on the NOPSA Review website. | <urn:uuid:8d7cedd4-48c4-437b-8ff3-227c4a743453> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/upstream_petroleum/nopsema/Pages/nopsema.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915274 | 464 | 1.867188 | 2 |
The Cerebral Rings
Object: Take apart and put back together
Difficulty: Level 8 - Demanding
Type: Plastic Interlocking Puzzles
Dimensions: 3.8 in x 4.1 in x 1.8 in / 9.7 cm x 10.5 cm x 4.5 cm
Fabled to have been found among the effects of the renowned astronomer Johannes Kepler, was an early version of the Cerebral Rings. This challenging puzzle baffles astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians alike. It was said that Kepler’s students had to master the expanding layers of the Cerebral Rings and the red plungers within, solving the puzzle in order to progress to apprenticeship. There are hundreds of possible combinations and only 8 solutions.
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May 24, 2012 at 3:09 PM ET
Getting a shot may soon be nearly painless, according to researchers developing a new type of syringe.
The device is able to blast a high-pressure jet of medicine at the speed of sound through a person’s skin without the aid of a hypodermic needle.
The jet is about the same diameter as a mosquito’s proboscis, Ian Hunter, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains in the video below.
“As many of you know, you don’t feel when the mosquito inserts its proboscis into your skin because it’s so very narrow,” he said.
While needle-less syringes have been around for a few years, the prototype device Hunter and his colleagues are developing can be fine-tuned to control the depth and speed of drug delivery.
For example, a shot may start with a super high-pressure blast to penetrate the skin, but then scaled back to deliver the drug in a slower stream.
This variable adjustment of the jet may ring familiar to fans of Star Trek, where medical officers are constantly fiddling with drugs and doses.
This is all possible thanks to a mechanism called a Lorentz-force actuator that MIT describes in a news release as:
A small, powerful magnet surrounded by a coil of wire that’s attached to a piston inside a drug ampoule. When current is applied, it interacts with the magnetic field to produce a force that pushes the piston forward, ejecting the drug at very high pressure and velocity. … The speed of the coil and the velocity imparted to the drug can be controlled by the amount of current applied.
The device can be programmed for different types of skin — a baby getting the whooping cough vaccine at the doctor’s office, for example, has softer skin than parents and grandparents who might also need the shot.
According to Hunter, the device can be used for delivery of drugs right through the eye into the retina as well as the inner ear.
The device can also be programmed to vibrate, which is able to make powdered drugs behave as if they were a liquid, which means it can inject powdered vaccines in parts of the world that lack refrigeration.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below. | <urn:uuid:b0dd491c-1009-430a-bf73-6ffc55960d91> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/afraid-needles-futuristic-syringe-doesnt-need-them-793149 | 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 | 0.951601 | 520 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Becker Underwood: Major Changes At St. Joseph
Becker Underwood’s St. Joseph facility has undergone a major expansion in recent years.
October 6, 2010
According to Chris Feiden, head of operations, St. Joseph, MO, and Caldwell, ID, for Becker Underwood, these are exciting times for the fields of inoculants and seed treatments. “Right now, we are entering a new era of biologicals use in agriculture,” says Feiden. “You already have products out there for legumes, and there are many more just around the corner for both legumes and other crops.”
It’s for this reason that Becker Underwood’s St. Joseph facility has undergone a major expansion in recent years. Originally constructed in 1997, the St. Joseph plant has added two 20,000-liter fermentation tanks to the mix, joining two 2,000-liter and two 6,000-liter fermentation tanks already at the site. This has effectively quadrupled the plant’s output capacity, says Feiden.
“We needed to do this to just keep pace with market trends,” he says. “It used to be that growers did a lot of their own seed treating with inoculants, but that’s all changed. Today, most inoculant seed treatment is being done by seed retailers and professional seed dealers.” In terms of size, adds Feiden, this has boosted soybean inoculant seed treatments from approximately 15% in 1997 to nearly 30% today.
“But that still leaves almost 70% of the soybean seed market not using an inoculant product,” he says. “That’s our biggest challenge right now as an industry, the non-user who doesn’t yet understand or believe in the value of the new generation of inoculant products. But as our technology continues to improve and prove itself, I think we will have plenty of opportunities to reach these potential customers.” | <urn:uuid:e0cfe8a1-0fdc-483c-80e5-68cdea9316c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.croplife.com/article/3181/becker-underwood-major-changes-at-st-joseph | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950832 | 423 | 1.625 | 2 |
Shelfari submitted a request to combine 2 books Friday, February 8, 2013.
Bookwizard edited the first edition of Watchers: The Coming of the King Wednesday, January 9, 2013.
Shelfari edited the subjects of Watchers: The Coming of the King Friday, March 5, 2010.
Shelfari edited the classification of Watchers: The Coming of the King Wednesday, January 27, 2010.
Shelfari edited the description of Watchers: The Coming of the King Thursday, August 6, 2009.
The old wall is a border: England and Scotland, South and North, light and darkness. It is 1745, and the long-awaited night as come. The Bloodking calls his army to battle, and armed with the powers of the undead and the damned, he will bring them South to claim his birthright: The throne of Britain. Only the old Watchers on the wall stand in his way. They, their swords, and their faith. But too much time has passed and the Watch has grown slack and ill-prepared for the coming war. Only Martin and Sean have seen the horrors that lie ahead for humankind. Only they have the power to stop it. Now, two young officers of the Watch have a duty to perform: Stop the Bloodking. Or die trying. | <urn:uuid:b69d2dae-8034-448b-8f38-ab96bbd90a70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shelfari.com/books/128798/Watchers-The-Coming-of-the-King/history | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948087 | 271 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Categories: Strategy and Leadership
According to a Gartner analyst firm report, 15% of all IT projects failed that year because of high cost variance, while 18% were unsuccessful because they were substantially late. [i] This means that in 2008, 1 in 3 technology projects failed. Why such a dismal success rate? Such projects primarily involve the management of human resources in order to accomplish the target schedule, cost, and quality, so it is safe to assume that poor resource management played a large role. Unfortunately, without effective resource management processes, such organizations are left asking questions like:
- “Who is working on what?”
- “How do I get this project back on schedule?”
- “How much more work will it take to finish?”
The Problem with IT Projects Today
IT project teams are made up of knowledge workers who are categorized by skill types or job functions. For example, a project team might require business analysts, developers, team leads, project managers, architects, or database analysts. Finding the right person to assign to a project or task can be the most challenging problem confronting the organization. Typically, quality staff is scarce and therefore heavily sought by competing projects. Without resource management processes, the organization struggles with allocation of its staff across projects.
In addition, project managers are responsible for keeping scope, budget, and schedules on track. How can project managers achieve this when they don’t know how many hours it takes to accomplish a task, or how many hours remain in the project? Without an effective system in place, project managers must constantly intrude on team members to get estimates. Likewise, the management team is always asking for status reports and accurate information on projects so that they can make critical decisions. Of course, the project manager is always the last to know when one of his or her critical resources has been magically “re-assigned” to another high profile project! In the words of a famous song, many project managers are “stitched up, out of their mind, feeling strung out, lagging behind, trapped in, can’t do a thing because they’re locked down….” [ii]
From an executive perspective, it is impossible to make effective decisions when one does not know what people are working on or how the projects are doing. Additionally, if strategic projects do not have priority for critical, scarce resources, it will cause stress for the organization as a whole.
Many organizations feel that it is enough to track project progress on a percentage complete basis. Unfortunately, this is not consistent with established methodologies, which nearly always suggest that the only accurate measure of progress is tracking work effort (i.e., time).
Integrating Plans with Actuals
Projects are executed in order to bring in a positive return on investment (ROI). The ROI might be lowering risk, enhancing the organization's strategy, streamlining processes, complying with regulations, or otherwise improving the state of the organization in some way. This potential return must be quantified in financial terms, even if it is only a very rough estimate of the benefit provided. It motivates people to understand why they are working so hard, and a big number is a good motivation.
The other half of ROI is the investment or cost. Project managers and executives cannot know if a project was successful or not unless they understand its cost. In today's globalized knowledge worker world, project costs are mainly derived from the cost of labor. Consequently, tracking time to projects and tasks is an inescapable requirement for measuring project ROI.
If 10% of a project's allocated budget has been spent and only 5% of the work has been completed, there is a problem. Project managers who track employee actuals and find this out early in the project have a fighting chance of recovery. Those who don't will find out much later on that their projects are drastically over budget. This is just one example of how real-time data enables project managers to fix problems before they start.
Insight Into Resource Availability
In a 100 person organization, there are always five or ten people who are overbooked. Everyone wants these people to work on their projects. Every time they take a vacation or becomes ill, the organization groans. Conversely, there are other people who are under-utilized.
Even when project managers understand resource availability, it changes. They might run around and get all of the vacation schedules recorded in a big spreadsheet, only to find that a week later it has all been moved. What project managers need is real-time access to team member schedules, tasks and available time. This makes assigning people to tasks much easier. (Such a system must also be web-based, since the team is probably not all in one workspace 24 hours a day. This is why spreadsheets don't work very well. Not only are they unable to be audited, but they don't allow for global access from various participants.)
Real Data for the CXO
It is extremely important to present project data to management in an easily consumable way. Executives just want to know, at a glance, what is broken or about to be broken. They are problem solvers, and they can only succeed if they have up-to-date, accurate information. Such data will also allow executives to prioritize projects based on their value to the organization at large.
The Bottom Line
When IT workers track their time by task and project, project managers can address problems as soon as they surface and executives can understand cost expenditure. This will put an end to project failure, as well as eliminate the waste of resources on projects that are not profitable to the organization. No IT organization can afford to have 1 out of 3 of their projects fail, but with the right procedures in place, they won't have to.
About Curt Finch
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Founded in 1996, Journyx automates payroll, billing and cost accounting while easing management of employee time and expenses, and provides confidence that all resources are utilized correctly and completely. Curt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. As a software programmer fixing bugs for IBM in the early ‘90’s, Curt found that tracking the time it took to fix each bug revealed the per-bug profitability. Curt knew that this concept of using time-tracking data to determine project profitability was a winning idea and something that companies were not doing – yet… Curt created the world's first web-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offerings in 1997. Learn more about Curt at http://journyx.com/company/curtfinch.
Read More In: Strategy and Leadership
Tips & Tricks from Software CEO Curt Finch | <urn:uuid:fd127563-5a4e-48d6-9b2a-f901d8c86a57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.softwareceo.com/blog/entry/45486/Insight-Into-the-IT-Project-Manager-s-Work-and-How-To-Help-Them/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96008 | 1,398 | 1.757813 | 2 |
jroryt on Family Tree Circles
Journals and Posts
DESTREE family fled France during the Revolution.
Then resided in DenHague Holland.
Were musicians and silversmiths. Have a prize music book presented when they were there.
AJB Destree was a watchmaker who worked in Paris then New York before moving to Melbourne where he opened his business from a hotel in 1853.
Advertised this in the melbourne Argus newspaper.
He then moved to Hamilton where he was again in business, succesful and owned several shops in french street. He was on the local council.
One of his sons, Hubert De La Grange DESTREE was my grandfather.
His wife was Kate Forbes, born in Glasgow.
Need information on the family in Holland and earlier.
AJB had cousins in Belgium, Matilde and Bettina La CHAPELLE who visited the family in Hamilton Victoria Australia.
Regards, John Rory Thompson
- Displaying 1-1 of 1 Journals | <urn:uuid:a0091152-420e-49da-b222-4292faaf42b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.familytreecircles.com/u/jroryt/?format=&sort=doe | 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 | 0.976458 | 215 | 1.8125 | 2 |
In 1984, a new restaurant opened in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, between the west bank campus of the University of Minnesota and Augsburg, a private liberal arts college of the ELCA. Restaurants come and go, and this new start was hardly noteworthy except that the goal was not to make money but to give it away, and they have succeeded beyond the founder’s wildest imagination. By the time that St. Martin’s Table serves its final customers this December, 26 years after it first offered delicious, homemade vegetarian fare, it will have gifted over $700,000 to alleviate hunger locally and globally.
St. Martin’s Table is an outreach ministry of the Community of St. Martin. It is a bookstore and restaurant open to the general public. St. Martin’s Table strives to be a center for peacemaking and justice seeking. This focus springs from the Community’s faith, centered in the life and teachings of Jesus, and so we seek to provide hospitality to all people in their journeys toward peace, justice and wholeness.
The existence of St. Martin’s Table was one of those things that lay somewhere in the recesses of my mind. I knew about it, but I didn’t really know about it. Thus, when I stopped in for lunch for the first time a month or so ago, my response was “why haven’t I been here before” and “I can’t wait to come back.” The homemade gazpacho and generous wedge of carrot cake were part of the attraction, but it was much more than that.
The food served is a celebration of God’s gifts to us. To that end, St. Martin’s Table serves vegetarian meals with and emphasis on locally grown and organic food. Volunteer servers not only contribute their time, but also contribute their tips to programs that alleviate hunger in the global community.
Conversation takes place not only around the table at noon, but also during programs centered on peacemaking, justice issues and community-building through the arts. St. Martin’s Table is also available for study, worship, fellowship and special events for the wider community.
St. Martin’s Table strives to be fiscally sound and to be a good steward of all resources, especially as they relate to the long-term vitality of the Table. As an alternative business, it is our priority to model a more just way to live and have that reflected in the relationships we cultivate. The Table strives to be a place of peace where creative visions for a world of justice are welcomed and nurtured.
And who is St. Martin, the namesake of the community and the restaurant/bookstore?
The restaurant/bookstore, like the ecumenical community, was named for five Martins who have been models of change, truth and resistance in the Christian faith:
- Martin Luther, the 16th century reformer who taught the theology of the cross
- Martin Luther King, Jr., for his leadership in nonviolent protest to end racism and injustice
- Martin of Tours, a fourth century Roman soldier turned pacifist
- Martin de Porres, a Spanish-Indian healer who served the poor of Peru in the 1600s
- Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor imprisoned for his nonviolent resistance to the Nazis during World War II
On August 25th, I received an email that announced that The Table would serve its last meal this coming December.
It is with thankfulness for all of the hospitality that has been shown here for 26 years, and also with great sadness that we announce that St. Martin’s Table will be closing in December, 2010.
Bookstore manager Kathleen Olsen encouraged people to continue to support The Table between now and Christmas. “We hope that our loyal clientele, in addition to those who have never been to The Table, will join us in the upcoming months for good food, good books, and good conversation. Help us celebrate a great 26 years!”
Drop in for lunch or leave a greeting on the Facebook page ( which lists the Thursday menu as “Soups: Creamy Curry Split Pea and Chilled Cucumber Yogurt followed by Cashew Carrot (cold). Spreads: Swiss Dill, Tofuna and Bunny Luv”). | <urn:uuid:92b5b969-b0be-493c-a70d-84a5d5eb957e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theliberalspirit.com/?tag=environment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959484 | 903 | 1.648438 | 2 |
|Lecture:||Things I would do differently now|
|Lecturer:||Claus Gittinger, author of Smalltalk/X|
|Date & time:||March 31, 2010, 17:00–19:00|
|Venue:||Balling hall, Technical Library, Prague|
Abstract of the lecture:
The talk will be about overall architecture of Smalltalk/X virtual machine and about problems that this architecture brings. The main goal of the talk is to give an insight into the design and implementation of virtual machines for dynamic languages:
The talk will especially cover folowing topics:
This talk requires at least basic knowledge of virtual machines and operating systems. Knowledge of Smalltalk is not neccessary. The talk will be given in English.
Short CV of Claus Gittinger:
Claus Gittinger is the author of Smalltalk/X – a complete implementation of Smalltalk-80 written from scratch. He graduated at Universität Stuttgart and afterwards he worked for many companies: Senior Consultant CrossConnect Development at Alcatel, Senior Consultant at Siemens-Nixdorf AG, Senior Consultant WaferStepper SW Techn. Lead & Architect at Carl Zeiss, Senior Consultant Unix Kernel Development at Siemens-Nixdorf AG, Consultant Hicom SW Development at Siemens, Software Architect / Developer at LBBW. Nowadays he is an owner and CTO of eXept Software AG. He is a main architect of Smalltalk/X virtual machine.
FIT Informatics Wednesdays is a series of lectures and workshops organized by the Faculty of Information Technology of the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU). The series aims at students, CTU employees, and professionals in informatics.
Admission is free of charge. | <urn:uuid:253f912c-80d4-4e05-8113-7f5dc806e881> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fit.cvut.cz/en/faculty/regular-events/informatics-wednesdays/2010-03-31 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901173 | 381 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Patty DeWarns of Helper and son, Blake, look at an original copy of the Declaration of Independence displayed at the Utah Capitol.
'This is fantastic,' commented DeWarns last Friday. Preschooler Blake's interest waned and he ended up sitting on the floor near where the Pinnacle Canyon singers were scheduled to perform.
The display and multi-media show will remain on exhibit in the rotunda until March 15. The presentation will then move to Georgia and be displayed at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, starting April 27.
The three and one-half year road tour was launched July 3, 2001 at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. One of the first visits was slated at the 2002 Winter Olympics. The idea was to not only expose as many Americans as possible to the document, but also the international crowd that the Olympics attracts.
Last Friday, the international crowd was evident as Japanese, Slavic and southern European languages mixed with English where the display is set up. A number of instructional kiosks are located around the rotunda. | <urn:uuid:3149c138-19d7-4d7e-b878-0e12802cfd7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sunadvocate.com/print.php?tier=1&article_id=338&poll=233&vote=results | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962375 | 220 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Degas’ dancers have returned to grace D.C. with their presence at The Phillips Collection.
By Kate Faherty
Edgar Degas is most well known for his artistic obsession with dancers and the graceful movements of dancers. In his successful years as an artist, he created at least 1,500 works focused around dancers. An expansive exhibition in The Phillips Collection, Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint, features 30 of his infamous impressionist creations.
All created between 1870 and 1900, the pieces are mostly focused on the offstage movements of dancers, stretching or practicing. One of The Phillips Collection’s most beloved oil paintings by Degas, Dancers at the Barre, is the focal piece of the exhibition. The museum founder purchased Dancers at the Barre in 1944 and has since purchased three more pieces by Degas. In 1928, Phillips acquired The Ballet Rehearsal by Degas. The Phillips Collection later gave the piece to the Art Gallery at the Phillips Collection’s founder’s alma mater, Yale University. Nearly 60 years later, The Phillips Collection will host the piece again for the duration of the Degas exhibition.
As in Dancers at the Barre, these works by Degas capture interest by means of the realistic and candid positions and emotions of the subjects in each piece of art. Although the exhibition is focused on the Phillip Collection’s permanent Degas pieces, the collection draws from galleries both domestic and international.
The exhibition at The Phillips Collection held a grand and graceful opening for the preview week for Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint. Young ballerinas from the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C., were at the patrons preview opening night, bringing Degas’s artwork alive and to reality.
The exhibition will be on display to the public October 1 until January 8 at The Phillips Collection. Click here for more information or to purchase tickets. | <urn:uuid:81048448-f7b9-4750-8cb5-85c6fe97d387> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonlife.com/2011/09/29/paint-the-town-en-pointe-exhibition/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962092 | 417 | 1.867188 | 2 |
want to suggest that I drank bad espresso in Italy; Anita’s
criticisms came from a rarefied palate, the gustatory equivalent
of finding fault with a New York Philharmonic performance.
In fact, nearly a decade ago, the Italian government created
a regulatory commission, the Istituto Nazionale Espresso
Italiano, which certifies restaurants and coffee bars
provided that the establishments demonstrate the use of a
certified coffee blend, certified brewing machine and grinder
and licensed personnel.
was a good place in which to be introduced to the art and
science of espresso. Like any privileged knowledge, it seduces
you, delights you, consumes you. I entered what I think of
as the first stage of espresso fanaticism: I became a crema
hunter, drawing puzzled looks from area baristas as
I finger-dipped my way through shot after shot.
is a protein-rich emulsion, the product of the high rate
of pressure behind the not-quite-boiling water that’s forced
through a compressed layer of finely-ground beans. It floats
atop the inky coffee and gives espresso its sweet richness.
that sweetness is gained in the context of a brew that can
be intimidating even to those who can’t go a day without coffee.
An espresso is a beverage consumed quickly (ideally, within
two minutes) and in minimal amounts, typically half-filling
an already diminutive demi-tasse.
the history of coffee goes back at least a thousand years,
espresso officially debuted in 1901, when manufacturer Luigi
Bezzera, seeking to reduce his employees’ coffee-break times,
patented a machine that brewed the stuff far more quickly
was steam-driven (a technique still used by lower-cost equipment),
but it produced a somewhat bitter brew—a characteristic that
became apparent after the development of pump-driven espresso
machines some years later.
where the classic espresso-machine look comes from: those
tall, gleaming units with long pump handles challenging the
barista (as the Italians term the journeyman server)
to apply the right amount of pressure to the pull. By
the 1950s, they’d become ubiquitous in trendy coffeehouses.
trend is toward machines with built-in pumps that automatically
apply the right amount of water and pressure for the number
of shots chosen. That’s what you see in the local emporia.
But you don’t have to use all of the conveniences the machines
one of the lead baristas at Ballston Spa’s Coffee Planet (where
I consume many a cappuccino), sees her share of espresso fanatics
coming through, many of them with their own home machines
who share stories and critical analyses. “We strive for a
consistent product,” she says, “and so we’re careful about
the grind and the tamp. Our espresso machine offers an automatic
brew, but we prefer to control the fill.”
my longstanding misconceptions was that espresso requires
a specific coffee bean. What’s needed is quality; good equipment
and technique does the rest.
myself to a fare-thee-well by testing two machines that present
two different approaches to home espresso brewing. The KitchenAid
Pro Line Series Espresso Machine is a handsome, sturdy, semiautomatic
unit with two separate boilers to provide the correct temperature
and pressure for brewing espresso and for steaming milk. Saeco’s
Odea Giro is a fully automatic machine that handles everything
from the grind to the espresso output, although you do your
own milk steaming.
Giro is at the lower-priced end of a new line of machines
designed by BMW, and it attractively departs from the boxy
look of most espresso units. A topside hopper holds several
ounces of beans that are sent through its ceramic burr grinder
a portion at a time when you select your brew strength and
than regular maintenance—and refilling the water and empting
the waste fairly often—that’s all you do. For a cappuccino
or other steam-enhanced drink, immerse the moveable Pannarello
wand into the milk, choose your steam pressure and froth away.
You can also set the spout to produce hot water.
this machine gives you a simple, surefire way to get consistently
good espresso without any kind of learning curve. It has a
feature set typical of much higher-priced machines; with retail
pricing at around $600, it’s a bargain.
also about the price at which you can find the KitchenAid
espresso maker, an excellent unit geared for a more hands-on
fanatic. Its pleasingly retro look comes from the twin boilers
that decorate the front alongside corresponding temperature
gauges, letting you know when brew-time is here.
to take care of the coffee grinding yourself—and you can pay
as much again for the grinder as for an espresso machine,
so shop around—but you have a professional dual-spout portafilter
with two removable baskets (one for single shots, one for
double) to fill and tamp (tamper included). A correct fill
and tamp pressure are critical to good espresso, and developing
your technique is part of the artistry this machine allows.
You also control the brew time, helped by an instant shut-off.
I’m obsessive enough to have charted my variables, clocking
the “pull” (20 to 25 seconds is optimal), pursuing my preference
for very strong coffee.
wand at the end of the steam boiler travels a much wider range
of motion than most, handy for frothing milk in a bulky mug,
but the unit ships with an eight-ounce stainless steel pitcher
for that purpose.
espresso cup should be preheated, so both machines give you
warming spaces at the top. Instructions are easy to follow—the
KitchenAid maker even has its own DVD—and either one of these
units will make it very difficult to go back to plain old | <urn:uuid:f2dfd1e8-f5a0-4b4b-8c4c-9ee563858202> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://metroland.net/back_issues/vol30_no47/dining_review.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912131 | 1,331 | 1.609375 | 2 |
- Written by David Mcaray
09 Aug 2011
POLITICS - This week marks the 30th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's firing (August 2, 1981) of approximately 13,000 Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO).
The reverberations are still being felt by union members across the country. Prior to the PATCO bust, firing strikers and filling their vacancies with permanent replacements was a fairly risky maneuver, one that had been done sporadically and gingerly. But after PATCO, it became -- if not standard procedure -- a more or less dependable Plan B.
Because the strike of these federal workers was technically illegal, Reagan had the right to fire them. However, the simple act of firing a group of federal union members didn't have to change the national consciousness regarding organized labor, and it certainly didn't have to usher in an era of brutal anti-unionism. But it did. Indeed, since the PATCO smackdown, the American labor movement hasn't been the same.
And the reason it hasn't been the same can be expressed in one deadly, three-syllable word: perception. Perception is everything. The Republicans roll over President Obama because they perceive him as gutless; the so-called Arab Spring occurred because Middle Eastern citizens perceived revolution to be in the air; and when PATCO got dumped, the perception was crystal clear: Labor was now vulnerable.
It's been said that because the U.S., unlike England, doesn't have a king or queen, it looks to movie stars as its royal family, and there's some truth to that wry observation. Americans adore movie stars. But more significantly -- and more potentially useful -- Hollywood is, politically, very liberal. And not just the actors, but also the directors, the writers, the agents and the producers. The movie business is a hotbed of leftist politics (at least in the sense of what passes for "leftist" today).
Although there are many socio-economic truths that cry out for dissemination, four seem most obvious: (1) Trickle-down economics is a hoax. Those who insist that giving tax breaks to the rich will result in jobs are lying. All we're doing by not raising tax rates on the rich is losing trillions in revenue. (2) Today's tax rates are the lowest in 80 years. (3) The middle-class is being eviscerated. And (4) the only institution capable of resisting the crushing downward forces on the wage market is organized labor.
These four facts need to be driven home forcefully and repeatedly. But instead of relying upon the likes of Paul Krugman, Ralph Nader, Lawrence O'Donnell, Keith Olbermann, Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow, et al (who, as accurate and persuasive as they may be, are, alas, often preaching to choir) this information needs to be disseminated by Hollywood -- by people Americans, young and old, idolize -- by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney, Edward Norton, Natalie Portman, Shia LaBeouf, etc.
The top tax-bracket is 35-percent, and that rate doesn't kick in until you earn $379,150. And while every movie star (not actor, but movie star) is in the top bracket, you don't hear them bitching about taxes the way you hear Wall Street bitching. That's because Hollywood is fundamentally leftist; it's also because, after deductions, no one is paying 35-percent. As Robert Reich has aptly noted, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in 2007 earned a minimum of $1 billion each, but averaged only 17-percent in income tax.
So what's stopping the industry from doing what Matt Damon recently did [link] when he came out publicly in favor of the public teachers union, and people actually listened to him? What's stopping these leftist-liberal-progressive movie stars from flooding the airwaves and spouting the relevant statistics that will put the lie to this evil propaganda?
It could be timidity, it could be fear, it could be apathy, or it could be something as minor as not knowing what the proper forum would be. But it shouldn't be fear that prevents them. After all, people aren't going to stop watching movies because their favorite actors tell them things they resist hearing.
People aren't going to boycott Ironman because Robert Downey, Jr. exposes Wall Street for the greedy bastards they are.
President Obama tells us the rich aren't paying enough taxes, Rachel Maddow tells us, Nader tells us, Krugman tells us, and our history books clearly show that tax rates have plummeted, yet the Tea Party continues to attract an audience with its anti-tax rhetoric.
Arguably, the only hope of neutralizing this propaganda is to have Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt go on TV and expose the lies. Hollywood needs to step up to the plate.
(David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author ("It's Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor"), was a former union rep. This article was posted first at huffingtonpost.com) -cw
Vol 9 Issue 63
Pub: Aug 9, 2011 | <urn:uuid:deea2d3b-f715-4a33-9948-12aa66a95df1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.citywatchla.com/archive/2092-keeping-la-safe-means-full-time-traffic-officershollywood-needs-to-step-up-to-the-plate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964879 | 1,077 | 1.851563 | 2 |
The city of Laguna Beach declined the offer of the land; the California Coastal Conservancy has also turned up its nose.
In addition to the 75-acre Driftwood parcel, the owner also agreed to offer the conservancy the right of first refusal for 50 years on an adjacent 80-acre parcel. So we are talking a total of 155 acres of beautiful Laguna Beach land, up for grabs with no takers.
Ten months after the parcel was "dedicated" to the public by a representative of Athens Group, if you visit the property you'll see fenced land and "Private Property: No Trespassing" signs.
"Driftwood Properties offered to deed the property as open space and at no cost to several entities including the city of Laguna Beach, County of Orange, California Coastal Conservancy, Laguna Canyon Foundation, California Coastal Commission and others," Joan Gladstone, a spokeswoman for Athens Group, which represents the property owner, said in an email. "To date, none of these entities have indicated they are willing to accept the land."
According to City Manager John Pietig, the city apparently looked this gift horse in the mouth and didn't like what it saw.
"The city is still in discussions regarding the future of the property but there are drainage and potential geologic issues that need to be addressed and are costly," Pietig said in an email. "Acceptance of the parcel as originally offered would require a substantial expenditure by the city to mitigate these issues."
The city has been burned before on land gifts: a well-used hiking area off of Laguna Canyon Road turned out to contain an old dump site from the 1950s that spewed its contents onto neighbors' yards during December's deluge.
Apparently it was news to the city that the farmer who owned the land would go around town collecting ash from incinerators and toss it into his canyon. The land was given to the city some 20 years later with no mention of the nasty, toxic brew that lay underneath. | <urn:uuid:da206650-5715-4f6b-810f-b3f2c4206972> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.coastlinepilot.com/2011-09-22/news/tn-cpt-0923-canyontocove-20110920_1_driftwood-properties-land-gifts-free-parkland | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970129 | 411 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Husking Media In Middletown, Ball State To Unveil Revelations Today
You wouldn't know it to look at the campus--which, with the exception of new building construction, looks like any other university in middle America: Green lawns stretch up to limestone buildings and undergrads pedal around campus on bicycles. But behind the bucolic exterior are some of the most leading-edge media technologies and advanced thinking on the current and future state of media.
In fact, digital data packets fly invisibly back and forth across the campus' miles-wide radius in what is believed to be the first Wi-Fi network of its kind. It's powerful enough to deliver 50 megabytes per second of wireless bandwidth to every home in Muncie--a town with a population of about 67,000, and an area covering 24 square miles. But with the exception of the university's students and faculty, and a small number of homes participating in the school's research projects, the locals aren't accessing it. And that's just the way Ferguson wants it.
"The rest of the community is still very pure," he boasts. By "pure," Ferguson means the people of Muncie are not the kind of early adopters to digital media likely to be found in big cities, especially on the media-centric coasts.
One of the things Ferguson's team does is observe how technology and design affect the way people use media. If you want to see how these factors affect the lives of average Americans, Ferguson says, you have to go where average Americans live. Not to digital media meccas like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston, but to a place that might be called Middletown. Actually, Middletown is what BSU researchers call Muncie, as well as a nearly century-long series of studies on how media have affected people living in the community.
It was an update to the so-called Middletown Media Studies two years ago that raised eyebrows in Madison Avenue media circles. First conducted in 1929, the studies are unique because they use real people to directly observe how consumers use media. There is none of the bias associated with measurement methodologies like meters, diaries, mail, and telephone surveys--which tend to exaggerate some media usage behaviors, while failing to detect others altogether.
What the most recent studies found is that people consume much more of every medium, in more combinations, than any of the ad industry's best research has ever detected. An eye-opener for many in the ad business, the study also sparked criticism that as powerful as its direct observation was, the study's sample--100 people--wasn't enough to meet Madison Avenue's statistical standards.
The Center for Media Design is fixing that. Researchers went back into the field this summer to conduct an even more ambitious version of the study, increasing the sample four-fold, and drawing nearly half of it from nearby Indianapolis. Instead of taking notes on clipboards and legal pads, the field researchers were equipped with handheld computers. The results will be revealed today in New York at Media Magazine's Forecast 2006 Conference, and Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at the center, promises there will be some surprises, especially when it comes to findings on the simultaneous use of media.
Bloxham is an unlikely character to be running the research. A gregarious Brit who was a leading interactive TV developer in the U.K. before uprooting his family from cosmopolitan London to small-town Muncie, Bloxham is more accustomed to dealing in the crass world of media commerce than the theoretical world of ivory towers. But that's exactly what makes him effective at BSU. Unlike its Ivy League counterparts, BSU is a state school that emphasizes an applied approach to media science. In fact, practical education pervades almost every program at the university. Students in the entrepreneur program at the business school receive their final grades from actual investors and venture capitalists. "If they don't like the business plan, the student fails," says BSU President Jo Ann Gora. "That's the way it is in the real world. It's all about risk. It's better that they learn that here."
With its premium on real-world commerce, BSU helps students incubate businesses while they're still in school. These ventures include a book publishing company and a new digital media application that Ferguson believes could revolutionize the field of architecture, as well as manufacturing-based industries.
BSU's Gora is also championing the Center as a hub for attracting media and entertainment industries to the state. In fact, one of the university's students, Jaron Henrie-McCrea, recently won the 32nd Annual Student Academy Awards, besting university film dynasties like New York University and UCLA. The ironic part is that BSU doesn't have a film school.
The undergrad produced his film with the support of the Center, as well as other university programs. This collaboration is typical of the way everything gets done on campus. If the Center is working on a media study that requires some ethnographic research, it has the College of Sciences and Humanities enlist psychology, sociology, or anthropology majors and faculty to the project.
The Center was created four years ago via a grant from Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant. Lilly hopes the Center will develop digital media technologies that will influence the field of eHealth. In fact, a new state-of-the-art lab is under construction and will house a doctor's office, where faculty and students can test digital media applications for healthcare, including the potential to digitally monitor ailments and their treatment.
For a guy from the world of media commerce, Bloxham is prone to his own blue-sky visions of media technology. He foresees a time when military personnel are equipped with hand-held Sony PSP-like devices that can monitor all their vital functions and relay them back to field commanders via temporary wireless grids. He also spouts visionary non-sequiturs about concepts that aren't fully baked, but make you think. For example, things like "nano-coms," a sub-molecular communications technology Bloxham believes may some day make everything capable of communicating with everything else.
While it's the visionary stuff that gets Bloxham and his colleagues excited, it's the application of the concepts that is their passion. To implement such blue-sky concepts, the Center needs a fairly close alliance with the commercial world.
Bloxham says there are three kinds of relationships between academic media researchers and the media industry. One is best exemplified by the MIT Media Lab, where companies simply underwrite scholarly initiatives in the hopes that they might shed light on something that will eventually have commercial application. In the second, companies provide seed capital to academics that conduct research that can be leveraged commercially. The third type is what Bloxham describes as a "collaborative relationship," in which academics and corporations work side-by-side, developing the plans for media studies, collaborating on the process, and jointly interpreting the results. He asserts this is a much more holistic approach that leads to better results for both sides: Commercial applications for industry and practical learning for academia.
Because he speaks both dialects, Bloxham has become BSU's de facto emissary to Madison Avenue and big media. He's gotten cozy with some of the biggest media companies, including Microsoft and Time Warner, but has yet to strike any substantive relationships with big agencies.
However, Bloxham has assembled a team of "research fellows," executives from the media industry who consult with the Center and work directly with faculty and students on media studies. To date, the Center has enlisted Jim Spaeth, former president of the Advertising Research Foundation; Bill Moult, former president of the Marketing Science Institute, who is now Spaeth's partner at Sequent Partners; John Canning, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Windows eHome Division; and Dale Herigstad, creative director and co-founder of digital media design agency Schematic, who has created what is believed to be the first interactive TV news design program at the university.
The research fellows do two things. They provide practical knowledge for students, faculty, and administrators. They also provide a pipeline into big media companies that may ultimately fund or assist important media research projects. Microsoft, for example, is making BSU an official field lab for its new Windows Media Center.
BSU has already initiated a program dubbed Digital Middletown. While the concept remains somewhat amorphous, part of it involves equipping homes that have little or no digital media connections with Wi-Fi, broadband connections, and other digital technologies to see how they impact the lives of "average" Americans.
One unique aspect of the Center is that it has the opportunity to study the effects of media over longer periods of time than is usually the case with commercial media research. Ball State has already enlisted undergrads to participate in a massive longitudinal study that will follow them over 20 or 30 years, to see how they adapt to media over their lives.
In one study, BSU journalism professor Michael Hanley took cell phones away from a group of undergrads to see how the loss affected their behavior--especially their use of other media.
The notion of a living laboratory is pervasive at BSU. For example, the Teacher's College runs experiments with elementary, middle, and high school students. In one study, Bloxham's team gave a group of teens new Sony PSPs and observed how long it took them to open the boxes and turn them on, and then, how long it took them to get involved in multi-player games and even game creation. The study was important, says Bloxham, because a key element of the Center's mandate is media design, or how the design and usability of media affects people's behavior.
One of the most interesting diagnostic tools developed at the Center for understanding the design of media is a new "eye-tracking" system that literally tracks the micro-second by micro-second movement of viewers' eyes to see what they're actually looking at any time they face a screen. "The big breakthrough was getting it to work at the 10-foot distance," says Bloxham, who spearheaded the project by working with the school's engineering college. While Madison Avenue has dabbled with eye-tracking technology for years, refining it to a range of 10 feet is important, Bloxham says, because that's typically the distance people sit from their TV sets.
The eye-tracking technology has huge implications for understanding the design and usability of any medium viewed on a screen, particularly as Madison Avenue embraces "engagement" as its new return on investment mantra. Because it can pinpoint where people fixate on a screen, the system can determine what people are really looking at versus what they say they were watching during recall studies. In fact, Bloxham says the technology is likely to be complemented by recall research, and possibly by "biometrics" that can gauge when someone reacts physiologically to what their eyes gaze at on a screen. With such a tool, Bloxham says media designers can begin to explain all sorts of media usage phenomena. As Schematic's Herigstad says, "The eye doesn't lie."
For all the gizmos and gadgets, the Center for Media Design is really about human beings and how they connect with media. It was probably inevitable that it would evolve at BSU, which has a legacy with media that goes well beyond the Middletown Studies. After all, BSU has already incubated some of the industry's best talent, including TV host David Letterman and "Garfield" cartoonist Jim Davis. Both are proud alums. | <urn:uuid:64e8475f-11ef-4b3e-bbdb-2585a5f98297> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/34439/husking-media-in-middletown-ball-state-to-unveil.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961966 | 2,423 | 2.234375 | 2 |
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out. | <urn:uuid:1da82dce-80d2-49d5-99c4-b7f71952ee3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/julie-otsuka/when-the-emperor-was-divine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960421 | 411 | 1.585938 | 2 |
LUNENBURG — In the bay of an old fire hall in Lunenburg, a young woman mixes paint that she will use to bring the voices of oppressed Afghan women to the world’s attention.
If her parents hadn’t fled her home in Kabul when the Taliban arrived in Afghanistan in 1996, Hangama Amiri would be one of those women.
She was just six years old then.
Amiri remembers being tired, cold and hungry as she walked — and sometimes rode horses when they crossed rivers — to reach the safety of Pakistan.
“It was winter. It was very hard,” said Amiri, now 23, as she looks off into the distance and sees herself as a little girl.
A winding road brought her to Lunenburg.
And a winding road lies ahead as Amiri works to find her own way in life by using her art to seek justice for women in Afghanistan.
Amiri is one of three NSCAD University graduates participating in the college’s Lunenburg Community Studio Residency program. They work in the abandoned fire truck bays and live in apartments above the bays on the second floor.
During her year in Lunenburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Amiri will research the identity of the community and immerse herself in its culture.
“I’m very inspired to question things,” she said. “I am really amazed by it here. I’m going to reflect on the people, the culture, the history that it has — bring it into the painting.”
Amiri did the same thing in New York last winter, “putting myself into the community and into the streets and walking every day and seeing what interests me.”
She was late moving to Lunenburg this fall because she was invited to display her work at a prestigious exhibition in England that had human rights as its theme.
Two paintings were selected for the Passion for Freedom Festival exhibition that was held at Unit 24 Gallery in London. One depicts a naked woman cowering under a shower of stones raining down upon her, her bowed face obscured by her long dark hair.
In the other, fire obliterates the right eye of a young woman, but her left eye is defiant as she holds up a burka in one hand and a book in the other.
Amiri was interviewed by the BBC about her work. And Nick Cohen, a columnist for the Spectator, wrote: “When you look at (the two paintings), you cannot help but know that the artist understands the plight of women facing one of the most murderously misogynistic forces on the planet.”
Amiri has lived in a number of countries including Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistsan, which is north of Afghanistan. Her family immigrated to Canada in 2005, but Amiri said she needs to live in new places to find inspiration.
“My art pushes me,” she said.
She returned to Afghanistan in 2010 for the first time in 14 years and decided to use women as the focus of her art.
She started with a series of paintings based on six Afghan women who provided a psychological and social portrait of life for women living under Taliban rule.
She went into the community every day to meet women.
“I went into neighbourhoods and heard their stories,” Amiri said. “That was very challenging for me and the best way to connect with the women.
“I put myself in the shoes of those women and I walked with them, so that’s how I heard their stories. They’re tragic; they’re harsh realities. It was a very, very extraordinary experience for me.”
It challenged her as an artist and as a person. She said she experienced flashbacks of her childhood when she looked upon the playground where she played with her friends and the school she attended.
Her paintings confront issues like arranged marriages, education for girls and the stoning of women accused of adultery.
Though the Afghan women were filled with questions about what Amiri wears, eats and where she studies, Amiri assured them that she, too, struggles, and that freedom does not automatically make a person happy.
“I’m an artist; I still struggle,” she said. “I came to this risky place is to find my own self. I’m still working at it.”
Amiri said her goal is to draw the attention of the international community to the plight of women in Afghanistan.
“I’m bringing those voices, those women who can’t express themselves fearlessly in Afghanistan, so I’m bringing those harsh realities into the international context, bringing awareness.”
She also wants to raise awareness about the need for individual rights.
“Always know your own rights. Every human being has a freedom inside them, so express that fearlessly with your voice, unite with other women and your community and fight against those regimes.
“And also, never give up. Every day you should have to take an action, and that’s how you can make change, because I believe once you’ve tasted freedom, no one can take it from you.”
Amiri said she sees her time in Lunenburg as an opportunity to grow. She said the community supports the arts and is a place filled with inspiration.
While here, Amiri is working with the Second Story Women’s Centre and a local art gallery. She will hold workshops and exhibit her work.
As natural lights fills the former fire truck bay and bounces off the white church across the street, Amiri said she knows she will find inspiration here as she takes the next steps along her path. | <urn:uuid:1b5540a1-2106-487a-b6df-64d8d59cde61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/193512-artist-dedicates-work-to-afghan-birthplace | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977602 | 1,197 | 1.96875 | 2 |
This is the current conditions weather report for Halifax. The report was made 43 minutes ago, at 09:00 UTC. The wind was blowing at a speed of 18.5 kilometers per hour / 12 miles per hour from the east (090°). The temperature was 7°C / 45°F, with a dew-point at 7°C / 45°F. The temperature felt like 4°C / 39°F. The relative humidity was 100%.
Downtown Halifax Restaurants and Nightlife:
The area is home to approximately 200 restaurants and bars, providing an interesting array of world cuisine. There are also over 60 sidewalk cafes that open in the summer months. The nightlife is made up of bars and small music venues as well as Casino Nova Scotia, a large facility built partially over the water.
There are several museums and art galleries in downtown Halifax. Pier 21, an immigrant entry point prominent throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, was opened to the public as a National Historic Site in 1999. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is a maritime museum containing 40 small vessels as well as an extensive exhibit on the famous Titantic. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is housed in a 150 year old building containing over 9000 works of art.
The waterfront in Downtown Halifax is the site of the Halifax Harbourwalk, a 3-km boardwalk popular amongst tourists and locals alike. Many mid-sized ships dock here at one of the many wharfs. The harbourwalk is home to a Metro Transit ferry terminal, hundreds of stores, Historic Properties, several office buildings, the Casino Nova Scotia, and several public squares where buskers perform, most prominently at the annual Halifax International Busker Festival in August.
Downtown Halifax, being home to many small shops and vendors, is a major shopping area in the HRM. It is also home to several small malls, including Scotia Square, Barrington Place Shops, and Maritime Mall. Numerous malls on Spring Garden Road are also located nearby.
List of hotels in downtown Halifax:Cambridge SuitesCitadel Halifax HotelDelta BarringtonDelta HalifaxFour Points by Sheraton HalifaxMarriott Halifax Harbourfront
(formerly Casino Nova Scotia Hotel).Marriott Residence InnPrince George HotelRadisson Suite Hotel HalifaxWestin Nova Scotian
Reputation of the North End:
In recent years, the North End has become a popular destination for Halifax's growing university population. As the prices of apartments closer to Dalhousie University and Saint Mary's University continue to rise, the students are finding cheaper accommodations in the North End.
The Quinpool district usually refers to the commercial section of Quinpool Road in Halifax, Nova Scotia as well as a few streets to the north and south of it. A fairly eclectic variety of local businesses populate the street, including many popular Chinese and Greek restaurants. as well as a Holiday Inn. The art-deco Oxford Theatre, which plays mostly independent films, can also be found on this street.
The South End has become the most prosperous region of Halifax, with a primarily middle class demographic. There is also a high student population, owing to the presence of Dalhousie University, Saint Mary's University, University of King's College, and the Atlantic School of Theology.
Areas of the South End include the downtown core, Point Pleasant Park, the Halifax Ocean Terminal and South End Container Terminal. It borders the eastern shore of the North West Arm.
Spring Garden, along with Barrington Street (which it adjoins) and Quinpool Road, is a major commercial and cultural district in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It comprises Spring Garden Road, South Park Street, and a number of smaller side streets. The area is considered to be one of the trendiest areas in Halifax.
Spring Garden Road is home to a number of pubs, coffee shops and boutiques, making it busy both day and night. On Spring Garden one can find the Main Branch of Halifax Public Libraries, the Law Courts, the former Technical University of Nova Scotia (now the Sexton Campus of Dalhousie University), the Halifax Public Gardens, and St. Mary's Basilica. The area is also adjacent to the Citadel and the Halifax Metro Centre; several major hotels are located nearby.
The Lord Nelson Hotel
, at the corner of Spring Garden Road and South Park Street, is a Halifax landmark. During the 1960s its grounds were a popular hang-out for artists and hippies. The Bud the Spud chip truck is parked on the street outside the library on summer months. | <urn:uuid:cf685338-ae2d-4c19-91b6-6a7154dc8823> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ineedahotel.com/hotels/ca/ns/halifax.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955535 | 934 | 1.507813 | 2 |
THIS week in the paper I'm writing about the commutation of Marcus Robinson's sentence from death to life without the possibility of parole. In 1991, Mr Robinson and an accomplice abducted Erik Tornblom, a 17-year-old high-school student who had stopped at a convenience store on his way home from work. At gunpoint, they forced him to drive to an open field. On the way he was begging for his life. They forced Tornblom to lie down in the field, where they shot him in the face with a sawed-off shotgun and took the money from his wallet: a grand total of $27. Mr Robinson was convicted and sentenced to die three years later.
I include the gory details of Mr Robinson's crime to make sure that readers understand that I am not writing this out of any sympathy for Mr Robinson. His crime was cruel, horrific and premeditated. He belongs in jail. But the commutation of Mr Robinson's sentence had nothing to do with his grisly crime, and everything to do with a long and shameful legacy of racial bias among prosecutors in North Carolina.
In 2009, that state became the second to pass a Racial Justice Act, which allows inmates to appeal their death sentences on racial-bias grounds, and holds that evidence of racial bias in capital sentencing is grounds for commuting that sentence. Proving racial bias under the Racial Justice Act requires proving one of three things: that in the jurisdiction in which the inmate was sentenced at the time of his sentencing, the death penalty was sought more often for members of one race than another; that it was sought more often as punishment for killing people of one race than another; or that race was "a significant factor" in jury selection—specifically, in how prosecutors exercised their peremptory challenges. (Peremptory challenges allow lawyers to strike prospective jury members without reason; the Supreme Court—the Rehnquist Court, no less—ruled in Batson v Kentucky in 1986 that while such challenges by law did not have to be explained, it violates the sixth and 14th amendments to use them in a racially discriminatory manner.) Unlike Kentucky, which passed its Racial Justice Act in 1998, inmates can use statistical evidence on their behalf; they do not need to prove active, intentional discrimination.
Shortly after North Carolina's Racial Justice Act became law, two professors at Michigan State's law school undertook a statistical study of jury selection and composition in North Carolina between 1990 and 2010 for trials of all defendants on death row. The study found that prosecutors at all levels struck 52.6% of black potential jurors, and 25.8% of all other potential jurors. The chance that this disparity resulted from race-neutral strikes is less than one in ten trillion. In cases involving black defendants, the average strike rate rose to 60% for black potential jurors and 23.1% for everyone else. The study observed similar disparities in the county, prosecutorial district and judicial division in which Mr Robinson was sentenced, as well as in his own trial. These disparities held firm even when controlled for other potentially mitigating factors. Against this evidence, as far as I can tell from Mr Weeks's ruling, the state offered little but quibbles, and on this evidence Mr Weeks found in Mr Robinson's favour. These are topline numbers; the study goes into far more detail.
But Mr Weeks's ruling went even further than just the numbers, much further. (Although it is 168 pages long, Mr Weeks writes extremely well, and not just for a lawyer. I read the ruling cover to cover in one sitting, like a thriller.) He explains why jury service is particularly important to black Americans, and how they have been systematically excluded for much of North Carolina's history. He also explains why prosecutors are reluctant to accept them on juries, particularly in capital cases ("African-Americans are perceived as less inclined toward the prosecution generally and the death penalty in particular than members of other groups"). But of course, black Americans have the same right/obligation to serve on a jury as anyone else, and a jury is supposed to be comprised of one's peers: of a broad slice of society.
A witness for the state argued that prosecutors tend to strike black jurors not because of their race, but because "African-Americans as a group disfavor the death penalty" and because "African-Americans as a group tend to be more concerned than other groups about fairness and inequality in the justice system." I will give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the floor and/or to stop conking yourself on the forehead. First of all, there is the bald-faced statement that the prosecution wants to exclude jurors concerned with fairness. Not jurors sympathetic to the defence, but jurors who are concerned with fairness! The prosecution in capital cases believes it cannot win before fair-minded jurors! Second, more mendaciously, excluding specific black jurors because of a perception of blacks generally is as close to a textbook case of racism as exists. I fear this post has gone on long enough, so I will not cite specific, incredible reasons prosecutors gave for striking black jurors, but if you want a good laugh/cry, read the last 48 pages of Mr Weeks's ruling.
Republican legislators in North Carolina already tried once to repeal the Racial Justice Act. They failed. Bev Perdue, the state's Democratic governor, vetoed their attempt. Ms Perdue is not long for office, and North Carolina may have a Republican governor soon enough. They will try again. Some have condemned the act as a backdoor method to end the death penalty, which of course it is not. It simply bans the racist application of the death penalty. In 2012, those two things should not be as synonymous as they have been. | <urn:uuid:4dde4f2e-cff1-491d-b17a-2f2a31b5cb72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com.hk/comment/1384770 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975714 | 1,178 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Blog: National Partnership for Action
Posted on 5/15/2013 by J. Nadine Gracia, MD, MSCE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health
As we celebrate National Women's Health Week, we reaffirm our commitment to women's health - and look ahead to new innovations, new platforms, and new opportunities in our efforts to empower women and advance health equity for women in all communities.
In August 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color Challenge. The challenge called on software developers and entrepreneurs to create an application for mobile devices that would help women in underserved and minority communities access information about cancer screening and preventive services, link to electronic health records, and connect with providers and community health workers. This was the first-of-its-kind, effort to engage and empower women of color in the fight against cancer - and put technology to the test in addressing deep-rooted health disparities.
Each year, more than 68,000 women in the United States die from breast, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancers. Given gaps in education, prevention, early treatment, quality of care, and access to networks of support, a disproportionate burden of these diseases falls upon women of color.
In the face of these disparities, the developer community stepped up to the challenge. As submissions came in from all across the country, a panel of judges comprised of federal and private experts in health care and health information technology set to work assessing the entries. Selection criteria included: capacity to provide users with general, easy-to-access information about screenings; securely communicate with patient health records or provider-sponsored patient portals; provide user-specific reminders about preventive services; accommodate multiple languages; encourage patient and family engagement with providers; and connect patients to community health workers who can provide support in adhering to complex care plans.
Based on these criteria, first place, second place, third place, and honorable mention distinctions were awarded. On behalf of the HHS Office of Minority Health and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, I am excited to announce the winners:
We are excited to provide new tools to help minority women and those in underserved communities take control of their health by receiving a list of screening and preventive services and details on how to better coordinate their information and care.
The Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color Challenge is a partnership between the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the HHS Office of Minority Health. To learn more about the app challenge, the winners, and information on how to download the winning apps please visit: http://challenge.gov/ONC/402-reducing-cancer-among-women-of-color and http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/reducing-cancer-among-women-color-challenge/.
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Posted on 5/2/2013 by J. Nadine Gracia, MD, MSCE, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health and Director, Office of Minority Health
From the earliest chapters of the American story, our diversity has defined us, and given us strength. "Out of many, one": those simple yet powerful words speak to an unshakable faith in the ties that bind us together.
In the face of changing demographics in this country and a health care system undergoing unprecedented transformation, cultural and linguistic competency may just be one of our most powerful levers for advancing health equity and improving care for everyone.
Last week, the Office of Minority Health along with several partners released the new enhanced National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care —also known as the enhanced CLAS Standards. The enhanced CLAS Standards aim to advance health equity, improve quality and help eliminate health disparities by establishing a framework for health and health care organizations to deliver effective, culturally responsive and linguistically appropriate care and services. Accompanying the standards is the Blueprint for Advancing and Sustaining CLAS Policy and Practice, a resource filled with implementation strategies to help organizations develop culturally and linguistically appropriate policies and practices.
We launched the original CLAS Standards in 2000, and now, with the input of experts and advocates from around the country, we have updated the standards to ensure an even stronger platform for equity. The enhanced CLAS Standards are grounded in a broad definition of culture – recognizing that our health beliefs and practices are influenced not only by race, ethnicity and language, but also socioeconomic status, religion, spirituality, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity and geography. The enhanced standards emphasize governance and accountability – underscoring the need for strong leadership in advancing system-wide change. And they call for participation by a broad array of organizations, recognizing that health equity cannot be achieved unless all institutions and all sectors are at the table.
For too long, too many Americans have struggled to achieve good health because the health care and services that are available to them do not adequately address their needs. Over the years, we have found that one of the most effective approaches to closing these costly gaps is ensuring the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate care. A growing body of research shows that health outcomes and patient experiences improve when care and services are provided in an environment that is culturally respectful and responsive at every point of contact.
The enhanced National CLAS Standards build on the foundation of the Affordable Care Act, empowering health and health care organizations to participate in the transformation of our nation's system of care, and better serve our nation's increasingly diverse communities.
We encourage everyone – from individuals and organizations – to take part by promoting, adopting and implementing the enhanced CLAS Standards. At this time of transformation, we have a remarkable window of opportunity to advance health equity and ensure that all Americans, in all communities, have a chance to live healthy lives.
To learn more, visit the Office of Minority Health's "Think Cultural Health" website – a resource on cultural and linguistic competency, including free e-learning curricula for health providers. And join in the conversation with @MinorityHealth by using the hashtag #CLASStandards as we work together to make CLAS the standard in health and health care.
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Posted on 5/2/2013 by Erin Poetter, ONC
Posted on Health IT Buzz blog on April 29, 2013
As part of National Minority Health Month, we're excited to release a brief report summarizing some important conversations that have recently taken place around the issue of eHealth equity.
As background, in February, ONC helped organize a White House Summit on Achieving eHealth Equity in collaboration with the Office of Minority Health, and ZeroDivide-an organization working to use technology to reduce economic and health disparities.
Many of those participants came together again earlier this month for a follow-up conversation via webinar, and pledged to keep their conversations going into the future. A summary of the Achieving eHealth Equity discussions is available online.
Increased Access to Health IT will Benefit Minority Health Outcomes
A new report released by the California Pan Ethnic Health Network at the White House Summit on Achieving eHealth Equity highlights some key benefits of expanded health IT use. For example, data collected through EHRs can help pinpoint health equity issues and give researchers some of the tools they need to find interventions to address those issues.
For patients, particularly those with specific linguistic, cultural, or other needs, use of this data can help ensure they have access to the right resources when using the health care system. In our recent Health Affairs paper, we cite two examples of research that highlight this potential.
Challenges in leveraging Health IT for Improving Minority Health
Ideas for Next Steps to Increase Health IT's Role in Minority Health Outcomes
HHS is committed to the advancement of health equity and eHealth equity.
The Summit represented neither the beginning nor the end of the conversation but rather and opportunity to bring key stakeholders together to share successes, challenges and a passion for working individually and collaboratively to make eHealth equity a reality.
Download the Achieving eHealth Equity summary report and comment below with your thoughts.
We look forward to continuing the conversation on this important topic.
Also, a special thanks to our partners at ZeroDivide, for their excellent facilitation of the meeting, especially:
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Addressing Poverty Today Among Those Facing Significant Social and Economic Challenges for a Healthier, Successful Tomorrow
Addressing Poverty Today Among Those Facing Significant Social and Economic Challenges for a Healthier, Successful Tomorrow At the Administration for Children and Families, we help to promote the social and economic well-being of millions who are struggling to get into the middle class. ACF administers more than 60 programs that include family assistance, Head Start, child welfare and other programs for families and children.
Our efforts to help lift people out of poverty got extra help from the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law by President Obama in 2010. This bold new legislation created comprehensive health insurance reforms that will take full effect in 2014. The law also provided crucial funding for health programs to help most in need and served by ACF programs.
The Affordable Care Act funds:
Anticipating this growth, the Affordable Care Act gave ACF’s Office of Family Assistance funding for 32 HPOG programs throughout the nation. Grantees that educate this future workforce partner with community organizations to enhance supportive services for Health Profession Opportunity Grant students, such as transportation, dependent care and temporary housing.
As you can see below, for many of these future medical professionals, this opportunity is a second chance at life. Luz Torres was out of a job, living out of a car and couldn’t provide for her family of four in the Seattle-area — until a Food Bank worker referred the young Latina to an HPOG program administered in Washington state.
Quinton Sanders dropped of out of high school to take care of his elderly grandmother. Having no diploma or career prospects, the African-American teenager was determined not to become another statistic and sought help from a South Carolina works program that showed him a pathway to self sufficiency.
Van Dinh Kuno, a former Vietnamese immigrant, is able to help other new citizens fulfill their American Dream on a regular basis. Kuno’s Refugee and Immigrant Services Northwest center has successfully placed 50 HPOG students in good paying jobs with full benefits since 2011.
ACF is working hard with communities of color to help promote these great opportunities provided by the Affordable Care Act. For more HPOG success stories, visit the HPOG Community.
Posted in: | Comments | Add a Comment | Comment Policy | Permalink
Posted on 5/2/2013 by Larke Nahme Huang, Ph.D.
Last month marked the third anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a landmark effort to make health insurance coverage more affordable and accessible. Among the many provisions guiding health reform, the Affordable Care Act includes requirements to ensure the health care system provides adequate coverage for individuals in need of services for mental and substance use disorders. According to a report from the HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), the Affordable Care Act provides one of the largest expansions of mental health and substance use disorder coverage in a generation.
Starting January 2014, an estimated 27 million uninsured individuals will have access to health insurance, and 25 percent of uninsured adults have a mental health condition or substance use disorder or both. The Affordable Care Act presents critical opportunities to improve access to care for these individuals. Building on the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA), the Affordable Care Act ensures that mental health and substance use services for newly covered individuals are provided at parity with medical and surgical benefits. The law also requires all new small group and individual market plans to cover 10 Essential Health Benefit categories, including mental health and substance use disorder services.
Improvements to the health care system will not only benefit individuals with behavioral health conditions, but also other groups who experience health disparities. Racial and ethnic minority populations are disproportionately uninsured, face systemic barriers to health care services, and often receive lower quality care and experience worse health outcomes. A concerted effort is needed to ensure that individuals from diverse racial and ethnic populations in need of mental health or substance use services are able to benefit from the expansion of coverage offered by the Affordable Care Act.
As the open enrollment period for the Health Insurance Marketplace approaches, targeted approaches for outreach and enrollment of diverse populations will be critical to reaching these vulnerable groups. The Office of Behavioral Health Equity at SAMHSA has partnered with four national associations (National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association, National Council on Urban Indian Health, National Latino Behavioral Health Association, and National Leadership Council on African American Behavioral Health) to identify and support the implementation of culturally appropriate outreach and enrollment practices, with the goal of increasing health insurance coverage among diverse populations.
Improved coordinated care and the integration of primary and behavioral health care, supported by Affordable Care Act provisions, will also benefit minority populations in need of mental health or substance use services. Individuals from racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to seek services from primary care providers; therefore, integrated care models can increase access to behavioral health services. Coordinated care also offers the potential to provide improved services for prevention and early intervention. SAMHSA funds the Primary and Behavioral Health Care Integration program, to provide support to communities to coordinate and integrate primary care services into publicly funded, community-based behavioral health settings, resulting in improved access to primary care services; improved prevention, early identification and intervention to reduce the incidence of serious physical illnesses, including chronic disease; increased availability of integrated, holistic care for physical and behavioral disorders; and better overall health status of clients.
Through these provisions and an emphasis on reducing health disparities, the Affordable Care Act presents critical opportunities for making access to health care more affordable for diverse populations. Now as the federal government partners with communities, we can work together to ensure these opportunities become a reality.
Posted in: Health Minority Populations Health Disparities National Minority Health Month | Comments | Add a Comment | Comment Policy | Permalink
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About the Blog
The Federal NPA Team writes about their thoughts on pressing issues, news and events concerning NPA. Follow and participate in this candid discussion.
Recent Blog Posts
→ Announcing the Winners of the Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color App Challenge
→ Enhanced National CLAS Standards Released
→ Achieving eHealth Equity - A report from National Minority Health Month
→ Addressing Poverty Today Among Those Facing Significant Social and Economic Challenges for a Healthier, Successful Tomorrow
→ Opportunities for a Better Behavioral Health System for Minority Populations
→ Research and Health Disparities: Breaking Down Barriers
→ Helping Americans Attain Optimal Health: The Affordable Care Act Delivering on its Promise
→ "I just didn’t want to hear any more bad news…"
→ Promoting Health Equity During Minority Health Month and Beyond
→ A big sister’s advice – get covered! | <urn:uuid:e15f9659-d6f9-4598-948b-58bbbd3dfab9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/npa/blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929357 | 3,149 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Why is the Southeastern Conference so supreme?
Why has the league won seven straight national championships?
Why can't any other league match the SEC when it comes to players, coaches and fans?
The answer is really very basic and simple:
Because in the SEC, college football just matters more.
SEC dominance all comes down to one word: Passion.
This one word is why Notre Dame players are still in the fetal position, mumbling to themselves, "Mommy, please make the big, mean men in crimson stop pushing us down and beating us up."
This one word is why any NFL job offered to Alabama coach Nick Saban would be a massive demotion.
This one word is why, in honor of the SEC, the BCS championship trophy should not only be made of crystal; it should be sponsored by Krystal.
Fans from other leagues have tried to claim the SEC's reputation has been artificially inflated by ESPN and CBS, which both have exorbitant TV deals with the league. Of course, this all just a bunch of whining from the little guys who have to eat peanut butter and jelly from the kid's menu while the SEC sits alone at the big-boy table and gorges itself on filet of Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12 and Notre Dame. Those seven straight national championships are the ultimate argument-ender. No other league has ever won more than three in a row since.
Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher put it best when I asked him not long ago why the SEC is so dominant and why he is attempting to build the Seminoles in the image of an SEC team.
"It's not just the athletes, it's the programs," said Fisher, who was Saban's offensive coordinator when he won his first national title at LSU. "It's the money that's spent in the programs, the money that's spent in player development, the money that's spent all the way around. That's what we're embarking on at Florida State."
There are some historians who believe SEC football dominance radiates from the South's loss to the North in the Civil War. They claim this provincial angst is why SEC schools dove head-first into college football – so they could once again go to battle with those "damn Yankees." In 1935, the SEC became the first conference to offer athletic scholarships, which outraged Harvard, Yale and the other hoity-toity institutions of higher learning in the Northeast.
"The Civil War had crushed the ego of the South," writes author Ray Glier in his recent book How the SEC Became Goliath. "The North was more urbanized and industrialized. It's why the North won the war and the South wanted to raise the level of its game. … Football was part of the formula. … The South finished second once before. Ever since it has been determined to finish first."
The SEC finished first in the nation in total attendance this year just like it has for the previous 14 years. Of the top 10 programs that draw the most fans, half are from the SEC.
Forbes magazine compiled its annual list of the "most valuable" college football programs. Seven of the top 10 were from the SEC.
College football's highest-paid coach (Saban) and four of the top eight most-compensated coaches reside in the SEC.
It's no wonder the best players are also drawn to the SEC. They want to play before the biggest crowds, in the biggest games, in front of the biggest TV audiences. They want to work out in the most advanced facilities and get developed by the best coaches.
In last year's NFL draft, an unprecedented nine of the first 18 players selected in the first round were from the SEC. Over the past 11 years, 81 players from the SEC have been first-round draft picks while the Big 12 is a distant second with 56.
When you add up all of these incredible numbers, statistics, attendance figures and salary amounts, you know what you get?
You get this:
In the SEC, college football just matters more.
Edited by Noah, 11 January 2013 - 09:28 AM. | <urn:uuid:279ab950-776e-445b-a38a-a58897945cc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sectalk.com/board/topic/100945-how-the-sec-monopolized-college-football/ | 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 | 0.971371 | 848 | 1.601563 | 2 |
UNESCO Stops Funding PA-Hitlerism
UNESCO has halted its funding of a magazine promoting Hitler as a role model for the PA. It expressed “shock” over the incitement – but only after it was exposed by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) and Arutz Sheva and after the Simon Wiesenthal Center complained.
Zayzafuna, a magazine which ostensibly promotes democracy and tolerance, published an article by a ten-year-old Palestinian girl who said that in her dreams, Hitler told her, “Yes. I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation who spreads destruction all over the world.”
"UNESCO is shocked and dismayed by the content of the February issue, and has requested more detailed information and clarification from the editors of the magazine and the Palestinian Authority,” the United Nations agency said. “UNESCO deplores and condemns the reproduction of such inflammatory statements in a magazine associated with UNESCO's name and mission and will not provide any further support to the publication in question."
The magazine is run by a body that is sponsored by a Palestinian Authority agency. The chairman of the PA is Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctorate thesis was on Holocaust denial.
The article on Hitler was published last February and stated that Hitler killed Jews “so you would all know that they are a nation who wreak havoc on Earth”.
UNESCO said that while it “upholds freedom of expression as an integral part of its mandate, the inclusion in this publication of a statement that may be interpreted as an apology of the Holocaust is contrary to UNESCO’s constitutional mandate and values. It is totally unacceptable.”
UNESCO supported the publication of three issues of the Zayzafuna Magazine six months after the February 2011 issue following an agreement with the editorial board that “they would focus on building greater appreciation amongst Palestinians for their heritage and culture,” UNESCO added.
Giulio Meotti noted in Arutz Sheva last week, “When the United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary, UNESCO refused to mention the Shoah - the Holocaust - in its World War II resolution, intentionally ignoring Israel’s request to include a reference to the destruction of European Jewry.”
He added that the article in Zayzafouna “is not just another example of Palestinian incitement to hatred…. When the Palestinian National Authority came into being in 1993, it pledged to junk its controversial textbooks, some of which date as far back as the ‘40s, and replace them with updated versions, purged of the anti-Jew racism and incitement that permeate the texts imported from Arab countries, many of which are reportedly still in use in Jordan.
“In 1994, Palestinian officials launched a textbook-replacement program, with the financing and help of UNESCO. The problem is that the Palestinian textbooks were not amended so as to be rid of the anti-Jewish remarks.
“’Palestine’ is shown to encompass all the Jewish State, the Jewish holy sites (such as the Temple Mount) have been erased, and Arab ‘martyrdom’ is praised. In these texts, Jews are described as ‘cunning,’ ‘locusts’ and ‘wild animals.’
“UNESCO, in 2003, financed the renovation of the Alexandria library, where a copy of the anti-Semitic booklet “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was soon prominently displayed.” | <urn:uuid:b13e673f-d4e5-4c90-a19b-0d8801aaaa13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151047 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958637 | 738 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Mobeam®(www.mobeam.com) today launched an innovative new music video to showcase what will happen when the more than 165 million Point of Sale (POS) laser scanners in use today are capable of scanning barcoded content on a smartphone using mobeam’s technology. While many companies tout their products as the solution in mobile commerce, no company has been able to crack the code of scanning a barcode at checkout – until now. Mobeam has patented technology that will revolutionize the way we all shop by enabling smartphones to be scanned by POS scanners, unlocking new potential for marketers and providing consumers the ability to seamlessly redeem coupons, gift cards and loyalty cards from their smartphone.
To view Multimedia News Release, go to http://www.multivu.com/mnr/60313-mobeam-innovative-new-music-video-portal-a
Simon N Reynolds ALDI ALDI Aldi is a supermarket that can be found in Germany and in most parts of the European Union. Simon specialises in the preparation and prosecution of patent applications in the engineering industry, specifically the ICT industry. Simon Reynolds is an English music critic who is well known for his writings on electronic dance music.keynote speaking, speaking, speakers, mentoring, coaching, executive coaching, marketing, marketing coach, advertising consultant, advertising agency,
Whether from a supermarket, farm stand, or your own garden, fresh fruits and vegetables are highlights of summertime. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reminds you that foodborne bacteria multiply faster in warm weather – and what’s more, safe handling of produce and fresh-squeezed juice is especially important because these foods are often consumed raw.
Keep foods safe this summer by practicing the Four Steps to Food Safety: clean hands and surfaces often; separate raw meats from other foods; cook to the right temperatures; and chill foods promptly. And with delicious, nutritious produce and fresh-squeezed juices, follow these additional tips to prevent food poisoning.
To view Multimedia News Release, go to https://www.multivu.com/mnr/50947-usfda-foodborne-bacteria-safe-handling-food-produce-fresh-juice
•Maybe you found yourself in the hospital’s ER because you thought you were having a heart attack only to be told later it was anxiety?
•Do you ever fear you might stop breathing because your chest feels tight and your breathing erratic?
•When you drive do you fear the idea of getting stuck in traffic, on a bridge or at red lights?
•Do you ever feel nervous and afraid you might lose control or go insane?
•Have you struggled with anxious thoughts that will not stop?
•Do you ever feel uncomfortable in enclosed spaces such as supermarkets, cinemas, public transport or even sitting at the hair dressers?
•Are you nervous and on edge in normal situations that never bothered you before?
The banana is transported by plane, eggs by refrigerated trucks and yogurt can be found in open fridges, so to speak – the bottom line: In order to maintain a certain standard in a supermarket you are forced to use a lot of energy. An increasing number of supermarket owners have recognized responsibility and have started saving energy. For example, the Swiss cooperative Coop has set itself the goal of having all of their supermarkets being carbon-neutral by the year 2023.
Every day thousands of people save millions of pounds on their household bills using moneysupermarket.com. But what do people do with the money they’ve saved? We challenged customers to make a short video to tell us what they did with their savings. | <urn:uuid:901450f3-5e56-4b4d-a7a6-64b514bb1ffe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clipmoon.com/tags/fresh-1/supermarket/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933865 | 771 | 1.5 | 2 |
SHOOTING SPORTS — A view of the Pondera Shooting Sports Club building west of town. Expansion for the facility is expected to begin soon. Photo courtesy of Scott Johnson
What started out in 2007-2008 as numerous separate groups needing a home for their activities, to becoming the PSSC (Pondera Shooting Sports Club) was an impressive achievement, but little did any of the initial leaders know back then that we would be expanding in 2013, thanks to the Mary Ellen Brownell Family and Pondera County Commissioners.
The PSSC has out grown its original plan and is adding on to accommodate the expanding needs of the community. What originally was a couple of acres has expanded into 4.5 acres and now will expand to 9.45 acres.
The groups in need of a facility in 2007 were Pondera County 4-H shooting sports program (air rifle, air pistol and archery), Pondera Valley Small Bore rifle league, Hunter Safety needed a facility to teach and shoot in (Rifle & Bow and Arrow), and the Conrad Trap Club was in very marginal shape and needed new equipment and facility also.
All these groups came together along with MSU extension agents to become an asset to Pondera County residents and a great example of what rural towns can do with tremendous community support. How did all this come about? Who would have ever guessed that the PSSC building gets used, to some degree three days of the week, year round? Where did the money, energy and enthusiasm come from?
Although 4-H was the first to contribute and continues to do so, they are certainly not the only group to donate.
Each of the shooting groups’ members volunteered energy, time and money to see the project to completion. In addition, the outpouring of support from individuals, local organizations, businesses, and grant funders has been tremendous.
The largest contribution came from the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks grant program.
Other funding came from smaller grants from Northwest Farm Credit Services, NorthWestern Energy, Sun River Electric and a series of grants from Friends of the National Rifle Association (NRA). These funders provided a solid foundation for the project, and the ability to complete it came from many other vital sources.
Professionals donated their expertise in construction, fundraising, appraisal, and even legal services to make the group an official non-profit entity. The local Lions Club and Pheasants Forever chapter contributed money to the project, as did numerous individuals.
Currently the facility has 13 lanes of indoor .22 rim fire small bore range, 4-H air rifle, pistol and archery, and two trap fields outside.
The expansion that is about to take place is multifaceted. First we are putting in two more trap fields, to accommodate a growing trap league (70 shooters last spring, 100+ anticipated this spring), and registered ATA trap shoot schedule, along with the doubling of our parking lot.
There have been meetings held out at the PSSC with between 275-350 people attending, parking space was greatly needed.
One of the newest projects that we are also doing is an outdoor, center fire pistol range on the west end of the facility. This will be surrounded by earthen embankments on three sides, to safely contain shooters and for sound abatement, shooting will be towards the west. It will have paper target boards, steel round up dueling trees, and metal pop up targets and gongs, for pistol plinking and possible future competition events.
This will help fill a void in Pondera County for people that have wanted to shoot center fire pistols (9mm, .40, .38-.357 and .44’s-.45) but do not have a place to do it. There will also be classes offered for woman and men on how to safely handle and become familiar with a hand gun. And this will be available to members.
A little longer term we are looking at installing 10 RV hookups, as we have people that come to competitive events with RV’s and it is a added bonus on getting larger participation. Along with the facility expansion the total 9.45 acres will be surrounded on all sides by a combination of Karaganda, chokecherry, spruce and Rocky Mountain juniper.
The trees are for visual enhancement, wildlife habitat and more sound abatement, the PSSC board wants to be a good neighbor to our neighbors near the club as they have been very supportive to us.
Where are we now? All the labor to develop this expansion will be done by PSSC members, along with people and contractors in the local community.
Currently the two new trap fields were made possible by businesses and individuals donating money per trap lane for a total of 10 sponsors. The Pat trap throwers and voice releases were submitted to the Friends of the NRA grant committee and approved by the state committee, we are waiting for National approval.
Estimated costs on the Pistol range for completion is $4,000 to $5,000, gravel for the parking lot estimated between 250 and 300 yards, we are still anticipating donations to accomplish this.
One might think after five years of work to construct the facility, develop policies to operate it, and continue to fund raise to maintain it, that PSSC members and the community who supports them might be ready to sit back and take a breath.
Instead, they continue to look at how to improve and expand the facility that has breathed new life into local shooting programs and provided a much-needed public use facility.
PSSC’s goal is to continue to develop a facility that will be an asset to the community that built it for generations to come. This is the kind of facility you may find next to a highly populated city in the Midwest or west coast, but we in Pondera County have it here in rural Montana, a great example of a super supportive Community.
The PSSC is a non-profit organization and charitable donations are welcome to assist with ongoing facility expansion.
Contributions can be sent to Pondera Shooting Sports Club, P.O. Box 691, Conrad, 59425.
PSSC is a 501 (c) (3) so donations are 100 percent tax deductable, anyone interested in donating can also contact a PSSC board member.
Anyone wanting to become part of the PSSC, the annual dues are $55 for an individual, $80 for a family, contact Sherry or Scott Johnson.
Editor’s note: This article was submitted by the PSSC board. | <urn:uuid:5537c70c-34c6-43b5-b860-ee19d9c8a390> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theindependentobserver.com/index.php/news-mainmenu-2/17-latest/2626-shooting-sports-club-going-great-guns | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960275 | 1,349 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Rampant consumerism is something we frequently address here at the Utopianist — it’s a pillar of American society most of us have come to at least tolerate. And though we may hear vague calls from the green movement asking us to ‘Buy Less, use less’, the vast majority continue buying and consuming away. We have to. It’s the default operating system; it’s how we obtain the goods and services we need to get by.
But it doesn’t have to be — there are enough options available that we could live perfectly fulfilling lives by (gasp) sharing stuff instead of buying it. The concept is awkwardly called ‘collaborative consumption’, and Shareable has a guide demonstrating how you can participate:
“It’s called collaborative consumption, (or the sharing economy) and it’s changing the way we work, play, and interact with each other. It’s fueled by the instant connection and communication of the internet, yet it’s manifesting itself in interesting ways offline too.
1. Remove all items from the box and assess
Sit down with yourself (or some friends) and talk about what you’ve got, what you need, and what you could live without. Take stock of what you’d be willing to share, rent, or give away. Write down all the things you really need to be productive/happy/connected. Then, cross out all the things that you want just to have them, and highlight all the things that involve a valuable experience. Now you have a list you can tackle through sharing.”
Shareable then goes on to curate an exhaustive list of services and websites that promote sharing instead of owning: BookMooch, car-sharing services, Couchsurfing.com, etc. By tapping all of these outlets, we can theoretically get by without actually buying much of anything at all (except food, I guess) — and by sharing everything.
Guess which other ideology besides ‘collaborative consumption’ advocates the sharing of everything? Evil, freedom-usurping communism! A key tenet of classical Marxism is that private property is abolished, and that everyone ends up being happier just sharing stuff amongst the community. Now, nobody can publicly endorse any element of the angry bearded man’s views out loud anymore, but movements like this are pretty much predicated on the idea that we’d be better off if we did away with ownership in general.
There’s clearly a benefit to wrenching yourself out of the demanding cycle of created wants that marketers try to keep us lodged in — if we’re not consumed with the desire to own stuff, we can spend our time, you know, doing more stuff. And the business world knows this.
Which is why it’s interesting to see the recent pro-business sharing-is-great trend try to make its case in a consumerist context: Pundits exclaim how great and innovative companies like Netflix are, that make a profit while encouraging you to own less, and how Zipcar and co. will lead to a world of less stuff. That’s the entire basis of a book by Lisa Gansky, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing. She argues that in the future, everyone will rent stuff instead of buying it, and that access will be more important than ownership.
In other words, we’re going to be perfectly happy sharing everything, so as long as someone’s making a profit off of it — it’s American consumerist communism! Snark aside, the ‘collaborative consumerism’ encouraged by Shareable is founded on laudable principles and, despite desperately needing a less cumbersome name, is about as much of a modern-day utopian movement as you’ll find. That’s right: you can live with communist values in consumerist America right now — and perhaps be all the happier for it. | <urn:uuid:64f2c887-13fc-477c-b696-8d7dda4639c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://utopianist.com/2011/03/how-to-live-like-a-communist-in-consumerist-america/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945705 | 833 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Our parents and teachers drummed it into our heads from a young age: "If you want to make a lot of money, you have to go to school."
While there is truth to that for the general populace, it really seems to be the case for some celebrities.
No, you don't have to have a doctorate to play the Terminator, but for some celebs, they hedged their bets and did the right thing -- they got their education under their belts, and then went on to tackle Hollywood.
Some on our list are no brainers -- you'd expect them to have rich educational histories. But some you barely expect to be able to spell, let alone have advanced degrees.
Keep that in mind before challenging one of the following five celebs to a friendly game of Trivial Pursuit. You'd have a great story to tell, but you'd also likely lose big.
Up first? Bueller .... Bueller ...
No. 5: Ben Stein
Ben Stein is so smart that he can actually spell "Bueller" without having to stop and figure out if the u goes before the e.
Stein is one smart dude. He earned a degree in economics from Columbia University, and then received a law degree from Yale. He was a lawyer, a professor, a historian, and a speech writer for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (Time magazine even speculated that he was the infamous Deep Throat).
Stein became a consultant to Hollywood and then came to fame with 1986's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" as the monotone economics teacher who was trying to take attendance. From there he got his own game show ("Win Ben Stein's Money") and has gone on to become a celebrated media personality.
While we are in awe of Stein's intelligence, he's not perfect. He also predicted that the mortgage crisis would "blow over." Oops.
Next up, a dumb "Friend" who's actually smart ...
No. 4: Lisa Kudrow
It is a well-known fact that it is easier to act drunk when you are sober than to act sober when you are drunk. The same must hold true for intelligence.
Lisa Kudrow became famous playing dim bulb Phoebe Buffay on "Friends," but the reality is that she's smart.
Kudrow comes from a line of smart people. Her father is a doctor and her brother is a neurologist. Before she even decided to pursue a career in acting, she was training in the family business, and was conducting tons of medical research.
Kudrow earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Vassar and worked for her father for eight years, even being credited for research on cluster headaches.
Later, she went on to join the cast of "Friends" and gave the world another gift: Her rendition of "Smelly Cat." | <urn:uuid:0785312e-5edf-4f1e-b7b9-de1ebf934dfd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news4jax.com/news/education/back-to-school/Five-celebrities-who-are-actually-smart/-/13088098/1670408/-/bt8jxfz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983864 | 591 | 1.648438 | 2 |
- (Photo: Screenshot/Laurel Leader-Call)
A local Mississippi newspaper recently received public criticism after it published, on the front page of its in-print edition, a story of a same-sex wedding with the headline: "Historic Wedding: Women wed in Laurel through smiles, tears."
Residents of Jones County, Miss., were reportedly upset because the Laurel Leader-Call referred to the same-sex wedding as "historic," even though same-sex marriage has not been legalized in the state.
The publication reportedly lost 15 subscribers over the front-page article, which was published Feb. 7, as well as received a torrent of phone calls, Facebook comments, and emails regarding its front-page story choice.
Many citizens of Jones County, which has a population of 67,761, took to the newspaper's Facebook page to express their objection to the front-page story.
While many cited the article as going against biblical teaching regarding same-sex marriage, others fired back, deeming these comments as "hateful" or "biased."
One commenter, Betsy McCarty-Livingston, defended her Christian beliefs, arguing that she believes "God loves everyone, but hates the sin."
Additionally, McCarty-Livingston argued that just because one opposes same-sex marriage does not make them a "hateful" person, as many pro-same-sex marriage commenters argued.
"I don't see 'hatred' in any of these comments. I personally believe that gay 'marriage' is wrong in the eyes of God. That is not how or what he intends marriage to be," McCarty-Livingston wrote.
"However, I realize that not everyone agrees with me or God on that subject. I do not think the article was news worthy, much less front page worthy," McCarty-Livingston continued.
"You seemed to get so defensive when someone disagreed with you, maybe you were basing your reaction off 'hatred' of those who don't agree with you. God loves everyone, he hates the sin. I have nothing against these 2 women, I just don't agree with their choice. I am a sinner saved but by the grace of God," she added.
Jim Cegielski, owner of the Laurel-Leader Call, issued a response editorial to the controversy last Saturday, arguing that the newspaper tried to report on the same-sex wedding ceremony in an unbiased manner.
"I had at least 20 or so readers express to me they think gay marriage is 'an abomination against God.' We never said it wasn't. We never said it was," Cegielski argued.
"We were simply reporting to the best of our ability," he added.
Those upset with the article disagree that it remained completely unbiased, arguing that the paper was attempting to "glorify" same-sex marriage through its portrayal of the wedding.
Those critical of the article especially took offense that a bolded quote from one of the brides read: "Love is love. It knows no gender."
The article described the wedding of Jessica Powell and Crystal Craven, two residents of Laurel, Miss.
The article focused on the wedding and also Craven's battle with brain cancer and her fight through chemotherapy.
Mississippi is one of 41 states in the U.S. where same-sex marriage in not legal.
A 2011 Public Policy Polling survey found that 78 percent of residents in Mississippi oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. | <urn:uuid:76805b11-14b6-4139-95da-59f75da6af42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/miss-newspaper-receives-backlash-for-printing-historic-gay-wedding-story-90532/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976304 | 724 | 1.625 | 2 |
May 22 2013 Latest news:
Monday, June 25, 2012
Pupils from the Federation of Gislingham and Palgrave Primary Schools had an unexpected treat during a recent trip to London – the chance to stand outside 10 Downing Street.
The children were in the capital to visit the Houses of Parliament when they were invited through the security gates at the top end of Downing Street and offered the rare privilege of posing in front of the Prime Minister’s official residence. A policeman also gave them a talk on interesting facts about all the buildings in Downing Street.
Earlier in the day the Year 5 and 6 students toured the House of Commons and the House of Lords, in a visit arranged by local MP Dan Poulter. The tour included the debating chambers of both houses, the royal rooms where Her Majesty the Queen prepares for the State Opening of Parliament, and numerous historical paintings and statues.
After the visit to the Houses of Parliament, the children were taken on foot for a brief sightseeing excursion that encompassed the Cenotaph, Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, Admiralty Arch, the Mall and Buckingham Palace.
Headteacher Andrew Berry, said: “Trips such as this are not only educational, but also broaden the children’s experience of the world in general. Our invitation to stand outside Number 10 Downing Street is an experience I think we will all remember for a very long time.”
Police in Norwich have launched an investigation after a woman claimed in a tweet she had knocked a cyclist off their bike.
max temp: 12°C
min temp: 6°C | <urn:uuid:35ece2f2-55cd-4790-9e6e-ca68bc351ee8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/education/palgrave_primary_pupils_visit_10_downing_street_1_1421399 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956867 | 332 | 1.703125 | 2 |
WHAT'S WRONG WITH FOOD IRRADIATION
revised February 2001
Irradiation damages the quality of food.
· Irradiation damages food by breaking up molecules and creating free radicals. The free radicals kill some
bacteria, but they also bounce around in the food, damage vitamins and enzymes, and combine with existing chemicals
(like pesticides) in the food to form new chemicals, called unique radiolytic products (URPs).
· Some of these URPs are known toxins (benzene, formaldehyde, lipid peroxides) and some are unique to irradiated
foods. Scientists have not studied the long-term effect of these new chemicals in our diet. Therefore, we cannot
assume they are safe.
· Irradiated foods can lose 5%-80% of many vitamins (A, C, E, K and B complex). The amount of loss depends
on the dose of irradiation and the length of storage time.
· Most of the food in the American diet is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
for irradiation: beef, pork, lamb, poultry, wheat, wheat flour, vegetables, fruits, shell eggs, seeds for sprouting,
spices, herb teas. (Dairy is already pasteurized). A food industry petition currently before the FDA asks for approval
for luncheon meats, salad bar items, sprouts, fresh juices and frozen foods. Another petition before the USDA asks
for approval for imported fruits and vegetables.
· Irradiation damages the natural digestive enzymes found in raw foods. This means the body has to work
harder to digest them.
· If unlabeled, raw foods that have been irradiated look like fresh foods, but nutritionally they are like
cooked foods, with decreased vitamins and enzymes. The FDA allows these foods to be labeled "fresh."
· Irradiated fats tend to become rancid.
· When high-energy electron beams are used, trace amounts of radioactivity may be created in the food.
Science has not proved that a long-term diet of irradiated foods is safe for human health.
· The longest human feeding study was 15 weeks. No one knows the long-term effects of a life-long diet that
includes foods which will be frequently irradiated, such as meat, chicken, vegetables, fruits, salads, sprouts
· There are no studies on the effects of feeding babies or children diets containing irradiated foods, except
a very small and controversial study from India that showed health effects.
· Studies on animals fed irradiated foods have shown increased tumors, reproductive failures and kidney
damage. Some possible causes are: irradiation-induced vitamin deficiencies, the inactivity of enzymes in the food,
DNA damage, and toxic radiolytic products in the food.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for poultry on only 5 of 441 animal-feeding studies. Marcia
van Gemert, Ph.D., the toxicologist who chaired the FDA committee that approved irradiation, later said, "These
studies reviewed in the 1982 literature from the FDA were not adequate by 1982 standards, and are even less accurate
by 1993 standards to evaluate the safety of any product, especially a food product such as irradiated food."
The 5 studies are not a good basis for approval of irradiation for humans, because they showed health effects on
the animals or were conducted using irradiation at lower energies than those the FDA eventually approved.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for fruits and vegetables on a theoretical calculation of the
amount of URPs in the diet from one 7.5 oz. serving/day of irradiated food. Considering the different kinds of
foods approved for irradiation, this quantity is too small and the calculation is irrelevant.
· Even with current labeling requirements, people cannot avoid eating irradiated food. That means there
is no control group, and epidemiologists will never be able to determine if irradiated food has any health effects.
· Science is always changing. The science of today is not the science of tomorrow. The science we have today
is not adequate to prove the long-term safety of food irradiation.
Irradiation covers up problems that the meat and poultry industry should solve
· Irradiation covers up the increased fecal contamination that results from speeded up slaughter and decreased
federal inspection, both of which allow meat and poultry to be produced more cheaply. Prodded by the industry,
the USDA has allowed a transfer of inspection to company inspectors. Where government inspectors remain, they are
not allowed to condemn meat and poultry now that they condemned 20 years ago.
· Because of this deregulation (continued under President Clinton, a protégé of Tyson Foods),
the meat and poultry industry has recently lost money and suffered bad publicity from food-poisoning lawsuits and
expensive product recalls. Irradiation is a "magic bullet" that will enable them to say that the product
was "clean" when it left the packing plant. (Irradiation, however, does not sterilize food, and any bacteria
that remain can grow to toxic proportions if the food is not properly stored and handled.)
· In 2000, seven meat industry associations submitted a petition to USDA to redefine key regulations relating
to contamination. If accepted by USDA, this petition would permit unlimited fecal contamination during production,
as long as irradiation was used afterwards.
Labeling is necessary to inform people so they can choose to avoid irradiated foods.
· Because irradiated foods have not been proven safe for human health in the long term, prominent, conspicuous
and truthful labels are necessary for all irradiated foods. Consumers should be able to easily determine if their
food has been irradiated. Labels should also be required for irradiated ingredients of compound foods, and for
restaurant and institutional foods.
· Because irradiation can deplete vitamins, labels should state the amount of vitamin loss after irradiation,
especially for fresh foods that are usually eaten fresh. Consumers have the right to know if they are buying nutritionally
· Current US labels are not sufficient to enable consumers to avoid irradiated food. Foods are labeled only
to the first purchaser. Irradiated spices, herb teas and supplement ingredients, foods that are served in restaurants,
schools, etc., or receive further processing, do not bear consumer labels. Consumer labels are required only for
foods sold whole (like a piece of fruit) or irradiated in the package (like chicken breasts). The text with the
declaration of irradiation can be as small as the type face on the ingredient label. The US Department of Agriculture
requirements have one difference: irradiated meat or poultry that is part of another food (like a tv dinner) must
be disclosed on the label.
· The US Food and Drug Administration is currently rewriting the regulation for minimum labeling, and will
release it for public comment by early 2002. They may eliminate all required text labels. If they do retain the
labels, Congress has told them to use a "friendly" euphemism instead of "irradiation."
Electron-beam irradiation today means nuclear irradiation tomorrow.
· The source of the irradiation is not listed on the label.
· The original sponsor of food irradiation in the US was the Department of Energy, which wanted to create
a favorable image of nuclear power as well as dispose of radioactive waste. These goals have not changed. Cobalt-60,
which is used for irradiation, must be manufaactured in a nuclear reactor.
· Many foods cannot be irradiated using electron beams. E-beams only penetrate 1-1.5 inches on each side,
and are suitable only for flat, evenly sized foods like patties. Large fruits, foods in boxes, and irregularly
shaped foods must be irradiated using x-rays or gamma rays from nuclear materials.
· Countries that lack a cheap and reliable source of electricity for e-beams use nuclear materials. Opening
U.S. markets to irradiated food encourages the spread of nuclear irradiation worldwide.
Irradiation using radioactive materials is an environmental hazard.
· The more nuclear irradiators, the more likelihood of a serious accident in transport, operation or disposal
of the nuclear materials.
· Food irradiation facilities have already contaminated the environment. For example, in the state of Georgia
in 1988, radioactive water escaped from an irradiation facility. The taxpayers were stuck with $47 million in cleanup
costs. Radioactivity was tracked into cars and homes. In Hawaii in 1967 and New Jersey in 1982, radioactive water
was flushed into the public sewer system.
· Numerous worker exposures have occurred in food irradiation facilities worldwide.
Irradiation doesn't provide clean food.
· Because irradiation doesn't kill all the bacteria in a food, the ones that survive are by definition radiation-resistant.
These bacteria will multiply and eventually work their way back to the 'animal factories'. Soon thereafter, the
bacteria that contaminate the meat will no longer be killed by currently approved doses of irradiation. The technology
will no longer be usable, while stronger bacteria contaminate our food supply.
· People may become more careless about sanitation if irradiation is widely used. Irradiation doesn't kill
all the bacteria in a food. In a few hours at room temperature, the bacteria remaining in meat or poultry after
irradiation can multiply to the level existing before irradiation.
· Some bacteria, like the one that causes botulism, as well as viruses and prions (which are believed to
cause Mad Cow Disease) are not killed by current doses of irradiation.
· Irradiation encourages food producers to cut corners on sanitation, because they can 'clean up' the food
just before it is shipped.
Irradiation does nothing to change the way food is grown and produced.
· Irradiated foods can have longer shelf lives than nonirradiated foods, which means they can be shipped
further while appearing 'fresh.' Food grown by giant farms far away may last longer than nonirradiated, locally
grown food, even if it is inferior in nutrition and taste. Thus, irradiation encourages centralization and hurts
· The use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and other agrichemicals, as well as pollution and energy
use, are not affected. Irradiation is applied by the packer after harvest or slaughter.
· Free-market economists say irradiation is 'efficient': it provides the cheapest possible food for the
least possible risk. But these economists are not concerned about the impaired nutritional quality of the food.
They are not considering the environmental effects of large-scale corporate farming, the social costs of centralization
of agriculture and loss of family farms, the replacement of unionized, impartial government inspectors with company
inspectors , the potential long-term damage to human health, and the possibility of irradiation-resistant super-bacteria.
All of these developments should be (but are not) considered when regulators and public health officials evaluate
the benefits of food irradiation.
Organic Consumers Association, <http://www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.html>
Contact Irradiation Coordinator: email@example.com
Office: 6101 Cliff Estate Rd, Little Marais, MN 55614 218/226-4164, fax 218/ 226-4157 | <urn:uuid:2c4f9779-92b5-49d6-88bc-bd1afb9abfdc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://organicconsumers.org/Irrad/irradfact.cfm | 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 | 0.936167 | 2,405 | 3.78125 | 4 |
After Barack Obama’s election, some in the women’s movement thought big – pushing for a Cabinet-level office, or even a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission on Women.
But when Obama announced his plans Wednesday, he brushed aside those requests.
Instead, he started the White House Council on Women and Girls — a sort of inter-agency task force with no full-time staff, no Cabinet-level leader and no set meeting schedule.
Women’s advocates who filed out of his East Room announcement Wednesday said they were delighted that their issues would get White House-level attention, whatever the forum.
But Obama’s move left others in the women’s movement questioning why he simply wouldn’t give the panel the prestige and heft they feel it deserves. Some activists already are strategizing about new ways to elevate women’s issues, beyond what Obama did.
“I think it falls far short of what’s needed,” Martha Burk, a former chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, said about the new board. The council will be headed by two top Obama advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Tina Tchen.
“With all respect to Valerie Jarrett and Tina Tchen, both of whom are excellent folks. ... I think both are going to find this is one of many things they’re responsible for and I think they’ll be stretched to give it proper attention. We have told them that,” Burk said.
One group – made up primarily of women who supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primary — said it will go to Congress seeking a presidential commission on women. The group sent out a blast email to rally its members around the idea just hours after Obama spoke.
In addition, the Center for American Progress is joining one of Obama’s most prominent female supporters, Maria Shriver, to launch a major inquiry into the stresses facing American women.
The White House confirmed officials considered and rejected the idea of creating a presidential commission. "They looked at a variety of options but ultimately they decided to go with the council that was announced," said one official, who asked not to be named.
Several women’s leaders in attendance at Wednesday’s event said they were pleased with Obama’s move, even as they acknowledged that it was not what most outside groups recommended.
“We have a commitment from the administration that they are determined to make this work and that, if it doesn’t work in the way they and we hope, they’ll take another look at it,” said Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women. “It has not been given short shrift in any way. ... I’m satisfied with that.”
In December, nearly 50 women’s groups sent a letter urging President-elect Obama to create a White House office to address women’s issues. “The director would hold Cabinet-rank and report directly to the President,” the letter said. “The restored program should be strengthened in rank, staffing and function.....A Cabinet-level office is the most effective way to accomplish this goal.”
“It’s definitely not what we were talking about,” Burk said of the new council. She called it a “retread” of another similar initiative from the Clinton era.
In his remarks Wednesday, Obama suggested the interagency panel would be more effective than other proposals, such as reinstituting a White House office on women, first set up in 1995 under President Bill Clinton but disbanded by President George W. Bush.
“It’s not enough to only have individual women’s offices at different agencies, or only have one office in the White House, but rather, as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once said, ‘In our government, responsibility for the advancement of women is not the job of any one agency. It’s the job of all of them,’” Obama said of the council, which will consist of 24 Cabinet-level officials.
But by brushing aside the calls for a Cabinet-level post or a presidential commission, Obama risks reopening old wounds from his Democratic presidential primary campaign with Clinton. Some of the most active backers of the idea of a stronger White House panel are former Clinton supporters who contend that sexism contributed to her defeat.
The call for a presidential commission on women is coming in large part from WomenCount, a group comprised largely of Clinton backers. The organization, founded by Clinton Bay Area fundraiser Susie Buell, claims that the 2008 election “exposed extreme gender bias in the media and throughout our culture.”
WomenCount has launched an Internet-based petition campaign to urge Obama to create a women’s commission within his first 100 days in office. The group’s executive director, Stacy Mason, said she was “thrilled” by news of Obama’s council.
But she added, “We are moving forward with our campaign calling for a presidential commission on women as well. ... We really need to do both.”
Mason said her group wasn’t giving up on Obama, but was planning a new effort to get a commission set up through legislation passed by Congress.
The idea for a commission comes in part from a similar panel President Kennedy created in 1961. His brother, Robert Kennedy, served on the board, which was headed by a former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. The panel filed its report to President Lyndon Johnson in 1963.
At the East Room ceremony, Obama made no mention of a commission, but he did tip his hat to Clinton. “I had the privilege of participating in a historic campaign with a historic candidate who we now call Madam Secretary,” he noted.
The effort at the Center for American Progress also will go forward, even with Obama’s new council.
“The decision by President Obama to form a White House Council on Women and Girls comes at a critical time,” said Ann O’Leary, a senior fellow at the think tank and director of Berkeley’s Center on Health, Economic and Family Security. “We look forward to working with the president and his advisers on this effort. We also plan to work closely with Maria Shriver as we undertake an in-depth review of the status of women in America.”
Shriver, who was in Washington for the National Governors Association convention last month, was spotted at the White House on Feb. 20. She met briefly with first lady Michelle Obama and at greater length with her staff, a White House spokeswoman said. As Shriver left, she declined to speak with reporters.
A spokeswoman for Shriver declined to make her available for an interview Wednesday. The White House did not respond to questions about the purpose of Shriver’s visit. | <urn:uuid:1fd18ed1-58a1-4356-9dfb-dcdcb2340df9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=F8D92B62-18FE-70B2-A8E69AF6230CD9EC | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970432 | 1,438 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Computer-linked cameras placed in the stands around each goal capture ball’s motion,which is then read by a computer in real-time.
Ball’s path is tracked on each of the cameras.These separate views are then combined to produce an accurate 3D representation of the ball’s path.
High speed TV cameras capture images at up to 500 frames per second.
The system would signal a goal to the referee in half a second who would hear a distinct beep through an ear-piece or message to a watch Ball.
Chip sensor in ball is triggered by magnetic field and signals computer to send “GOAL”message.Wires run around the goal mouth to form a magnetic field.
Six Cameras around the goal track the ball and the system software creates 3D images which capture the position of the ball in relation to the goal line.
If the Ball crosses the line,an encrypted signal is transmitted to he referee via watch or a ear piece within half a second.
Posts Tagged ‘sports’
July 7, 2012 Leave a comment | <urn:uuid:f6982100-42eb-4607-84db-3dfd9867a668> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://doddera.com/tag/sports/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930817 | 225 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Reuters has a story about a man who's apparently contracted a life-threatening lung disease that his doctor says may be linked to his massive consumption of microwave popcorn. He ate several bags of buttered microwave popcorn each day, according to the story. (The FDA is now launching an investigation to see if the additive diacetyl could be responsible for his illness and that of workers in plants where microwave popcorn is made.)
This news is not totally shocking to me. That's not to say anyone should expect to come down with lung disease because they ate food that's readily available on grocery store shelves. But I have deep-seated distrust for a lot of the packaged food out there, namely because of all the preservatives and other chemical additives they tend to contain. As such, I try to avoid the pervasive nasties as often as possible.
But this is no easy feat when it comes to popcorn, for which I have an insurmountable weakness. Popcorn is like kryptonite to my will power. I simply cannot get enough of it.
Fortunately, there are lots of appliances available that make it easy for me to balance these two forces--my loathing for eating strange chemicals and my crazy love for eating popcorn. Making it by hand in a lidded pot with oil is easy enough. But for total ease of use, it's tough to beat a standard air popper. Or so I thought before a friend gave me this super appliance.
The West Bend Stir Crazy popcorn popper is one of those rare gadgets that's functional and actually fun to use. The non-stick bottom heats up like an electric wok. To use it, you just put a little oil and the unpopped kernels on the bottom, put the dome lid over the top and turn the Stir Crazy on. A thin metal rod spins around just above the heated bottom, keeping the kernels from sitting still (and therefore burning). After a few minutes, the popcorn starts popping away like one of those old Fisher-Price vacuum cleaners.
When you're done, you can just flip the whole thing upside-down and use the dome as your popcorn bowl.
The top of the dome has holes in it, and you can put butter there while the popcorn pops. The idea is that the heat will melt the butter, which will then drip down onto the popcorn below (the Stir Crazy comes with a small cover you can place over that section when you're done so all the remnants of the butter don't drip onto your lap while you eat). A neat idea, but it hasn't worked that well for me. I've always used refrigerated butter, and the popcorn's always done before the butter has melted.
For those who get peeved at unpopped kernels, the Stir Crazy performs well, usually only leaving a few duds behind per batch. I'm told it can be used for making caramel corn, too, though I haven't tried that yet.
If you're looking to cut microwave popcorn and all its spooky additives out of your diet, the Stir Crazy is a pretty solid way to go about it. | <urn:uuid:f723c448-36c6-4d2a-ac45-9c4977abda88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnet.com/8301-13553_1-9773490-32.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964589 | 634 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Mexico's old ruling party looks set for comeback
THE PARTY that ruled Mexico for most of the past century looked set for a comeback yesterday as voters chose a new president, seeking an end to a brutal drug war and weak economic growth that have worn down the ruling conservatives.
Twelve years after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost power, opinion polls showed its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, heading into the vote with a double-digit lead over his opponents despite lingering doubts about the party.
Tainted by corruption, electoral fraud and occasional bouts of brutal authoritarianism during its 71 years in power, the PRI was voted out in 2000. It has bounced back, helped by the economic malaise and a tide of lawlessness that have plagued Mexico under the conservative National Action Party (Pan).
Mr Peña Nieto, a youthful-looking former governor of the state of Mexico, has established himself as the new face of the PRI with the aid of favourable media coverage led by Mexico’s most powerful broadcaster, Televisa.
Long queues of voters snaked around city blocks in the capital. “It’s time for the PRI to return.
They’re the only ones who know how to govern,” said Candelaria Puc (70), preparing to vote in Cancún with the help of a friend because she cannot read or write.
“The PRI is tough, but they won’t let the drug violence get out of control,” she added, speaking in a mix of Mayan and Spanish.
After ending the PRI’s rule in 2000, the Pan raised hopes high. But years of weak growth and the deaths of more than 55,000 people in drug-related killings since 2007 have eroded its popularity.
Violence continued in the days before yesterday’s vote. On Saturday, in the Pacific beach resort of Acapulco, one of the cities most affected by the drug war, four people were killed, two of them tortured and beheaded, a hallmark of drug-related killings, Guerrero state police said.
The PRI mayoral candidate in the city of Marquelia, about 70km (40 miles) from Acapulco, was kidnapped by an armed group, prompting a protest of his supporters that closed a highway for five hours, a party leader said.
Bidding to become the country’s first female president, Pan candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota was third in the polls.
Mr Peña Nieto’s closest challenger in pre-election polling was former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuél López Obrador, the front-runner for much of the 2006 race. Mr López Obrador ultimately lost by half a point to Mexican president Felipe Calderón of Pan and refused to accept defeat. Claiming fraud, he led massive protests in the capital for weeks, bringing much of Mexico City to a standstill and alienating even some of his supporters.
Though his bid in this campaign surged late on when a wave of student-led opposition to the PRI boosted his ratings, polls suggest Mr López Obrador will fall short of the 35 per cent of votes he won in 2006. “This is no time for the country to go in reverse,” a relaxed Mr López Obrador said of the PRI before voting.
Final polls showed Mr Peña Nieto winning 40 per cent to 45 per cent of the vote, Mr López Obrador close to 30 per cent with Ms Vázquez Mota not far behind. Gabriel Quadri, a fourth candidate competing for a smaller party, is expected to pick up a few per cent.
The one with the most votes wins, with no need for a second round.
Mr Peña Nieto has seized on Mr Calderón’s failure to tame cartels with a military-led offensive, arguing the PRI’s experience in power means it best understands how to restore peace to Mexico and reinvigorate the economy.
Mr López Obrador has in recent weeks sounded alarms about possible vote fraud, raising concerns he might call new street protests if he loses again. – (Reuters) | <urn:uuid:e9526d1c-64c5-47b1-aca6-64b1c8dcd14d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irishtimes.com/news/mexico-s-old-ruling-party-looks-set-for-comeback-1.527363?via=rel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956304 | 882 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The following essay was written by Ellen Fletcher in 2000. We share it with you to give you a sense of just how much she overcame in her early years, before becoming the bicycling revolutionary we came to love in California.
Life in Nazi Germany
I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1928. My mother was a German native, but my father was born in a part of Austria which was annexed to Poland after World War I. Although he had served in the Austrian army, and his name was definitely a German one, he was given Polish citizenship — much to his dismay.
German law requires children and grandchildren ad infinitum to take the nationality of the their male ancestor, so I was a Polish citizen too. This became significant after Hitler came to power in 1933.
My family was Jewish. The Nazi government placed many restrictions on the Jews. But somehow foreign Jews were supposedly not subject to these restrictions. Jews were barred from walking on certain streets in Berlin, one of which was Kurfuerstendamm, where my orthodontist was located. I was permitted to visit his office, but neither my mother nor my grandmother could accompany me. My fright on walking there was intense each time, knowing very well that the authorities could do whatever they wanted with Jews they encountered.
Similarly, I was given a ticket to go to a circus performance where there was a sign at the entrance reading “Keine Juden,” (no Jews). Again, I was alone. Shortly after the performance began, someone near me dropped an umbrella, which made a loud clatter falling down the bleacher area where I was sitting. All eyes turned towards me, or so I thought. I shook with terror. The circus performance did not penetrate my mind.
As the world now knows, Kristallnacht occurred on the night of November 9th, 1938. I was not living with my mother because, being a single working mom, she could not care for me. I lived in a group home a few blocks from her apartment. We children had gone to sleep as usual that evening. The housemother later woke us up and told us all to get dressed, even with coats, hats and gloves. We were to sit silently on our beds, in the dark. She was sobbing. We could hear much noise outside of shouting, screaming, bashing and running, and the windows were lit with the light from one or more fires. We sat for what seemed a long time. Our housemother fully expected the Nazis to crash into the apartment. Fortunately, they didn’t, and eventually we were permitted to undress again and go back to sleep.
Late one afternoon a telegram was delivered for me. I ran with it to my mother’s. It ordered me to appear at the Police Station the following morning at 8 a.m. My mother said she would go in my place. When she did, she was told that I, a Polish Jew, must leave the country within ten days.
My tenth birthday occurred shortly before I left. My mother planned a big party both to celebrate my birthday, and as a farewell party. After living away from my mother for as long as I could remember, I had just moved in with her a couple of days before - an event we had both been looking forward to for years. We were both in the kitchen on Friday afternoon the day before the party, and the radio was on. Suddenly, we heard an announcement: No Jews would be allowed on the streets on the following day. The only person who could come to my “party” was a friend of my mother’s, Tante (aunt) Dora as she was known to me. She was a non-Jew married to a Jewish man who had already been taken away earlier that year. She had two sons. The younger one, Dagobert, was about my age, and we usually played together while our mothers visited. Dagobert’s older brother was taken away also. Dagobert was taken away after I left Berlin. Tante Dora was the only one in her family to survive the war as she was not Jewish.
The atmosphere among the population was far from blase. There were loudspeakers all over the city blaring out Hitler's hate-Jews speeches plus military march music at all hours of the day. There were frequent hate-Jew rallies in town that attracted thousands. The Jews were certainly concerned, though many thought such wild behavior couldn't last. And every week or so (my remembrance of the timing is a bit vague now) there were new pronouncements placing ever more restrictions and prohibitions on the Jews. First they had to put a star of David on their businesses, then non-Jews were discouraged to do business there. That was of course followed by destruction of those businesses on Kristallnacht. Jewish professionals were forbidden to practice their professions. Jewish children were not permitted to attend public schools. And on and on. What was so frightening too was that the entire population (or so it seemed) joined in the hating Jews with enthusiasm. Jews were evicted from their homes. Jews were taunted in their restricted section of the parks (the section with yellow benches with a J painted on them) and as we left our Jewish school every day we were taunted more; there was a public school across the street from ours that let out about the time ours did, and the abuse we had to put up with daily was daunting.
I left Berlin on December 14th, 1938. My mother and stepfather took me to the railway station in a taxi early in the morning. The scene in the station waiting room was a very emotional one. The parents were saying goodbye to their children, some as young as toddlers, not knowing what was to happen to them, or, indeed, to themselves. The parents told their children they would be joining them later, but about half of the Kindertransport children never saw either of their parents again. The Kindertransport was the operation that took nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to England from December, 1938 until the war broke out on September 3rd, 1939.
The train was a chartered one, with I don’t know how many hundreds of children on board. Two adults were assigned to supervise us. We saw them only briefly. I was the oldest in my compartment, and took a mothering role in comforting the others who were, of course, very upset at leaving home and family. Having lived away from my mother all those years, I was not as upset as the others. After a while I took out a recorder I had been permitted to take with me, and played songs for the others to sing. It helped.
As we neared the Dutch border a uniformed customs official came into our compartment and ordered us to open our suitcases. He then wildly threw their contents around, upsetting the children all over again. After we had collectively repacked the suitcases, I again played songs on my recorder to calm everyone’s nerves once again.
We reached the Hook of Holland after dark that evening and boarded an overnight ferry to England. After breakfast the next morning we were lined up on deck. Two Bobbies (English policemen) walked by, frightening us no end. From our experience in Germany, uniformed men were to be feared. Of course they did us no harm, and we boarded buses that took us to a camp at a place called Dovercourt. It was a summer vacation camp, and consisted of unheated cabins and a large marquee where we gathered for meals and activities. We learned that this was the coldest winter England had experienced in fifty years. There were already many children there from a previous transport.
The first evening the BBC was there for a live broadcast. I couldn’t understand English at the time, but I believe it must have contained an appeal for listeners to take us into their homes. I became sick the next morning, I believe with the flu, and was taken to the “hospital” hut. It contained four beds like the others, but also had a small electric floor heater. After I had been there for I don’t know how long, I was finally instructed to put on lots of clothes and pack everything else, as I was going on another journey.
After a train trip that took most of the day, the few of us from the camp who were on the train got off at Hull, a port city in Yorkshire on the north east coast of the country. We all wore identifying tags and were marched around in a circle while our prospective foster parents checked the tags for the child assigned to them. I was taken by a couple who took me to their home in a car.
Neither of my foster parents spoke German, and adjustment was quite difficult. Not only could we not understand each other’s conversation, but the customs were different. For instance, in Germany “good” children didn’t hide their hands on their laps when sitting at a table; the hands were to rest at the edge of the table. When I took pains to be on my best behavior and put my hands on the table, I got slapped because that was considered unacceptable. They had no children of their own and had no idea how to deal with me.
I attended a two-room schoolhouse. I was armed with a German-English dictionary. At the beginning of each day the teacher would write down a list of words for me to translate, and I would retreat to a desk at the back of the room to look for the translation in the dictionary. All the children knew I had came from Germany, and called me “Nazi,” a word I understood all too well. None of the children wanted to make friends with me. Looking back at that period, I’ve wondered why the teacher didn’t make an attempt to explain my situation. It’s possible she didn’t understand it any more than her students did.
During the war, air raid sirens would go off frequently and the alerts would last a long time. My foster father had built a dugout in the center of the garden lawn, and the entire family would troop down to it when the sirens sounded. We spent the time putting jigsaw puzzles together. Then gradually the sirens were more or less ignored, and we’d stay in the house with its windows blacked out. Later, the dugout became my bedroom when a friend of the family was bombed out of his house and he was given what had been my room.
One night an incendiary bomb actually bounced off the roof of the dugout, but fortunately it burned itself out harmlessly in the garden.
Later, I was sent to live in a hostel for refugee girls which was in an area less subject to bombing raids.
Off to the U.S.
My mother and stepfather left Germany for the United States in June, 1941, while I was in England. There was no civilian ocean travel from England during the war, and besides, my parents were just getting settled in New York at the time. It was hard for them, as it was for other refugees who managed to escape from the Nazi countries. They were permitted to only take out what they could carry, plus the equivalent of only $4 each in cash. In New York they were helped, as were other refugees, by a Jewish organization that found them an apartment, helped them get (menial) jobs, and assisted them in getting furniture from the Salvation Army.
My mother sent me ship tickets from England to New York in 1946. I was very resentful that she had not asked whether I even wanted to join her in New York. I was seventeen years old at the time, and had no desire to go to the U.S. My impressions of the States were formed by the rash behavior of the GIs stationed in England, and the Hollywood movies, neither of which appealed to me.
No sooner had I landed in New York than I plotted how to get back to England. I decided I would be a hospital stewardess on a transatlantic liner. There were two nurses with that title on board the ship I had come on. I walked into Montefiori Hospital in the Bronx a day or two after my arrival and asked to be trained as a nurse. The first (and only) question I was asked by the nursing supervisor was whether I had a high school diploma. The answer was no. To get a secondary education in England students had to pass an "elevenses" exam, which was given at eleven years old. My foster mother told me I wouldn't pass that exam (even though I knew English well by then), so there was no point in my taking it. So I left school at age fourteen, which was the common leaving age for those who didn't go on to high school. Secondary education had to be paid for, which I presume was the reason I was not allowed to take the qualifying test.
In New York I enrolled in evening classes at Roosevelt High School. I completed all required course work in three and a half years, and even got an award at the graduation ceremony for having the best average grade. I don't know if I actually did have the best average grade (I hadn’t heard of grade point averages at the time), but I think the teachers were impressed that I worked for my high school diploma entirely in evening classes and wanted to recognize me in some way. I was quite surprised that I could actually earn a high school diploma, let alone a special award, as my foster mother had considered me so incompetent.
During that period I had appendicitis. My stay in the hospital convinced me that I didn’t want to become a nurse after all. I had not considered going on to college; after all, I was far too incompetent. But my employer, the mother of the children I babysat for, urged me to take the qualifying exam, which I did and actually passed! I applied to City College, but was rejected on the basis that I was female, and females could only enter the college’s School of Education, which I didn’t want to do. I went to Hunter College, a girl’s college, instead. It was one of the four colleges supported entirely by the City of New York. The students didn’t have to pay any tuition, and didn’t even have to buy text books, which were available for loan. Again, to my surprise, I graduated from college.
After marrying and having a family I become active in the PTA and other civic affairs, and was later elected three times to the Palo Alto City Council. | <urn:uuid:8bf14902-4705-4c4c-9694-c36e9df20dae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bikesiliconvalley.org/2012/11/ellen-fletchers-war-stories | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993766 | 3,029 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Voter ID law heads back to court
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court promised an expedited hearing for the law so it can be decided in time for the election
September 18, 2012, 7:59 pm·
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 4-2 to send the Voter ID law back to the lower court for additional hearings.
“We are not satisfied with a mere predictive judgment based primarily on the assurances of government officials, even though we have no doubt they are proceeding in good faith,” read the official decision.
The additional hearings are meant to determine how the state will implement the law to guarantee that all voters will have access to approved voter identification. Approved photo IDs include U.S. passports, Pennsylvania drivers’ licenses and student ID cards issued by an accredited Pennsylvania college or university. All valid IDs must have an expiration date.
The court promised an expedited hearing for the law with the interest of deciding in time for the election. If the court upholds the law, it will be in effect for the November election.
The Pennsylvania Department of State initially estimated that there are 758,000 voters in the state without valid ID.
Political science professor Rogers Smith explained that security is also a concern with the IDs. “The mode of implementation risks people who have state IDs being used for other purposes in ways like boarding planes that could endanger security,” he said.
He added, “It’s not very likely that they will be reassured in the time between now and the election.” | <urn:uuid:c3541a51-e5df-4293-a04a-6b1323b6f531> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedp.com/article/2012/09/voter-id-law-heads-back-to-court | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952236 | 316 | 1.59375 | 2 |
With built in arpeggiators, there are scores of different design variations. There are also different places they can be placed in the data flow and the location greatly affects what can be done with them.
Some instruments, like those from Yamaha, send arpeggiated notes out through MIDI. These instruments are very flexible and allow the arpeggiation to be played in unison with other instruments. Some very flexible instruments even allow for sending data out on two channels - the unmodified key data as played on one channel, and the arpeggiated notes on a separate channel which is selectable or can be disabled. This latter design is the ultimate in flexibility.
Other instruments only send the arpeggiated data internally from keyboard to synthesis engine, or from MIDI in to synthesis engine, but don't transmit the arpeggiated notes. This design is less flexible for studio work, and for situations where MIDI notes are externally modified under the control of a sequencer, DAW, or MIDI processors.
I read the manual but could not determine which design the MiniBrute uses.
Are the MiniBrute's arpeggiated notes transmitted out through MIDI? And if so, if coming back through a sequencer when Local Off is enabled in the instrument (assuming it is supported), are the new arpeggiated notes played once (good) or do they cause cascading new arpeggios (not as good)? | <urn:uuid:3582dee2-d39d-45f0-8fbe-4417f15132c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arturia.com/evolution/smf/index.php?topic=7997.0;prev_next=next | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94051 | 294 | 2.015625 | 2 |
“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emergency doctors are the ultimate in the practical; we do everything with nothing, and we make things work. And yet, here I sit, reading and dissecting a series of malpractice cases which are based on the lack of common sense. Thomas Payne used the term to debate political philosophy. I will not go there, but rather use the term to speak to the practice of good medicine.
Good medicine and the Krebs cycle are only tangentially related. It is impossible to care for patients without a solid scientific base. However, most of the issues I have watched proceed through the legal system over the years have had nothing to do with the posterior ventral nucleus of the thalamus or diseases related to branch chain amino acids. In all my years as chief of a department, I never got a complaint letter haranguing us for giving too few milligrams per kilogram of Ceftriaxone. It’s about human interaction. It’s about unmet expectations. It’s about life, death and transfiguration. These are quotidian situations which drive us to momentary lapses in judgment for which we pay an unacceptably high emotional price.
Our story begins in the South in 2007. Allow yourself to envision an Absalom Faulkneresque South with warm September nights and dust on the roads. There is no need for the characters in our three-act play to have names. Our heroine – hereafter called the plaintiff’s defendant – was a 10-year-old girl who awoke with a headache. She begged her mama and was allowed to stay home from school when Tylenol only partially relieved her head pain. Throughout the day the child complained of ear pain and general malaise. In the middle of what was a warm end-of-summer night, the child awoke with more headache and a fever. Don’t ask the height of the fever, the mother didn’t know. They often don’t know and it’s not a crime.
It really makes no difference from a scientific standpoint. When the child was awoken in the morning to go to church she was worse. This was an experienced mother and she knew something wasn’t right. At the local emergency department, they took her temperature and found it to be 104.3 degrees. The child was properly examined, the doctor dutifully heard the story, did the requisite exam, and pronounced the child as having an ear infection. As an aside, isn’t one ear always redder than the other? The family was given a standard antibiotic and told to call the family doctor the next day.
Act 2 of the play is where all of the elements necessary for high drama come together. The family called the emergency department not once but twice to relate the fact that their child was doing worse. Both times they were told that the antibiotics just hadn’t worked yet. Mother feels she was “blown off” as an overanxious, undereducated parent. No real discussion of her concerns was held as if nobody cared about this child.
In three act plays we move from establishment to expectation to crisis and finally resolution in the final scenes. The child awoke in the morning and collapsed never to awake again. She was taken back to the same emergency department where she was seen the previous day and where the parents had called for advice twice during the night. Meningitis was diagnosed and an emergency airlift took place. For two days the child languished in a PICU before finally dying.
In the theatre the curtain would fall, bows would take place, applause, more applause, perhaps a bouquet of roses for our ingenue, but this is real life. What our child got was buried. And what our hospital got was a lawsuit. Doctors, nurses, the hospital, all involved in the second play called The Courtroom. After denials and recriminations, the case boiled down to the fact, the hospital claimed its nurses did not give advice during these two one-minute phone calls. But now it’s a “He said, she said” situation. Who knows what took place. There is no evidence on the chart that these events ever happened. And the hospital does not claim that anyone told the family to return immediately. In fact, no one remembered much of the patient’s case at all.
Again, this is life, not Broadway. There are no happy endings. The hospital is found negligent. The legal concept of respondeat superior applied to the nurses. This case was decided by judgmental opinion and the hospital, unhappy with that outcome, filed a motion for JNOV – a reversal of the judgment not withstanding the verdict. So on it goes, ad infinitum ad absurdum. But the larger questions of common sense keeps coming back. What should we do when someone calls for advice? What should we do when they were worse and we have a chart and had just seen them? Is there something here that I’m missing? Just tell everybody who thinks they are worse to come back. It costs almost nothing to see one more patient. There is no way you could assess the true mental status of a febrile child over the phone.
One look and you know which kids aren’t doing well. It’s not common, but that vapid look tells all. There are no de minimis exceptions over the phone. There isn’t an app for that. We still have value in medicine by using our judgment. Common sense would say just bring them back now.
There is no way of knowing if eight or 10 hours difference would really have changed the outcome in our play. But try explaining this to 12 people picked from the voter’s rolls. Perhaps I’m the last romantic in America, but I think we can do better than this. We have always held the banner of emergency medicine as a safety net for the American healthcare system. Without quoting Emma Lazarus, but emulating her spirit, we should honestly deal with our product and make it better. From a Shakespeare perspective, this child’s death cannot be considered a true tragedy, but is certainly a sadness which can be shared by all of us.
You will notice I make no mention of monies awarded. Does it matter? Ask yourself this: How much money would you take in exchange for your dead child? There is no reductive materialism that can answer this question.
Acta est fabula. | <urn:uuid:b36d8724-f16a-4ab4-bc59-c8810ab79fdb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.epmonthly.com/columns/oh-henry/on-sense-and-science/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975034 | 1,364 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Handling Deadlines - Delegating Your Work Intelligently
Time Management Guide Part 10
Due to severe time contraints sometimes placed on you or your
company, handling deadlines needs to be managed intelligently.
Delegation can be a manager's best time saver. The three advantages
of delegating are:
1. Delegating gives us more time to concentrate on more important
2. Delegating is a very good method of giving practical training
in the real situation to our staff.
3. It is a good method of fostering decision making among subordinates.
all tasks can be delegated of course. There are certain criteria
to be taken into consideration before delegating a task.
can include these guidelines:
If the task is repetitive, by all means delegate.
If the decision can be reversed quickly and easily, it is safe
Check and see if the impact is not too much on others in case
the decision is wrong.
Check and see how much money or what resources are involved
in the decision.
Check if delegating this particular job is within the companies
is needed to sit down and work out a plan.
this way, if you prioritize you can decide which jobs should be
done first, who should do it and what should be done when.
these suggestions when handling deadlines can take away much of | <urn:uuid:f8f1d1ab-f5db-4227-8a41-487e23ee9121> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.about-goal-setting.com/time-management-guide/10-handling-deadlines.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90196 | 280 | 1.617188 | 2 |
If you have a long-term health condition, you may wonder if it may shorten your life expectancy, how much it will cost you in terms of medical bills and whether you’ll be able to work for as long as those who have a clean bill of health.
This is certainly something that anyone with diabetes will worry about and they will want some form of back-up plan in case their health takes a turn for the worse.
For anyone with diabetes life insurance may seem financially unreachable because insurers take note of existing conditions when issuing a policy. Fortunately for those who are intrigued by the possibility of having some form of cover for their illness, the news that life insurance premiums have become less expensive will be music to their ears.
In the UK, nearly three million people have been diagnosed with various strains of diabetes, the common symptoms of which include low blood sugar levels, fatigue and irregular sleeping patterns.
It’s likely that more cases of diabetes will occur in the next two decades and as more people are diagnosed, it’s likely that medication to help treat and manage it will become more advanced. This alone is why premiums for diabetes life insurance policies are falling.
By how much have costs fallen?
It’s estimated that premiums for life insurance relating to diabetes have fallen by as much as 30%, but it varies wildly depending on the type of cover available and on other factors such as age and occupation.
Other health problems such as asthma and high cholesterol levels also have an impact.
As more insurers recognise how care and diagnosis of diabetes has improved in recent times, those with life insurance relating to their condition find that they’re paying less than they would have done as recently as a couple of years ago.
The news comes just weeks after it was announced that gender neutral pricing is to be introduced in the UK on all insurance policies.
Photo courtesy of: www.flickr.com/photos/42dreams | <urn:uuid:e6863bed-17a4-43dc-a786-ce4a53f68d97> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lifeinsurance.org.uk/diabetes-sufferers-see-life-insurance-premium-costs-tumble/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978056 | 397 | 2.234375 | 2 |
STILLWATER, Okla. —
Students at Highland Park Elementary School and Stillwater Middle School soon will be growing and eating vegetables out of their own school garden.
Funding for the gardens was made available by the Stillwater Public Education Foundation, which awarded six grants in the amount of $8,400 on Tuesday.
Highland Park teacher Starla Bilyeu was allocated $2,000 for her grant proposal, Cultivating the Curriculum. Stillwater Middle School science teacher Cathy Evans and PTA President Angela Weiser were awarded $1,500 for their project, Edible Gardens.
As part of the science curriculum at each of the schools, students will use the gardens to study the life cycles of plants, food chains and photosynthesis. At harvest, students will prepare and eat the vegetables.
“There are a lot of kids from farming (families) in our area, but not all students are aware of how food is grown,” said Weiser.
Stillwater Public Education Foundation spring grants
• The “IT” Series: The Informational Technology Series is a reusable curriculum that teaches students critical thinking and technical writing skills while they are developing technology proficiency through hands-on projects. Grant Allocation: $1,800 awarded to Denise Hall at Stillwater Middle School.
• Modeling Math with Graphing Calculators: The funds will be used to purchase 15 Texas Instruments Nspire CX graphing calculators. SHS will match the funds so that a full classroom set can be purchased. Grant Allocation: $2,100 awarded to Karen Strande at Stillwater High School.
• Writing Center Project: This project creates a writing center that will use a peer tutoring support model. Fourth- and fifth-grade students have been taught how to tutor and support each other in their writing this year and the project will be expanded to third-graders this semester. Funds will be used to purchase curriculum materials for the Center. Grant Allocation: $600 awarded to Jacqueline Iob at Will Rogers Elementary.
• Rethinking Citizenship & the American Dream: This project supports the redesign of the English III curriculum to include a hands-on integrated unit focusing on the American Dream and citizenship. Funds will be used to purchase reading materials, audio-visuals and instructional games. Grant Allocation: $400 awarded to Allisyn Mills at Stillwater High School.
• Cultivating the Curriculum: Funds will be used to create a school garden that will be used for math and science instruction by students across the elementary grades. In addition, all food grown will be harvested and prepared for the children. Grant Allocation: $2,000 awarded to Starla Bilyeu at Highland Park Elementary.
• Edible Gardens: The science classes at Stillwater Middle School will learn about plant growth by working on a vegetable garden of raised beds. Funds will be used to construct the raised garden beds. Grant Allocation: $1,500 awarded to Cathy Evans and Angela Weiser, PTA. | <urn:uuid:79624c17-901a-43c8-9d83-51f16672e37a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stwnewspress.com/local/x2056606329/Foundations-awards-grants-to-six-Stillwater-teachers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934328 | 625 | 2.15625 | 2 |
|Livingston County, Kentucky|
Location in the state of Kentucky
Kentucky's location in the U.S.
|Named for||Robert Livingston (1746–1813), one of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence|
342.20 sq mi (886 km²)
316.08 sq mi (819 km²)
26.12 sq mi (68 km²), 7.63%
31/sq mi (12/km²)
|Time zone||Central: UTC-6/-5|
Livingston County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of 2000, the population was 9,804. Its county seat is Smithland. The county is named for Robert R. Livingston. It is a prohibition or dry county.
According to the 2000 census, the county has a total area of 342.20 square miles (886.3 km2), of which 316.08 square miles (818.6 km2) (or 92.37%) is land and 26.12 square miles (67.7 km2) (or 7.63%) is water.
Adjacent counties
- Hardin County, Illinois (north, across the Ohio River)
- Crittenden County (northeast)
- Lyon County (southeast)
- Marshall County (south)
- McCracken County (southwest)
- Massac County, Illinois (west, across the Ohio River)
- Pope County, Illinois (northwest, across the Ohio River)
Major highways
As of the census of 2000, there were 9,804 people, 3,996 households, and 2,893 families residing in the county. The population density was 31 per square mile (12 /km2). There were 4,772 housing units at an average density of 15 per square mile (5.8 /km2). The racial makeup of the county was 98.49% White, 0.14% Black or African American, 0.42% Native American, 0.03% Asian, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.28% from other races, and 0.63% from two or more races. 0.75% of the population were Hispanics or Latinos of any race.
There were 3,996 households out of which 29.50% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 60.40% were married couples living together, 7.90% had a female householder with no husband present, and 27.60% were non-families. 24.40% of all households were made up of individuals and 11.00% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.42 and the average family size was 2.86.
The age distribution was 22.30% under the age of 18, 7.50% from 18 to 24, 28.20% from 25 to 44, 27.00% from 45 to 64, and 14.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females there were 97.80 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 97.70 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $31,776, and the median income for a family was $39,486. Males had a median income of $33,633 versus $19,617 for females. The per capita income for the county was $17,072. About 7.60% of families and 10.30% of the population were below the poverty line, including 10.70% of those under age 18 and 15.80% of those age 65 or over.
Notable people
- James Ford (pirate) (c. 1770-1833), was a civic leader and businessman who was later discovered to be the secret leader of a gang of Ohio River pirates and highwaymen in the early 19th century.
Census-designated place
Other community
See also
A portion of the proceeds from advertising on Digplanet goes to supporting Wikipedia. | <urn:uuid:9d162442-dcb9-40c6-b355-8d0c5cbeb3df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/Livingston_County,_Kentucky | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941387 | 865 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.
-Fawn M. Brodie
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.
School is a building that has four walls—with tomorrow inside.
A child's hand in yours—what tenderness it arouses,
what power it conjures. You are instantly
the very touchstone of wisdom and strength. | <urn:uuid:dcfde4cc-0d19-4a96-b2c1-26c122b6f678> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teachervision.fen.com/botr/botr_book.html?pid=tv00110 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958164 | 105 | 1.921875 | 2 |
SEN membergroups work to protect and conserve all of Saskatchewan's diverse ecosystems.
The Saskatchewan's Environmental Champions website features outstanding environmentalists and organizations that have championed the protection of Saskatchewan's natural environment.
Make a donation to SEN.
We are a non-charitable non-profit organization.
Contact us to learn how you can post your own events directly to this calendar.
SEN's Info Bulletins are available here, archived by date.
Interested in finding up-to-date information about a particular issue? We have compiled an index of Listserves, E-Bulletins, E-Newsletters and On-line Publications that you can subscribe to, organized by topic.
535 - 8th St. E.
Saskatoon SK S7H 0P9
Regina office 306.543.2784
Links leading away from this site will open in a new browser window.
The documents available for download from this site are in the PDF format. You can get the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software here.
World Rivers Day is the day for local Saskatonians to celebrate the many benefits of the South Saskatchewan River for its beauty, recreational value, supply for our drinking water and as a vibrant and diverse ecosystem that we're a part of. Each year SEN, with the help of its member organizations and other community partnerships, organizes a full day of festivities to celebrate the South Saskatchewan River!
We are now in the beginning phases of organizing our 2013 event and we are looking for volunteers for our committee! Do you have a love of aquatic ecosystems? Want to encourage public awareness and water stewardship? This is the perfect opportunity for you! We welcome the participation of individuals, community and environmental groups to make this year's World Rivers Day more fun and exciting than ever!
Interested in organizing an event in your own community? SEN is here to help! Contact us at (306) 652-1275 or by email email@example.com
Thanks to our Regina and Saskatoon Communities! We had a successful and inspiring weekend of environmental films, workshops and connecting on many many environmental and social issues! It was a blast! Of course, we couldn't have done it without our wonderful and generous sponsors! Take a look and see who our festival champions are right here! Want to be involved in the fun next year? Contact us at (306) 652-1275 or by email firstname.lastname@example.orgKeep making change Saskatchewan!
Saskatchewan's Green Directory is Saskatchewan's 'one-stop shop' for all your 'green' needs. Saskatchewan's Green Directory currently excels in representing companies that can help you make your home or business more energy efficient, or energy independent. As the Directory expands, many new features and categories have been added including a Services category and expanded listings in personal care products, consumer goods and food.
If you know of a company that needs to be represented, drop us a line. The more companies that we can get represented with paid listings, the more sustainable Saskatchewan's Green Directory becomes. It's our shared resource, let's build it together.
Last updated Tuesday, 28-May-2013 16:50:11 CST | <urn:uuid:2831ee59-eace-4c01-b2a6-970de74c7538> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://econet.ca/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925374 | 657 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Elect IT: Technology and the Democratic Process2 |
On Election Day 2008, Americans will head en masse to the polls to cast their ballots in an undoubtedly historic election. But what the average voter might not realize is this election is historic in more ways than one.
Not only has information technology enabled voters to have more access to information about the candidates and the electoral process, but it’s never been easier for people to participate in the process, as the Internet has helped break down barriers to both transparency and accessibility.
“People expect to get the information they want with a quick Web search, and as more people experience the power of having information at their fingertips, it will be increasingly difficult for the government to keep any of its information behind closed doors,” said Daniel Newman, executive director and co-founder of MAPLight.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to show the public the connection between money and politics.
IT has opened those doors, as voters have better access to candidates’ views and finances, as well as a clearer understanding of how to register, where to vote and what’s on the ballot.
In prior years, public government information was held captive, available only to those who could afford to pay a fee.
“Government agencies would often make their data sets available only in bulk on big computer tapes,” Newman explained. That meant it was practical only for large database companies to load these tapes onto their computers and sell access by the hour back to the public.
“Citizens had to pay fees to search databases that were public information and generated by tax dollars. As we’ve moved toward the Internet era, [it’s become] possible [for] government agencies to make all this information available. And they can do it relatively inexpensively.”
One such agency that has made tremendous strides in this effort is the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that discloses campaign-finance information for presidential, House and Senate candidates.
Five years ago, the organization’s Web site was difficult to navigate; now, with a few clicks of the mouse, a user can find out how much money a candidate has raised, who contributed to the campaign and how the candidate spent those funds.
“I look at information technology, here at the Federal Election Commission, to act as a facilitator and to make it easy for people to become educated on the campaign finance process,” said Alec Palmer, chief information officer and co-privacy officer. “The easier that we can make it for the individuals doing research, or for the general citizen from just a point of curiosity, the better off the democratic process.”
MAPLight.org is another example of improved transparency. This particular nonprofit uses three databases of information to illustrate the connection between campaign contributions and how legislators vote.
“The hundreds of millions of dollars that politicians raise to run their campaigns often comes from interest groups that have a stake in legislation,” Newman said. “Even though many people know this general concept, there was not much information out there on the specifics of how money influences legislation. So [we] set out to build what would be a continuous example generator of how money influences our political system.”
The first component of the example generator is how each member of Congress votes on every bill. To get this information, MAPLight uses GovTrack.us, an automated service that polls the Library of Congress site every 15 minutes to determine whether any recent votes or changes have been made. GovTrack.us then “downloads those changes, parses it into a structured format and then MAPLight imports” that information into its MySQL database, Newman said.
The second component of MAPLight’s research is the campaign money that’s given to each member of Congress, a record of which is filed with the FEC. The Center for Responsive Politics — a nonprofit research group — takes that information, processes and analyzes it, and then classifies each contribution into one of 400 industry denominations (e.g., oil company, environmental group). Once a month, after the candidates have filed their reports, MAPLight imports the data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
The third and final component is collected in-house through intense manual research. MAPLight’s research team selects a bill and reads the congressional testimony about that bill. If any of the speakers came out in support or opposition of the bill, the researchers log into the back-end Web database, make a note of which organization the speaker represented, whether the speaker was a supporter or opponent and the source for that information. This process is repeated with news databases and Internet searches.
In the end, these three sources work together on the site to provide information such as which organizations gave money to which politicians, how those politicians voted on specific bills and whether there’s a connection between the money given and how the politician voted.
“All of this information would have taken days, if not weeks, to collect and analyze before MAPLight.org came along,” Newman said. “What [you] see that you could never see before is how money correlates with the votes.”
For this upcoming presidential election, MAPLight also has downloadable, customizable widgets that can compare funds raised by Sen. Barack Obama to the funds raised by Sen. John McCain. There are similar widgets for the congressional candidates.
“Often people say, ‘Well, so what if there’s more information? Do people really want more information?’” Newman said. “It’s not so much [that] people will check MAPLight as often as they check the weather report. No, rather journalists, bloggers and active citizens [who] are already the sources of information for their communities will rely on MAPLight and other cutting-edge tools to extract key pieces of information. That power to drill down quickly to get a key connection will revolutionize democracy.”
Behind the Scenes
IT hasn’t just had an impact on information accessibility; it’s also had an impact on the electoral process. For instance, in Minnesota, technology has affected the way information is distributed to the public, how voters cast their ballots and the way election results are reported.
In terms of informing the public, Minnesota provides online information about the electoral process such as what’s on the ballot and where to vote. But this year, Minnesota went above and beyond and developed the Caucus Finder, which is based on Polling Place Finder, in preparation for caucus season. The application, the first tool of its kind, allowed residents to enter their addressees and find out where all of the political parties in Minnesota were caucusing.
To obtain the caucus locations, though, the state had to coordinate with each of the parties. “We gave [the parties] an Excel spreadsheet,” said Ted Lautzenheiser, chief information officer for the secretary of state’s office. “They would fill it out, and then we had the ability to load that into our system. We used DTS [data transformation services] and SSIS [SQL server integration services] packages and SQL server to load the data from Excel. Sometimes, it’s not how technically eloquent the solution is, but are you using a solution that everyone can use?”
The tool proved unexpectedly successful, and the state had an unbelievably large turnout for the caucuses, four times more than in 2004, according to Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s secretary of state.1 | 2 | | <urn:uuid:5ea73c6b-6cd2-4dfd-878b-b161312b83d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.certmag.com/read.php?in=3599 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958129 | 1,570 | 3 | 3 |
Giving to the Garden is an investment in a more sustainable, impactful Garden for the future. The need to protect and preserve California's native plants grows more urgent each year - among the 6,500 different kinds of plants native to California, 30% are threatened with extinction in the next 50 years. Preparing the Garden to meet greater needs in conservation and education is a priority now. Thank you for giving to the Garden today.
The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden fosters the conservation of California's native plants through our gardens, research and education, and serves as a role model of sustainable practices. | <urn:uuid:5afd70ed-5327-4cd3-86d3-06be51be9360> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sbbg.org/get-involved/donate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938704 | 120 | 2 | 2 |
Advanced breast cancer: Can bisphosphonates prevent broken bones?
Women with breast cancer that has spread to the bones can reduce their risk of broken bones by taking bisphosphonates. It is not known, though, whether one particular bisphosphonate medication is better than others.
Cancer spreading to the bones is one of the fears with advanced breast cancer. Cancer cells move to the skeleton and start to grow there. This growth weakens the bones so much that it can lead to painful breaks.
Researchers have been testing bisphosphonate drugs in recent years to try to find a way to protect women with advanced breast cancer from broken bones. It is known that these drugs can slow down damaging bone loss.
To assess the benefits and adverse effects of these drugs, researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration, an international research network, gathered and systematically analyzed the treatment results of 21 trials among almost 7,200 women with advanced breast cancer.
Bisphosphonates can slow down damage to bones
Their most important conclusion was that although bisphosphonates cannot completely stop bone damage from cancer, the treatment reduced the number of broken bones. However, it is not possible to judge whether one particular medication is more effective than others. The evidence suggests that these drugs only have a benefit for women in whom cancer has already spread to the bones. It does not seem as though bisphosphonates can prevent cancer spreading to the bones, and they do not appear to lengthen life, either.
Serious adverse effects such as severe nausea, fever or calcium deficiency were uncommon in the trials. When bisphosphonates are used in combination with other cancer drugs there is an increased risk of problems with the jawbone following dental treatment.
The risk of certain, rare fractures is higher, however
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) reported in April 2011 that bisphosphonates can lead to fractures (breaks) of the thigh bone in rare cases. But they increase this risk only for what are called atypical stress fractures. These fractures are caused by long-term overuse of the bone and not by a sudden, severe impact from outside the body. They represent only a small part of all thigh bone fractures. For this reason, the EMA stands by their assessment that the benefit of using bisphosphonates outweighs their risks.
Warnings signs of stress fractures can often be noticed weeks or months ahead of time. Typical symptoms are pain or a feeling of weakness in the affected area. If women who are taking bisphosphonates notice these signs in their thigh, it is important they notify their doctor. Because these fractures can happen on both sides, both legs need to be examined. In most cases that have been examined, the stress fractures only developed after years of taking bisphosphonates.
You can read more about breast cancer here.
Author: German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG)
(The latest update only contains the EMA recommendation from April 2011. Other information on the advantages and disadvantages of bisphosphonates has not been updated.)
- May 26th 2011 08:57
- February 14th 2006 10:00
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IQWiG health information is based on research in the international literature. We identify the most scientifically reliable knowledge currently available, particularly so-called “systematic reviews”. These summarize and analyze the results of scientific research on the benefits and harms of treatments and other health care interventions. This helps medical professionals and people who are affected by the medical condition to weigh up the pros and cons. You can read more about systematic reviews and why these can provide the most trustworthy evidence about the state of knowledge here. We also have our health information reviewed to ensure the medical and scientific accuracy of our products.
European Medicines Agency (EMA). European Medicines Agency concludes class review of bisphosphonates and atypical fractures. London: EMA. 15 April 2011. [Full text]
Pavlakis N, Schmidt RL, Stockler M. Bisphosphonates for breast cancer. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: Version 2005, Issue 3. CD003474 [Cochrane summary] | <urn:uuid:286eb370-9cfb-4e8a-9504-79d676136ac1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.informedhealthonline.org/sidgi3vpga8l4nkeqa3ra5413aq4u50pumc29/advanced-breast-cancer-can-bisphosphonates-prevent-broken-bones.87.en.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947653 | 872 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Recent data distributed by Realtytrac, a company that compiles data on home foreclosures, showed that foreclosures are not a national crisis, but more of a regional problem.
There are pockets, places such as Stockton, CA and Las Vegas, NV where the foreclosure rate is in excess of 4%, however, the national average is 1.033%. Considering the fact that 30% of all homes are actually free and clear of any mortgage, the true foreclosure rate is actually seven tenths of 1% of all homes.
Although the media loves bad news, organizations such as MSN, Time Magazine and others are now starting to report factual data such as this to give the market some perspective. They whip everybody up into a frenzy and are then able to present a counter balance story. Either way, know your facts, know your numbers and give your clients perspective.
Great sources for data on the web are NAR, AARP and MSN Money. In print, check out Realtytrac, Swanepoel Trends Report, and Money Magazine. I’ll also be doing my best to distribute solid data so that you can keep perspective and help your clients do the same. Keep your head down working hard.
It’s a good life! | <urn:uuid:5bd60cde-98c1-4660-8f0a-4529282f3acc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.buffiniandcompany.com/Blog/?tag=/foreclosure+rate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944759 | 262 | 1.625 | 2 |
| Old Bike Gloves Find New Homes
By Fran Taylor, Member Walk San Francisco Jul 14, 2009
Bicycle gloves serve their owners well, helping them climb the City’s steep hills, dodge buses and taxis, and endure the daily slog to work. The padded gloves with cut-off fingers are not a frill or fashion statement for the serious cyclist. Besides protecting the hands, they may also help prevent lateral epicondylitis, or “tennis elbow,” by cushioning the repeated whacks a cyclist takes going over San Francisco’s bumps, tracks, and potholes.
When their stubby fingers begin to fray or their owners get a new pair, old gloves need not head for landfill. They can now embark on a second career at the opposite end of the mobility spectrum, thanks to a new project.
Carla McVey, an occupational therapist at Mabini Adult Day Health Center, located on an alley off Folsom near the Moscone Center, and Iris Biblowitz, a nurse at the center, came up with the idea of collecting bike gloves for seniors and patients at city-affiliated centers and clinics. The padding in the gloves helps users of walkers, wheelchairs, and canes. The half-fingers allow wearers to button buttons and use eating utensils.
Seniors and patients coping with hand pain from mobility difficulties or recovering from injury or surgery have found the gloves invaluable. Walkers using parallel bars to build up leg strength find that the gloves soften their hands’ impact with the bars.
This spring, the Mabini center worked with CC Puede and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to conduct a glove drive. The SFBC sent out a plea in its weekly e-mail bulletin, and gloves poured in from as far away as Chicago and New York City, some with effusive notes about how happy the donors were that their gloves had found a new use.
“Many of the bicyclists who donated their old gloves confessed that the gloves had been sitting in a drawer or box for a long time,” said Kate McCarthy, membership and volunteer director for the bike coalition. “They didn’t want to throw the gloves away but didn’t know what to do with them until we asked. They were happy the gloves were finding a good home.”
Cyclists also dropped gloves off at a bicycle service station held outside St. Luke’s Hospital at Cesar Chavez and Valencia. The initial effort collected about 40 pair, mostly in good shape.
Dan Sherman of CC Puede works at Genentech in the legal department and participates in the company cycling group. He put out the call on the Bicycle Club mailing list and collected several pair. The personal experience of one member put a face on the effort.
“I was stuck on a walker for a few weeks when I broke my pelvis, and my bicycle gloves totally saved my hands,” said Lise Dumont of the Genentech Bicycle Club. “This is a very worthy cause. Also, my handle bar bag fit very nicely on my walker top bar, so I could carry stuff around with me even though my hands were tied up.”
McVey hopes to expand the program, perhaps by enlisting donations from bike shops around the City. Almost everyone who participated in this spring’s glove drive has commented on the heartwarming yet practical joy of finding this new use for an old friend.
At press time, the future of Mabini and all adult day health centers in California was clouded, as Governor Schwarzenegger has called for elimination of all Medi-Cal payments for adult day health.
Fran Taylor can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
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You probably don't carry your fancy-pants DSLR camera with you all the time, but your smartphone--along with its built-in camera--is in your pocket everywhere you go. That's why these days the most popular camera used to upload photos to Flickr isn't a camera at all, but the iPhone.
The challenge, of course, is getting great-looking photos from a gadget primarily designed for chatting. If you keep a few tips in mind, you can take some pretty sharp pictures with either an iPhone or an Android phone. Here is what you need to know (click all photos to enlarge).
1. Let the sun shine in: Your phone can handle a lot of situations with aplomb, but it can't shoot every scene you encounter. The teeny image sensor craves light, and does best outdoors, in daylight. For the best exposures, follow the same advice that photographers have kept in mind for decades:
Try to put the sun behind you or over one of your shoulders. Avoid shooting directly into the sun, or you'll radically underexpose your subject. If you're shooting indoors, put your back to the window and turn on the lights.
2. Compose your photos: Capturing a good photo isn't merely about knowing the right settings. Compose your photos as the pros do. Divide the frame into thirds--imagine a tic-tac-toe board--and put your subject on one of those lines, rather than in the middle of the screen.
Be careful to keep the camera level, too; nothing ruins a photo like a tilted horizon. Keep an eye on the background to be sure that nothing is "growing" out of the top of someone's head.
3. Start the camera faster: Some phones make it so hard to get to the camera that you might think they're, well, camera-shy--which could mean losing out on many a great photo opportunity. If you have a smartphone and the operating system allows it, move the camera app to a more convenient location.
On the iPhone, for example, ensure that the camera app is on the first screen, or put it in the quick-access area at the bottom of the screen. Some phones even let you reassign buttons to launch the camera.
4. Keep the phone steady: One reason you tend to get blurry photos with your phone is that it's light and thin, and awkward to hold compared with a full-size camera. Grip the phone as still as you can, with both hands, and keep your elbows tucked in to your sides for support. Take a deep breath and then let out a slow, steady exhale as you gently trigger the phone's shutter release.
5. Know when the shutter clicks: If the shutter lags, you'll need to account for that. Some phones have a surprising delay after you press the shutter release. And if the shutter release is on a touchscreen (as it is on the Apple iPhone), the shutter probably trips after you lift your finger, not when you press down. Either way, hold the camera steady while the picture is being exposed. And don't jab at the screen, or the shake will blur your photo.
6. Optimize the settings: If your camera has a white balance control, you'll often get the best results leaving it on automatic. But if the colors come out wrong, try setting the balance to reflect the ambient light, such as fluorescent, daylight, or sunset. Just be sure to reset it to automatic when you're done, or future photos will look weird.
If the camera offers an ISO setting (usually under Settings or Camera on an Android device, and under the gear icon on Windows Phone), take that off Auto. When you're outdoors in daylight, set the ISO to its lowest value to minimize the digital noise in your picture. In low-light situations, bump the ISO up as high as it will go.
7. Widen the dynamic range: Some phones (such as the iPhone 4 and Windows Phone 7 handsets, to name a few), provide a High Dynamic Range mode that captures an impressive amount of detail and a range of tones and colors in a single exposure.
The effect is similar to the way HDR software can combine multiple photos to create one rich, dynamic photo. If you have an HDR option (it might also be called Wide Dynamic Range, or some similar variation), try it instead of the flash when faced with tricky lighting.
8. Turn your camera into a photo lab: Most phones offer relatively few options for enhancing photos. That's what Photoshop and other editing apps are for. But some cameras include a veritable treasure trove of ways to tweak your shots, so check the camera settings for adjustments such as contrast, saturation, and image effects. You can use most of these controls as if you were adding spices to a soup: Experiment and apply the ones you like to taste. The saturation control, for example, adjusts the intensity of colors in your photos.
It's usually best to stick with low or medium, since high saturation levels tend to make everyone look like an overcooked turkey. Image effects like negative, sepia, and black and white can help you take charming photos. But remember that if you shoot a photo in sepia, for instance, it will be tinted that way forever--there's no going back to the real colors. You might be better off ignoring such controls and adding a similar effect on your PC with a free program like Windows Live Photo Gallery, so you can always revert to the original color if you prefer.
9. Use the flash to reveal daytime details: It's counterintuitive, but in daylight, a fill flash can be your secret weapon. It provides a burst to reduce the shadows that bright sunlight causes. Although the flash won't be powerful enough to fill every shadow, if you're close enough to your subject, it can provide pleasant, even lighting on your subject's face. Of course, the tiny flash on most cameras works only at very close range, so don't expect it to help unless you're within a few feet of your subject.
10. Don't use digital zoom: Your camera phone can't magnify the image by moving its lens. Instead, it has a digital zoom, which merely makes the pixels big and blocky, obliterating fine detail. Want to fill the frame? Walk closer to your subject. If you really need to zoom, you can always produce the same effect on your PC with an image editor later.
11. S tock up on software: One of the best reasons to carry a smartphone is for the scores of apps you can install to enhance every aspect of the phone, and photography is no different. Check out your phone's app store for programs that can improve the way the camera works, as well for apps that can enhance the photos you take. | <urn:uuid:05a18490-0407-401c-b89e-dae6ff575dec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/photo-video/3294639/tips-for-taking-great-smartphone-photos/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936104 | 1,406 | 1.859375 | 2 |
Does Social Mood Influence Accusations of Presidential Ineligibility?
The socionomic model has often noted the dramatic effect social mood has on the public's attitude toward sitting leaders. For example, the November 1999 Elliott Wave Theorist featured a short story on elections in a report titled "Socionomics In a Nutshell." It showed that rising public mood tends to lead to presidential reelections while falling public mood leads to oustings. Robert Prechter, Peter Kendall and others have proposed other aspects of the mood/election relationship, such as the observation that rising mood favors traditional candidates while falling mood tends to smile upon perceived agents of change.
The charges that Obama was born outside the United States and therefore is ineligible to hold the presidency fit right in. The same charge was leveled at the Republican presidential candidate during the same election: John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone when his father served there as a Navy officer. The public always looks for justification to support its feelings; during extreme mood phases, voters embrace increasingly farfetched rationales.
Barack Obama's presidency has so far endured two major social mood
phases: the strong bear phase that he inherited and a powerful bull
phase (see Figure 1). The "Birther" charges dogged him during
his candidacy and early presidency, as stocks plunged. But during
the subsequent two-year rally, those same charges faded--and then
It turns out that Obama is not the first sitting president to face charges of ineligibility. James Fallows of The Atlantic noted that such an expression has happened once before: to President Hoover, another big-bear-market president (see Figure 2). In 1931, John Hamill released his book, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags. Among other accusations, Hamill asserted that Hoover had given up his U.S. citizenship as early as 1900 in order to gain an edge in an overseas business deal.
Hoover's eligibility question did not get legs, despite the continued
plunge in public mood. But mood did do a number on Hoover's reelection
bid (and legacy). First, he was the people's overwhelming choice for
president: He entered the office with a 58% landslide victory in the
popular vote as the Roaring Twenties came to a head. Then he was tossed
from office just four years later in a near-mirror-image landslide
defeat of 57%. The reason for this emphatic dismissal? Social mood
had plunged, as displayed by the Dow, which had shed 89% of its value.
Having dodged the Birther charges, presumably for good, the question now is how President Obama will fare from here. What are his chances for reelection? The direction of public mood, as reflected by the stock market, will set the odds.
Do you want to know who will win in November? Ask The Stock Market.
Read the landmark academic paper by Prechter, Goel, Parker and Lampert that identifies the link between stock market performance and presidential election winners. Read it for yourself, courtesy of SSRN, by following this link and clicking "One-Click Download" at the top of the page.>> | <urn:uuid:9fd3e4fd-69e7-4ca0-be87-e953626b763e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://coachingtip.blogs.com/what_can_it_be/2012/04/accusations-of-presidential-ineligibility.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969622 | 656 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Shawnee State's General Education Program is committed to:
Providing you with an undergraduate education that includes
competence in written communication, oral communication,
scientific and quantitative reasoning, critical analysis, and
Providing you with a breadth of knowledge that goes beyond
education for a specific discipline or profession.
Providing you with a breadth of experience that includes knowledge
and understanding of multicultural factors.
Ensuring that you have the ability to reflect carefully upon
ethical issues and can enter into reasoned dialogue about these
Preparing you to become an independent and continuing learner.
As part of our commitment to your success, Shawnee State
University has adopted the goal of integrating information
literacy and computer literacy into the courses included in the
General Education Program. | <urn:uuid:849bdd37-c569-4690-89f3-e14c4c17f3ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shawnee.edu/off/gep/goal.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936104 | 159 | 1.828125 | 2 |
A neuroma is the swelling of nerve that is a result of a compression or trauma. They are often described as nerve tumors. However, they are not in the purest sense a tumor. They are a swelling within the nerve that may result in permanent nerve damage. The most common site for a neuroma is on the ball of the foot. The most common cause of neuroma in ball of the foot is the abnormal movement of the long bones behind the toes called metatarsal bones. A small nerve passes between the spaces of the metatarsals. At the base of the toes, the nerves split forming a "Y" and enter the toes. It is in this area the nerve gets pinched and swells, forming the neuroma. Burning pain, tingling, and numbness in one or two of the toes is a common symptom. Sometimes this pain can become so severe, it can bring tears to a patient's eyes. Removing the shoe and rubbing the ball of the foot helps to ease the pain. As the nerve swells, it can be felt as a popping sensation when walking. Pain is intermittent and is aggravated by anything that results in further pinching of the nerve. When the neuroma is present in the space between the third and fourth toes, it is called a Morton's Neuroma. This is the most common area for a neuroma to form. Another common area is between the second and third toes. Neuromas can occur in one or both of these areas and in one or both feet at the same time. Neuromas are very rare in the spaces between the big toe and second toe, and between the fourth and fifth toes. Neuromas have been identified in the heel area, resulting in heel pain.
A puncture wound or laceration that injures a nerve can cause a neuroma. These are called traumatic Neuromas. Neuromas can also result following a surgery that may result in the cutting of a nerve.
The diagnosis of Neuromas is made by a physical exam and a thorough history of the patient's complaint. Conditions that mimic the pain associated with Neuromas are stress fracture of the metatarsals, inflammation of the tendons in the bottom of the toes, arthritis of the joint between the metatarsal bone and the toe, or nerve compression or nerve damage further up in the foot, ankle, knee, hip, or back. X-rays are generally taken to rule out a possible stress fracture or arthritis. Because nerve tissue is not seen on an x-ray, the x-ray will not show the neuroma. A skilled foot specialist will be able to actually feel the neuroma on his exam of the foot. Special studies such as MRI, CT Scan, and nerve conduction studies have little value in the diagnosis of a neuroma. Additionally, these studies can be very expensive and generally the results do not alter the doctor's treatment plan. If the doctor on his exam cannot feel the neuroma, and if the patient's symptoms are not what is commonly seen, then nerve compression at another level should be suspected. In this instance, one area to be examined is the ankle.
Just below the ankle bone on the inside of the ankle, a large nerve passes into the foot. At this level, the nerve can become inflamed. This condition is called Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. Generally, there is not pain at this site of the inflamed nerve at the inside of the ankle. Pain may instead be experienced in the bottom of the foot or in the toes. This can be a difficult diagnosis to make in certain circumstances. Neuromas, however, occur more commonly than Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome.
Treatment for the neuroma consists of cortisone injections, orthotics, chemical destruction of the nerve, or surgery. Cortisone injections are generally used as an initial form of treatment. Cortisone is useful when injected around the nerve, because is can shrink the swelling of the nerve. This relieves the pressure on the nerve. Cortisone may provide relief for many months, but is often not a cure for the condition. The abnormal movements of the metatarsal bones continue to aggravate the condition over a period of time.
To address the abnormal movement of the metatarsal bones, a functional foot orthotic can be used. These devices are custom-made inserts for the shoes that correct abnormal function of the foot. The combination treatment of cortisone injections and orthotics can be a very successful form of treatment. If, however, there is significant damage to the nerve, then failure to this treatment can occur. When there is permanent nerve damage, the patient is left with three choices: live with the pain, chemical destruction of the nerve, or surgical removal or decompression of the nerve (see neuroma surgery).
Article provided by PodiatryNetwork.com. | <urn:uuid:563be677-5ff6-437f-88fe-5f63887c991d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.heeldocs.com/document_disorders.cfm?id=170 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939984 | 996 | 3.109375 | 3 |
It's about 5 on Saturday evening. Slowly, insidiously, the aroma weaves its way into the air, until even passing motorists get a redolent whiff, a tantalizing, mouth-watering scent. And even if they were heading home to chicken stir-fry, they may begin to think, instead, about . . . grilling steak.
Or maybe it's Dad's birthday, and Mom and the kids want to do something special for him. Maybe take him out to dinner, at his favorite place -- a steak house.
It's true that hard times and leaner living have taken a bite out of Americans' red-meat consumption. Grocery shoppers say they are buying less red meat, and vegetarianism seems to be on the rise, especially among younger people. And for a while there, it seemed that amid some legitimate concerns about fat and cholesterol, eschewing red meat became almost a fashion.
But it's also true that few things are more dependable, more comforting, more timeless, or more un-give-up-able than beef.
"Baltimore's definitely eating beef," says Patrick Raum of McCafferty's, a Mount Washington restaurant that specializes in prime beef. The restaurant opened in February, and business has been good, Mr. Raum says. "Baltimore is more of a meat-and-potatoes kind of town. People don't look at us as a special-occasion place, but as a place that serves really good beef. That's what people are coming here for. I see the same faces in here week after week. They like their beef."
Indeed they do. Figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service show that Americans still consume more beef per capita than chicken or seafood. Preliminary figures for 1992 put beef consumption at 62.8 pounds per person per year, down slightly from 63.1 pounds in 1991, with chicken at 45.9 pounds, up from 43.9 in 1991, and fish and shellfish at 14.7 pounds, basically unchanged from 14.8 pounds in 1991.
Beef consumption has fluctuated up and down since the '70s, when the first messages of health-consciousness began reaching mainstream Americans. It was at a high of 88.8 pounds in 1976; three years later it was at 73.5 pounds. In the same period, fish and seafood consumption hasn't changed much -- it was 12.9 pounds in 1976 -- while chicken consumption has almost doubled -- it was just 28.5 pounds in 1976.
The most popular beef dishes at McCafferty's are the New York strip, filet, prime rib and Delmonico steak, Mr. Raum says. "We're probably doing 1,000 to 1,200 pounds a week," among those four items. On any given night, he estimates, two-thirds to three-quarters of the entrees served are beef.
McCafferty's beef comes from its own ranch in Montana; it's aged right at the restaurant. Beef lovers run the gamut from old people to young, and include men and women, Mr. Raum says. "People still enjoy a 32-ounce piece of prime rib. We get little old ladies coming in here and ordering it. They eat half and take the rest home."
"My customers are eating beef on a regular basis," says Steve deCastro, owner of Ruth's Chris Steak House in downtown Baltimore. "Maybe it's once a week, or twice a month -- whatever, they're going out and getting the best beef they can find."
Ruth's Chris is a nationwide chain of 40 restaurants that started 28 years ago with a single restaurant in New Orleans. Mr. deCastro's restaurant opened last year and business is good, he reports. "We're 35 to 38 percent ahead of last year," he says. In the chain as a whole, revenues were up 16 percent in 1992, over 1991.
What's the appeal of beef?
"It's plain, basic food," Mr. deCastro says. "You're not talking fancy sauces -- people just want to eat a nice piece of juicy prime beef."
At Ruth's Chris, Mr. deCastro says, the most popular item is the filet (which is also the leanest cut, he notes), followed by the strip steak (the most heavily marbled, hence the fattest), then the prime rib and then the rib eye.
While people still like their steaks when they go out, when they prepare
beef at home, it's most often ground.
"By far, still the No. 1 item, especially at any major holiday, is ground beef -- hamburgers on the grill," says Matt Wineinger, director of retail programs for the Beef Industry Council, an industry group that is part of the National Live Stock & Meat Board of Chicago. "Between 40 and 45 percent of the [per-year beef] tonnage sold is in the form of ground beef."
But there has been a change in ground-beef consumption, Mr. Wineinger says: Retailers are offering customers more choices in the fat content of the mix. "There's not a retailer in the country not offering a minimum of 3 different varieties of ground beef," he says, "and I've seen as many as six to eight."
Five years ago, he says, the most common range was 80 percent lean meat, 20 percent fat meat ground together. Now, he says, it's 85 percent lean and 15 percent fat.
And, while burgers and steaks still dominate beef-lovers' plates, there have been some changes in the way people prepare and serve beef at home. | <urn:uuid:42844c5c-af20-4be1-9928-81a445577dca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-09-12/features/1993255232_1_beef-consumption-prime-beef-red-meat | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975889 | 1,182 | 2 | 2 |
Who is Appalachian By Design?
ABD is a non-profit organization that connects home-based knitters to produce and market knitwear. It operates as a flexible manufacturing network and provides rural women in West Virginia with alternative job opportunities. Serving as a model for rural economic development, ABD has received national interest in the past two years.
ABD is participating in a variety of research studies and learning clusters on enterprise and sectoral development that are being sponsored by the Mott Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, the Ms. Collaborative for Women's Economic Development, and now NERCRD. | <urn:uuid:0c76bf25-b78f-488e-be4c-ccbd504ab43c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~oberhauser/abd.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955581 | 134 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Digital compositors bring the frightening digital world of Silent Hill to life in the film adaptation of the game series
Interview by Chief Editor Karen Moltenbrey
Alain Lachance is the senior compositor, VFX supervisor, and one of the founders of Mokko Studio in Montreal. His latest accomplishment includes the recently released Silent Hill from Tri-Star Pictures/Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Silent Hill began in 1999 as a survival horror video game from Konami that has since grown into a lucrative franchise; currently, there are five Silent Hill video games. Each unfolds like a movie, with several possible endings, as a person’s choices during play determine which ending is revealed. Recently, Sony Pictures released a film version of this eerie series, maintaining its visual film-noirish design depicting dark, fog-enshrouded, decaying environments enhanced by chilling (and very sudden) sound effects and thoroughly unnatural, disturbing, and surreal/absurd creature designs. The main storyline, cinematography, and set designs for the live-action film adaptation follows the original CG game. The plot centers on Rose Da Silva, a married mother whose life takes the unexpected turn toward Silent Hill as she tried to discover the source of her adoptive daughter’s nightmares, which have her crying out “Silent Hill.” Among the facilities that worked on the 619 effects shots was Mokko Studio, which completed 50 of the shots in two months.
What work did you do on Silent Hill?
I supervised our 3D artists as well as the compositing team, and also created key composites. The most exciting part of my job was to work hand-in-hand with our artists at creating the mood that Christophe [Gans, the director] was looking for, from the concept all the way to the final composites.
Pertaining to the effects, what was the director’s goal?
He was looking for the most realistic results possible, and I think we did a good job of delivering that, especially considering the time constraints.
What was your directive?
We actually began work on the shots without any directive. We focused on rotoscoping the characters and creating all the necessary masks needed for compositing immediately after receiving the plates. Having all of this work done before we received any initial direction enabled us to begin adding elements into the shots the instant after speaking to the director.
How did your experience help you achieve this?
As an editor and then as a digital compositor, I have worked on many high-end projects within both the commercial and film industries. In addition, I have an extensive background in commercial work with clients such as: Coke, Nestlé, Labatt, Fido, and Budweiser. When I am not in the studio supervising the digital team, I’m usually on set to assure that we have everything necessary for the team at Mokko Studio to create the most breathtaking shots possible.
Can you detail some of the more impressive effects you did for this film?
We did some massive set extensions for many of the shots. We even created entirely virtual environments for some shots where all we received from the client was just a character or a vehicle shot against a greenscreen.
How did you achieve that?
With most of the shots, we began tracking the characters and cameras. We then used a combination of 2D matte paintings, 3D elements from Autodesk Maya combined with 3D matte paintings. We used a lot of Maya fluids for the smoke and fog effects, and Maya particle systems for ash falling like snow throughout the film. Most shots had over 10 layers in the final composite.
What other software and hardware did you use?
Autodesk Maya animation software and Autodesk Toxik collaborative compositing software formed the backbone of our pipeline for Silent Hill. We also used [Adobe’s] Photoshop for matte paintings, [2d3’s] Boujou for tracking, and some Autodesk Discreet Combustion. Our hardware is fairly average among other production facilities. Production work is more about software these days as opposed to a few years ago, where you needed the fastest machines available.
Of the backgrounds, how many were CG versus live action?
On most of the shots, the live-action background was only the immediate surroundings of the character. Everything else was set extension and matte painting. In many shots, we had to zoom out and end with a very wide shot that involved a combination of tracking, set extension, matte painting, and, of course, a huge proportion of the background in CGI.
How many shots required roto and compositing of the characters?
Ninety percent of the shots. Roto was done on most of the characters to add ash effects around them. In one shot, we completely rebuilt the road in CGI. For the bridge shot, we had to create a huge dolly out—the live-action car didn’t work, so we had to rebuild a 3D car with complex fluid, fog, and ash trailing behind the car. Of course the bridge that magically appears in front of the car was CGI as well as most of the décor surrounding the action.
Why was the work on this film more complex than other roto/composites?
Challenges for this project included a short deadline (50 shots in two months) as well as quickly matching the look of the other studios already onboard (fog, ash, ambiance). The ash look was quite unusual and was a cool challenge, especially with very long shots. The ash was Maya particles with a unique behavior on each particle.
Did you devise any special techniques?
Not particularly; I suppose for Silent Hill, the work was more software-related. This was our first real production experience using Autodesk Toxik. We certainly learned some good lessons in efficiency while working on this film.
Can you elaborate?
We implemented some Python scripts into Toxik to import and cache the layers for shots overnight so that in the morning, we could do our dailies and all the layers for a particular shot would play out in real time, even at 2k.
What were the biggest technical challenges you ran into?
Our biggest constraint was time. We also had some concerns about asset management—having a lot of layers to deal with for each shot was daunting.
How did you overcome this?
Again, Toxik was very helpful here; due to the collaborative nature of the work environment in Toxik, we were able to have two and sometimes three compositors working on a shot at the same time. One artist could work on the first section of the comp while another worked on the middle or final section. The whole sequence was updated instantly on each machine as the artists worked together. There was no searching for images to add into the composite. This was very much a time-saving feature.
What were some of the biggest creative challenges?
When working with other studios on a film, the most important goal is to achieve the mood the director is looking for while also matching the look of the shots from the other studios. The director was looking for an ominous foggy atmosphere and almost surreal mood for the shots.
Most shots by Mokko entailed rotoscoping and compositing actors into eerie backdrops.
How did you handle that?
We initially had two concept artists working on ideas for the look independently of each other, meaning neither artist knew what the other was doing. We showed both designs to the director so he could choose which look he liked best. In the end, we mixed their ideas together, creating a composite design from two artists; the director then approved that.
Was any of the work on the film unique?
We had a particularly unique shot with a jeep driving across a bridge where all we received from the client was simply a jeep driving about 10 meters on a greenscreen. The shot wasn’t really working with the source material, so we matched the camera movement, created a 3D jeep in Maya, and then projected the texture of the jeep from the original footage back onto the 3D model of the jeep. That was an interesting shot, and in the end, this method offered us much more control. We added reflection layers to the jeep and other interactive layers like swirling fog with Maya that would have been difficult to simulate in the original footage of the jeep against a greenscreen.
Any other highlights about your work for this film?
As with any new software on a production, you are always a bit nervous because you will have unknown factors to contend, and there is not a lot of room for error when you are on a tight schedule. With Toxik, we actually saved time by implementing a new product into the pipeline for Silent Hill. | <urn:uuid:b3117d5a-5714-4551-bb46-0d5d68978817> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cgw.com/Print.aspx?Page=%2FPublications%2FCGW%2F2006%2FVolume-29-Issue-6-June-2006-%2FLiving-a-Nightmare.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969355 | 1,818 | 1.5 | 2 |
Monday, July 30, 2012
Dismissed case leaves Thai workers feeling that there is no justice for them
“ ‘The poor, no matter how loudly they speak, no one hears them. No one listens to them because they are viewed as unimportant…’ ‘There is no question this means other companies will continue to do the same thing,’ and trap others in slavery.”
by Larry Geller
Today would have been the final pre-trial hearing in the now-dismissed Global Horizons human trafficking case, billed as the largest such case in US history. I still have it on my calendar for 1:30 p.m. today. Of course, now it isn’t going to happen.
‘Slavery’ case dismissal frustrates Utah ‘victims’
Human trafficking » Case dismissed after federal prosecutor missteps, but Utah workers say they were enslaved.
The two Thais are strong men, but they wept Monday. One even abruptly jumped up from an interview table, darted into a corner, and buried his face there to hide and wipe tears that embarrassed him.
The Thais in Utah thought they helped break that case against labor-recruiting company Global Horizons, and mistakenly believed that it would lead to prison terms for company officials they view as slave masters.
[Salt Lake Tribune, ‘Slavery’ case dismissal frustrates Utah ‘victims’, 7/30/2012]
Please check out the complete story at the link above.
Links to this post: | <urn:uuid:2edf22e6-0463-4ebb-aa98-0614b0392cf7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.disappearednews.com/2012/07/dismissed-case-leaves-thai-workers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962859 | 330 | 1.554688 | 2 |
"I watch their softly tousled heads slumbering on
their pillows, and sadness wells up in me. Have I drunk in their smiles
and laughter and hugged them, or have I just checked things off my to-do
list today? They're growing so quickly. One morning I may wake up and
one of my girls will be getting married, and I'll worry: Have I played
with them enough? Have I enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of their
lives?" -- Janet Fackrell
It's part of our job description as parents to guide our kids and keep them moving through the daily routine. All too often, that means setting limits, denying requests, correcting behavior. Sometimes we're skillful enough that our child doesn't perceive our guidance as "negative." More often, kids give us the benefit of the doubt because all the other loving, affirming interactions create a positive balance in our relationship account. READ POST
Dr. Laura, I see how all your
mindfulness techniques make me a more patient mother. But when I find my temper rising, what can I do in that
moment? I know yelling doesn't work. I know that my inner critic that
tells me I'm a bad mother just makes things worse. But what do I actually DO?" -- Cara
Nothing. Really. You notice what you're feeling, you breathe your way through it, and you DO nothing.
When our temper rises, we all feel an urgent need to DO something, anything. But that's our emergency response system operating. And parenting, despite how it feels, is not usually an emergency.
So the most effective thing you can do is restore yourself to calm before you act. Why? Because the rational brain stops working when you're angry. So when you act from anger or fear, you're never taking constructive action.
I define mindfulness as just noticing our own feelings and thoughts without acting on them. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says it more directly: "Mindfulness is not hitting someone in the mouth."
Sure, it feels like we MUST intervene at that moment. Otherwise, our child will "get away with" bad behavior, and will become a terrible person. But that's fear speaking, and it drives us to take actions that make things worse. Later, we realize that we let our emotions run amok. We didn't guide our child with love. We didn't help her WANT to be a more loving or cooperative person. Instead, we dumped those yucky feelings from our full emotional backpack onto our child.
So what can you actually DO when you feel your temper rising? READ POST
"It’s like a big stick that I hit
myself with from the inside. Really, would I want anyone I love to do
that to themselves? Certainly not! And, I’ve made a commitment to
support my kids and myself in putting that stick down. For good. The
other day...the part of me that is Unconditional Love stood up, turned
towards the Critic, and embraced it. In that moment of love and
connection, the critic dissolved. Now I make it a practice to embrace
the Critic, over and over again. I am learning that whatever has a hold
on me, that which we most want to turn away from, is exactly what needs
undivided, loving attention." -- Jennifer Mayfield
The inner critic's goal is to protect us. It thinks its job is to constantly scan for threats so it can keep us safe: future dangers, past problems we keep reliving to prevent their recurrence (or prove we were right!), defects in others that we need to control and correct, and deep flaws in us that we fear threaten our very survival because they make us unlovable. No wonder we so often ricochet between anxiety and depression. READ POST
“The key is
unconditional kindness to all life, including one’s own, which we refer
to as compassion.” – David R. Hawkins
All parents know that children need unconditional love to thrive. But how can we give our children something most of us haven't really experienced?
The answer is that we CAN experience unconditional love -- by giving it to ourselves. We do this by actively, thoughtfully, accepting our selves -- imperfections and all. When we miss the mark of our own standards -- as we all do, all the time -- we give ourselves a compassionate hug, and resolve to give ourselves better support so we can keep moving in the right direction. READ POST
"Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s real. We can let go of the unconscious belief that being anxious about the past or the future will somehow protect us and instead reprogram our cells with new ways of responding.” -- Doc Childre
Do you worry about your child? Join the club. It's part of the job description. But when we say "Be careful!" to our child, we're not giving the message that we care, even though that's what we feel. We're giving the message that the world is an unsafe place and we don't have confidence in our child to navigate it. READ POST
"Yesterday my husband and I had an argument at dinner time in front of the kids. My four year old daughter yelled at us to ‘Be quiet!’ … My two year old had a tough time going to bed, which is unusual for him. Could that have had to do with mommy and daddy arguing?” READ POST
“I was born perfect. The rest is just
beliefs that I picked up…I don’t believe them anymore. I choose to
believe that I am perfect and whole.” – Caron Goode
Ever wondered why some parents can keep a sense of humor in the face of their child's challenging behavior while another parent starts yelling? Why some parents plague themselves with criticism, worry and doubt while others seem more able to just relax and enjoy their children?
Yes, some children are more challenging than others. But whatever our child's behavior, we always have the choice of how to respond. And yes, it's our emotional response that determines our actions. But what creates that emotional response? READ POST | <urn:uuid:2a990855-84f0-4233-98e9-94591a1c4057> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ahaparenting.com/_blog/Parenting_Blog/tag/Mindful_Parenting/ | 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 | 0.960685 | 1,325 | 2.171875 | 2 |
Chabert family inducted into Louisiana Political Hall of Fame
Published: Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 10:37 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 10:37 p.m.
BATON ROUGE — To hear the Chabert boys tell it, the folks over at the Louisiana Political Museum should have put someone else in their Hall of Fame in Winnfield.
The Winn Parish community of about 5,800 gave Louisiana three governors, most notably the brothers Long, including Huey the “Kingfish” and Earl, who once claimed that fancy suits would hang on him like “socks on a rooster.”
The third was O.K. Allen, who Earl said was so dedicated to filling in for the Kingfish that he once signed a leaf that blew in through an open window — “(Allen) thought Huey must have sent it, so he signed it,” he said famously.
Their legacies are fixtures in the museum, which also hosts a Hall of Fame that has welcomed past inductees who include U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, former Gov. Mike Foster, former Congressman Billy Tauzin of Chackbay and former state House Speaker Hunt Downer of Houma.
But now they are joined by the late state Sen. Leonard J. Chabert, who served in the upper chamber from 1980 until his death in 1991, and his sons who followed in the same seat, former Sen. Marty J. Chabert, 1992 to 1996, and current Sen. Norby Chabert, elected in a 2009 special election and unopposed two years later.
The three men are the first group ever to be inducted as a family into the political Hall of Fame, following a ceremony two weeks ago. That is when they were given the “Louisiana Political Family of Officeholders Award.”
Norby Chabert said he and his brother were honored to be included but realized they were not unique in terms of their service lineage.
After consulting with Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, a former state senator and noted history buff, he said, it became clear that fathers, sons and brothers had filled the same seats before in the Legislature and even served concurrently.
So it is actually the family matriarch, Viona Lapeyrouse Chabert of Chauvin, who raised her family on the banks of Bayou Petite Caillou, who deserves the asterisk in the history books.
“She is the only woman ever to be married to a sitting senator and have two sons serve in the same seat,” said Norby Chabert. “Not too bad for the daughter of a trapper from down the bayou.”
While the ceremony focused on the time all three men spent in the Senate, they all have their own histories that led to the state Capitol, and grew after they left, as is the case with the oldest brother.
Their father, Leonard J. Chabert, served as a state representative from 1972 to 1980 and became close political ally to former Gov. Edwin Edwards, godfather to Norby Chabert.
Marty J. Chabert, the eldest of the brothers, ran unsuccessfully for a House seat before moving to the Senate, served in Edwards’ administration in public works and was a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
Norby Chabert operated a government-relations firm prior to being elected, advising both Republicans and Democrats on the federal, state and local levels and was a marketing specialist for Nicholls State University.
Unlike his father and brother, Norby Chabert is a Republican, dropping the Democratic label in 2011 in what was a much larger trend of state legislators gravitating toward the GOP.
He currently serves as vice chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, which is charged with crafting the budget in the upper chamber.
Other 2013 inductees include:
-- Late state Sen. Charles Barham of Lincoln Parish.
-- Vidalia Mayor Hyram Copeland.
-- Bossier City Mayor George Dement.
-- Former Grant Parish Sheriff Pop Hataway.
-- Shreveport political activist Angelo Roppolo.
-- Consultant Raymond Strother, who is often credited with creating political consulting.
For information about the Louisiana Political Museum and the Hall of Fame, visit www.lapoliticalmuseum.com/.
Jeremy Alford can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:882506da-66d8-418a-b8ec-7613da489caa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130216/ARTICLES/130219719/0/frontpage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975344 | 975 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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Since 1937, TABC has published annual reports that included a summary of the local option elections taking place during the previous year. From 1937 to 1968, these reports were published by calendar year. Beginning in 1969, reports were completed at the end of each fiscal year. State of Texas fiscal years run from September 1st to August 31st.
Below you can find excerpts from these reports. Please understand that this information is the most accurate that TABC has to offer, but we cannot guarantee its accuracy. | <urn:uuid:3641415f-4c7b-4254-878e-0f57807a98f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tabc.state.tx.us/local_option_elections/history_of_elections.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985285 | 117 | 1.664063 | 2 |
WATSONVILLE -- About 200 dead carp have washed up at Pinto Lake in the past week.
The state Department of Fish and Wildlife is examining the fish to determine what caused the deaths, said Robert Ketley, Watsonville water quality specialist. But because of their advanced state of decomposition, it may be difficult to say for sure what happened.
Ketley said it's possible the bottom-feeding carp are victims of the toxic blue algae that plagues the lake. As the algae decays and drifts to the lake bottom, it can cause ammonia levels to increase and oxygen to decrease, he said. Because carp feed in the depths, they are more likely to be affected than other fish.
Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, has long infected the 80-acre lake, the center of city and Santa Cruz County parks in rural Pajaro Valley. The problem is pronounced when temperatures rise, and a warm fall produced a late algae bloom.
Exposure to toxins produced by the algae can cause rashes, nausea, diarrhea, liver and kidney damage in humans. The toxins also have been linked to deaths of livestock, dogs and sea otters.
A study of Pinto Lake, released last spring, concluded nitrogen- and phosphorous-laden sediments deposited in the lake 50 to 100 years ago, possibly due to erosion in clear-cut forests, are the main culprits in providing nutrients for algae growth.
No swimming is permitted in the lake, and warnings are posted when toxin levels are too high for safe
Follow Sentinel reporter Donna Jones on Twitter at Twitter.com/DonnaJonesSCS | <urn:uuid:759f2506-7e12-4856-bbbd-3d9d77a0e4e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/rss/ci_22117159?source=rss | 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 | 0.933896 | 334 | 2.640625 | 3 |
In 1942, anywhere from 76,000 to 100,000 American and Filipino POWs were marched for days without food or water for fear of being executed by their Japanese captors across the Bataan peninsula. Thousands of them died.
Every year at the White Sands Missile Range outside Las Cruces, NM, a march is held in memory of those individuals so that we can honor their sacrifice for us to enjoy the liberties and freedoms we have today. The website is Bataan March
I am a Kansas Air National Guardsman. I participated on a team as the "Military Light" category, though you can go as a civilian.
This is an entry in the Burning Questions: team-building contest
Step 1: Team it up
Your team will help you train, keep you focused and most importantly support you to the finish.
Many of the original Bataan POWs marched alongside others and did not experience the support needed to keep themselves alive. | <urn:uuid:b0b9d243-a7d5-4a4a-b2f4-a80b2ef6107e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.instructables.com/id/Bataan-Death-March...Are-you-worthy--Team-Buildin/meta-info | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967077 | 195 | 2.625 | 3 |
Volunteer vacations or "voluntourism" are incredibly popular – they are a great way to take a break from work, school or home while feeling a sense of accomplishment that you have done something in service to someone else. The Sierra Club has taken the lead on these types of trips, adding more than 350 "outings" to their growing list of environmental conservation and protection programs. But what’s really interesting about the Sierra Club’s volunteer vacations is that most of them happen right here in the United States. While there are some trips abroad (and this is a work abroad blog, after all), the breadth and diversity of the Sierra Club’s trips does make you think about how little many of us know about the parts of the country we’ve never lived in. So today, we’re focusing on volunteer vacations abroad…in our own backyard.
Who is the Sierra Club?
The Sierra Club is one of the largest and most visible grassroots environmental organizations, comprising more than 1.4 million people worldwide. They believe in protecting wild lands, combating global warming, and creating a clean, safe world in which to live. To do these things, they engage members all over the country to support them both monetarily and as volunteers with environmental clean-up. They also support research for alternative energy sources, and advocate for greener business practices.
What are Sierra Club "service outings"?
In the spirit of engaging many people in their mission, the Sierra Club organizes "outings" year-round, across the globe. These outings can be for one to several days, and generally involve some serious work – from "helping with research projects at whale calving grounds in Maui to assisting with archaeological site restoration in New Mexico." Service outings or "volunteer vacations" are generally conducted in partnership with local government agencies like the parks service, so you can be sure that the work that you are doing is well funded and necessary for the environmental success of the region. For more information about specific volunteer vacations, please visit the Sierra Club website.
When can I volunteer with the Sierra Club?
The Sierra Club runs program year-round. Trips begin every few days for most of the summer, and only trail off a bit once the colder winter months hit. Trips are generally about 6 days long, and include some time for travel in addition to the service project you will be working on.
How much does it cost?
The cost of a volunteer vacation with the Sierra Club will vary as much as the cost of any other vacation. A large part of the cost will be an airline ticket to your destination, which is not included in the program costs that you’ll pay directly to the Sierra Club. Program costs include room and board, meals, and supervision during the vacation.
A great part of the beauty of considering a volunteer "abroad" vacation right here in the U.S. in the substantial decrease in the cost of the project. You can still feel like an explorer as you clean up the shore of Northern California at the breathtaking Point Reyes (which comes complete with sunbathing seals!) or in the massive grounds of Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. You can even explore stunning natural habitats in the rainforests of Puerto Rico (and maybe even practice your Spanish!) as you help the U.S. Forest Service clear trails and protect the land. You’ll feel far away from home, while benefitting from never having to cross U.S. borders. The costs for trips like these vary from $500 – $1500.
How do I apply?
Once you’ve had the chance to scroll through the brochures for the Sierra Club’s many service adventures, you can start filling out your application by signing up through the website. There are also extensive instructions about how to secure your spot by leaving a deposit, and handling payment for the trip to the Sierra Club.
If you are definitely looking to go abroad, and are not enticed by the new frontiers of the United States, I’d encourage you to keep checking the Sierra Club website for information about trips abroad. They are great at updating their website with the most current information, and new trips are being planned all the time.
You can also get to know the Sierra Club a bit before you commit to a week long trip through the organization’s local chapters. They routinely plan day outings (including both leisure trips and service outings) all over the country, and they are a great way to find out more about how the Sierra Club operates, and you can probably get feedback from other volunteers who have been on volunteer vacations about their experiences. Find out how to get in touch with your local Sierra Club chapter by visiting the Chapters page on the Sierra Club website. | <urn:uuid:fa7aa06b-09e2-460b-8222-04548bc2ae0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.workingabroadmagazine.com/volunteer/volunteer-vacations-sierra-club/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955418 | 982 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Old South Meeting House, located in the Downtown Crossing area of Boston, was built in 1729 as a Puritan meeting house. The original congregation included famous colonists such as inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin, patriot leader Samuel Adams, and the first African American to publish a book, Phillis Wheatley.
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, colonists gathered at Old South Meeting House to challenge British rule, culminating with a gathering on December 16, 1773, the aftermath of which is known today as The Boston Tea Party.
Today, Old South Meeting House is a busy museum, a treasured National Historic Landmark, and an active center for civic dialogue and free expression in the heart of downtown Boston, particularly as the frequent host of the Ford Hall Forum public lecture series.
And for over a decade, New England Conservatory, in conjunction with Old South Meeting House, have been showcasing its talented students with lunchtime recitals in this unique and centuries-old performance venue.
Upcoming Events at Old South Meeting House:
Friday, February 15th, 2013, 12:15 pm: Jaime Korkos, mezzo-soprano
Friday, February 22nd, 2013, 12:15 pm: Trio Cleonice
Friday, March 1st, 2013, 12:15 pm: Soyoung Park, soprano
Friday, March 8th, 2013, 12:15 pm: Xiang Yu, violin | <urn:uuid:40c427b4-c0db-43d4-84e6-ddedd7fb0278> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.necmusic.edu/old-south-meeting-house | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951767 | 294 | 1.921875 | 2 |
Sustaining That Back-to-School MomentumOctober 18, 2012 | Nicholas Provenzano
There's nothing like the excitement students and teachers feel when school starts. Kids are excited to see who's in their class and what types of great things they're going to learn. Teachers spent their summer tweaking lessons and creating brand new ones, and now they're excited about engaging the next set of students sitting patiently in their chairs just waiting to be taught. OK, it might not be exactly like that, but there is an energy at the start of the school year that is already fading as Halloween decorations start to appear in stores.
The longest period between any break is the start of school and the (American) Thanksgiving holiday. All of that energy from the start of the year is gone, and it's easy to slip into a little funk as Turkey Day approaches. Here are some great tips to keep teachers fresh during the Post Back-to-School Doldrums.
1) Continue to Learn
This might sound like the last thing a busy teacher wants to do, but it's important to keep learning new ideas all year, and October is a fine time to start. This doesn't have to be a three-hour workshop or two-day conference. Those are excellent, too, but you could also simply grab a book and read a little bit each day. Find something you think you can learn from and possibly implement during the school year. Here is a recommendation from my PLN: To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension by Ellin Oliver Keene.
2) Plan a Get-Together with Other Teachers
October is the time of the school year where teachers start to close their doors and bury their heads in work. They make less frequent appearances in the faculty lounge at lunch because they "have to" get work done. Try organizing a nice lunch during the school day where you'll get everyone together and ban all work talk. This is just a get-together for enjoying each other's company and talking about weekend plans or reality TV. You can even invite administration if you want. These get-togethers can be a nice opportunity for staff to meet, greet and bond.
October should be National EduBlogger's Month, and I'll see what I can do to make that happen. The reason I think October is the perfect month for blogging is because, with so much happening in the first month of school, there tends to be plenty to write about. It's a great time to reflect on what worked and what needs tweaking. Often, teachers do not think about the start of the school year until the following August. October is perfectly placed to think about the start of the next school year and the changes a teacher would like to make. I think everyone should blog, but a private journal would also be great. Reflection of any kind is a teacher's best friend, and October is the perfect time to start.
4) Find Some "You" Time
We can get so wrapped up in prepping for the school year and making sure the class starts off on the right foot that we can easily ignore ourselves. Take some time this October to spend with . . . yourself. Take walks, ride a bike, get a massage or anything else you keep saying you don't have the time to do. Add these events to your calendar, and stick to them. There's nothing weird about scheduling an appointment to hang out with yourself. I do it all the time. This "you" time will make October sail by right into November.
These four things are perfect for the teacher looking to change up the traditional waiting period between early September and Thanksgiving break. Whether you decide to start a new book, take a walk or share your first month of school with the world around you, it's important that teachers find something to battle the Post Back-to-School Doldrums. | <urn:uuid:46a909e4-d9b1-4176-ba61-3a578ba62374> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edutopia.org/blog/sustaining-back-to-school-momentum-nicholas-provenzano?quicktabs_edutopia_blogs_sidebar_popular_list=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974233 | 792 | 1.945313 | 2 |
The VL/HCC conference is the premier international forum for researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss the theory, applications and evaluation of technologies, visual and otherwise, that enhance the role of humans in the computing process. The conference was established in 1984 and aims to support the design, formalization, implementation, and evaluation of computing languages that are easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to understand by a broader group of people.
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-- Popular computer one-liner
Read the fascinating history of Wearable Computing, told by its father, Steve Mann
Read Steve's chapter ! | <urn:uuid:de8d066e-9ca7-4322-aa94-9ab6acf65f46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://interaction-design.org/calendar/vl_hcc_2012_-_ieee_symposium_on_visual_languages_and_human-centric_computing.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904621 | 192 | 1.6875 | 2 |
When it comes to unionizing, workers should be free of intimidation. The Goldwater Institute’s Save Our Secret Ballot effort is ensuring workers have anonymous ballots in union votes.
For tyrants, December 15, 1791 is a day that lives in infamy. It is the day the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Bill of Rights not only confirmed that the federal government was meant to be one of limited powers, it also crucially underscored the existence of inalienable natural rights that are beyond the power of any legitimate government to deprive.
When I worked for a state legislator in Texas, his policy was his legislative offices were open any time his private business was open. I spent many a lonely day in a largely abandoned Texas Capitol on government holidays that were ignored by the world in general. I also enjoyed marvelous health insurance benefits. The birth of my third child cost me personally a total of $20.
2011 may very well mark the year that many policymakers and citizens nationwide take action to curb the corrosive influence of unions. In the public sector, they create costs and inefficiencies, from inflated pension and health care costs to cumbersome work rules. In the private sector, they make companies uncompetitive and promote unemployment due to artificially high wages and benefits.
While President Obama has made union-building a top priority, Arizona has quite a different approach.
[W]e feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose. So wrote Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and 15 colleagues in a 2001 letter to the Mexican government.
Why then is Miller sponsoring legislation nowthe Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Actthat would eliminate the secret ballot for authorizing union representation in this country?
This November, Arizona voters will have a chance to outlaw government racial preferences. Similar initiatives passed by large majorities in three blue states: California, Washington, and Michigan.
The initiative is straightforward, forbidding discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin in public education, employment, or contracting. Because it embraces the moral imperative of nondiscrimination, it will be tough to beat on its merits.
Enter a new opposition tactic: confusion.
When I moved to Arizona seven years ago, two things happened related to my legal practice. First, I was invited to teach a continuing legal education class for Arizona lawyers on property rights law. Second, I was told I could not practice law until I passed the Arizona bar exam. Good enough to teach, but not good enough to do.
John Stossel interviews the Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick on the troubling practice of "release time," which pays government employees tax dollars to do nothing but union work.
Learn more about our effort to stop this waste here.
Phoenix, AZ — The Goldwater Institute is asking the Maricopa County Superior Court to once again grant a preliminary injunction in Cheatham v. Gordon, the Institute’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of release time provisions in the City of Phoenix’s labor contract with the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which allow city employees to perform union work on police time.
When a judge tells you you're breaking the law, it's generally not a good idea to thumb your nose at her. Yet that's exactly what Phoenix is doing. | <urn:uuid:1414a98b-260d-4c33-8b42-1e91855215f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://goldwaterinstitute.org/workplace-freedom-0?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956623 | 690 | 2.375 | 2 |
In a series of seven patches, Arnd Bergmann proposed adding in-memory write support to mounted cramfs file systems. He explained, "the intention is to use it for instance on read-only root file systems like CD-ROM, or on compressed initrd images. In either case, no data is written back to the medium, but remains in the page/inode/dentry cache, like ramfs does." Reactions were mixed. When Arnd suggested this as an alternative to using the more complex unionfs to overlay a temporary filesystem over a read-only file system, and that similar support could be added to other file systems, it was pointed out that there was ultimately more gained by focusing on a single solution that worked with all filesystems. David Newall stressed, "multiple implementations is a recipe for bugs and feature mismatch." Erez Zadok suggested, "I favor a more generic approach, one that will work with the vast majority of file systems that people use w/ unioning, preferably all of them." He went on to add that more gains would be had from modifying the union destination filesystem rather than multiple source filesystems. Arnd agreed in principle, but noted it would add complexity. He indicated that he'd explore the idea further, then explained:
"My idea was to have it in cramfs, squashfs and iso9660 at most, I agree that doing it in even a single writable file system would add far too much complexity. I did not mean to start a fundamental discussion about how to do it the right way, just noticed that there are half a dozen implementations that have been around for years without getting close to inclusion in the mainline kernel, while a much simpler approach gives you sane semantics for a subset of users."
"That's quite buggy and would have generated so many runtime warnings in a 'developer' setup (rofl) that I look at Documentation/SubmitChecklist and just weep."
"I don't care what anybody else says - x86 is *so* totally dominant, that other architectures have to live with the fact that 99.9% of all drivers are written for and tested on x86. As a result, anything else is 'theory'. Are some drivers good and are careful? Yes. Are most?
"I'm all edicted out. Sometimes one just puts forth the reasoning and lets others decide whether it's worth bothering about."
"Another week, another batch of mostly pretty small fixes. Hopefully the regression list is shrinking, and we've fixed at least a couple of the oopses on Arjan's list," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc5 kernel. He added, "as usual, the bulk of the changes are in drivers and arch code - together they are about 70% of the diffstat. And the arch stats are bloated by some new/updated SH and avr defconfig files, which is also fairly common at this stage." Linus concluded:
"Perhaps unusually, 13% is in kernel/, almost all of it fixing up some scheduler issues - with the bulk of it by far being a couple of reverts due to performance regressions. But there's a few other fixes too. And then there is networking and some ocfs2 updates. Along with various one-liners sprinkled all around.
"The shortlog (appended) gives a reasonable view of it all. Nothing hugely exciting sticks to my mind, but then I don't think we've had any really hugely exciting problem spots either.."
"A key reason that Linux has succeeded is that it actively seeks to work for a variety of people, purposes and products. One operating system is now a strong player in the embedded market, the real time market, and the High Performance Computing market, as well as being an important player in a variety of other markets. That's a rather stunning success."
Tony Luck offered some statistics focused on the frequency of developers that only contribute to the Linux kernel one time, "I skimmed through looking for drive-by contributors (defined as someone who contributes to just one release and is then never heard from again)." Starting with the 2.6.11 kernel, he suggested the following numbers: "63 [developers contributed patches] in version 2.6.11 [and then were] never seen again, 148 in version 2.6.12, 128 in version 2.6.13, 92 in version 2.6.14, 96 in version 2.6.15, 122 in version 2.6.16, 137 in version 2.6.17, 140 in version 2.6.18, 135 in version 2.6.19, 95 in version 2.6.20, 136 in version 2.6.21, 153 in version 2.6.22, 179 in version 2.6.23, 179 in version 2.6.24, and 304 in version 2.6.25".
It was pointed out that the statistics were artificially inflated due to name misspellings and other variations, and that many of the listed people are actually still working with the Linux kernel. Greg KH added, "well, you do know that the distribution of all of our users are: 50% only contributed 1 patch; 25% contributed 2; 12% contributed 3; 6% contributed 4 and so on?" He went on to point out:
"Our curve is leveling out much better now though. For the whole 2.5 release, the top 30 people did over 80% of the work. Now, the top 30 people are doing 30% of the work. So it is getting much better, as long as we still continue to keep our massive rate of change that we have going, and huge number of developers, we should be fine. So this list doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong, only that 50% are one-time contributors. And I think that shows we are easy to get a change into our tree from just about anyone, not that we are driving people away."
"These random kernel boots found many 'impossible to trigger' bugs and races in the past. The reason for its race finding capability is the timing randomness of the resulting random kernel image: the delays caused by random combination of debugging facilities, build variants, kernel subsystem variants we have."
"The http://www.kerneloops.org website collects kernel oops and warning reports from various mailing lists and bugzillas as well as with a client users can install to auto-submit oopses," began Arjan van de Ven, referring to a website first announced last December. He summarized, "this week, a total of 3670 oopses and warnings have been reported, compared to 3029 reports in the previous week." The 'kerneloops' client is available from the project's web page, and is now being included by multiple distributions. Arjan explains, "in addition to Fedora, Debian now has included the client application in their default GUI install targets, thanks a lot for that!" He went on to discuss some recent changes:
"This week, based on feedback, I've split the report into 'untainted' and 'caused by proprietary drivers'. Let me know if I should continue doing this or if the old format was better.
"As an experiment (on request) I've exported the database to text files (one file per report) and stuck it in a git repository. You can take a look with git clone git://www.kerneloops.org/ Suggestions for improving the format of this are obviously very welcome, as are 'yes useful' and 'no not useful' comments. Again, this is an experiment, if it's not seen as useful I may discontinue it."
"I think our mistake is the assumption that everyone who wants to contribute to the kernel wants to code, or that everyone wants to end up at the top of the major feature contributors list. For lots of people, we're going to be that experiment from college they never quite want to admit to later on in life."
In April, 2.4 kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau queried the Linux kernel mailing list regarding how the 2.4 kernel is still being used. He followed up summarizing the responses, suggesting that about 5% of 2.4 users run the kernel on old recycled laptops at home or on PDA's and thin clients, running whatever works with no real need to upgrade. Another 5% of the users are on desktop PCs and monitoring stations, not upgrading because "it works". From there, about 50% of the users run the 2.4 kernel on general purpose servers and update regularly, still running the older kernel due to lack of need for new features and lack of time, and possibly due to failed earlier attempts to upgrade. Another 20% use the 2.4 kernel on application specific servers where reliability is of the highest importance. 10% of the users run the older stable kernel on routers, firewalls, and intrusion detections systems, with 1 to 2 year uptimes and limited updates in a business setting, and shorter uptimes and frequent updates in a personal setting. The final 10% or so use the kernel in embedded systems where stability is again very important, and the build tree may be highly modified, causing at least one major network equipment manufacturer to still be shipping devices with the 2.4.2 kernel. Willy continued:
"Based on that and on the workflow people took the time to explain, I realize that the distinction between -pre and -rc is useless (ding! Linus if you read this, don't beat me). In fact, either people want absolute reliability and they pick one kernel from the stable 2.4.X.Y branch, or they want more recent updates and they simply do their shopping in the -master branch, which is fairly easy thanks to the Gitweb interface. But there are almost no testers in 2.4, just users. That means that I don't have to expect immediate feedback when posting a pre-release. And it has happened several times that I got a build error report several weeks after the release.
"Also, since most people do not update more than 1 - 2 times a year, it's not very useful to have more than 1 - 2 new versions a year, especially since we have the stable release. For this reason, I think I will issue stable releases a bit more often for users to quickly get their fixes, but progressively increase the delay between major releases. Those ones will only be issued with new PCI IDs, major driver updates, compiler support, etc..."
"In the early days, the project was conceived as a way of getting fresh blood into kernel development by giving them fairly simple but generally useful tasks and hoping they'd move more into the mainstream," began James Bottomley starting a thread titled Fixing the Kernel Janitors project. He continued, "if we wind forwards to 2008, there's considerable and rising friction being generated by janitorial patches,", references a recent thread complaining about worthless patches hitting the lkml. Later in the thread he added:
"That's why I think we have to change the process. If we keep the Janitors project, then the bar has to be raised so that it becomes more participatory and thought oriented (i.e. eliminate from the outset anyone who is not going to graduate from mechanical changes to more useful ones). That's why I think bug finding and reporting is a better thing to do. There are mechanical aspects to finding bugs but it is a useful service. Bug fixing is participatory because we usually do quite a lot of back and forth between the reporter and the fixer and at the end of the day quite a few people get curious about how the bug was triggered in the first place and actually go off and read the code."
"Look at anyone who is extremely nimble with the kernel, and ask them what they worked on to get going with development. Did Andrew Morton fixup whitespace errors when he was starting to become familiar with the tree? Did I?
"My suggestion to you, and to everyone else who wants to improve the quality of this community, is to become a part of it. Learn a subsystem. Post patches that fix problems people care about. Listen to criticism and respond to it constructively."
"This is a high performance network filesystem with a local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data," Evgeniy Polyakov said, announcing the latest version of his Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System. He noted that in addition to numerous bugfixes, the latest release includes the following new features:
"Full transaction support for all operations (object creation/removal, data reading and writing); Data and metadata cache coherency support; Transaction timeout based resending, if [a] given transaction did not receive [a] reply after specified timeout, [the] transaction will be resent (possibly to different server); Switched writepage path to ->sendpage() which improved performance and robustness of the writing."
Evgeniy also noted that he has started working on support for parallel data processing, one of the key intended features of the filesystem. He explained that initial logic has been added so data can be written to multiple servers at the same time, and reads can be balanced across the multiple servers, though the logic is not yet being used by the filesystem. | <urn:uuid:f50ed8b3-51a5-40a6-a26f-93e6d383cc95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kerneltrap.org/Linux?page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964459 | 2,764 | 1.640625 | 2 |