text stringlengths 213 24.6k | id stringlengths 47 47 | dump stringclasses 1 value | url stringlengths 14 499 | file_path stringlengths 138 138 | language stringclasses 1 value | language_score float64 0.9 1 | token_count int64 51 4.1k | score float64 1.5 5.06 | int_score int64 2 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The original Emancipation Proclamation is going on display in Nashville as the Civil War-era document that changed the lives of countless African-Americans makes its only stop in the Southeast on a 150th anniversary tour.
The exhibit opens Tuesday, the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's birthday, at the Tennessee State Museum. The proclamation will be viewed for just 72 hours over six days because exposure to light is harmful to the fragile document.
The stop is a rare visit to the South for the document Lincoln signed in 1863 declaring all slaves "forever free" in states rebelling then against the Union.
Bruce Bustard, senior curator at the National Archives where the document is kept, said Tennessee was a key battleground in the war. | <urn:uuid:46c1321c-ddad-483e-80f1-5cf1bec8ace2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/02/12/us--emancipation-proclamation.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929092 | 159 | 2.78125 | 3 |
The 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide gets a panoramic investigation in Alrick Brown’s Kinyarwanda. Through a series of vignettes we see neighbors and strangers transformed into enemies and saviors as machete waving rogues terrorize Tutsi citizens. These separate stories begin to coalesce into one powerful narrative of forgiveness, faith, sorrow, and loss.
We start with Jeanne, the daughter of a Hutu man and Tutsi woman, who narrowly escapes death by visiting her boyfriend, a Hutu. Finding her parents massacred, she has no where to go and joins a band of refugees seeking shelter and protection from the murderous militia. That band includes a Tutsi Catholic Priest who finds salvation in the friendship and partnership with an Imam who opens his mosque to Tutsi refugees. Looking over them all is Lieutenant Rose, a solider trying to lead many Tutsi to an UN safe zone.
In Kinyarwanda, we see the brutality of the massacre of Tutsi families and the bravery of people who stood up to protect neighbors. Even more impressive, Director Alrick Brown shows us Rwanda 10 years after that violent period to a rehabilitation and reconciliation camp for people responsible for the atrocities. Seeing these men admit to their crimes, some obfuscating the extent of their responsibility and others narrating with great detail everything they did was even more chilling.
In these confession sessions led by Lieutenant Rose, she helps them to understand the insurmountable obstacles victims will have to vaunt to forgive these men. ”Forgiveness is asking for a miracle.” Indeed, when over 1 million Tutsi and sympathizers were murdered in little under a year during the genocide. Through the stories during the massacre, we see these killings were both anonymous and fueled by personal animosity hiding behind the mob’s blood lust. Yet, through these reconciliation scenes, we see the pain of trying to forgive and move on with life after so much has been stolen. In all, Kinyarwanda is a haunting film about this dark period in our world’s history and a reminder that we must vigilant to never let it happen again. | <urn:uuid:dfdbcc5b-d97c-4709-a829-e30ca4fa5d78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://heykmart.tumblr.com/post/11445329069/who-is-my-neighbor-kinyarwanda-ciff | 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 | 0.951826 | 446 | 1.625 | 2 |
About Thassos -
Information About Thassos
The Blue Flag is an exclusive eco-label awarded to over 3300 beaches and marinas in 36 countries across Europe, South Africa, Morocco, New Zealand, Canada and the Caribbean.
The Blue Flag Programme is owned and run by the independent non-profit organisation Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE).
The Blue Flag works towards sustainable development at beaches and marinas through strict criteria dealing with water quality, environmental education and information, environmental management, and safety and other services.
The right to fly a Blue Flag at a beach or recreational water is a strong indication of high environmental standards and is a much sought after accolade by local authorities and providers of water-based recreational facilities.
A Blue Flag is rewarded to a beach only after it has met stringent quality standards during the whole of the previous bathing season. Blue Flag status is also applied to marinas.
A Blue Flag that stands on Golden Beach
Greece ended 2007 and was awarded or re-awarded for 2008 a whopping 439 Blue Flags. Of those flags, seven of them are on Thassos! These beaches include one in Thassos Town
next to the old port, one in Makryammos
, one in Pefkari
, two in Golden Beach
and another two in Skala Prinos
If you would like to learn more about the Blue Flag Programme
, please click the link. | <urn:uuid:2ebb76b7-f59d-4040-9b98-dd28a4332538> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.go-thassos.gr/about-thassos/thassos-information/what-is-the-blue-flag.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926918 | 296 | 1.992188 | 2 |
From the Chairperson
Welcome! The Department of History at Michigan State University is a large, vibrant intellectual community. The faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, alumni and friends of the Department of History are actively engaged in an enormous range of activities involving research, publishing, teaching, learning, and public outreach. It is my honor to share these with you.
On April 16, the Football Scholars Forum met to discuss Soccernomics by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper. Szymanski, Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, joined us in East Lansing while Simon Kuper participated via Skype.
For Twitter timeline click here. Listen to the audio from the session here (mp3). For more information visit: http://footballscholars.org
Dr. Steinberg will spend the academic year 2013-14 as a resident fellow of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. The theme of the fellowship is “Trauma and Social Transformation.”
As part of the Speaker Series, our very own Helen Veit will be giving a talk on Friday, April 19, at 3:30 pm in the Old Horticulture Conference Room. Helen Veit specializes in American history. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina, 2013) explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. Her next book, Small Appetites: A History of Children’s Food, examines the history of children’s eating starting in the early nineteenth century. She is the editor of the American Food in History book series, forthcoming from Michigan State University Press.
“For Infants and Invalids: Medicalizing Children’s Food in the Nineteenth Century”
Friday, April 19, 3:30 pm
Old Horticulture Conference Room
Beliefs about children’s food have changed enormously over time. Today, many Americans believe that children have naturally delicate tastes. But Americans in the nineteenth century more often claimed the opposite: children had naturally delicate bodies, they said, and dangerously omnivorous tastes. This paper explores changing ideas about children’s food, a seemingly biological subject that continues to be deeply influenced by beliefs about medicine, mortality, the duties of good parents, and the nature of childhood itself.
Speaker Series Flyer: Veit
Professor Sayuri Shimizu has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship for a project titled “The Rise and Transformation of the North Pacific Ocean Resource Management Regimes, 1900–1975.” Taking a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to maritime environmental history, the study examines ideas, local practices, national regulatory policies, and intergovernmental institution-building regarding the commercial harvesting and scientific husbandry of fishery resources in the North Pacific in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century leading up to the United Nations Law of the Sea Conventions (UNCLOS I & II). Congratulations Professor Shimizu!
As part of the Speaker Series for the Department of History, Jerry Davila will be giving a talk on Thursday, April 11, 3:30pm in room 255 Old Horticulture. Davila is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Race Mixture in the Land of the Future”
The decolonization of West African nations reignited connections across the Atlantic world that had been severed under colonialism. In Brazil, the renewal of these connections was seen as an opportunity to define a sphere of political and economic influence that would drive its development as an industrializing future world power. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian government and Brazilian intellectuals pursued opportunities across the Atlantic by promoting Brazil as a racially mixed and racially democratic nation. Dávila examines these crossings to understand dynamics of racial identity expressed in the experiences of Brazilians sojourning in West Africa.
Jerry Davila Flyer
Nearly 70 years after the United States bombed Japan in 1945, Michigan State University has acquired the world’s largest collection of interviews with bomb survivors living in North and South America.
After months of cataloging, 56 interviews of those who lived through bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima – ranging from 45 minutes to several hours – are now part of the Robert Vincent Voice Library of MSU Libraries. They are available worldwide through MSU Libraries’ online public access catalog.
This documentary film journeys through the experiences and memories of Antonia Castañeda from her migrant family’s cycles between Crystal City, south Texas, and the Yakima Valley in Washington state, to her coming of age as a Chicana activist, community organizer, feminist, teacher, mentor and scholar. Shifting away from documentarian conventions, the film proposes a non-linear set of narratives where past and present are intertwined by intense mementos dealing with patriarchy, subordination, sexuality, survival and self-discovery.
Saturday April 30 at 9:45 AM at the Kellog Center. Dia de La Mujer Conference.
Ashley Wiersma’s academic blog, Colonialism Through the Veil, was recently featured on Settler Colonial Studies, a website affiliated with the field’s peer-reviewed journal and edited by Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh.
Leslie Page Moch will deliver the keynote address, “Repertoires and Regimes of Human Mobility: On the Move in 20th-Century Eurasia,” at an interdisciplinary conference in St. Louis on Friday, April 5. The Conference, On the Move: Migration and Mobility in East and Central Europe and Eurasia, is sponsored by the Migration, Identity, and State Research Collective and the Eurasian Studies Research Cluster in International and Area Studies of Washington University and by the Volkswagen Foundation. | <urn:uuid:66804c0b-088e-46d7-b7ce-d9e7e096ca81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://history.msu.edu/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915764 | 1,205 | 1.523438 | 2 |
In order to enjoy this exhibit, you will need a Web browser that understands graphical Fill-Out Forms. See our list of browsers for more information.
This web-based interface to the Pisces program allows you to compute implicitly defined curves in the plane. You can choose from several pre-defined functions, and can modify their parameters and domains.
How are rainbows formed? Why do they only occur when the sun is behind the observer? If the sun is low on the horizon, at what angle in the sky should we expect to see a rainbow? This laboratory, developed as part of the University of Minnesota Calculus Initiative, helps to answer these and other questions by examining a mathematical model of light passing through a water droplet.
Generate the famous Penrose tilings, or design your own nonperiodic tilings of the plane. In the process, you can select and visualize plane cross-sections of a lattice in anywhere from 3 up to 13 dimensions!
Kali is an interactive editor for symmetric patterns of the plane, as seen in some of the woodcuts of M.C. Escher. It's also a fun way to learn about the 17 crystallographic symmetry groups of the plane.
An interactive 3D viewer that works with any HTML 2.0 compatible Web browser. You can pick an object out of our predefined library, or you can learn about the OOGL format and define your own 3D objects. (You are free to choose either version of Cyberview; the only difference is the rendering system used by the server.)
This discussion of Pascal's theorem in terms of projective geometry includes an interactive application that lets you specify points on a conic and see how the theorem applies to them.
Explore the effects of negatively curved space in this pinball-style game. The game board is not only curved, but also contains singularities which serve as ``bumpers'' off which the ball can bounce.
Explore Teichmuller space, the space of all different angle geometries on a genus two surface. Moving through this space is accomplished by shifting the vertices of a tiling of the hyperbolic plane.
Experiment with numerical integration of data sets. Enter your own data set, choose a model function, and interpret both numerical and graphical results. This module, developed as part of the University of Minnesota Calculus Initiative, introduces the key ideas of modeling discrete data, as well as computing the total change in a quantity from data about the rate at which it is changing.
Discover and visualize families of Riemann surfaces with a specified group of symmetries. The presentation you choose for your symmetry group corresponds geometrically to a construction of the surface as a covering of a particular orbifold.
Work with any discrete symmetry group of the hyperbolic plane. Lafite will calculate the fundamental region and generators of the group you chose. The program then creates Escher-like patterns by replicating a motif through the action of that group.
Most of the programs presented here were written using the W3Kit library developed at the Geometry Center. This is an object-oriented toolkit for building interactive World-Wide Web applications.
Created: Late 1993? --- Last modified: Mon Feb 3 10:55:22 1997
Copyright © 1993-1996 by The Geometry Center All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:c7534abb-1aaa-403f-83b8-e72b5dcb2289> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/apps/gallery.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.902555 | 690 | 3.328125 | 3 |
For about a day this week, it sounded to some interested parties like the federal government might be reconsidering the rules that have always meant that same-sex couples are not treated the same as married heterosexuals when it comes to applications for such things as visas and green cards.
But, as The Advocate reports, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Christopher Bentley says "it's business as usual."
The Obama administration has said its purpose in Libya is to protect civilians and not to choose a new government for the country — or to oust Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi through military means.
But while the president is still talking of limits to the intervention, many outside observers are pointing to actions that have stretched beyond what was called for under the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the bombing campaign.
These lines drawn around U.S. goals in Libya are fuzzy for a reason, analysts say.
Singer-songwriter, guitarist and record producer, Raul Malo has become a venerable force in both Latin and country music. Malo's career first took off while leading Grammy-winning group The Mavericks. Many of the band's country-influenced singles hit the charts, and when the group disbanded in the early 2000s, it had won a Grammy and two Country Music Awards. Malo had been doing some solo work on the side, and since then it has become his primary focus.
A federal judge in Washington will allow inmates in two restrictive prison units designed for terrorists and other prisoners who get 24-hour monitoring to proceed with parts of their civil rights lawsuit. | <urn:uuid:5214951a-0fe7-4fd4-b74b-bef10fa1a01a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kunc.org/npr-news?page=6883 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97905 | 325 | 1.679688 | 2 |
The Fall & Rise of Occupy Wall Street
"A year and a half after the takeover of Zuccotti Park there exists a widespread conviction that Occupy Wall Street ultimately failed, and that it did so for lack of commitment, organization, and clear objectives. [. . .] But it has become increasingly clear that OWS didn’t fizzle because its objectives were too muddled or its talk too abstract or its organization too chaotic. In fact, the movement was undone by a concerted government effort to undo it."
Madrick persuasively argues two things: OWS neither failed nor fizzled. It accomplished several things - including focusing attention on glaring political economic inequalities that somehow escaped attention - and was actively suppressed.*
* And, for those who think this is just so much paranoid whining, here is a report from the Assembly Rights & Protest Project documenting the unjustified and illegal violent tactics the government used to suppress OWS in New York City. | <urn:uuid:ff643c99-3b82-4a85-a0ba-ac97dc2218cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-fall-rise-of-occupy-wall-street.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968097 | 194 | 1.609375 | 2 |
CAMBRIDGE, Mass./NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Northeast was digging out on Sunday after a blizzard dumped up to 40 inches (one meter) of snow with hurricane force winds, killing at least nine people and leaving hundreds of thousands without power.
As the Northeast cleared roads and shoveled out, another storm bore down on the Northern Plains and tornadoes threatened the Southeast in a weekend of extreme weather across the United States.
A tornado which appeared to be a mile wide touched down in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, causing significant damage, said Anna Weber of the National Weather Service. The twister also hit the nearby town of Petal where it destroyed a brick building.
In New York City trucks plowed through residential streets, piling snow even higher at the edges and leaving thousands of motorists to dig out their buried vehicles.
Another round of severe weather on Monday could bring more misery, with freezing rain and more snow predicted that would make the evening commute even more difficult.
In Boston, Mayor Tom Menino canceled school on Monday after touring neighborhoods throughout the city, where two feet of snow fell.
Utility companies reported that some 350,000 customers were still without electricity across nine states after the wet, heavy snow brought down tree branches and power lines.
Air traffic began to return to normal after some 5,800 flights were canceled on Friday and Saturday, according to Flightaware, a flight-tracking service.
Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, and New York state’s Long Island MacArthur Airport reopened on Sunday morning. Boston’s Logan International Airport reopened late on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Rare travel bans in Connecticut and Massachusetts were lifted but roads throughout the region remained treacherous, according to state transportation departments.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, residents were digging out their cars and driveways under clear blue skies on Sunday afternoon.
As the region recovered, another large winter storm building across the Northern Plains was expected to leave a footof snow and bring high winds from Colorado to central Minnesota into Monday, the National Weather Service said.
South Dakota was expected to be hardest hit, with winds seen reaching 50 miles per hour (80 kmph), which would create white-out conditions. The storm was expected to reach parts of Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Wisconsin.
South Dakota officials closed a 150-mile (240-km) stretch of Interstate 90 in the center of the state. They also closed 75 miles of Interstate 29 in the state’s northeastern corner near North Dakota.
Officials said motels and other facilities along Interstate 90 were filling up with travelers trying to avoid the heavy drifting and near-zero visibility.
“Travel will be difficult to impossible at times on other highways in many areas of South Dakota,” state transportation officials said in a statement.
GREAT LAKES TO THE ATLANTIC
The mammoth storm over the weekend stretched from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and covered several spots in the Northeast with more than 3 feet of snow. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts took the brunt of the blizzard.
The Connecticut town of Hamden had 40 inches and nearby Milford 38 inches, the National Weather Service said.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said 675 pieces of equipment and 975 personnel had been dispatched to help Suffolk County, making up the eastern half of Long Island, dig out of 3 feet of snow.
The storm “effectively shut down the entire region,” Cuomo said in a statement.
Amtrak ran a limited train service between New York and Boston on Sunday and a regular Sunday schedule from New York to the state capital in Albany.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said it had resumed limited service on Sunday afternoon and would return to regular service on Monday.
The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority and Connecticut Transit said service would remain suspended on Sunday.
The storm dropped 31.9 inches of snow on Portland, Maine, creating “whiteout conditions,” said city spokeswoman Nicole Clegg, 42. “It’s the biggest I’ve seen since I was a little girl.”
Clegg said most city roads had been cleared by Sunday night, and city employees were set to begin plowing Portland’s “100 miles of sidewalks.”
Winds gusted to 83 miles per hour (134 kmph) at Cuttyhunk, New York, and brought down trees across the region.
The storm contributed to at least five deaths in Connecticut and two each in New York state and Boston, authorities said.
The two deaths in Boston were separate incidents of carbon monoxide poisoning in cars, an 11-year-old boy and a man in his early 20s. The boy had climbed into the family car to keep warm while his father cleared snow. The engine was running but the exhaust was blocked by snow, said authorities.
In Rutland, Vermont, the snow helped solve a crime, said Rutland police Sergeant James Tarbell. After a burglar alarm went off at a gas station in the small hours of the morning, police found a broken window and discovered someone had stolen cartons of cigarettes, said Tarbell.
A trail of footprints in the snow led the police to a nearby street, where they found a 42-year old man shoveling snow.
“It was an ungodly hour to be shoveling snow,” Tarbell said. Police arrested the man and found A duffel bag full of cigarettes on the front porch of the house. | <urn:uuid:b83c4340-20b3-431b-81e3-3dd7527ae3da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wklh.com/news/northeast-digs-out-from-blizzard-tornado-strikes-in-south/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963569 | 1,140 | 1.570313 | 2 |
How to recognize a rogue security program?
New security tools appear online every day; can you tell if they are useful programs or fraudulent applications? Advertising techniques used by rogue programs might be even more convincing than advertisements of real security tools. How can you recognize a scam?
If a program is installed without your consent, it indicates either a computer parasite or bad attitude of the creators of the program. Regular software can’t magically appear on a machine without your permission. However, not every program is fraudulent and malicious if it is installed without user’s agreement. Software already installed on a computer may offer new additional tools and they may even install those new products automatically. These actions are usually defined in settings of the program and in the license agreement.
Doing a little research online is always worth the time spent. If the program is reputable, you will find reviews on at least several different websites. And if the program is not genuine, most of the results you find will advice how to delete the software. Unfortunately, some of the rogue programs are advertised on fraudulent websites in order to trick people into buying the fake security tools.
Running a website doesn’t cost much and it’s not as difficult as it may seem to be. This is the reason why there are plenty of fraudulent web sources; however, creating a functional website takes much efforts and time and money. Scammers rarely bother to spend time and money for websites that get closed and banned in a week; this can help you to recognize a fraud.
If the official website of software is full of logic mistakes and spelling mistakes, it shouldn’t be trusted. Lack of contact details and basic information about a company is also a symptom of a phishy deal.
Learn more: How to recognize a rogue website?
Learn more: Signs of browser hijacker infection.
There are plenty of websites dedicated to payment but the most majority of them are not reputable. If you decide to purchase a license of new software, make sure you know what kind of payment system is used. If you have never heard about certain payment system before, it’s better to back off. If you pay for something via fraudulent website, you lose the money, your online banking account and it may even lead to identity theft. If the payment system is reputable, you can trust the software too since reputable companies don’t cooperate with scammers.
If the payment page is secured, the address bar should be yellow on the most popular web browsers. There should also be a closed padlock icon next to the address of the website.
If the program doesn’t do a thing, why should you pay for it? The majority of fake security applications slow down a computer considerably because they use lots of system resources but they don’t perform any actions. If the program is only capable of loading pop-ups it’s most likely not a security tool. | <urn:uuid:6ea1d995-c7b3-44c7-a9aa-4ff920b044ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.spywarevoid.com/how-to-recognize-a-rogue-security-program | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942674 | 597 | 2.25 | 2 |
Originally Posted by SunDeck
I stilly think it makes sense to use a variety in the lawn, a mixture of fescue, ryes and bluegrasses. The problem with using only one type of grass is that it's a monoculture, which is less resistant to specific pathogens, and environmental stresses.
Looks pretty cool though.
I think that our yard with its various micro climates (light shade-dense shade to no shade with intense sun, high traffic-no traffic, flat to hilly) proves you correct, whenever I have not considered the differences this year I have received an expensive education that supports what you are telling me.
So if I overseed in September or October with a mix of good fescue, blue grass and perinial rye would it cover my learning mistakes by next spring? | <urn:uuid:6cc859e8-68d7-47df-b0c1-993c8be953d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redszone.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1092728&postcount=76 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97176 | 171 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Talking About Medicare Fraud
By Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
A few weeks ago, I went out to Los Angeles, California and participated in a Health Care Fraud Prevention Summit. The event was the latest in a series of fraud prevention summits held by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to bring together federal, state, and local partners; beneficiaries; providers; and other interested parties to discuss innovative ways to eliminate fraud within the U.S. health care system.
I also had the chance to visit the Freda Mohr Senior Multipurpose Center, where I was joined by the CEO of Jewish Family Services Paul S. Castro, who oversees the Freda Mohr Multipurpose Center, as well as a local Senior Medicare Patrol, volunteer, Joyce Rosenthal, who was able to share her own experiences with the Senior Medicare Patrol program and urge others to join. We talked with the seniors present at the Center about how to spot potential scam artists and alert the authorities in order to protect themselves and others.
Here are some useful tips to stop Medicare fraud:
- Guard your Medicare and Social Security numbers. Treat them like you would treat your credit cards.
- Be suspicious of anyone who offers you free medical equipment or services and then requests your Medicare number. If it’s free, they don’t need your number!
- Do not let anyone borrow or pay to use your Medicare ID card or your identity. It’s illegal, and it’s not worth it!
Stopping Medicare fraud is a priority for the Obama Administration. Taxpayer dollars must be safeguarded, and people with Medicare should be protected from fraudsters. Check out our new ad about this issue, which reiterates fraud prevention tips for people with Medicare:
Our next fraud prevention summit will be held in Brooklyn, NY on this Friday, November 5, 2010, and we’re looking forward to continuing this conversation in other communities. For more information, make sure you check out stopmedicarefraud.gov. | <urn:uuid:798977d5-503f-4346-854a-21edf757b3e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthcare.gov/blog/2010/11/fraudprevention-losangeles.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94458 | 424 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Thirteen Ways of Looking At TheBus
By Gizelle Gajelonia
Tinfish Press, 2010
Reviewed by Lily Nazareno
“Depart.” This is how Gizelle Gajelonia’s collection of poetry, Thirteen Ways of Looking At (small a here) TheBus, commences its journey. It is both a kind invitation and an urgent call to come away with her on her rides through Hawai‘i, with TheBus as her medium. Hawaii‘s local residents and workers have relied on public transportation for decades, and this collection may fairly be considered the epitome of Hawai‘i’s own, local brand of literature. Gajelonia’s poetry stops through such topics as perseverance, Hawai‘i’s cultural diversity, and the ills of consumerism, with Gajelonia as our poetic chauffeur.
The title of the collection and the corresponding title poem is a parody of Wallace Stevens’ classic poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking At(small a here) a Blackbird”; however, one does not need to read Stevens’ poem to be able to drink in Gajelonia’s. The poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking At TheBus” is an apt and mildly derisive observation of the local community’s perseverance. Its sixth section reads:
Late afternoons filled TheBus
With academic and corporate drones,
The shadows of their feet
Paraded down the aisle.
Traced in their shadows
A call to apathy.
This particular stanza is a reference to Hawai‘i residents’ dependence on TheBus for their education and career, albeit with a somewhat dissatisfied attitude. In the lines of the twelfth stanza,“Nana is moving / TheBus must be coming,” Gajelonia brings to the reader’s attention how the local elders have become accustomed to this daily mode of transport; they know and accept the patterns of work and travel, in order to keep up with the turmoils of everyday life.
The poem “A Bus Hay(na)ku” arrives at the heart of the collection, and is written entirely in Tagalog, a Philippine language. Gajelonia provides an English translation adjacent to the poem. Its diction may sound very plain, but perhaps it is this frankness that allows the reader to picture the honesty and integrity that empowers Filipinos to work in Hawai‘i.
sa wikang aking
u ta n.
in the language I have
The sparse placement of the words in these last two paragraphs visually depicts how she had been forgetting her language, prompting her to take the actions to change that, by writing in Tagalog. The speaker writes while observing other bus riders, many of whom are Filipinos commuting to and from their jobs. The speaker also worries what these Filipinos think of her, not wanting to lack that “hardworking” characteristic—the poem is of a younger generation observing an older generation. “A Bus Hay(na)ku” is a simple, sincere observation of the typically hard-working nature of the Filipino immigrant community, as well as an attempt to reinvigorate Gajelonia’s own Filipino roots.
Further along this poetic voyage is the piece “Bustainability”. At first read, its title sounds like an environmental message concerning Hawai‘i’s TheBus. A closer evaluation reveals that the poem is a deeper critique of the state government’s actions—or, rather, inaction—that the speaker feels have impact on only a select few local residents. In the lines “How come dey get the fancy bus? How come we / gotta ride the old kine brown bus?” the speaker clearly expresses disappointment that the richer neighborhoods seem to receive better privileges than “da ghetto North Shore side”. Commerce and wealth do not, apparently, trickle down fairly, despite the expectations of social equality. The title “Bustainability”, therefore, alludes not to an economic sustainability, but to a cultural one. It calls to allow all cultures to coexist as equally and as peacefully as possible in the eyes of the government.
“He Do Da Kine In DifferentVoices”, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, is the penultimate poem in the collection. Separated into five distinct parts, it is a genuine and richly articulated account of Hawaii’s local cultures clashing with the western world’s commercial interference. It describes a “Real Unreal City”, a reference to “The Waste Land”’s line, “Unreal City”. The speaker toys with the idea that the land of Hawai‘i is, metaphorically speaking, being prostituted. The reality is that this has negative impacts for Hawai‘i as a whole. The lines in part III of this poem mention that people come to Hawai‘i for the “experiences that will entice the traveler”—yet what is most significant is that there is no apparent benefit for the resident, only for the people who travel to Hawai‘i. This metaphor of taking advantage of the land is extended through the last stanza of the poem’s fifth section. It states, “Thinking, with my people behind me, / Shall I sign the proposition handed to me?” It refers to Hawai‘i’s land reluctantly changing hands, after its monarchy fell. Eliot’s poem concludes “Shantih shantih shantih”, a chant that he translates to “the peace which passeth understanding”, or a peaceful departure. In her own poem, Gajelonia pens “Aloha ‘oe, aloha ‘oe, aloha ‘oe”, a poignant farewell and conclusion signifying that, after Hawai‘i loses sovereignty, it will never be returned to its original state.
My only qualms with Thirteen Ways of Looking At TheBus include the fact that some of Gajelonia’s word choices are quite heavily pidgin, such as “ainokea” and “bumbai” and may be difficult to understand for those completely unfamiliar with pidgin. Some readers also ought to be forewarned: this collection of poetry contains a few instances of strong language and profanity. Of course, this is not without the purpose of accurately portraying every facet of Hawai‘i’s diverse people.
As a whole, this is the kind of poetry collection that is worth more than the sum of its parts. Though each poem could stand on its own, as a collection, one could not exclude a single poem from it and still consider it to be as cohesive and thorough. Concluding this ride through 35 pages of Gajelonia’s memoirs, the final page of the collection features the iconic, horizontal gradient stripes of TheBus. There is only one word on this page, befitting of the prolific and illuminating road that Gajelonia had lain. It is a simple notice of what the reader accomplishes by experiencing this poetic vehicle to its fullest: “Arrive.” | <urn:uuid:eb031895-8848-4ab2-838c-63341c7e1a7e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hpu.edu/CHSS/English/LitLife/HawaiPacificReview/2012BookRev/thebus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941466 | 1,541 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Indonesia’s Wildlife Crimes Unit
- Black Market Tigers Video
- A Wildlife Crimes Unit coordinator talks about fighting a dangerous trade in Indonesia.
- Tarsius Indonesian Wildlife Crimes Unit Photo
Tarsiers are among the wildlife impacted by hunting and wildlife trade.
A spectacular variety of wildlife species live on the islands of Indonesia, from birds of paradise to tigers and elephants. As one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, it also has one of the highest human populations—the fourth largest in the world. The island faces heavy development pressure, and increasingly, its people are harvesting the wealth of natural resources to supply a growing wildlife trade. The islands are now home to the highest number of internationally threatened mammals and birds, largely due to uncontrolled hunting. To help stem the trade, WCS and the Indonesian Department of Forestry work together as “Wildlife Crimes Units,” conducting on-the-ground enforcement as well as education campaigns.
Hunting and wildlife trade have tremendous impacts on the biodiversity of Indonesia. Tons of turtles and pangolins (a type of scaly anteater), are exported on a weekly basis, and about 1.5 million wild-caught birds are sold in a bird market every year in Java, according to the wildlife trade monitoring network known as TRAFFIC. A steady demand for tiger parts fuels a lucrative export trade from Sumatra to China, where tiger skins and bones are sold as souvenirs, talismans, and ingredients for traditional medicines.
While Indonesia does have a system of laws to control wildlife hunting and trade, enforcement is weak. In addition, many of its protected areas lack adequate resources and staff to prevent poachers from entering.
- In key locations, establish Wildlife Crimes Units comprising teams of staff members from various government agencies, including the judiciary, as well as local NGOs and the media.
- Mount a media campaign to raise awareness about the perils of wildlife crime and to promote strict controls.
- Expand the network of Wildlife Crimes Units throughout Indonesia.
What WCS is Doing
WCS created the first Wildlife Crimes Unit in 2003. Since then, others have been established in southern and northern Sumatra, and WCS is working to create teams in Maluku and Jakarta. The units provide data and technical advice to law enforcement agencies to support the investigation and prosecution of wildlife crimes. They also work to raise community awareness of prohibitions against wildlife trade.
From the Newsroom
As Indonesia steps up the fight against the illegal wildlife trade, one baby orangutan confiscated from the pet trade in Sumatra prepares for a return back to the wild.
Indonesian authorities arrest a bird smuggler traveling through the island of Sumatra by bus, saving more than 20 rare birds—including the palm cockatoo—from becoming victims of the illegal wildlife trade.
As organized crime steps up its game in wildlife trade, a WCS conservationist suggests fighting back through increased law enforcement and better use of resources.
In a huge wildlife trade bust in Da Lat City, Vietnamese authorities make arrests and confiscate more than 850 pounds of illegal wildlife meat from restaurant kitchens.
WCS scientists upgrade camera-trap research by developing huge virtual photo albums of species living in large landscapes. | <urn:uuid:84416f5c-b3e2-448e-842b-32255ca09763> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wcs.org/conservation-challenges/natural-resource-use/hunting-and-wildlife-trade/indonesias-wildlife-crimes-unit.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927363 | 656 | 2.546875 | 3 |
The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach,
Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom he had chosen:
To whom also he showed himself alive after his passion, by many infallible proofs, being seen by them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:
And being assembled with [them], commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, [saith he], ye have heard from me.
For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days hence.
When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?
And he said to them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.
But ye shall receive power after the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses to me, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth.
And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.
And while they looked steadfastly towards heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel;
Who also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up to heaven? this same Jesus who is taken from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.
Then they returned to Jerusalem, from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey.
And when they had come in, they went into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James [the son] of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas [the brother] of James.
These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.
And in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples, and said (the number of the names together were about a hundred and twenty,)
Men, brethren, This scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit by the mouth of David spoke before concerning Judas, who was guide to them that took Jesus.
For he was numbered with us, and had obtained part of this ministry.
Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
And it was known to all the dwellers at Jerusalem; so that that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.
For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell in it: and, His bishopric let another take.
Wherefore, of these men who accompanied us, all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,
Beginning from the baptism of John, to that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.
And they appointed two, Joseph called Barsabas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias.
And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, who knowest the hearts of all [men], show which of these two thou hast chosen,
That he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.
And they gave forth their lots; and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles. | <urn:uuid:0c05f4a6-0a53-4528-8431-f51a130abfca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biblestudytools.com/wbt/acts/1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986173 | 844 | 1.75 | 2 |
Why Africa Needs a Study Bible
Even in a nation long saturated with Christian resources, Americans love their study Bibles. By juxtaposing the inspired text with informed commentary, readers quickly grow in their knowledge and depth of insight into God's Word. So imagine the good that could come from a study Bible produced by Africans for Africa, where 200 million Christians don't have a Bible at all.
Oasis International, which aims to establish a Christian book industry across Africa, has assembled an 11-person editorial team leading hundreds of contributors across the continent to produce the Africa Study Bible. To learn more about this exciting project I corresponded with Oasis president and Africa Study Bible project manager Matthew Elliott, who has been working for more than 15 years to supply books and Bibles to Africa's poor majority. Elliott earned his PhD in New Testament from the University of Aberdeen and has written two books, Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart and Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament. He explained how the study Bible idea originated, how they selected the contributors, and how we can help.
How did this idea come together?
As early as 2002, we were talking about ways to make the Bible come alive for African readers. In Jos, Nigeria, one of our partners did a study for English-speaking Christians on how they understood the language of the Bible. Many millions across the continent go to school in English. We found that many words familiar to us in the United States are not so clear to the average African. We began thinking and dreaming of ways to increase understanding of the Bible. Then in 2010 I spent about two months traveling Africa asking questions of pastors, denominational presidents and bishops, and seminary residents. Is this a good idea? If so, what does this look like? What are the features and topics that will grow Christians deep in Africa? Every single conversation ended something like this: "Africa needs this Bible, what can I do to help?" We had a green light to stop dreaming and start working on the project.
Help us understand the need for an Africa study Bible and how it would contrast with the many study Bibles produced in the West.
We just received an article on "God's People in Transition." It starts like this:
The sun was rising when the first gunshot and bombardment were heard in the town of Dolisie. Everyone tried to find shelter or get to safety amid the cries of children, wailing, shouts, and heavy bombardments. War had come to our town, and we did not know what to do. After two days of trying to hide in our house we were driven out by lack of food and an encounter with angry and greedy soldiers.
It goes on to talk about the biblical basis for taking care of refugees. Our author has lived it. AIDS orphans, female circumcision, slavery---these are just some of the most obvious examples of the African context that would never appear in an application targeted to readers in America. This study Bible will equip Africans to live out the gospel in their context, to be disciples of Jesus.
The ASB will also capture the wonders and blessings of the African church and culture, their spirit of celebration, community, and faith. In many ways, African culture is closer to that of the Bible than ours. Africans understand things we cannot see. The ASB will bring African insights about the Scripture to the world as well.
Every feature has one simple purpose---growing disciples deep in the African context.
How did you select the various contributors?
Our editorial committee came to Accra, Ghana, from every major region and language group---English, French, Arabic, Portuguese (the Bible will be published in multiple languages). They set the direction for the project and made every major editorial decision. It was probably the most amazing week of my working life, to see these men and women come together from all these different denominations and cultures and have such unity of purpose and vision. All were highly educated, having a doctorate in one field or another; a number were seminary presidents or denominations presidents. One man was the president of an association representing probably 50 million African Christians. Most had never met each other. Can you imagine a greater possibility for conflict and disagreement? Yet all were strong believers in the authority and power of the Bible. From the first moment, we were on task and working as true brothers and sisters in Christ.
They had a pastor's heart to grow the church in every discussion. Our editors, directed by John Jusu from African International University (formerly NEGST), are now working with hundreds of writers across the continent to see their vision accomplished.
Previous African theological projects have been criticized for essentially offering the same Western perspective, since so many African leaders were educated in the West. Are you concerned with that critique on the Africa Study Bible?
Great question. That was a topic in about every conversation in my travels in 2010, and many, many conversations since. I wish you could see the notes coming in to see the results. We have designed whole feature criteria to set an authentic African tone for the project. In the stories and proverbs, writers are comparing their sayings and stories with the truth of Scripture. What wise sayings fit the truth of the Bible, and which ones contradict biblical truth and need to be changed or modified? In another feature, authors are working to draw parallels between passages of Scripture and practices in a part of African culture. I think the ASB may set a new precedent for this kind of project. That is our hope, anyway. All this is being run through a very strong filter of historical, biblical, orthodox Christianity. We have defined a very rigorous, African-led review process that will ensure this outcome. So the final result should be strong in both sound theology and cultural context.
How can readers participate in and support this project?
They can go online to www.africastudybible.com, give, and post a dedication or encouragement for our writers. That is a start. However, it is a $500,000 project just for the editorial process, and additional funds are needed for translation and to start printing Bibles. Our hope is that the ASB will affect many millions in the years to come. Many of these African Christians---even pastors---do not have a single book to equip their spiritual growth. The Africa Study Bible will be one volume that has the words of Scripture, defines the basic truths of Christianity, and teaches them to apply it in their lives. If they can own one single book to grow their faith, this should be it.
We need churches and other groups to come alongside the project as well. We have defined the cost of every book of the Bible. A congregation can give by underwriting the Gospel of Mark, or maybe a smaller group wold like to raise the funds for Jude---we all can do something. The editorial cost and printing the first 200,000 copies will cost about $50 per verse.
Last, pray for us! Africa is a place of intense spiritual warfare. The church is growing so quickly, but can you imagine a continent where more than 200 million Christians do not have a Bible, where many if not most pastors have two, three, or more churches to oversee? How do you learn what it means to be a Christian? What does the church become in this context? What kind of false teachings can arise when people do not have a way to learn what the Bible is really saying? Pray with us that God supplies the resources to complete the Africa Study Bible so it can be a tool to grow believers deep! | <urn:uuid:e7a7f1f6-3cca-4244-aa94-096361721d91> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/05/24/why-africa-needs-a-study-bible/?comments | 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 | 0.964815 | 1,557 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Red,white, and blue are the colors that represent our flag.
People honor our country by saying the pledge.
As time goes by, laws change and taxes get higher.
We start to get mad and frustrated at the government as bills pile up and our money starts going.
We try to hang in there and help America out by voting.
For we are good citizens even when the country doesn't always treat us like one. | <urn:uuid:2facafb0-bb28-4252-bf3e-375cc10942b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.poetrysoup.com/poems_poets/poem_detail.aspx?ID=434273 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954913 | 90 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Contents | September 2002
More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.
Also by Stanley Plumly:
John 6:17 (2001)
The Marriage in the Trees (1996)
Will Work for Food (1993)
In Answer to Amy's Question What's a Pickerel (1990)
The Atlantic Monthly | September 2002
Hear Stanley Plumly read this poem (in RealAudio)
by Stanley Plumly
A murder of crows,
what I saw on a spindle of dead white oak,
two or three of them, at different times,
hectoring the head of the sick one,
the old one, the weak one apart.
From school those Eskimo stories
in which leathery grandfathers and grandmothers
are left behind or set afloat.
They'd freeze, Mr. Steinman said, from the extremities in.
Thinking about what they must have been thinking,
I imagined the brain last
on the ascending list—
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow
I read, in chilling poetry,
years later. Even at twelve,
the concept seemed distant, efficient,
in keeping with the clarity
and killing cold of vast, undifferentiated arctic spaces.
In keeping with the landscape of the old.
In the language of the desert Navajo,
the old man didn't drown,
the water came up to get him.
That's how I imagined freezing,
as a kind of incremental drowning,
a sort of slow, word-by-word submersion,
then, at last, the pulling under, rings on water.
The killed crow fell the sixty feet in seconds,
less, though in the while it took
to find it, it had moved. My mother,
alive in the machine,
becalmed on hard white sheets,
the narrative of legs, arms,
animal centers stilled,
some starlight in the mind glittering off
and on, couldn't tell me
whether or not to leave her.
Stanley Plumly's most recent book is Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me (2000). A Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, Plumly recently won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 2002; Mercy; Volume 290, No. 2; 103. | <urn:uuid:a83a5883-a24d-4ba0-b46e-6843708c06c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/plumly/mercy.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909748 | 508 | 1.648438 | 2 |
- Bastian Brandt
- Amsterdam (Nl)
Say there are a hundred gold coins and a hundred people using them as a measurement to exchange their goods and services.
If you as one of them would be the only provider of goods and services for all, you would end up with all the scarce and valuable gold coins yourself and if the others wanted to have some of your scarce and valuable gold coins they would have to sell you their goods and services.
That is a fair system.
But if now there would come another person into your economy, the 101th person and that person would 'create fake gold coins' himself to purchase goods and services from your economy, he would steal from all of you without creating any goods or services himself.
Is this exactly what commercial banks do 'legaly' when they are creating new money everytime they give out a new loan? Counterfeiting, 'bringing fake gold coins into circulation'?
That is what these videos explain: | <urn:uuid:27efb14f-5499-4ff7-8185-2676602b0016> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ted.com/conversations/13424/gold_standard.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956844 | 200 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a blunt warning to followers of Osama bin Laden, especially Taliban members in Pakistan and Afghanistan: You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. You can make the choice to abandon al Qaida and participate in a peaceful, political process.
Clinton is the latest U.S. official to make a formal statement following the slaying of Osama bin Laden today in Pakistan. She began her remarks by remembering bin Laden's victims, nearly three thousand of whom died on September 11, 2001.
NPR's Michele Kelemen tells NPR Newscasts that Clinton also noted the close working relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, saying it's put intense pressure on Al Qaida but didn't offer further diplomatic clues into the bin Laden incident: | <urn:uuid:2caa20b1-c2f2-41ab-b4c0-5a919105bc1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/135917390/clinton-to-bin-laden-sympathizers-you-cannot-defeat-us | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967059 | 155 | 2.03125 | 2 |
The Mind-Body Connection – Health is a state of Mind!
by Dr Tad James
In the past 5 years, there is exciting news in the field of disease. Old concepts on the nature of consciousness, and on the nature of the body are changing. We have been using many of these concepts in Time Line Therapy™ for some time now, and many of these concepts are new. Let me warn you in advance, that this article may change your viewpoint about your mind and your body. It has a potential to be controversial. This change in the structure of our belief systems is necessary to affect a change in the way we assist people in healing themselves and others.
Some of the more exciting conceptual work on the healing process has been done by a medical doctor in Massachusetts. Deepak Chopra is one of the new breed of health care practitioners who is speaking out, and in a way that will change how we view the mind and the body. Chopra's credentials are impressive. He is an endocrinologist, and former chief of staff of the New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Chopra calls himself a quantum biologist, which means the application of quantum physics to biology. He says that the body is a quantum mechanical device, and that it is subject to the laws of quantum physics and not Newtonian physics. If you aren't aware of the meaning of these terms yet, please take every means to find out.
In Quantum Healing, 1986, Chopra gave us a new paradigm for how the body handles its own rejuvenation processes. How often does the body renew itself? Older wisdom had it pegged at around seven years. Chopra has revised that estimate downward to roughly one year (approximately 98% totally renewed). Based on the estimates of quantum biology, you have a brand new stomach lining every 4 days, new skin every 30 days, a new liver in 6 weeks, even the skeleton is replaced every three months. These concepts are vital as we structure the metaphors for treatment while we work with our clients in the healing process.
Another of the more important notions of quantum biology is that consciousness is not localized to any one place. Is there any evidence for this?
Neuropeptides: Twenty years ago a group of scientists discovered in the brain, a set of chemicals known as neuropeptides. Neuro because they are found in the brain, and peptides because they are protein like molecules. So every time you have a thought or a feeling, a desire, an instinct, or a drive, each of these affects our nervous system by means of specific messenger molecules called neuropeptides.
There are receptors to these neuropeptides not only in brain cells but also in cells of the immune system. So when the scientists began looking at the various immune system cells that protect us from cancer and infection (t-cells, for example), they found that there were receptors to these same neuropeptides in those cells. In fact, the word neuropeptide became obsolete, because they're not confined to the brain. They are floating around in the bloodstream and going to all our different organs. Since there are receptors to these neuropeptides in cells in the immune system, then it becomes obvious that, as Chopra says, "The immune system is constantly eavesdropping on our internal dialog." In NLP we would add the following comment, "The immune system is constantly responding to the pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes, and the internal dialog that we hold in our mind."
The Unconscious Mind: Since the unconscious mind (also known as the "body mind") is the controlling intelligence in the body, it is also the connection between the mind and the immune system. One of the major theories of Time Line Therapy™, NLP, and Hypnosis is that the unconscious mind can communicate with any part of the body at any time it so desires, and can, in this way, stimulate the healing process. It seems that there is, in fact, neurological evidence for this idea.
Every thought, every emotion, every desire, every internal representation you have is monitored, overheard, viewed. Your immune system is watching, listening, feeling! It has been shown that grieving people have grieving immune cells. If the grieving goes on for a prolonged period of time, then the immune system has also the self talk of, "Leave me alone, I don't want to be bothered." Such people are, according to Chopra, susceptible to cancer and other infectious diseases.
That is why it's so important to understand that negative emotions which are trapped in the body are not conducive to health, and why we release all of a person's negative emotions when we do healing processes in Time Line Therapy™ techniques.
The Significant Emotional Experience: Many mental and physical dis-eases are preceded by a significant emotional experience (SEE) of a negative nature which may appear in the person's recent past, or even further in the past, such as during childhood. If negative, and depending on the intensity, the SEE has the potential to create or be the source of some emotional, mental or even physical dis-ease occurring in the body.
Let's define some terms so that we are speaking the same language: (I borrow the notion of an SEE from the sociologist Dr. Morris Massey, in the book The People Puzzle.) First event means the very first time that an experience happens, or the root cause of a first event occurring (this is also called root cause). Significant emotional experience is any major, fully associated, highly charged emotional event wherever it occurs. Emotional chain is the process that the unconscious mind uses to connect experiences of a similar nature. (The term used in Time Line Therapy and The Basis of Personality [1988, Tad James, M.S., Ph.D.] is gestalt which means a collection of memories around a certain subject.)
The potential of a negative SEE to create dis-ease is based on the trapped emotions which remain in the memory because they are stored in the body. The work of Dr. Paul Goodwin, a neural physicist at Alaska Pacific University, implies that the trapped emotions in the body have the possibility of creating functional (software, non-physical) boundaries which can impede the flow of nerve information through the neural network pathways.
Testing Memories for Negative Emotions: You can tell if there are still any negative emotions in one of your past memories by going back to that memory, and remembering what happened looking through your own eyes. (Warning: Do not try this with memories which contain trauma or phobia.) If, as you remember the memory, you feel any negative emotions in your body, then there is a negative emotional content to the memory, and there is trapped emotion in your body. The trapped negative emotion, if you feel it, is the basis for dis-ease.
Getting Rid of the Negative Emotions: Now, other than dis-ease, why get rid of negative emotions which are trapped in one's body? Well, for example, imagine a salesperson, (s)he has a dream, (s)he's well trained, knows how to sell, and (s)he wants to make more money. But every time (s)he goes to close the sale, fear comes up. That salesperson is not going to do his or her best. Certainly the closing ratio will not be as high as it could be without the fear.
Now imagine that same salesperson without the fear. Which one do you thing will do better? Of course, the second one.
Or in a relationship, perhaps you once got hurt, and so you said, "I'm never going to let that happen to me again." So every time you get to a certain point in the relationship you begin to feel those old negative feelings, and so you end the relationship. More importantly, each relationship ends in exactly the same way each time. You may not even remember the source of the negative feelings, but at a certain point there they are, and the relationship ends.
Now imagine being without those negative emotions, do you think that it would improve the relationship? Of course.
Obviously, the creation of dis-ease requires more trapped negative emotions than those in the situations we've just discussed. However, the process is the same--the unconscious mind represses (to whatever extent it needs to) memories with unresolved negative emotions. It does this for the "sanity" of the conscious mind. Since the unconscious mind does repress the memories with the negative emotions in them, the emotions get stuck in the body and aren't released.
Time Line Therapy has the potential of releasing the trapped emotion in memories in a very short period of time. In fact, we usually release most of a person's negative emotions in the Secret of Creating Your Future® Seminars which we give all over the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. My experience with the now thousands of people of all walks of life is that it is possible to release all of a person's negative emotions from past memories in as little as five hours. That release of negative emotions has a profound effect on the person.
This happened to one of the students in a recent Secret of "Creating Your Future" Seminar. After the seminar, I learned she had been severely abused as a child and had, for most of her life, been depressed. At times she was also suicidal. She had visited psychologists and psychiatrists on and off for most of her life.
During the seminar, she paid close attention to releasing her major negative emotions, including sadness and depression, the trauma from the abuse and a number of her limiting decisions from the past. Her experience after the weekend was that she was no longer able to access the feelings of depression. In fact, when I saw her two weeks later, she came running up to me and said, "Do you know I haven't been depressed for the last two weeks, at all? And do you know what else, I seem to be laughing for no reason at all!" | <urn:uuid:31e0d610-9756-46b4-b2a8-aefcafe95f5b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pecoaching.com.au/content_common/pg-coaching-life.seo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963723 | 2,052 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Aamras is a quintessential mango juice recipe in India. This Indian recipe is so common in the mango season, that it is a part of collective memory now. Aamras is the Indian term for pulpy mango juice. It is a summer recipe that serves as a gravy, refreshment and sauce. This summer drink is muti-purpose tin every way.
You can have this as a normal mango juice by diluting it a little. You can have it as a side dish with rotis (Indian flat breads). This Indian recipe also serves as a great sauce replacement in the summer. It is not uncommon for folks to dip their samosa in a bit of aamras.
Ingredients For Aamras:
1. Aam or Mangoes 1 kilo
2. Sugar (finely ground) 1 cup
3. Whole Milk(preferably) ½ litre
Procedure For Making Aamras:
- Peel mangoes and seed them. You cannot use the seed of the mango in this recipe. You can either enjoy suckling on it or throw it.
- Cut the mangoes into small pieces, and then put them into the blender. Make a smooth pulp out of the mangoes.
- Add sugar to milk and stir it in. The sugar should be powdered so that it mixes in the milk completely.
- The milk should ideally be whole milk that is chilled overnight in the refrigerator.
- After the sugar dissolves completely, add the mango pulp to it. You can either mix it with an electronic blender or manually.
Aamras can be stored for weeks if it is refrigerated properly. | <urn:uuid:ca0ffe1f-9c3c-42a5-85ab-e21da51a7800> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.boldsky.com/cookery/soups-snacks-drinks/non-alcoholic-drinks/aamras-mango-juice-290312.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942668 | 341 | 1.875 | 2 |
The Growing Child: Newborn
In the first month of life, babies usually catch up and surpass their birthweight, then steadily continue to gain weight. A weight loss up to about 10 percent of birthweight is normal in the first two to three days after birth. However, the baby should have gained back to his or her birthweight by about the 10th or 11th day. While all babies may grow at a different rate, the following indicates the average for boys and girls up to 1 month of age:
- Weight: after the first 2 weeks, should gain about 1 ounce each day
- Average length at birth:
- 20 inches for boys
- 19 3/4 inches for girls
- Average length at one month:
- 21 1/2 inches for boys
- 21 inches for girls
- Head size: increases to slightly less than 1 inch more than birth measurement by the end of the first month
Although a newborn spends about 16 hours a day sleeping, the time a baby is awake can be busy. Much of a newborn's movements and activity are reflexes or involuntary--the baby does not purposefully make these movements. As the nervous system begins to mature, these reflexes give way to purposeful behaviors.
Reflexes in newborns include the following:
- Root reflex
This reflex occurs when the corner of the baby's mouth is stroked or touched. The baby will turn his or her head and opens his or her mouth to follow and "root" in the direction of the stroking. The root reflex helps the baby find the breast or bottle.
- Suck reflex
When the roof of the baby's mouth is touched with the breast or bottle nipple, the baby will begin to suck. This reflex does not begin until about the 32nd week of pregnancy and is not fully developed until about 36 weeks. Premature babies may have a weak or immature sucking ability, because they are born prior to the development of this reflex. Babies also have a hand-to-mouth reflex that accompanies rooting and sucking and may suck on their fingers or hands.
- Moro reflex
The Moro reflex is often called a startle reflex because it usually occurs when a baby is startled by a loud sound or movement. In response to the sound, the baby throws back his or her head, throws out his or her arms and legs, cries, then pulls his or her arms and legs back in. Sometimes, a baby's own cries can startle him or her, initiating this reflex. The Moro reflex lasts until the baby is about 5 to 6 months old.
- Tonic neck reflex
When a baby's head is turned to one side, the arm on that side stretches out and the opposite arm bends up at the elbow. This is often called the "fencing" position. The tonic neck reflex lasts until the baby is about 6 to 7 months old.
- Grasp reflex
With the grasp reflex, stroking the palm of a baby's hand causes the baby to close his or her fingers in a grasp. The grasp reflex lasts only a couple of months and is stronger in premature babies.
- Babinski reflex
With the Babinski reflex, when the sole of the foot is firmly stroked, the big toe bends back toward the top of the foot and the other toes fan out. This is a normal reflex until the child is about 2 years old.
- Step reflex
This reflex is also called the walking or dance reflex because a baby appears to take steps or dance when held upright with his or her feet touching a solid surface.
Newborn babies not only have unique reflexes, but also have a number of physical characteristics and behaviors that include the following:
- Head sags when lifted up, needs to be supported
- Turns head from side to side when lying on his or her stomach
- Eyes are sometimes uncoordinated, may look cross-eyed
- Initially fixes eyes on a face or light then begins to follow a moving object
- Beginning to lift head when lying on stomach
- Jerky, erratic movements
- Moves hands to mouth
At this early age, crying is a baby's only form of communication. At first, all of a baby's cries sound similar, but parents soon recognize different types of cries for hunger, discomfort, frustration, fatigue, and even loneliness. Sometimes, a baby's cries can easily be answered with a feeding, or a diaper change. Other times, the cause of the crying can be a mystery and crying stops as quickly as it begins. Regardless of the cause, responding to your baby's cries with a comforting touch and words are essential in helping your baby learn to trust you and rely on you for love and security. You may also use warmth and rocking movements to comfort your baby.
You may find that your baby responds in many ways, including the following:
- Startles at loud noises
- Looks at faces and pictures with contrasting black and white images
- Gives attention to voices, may turn to a sound
- Hints of a smile, especially during sleep
Young babies need the security of a parent's arms, and they understand the reassurance and comfort of your voice, tone, and emotions. Consider the following as ways to foster the emotional security of your newborn:
- Hold your baby face to face.
- Talk in a soothing tone and let your baby hear your affectionate and friendly voice.
- Sing to your baby.
- Walk with your baby in a sling, carrier, or a stroller.
- Swaddle your baby in a soft blanket to help him or her feel secure and prevent startling by the baby's own movements.
- Rock your baby in a rhythmic, gentle motion.
- Respond quickly to your baby's cries.
Click here to view the
Online Resources of Pediatrics | <urn:uuid:908fc079-0c25-411b-82d6-9cda153ff22c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.muschealth.com/gs/healthtopic.aspx?action=showpage&pageid=P01040 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950557 | 1,197 | 3.625 | 4 |
three, two, one, go…and ten of us slip off the back of the boat into the water and follow our spotter – on her signal we try form ourselves into two lines of five, facing each other, ten metres apart, snorkels and fins on. My heart is pounding out of my chest. Somewhere, really close by, there is a 4-5 m whale shark, just below the surface of the ocean. We know this because a spotter plane has directed us to this exact spot – the whale shark is a couple of metres below the surface, so a plane in the air can see it but we can’t. The plane directs us to a drop-in spot in front of the whale shark’s path, the boat drops us and then moves a few hundred metres away, and we form our two lines, hoping the whale shark is going to swim between our honour parade! Our spotter is ahead of us in the water, she raises her arm when she can see the shark, and directs us to the right spot.
Where am I and how did I get here?
I am offshore from Ningaloo reef, an amazing (and relatively deserted) coral reef off the west coast of Australia. Between April and June each year, whale sharks pass through to feast on the coral spawning, and some of them come near the surface, enabling us to observe the world’s largest (and possibly shyist) fish, the planet’s largest shark (but luckily for me its a plankton eater, not a meat eater!). It is a shark, not a whale, and is so named because of it’s immense size – between 3 to 12 metres long, with a wide, flat, spotted body. It is possible to swim with the whale sharks here, in a manner designed to minimise the impact on the whale sharks, to ensure we do not affect their patterns and habits. There are a handful of licenced operators who operate out of Exmouth, WA, and who are only allowed to let 10 people at a time into the water with a whale shark.
There are twenty on our boat and I am in the water with the first ten on our first spotting of the day.
Although this is at Ningaloo reef, this is on the deep water, open ocean side of the reef, and my adrenalin is up. We attempt to form our orderly two lines of five, then our spotter starts shouting “move back, move back”. This means “you are too close to the whale shark, back paddle fast!” I start back paddling, all ten off us are going in different directions, no-one is sure what is happening, so I decide it is time to put my head under the surface and see what is happening. I duck down and my heart stops – about 3 metres under me, and rising, is a teenage whale shark of about 4-5 metres, with a mouth about 2 metres wide, open, showing its three rows of teeth, heading straight for me. I gasp, someone grabs my foot and hauls me backwards through the water, the most beautiful and elegant fish I have ever seen underwater slides past me, and I surface into a maelstorm of snorkelers trying to swim after the whale shark. I put my head back under but I have missed the moment, the whale shark is effortlessly moving away from me into the murk. We signal to our boat and wait for it to move back in and pick us up.
Over the course of the day we get to swim with five whale sharks
(we think it is either two or three different sharks, surfacing more than once, but it is hard to be sure). After the chaos of our first swim, we get the hang of it, although no-one has ever told the whale sharks that they are supposed to swim between our neat line of snorkelers, so there is still a bit of improvisation, but we adapt more quickly, and each time we manage to watch the whale shark swim between us, and we turn and swim with it as long as we can.
The whale sharks typically look as though they are barely moving,
an occasional small flick of their huge tails, but we have to swim our hearts out to try and keep alongside them, and no-one manages to stay with them for more than a couple of minutes. I have my underwater camera and often drop off behind the shark as I pause for a couple of seconds to try and focus for a photo, and then find myself chasing it from behind. My photos are blurry and unfocussed, (my shaking arms?) but are wonderfully superseded by my memories of sharing the underwater with this most beautiful fish. From the front it is very wide and flat, it looks tranquil and friendly as it opens it’s mouth wide, sucking in the ocean and using its three massive rows of teeth to separate plankton from sea water.
I’m not sure I can really describe what it was like, for me, to swim with a whale shark,
but I am going to try – I apologise in advance if I fall into hyperbole. I float on the surface of the ocean, peering through murky water, which just fades into a dark depth, wondering if I will actually see anything. Then a shape starts to form a few metres down and drifts ever closer. From the front it is looks slightly cartoon-like, wide and smiley and harmless – but big! So much bigger than me, and it’s a beautiful blue/grey with an intricate pattern of white spots. As it’s head passes and I start to notice the body, it morphs into pure shark. The body is fluted and strong and streamlined, and as I fall behind, the view of the tail and body spells shark, upsized for Hollywood. It looks like it is barely moving, occasionally it twitches a muscle which moves it’s tail a few inches in a slow flick, but it is pure muscle and sinew, and the tiniest lazy movement torpedoes it through the ocean. I am not conscious of swimming as fast and far as I can, I only feel the rythm of my breath through the snorkel and an overwhelming sense of peace and beauty, I cannot take my eyes off this animal. It made me feel like I am dreaming of flying, but underwater.
After five swims for the day, we are all on an adrenaline high,
and the long trip back to shore, in bright evening sunlight, is euphoric. Even the crew telling us how they once, by mistake, dropped a group of ten in front of a tiger shark instead of a whale shark, is not going to dent our enthusiasm. For me it had an immediate impact beyond the experience itself, it made me question what I was doing with my life, made me admit that the job I once loved I now hated, and lead me down a path where I changed jobs within a few months and reclaimed the “me” I used to be – the one who was enjoying her life! I can’t guarantee it will have that impact on you, but I can highly recommend it as a unique and mesmerising experience. | <urn:uuid:e979e5e9-fa7d-41ed-bb70-59b0b30a2f2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://redheadedtravels.com/australia/swimming-whale-sharks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96935 | 1,497 | 1.523438 | 2 |
How many times have you been in a learning situation where you have been allowed to go home early? Sometimes it feels like “great, now I can go and do something else like run to the supermarket and pick up those vegies I thought I wouldn’t be able to”. Or sometimes its, “excellent now I can go and meet my friends earlier at the pub”. Other times its feels like you are being duped… “hmmm, really? we are finishing this early?”
Now don’t get me wrong, from a teaching perspective it is highly desirable for your students to see you as a well-organized time manager. The session runs for three hours, for example, then I want to finish as close to that three hours as possible, if not within a five to ten minute period. But I want the students to get “value for their money”. Whether I am running a professional development workshop, teaching in the university context, or facilitating a coaching session I as the educator have to manage the learning experience not only from the pedagogical perspective and the content angle but also the approach to time.
I’m a firm believer in beginning on time and valuing the students who are ready to go. I also know that running late is a part of life for those participating but if we are talking about modeling and valuing the time dedicated on the learning topic then, starting on time is a must. Managing the time within the workshop or session is important as well. The activities, discussions and cooperative group based strategies all need to be managed for effective use of time. All educators plan these out based on the learning outcome and focus for understanding, knowledge and transfer.
As a learner, I want to immerse myself in the time dedicated to the workshop or session I have paid to be a part of. I want to learn. I’m attending to learn. I want to up skill, apply new knowledge, transfer ideas, and gain new perspectives. Now, aside from those professional development sessions we are told to attend where the content is boring, the delivery is undesirable and the relevance does not exist, most classroom or learning environments we place ourselves in have a strong vested interest in the learning outcome. What am I going to gain from being here? What am I going to get from this three-hour workshop? How is this relevant to me?
This brings me to a recent experience I had. I enrolled myself into a life drawing class. Much enthusiasm was connected to this choice. I had a vest interest in extending my drawing and observational skills. Three hours on a Saturday was also a big investment for me… I had to consider the weekend where I usually do not work nor do anything related to work (a worklife balance goal of mine). I also had to rearrange other activities, and consider impact on others in my life. I also had to consider how I would be as a leaner in this environment. How would it be for me focusing on drawing, working with charcoal and observing the human body as a form to capture shape, tone, and line. I was a ball of excitement and nervousness all rolled into one. So once the nervous energy balanced itself out, the class created a flow with quick three minute and then five-minute observational sketches I loved the experience. The flow was happening. So I was surprised when the teacher went “okay, well done everyone, great days work, you can pack up now. Great class today, you are free to go”. Wow, I thought, gee that three hours went quick. How cool. Loving this learning environment. Then I looked at my watch…hang on a moment we have an hour to go. What’s this all about? Yep, I felt duped. A three-hour workshop all of a sudden became two hours. There was no communication about why (although the fact that the teacher was already onto the topic of where she would get her wine for the afternoon may have been a significant hint). My peers and I just looked at each other with these blank, stunned eyes. I was looking at a sea of faces that had changed from focused looks, smiles of achievement, and content artists in the making.
From a teaching and learning perspective what happened here? Leaners wanted a three-hour experience, value for their investment in time and development of skills, and a feeling of satisfaction connected to working for three hours and not two. The teacher perhaps forgot to communicate how the class would run? Or was it that the teacher just couldn’t be bothered? Either way what the intention of the workshop was and how it was delivered in regards to time management was seriously lacking integrity. What this also created was “behind the teacher’s back” comments about not feeling satisfied (including sniggering and hands to the mouth pretending to cover any opportunity for across the room lip reading). A culture of teacher verses emerged emerged after one session and a sense of questioning of the learning focus and outcomes advertised verses being delivered. What will happen next?
Have you ever been in a situation as a learner where you have felt duped?
Are you an educator where you have managed your time in such a way that leaves a significant deficit on “value for money”? What do we actually want as leaners/teachers in these situations? How do we communicate it so all have a common understanding? | <urn:uuid:d434eb28-a528-4faa-b361-11cab6c54a71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chatwithrellypops.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/great-class-today-you-are-free-to-gobut-we-have-an-hour-to-go/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979039 | 1,120 | 1.851563 | 2 |
By Wally Kennedy
Marshall Long, who lives along Indian Creek in McDonald County, listened carefully Wednesday night as speaker after speaker talked about the pressure that is being placed on the Ozark aquifer to provide increasing amounts of water in the Tri-State Area.
One speaker said some communities, such as Noel and Carthage, might find themselves without sufficient water if water usage increased by as little as 1 percent annually each year from 2007 to 2057.
But Long paid particular attention to comments by Pete Rauch, public works director at Monett and a member of the Tri-State Water Resource Coalition. The coalition was formed in 2002 in response to a study that suggested the Joplin area could face a groundwater shortage in the future during a period of serious drought.
Since then, the coalition has explored the possibility of obtaining water from other sources. The coalition has found that it has two options: It can get water from a new reservoir or from a place where surface water is already being impounded, such as Table Rock Lake or Grand Lake of the Cherokees.
Long, whose property along Indian Creek would be flooded if a reservoir were constructed there, was relieved when he heard Rauch say that the coalition is actively pursuing water from an existing impoundment.
“My main concern was finding out more about the status of building a reservoir,” Long said. “I was encouraged by what he (Rauch) said. I don’t think I will have to deal with it in my lifetime.”
As for what he learned during the meeting, he said: “I understand there is an issue with the water. These people have re-emphasized that by putting all of the information in one place. It looks to me that water will become as valuable as fuel some day.”
Representatives of the U.S. Geological Survey unveiled a four-year study Wednesday night at Missouri Southern State University that suggests that the Ozark aquifer — a primary source of water for many municipalities in the Tri-State Area — could go dry in places if demand increases by as little as 1 percent annually over the next 50 years.
A model simulating groundwater withdrawal at future rates greater than actual 2006 rates suggested that the aquifer could be emptied near some municipalities.
Carthage and Noel, towns with industries that use large quantities of water, would be among the first to feel the impact of a groundwater shortage. Joplin and Miami, Okla., would be next if water usage in those communities were to increase dramatically. Among the communities least likely to be affected by a groundwater shortage is Pittsburg, Kan. That’s because Pittsburg is not a heavy user of water.
Research has shown that water levels have declined as much as 400 to 500 feet in some parts of the Ozark aquifer since 1960. Walt Aucott, with the USGS in Kansas, said the Ozark aquifer will continue to be part of the long-term water supply for the region, but users must remember that it is “a finite water source. The Ozark aquifer is a very stressed aquifer in some areas.”
Another McDonald County resident, Bill Miller, said it appeared to him that some communities may have to choose industries in the future that use less water.
Rauch said Monett, which has industries that are heavy water users, consumes 3.1 million gallons of water per day. The town, he said, has 8,000 residents but 12,000 jobs. Seventy percent of the water pumped in Monett is used by industry.
Lane Letourneau, with the water resources division of the Kansas Department of Agriculture, said a moratorium on new deep-water wells in Southeast Kansas that has been in place since November 2007 could be affected by the study. Kansas officials are to decide by the end of the year whether the moratorium should remain in place or be lifted, he said.
Representatives of the USGS said the new study is the most complete analysis of the Ozark aquifer to date, but that more data is needed to better assess water usage and aquifer recharge in Missouri.
To learn more
“Groundwater-Flow Model of the Ozark Plateaus Aquifer System, Northwestern Arkansas, Southeastern Kansas, Southwestern Missouri, and Northeastern Oklahoma,” by John B. Czarnecki, Jonathan A. Gillip, Perry M. Jones and Daniel S. Yeatts, is available online at pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2009/5148.
By Wally Kennedy
- Carthage, Jasper County
Carthage attorney, reformer of revenue department, dies
James R. Spradling, a Carthage attorney who was noted for his reform of the Missouri Department of Revenue in the 1970s, died at 5:50 a.m. Monday at McCune-Brooks Regional Hospital.
Steadley trust planning session attracts 40-plus Carthage leaders
Carthage officials and representatives of organizations in the community gathered Friday to start a process aimed at identifying future needs that can be addressed by funding from the Steadley Memorial Trust. Discussions were led by Ralph Ochsner, a Kansas City-based consultant hired by Steadley directors to oversee the effort.
Bondswoman charged with false imprisonment
A bail bondswoman from Carthage is facing a charge of false imprisonment for allegedly attempting to put a man in jail without a judge’s order, then taking him home and handcuffing him to the banister of a staircase until a friend of the man paid her his bond money.
Man’s last statement to be given to defendant
A judge ruled Monday that the Jasper County prosecutor must provide attorneys for Darren J. Winans with a videotaped statement co-defendant Matthew D. Laurin made about the Sheldon murders shortly before killing himself.
Carthage proposes 1.6-cent rise in city property tax
A drop in the assessed value of Carthage real estate will translate to an increase of about 1.6 cents in the city’s proposed property tax rate.
Open house to celebrate projects at courthouse
Projects completed last year at the Jasper County Courthouse will be celebrated in ceremonies Thursday in the courthouse lobby.
County officials will join representatives of local chambers of commerce and others for a ribbon-cutting and open house to mark the opening of a Route 66 display in the lobby and a new “peace star” atop the building.
State budget cuts reduce county funds
County officials are bracing for more state budget cuts to translate into a loss of county revenues.
In an effort to balance Missouri’s budget, the state earlier this year cut the amount it reimburses county assessors for work to determine property values. The budget approved by lawmakers for fiscal 2011 calls for cutting the amount the state reimburses counties to house prisoners bound for state lockup.
Jo Ellis: County home to rare yellowwood tree
In late spring, drifts as white as snow fill the gutters and curbs on the east side of the Jasper County Courthouse. It isn’t snow, of course; it’s the fallen petals of the yellowwood tree that grows squarely in front of the door to the Jasper County Extension office.
Jasper County Commission gets building project update
Plans to close out one building project and start another were reviewed by the Jasper County Commission last week.
Darieus Adams, Western District associate commissioner, met Thursday with officials of the firm who designed a $292,400 project to upgrade the lighting and make other changes to make four county-owned buildings more energy efficient.
Two men running for associate judge in 39th Circuit take case to court
Two men running for associate judge in Missouri’s 39th Circuit began battling it out in a Jasper County courtroom this week.
Jasper County Circuit Judge Gayle Crane heard arguments Wednesday concerning the disclosure of documents sought by Robert “Bobby” George, Aurora, the current Lawrence County prosecutor.
- More Carthage, Jasper County Headlines
- Carthage attorney, reformer of revenue department, dies | <urn:uuid:fc00f4ea-5079-4afe-8eb8-5b3cd1d5331c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.joplinglobe.com/carthage_jasper_county/x46863638/Coalition-continuing-to-look-for-alternative-water-sources | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957693 | 1,686 | 2.21875 | 2 |
During a symposium held by Al-Ahram institution to discuss the law of mineral wealth before being adopted by Shura Council, Petroleum Minister Osama Kamal confirmed that the mineral wealth in Egypt is one of the hopes of Egypt that has not been well-exploited so far. He said that we have billions of tonnes of mineral wealth, whether they are in mines or quarries, and there are other billions of tonnes in unknown areas.
As for the reasons for not exploiting this wealth, the Minister said that this is because we currently work under the umbrella of the old law which includes some cheap materials.
Second, there are vast areas of quarries that are rented at 5 pounds for the 10,000 square meters annually, he added. He also pointed out that the mineral wealth has not a future vision, and that's why its affiliation shifted between the petroleum and industry ministries.
Third, there was not a long-term strategy for using these materials and wealth, and whether they are to be sold or used as raw materials. | <urn:uuid:621f95e1-bc2a-414c-aec7-dc297e3f7ebe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allafrica.com/stories/201303061164.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980509 | 210 | 1.84375 | 2 |
April 2011 / Volume 63 / Issue 4|
Automated surface finishing is a 'game changer'
By CTE Staff
Some manual surface finishing operations can cause operator discomfort, fatigue and injury that shrink productivity and compromise product quality.
In the case of RCBS, Oroville, Calif., concerns about just such a scenario resulted in a goal to eliminate a manual finishing operation. It also led to an estimated 60 to 70 percent increase in productivity and a substantial quality improvement.
Courtesy of RCBS
RCBS has been a leading producer of ammunition reloading equipment for more 60 years. Among its products are steel and carbide reloading dies for rifle and handgun ammunition, which are produced in high volumes, according to engineer Tim Taylor.
The die production process involved extensive manual labor to finish bores. Workers wrapped emery cloth on rods and polished the internal die surfaces, which imparted inconsistent surface finishes, according to Taylor. “That resulted mainly from ergonomic factors,” he said. “So achieving a consistent, high-quality surface finish and avoiding worker discomfort in the finishing operation became high priorities.”
RCBS explored process improvements including CNC equipment and various finishing tools. A possible solution surfaced at a trade show in the form of flexible ball-style hones that could be tailored to meet the die bore surface finish requirements and worked with RCBS’s recently acquired CNC equipment.
Supplied by Brush Research Manufacturing Co. Inc., Los Angeles, the Flex-Hone tools consist of a shaft from which nylon filaments with abrasive grit extend. The tools are available in many diameters, abrasive materials and grit sizes, and are suitable for various surface finishing and deburring applications.
“We decided to test the Flex-Hone on steel dies,” Taylor said. “Brush Research gave us some recommendations and basic guidelines. Using a spare CNC mill, we tried different speeds and feeds until we were able to consistently achieve the desired results.”
The toolmaker helped by developing a series of brushes that enabled RCBS to apply progressively finer silicon-carbide abrasives to meet its stringent surface finish requirements. According to Taylor, the steel dies come off turning machines with a suboptimal finish, which the brush honing operation improves by a factor of eight to a submicron finish. “Depending on the die, we use multiple hone sizes as well as varying grit sizes and number of strokes,” he said.
With steel die finishing automated, RCBS successfully migrated the brush honing process to its carbide dies using tools with a diamond abrasive. Then Taylor set about optimizing both processes by writing a CNC program that selects the correct brush and process parameters based on operator input about bore length, ID and other elements.
“The new automated process is a real game changer,” Taylor said. “It is probably 60 to 70 percent more efficient than the manual process, and it resulted in a substantial increase in quality. But the ergonomic improvement alone—eliminating the potential for operator discomfort and injury—would have been enough to justify the new process.” CTE
CUTTING TOOL ENGINEERING Magazine is protected under U.S. and international copyright laws. Before reproducing anything from this Web site, call the Copyright Clearance Center Inc. |
at (978) 750-8400. | <urn:uuid:9ae46a9c-c007-4222-878c-3aca7de3d29d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctemag.com/aa_pages/2011/110408-ProTimesC.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938259 | 701 | 1.929688 | 2 |
NOAA'S SEA TURTLE RESEARCH GAINS ADDITIONAL RECOGNITION
June 2, 2005 — Two NOAA Fisheries Service researchers, George Balazs and Yonat Swimmer, both with the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Hawaii, have been recognized for their exemplary sea turtle research and recovery efforts this year. Not only does their research contribute toward achieving one of the NOAA PIFSC's primary goals (to achieve the biological recovery and sustained management of sea turtle populations in the Pacific Ocean), but it reflects recent trends in NOAA sea turtle research and conservation efforts throughout the world.
Core Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation Efforts
Balazs helped place the turtles on the federal endangered species list in 1978 and has overseen research on sea turtle biology, ecology and life history throughout his career. Balazs attributes much of the sea turtle population recovery over the last few decades to the Endangered Species Act and education efforts — in which he has played a major role — that have shifted Hawaiian's residents perceptions of sea turtles from a source of food to a native species they are proud to protect.
His work with radio transmitters — attached to sea turtles that were caught and released from commercial longline vessels — has shown that sea turtles often take long open-ocean routes from their feeding sites to nesting areas and that they can navigate hundreds of miles without landmarks.
Today, he is recognized as one of the world's foremost sea turtle experts in Hawaii, Japan and many other parts of the world inhabited by sea turtles. His work has been published in numerous scientific publications, and he has served as a scientific advisor on a prestigious list of global turtle conservation groups.
Sea Turtle Behavioral and Physiology Research
Starting in the fall of 2005, Swimmer will work collaboratively with scientists and students from the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Projeto TAMAR, and Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis in Bahia, Brazil. Swimmer’s research will focus on determining if large circle hooks or other gear or bait modifications could be used effectively to both increase catch target species, while simultaneously reducing sea turtle bycatch — a practice that has already proven to be successful and is now required by law in the United States. Swimmer also will use state-of the art satellite technology to help determine the probability of mortality for sea turtles after their release from longline fishing gear. Using pop-up satellite archival tags, which are attached to the shells of incidentally-caught sea turtles, Swimmer will track their movements for close to six months post-release. Rates of post-hooking mortality and morbidity will be correlated with other data collected, such as hook location, severity of injury and a general assessment of each turtle's health. Because PSATs also have sensors that record hourly data on swimming depth, water temperature and geolocation, Swimmer’s research also will contribute toward a better understanding of environmental factors that influence turtle's movements. Lastly, Swimmer also hopes to assess the health status of sea turtles following a longline fisheries encounter by analyzing various blood chemistry parameters from incidentally caught sea turtles. In this way, she and her collaborators hope to gain insight into the extent of injury and the probability of survival for turtles subjected to various stressors. In combination with the satellite tracking, this information could prove to be a useful tool in evaluating mortality of sea turtles due to fisheries interactions.
Fisheries Service would not enjoy the international clout and reputation
as leaders in marine science if we didn’t have the world’s
most capable and dedicated scientists on our staff," said Bill
Hogarth, director of the NOAA Fisheries Service. "We are fortunate
Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center
NOAA, in collaboration with partners, has made substantial progress in identifying and reducing human threats to turtle populations in recent years, but there is more work to be done. For example, NOAA has seen how the required use of turtle excluder devices in shrimp fisheries (both in the United States and by countries exporting wild caught shrimp into the United States) — in conjunction with full protection of nesting beaches in Mexico — is helping in the recovery of endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle population. Although regulations requiring the use of TEDs was put into place almost 15 years ago, NOAA continues working to improve the TEDs. Just last year, NOAA began requiring larger escape openings to allow even the largest turtles out of the nets. These larger openings will be required for foreign producers starting August 1, 2005. NOAA also has made progress in its next biggest challenge, sea turtle bycatch associated with longline fishing.
Turtle Bycatch Associated with Longline Fishing
During NOAA’s research, scientists found that sea turtle captures and injuries could be substantially reduced by prohibiting the use of traditional “J” hooks, which cause serious harm when swallowed by sea turtles, and replacing them with large circle hooks. Because of their shape, circle hooks are much less likely to catch turtles or to cause serious injury if a turtle does try to take the bait. Furthermore, because many sea turtle deaths occur when commercial fishing gear is not removed (or removed improperly) from the sea turtle, NOAA researchers and private industry also developed dehookers and line cutters — so that fishermen could remove longline gear when it was safe to do so without further injury to the sea turtle. Removing gear is believed to decrease post-release mortality. This research was such a success that, as of April 5, 2005, the NOAA Fisheries Service now requires the use of these new technologies in U.S. longline fisheries in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
"I am pleased that we found a solution that allowed NOAA to both reopen the Pacific and Atlantic waters to American longline fishermen and promote sea turtle conservation,” said Bill Hogarth, director of NOAA Fisheries Service.” Hogarth added “It is now critical for NOAA to demonstrate to other countries that longline fisheries could use these tangible and effective methods of protecting turtles and still remain profitable.”
International Sea Turtle Efforts
NOAA Sea Turtle Efforts and Activities
NOAA Ocean Service
Relevant Web Sites | <urn:uuid:2d13704e-40a7-4489-9638-98787b98f10f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.magazine.noaa.gov/stories/mag170.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943392 | 1,278 | 2.6875 | 3 |
A fabulous green gem made in Gondolin during the First Age. Stories of its creation differ in detail: some name Enerdhil as its maker, but Celebrimbor son of Curufin was more likely to have been the jewelsmith who created it. The Elessar had the light of the Sun trapped within it, and those who looked through it were said to see the withered or aged as whole and young again. It was even claimed to have some power of healing.
This Elessar was saved from the Fall of Gondolin by Idril, who gave it to her son Eärendil, and with Eärendil it was carried across the Sea to the Blessed Realm. In the Third Age, another Elessar was seen - the Elfstone given by Galadriel to Aragorn - and some said that this was Eärendil's jewel, brought back to Middle-earth by Mithrandir. In truth, though, Aragorn's Elessar seems to have been a new stone, also made by Celebrimbor, with less power than the original jewel.
A green stone named the Elessar definitely existed in Middle-earth during the Third Age. Some accounts claim that this was the original Elessar of the First Age returned, while others refer to it as a replica of the original made in Eregion. To avoid confusion, the timeline for this entry only shows the Elessar during the First Age; if it did indeed return to Middle-earth out of the West, its history would resume in about the year III 1000.
For acknowledgements and references, see the Disclaimer & Bibliography page.
Website services kindly sponsored by Axiom Software Ltd.
Original content © copyright Mark Fisher 2004, 2013. All rights reserved. For conditions of reuse, see the Site FAQ. | <urn:uuid:de7d04f5-ff39-4067-ab07-617efc19fddb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/e/elessar1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982353 | 380 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Engineers Fail To Disclose Private Interest in Report to Public Agency
asce recently conducted leadership conferences in each of its four zones. Leaders at the national, section, and branch level, together with younger member and student leaders, came together to exchange ideas, network, gain a better understanding of Society activities, and consider ways of leading their groups more effectively. This year's conferences included two sessions on ethics, both using materials provided by the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (niee). This month's column reviews and analyzes one of three case studies presented at the conferences. In preparing the case summary, the niee drew on an opinion from the National Society of Professional Engineers' Board of Ethical Review.
The case involves a licensed engineer and project manager named Daulton Squyres. Squyres's employer, ClearWater Developers, has challenged him to plat, design, and construct a high-profile, 90-lot subdivision in Murray Township on an accelerated time schedule. Squyres retains local engineers Elias Auften and Shellie Moore to design and supervise the construction of the subdivision. Auften and Moore are in a joint venture in an engineering and construction management practice that provides civil and municipal engineering and construction management services to clients in a number of townships in the state.
During a design review, township officials determine that a second road will be needed to access the subdivision. This second road exits into Walbert Township, which is adjacent to Murray Township. As engineers for ClearWater, Auften and Moore will be responsible for locating and designing the second road. However, their joint venture happens to also serve as Walbert Township's municipal engineer. Because Auften and Moore are working on the subdivision in Murray Township while serving as engineer for Walbert Township, a potential conflict of interest exists.
In conformity with ethical engineering practice, the joint venture of Auften and Moore discloses to Walbert Township its relationship with ClearWater Developers regarding the subdivision for Murray Township. For its part, Walbert Township does not object to Auften and Moore making a recommendation regarding the feasibility of constructing the proposed second road. Thereafter, as municipal engineer for Walbert Township, Auften and Moore's joint venture recommends that Walbert Township approve the construction of the proposed road.
The second road requires the acquisition of new property in Walbert Township, and Squyres authorizes negotiations for purchasing the property. During this process, Squyres notices that there is a large parcel of land owned by Auften and Moore's joint venture in the area of the surveyor's plat demarcating the parcels that ClearWater will have to purchase. At no time do Auften and Moore ever mention to Squyres or to Walbert Township that they own this property.
By recommending construction of the second road into Walbert Township next to their land, Auften and Moore stand to benefit financially, since the new road will dramatically increase the value of their property. Squyres is concerned about the implications of this conflict of interest for his project. He considers a number of options to address the problem, including suppressing the information to avoid delaying the project.
Is Auften and Moore's failure to disclose their ownership of the property a violation of asce's Code of Ethics?
Yes. Canon 4 of the code reads as follows: "Engineers shall act in professional matters for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees, and shall avoid conflicts of interest." Further, the guidelines to practice in category (a) of canon 4 have this to say: "Engineers shall avoid all known or potential conflicts of interest with their employers or clients and shall promptly inform their employers or clients of any business association, interests, or circumstances which could influence their judgment or the quality of their services."
Clearly, owning property affected by a recommendation for construction made as part of work for a client is a conflict of interest and must be disclosed. However, the more difficult question concerns Squyres's responsibility after learning of Auften and Moore's apparent property ownership.
At the zone leadership conferences, several options for Squyres were presented for consideration by the attendees:
- Engage an independent engineer to give a second opinion because if the decision to build the road stands on technical merit there would be no ethical conflict.
- Talk to Auften and Moore to hear their side.
- Propose to Auften and Moore that they donate the money they stand to gain to civic and humanitarian organizations in the two townships.
- Tell the townships what he's learned and let them handle it.
- Seek independent advice from his professional society and his legal counsel.
- Report Auften and Moore to the state licensing board.
The majority of participants were split fairly evenly between options 2 and 5. According to asce's bylaws, members are duty bound to promptly report any observed violations of the Code of Ethics to the Committee on Professional Conduct (cpc) when those perceived as being guilty of ethical lapses are asce members. In this case, the two options favored by participants at the conferences provided a means whereby Squyres could verify his facts and responsibilities before taking action. Once he had done this, participants agreed that other options came into play, among them terminating the contract with Auften and Moore, reporting the matter to the townships, or reporting the matter to the cpc and the state licensing board.
The fruitful interchange of ideas at the leadership conference sessions devoted to the ethical aspects of engineering practice demonstrates the value and importance of discussing ethical issues with your friends and colleagues. Further details of this case will be published in the April issue of asce's Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, along with the online voting results from the niee for the options noted above. The original case (97-4) and the actual findings of the National Society of Professional Engineers' Board of Ethical Review can be accessed online at http://www.niee.org/cases. William Lawson, Ph.D., p.e., and Brian Brenner, Ph.D., p.e., prepared the case study and dramatization.
Members who have an ethics question or who would like to file a complaint with the cpc may call asce's hotline at (703) 295-6061 or (800) 548-asce (2723), extension 6061. The attorneys staffing this line can provide advice on how to handle an ethics issue or file a complaint.
A Question of Ethics Home | Browse by Canon | Browse by topic | Browse by year | <urn:uuid:a712cf27-f8f3-4b44-a81e-f9a8150c0b99> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asce.org/Publications/ASCE-News/2006/04_April/A-Question-of-Ethics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948006 | 1,330 | 1.8125 | 2 |
How To Gather Pet Mice Supplies
How To Gather Pet Mice Supplies
An animal shelter manager shares some information on what supplies to gather for your pet mice at home and where to find these supplies. <!--40c345a1242740bb859b2df2f60303c3-->
Hi, my name's Marie. I'm the deputy manager of the Small Animal Department at Wood Green Animal Shelters and I'm going to tell you how to care for mice. I'm going to tell you how to gather pet mice supplies.
First of all, before bringing in any mice at home, make sure you have got all the equipment needed to care for them. You need to choose a suitable accommodation, bedding, food and enrichment for them before you can bring them home. First of all, you'll need to find a suitable tank.
You can find these at your local pet shop, your rescue shop, or if you go for a larger aquarium like this, you may be able to find them at your local recycling center or charity shops, so search around for them. Glass tanks like this are the best type of accommodation for your mice. They're safe and secure from escaping and they provide lots of space for you to add with enrichment.
The other option that we've got here is a storage container. These can be purchased at many shop outlets and places that stock stationary as well, so have a look around. These are easy to make your own design tanks, so you can find these again in many shops.
Once you've chosen your accommodation, you're then going to need to kit it out. So first of all, let's start with bedding. The best option is to either use short shredded paper and this is obviously free, if you've got a paper shredder at home, you can be making your own mouse bedding.
The other option is a product called Carefresh and this is available in most pet shops and rescue centers. It's short egg carton and it's absorbent and safe for your mice to use. Never use wood shavings as this can often contain parasites and bring on breathing issues and allergies that you and your family may have.
You would then want to purchase some soft paper bedding for them to sleep in and again, this is available in nearly all pet shops and also any local rescue shelters you may have. Don't use the type of cotton ball, the best one is soft tissue paper as this doesn't wrap around their legs and their feet as the cotton ball type can. But again as I mentioned, most pet shops do stock these.
You're going to need a good quality water bottle. Ideally, purchase two of these in case one ever gets broken, you've got an instant one to replace it with. Most of these are available from pet shops, your local rescue shelters and even on the internet.
If you are going for a style of accommodation which is a large aquarium, it's best if you can purchase a water bottle with a hanging top. That way, they can be hung from the cage quite easily. Otherwise, you might not be able to use a water bottle quite so easily.
These should be cleaned out at least once a week and refreshed daily with fresh water. You then also want to consider a toy and enrichment for your mice. You can make these, so you could start saving your old toilet rolls, you could be saving cereal boxes, shoeboxes and any old cardboard boxes as well, really, and they're fantastic if you cut lots of holes in and make all sorts of houses and tunnels for them.
You could also get any old blanket so they'll jump at and you can create little hammocks inside their homes as well, so it's lots of ideas such as children's toys that you could be using for mice enrichment. You could also go to a local pet shop or rescue shelter and they often stock a variety of different types of enrichment. Try to keep your enrichment as natural as possible.
Treats and toys like these where they can chew with them are really brilliant for their teeth. They can run through these tunnels and as I mentioned, they can crawl on them as well. You'll also find different types of Play Stix like these which could be bent to different shapes.
They can run underneath them, they can sleep on them, and crawl across them as well. So, be inventive with your enrichment. You don't have to purchase it, there are loads of things you can make and find at home as well.
Lastly, a good pet disinfectant, | <urn:uuid:c638d5bd-b704-403f-8821-4fc453f04a68> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-gather-pet-mice-supplies | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974625 | 943 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Nyala is a Swahili name, from the Zulu ‘Inyala’.
Like most antelope Nyala are shy creatures and aren’t very comfortable in open-spaces. They tend to only venture into the public eye as they drink at waterholes. Usually exclusively browsers, the Nyala feed mostly on fruits, pods, twigs and leaves.
Like a growing number of people, Nyala prefer their own company – although they can be found in family groups of around 10 people.
It is easy to distinguish between adult males and females. Females tend to be slightly smaller than the males at around 90cm and do not have horns. Like their young, the females are a reddish brown (almost copper) colour with the white vertical lines on their backs.
Standing at 110cm the males have shaggy dark brown fur with a white line under their eyes and white patches on their chest and belly. Like humans male Nyala grey with age. They have loosely spiralled horns (approx 21 to 33 inches long with yellow tips) and a long fringe on their throat and underbelly – which does make them look a little scruffy. Like the females the males also have white vertical markings on their backs which look as though paint has been dribbled over them.
Nyala have a different dominance display to impala. Generally docile they rarely fight aggressively, with back mane fully erect they circle each other slowly whilst using their horns against objects or even the ground in an attempt to intimidate. The erect hair on back and fringe helps the bull to appear larger, aiding in his intimidation.
Nyala breed at any time of the year with their peak seasons being Spring and Autumn. After a gestation period of 8-9 months The newborn lambs are hidden for the first 3 weeks with the mother returning only to feed and relocate them. When the lamb has got used to its legs and is able to keep up with the rest of the group it joins the herd.
Females mature at 11 to 12 months and males at 18 months (although males are not socially mature until around 5 years of age). | <urn:uuid:777ba30b-cfb0-48b8-b3b4-7f4f152f9b71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://umkhumbilodge.co.za/blog/tag/our-animals-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968563 | 442 | 2.40625 | 2 |
FLA, Apple and Foxconn shake on new deal for Chinese workers
Critics argue some abuses are still being ignored
The Fair Labor Association is claiming to have secure assurances from Apple and its supplier Foxconn that they will make sweeping changes to workers’ pay and conditions at the latter’s Chinese plants in line with the FLA’s latest report, but critics have argued they don’t go far enough.
As Apple CEO Tim Cook wraps up his eventful trip to the People’s Republic this week, the non-profit released the findings of its initial month-long report into conditions at three Foxconn plants in China, at Guanlan, Longhua, and Chengdu.
It found substantial problems with working conditions including excessive overtime, health and safety risks and management dominated unions.
Firstly, the FLA reported that all three factories breached its limits of 60 hours per week including overtime and local Chinese limits of 40 hours a week plus 36 hours overtime per month. In some cases employees worked more than seven days in a row without the required day off.
The health and safety issues at Foxconn are well documented, since a fatal explosion rocked the Chengdu plant in 2011, and the FLA said that 43 per cent of the workers it interviewed had experienced or witnessed an accident.
Finally, the FLA found that the union at Foxconn is dominated by management representatives and therefore doesn’t provide true worker representation according to the law of the land.
To address these problems, the FLA said Foxconn and Apple had agreed to comply with FLA and Chinese legal limits on working hours, reducing monthly overtime hours from 80 to 36. To be fair to Apple it had already begun to ‘micro-manage’ hours at the plants to ensure compliance.
The FLA added that Foxconn would increase its workforce “significantly” to maintain capacity while reducing workers’ hours.
It also said that Foxconn agreed to develop a compensation package to ensure workers are protected from the loss of income incurred by reduced overtime, and added that workers cheated out of overtime payments would be retroactively paid according to the results of an audit.
More importantly, the FLA said it is conducting a cost of living study to make sure that workers’ salaries meet its requirements for basic needs.
Groups have argued in the past that despite raising wages, Foxconn also charges staff for living costs such as dorm rooms and that once these extras are deducted from their pay it makes excessive overtime the only way for workers to earn a living wage.
On the health and safety front, FLA said that it would force Foxconn to record all accidents resulting in injury, not just those incurring a production stoppage. It added that progress has been made to reduce risk and improve operating procedures.
Finally, Foxconn agreed to ensure management doesn’t interfere with the election of union representatives and said it will adapt its internship program to ensure a “productive, healthy and safe educational experience” for interns.
“The Fair Labor Association gave Apple’s largest supplier the equivalent of a full-body scan through 3,000 staff hours investigating three of its factories and surveying more than 35,000 workers. Apple and its supplier Foxconn have agreed to our prescriptions, and we will verify progress and report publicly,” said FLA president and CEO Auret van Heerden.
“If implemented, these commitments will significantly improve the lives of more than 1.2 million Foxconn employees and set a new standard for Chinese factories."
Fair play to the FLA then. There were some who doubted the organisation’s neutrality given Apple is a member but its report has been pretty damning of conditions in the plants, although Apple will say it has already been working to address many of them.
Critics, however, argued that the inspection really just uncovered the tip of the iceberg – it only visited three factories initially and there were reports from non-profit group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) that factory bosses were tipped off about the inspections , giving workers extra breaks and hiding underage workers.
Debby Chan, a project officer for Hong Kong-based SACOM, questioned the low number of interns working at the factories during the inspections – 519 compared to an average of 27,000 per month in 2011.
“On page ten, the report concedes that the use of student labour is to cope with the problem of seasonality. However, it has not found cases of interns who were forced to work at Foxconn, the victims of involuntary labour,” she told The Reg.
“The use of student workers seems to be very insignificant in March. There can be two reasons: (1) it is low season in the factories; (2) students were sent away because of the factory inspections.”
Indeed there is no mention of the problem in the accompanying FLA press release aside from vague assurances about adapting the internship program in the future.
Also missing are mentions of the harsh management practices which many believe contributed to the suicides of countless Foxconn staff in the past. Even the word ‘suicide’ is not mentioned once in the report.
Chan argued that while none of the abuses uncovered in the report are new, they may be taken seriously this time.
“The labour rights violations stated in the report have been mentioned a long time ago. Apple simply ignored those issues,” she argued.
“The demand from consumers now for ethical Apple products is an impetus for changes in the supply chain. However, to make the change sustainable, there must be participation from the workers. They should have the right to form genuine unions through democratic elections.”
She also rejected claims that the cost of Apple and other goods could rise as a result of changes to pay and conditions at the factories, saying that labour costs form only a tiny percentage of the final sales price.
In the end, Apple and Foxconn have until July 2013 to make these changes and if consumer pressure continues then the guarantees are likely to be met, but there are few ways to genuinely know what goes on inside these factories without the threat of continuous, unannounced and fully independent inspections.
Apple did not immediately reply to a request for further comment on the news. ® | <urn:uuid:e2805370-d761-4329-8417-128dfa04cd15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/apple_foxconn_deal/print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969454 | 1,299 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Greater London England
|Cemetery notes and/or description:|
This is a record of Civilian casualties of WWII, principally those killed as a result of enemy action, though occasionally, an allied aircraft may have crashed resulting in the death of non-combatant civilians (friendly-fire). Civilian casualties include, apart from innocent residents, those men and women engaged as police officers, firemen, ambulance drivers, ARP Wardens, Home Guard, firewatchers, dispatch riders, messengers, St John Ambulance Brigade members, Women's Voluntary Service members, etc.
It is therefore not a 'cemetery' as such, and no additions should be made to it by contributors.
However, if the grave of a civilian casualty of WWII should be discovered, the finder is asked to contact either Gary Nelson/International Wargraves via the 'suggest a correction' feature to notify them, whereupon the record will be transferred to the cemetery/churchyard.
No records were kept of where civilians were interred and it is often the case that an individual shown here, was interred in their home town. The Reporting Authority shown on the individual record relates to the place where the inquest was held; it is the district where death occurred, but it is not necessarily the area where the attack took place, because frequently the injured of enemy action were conveyed to distant specialist hospitals for treatment.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was asked by Winston Churchill to keep a roll of Commonwealth civilian war dead. This roll is the official point of commemoration of the 67,000 men, women and children and is now held near St George's Chapel in Westminster Abbey , but the Commission's database-the Debt of Honour-can be searched by name and date.
The records do not cover civilian casualties of World War One, but it does cover WWII civilians killed or lost at sea and those citizens of Britain and its Commonwealth killed abroad-Singapore, Hong Kong for example. (text by Geoffrey Gillon) | <urn:uuid:6f1f90c8-36a9-48ad-9fc4-494185c8e4a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&GSln=Carter&GSiman=1&GSst=4220&GSsr=41&CRid=2287813&pt=Civilian%20War%20Dead | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958542 | 412 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Mitsubishi Heavy Network Most Likely Compromised by Spear-Phishing Attack
Attackers most likely used spear-phishing techniques to compromise Japanese defense contractor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries last month, security researchers said. Spear phishing techniques are increasingly being used to steal sensitive information.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries admitted Sept. 19 that 83 systems in over 10 locations had been infected with several types of malware, including data-stealing Trojans. Japanese media reported that another defense contractor based in Japan-IHI, which builds engine parts for fighter planes-has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of suspicious emails and malicious attachments hitting its servers.
There are many possible scenarios as to how Mitsubishi Heavy was infected. The possibilities include an infected computer connecting to the network, an employee's log-in credentials being leaked, not having enough security measures and employees having access to data they didn't need, according to Catalin Cosoi, head of the online threats lab at BitDefender. Employees giving away too much personal information about themselves online would have made them more vulnerable to phishing emails, said Cosoi.
The attack against Mitsubishi Heavy was different from other attacks seen in recent months, which generally involved SQL injection or distributed denial of service. Malware and targeted attacks generally require "higher effort" for the attackers, but a recent Cisco study found that they are also more lucrative.
The "best" comparison for the attack on Mitsubishi Heavy would "probably" be Operation Aurora, Cosoi said. Operation Aurora refers to a six-month-long cyber-attack, believed to have originated from China, that hit Google and 30 other United States-based companies in 2009.
Spear-phishing is the "leading point of entry" for cyber-adversaries, according to Anup Ghosh, founder and CEO of Invincea. Phishing is an "extremely low-risk, high reward method" to co-opt users and gain access on to the network, Ghosh told eWEEK.
"A simple click on a URL in an email or opening an attachment is all it takes to compromise the unwitting user's machine, and gain unfettered access to the network from there," Ghosh said.
Phishing dominated every other attack category and accounted for half of all reported incidents in 2010, according to United States CERT.
Attackers were allegedly using simplified Chinese characters to remotely control infected computers, according to Japan's Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper. The compromised machines were communicating with several servers outside of Japan, including at least 20 servers in China, Hong Kong, the United States and India, the paper reported.
Since the attack likely involved a person with deep knowledge of the language, the investigators were treating the incident as an international espionage case, according to Yomiuri. Predictably, fingers are pointing at China, but Cosoi believed it was "way too early" to accuse China.
"Criticism that China initiated a cyber-attack is not only groundless, it goes against development of international cooperation on cyber-security," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a daily briefing Sept. 20.
State-sponsored hacking is a "highly effective and far less expensive way" for governments to empower their military rather than investing in research and development, according to Joseph Steinberg, CEO of Green Armor Solutions. "It is far cleaner to take out an enemy's defense capabilities through a virus, than with bombs, and the virus approach ensures plausible deniability that an air force cannot claim," Steinberg told eWEEK.
Japanese government officials were reportedly furious after learning of the attacks through the media, according to Reuters. The government requires all contractors to immediately notify authorities of any suspected breach of sensitive or classified information.
"It's up to the defense ministry to decide whether the information is important. That is not for Mitsubishi Heavy to decide. A report should have been made," a spokesman for the ministry told Reuters.
Mitsubishi Heavy was also criticized for how it handled the situation. "They've been dozing for the past month," Yoshiyasu Takefuji, a cyber-security expert at Tokyo's Keio University, told Reuters. While Mitsubishi Heavy said no classified information had been leaked, if the investigation finds otherwise, the company faces heavy fines.
A Japanese defense white paper released last month urged better protection against cyber-attacks in light of the recent attacks on Lockheed Martin and other U.S. defense contractors. The government needed to "strengthen its information security measures," Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said.
"Cyber-security must be a public-sector priority," Karen Kelley, a U.S. embassy spokeswoman in Tokyo, told Reuters. | <urn:uuid:f6851e48-f12e-4675-ae46-76e071d41a89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eweek.com/print/c/a/Security/Mitsubishi-Heavy-Network-Most-Likey-Compromised-by-SpearPhishing-Attack-335314/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958512 | 977 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Just off U.S. 412 between Alpena and Huntsville, you’ll see an old building standing to the south. The old Stamps General Store has been located there since 1901, but the business closed down decades ago. Still, the store is busy today as home of the Osage Clayworks, a thriving pottery business.
When you first drive up, you may see a dog or cat on the porch. There’s a sign on the door letting you know it’s okay to let them in. The place has its own cats and a friendly dog, too.
Newt Lale will be the first to tell you that the cats won’t knock anything over. They’ve grown up between the stoneware mugs and plates on the shelves. They grace the building like ghosts in an old house.
Lale will also tell you everything’s original. See, when he was looking at the property, he saw it was full of old stuff. Many of the items the general store sold still sat on the counters, and the cabinets and furniture hadn’t been moved since the last day of operation. Turns out, the family was willing to leave every antique, every oddity and cereal box and glass-front curio – as long as they were left there like a living museum.
Lale agreed, and moved his potter’s wheel in. That’s been decades ago, and today every countertop and every shelf is covered with objects wheelspun and fired and glazed right in the old building. Those cats? They’re experts at dusting.
And there’s lots to dust – from gigantic tureens with lids and handles to tiny pinch-pots and rag holders. There are mugs of all shapes and sizes, plates and bowls and spoon rests and saucers. There are art objects and vases and lambs and just about anything you can imagine made out of clay.
It doesn’t take Lale long to make a pot. He’s been at the wheelthrowing for nearly 30 years. He sits down right at the wheel in the middle of the store and will thump a lump of red clay onto the turntable in front of him. Then away the wheel goes, and he smatters the clay with water and works it up with his hands, first forming a depression in the center and then shaping the outsides with his palms. As he presses, the clay rises up above his fingers, and he expertly turns it down again.
Within a minute a pot is formed, and he stops the wheel, cuts it from its base with a piece of wire and sets it to drying. These pots will cure for a while until he has enough to run the kiln. They’ll then receive a glaze and go back in the kiln. The final product is hardy, dishwasher and microwave safe and surprisingly hard to break.
The old general store is the perfect place to display those items. The unique mugs fit separately each in its own cubby that used to be the postal boxes that served the town. Every surface is utilized for something.
Osage Clayworks is located at 22 CR 966 in Osage – though the mailing address is Alpena, which is actually 11 miles to the east. It’s open now and then with varying hours; best thing to do is either call ahead or call when you get there and Newt Lale will come on over and open the door. (870) 553-2513. Don’t forget to let the cat in — and to check out the website. | <urn:uuid:926ef918-387c-4b68-b9ca-e615ade71a37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arkansas.com/blog/post/the-potter-in-the-old-general-store-osage-clayworks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971738 | 761 | 1.625 | 2 |
3:05 AM CST, December 21, 2012
Agricultural producers should do tax planning before the end of the year based on the information known at this time. Traditionally, producers try to do tax planning to limit their tax liability. With uncertainty in Congress, tax rates may be higher in 2013 than 2012. If so, it may be best not to defer as much income to 2013.
"In tax planning, it is best to start with year-to-date income and expenses and estimate them for the remainder of the year," says Ron Haugen, North Dakota State University Extension Service farm economist. "Do not forget any income that was deferred to 2012 from a previous year.
Depreciation also needs to be estimated, he says. It is best to try to spread out income and expenses so producers don't have abnormally high or low income or expenses in any one year. However, caution should be used in deferring too much income into future years because it may push you into a higher tax bracket."
These are items to note for planning 2012 tax returns:
· The section 179 expense election is $139,000 for 2012. It generally allows producers to deduct up to $139,000 of new or used machinery or equipment purchased in the tax year. There is a dollar-for-dollar phase-out for purchases above $560,000. The section 179 expense election is scheduled to revert to $25,000 for 2013 unless Congress acts. The reduction in this provision greatly affects the ability for producers to reduce taxable income.
· The additional first-year bonus depreciation is available for 2012. It is available for new property with a recovery period of 20 years or less. It is equal to 50 percent of the adjusted basis after any section 179 expensing. It is scheduled to expire Dec. 31, 2012.
· Income averaging can be used by producers to spread the tax liability to lower income tax brackets in the three previous years. This is done on schedule J. North Dakota farmers who elect to use income averaging for federal purposes also may use Form ND 1FA (income averaging) for North Dakota income tax calculations.
· Crop insurance proceeds and government crop disaster payments can be deferred to the next tax year if a producer is a cash-basis taxpayer and can show that normally income from damaged crops would be included in a tax year following the year of the damage.
· A livestock deferral can be done for those who had a forced sale of livestock because of a weather-related disaster.
Here is what producers can do before the end of the year to limit their tax liability:
· Prepay farm expenses. Feed, fertilizer, seed and similar expenses can be prepaid. Typically, discounts are received by paying for these expenses in the fall. Producers can deduct prepaid expenses that do not exceed 50 percent of their other deductible farm expenses.
· Pay real estate taxes or interest. Paying taxes or interest can be done before the end of the year to increase 2012 expenses.
· Defer income to 2013. Crop and livestock sales can be deferred until the next year by using a deferred payment contract. Most grain elevators or sales barns will defer sales until the next tax year. Producers should be aware that they are at risk if the business becomes insolvent before the check is received and cashed.
· Purchase machinery or equipment. Machinery or equipment purchases can be made before the end of the year to get a depreciation or 179 expense deduction in 2012.
Information on agricultural topics can be found in the Farmers Tax Guide, Publication 225. It can be obtained at any IRS office or can be ordered by calling (800) 829-3676. Questions should be addressed to tax professionals or the IRS at (800) 829-1040 or http://www.irs.gov. North Dakota Tax Department at (877) 328-7088 or http://www.nd.gov/tax/.
Copyright © 2013, Aberdeen News | <urn:uuid:a0e3e6ad-517e-4ed0-b8b8-646020acabcf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aberdeennews.com/farmforum/news/business/aan-ff.12-21-12.musttaxplanning-20121221,0,3389033,print.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952942 | 810 | 1.976563 | 2 |
Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians
by Jeffrey Burton Russell
Praeger, 117 pages, $12.95
Revisionist history offers satisfactions of several kinds to a certain type of writer. Not only does the reviser feel a sense of superiority to his predecessors, the benighted drudges who wasted their lives mired in ignorance and error. He, or increasingly she, often has the added pleasure of superiority to contemporaries as well: the bearer of the light understands the past, therefore also the present, and may confidently propose a future—usually of an impeccably progressive cast. For such intellectual laborers, Harold Bloom might have said (perhaps he already has): all vision is revision.
Yet from another quarter we receive whispers of ancient warnings: he gnosis phusioi, scientia inflat, knowledge puffeth up—not the knowledge itself, naturally, but what we allow it to do to us. And when what we think is superior knowledge turns out itself to be an intellectual imposture, what course remains but the revolutionary expropriation of the expropriators? With ideologies and empires crumbling around us in the late twentieth century, the revision of the revisionists bids fair to become a central intellectual growth industry.
In Inventing the Flat Earth, Jeffrey Burton Russell, a medieval historian, has assembled evidence exploding one of the most influential historical hoaxes ever perpetrated by revisionists. We have all heard it vaguely claimed that Christopher Columbus proved to a dark and disbelieving late-medieval Europe that the world is not flat. Russell shows beyond dispute that any educated person in medieval Europe already knew that. Later historians simply invented a progressive Columbus myth for several reasons. Some hated the Spanish Empire and Roman Catholicism. Others wanted to demonstrate the superiority of the modern world. Still others thought it crucial to portray religion (particularly Christianity) as a reactionary force and an opponent of enlightenment.
How was what Russell calls the Flat Error constructed? Only two ancient Christian writers of any significance put forward a flat-Earth theory: Lactantius (c.245-325), a Latin convert who ignored the sophisticated hermeneutics of Fathers like Augustine and Chrysostom and propounded a crude “biblical” cosmos; and Cosmas Indicopleustes (writing around 547-549), a Greek who argued that the universe was a vaulted arch with the earth as the floor. Lactantius was posthumously condemned as a heretic, and Cosmas was and is so obscure that a graduate student may easily finish a degree in medieval studies without ever coming across his name. (Of further importance to the present context is the fact that Cosmas was unknown to Western Europe until 1706 and could have had no influence in Columbus' time.)
As anyone who has read Dante's Divine Comedy will recall, that medieval author takes for granted a spherical Earth and a Ptolemaic universe, in fact makes them of major structural significance in his poem. All other serious medieval thinkers held the same belief. How then did their views get steamrollered into the Flat Error? (A “Wizard of Id” cartoon included among the illustrations to the volume shows a mock-Solomonic king reconciling a dispute between the court's flat partisans and round partisans by proclaiming that the world is both flat and round: “I call it the Pizza Theory.”) Russell points to two main schools of earlier revisionist historians as the primary sources: the progressives of the early nineteenth century and the Darwinians after 1870. Both groups had an interest in revising the record for contemporary purposes.
Washington Irving, probably the best known of the progressives, felt obliged to present an image of modern man freeing himself from the constraints of feudal and Catholic Europe to help create the democratic and Protestant New World. During a stay in Spain, therefore, he read some of the original archival materials on Columbus and selected among them to make of that Catholic Genoese navigator the unlikely hero of American Protestantism and progressivism. The whole vivid, romanticized, dramatic, and almost entirely fictitious moral tale was published in 1837 as the History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Despite its shortcomings as truth, the book set the tone of Columbus studies for the rest of the century and, to a certain extent, beyond.
Samuel Eliot Morison, a canny sailor himself and judicious historian of Columbus, describes Irving's dramatic scenes of Columbus in argument with the learned doctors at the University of Salamanca as “pure moonshine.” As we know beyond question, such conversations as Columbus had with scholars at the behest of the Spanish crown did not deal with questions of the earth's roundness but of its size and the location of land masses. (The theologians' theories, incidentally, were far closer to the truth than Columbus' optimistic projections.) In Washington Irving, however, and in a host of other self-styled progressive writers after him, the Inquisition and “monastic bigotry” are the forces that must be overcome to create America. The “learned” theologians, therefore, confront Columbus with a passage from—Lactantius! “Is there anyone so foolish as to believe that there are people living on the other side of the earth with their heels upward and their heads hanging down?”
Though Lactantius had himself been declared heretical more than a thousand years earlier, historical ignorance made it but a short step to the kind of truth v. orthodoxy morality play that bas persisted even as late as this exchange in Joseph Chiari's Christopher Columbus (1919):
Columbus: The Earth is not flat, Father, it's round!
The Prior: Don't say that!
Columbus: It's the truth; it's not a mill pond strewn with islands, it's a sphere.
The Prior: Don't, don't say that; it's blasphemy.
Columbus the bearer of universal enlightenment was to find a successful career in France and other continental nations as well.
After 1870, the Flat Error was found to have a second use, this time among what might be called the anti-anti-Darwinians. Darwin's defenders were looking for any ammunition they could find in their struggle with fundamentalist Christians. None of the major Church Fathers or medieval thinkers, says Russell, would have dreamt of using the Bible all by itself as a complete guide to scientific matters. From the first, biblical hermeneutics were generally too sophisticated for that. But threatened by the advances of science, some modern Christians tried that desperate tactic. In the evolution controversy, therefore, Darwin's supporters—who were not very theologically sophisticated themselves—bad a vested interest in making all so-called “biblical” thought appear benighted.
Dug up by some scholar or other, Cosmas Indicopleusies was translated into English for the first time in 1897 and was immediately portrayed not only as a fool himself, but the emblem of Christian foolishness. His name began to appear in histories and textbooks as if be bad been the main cosmological theorist of the Middle Ages.
The medieval Church bad been a sponsor of science, of course, but the Darwinian dynamics were projected back upon the earlier age. For example, Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, became one of the principal late-nineteenth-century propagators of the Flat Error out of opposition to contemporary Christian obscurantists. Ignoring the medieval scholarship that was available even in his day, be accepted on faith the misstatements of several fellow polemicists. Russell comments: “White and his colleagues ended by doing what they accused the Fathers of, namely, creating a body of false knowledge by consulting one another instead of the evidence.”
Though for at least the last fifty years all this bas been known to scholars as a simple comedy of errors, the myth persists. The Flat Error continues to appear, of course, in widely used primary, secondary, and college textbooks. But even some of the most influential modern historians have been taken in. The distinguished historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin in his lively and generally reliable volume The Discoverers, for example, falls prey. In chapter 13, “The Prison of Christian Dogma,” Boorstin asserts that during the Middle Ages Christians engaged in an “amnesiac effort to ignore the growing mass of knowledge [about a spherical earth] and retreat into a world of faith and caricature.” As evidence, Boorstin cites the hapless Cosmas and over several pages mixes that eccentric figure with more mainstream Christian thinkers like Augustine to evoke a wholly imaginary “legion of Christian geographers” who believed that the earth was flat.
When even a Daniel Boorstin can be taken in by a scholarly imposture that bas become widespread, is it any wonder that far less learned people look down on the past in general and the religious past in particular? The historian David Noble, who wrote the foreword to Inventing the Flat Earth, laments this situation and reminds us that progressivism bas a deep human genealogy: once the medieval sense of the world's unity is rejected and time “is conceived in discontinuous terms, it becomes necessary to believe in progress to escape the terror of a world without meaning.” So all traces of progress are carefully husbanded by progressives for fear of falling, not off the edge of the Earth, but off the edge of presumed knowledge.
The Flat Error will probably continue its fugitive life in the odd nooks and crannies of modern pedagogy. Our schools have for some time been sponsoring a colossal loss of basic historical knowledge, ironically mirroring the very kind of medieval amnesia we are told that they remedy. Perhaps one way at least to begin a recovery of history, now that even the Flat Error can no longer stand the light of day, is to take a bard look at the truth and revise the facile, stubborn, and obscurantist myth of progress.
Robert Royal is Vice President and John M. Olin Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which will publish his book 1492 and All That later this spring. | <urn:uuid:02a8fd4c-72ca-471c-8f81-7e7221933672> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/01/001-the-pizza-theory-12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955408 | 2,116 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Power electronic systems are used in day-to-day applications. The sophisticated technology behind the scenes, however, often goes unnoticed. Take, for instance, public transport vehicles such as the underground, trams or trolley buses: the only time the systems that run these vehicles are noticed is when they fail to work properly, for example, if people get trapped in a stalled metro train. The utmost care, therefore, has been taken to guarantee the reliability of the power electronics driving the vehicle. This article outlines the cooperation between two manufacturers that fulfil the demands for public transport.
Dr. Ladislav Sobotka, ŠKODA ELECTRIC, Pilsen, Czech Republic and Ralf Herrmann, SEMIKRON, Nuremberg, Germany
The environmental requirements for traction applications are very demanding in terms of ambient temperature, power and temperature cycling, as well as size. Ambient temperatures under operation normally exceed 100°C, but could also drop at night during standstill to below zero centigrade. This passive temperature swing shows the need for extreme temperature cycling capability. Equally important is the need for a compact overall package, a high power density and a robust design in terms of vibration and shock. These somewhat conflicting requirements have to be taken into consideration when designing a new IGBT traction converter. The need for high power density at high coolant temperatures often goes at the expense of the power cycling capability.
IPM for traction
Many conventional power modules with copper base plate are available for traction applications. These modules then still have to be matched with driver boards and heatsinks from several suppliers. The user is responsible for matching the components and ensuring the proper functioning of the individual components in interplay. A SKiiP intelligent power module comprises three matched components: heatsink, IGBT half-bridges and driver with integrated protective functions. High power density, load and temperature cycling capability are ensured, thanks to the patented SKiiP pressure contact technology.
ŠKODA's more than ten years of experience with challenging applications such as trolley buses, trams and metro cars is a confirmation of the high reliability of the intelligent power module SkiiP. When developing unique technologies for public transport vehicles, there are applications where the use of intelligent IGBT modules is the only possible option, e.g. the 100% low-floor tram ŠKODA ForCity with rotary bogies.
Figure 2. SKiiP pressure contact technology without baseplate. The thermal cycling capability is five times higher than that of a standard module with baseplate
Figure 3. Power module on heat sink
The modules (Figures 2/3) are used for asynchronous traction drives for voltages of up to 1000VDC on a direct current intermediate link. Almost twenty years of experience with pressure contact technology has gone into this power module.
The principle behind the technology is a mechanical pressure system that presses the DBC (direct bonded copper) onto the heatsink without soldering. This results in homogenous pressure distribution with a thermal connection between the ceramic substrates carrying the semiconductor chips and the heatsink. A 40% improvement in thermal resistance (Rth(j-s)) compared to standard modules is achieved. SKiiP has no baseplate and fewer solder layers, resulting in lower thermal-mechanical stress inside the module. The thermal cycling capability is five times higher than that of a standard module with baseplate, is reached even under the harsh climatic conditions common to the electric traction industry, and brings a number of crucial advantages for this field of application. High load and temperature cycling capability is ensured thanks to the use of patented SKiiP pressure contact technology. The pressure contact technology has been optimised to provide low thermal resistance and high load cycle capability. Well-matched materials with careful consideration of the coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE), state-of-the-art packaging and bonding technologies make this module the fitting choice for this area of application.
For lower outputs, ŠKODA uses modules with air-cooled heatsinks. For traction drives in metro cars, especially in the electro-dynamic brake mode, liquidcooled modules are preferred, thereby utilising the maximum current load of the IPM. The low thermal resistance is used to provide high load capability. This means that the dynamic behaviour of the semiconductor structure is optimised to achieve maximum reliability and minimum switching losses. Thermal and over-current protection elements are already integrated in SKiiP. The corresponding sensors can be used for traction converter semiconductor diagnostics and for automatic intervention when admissible limits are exceeded. The current sensors are used for traction motor control.
High reliability and long service life
The IGBT converters have become standard for power supply in asynchronous traction motors and are subject to considerable price pressure. This is why the technologies used in intelligent IGBT power modules are compared to conventional IGBT transistors in every new project. The good price-performance ratio, minimum failure rate and long service life of IGBT traction converters are important for end applications. Every year, ŠKODA ELECTRIC manufactures more than 300 SKiiP-based converters for public transport vehicles and prefers the IPM, especially in light of its extensive positive experience in operating these vehicles. The robustness and resistance to thermal cycles are particularly crucial selection factors.
The tram car consists of four fully rotating traction bogies which bear 16 synchronous low-speed traction motors with permanent magnets. Each of the traction motors is supplied separately from a voltage converter comprising SKiiP modules. The roof container houses the entire traction equipment for one bogie, including an isolated brake resistor. Traction converters work with 5kHz pulse modulation, which is the optimum modulation for this type of vehicle. Given the limited space and the parameters requirements for synchronous motors with permanent magnets, this constitutes the only possible design solution, owing to the compactness and thermal properties of SKiiP modules.
All SKiiP IPMs used are 1700V modules. The current parameters of the modules in the traction converters are 500A, and the modules of the brake converters and input recuperation circuits are 1000A. The traction container can withstand harsh type tests. The design meets the challenging demands of the fast IGBT technology, in respect of the very low inductance between the DC link capacitance filter and the IGBT modules. Easy access to these modules for measurement or service reasons is a further important factor.
Contracts for ForCity trams constituting a production volume of more than 1000 traction containers have already been signed, i.e. 4000 traction inverters comprising the proven SKiiP modules.
Another application featuring the liquid-cooled SKiiP modules is currently under development: traction equipment for the underground system in St.Petersburg, Russia. Here, the modules must be able to work for a short time in the electro-dynamic brake mode at an output that reaches almost 1MW. A challenging requirement is the -40°C temperature level required by the customer. Traction drives for metro cars are among the most demanding applications for thermal cycles, which is why all operating states were simulated carefully and the traction converters subjected to worst case dynamic load tests. The SKiiP module passed these tests, thus guaranteeing the high reliability and long service life of these modules for the future. SKiiP has also been used in the first ever hydrogenfuelled bus; the official presentation and first road tests have already taken place. In addition, ŠKODA ELECTRIC employs these modules in converters for auxiliary drives in the rail industry; electric locomotives and electric multiple units (EMUs).
Fully tested power module
The power module is 100% tested to meet the requirements of traction applications. Once the IGBT half-bridges, driver and all other components have been tested, the overall system qualification is carried out. If modules are bought separately and used in combination with the customer’s own driver or drivers from other suppliers, the overall system test has to be done by the customer. SKiiP guarantees lower costs (development of driver electronics and test plus the corresponding test equipment) and no time wasted on inhouse development.
An optional burn-in test for SKiiP modules is available, in which the modules are operated for approximately two hours under worst case real inverter conditions at elevated temperature and elevated voltage. All root causes of early failures are identified and eliminated. SKiiP undergoes one of two burn-in cycles. The modules are tested with cooling water at 80°C and cycling at a constant chip temperature. The junction temperature of the silicon reaches temperatures up to 140° (IGBT3) to ensure high stress levels for the module. High power densities at coolant temperatures of 105°C can only be achieved at a maximum junction temperature above 150°C.
For comparable conditions and module sizes, the SKiiP4, which was introduced this year, provides 33% more power than the current version of this module (Figure 4). On the one hand, this allows for the development of more powerful or more compact frequency converters, thus reducing costs. This increase in power is due to the use of an innovative pressure contact system, an improved heatsink and IGBT4, CAL4 diode chip technology. In addition, six parallel half-bridges have been used for the first time at the upper power end instead of four, as was the case up till now (Figure 5).
Figure 4. Power module featuring six parallel half bridges
Like its predecessors, SKiiP 4 is based on well-matched components such as heat sink, power module, driver and protective sensors/functions. Here, the mounting and connecting technology, which is based on the pressure system, still plays a crucial role.
For a reliable and smooth switching behaviour, a new driver was developed with digital signal transmission, fully galvanic insulated switching and sensor signals, a diagnosis channel (based on CAN open protocol) and a multi-output stage.
For more informtion, please read: | <urn:uuid:d2cd6fa2-dd7d-4b55-9180-2b63e1dcf8ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.powerguru.org/intelligent-power-modules-drive-public-transport/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907638 | 2,054 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Nick Clegg – Smiling For Now – Photo by Alex Folkes/Fishnik Photography via Flickr
The Government’s “Fixed Term Parliaments Bill” has passed its final hurdle. The House of Lords agreed to back it after the Government agreed to insert a clause that subjects the provision to review in 2020.
The Prime Minister of the day currently has the power to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call an election, whenever he or she sees fit. This new Bill will create fixed five year parliamentary terms. (Parliament could, however, be dissolved if the Government lost a No Confidence motion.)
This clearly takes away from David Cameron the ability to call an election. In turn, this removes an enormous bargaining chip from his hand. At the moment, he can threaten the Liberal Democrats that if they don’t agree to something or other, he will call an election. With the Lib Dems languishing on under 10% in the opinion polls, and likely to lose a swathe of seats in any early election, that is a situation they want to avoid at all costs.
Once this Bill becomes law, that threat will no longer be available to Mr Cameron. In future, the only way he could call an election would be to ask for a vote of “No Confidence” in his own Government – and even then, Labour could hoist his petard by joining the Liberal Democrats in voting against!
Mr Cameron and the Tories, therefore, have lost the power to insist on any policy in their own Government. The Liberal Democrats now effectively have a complete veto over all areas of policy.
What is even worse for the Tories is that they cannot even give it all up and go for an election. They are now forced on the Liberal Democrats’ pleasure to stagger on for the full term until 2015, all the while unable to do anything the Lib Dems don’t like. It is going to be a long three and a half years for the Tories.
By contrast, the Lib Dems still have the power to have an election whenever they like, simply by walking out of the Coalition and precipitating a “No Confidence” motion. They therefore have the power to blackmail the Tories with this threat, to ensure they get what they want out of the Coalition.
For the next couple of years, this gives the Liberal Democrats enormous power, more than they have had for around a century.
In the long run, however, it is likely to do them little good. As the downward drift in their fortunes continues, the later the election comes, the worse their battering is likely to be. With their opinion poll ratings at their current levels, and continuing to drift down, and with UKIP ratings on the rise, there is every prospect of UKIP overtaking them as Britain’s third party at the next general election when it finally comes.
The Lib Dems should enjoy their power while it lasts. | <urn:uuid:e6640d28-27f3-4e89-95db-9b36a16a7203> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://adamcollyer.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/the-liberal-democrats-get-one-over-on-david-cameron-again-for-now/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969333 | 602 | 1.632813 | 2 |
That's a headline from the Times of India. At first glance, we're going to go with "no." At second glace, we still are.
"When a rapist offers to marry the victim, one would think it's the perfect solution," begins the article. Yet, one would be wrong! Maybe! Sometimes!
It's actually not an unusual scenario. In India, even as women's issues gain prominence, rape is largely considered shameful to the victim. Particularly in rural communities, a rape victim — especially one who is impregnated by rape — can be stigmatized and unable to marry in future, and sees her options, economic and otherwise, drastically reduced. As such, women do sometimes marry their rapists — indeed, as the article terms it, "want" to do so. Such unions are not themselves considered problematic; indeed, there has been a trend of romanticizing these relationships in movies and on TV. Says one activist quoted in the article, "Indian television has replicated these real life incidents into reel life. What they don't understand is that this could lead to serious repurcussions. TV channels should ensure that they are not propogating the act by showing victims marrying their rapists."
The situation has led to further complications. In March, the then Chief Justice of India, suggested (apparently in...some kind of gesture towards rape victims' rights), "A woman should be allowed to have a baby out of rape and/or marry the man and drop the rape charge if she so wishes."
The thinking, apparently, was that as long as this system persisted — and led to a certain amount of superficial societal rehabilitation for the woman — it should be facilitated. That this merely succeeds in reinforcing the existing societal norms does not appear to trouble the Chief Justice. But, says one NGO worker quoted in the article,
The girl has already been wronged once. And to add to the misery, her predator neatly escapes the consequences of the crime by simply marrying the girl. You never know if this practice catches on, rapists might resort to such techniques on any girl he fancies. This is just not done.
To the paper's credit — we guess — they do quote a psychologist who asserts that marrying one's rapist is probably not a good idea on grounds other than the legal. That, for instance, a rapist might not make the greatest husband, and that being forced to marry someone who's perpetrated an act of such violence and fundamental violation could be traumatic. Indeed, says she,"rape is a big trauma and the victim requires intensive therapy" rather than the dubious band-aid of retroactively decriminalizing the rape. The effects on any offspring are not even addressed, but we're guessing they're not salutary — even if they are spared the societal stigma of illegitimacy.
In response to the article's headline, here's our answer: we wish this question was rhetorical. And, indeed, didn't need to be asked in the first place.
Should A Woman Marry Her Rapist? [Times of India]
Times Of India Asks (And Doesn't Adequately Answer), 'Should A Woman Marry Her Rapist?' [Caveat Viator] | <urn:uuid:43c09c6c-4334-4763-89d3-8127beb45bd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jezebel.com/5639034/should-a-woman-marry-her-rapist | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965062 | 656 | 1.789063 | 2 |
View trusted insights from KidsHealth.org, the #1 most viewed health site for children, created by the experts at Nemours. We've also provided information from the most-respected
From Nemours' KidsHealth
- A Directory of Medical Tests
- Broken Bones
- Frequently Asked Questions About Casts
- CAT Scan: Neck
- CAT Scan: Head
- Ultrasound: Renal (Kidneys, Ureters, Bladder)
- Central Venous Catheters
- Ultrasound: Infant Hip
- When Your Child Needs a Cast
- Ultrasound: Pelvis
- Ultrasound: Scrotum
- Ultrasound: Bladder
- X-Ray Exam: Voiding Cystourethrogram (VCUG)
- Ultrasound: Head
- Ultrasound: Abdomen
- CAT Scan: Abdomen
- CAT Scan: Chest
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Trusted External Resources
What It Is
A bladder ultrasound is a safe and painless test that uses sound waves to make images of the bladder before and after urination.
During the examination, an ultrasound machine sends sound waves into the bladder area and images are recorded on a computer. The black-and-white images show the internal structure of the bladder, as well as the amount of urine inside.
Why It's Done
Doctors order bladder ultrasounds when there's a concern about bladder problems, such as difficulty urinating or daytime wetting.
A bladder ultrasound can show how much urine the bladder holds when it's full and whether someone completely empties the bladder when urinating. It can also demonstrate any obvious abnormalities of the bladder, the size of the bladder, the thickness of the bladder walls, and the presence of blockages or stones (lumps of built-up minerals).
Usually, you don't have to do anything special to prepare for a bladder ultrasound, although the doctor may ask that your child drink lots of fluids before the exam so that he or she arrives with a full bladder. You should tell the technician about any medications your child is taking before the test begins.
The bladder ultrasound will be done in the radiology department of a hospital or in a radiology center. Parents are usually able to accompany their child to provide reassurance.
Your child will be asked to change into a cloth gown and lie on a table. The room is usually dark so the images can be seen clearly on the computer screen. A technician (sonographer) trained in ultrasound imaging will spread a clear, warm gel on the lower abdomen over the pelvic area, which will help with the transmission of the sound waves.
The technician will then move a small wand (transducer) over the gel. The transducer emits high-frequency sound waves and a computer measures how they bounce back from the body. The computer changes those sound waves into images to be analyzed.
After the first image with a full bladder is taken, your child will be asked to empty the bladder and more images will be recorded. Sometimes a doctor will come in at the end of the test to meet your child and take a few more ultrasound pictures. The procedure usually takes less than 30 minutes.
What to Expect
The bladder ultrasound is painless. Your child may feel a slight pressure as the transducer is moved over the abdomen. Ask your child to lie still during the procedure so the sound waves can produce the proper images. The technician may ask your child to lie in different positions or hold his or her breath briefly.
Babies might cry in the ultrasound room, especially if they're restrained, but this won't interfere with the procedure.
Getting the Results
A radiologist (a doctor who's specially trained in reading and interpreting X-ray, ultrasound, and other imaging studies) will interpret the ultrasound results and then give the information to your doctor, who will discuss them with you. If the test results appear abnormal, your doctor may order further tests.
In an emergency, the results of an ultrasound can be available quickly. Otherwise, they're usually ready in 1-2 days. In most cases, results can't be given directly to the patient or family at the time of the test.
No risks are associated with a bladder ultrasound. Unlike X-rays, radiation isn't involved with this test.
Helping Your Child
Some younger kids may be afraid of the machinery used for the ultrasound. Explaining in simple terms how the bladder ultrasound will be conducted and why it's being done can help ease any fear. You can tell your child that the equipment takes pictures of the bladder.
Encourage your child to ask the technician questions and to try and relax during the procedure, as tense muscles can make it more difficult to get accurate results.
If You Have Questions
If you have questions about the bladder ultrasound, speak with your doctor. You can also talk to the technician before the exam.
Reviewed by: Yamini Durani, MD
Date reviewed: March 2012 | <urn:uuid:ae6db770-1b62-4327-a06b-41b65861b875> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nemours.org/service/medical/sedation.html?tab=about&kidshealth=68062 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93199 | 1,032 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Free Bassel, Free Culture
“For Bassel and others around the world who fight for open, a free internet is not a theoretical matter. Real lives hang in the balance.”
Join us in honoring CC Syria lead Bassel Khartabil, who has been in prison in Syria for a year without legal representation.
Photo: Kennisland, CC BY-SA
CC Filmmakers and Festivals Change the Rules
Around the world, CC filmmakers and festival organizers are changing the rules of every step in the process of filmmaking, from writing and shooting to editing, distribution, and monetization. At a time when the mainstream film industry is struggling to redefine and modernize itself, the CC community isn’t waiting up.
Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, CC BY
What is Creative Commons?Creative Commons helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world.
Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical
infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and
How can I license my work?There is no registration to use the Creative Commons licenses. Licensing a work is as simple as selecting which of the six licenses best meets your goals, and then marking your work in some way so that others know that you have chosen to release the work under the terms of that license.
Our license-choosing tool can help you select the right license.
Looking for Creative Works?Looking for music, video, writing, code, or other creative works?
Creative Commons has got you covered. Search for creative work through sources like Google and Flickr right here.
CC Affiliate NetworkPromoting CC Around the World
The CC Affiliate Network consists of 100+ affiliates working in over 70 jurisdictions to support and promote CC activities around the world.
The teams engage in public outreach, community building, translation, research, publicity, and in general, promoting and sharing our mission. | <urn:uuid:fb6ea548-f344-4553-a7c9-3c0513d4b91b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://creativecommons.org/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Casestudies+roadmap | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901733 | 400 | 1.976563 | 2 |
Dan Terry, 64, a man with strong connections with members of a Sequim church, was killed on Aug. 5, along with nine other relief workers.
The group was serving with a Nuristan Eye Camp team in Badakhshan, the most northeastern province of Afghanistan.
The Taliban and another insurgent group claim responsibility for the attack and accused the aid workers of spying and trying to spread Christianity.
Terry and 11 other volunteers for International Assistance Missions were traveling by foot, distributing eyeglasses, toothbrushes, pain relief and prenatal care remotely.
He visited Sequim frequently to see his parents George and Pat Terry, who retired here.
Terry and his wife Seija were last in Sequim August-December 2009, and attended Trinity United Methodist when on leave.
The church donated to his efforts.
Diane Davis, a church member, said Terry was very dedicated to his service in Afghanistan.
"He very much believed in what they were doing there," Davis said.
She spoke to Terry's sister, Ruth, who said he was known throughout Afghanistan for his work.
Shirley Anderson, another church member, had Terry stay in her parents' home while he was here attending his mother's funeral last summer.
She found Terry hesitant to talk about his work, but that he did say he had encounters with the Taliban before.
"He said he was always able to talk his way out of things with them," Anderson said.
"He told them that he was worth more to them alive than dead."
In the few months, he stayed in Sequim, Anderson found Terry to be a good, generous person and very devoted to that part of the world.
Terry began work in Afghanistan in 1971. He specialized in relating to local communities and connecting with aid organizations to the government for improving services and was supported by Global Ministries.
Terry married Seija, a nurse from Finland, in 1976, and returned to the U.S. for graduate work before going back to Afghanistan in 1980.
They continued visits the next 30 years, providing logistical support in community health and development projects in some of the poorest and most remote regions of the country.
"It is almost beyond belief that Dan Terry would be murdered in Afghanistan," said Thomas Kemper, chief executive of Global Ministries.
"He loved the country with a passion and worked tirelessly on behalf of its most marginalized communities."
Terry is survived by his wife, three grown daughters and one granddaughter.
See a press release at www.iam-afghanistan.org for more about the victims.
For more information about a local service, call Trinity United Methodist Church at 683-5367.
The Sequim Gazette is located at 147 W. Washington Street in Sequim.
Business hours are Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Phone 360-683-3311, or toll free at 800-829-5810. FAX 360-683-6670.
For a complete company directory with contact information please click HERE. | <urn:uuid:531ad4ef-f9fa-47ab-9519-416e6d332f7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sequimgazette.com/news/article.exm/2010-08-11_relief_worker_with_sequim_connection_murdered | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983111 | 632 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Updated May 25, 2011
Although they serve only a fraction of the nation’s public school students, charter schools have seized a prominent role in education today. They are at the center of a growing movement to challenge traditional notions of what public education means.
Charter schools are by definition independent public schools. Although funded with taxpayer dollars, they operate free from many of the laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. In exchange for that freedom, they are bound to the terms of a contract, or "charter," that lays out a school’s mission, academic goals, and accountability procedures. State laws set the parameters for charter contracts, which are overseen by a designated charter school authorizer—often the local school district or related agency.
With their relative autonomy, charter schools are seen as a way to provide greater educational choice and innovation within the public school system. Their founders are often teachers, parents, or activists who feel restricted by traditional public schools. In addition, many charters are run by for-profit companies, forming a key component of the privatization movement in education.
Since the first charter school was founded in 1992, shortly after Minnesota approved the first charter-school law, charters have fanned out across the country. According to the Center for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for charters, there were over 5,000 charter schools in 39 states and the District of Columbia by January 2010, and they enrolled more than 1.5 million students. Charters serve the full range of grade levels, often in unusual combinations or spans.
One appeal of charter schools is that they are typically smaller than their more traditional counterparts, advocates say. The average charter school enrollment is 372, compared with about 478 in all public schools, according to the Center for Education Reform. Researchers have linked small schools with higher achievement, more individualized instruction, greater safety, and increased student involvement.
With their relative autonomy, charter schools are also seen as a way to provide greater educational choice and innovation within the public school system. Another attraction is charters’ often specialized and ambitious educational programs. Charters frequently take alternative curricular approaches (e.g., direct instruction or Core Knowledge), emphasize particular fields of study (e.g., the arts or technology), or serve special populations of students (e.g., special education or at-risk students). With the rise of distance learning, a growing number of "cyber" charter schools have also done away with the concept of a bricks-and-mortar school building.
Coupled with aggressive academic goals in charter contracts, such alternative visions of schooling are a motivating force behind the growth of charter schools, the U.S. Department of Education has reported. That growth has been particularly strong in cities. According to the department's “Condition of Education 2011” report, more than 55 percent of public charter schools were in urban settings.
If charter schools’ independence is part of their appeal, however, it is also a source of concern. Though charters must spell out performance goals in their contracts, some observers question how well academics and student achievement in charters are monitored.
A high-profile report from the American Federation of Teachers (2002), for example, argued that many charter school authorizers have failed to hold the administrators and teachers accountable, leaving some students to languish in low-performing schools. A 2011 study by the Center for Reinventing Public Education noted that charter schools’ governing boards often received minimal training
Some observers say that charters, by virtue of their autonomy, can be vulnerable to financial problems and mismanagement. Indeed, the fiscal arrangements of charters can be inherently problematic, in part because, in many states, charters’ access to facilities and start-up funds is limited.
Increasingly, such issues are coming to the attention of state leaders. After a series of well-publicized charter closures and compliance problems, some states began re-examining their charter systems with the aim of giving the schools greater oversight. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) now recommends best practices for authorizers that evaluate and monitor charter schools.
Outside of managerial concerns, some critics have charged that, on a school-by-school basis, charters are more racially segregated than traditional public schools, thus denying students the educational “benefits associated with attending diverse schools” (Civil Rights Project, 2010). Charter supporters have responded that some charters have high concentrations of minority students because demand for schooling alternatives is highest among such students, whom they say are often poorly served by the traditional public school systems (Center for Education Reform, 2008).
A 2010 study by researchers at University of Colorado-Boulder and Western Michigan University found that most charter schools were “divided into either very segregative high-income schools or very segregative low-income schools” compared to their sending districts, and that the pattern had changed little between 2000-01 and 2006-07. They also tended to enroll a lower proportion of special education students and English-language learners. (Miron, Urschel, Mathis, 2010)
Other concerns about charter schools mirror those surrounding their private school choice counterpart—school vouchers. Skeptics worry that charters unfairly divert resources and policy attention from regular public schools. Other observers counter that charters improve existing school systems through choice and competition (Ericson and Silverman, 2001).
Meanwhile, the question of whether charters or traditional public schools do a better job of educating students is still open to debate. The research is highly mixed—in part due the complexities of comparison and wide performance differences among charters.
A case in point: One study by Western Michigan University’s Evaluation Center found that charter schools in Michigan posted significantly lower scores—and less-consistent gains—on state standardized tests than their host districts (Miron and Horn, 2000). Yet, in a later evaluation of charters in Pennsylvania, the center found that "student achievement appears to be a source of modest strength" for the schools, with some making steady test-score gains. That study points to best-practices evaluation and stronger accountability as ways to expand charter schools’ gains (Miron et al., 2002).
Taken together, other studies paint an equally varied portrait. Studies by the Goldwater Institute and California State University-Los Angeles found that students in charter schools show higher growth in achievement than their counterparts in traditional public schools (Solmon et al., 2004; Slovacek et al., 2001) A major state-commissioned study by the RAND corp. (2003), meanwhile, concluded that charters in California were making solid improvements in student achievement over time and generally keeping pace with other public schools on tests scores after adjustment to reflect students’ demographic backgrounds.
By contrast, however, a 2003 study of charters schools in Ohio found them falling short of traditional public schools on the majority of comparable performance measures, concluding that charter schools "were doing no better than low-performing traditional public schools with similar demographic characteristics" (Legislative Office of Education Oversight). Likewise, a 2002, study of North Carolina charter schools by the North Carolina Center for Public Policy concluded that charters schools were lagging behind traditional public schools in achievement growth and had not proven themselves to be any "better at serving at-risk students."
Still, that report allows that there is significant variation among charters: "Some schools have delivered on the charter school promise, and some clearly have not," the researchers found. Some charter proponents would argue that such individual examples of achievement may in themselves go a long way toward validating the charter experiment, representing successful new models of schooling that states and parents can build on.
More recent studies are also split. A 2010 study by Mathematica Policy Research, of Princeton, N.J., found students’ gains in mathematics after three years in a charter school run by the Knowledge Is Power Program , or KIPP, are large enough in about half of the 22 schools studies to significantly narrow race- and income-based achievement gaps among students. Another 2010 study, commissioned by the federal government and also conducted by Mathematica, found that students who won lotteries to attend 36 charter middle schools across the country performed, on average, no better in mathematics and reading than their peers who lost out in the random admissions process and enrolled in nearby regular public schools.
Access selected articles, e-newsletters and more!
The EPE Research Center's monthly newsletter provides the latest in education policy and analysis.
- K-12 Teachers
- The International Educator, Multiple Locations
- Perspectives Charter Schools, Chicago, IL
- Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction
- Lake Forest School District 67 & 115, Lake Forest, IL
- Elementary Principal
- Forest Grove School District, Forest Grove, OR
- Princeton Public School District, Princeton, NJ | <urn:uuid:aae529db-fad1-486d-8b22-b068b28e26be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/charter-schools/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961228 | 1,823 | 3.78125 | 4 |
Scranton should see 150 new trees planted in spring
Sections of Scranton should have 150 new trees planted by the first week of April, thanks to a $50,000 federal grant.
Tony Santoli, volunteer city forester, said an Office of Economic and Community Development grant will allow him to accept bids by the end of the month.
South Scranton, Tripp Park and West Scranton will see the additions. While there will be trees planted along sidewalks, there also will be a focus on parks, such as Connell Park in South Side, much to the relief of many residents with whom Mr. Santoli has spoken.
"People have complained that there is no shade," Mr. Santoli said, adding that the dog park there will get 10 trees.
South Side Neighborhood Watch Commander Steve Wallis worries that the small size of the initial saplings might make them vulnerable to vandalism at first but supports the idea.
"Trees are always a good thing," Mr. Wallis said. "They improve the air quality."
The species that Mr. Santoli plans to plant are numerous, ranging from October glory maples to Eastern redbuds to Japanese tree lilacs. The parks will receive a lot of red oaks.
"That will provide a lot of shade," Mr. Santoli said.
Karin Foster, president of the West Scranton Hyde Park Neighborhood Watch, said the additional trees will fit in well with an initiative she has been trying to tackle - securing an Elm Street designation in sections of Hyde Park.
The Elm Street designation would include from the 500 block of North Main Avenue to the 500 block of South Main Avenue, as well as five or six blocks on either side, she said.
"It would definitely tie in with what we're doing there," she said.
She said she would know more about the potential Elm Street designation in the next few months.
As for the incoming trees, Mr. Santoli said there will be a pre-bid meeting on Jan. 23 at 10 a.m. in the Governor's Room in City Hall.
Contact the writer: firstname.lastname@example.org, @jkohutTT on Twitter | <urn:uuid:a4fe9548-b3ac-47be-bffd-9fcd4400611c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/scranton-should-see-150-new-trees-planted-in-spring-1.1429333 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966052 | 461 | 1.5 | 2 |
Lakewood's new Garden Mausoleum digs into a hillside site and takes architecture to new heights.
When it set out to build a new mausoleum in 2007, Lakewood Cemetery Association, the nonprofit that manages the 250-acre historic cemetery near Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, could have commissioned another dull granite box.
Instead it hired top-notch architects Joan Soranno and John Cook of HGA, told them to explore new design ideas and gave them two requirements: Respect the cemetery landscape and use only premium materials -- bronze, glass and stone.
The result: a stunning modern mausoleum that is a work of transcendent architecture. Its reception room, small chapel and light-filled burial rooms will comfort the bereaved and serve the cemetery well into the future. Its design should inspire a new generation of funerary architecture.
As part of the cemetery's Memorial Day event, the Lakewood Garden Mausoleum will be open for tours Sunday and Monday, with the architects present from noon to 3 p.m. each day.
Soranno and Cook had never designed a mausoleum. It isn't the kind of commission that comes along often. But their previous efforts -- from working with Frank Gehry on the Weisman Museum to their award-winning Bigelow Chapel at United Theological Seminary in New Brighton -- had prepared them for the task.
They collaborated on the $30 million project with landscape architects Liz Vizza and the Halvorson Design Partnership of Boston -- who had done a new Lakewood master plan in 2003 -- mausoleum consultant Tom Woodworth and M.A. Mortenson Construction.
Soranno and Cook researched the project to the hilt, winning the commission in a national competition.
"We took a tour of death," Soranno said of their visits to noted cemeteries and mausoleums nationwide.
Unlike most architects, who must juggle multiple projects and work as fast as they can, Soranno and Cook lead a studio within HGA that allows intense focus on one design. "I worked only on this project for 3 1/2 years," Soranno said.
In the work partnership, Soranno is the design genius, Cook the technical wiz. They are also married. In fact, they got married in Lakewood Chapel while the mausoleum project was underway.
That red-domed chapel, designed in 1910 by Harry Wild Jones, set a high mark for the new building. Its Byzantine-style exterior, with its rough rock and heavy geometry, and Charles Lamb's masterful mosaic interior of angels and grieving female figures, combine to create a beauty that touches the depths of grief.
Like the chapel, the new mausoleum resembles a geode; its stony exterior of rough-faced gray Cold Spring granite (two kinds, to get the right kind of sparkle) opens to a luminescent interior.
"The outer shell represents the roughness of life, the white interior represents the eternal," Soranno said.
The play of light and dark is maximized by the building's brilliant interaction with its site. Only one-third of the structure is above ground; the other two-thirds, including the rooms for crypts for caskets and niches for ashes, is burrowed into the south-facing hillside under a green roof.
"We wanted to make the building more intimate -- and wanted the landscape to dominate," Soranno said.
The rough gray building rises from its grassy pedestal like a force of nature. Into its facade is cut a white marble mosaic entry whose sweeping curves invite visitors to the recessed doors. The mosaic pattern of intersecting circles speaks of the eternal.
Inside, two huge windows capture Lakewood's beauty: An angled view of the domed chapel shows off its powerful volumes; straight on, two obelisks frame a monument.
Burial rooms awash in light
The interior of rift-sawn mahogany walls and black-and-white marble floors is dignified yet warm. The layout of angled and curving walls subtly leads visitors to the building's activity points: a reception room on the main floor -- the first such space for the busy cemetery -- and the small chapel or committal room downstairs on the garden level.
Also downstairs is the wing containing 12 serenely beautiful burial rooms. Far from cold and dark, they are washed by natural light. Rooms on the outside row overlook the cemetery's sunken garden, which HGA and Halvorson redesigned to be more serene, and feature large windows framing autumn blaze maples. On the inside row, asymmetrical cone-shaped skylights create a compelling sense of mystery.
Soranno said she learned three things in the course of designing these rooms. Never mix crypts and niches; some religions are against cremation. Provide variety for different tastes -- thus each room has a different color of onyx floor -- rose, green or honey. And there's no need to install sprinklers, since fire code considers these spaces to be storage.
The curving white mosaic motif of the entry recurs on the outside of the building's garden level and in the slit windows of the womb-like chapel. This unusual curved form shows up again in the chapel's ceiling, where its downward arc "feels like the weight of the Earth," Soranno said.
There is no science to designing a building so sublime that it comforts the grieving. Certain music cuts to that core where grief resides. At Lakewood Garden Mausoleum, architecture reaches those depths, as well. | <urn:uuid:62a8bc0d-3b30-474c-a057-9e434e467776> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/stageandarts/153819085.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935 | 1,172 | 1.78125 | 2 |
No matter the race for which you are training, the long run is a key part of your weekly training. If you’re planning to run your first 5k or your 50th marathon, the major goal of the long run is the same: To improve your endurance and make yourself better able to complete the race distance. That’s a large task by itself, but as training becomes more advanced and you really want to “race” a long distance (we’ll focus on the marathon in this post for simplicity), the long run has multiple additional training effects, depending on how you approach it:
- Training the body to burn primarily fatty acids as fuel (Long Slow Distance)
- Training the digestive system to process additional fuel for glucose replacement (Fueled Long Run)
- Training the body to maintain race pace under simulated race conditions (Long Run with Quality)
Long Slow Distance: When most people think long run, this is what they think. And for good reason. Most of your long runs (especially as you add distance) should be of the easy variety. The pace is generally a minute or more slower than marathon goal pace, and the only real goal is to complete the run. However, I differentiate this type of run from others in that my LSD runs are minimally fueled. If the effort is low enough (generally at or below 150 bpm for most adult runners), the body will burn almost entirely fatty acids as fuel, so none is needed during the run to replace what is used (your muscles have a huge stock of fatty acids to burn, unlike glycogen which only lasts several minutes before it needs to be replaced). The only “catch” is that fatty acids need a small amount of glucose to be burned (based on the metabolic process, where mitochondria convert substrate into ATP for energy…blah blah blah…just remember that fat only burns in a glucose/glycogen flame). So I either start LSD runs well-fueled or I take some calories early in the run. The most important thing here is the effort: EASY.
Fueled Long Run: In addition to general endurance, a fueled long run trains your stomach to deal with processing calories on the run. The only way to avoid cramping or getting sick during a race, and also to ensure that you can replace the glycogen stores you are going to be using in a race, is to take calories on the run. The type and schedule for consumption is very runner-specific, so you need to experiment until you find something that works for you (I personally like to practice with what I know will be offered on the course, so that I have the option of not carrying my own calories during the race). The pace/effort is not a concern here, the focus is on learning your schedule and getting accustomed to it.
Long Run with Quality: This is the final piece in the puzzle. For a marathon, these runs should consist of some easy running (to get the body fatigued), then some work at goal race pace (or faster, depending on the approach) at the end of the run. I have my athletes run 5k segments at goal pace in the second half of a 20+ mile run, or some mile repeats at half marathon pace. All these runs serve to train your body to use all available fueling systems, and they also train the most important part of a marathoners body: the brain. The most important lesson for race day is: “I can still run hard when I feel tired.” These runs should also feature calories, just like in the race, so that you know how your body reacts to food in your stomach when you are running race pace.
Make sure you are integrating all these long runs when you are focused on a long race where a PR is on the line. When you get to the starting line, make sure that all the tools you need for the race are sharp and ready to go! | <urn:uuid:831916d6-2523-4b76-9bd7-8254422ac333> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailymile.com/blog/coach/when-to-fuel-during-long-runs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953824 | 811 | 2.625 | 3 |
The Learning Process
We know that children develop in many different areas as they grow – cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally. We also know that when children develop skills in one dimension, learning occurs in other dimensions as well. A wonderful example that demonstrates how these diverse dimensions integrate is presented in Planning for Success. Consider the following:
“Think about a six-month-old girl who sees a brightly colored ball across the room. First the child notices the ball (vision) and begins to crawl toward the ball (gross motor). She knows from having played with it before that it rolls and bounces (cognition). The child reaches out and grabs the ball with one hand (fine motor), then squeals with delight (emotion) and says “Ba!” (language). The child sits back down, then extends her hand and tosses the ball to you (motor and social). You catch the ball and can tell from the child’s face that she is very pleased with herself (self-esteem)!”
(Hardin, Belinda J., et al, Planning for Success, Kaplan Press, Lewisville, NC, 1997, p. 13.)
At O2B Kids College, we recognize the value of integrated learning, and incorporate this focus into our daily planning. The following Learning Centers provide the “places” that this amazing cross-functional learning takes place.
O2B Kids College offers a wonderful assortment of distinct play areas in each classroom. Specific activity areas include the following:
Art provides children with ways to communicate their experiences, ideas, and feelings. As children work on their creations, they are also strengthening the small muscles of their hands and refining their eye-hand coordination.
Building Things Area
Blocks are a way for children to learn about size, shape, color, balancing, planning, problem solving, counting, and measuring. Group block play also promotes sharing and stimulates imagination.
Cognitive and Language Activities
Provides children with opportunities to investigate a concept in depth, to understand how objects are alike and different, to observe, categorize, and develop ideas about patterns, sequences, and outcomes, and to learn about past, present, and future.
Dramatic Play Activities
Dramatic play stimulates language development, imagination, and social skills.
Fine Motor Activities
Fine motor or manipulative activities help improve eye-hand coordination and strengthen the muscles that are critical for writing. These activities also develop problem-solving skills, and teach children to match, sort, and identify parts of a whole.
Gross Motor Activities
Young children need large muscle activity on a daily basis with both indoor and outdoor experiences. Time spent using large muscles during interactive play not only helps develop coordination, it helps develop communication and team-building skills as well.
Early Literacy Activities
Exposing children to books at an early age teaches them to love reading and to turn to books for pleasure and information. Listening to, telling, and acting out stories provides children with opportunities to develop listening and language skills while sharing experiences with others.
When children express themselves through music, they are learning to use their bodies and voices in a variety of enjoyable ways. Differences in sound and pitch stimulate their imaginations. Dance and movement provide opportunities for exercise, sharing space, and unique learning.
Sand and Water Activities
Sand and water activities are valuable ways for children to explore and manipulate their world. They provide opportunities to learn math and science concepts, such as conservation of volume, and to share their ideas about cause and effect. While they are enjoying the way the sand feels and changes, the children can use their creativity to plan without fear of failure.
Science and Discovery Activities
Children are naturally eager to learn about the world in which they live. A science/discovery center provides opportunities for them to refine their observation skills, test out their own theories about how and why things work, learn about animals and plants, and wonder about the natural environment.
Source: Hardin, Belinda J., Ed., A New Planning Guide: To the Preschool Curriculum, Chapel Hill Training-Outreach Project, Chapel Hill, NC and Kaplan Corporation, Lewisville, NC, 1994, p. ix-xii.
The world begins to open up at this very curious age. As language rapidly develops, our teachers introduce new songs, stories, and picture books to stimulate word recognition and articulation. Children begin to learn important independence skills at this age, so the classroom is set up to provide children with many opportunities for self-initiated repetition that instills a feeling of success in each child. Although the concept of sharing begins to develop, the classroom provides duplicate materials and toys which helps avoid conflict among young toddlers. Movement, movement, and more movement is part of every day. Whether the focus is on large muscle groups and outside play, or small muscle groups used to paint, build, or put together puzzles, your child is actively engaged by our caring staff.
The Preschool Schedule
A schedule of activities guides each day. Activity periods combine teacher-directed and child-initiated offerings, and include small-group, large-group, outside, eating, resting, and special event periods. A consistent schedule gives children confidence, and allows them to safely anticipate all daily transitions. Daily routines are flexible enough, however, to adapt to the spontaneous events and unexpected fascinations that children have to a particular unit. This flexibility not only creates happy children, but it maximizes the learning process. | <urn:uuid:cdbaa906-33ac-4a9c-8621-87a24fc209bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.o2bkids.com/Philosophy--Goals.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945147 | 1,130 | 4.03125 | 4 |
Our tax code is about the most unfair, complex, expensive to comply with and anti-competitive code we could create. One would think it could not get more burdensome and illogical. Unfortunately, it can.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases, affecting every single American, will take effect if Congress and the President do not act by the end of this year. President Obama would further complicate this by proposing relief for only one-year and for only some Americans. Questions are swirling about how the tax penalties for noncompliance with President Obama's Health Care Law will be imposed and the law's other costs. With the nation's record debt, the focus should be on tax reform that will generate investment, capital and jobs, not growth-killing tax increases.
Estimates indicate the average family pays nearly 40 percent of its income in local, state and federal taxes. In a family where both parents work, one is essentially working for the government. Now, Americans face potential federal tax increases, including increases in all income tax rates to as high as nearly 40 percent, increases on capital gains and dividends taxes, an Alternative Minimum Tax expansion and a death tax increase to as high as 55 percent.
President Obama's push for temporary tax relief for some, but not all, Americans would have broad effects. Temporary tax policy compounds problems by confronting American families and businesses with continued uncertainty. Uncertainty makes it impossible to make hiring, investing and personal plans for the future. This proposal stifles job creation and affects investments and savings:
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the latest White House tax proposals would raise taxes on nearly 1 million small business owners.
Fifty-three percentof all small business income reported on individual tax returns will be affected by this policy.
Twenty-five percentof employees of small businesses in the country will see their company's financial strength damaged, with the accompanying diminishment of their wages and benefits.
Economists agree that in a weak economy raising taxes is one of the worst things to do. President Obama agreed two years ago when the economy was growing at 3.1 percent. Now, he is calling for a tax increase when growth has slowed to just over 2 percent. In addition to the pending income tax increases, we face Health Care Law tax increases--including individual and employer mandate tax penalties, taxes on the manufacture of medical devices, an investment income surtax and a Medicare payroll tax increase among a laundry list of others. These taxes further the burden on Americans and add complexity to our tax law, which increases compliance costs.
Hopefully, all Americans are paying close attention to the impacts raising taxes on tens of thousands of job-creating businesses will have on our economy. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal gross debt totals nearly 99 percentof gross domestic product. This growing debt reduces national savings, and leads to higher interest rates, more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment. Stifling private sector growth through tax increases will make matters worse.
Over the last few years, we have seen more spending, more debt, more taxes and more regulations from the federal government. Recent administration tax proposals do not simplify the tax code; they make it more unpredictable. I have been working for years, through my committee assignments, the president's Fiscal Commission and the Gang of Six,to craft solutions for comprehensive tax reformand welcome continued engagement from Idahoans. We must curtail out-of-control deficit spending and institute comprehensive long-term tax and fiscal reform to get out of this financial hole. | <urn:uuid:b2903615-206c-4516-871d-f61b6c42774a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://votesmart.org/public-statement/731622/senator-mike-crapos-guest-column-making-the-tax-code-less-fair-more-complex | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955308 | 712 | 2.3125 | 2 |
December 1 Brings Countdown to Non-Apocalypse
It’s December 1, 2012, and many around the world are counting down to the purported Mayan Apocalypse, the end of the indigenous group’s Long Count calendar.
Never mind that revelations during the past year alone have put ancient Mayans firmly in touch with the future, most notably with the May 2012 discovery of a scribe’s wall covered with murals plotting Venus’s orbit 7,000 years out.
NASA has been doing its best to debunk apocalypse myths all year, and now it has taken it a step further: The space agency is now warning of a dark side to apocalyptic rumors, cautioning that while those who don’t believe in the rumors may consider it a joke, there are some who are mentally vulnerable, “frightened children and suicidal teens who truly fear the world may come to an end,” LiveScience.com reported on November 28 after an online NASA session over Google+ designed to quell doomsday fears.
Anyone worried can go to NASA’s 24-hour apocalypse-debunking web page. The 21st of December will bring a regular, garden-variety winter solstice, NASA said.
"There is no true issue here," said NASA astrobiologist David Morrison, of the agency’s Ames Research Center, during the NASA Google+ Hangout session. "This is just a manufactured fantasy."
What does end on the 21st is the Mayan calendar cycle the 13th b’ak’tun. But for the Mayans it would be no more significant than flipping from December to January is for us. Although Maya scholars agree that the ancient Maya would not have seen this day as apocalyptic, Morrison said at the session that correspondence is streaming in from people, especially youth, who are worried about the end of the world. Some can’t eat or sleep, while others are suicidal, he said.
"While this is a joke to some people and a mystery to others, there is a core of people who are truly concerned," Morrison said. One needn't look any further than last weekend, when France banned access to Pic de Bugarach, a mountain believed to be a Mayan doomsday refuge, because of the number of people trying to camp out there.
A final irony comes from the fact that the Mayans did not predict doom and gloom, two professors at Southern Methodist University (SMU) said in a recent lecture. That was more the Aztecs' purview, said professors Michael Callaghan and Brigitte Kovacevich in a talk at the Dallas university. The SMU newspaper Pegasus News noted that the Aztecs "made apocalyptic and fatalistic predictions for the future" and that "The idea of large-scale natural disasters causing the end of the world comes entirely from Aztec tradition."
Moreover, the Mayans themselves changed the calendar at one point, the professors said, making the exact day and year of this non-event difficult to pinpoint. Thus, as Kovacevich pointed out, according to Pegasus News, “For you Doomsday preppers, if the 21st rolls around and the world hasn’t ended, don’t worry because it could still happen."
However, things like rogue planets are not only unlikely but also pale in comparison to real threats, such as the slow bake of climate change, with its accelerating ice-sheet melt and rising oceans, NASA scientists said. | <urn:uuid:8f19f431-9d09-42fa-bdc6-b998efdec000> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/december-1-brings-countdown-non-apocalypse-146021 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95243 | 719 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Ankylosing spondylitis is a form of joint inflammation
(arthritis) that is long-lasting (chronic) and most often affects the spine.
Ankylosing spondylitis commonly causes pain and stiffness, with swelling and
limited motion in the low back, middle back, neck, hips, chest wall, and
Ankylosing spondylitis is a specific disease within a
family of diseases called spondyloarthropathies. The cause of the disease is
not known. In severe cases the affected joints in the spine fuse together,
causing severe stiffness in the back. Other joints can be stiff and painful,
including those in the shoulders, wrists, hands, knees, ankles, and feet.
Complications of ankylosing spondylitis may include inflammation of the colored
part of the eye (iris), called iritis, or difficulty breathing due to curving
of the upper body and stiffening of the chest wall. Inflammation from the
condition may also affect the heart valves. In rare cases of severe disease,
the artery called the aorta, the lungs, the kidneys, and the digestive tract
can also be affected.
Ankylosing spondylitis usually affects
people younger than about 35 and can run in families. It is more common in men
than in women.
Although there is no cure, treatment can usually
control symptoms and prevent the condition from getting worse. Most people are
able to continue to work and do normal daily activities.
May 11, 2011
Anne C. Poinier, MD - Internal Medicine & Stanford M. Shoor, MD - Rheumatology
How this information was developed to help you make better health decisions.
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2013 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
We are happy to take your appointment request over the phone, or, you may fill out an online request form.
Disclaimer: The information on this website is for general informational purposes only and SHOULD NOT be relied upon as a substitute for sound professional medical advice, evaluation or care from your physician or other qualified health care provider. | <urn:uuid:5c536e54-bfbb-4da4-b4ad-802425f7f49b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wakehealth.edu/Health-Encyclopedia/HE-Content.htm?hwid=sta123240 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914131 | 479 | 3.0625 | 3 |
The unglamorous truth is that the wall is only visible from low orbit under a specific set of weather and lighting conditions. And many other structures that are less spectacular from an earthly vantage point¡ªdesert roads, for example¡ªappear more prominent from an orbital perspective.
The dates back decades in 1932, Cartoon claimed that the wall is "the mightiest work of man, the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon." The belief persisted into the Space Age.Since Neil Armstrong returned from the moon in 1969, he has been repeatedly asked whether he could see it.
His answer was relayed in a recent NASA Johnson Space Center oral history: He saw continents, lakes and splotches of white on blue. But he could not make out any man-made structures from the lunar surface, which averages a distance of 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Earth.
So just how visible is the Great Wall from low Earth orbit, at an altitude that begins around 100 miles (160 kilometers) up? Not very. Although sections near Beijing, China's capital, have been restored for tourists, in many areas the structure is crumbling. Where it still stands, the wall's mixture of stone and clay blends into the surrounding land.
"I have spent a lot of time looking at the Earth from space, including numerous flights over China, and I never saw the wall," asserts former NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, who flew on five space shuttle missions from 1985 to 1996. "The problem is that the human eye is most sensitive to contrast, and the color of the wall is not that different from the ground on either side of it."
Hoffman, now an aerospace engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, failed to make out the Egyptian pyramids for the same reason. But he could identify roads, airport runways and irrigation ditches simply because they stood out in their environments.
Some U.S. astronauts, notably Eugene Cernan and Ed Lu, have said they've seen the wall from low orbit. But it tends to show up only in certain lighting conditions. When the sun is low on the horizon, for example, the wall casts extended shadows that make it possible to discern its silhouette.
In 2004 American astronaut Leroy Chiao snapped a photo from the International Space Station of a swath of Inner Mongolia, around 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Beijing, while the sun's angle was favorable. NASA experts later confirmed that the photo appears to show the wall. But Chiao admitted that he wasn't sure what he was seeing from space.
Machines can do a better job. Low-orbit satellites have sensors that can penetrate through haze and clouds, making it easier for them to produce clear images. But, as with the naked eye, identifying the wall is hardly a guarantee.
Moderate-resolution satellites, like the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) two operating Landsat land observation satellites that orbit 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth's surface, can typically only pick up the structure under specific weather conditions, says Ronald Beck, program information specialist with the USGS's Land Remote Sensing Program. "We have satellite images where snow covers the fields near the wall and snow has been cleared on the wall, and that allows us to see the wall," Beck says. "The key is contrast."
Often, identifying the rampart in satellite images requires a degree of sleuth work. In populated areas, Beck says, USGS scientists pinpoint sections of the wall by looking for parking lots and pathways. In more remote areas, they may scan for breaks in the vegetation surrounding the structure. But those techniques are hardly foolproof; at many points, the vegetation grows up and over the wall.
For the Chinese, the wall's visibility from space has long been a point of pride. When "taikonaut" Yang Liwei, China's first man in space, returned from the 14-orbit Shenzhou 5 mission in 2003 and admitted to reporters that he had not seen the Great Wall, online forums exploded with disappointment. The Ministry of Education even moved to revise its elementary school textbooks, which had long claimed the ancient barricade was visible.
Since then, a debate has raged in China, with scholars grasping at evidence that might settle the question of how great the wall really is. Chinese Academy of the Sciences Institute of Remote Sensing Application professor Wei Chengjie, who appeared on a national television special devoted to the issue in 2006, says more research is needed. "We need to carry out more tests and improve astronaut training. Some astronauts have said that they didn't see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. A shuttle passes by so quickly."
In the meantime, however, China's search for clarity is coming up against a modern complication. As the country industrializes and its factories belch out noxious gases, the wall further fades from view. "The biggest problem nowadays is the pall of pollution which exists over much of China," Hoffman says. "It effectively makes it impossible to see almost anything." | <urn:uuid:334b1ffd-a8fe-4100-b2fa-ea181fe94f0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beijing-travels.com/great_wall_of_china/visible_from_space.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958653 | 1,046 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Symposium on Land/Tree Tenure Rights and Benefit Sharing to mark International Year of Forests 2011
As part of activities towards the celebration of the International Year of Forests 2011, a one-day symposium took place in Accra, on 4th August 2011. The symposium, dubbed ‘Securing Land/Tree Tenure Rights and Benefit Sharing Towards REDD Implementation in Ghana’, was an initiative of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, with facilitation support from The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Growing Forest Partnerships (GFP).
The seminar brought together a broad spectrum of stakeholders from all the ten regions of the country, representing government, civil society, private sector, traditional authorities, communities and development partners. It provided a good platform for discussion on the challenges with regards to the current land and tree tenure regimes in Ghana and their implications for benefit sharing and REDD-plus implementation. Key recommendations and options for overcoming these challenges were identified after deliberations on issues from different stakeholder perspectives such as government, civil society, legal, traditional/cultural, private sector and gender.
The event was honoured with the presence of the Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources Hon. Henry Ford Kamel and was chaired by Stewart Maginnis, Director of Environment and Development Group at IUCN. Gretchen Walters, PACO Regional Coordinator for the Forest Programme at IUCN was also in Accra to offer her support. For more information contact Saadia Bobtoya, the IUCN REDD Project Officer in Ghana at Saadia.Bobtoya@iucn.org | <urn:uuid:2d357b78-fbf0-43f0-bfa4-8fcb7134356e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iucn.org/fr/propos/union/secretariat/bureaux/paco/paco_ghana/?8021/Symposium-on-LandTree-Tenure-Rights-and-Benefit-Sharing-to-mark-International-Year-of-Forests-2011&add_comment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92505 | 331 | 1.695313 | 2 |
I recently read the book “New Evangelicalism“, by Paul Richard Smith, founder of Calvary Chapel Victorville CA. Paul Smith is a leader in the Calvary Chapel movement founded by his brother Chuck Smith, who also wrote the foreword to Paul Smith’s book.
The book gives a brief history of modern Protestantism beginning with modernism where scripture became critically analyzed through the filters of the philosophies of 19th and early 20th century humanist intellectuals. This humanistic intellectual analysis of the scriptures became known as “higher criticism”. I took one of those silly “higher criticism” courses in college myself.
I will give you my own take on modernism; most of what I will say about modernism in Christianity does not come from Paul Smith’s book, but from what I read in his book, I think Paul Smith would agree with most of it.
Modernism is also known as liberalism and it has a low view of scriptures. They do not believe the scriptures came from God as inerrant doctrine. Educated men and so-called “science” became the judge of scriptures. Man and his intellect decided which scriptures contain truth and which were just creative writings of men.
Man with his “higher criticism” became the judge of God’s inerrant word, even though man did not have the knowledge or the spiritual wisdom to take that role upon himself. There is overwhelming proof that we still have the same scriptures that Jesus read and Jesus said that every jot and tittle of the law and the prophets would be fulfilled (Mt 5:18). That fact carries little weight with the critics in modernism. After all, “higher criticism” really exists to discredit the scriptures.
The modernists have said that the Bible is full of errors and contradictions but that claim itself is just the conjecture of critics. Humankind did not and does not have the required knowledge to make such a judgmental statement. When new discoveries were found over time they always supported what the Bible said and not the critics. The Bible is always proven correct but the best reasoning of man trying to discredit the Bible always turns out to have its facts wrong.
Christian apologists have since given reasonable answers to anything that the critics of inerrancy have brought up. Nevertheless, they simply chose to ignore reasonable explanations because they would rather believe that the Bible is just writings of men and a work of man rather than the very word of God.
The only thing inerrant to most modernists is their own low view of scripture. In their mind scripture might be inspired by God but probably no more inspired than the writings of later Church theologians.
Which begs the question, was God’s word to man complete after the Apostles and the Holy Spirit appointed witnesses of Jesus died, or would there continue to be progressive revelation within the Church? This question came up early in Church history with the early Gnostics that were claiming to have received special knowledge from God. Much of what they were claiming was obvious heresy that conflicted with books that were already widely accepted as scripture in the churches. So the Church refuted Gnosticism and other heresies with the Jewish scriptures and the writings of the apostles and direct witnesses that wrote of Jesus.
To keep out heresy the Church determined that the Church needed to decide which books that were widely circulating among the churches would be accepted as scripture. The Church believed that the Holy Spirit guided them through this endeavor and the end result of that effort was the Canon. The Holy Canon actually fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 2:16, when the sword of God’s mouth (the word) fought against the heresies that Jesus said He hated at the Church identified with Pergamos.
There would be progressive revelation in the Church but it would not come through new revelation of fallible men. It would come from those that obtained the wisdom and understanding to be able to expound on God’s inerrant written word. Nevertheless, many in modernism in recent times have chosen the philosophies of men over scripture. The Popes of the last few centuries even declared themselves to be infallible in matters of Church doctrine.
Many in modernism reject anything supernatural. They have a form of godliness but they deny God’s power to keep the word of God inerrant. Most in modernism see nothing supernatural happening in creation. With these people, God only works in His creation through the works of men of good will. They think humans can evolve toward their higher nature as images of God and work to bring back paradise lost through their own efforts. The modernist thinks that God is somewhere outside of creation, waiting for man to solve the problems in His creation, through fallen man’s basic goodness and intellect. It really is a pretty silly concept.
Modernism took the words of God and made the words meet man’s litmus test to determine which words would be accepted as truth and which would not. That made fallible men the judge of the inerrant autographs of God. They have no excuse, because the many manuscripts found over time overwhelmingly prove that the scriptures have not changed from Jesus’ time and Jesus Himself verified that the scripture He quoted was the very words of God.
Why is it that some men can believe in a risen savior and a Holy Spirit led Church, but they will not believe that this same Holy Spirit could keep the scriptures inerrant? I bring this up because as Paul Smith documents in his book, all major heretical movements started when people departed from believing that scripture was inerrant.
The modernists or liberals with their higher criticisms took over the mainline denominations. Then denominational doctrine and traditions of men trumped scripture in most mainline institutions and churches. The liberal churches are full of ritual and traditions of men and most of the lay people have lost the meaning of why they started the rituals and traditions in the first place. You very seldom will find members of these churches getting any spiritual truth or guidance from the Bible; they get everything from their denomination or clergy.
Of course not all Christians agreed with those embracing modernism. Many in Christendom still believed that the Bible was inerrant and they split off and formed new denominations. Any common sense literal reading of the scriptures readily produced certain fundamentals of the faith, so most of the Christians that held to biblical inerrancy became identified as fundamentalists.
Over time there was division over certain emphases on scriptures among fundamental believers; there were also those fundamentalists that became obsessed over certain social practices that they thought were uniquely sinful. Many Christians that believed in inerrancy did not agree with the legalistic control freaks that were giving fundamentalism a bad name so they started looking for a new name to rally around. For reasons given in Smith’s book, people soon started calling themselves Evangelicals.
The early Evangelicals believed that scripture was inerrant but later the word inerrant was rejected by some and replaced with the word infallible (which means different things to different people). Nevertheless, all still wanted to be identified as Evangelicals, as do the postmodern rejectors of biblical inerrancy today. The history of the Evangelical movement is well documented in Paul Smith’s book.
The big left turn in the Evangelical movement started in Bible teaching seminaries like Fuller Theological Seminary that originally taught that the Bible was inerrant. Paul Smith mainly documents the devolution into new evangelicalism at Fuller Seminary (it also happened elsewhere). He gives the history how Fuller Seminary over one lifespan went from teaching Bible inerrancy to postmodernism (where truth is relative and truth is whatever the consensus of the group says it is).
By the 21st century, church marketing techniques rather than evangelism and salvation of the lost became the popular way to try to bring a postmodern generation into the churches. The mastermind behind this humanistic marketing strategy for churches was Peter Drucker. He was not a Christian. He got his fame as a management Guru to large corporation. Rick Warren and others were mentored by Peter Drucker and the seeker-friendly market-driven churches were the end result of that.
Drucker thought that mega-churches were the ideal model to build humanistic communities. Rick Warren said that Peter Drucker was his mentor for 20 years. It is obvious to many that the seeker-friendly church growth model originated from Peter Drucker. Rick Warren and Bill Hybells were the two most successful people in bringing this seeker-friendly movement to thousands of churches. The churches were modeled to attract a postmodern generation that rejected the traditional evangelical Christian message.
In order to attract that postmodern generation the seeker Gurus removed everything that people might consider negative or objectionable from the Sunday service. The Gospel that taught that man’s sin required repentance and salvation through the work of Jesus at the cross would no longer be preached on Sunday. Instead it was replaced with feel good and self-help humanistic messages and entertainment eye candy. During the week the churches would offer every program that would appeal to the community. The postmodern seekers soon took over the churches with their self-centered and humanistic pragmatism and relativism and many believers in Bible inerrancy decided or were told to go down the road.
Paul Smith on page 12 in his introduction says:
The Devil is truly in the details. My objective is to show how interwoven the connections are among Fuller Seminary, the new evangelicals, Rick Warren and Peter Drucker, the Emergent church, and a postmodern America that has drifted far from Christian origins. This documentation is staggering and sobering. The subtle progression of unbiblical ideas is shocking.
I think the book justifiably targets Rick Warren. He has spread error throughout many denominations. He poses as an inerrant Bible believer to Baptists but promotes a postmodern gospel of humanistic works to the world and he has become unequally yoked with those in demonic religions. The history of Fuller Seminary and how it got to be the postmodern institution that it now is today, is extremely well documented in this book. I think “New Evangelicalism” meets Paul Smith’s quoted objectives above.
Rick Warren is linked with globalist endeavors and globalist interfaith foundations but he never uses his international platform to give out the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. He also attacks fundamentalists as a danger to the world and Rick Warren believes and has taught that the study of Bible prophecy is a diversion or a waste of time. However, the Bible sternly warned people to watch for Jesus and it also warned that people saying and doing such things as the postmodernists are doing would be evidence that we were near the Lord’s coming.
Rick Warren even brings pagans into his church to teach Christians how to live. Warren is a CFR globalist and he sits on the board of Tony Blair’s Interfaith Foundation. He does not proselytize to those in other religions. He does all this while subverting half the churches in the Southern Baptist Convention and churches in many other denominations through his purpose driven church program that waters down the gospel message. Now he seems to be on a purpose driven agenda to get Christians to believe in religious pluralism and to produce social works rather than Christians making any effort to bring those trapped in the bondage of demonic religions to Christ.
From my experience in the Southern Baptist Denomination, I know that ten times more people have read through Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” book than have ever read through the Bible. I wrote about the purpose driven seeker agenda years ago. Many pastors are still downloading his purpose driven sermons and delivering them on Sunday. I know what the Bible says about double-minded men and Rick Warren has proved to me that he is a double-minded man over-and-over again, but few in Christian leadership care.
Now Warren is actively endorsing postmodern authors and pastors in the heretical Emergent Church and Contemplative Prayer movement that is giving young people a Jesus made in their own image, but few in leadership care. I think if Warren openly joined with Rome, half the new evangelicals would just follow him.
Peter Drucker must have been very happy with Rick Warren and ilk. There are now over 5000 mega-churches in the United States and few of them teach the gospel on Sundays. However, they are the focal point for every humanistic social program ever devised by man. Peter Drucker would be so proud.
One thing I noticed from the letters in Smith’s book, and my own experiences over the years, is that leaders that do not go along with the consensus usually resign rather than fight for what they believe is right. The documentation in the book suggests to me, that the resignations of believers in inerrancy in these institutions, made it just too easy for the postmodern new evangelicals to take over major religious institutions. That is still going on today.
With postmodern boards, committees or teams there must be consensus; people are expected to resign rather than disagree with the consensus. The consensus position becomes their truth even if it not the truth. History tells us that the majority is often wrong. Just resigning because you disagree with the majority really makes it easier for influential Satanic plants to take over religious institutions. I do not think we can broad-brush this, but it seems some leaders in Christianity are more afraid of being fired or being in the minority, than they are of failing to stand up for God’s truth.
I am sure it was board consensus that decided all churches no matter how liberal or Catholic should take part in the Billy Graham Crusades and I am sure that seminaries continue to be taken over because the opposition soon resigns. Likewise, churches are becoming more-and-more postmodern because a search committee consensus ignorantly suggested the hiring of a pre-programmed outsider because he was a seminary graduate.
Not long after you bring them in, they will bring in like-minded people and then the traditional Bible believers will depart. Once the salt and light is removed from the institution or local church it becomes a lost cause. There is usually no going back once a church starts down this postmodern path. Try changing your own Purpose-Driven or Willow-Creeker church back to teaching Christian doctrine on Sundays now. It can’t be done, because the postmodern pragmatic church boards will not even entertain biblical arguments or the thought that the Church is supposed to be made up of believers. That would mean less attenders and less attenders is the unforgivable sin in mega-churches..
Paul Smith’s “New Evangelicalism” mentions C. Peter Wagner and his mystical influence at Fuller Seminary. He taught the Signs and Wonders class at Fuller with John Wimber. Paul Smith gets into some ramifications within the Calvary Chapel movement because of John Wimber, but I think Smith fell short in explaining where Wagner’s influence led many Pentecostals. The influence of C. Peter Wagner led to what is now known as the New Apostolic Reformation and ilk, with its postmodern third wave of self appointed anointed Dominion Theology heretics.
I thought that Smith should have expounded on this more in his book because this signs and wonders movement is greatly influencing the Pentecostal side of postmodernism and their Dominion Theology heretical doctrine also leads to the religious Harlot. Paul Smith only wrote a couple of pages on the signs and wonders movement but I think fifty pages would have been much more appropriate. Maybe Smith could work on that if he has any revision in mind or wants to write a follow-up book on the Pentecostal influence within new evangelicalism.
When people want to experience God by creating Him in their own mind, or by getting some sign or extra-biblical message, or by getting some mystical experience from one of the self-appointed anointed they will be deceived. In these last days these things will tie in with the mysticism of the Roman Church and other demonic deceptions. All these demonic deceptions and more, will be the foundation of the one world religious Harlot that Paul Smith does talk about in his book.
The latter part of Paul Smith’s book explains that postmodernism, emergent theology and religious mysticism is all heading toward a one world political, economic and religious system. It is a pretty good summary of where the world is heading and a briefing on sound eschatology in just a couple of chapters.
The book also has some insider information about the Calvary Chapel movement. It contains a couple of positional letters by Chuck Smith against those that wanted to change the Calvary Chapel movement from its expository teaching through the Bible to some other format.
Finally, the book has an appendix that explains the difference between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light. It is very good, but I would disagree on at least one point. God never gave Satan the deed to planet earth as Paul Smith suggested. God does not give away His creation to angels or Satan. After the fall of man God gave Satan the power to rule the earth but He certainly did not give Satan the title-deed to the planet. I mention that because this thinking is a popular error that leads some to believe in Dominion Theology. I write about that in my paper on the Woman on the Beast.
I highly recommend this book. In fact, it should be required reading for all church leaders. If God never gave us His written word there really would be no foundation for Christianity at all. If man can just redefine or dismiss God’s word because he thinks it is full of error, he really does not believe that there is a God with the ability to preserve what He spoke. If God did not give us the absolute truth, then man cannot be saved from the obvious fallen nature that we find ourselves in. If God cannot preserve what He said, why should anyone believe that Jesus fulfilled what God might not have said?
If you are one of those that does not believe that the scriptures were spoken by God, then you probably should examine yourself to see if you are really in the faith. What hope can man have in a God that did not also provide foundational truth to trust in Him? It should be clear to any true believer that God gave man both the inerrant word and the living Word (John 1:1).
Don Koenig founded www.thepropheticyears.com website in 1999 after almost thirty years of independent study on the Bible and learning from many astute teachers within Christendom. Don created his website to write about Bible prophecy, biblical discernment and his Christian worldviews. Don wrote a free Revelation commentary ebook in 2004 named "The Revelation of Jesus Christ Through The Ages". The World and Church and Bible Prophecy section of this website was started in 2007. | <urn:uuid:5f6b19ba-d8ba-49f8-8288-e60a87e78848> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thepropheticyears.com/wordpress/new-evangelicalism-usually-also-means-denying-bible-inerrancy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974491 | 3,905 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Well I fianlly made something not Star Wars. Yesterday was our national celebration (20th August---the founding of the Hungarian Kingdom) so I decided to make our historical battleship, the "Stephanus Rex" (or Saint Stephan). Please everybody read through the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's most beautiful ship's short but epic history...
About this creation
About he name: "Saint" Stephan the First was the one who founded the Hungarian Kingdom in 1001. In all year in the 20th of august we celebrate this event.
The "Stphanus Rex" (or Szent-István Csatahajó in hungarian) was made by the Austro-Hungarian Empire's shipyard in Fiume in 1915. In the First World War the ship was used to provide anti-air protection to the fortress of Pola. Then it was sent to a mission (1918 June)to break the british-french ship-blockade, but during the battle an italian MAS motor-torpedo sinked it. Here is an old photo.
In this lego creation I tried to focus the highest level of accuracy: the ship has two heavy batteries (6 cannons) on the front agains air units, 4 cannons both side of the ship and four rocket launchers on the back.
I hope it works---I think it looks as good as my sw creations...and God bless the brave Austrian and Hungarian soildiers who died for their homeland. Also God bless the brave French and Italian soldiers who also died in the battle.
It says: " The duty for your homeland is more important than life. God bless the heroes!"
Also please don't forget to rate and comment! Thanks! | <urn:uuid:afed3b32-7a6f-4c22-8e8b-1e485ae7b57f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/146665 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964335 | 363 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Old Redcap, an inventor elf, is proud of his greatest creation—a hot-air balloon with wings for steering. One day, Bluecap, a young elf, comes rushing through the woods. A fox has nibbled at the ropes that keep the balloon from floating away! Redcap and Bluecap grab a rope but cannot keep the balloon from rising into the sky—with the two elves still attached.
Eventually darkness falls, along with the balloon. When they awake the next morning, they find themselves in the land of the fairies, They have become stuck on rocks that are not rocks at all, but turn out to be a sleeping dragon.
Their adventure has only begun.
Ages 4–7 Hardbound, 24 pps, 8 1/4" x 10".
Daniela Drescher was born in Munich and trained in art therapy before living for a time in America and Switzerland. She has worked intensively with children in a therapeutic capacity for ten years and currently provides illustrations for a parenting magazine. She has written and illustrated several children’s books. | <urn:uuid:ba97ad32-3ac1-4377-8686-7e04c4d63b31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.atoygarden.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/product.display/product_id/2445/index.cfm?CFID=14517555&CFTOKEN=8d9f8cc85880a589-DBBF1FC0-D61C-E357-DDD7ED166CDBBC05 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975269 | 220 | 1.820313 | 2 |
AKA: Thiopentone sodium, sodium pentathol, trapanal.
What is it? It's a drug – a barbituate – usually administered intravenously.
Any side effects? Headache, delirium, hypontension, nausea, among others.
What's it for? Oh, lots of things. It's an anaesthetic; in the past, it's been employed as a truth serum, and it also has certain psychiatric applications. And you can kill people with it.
You can kill people with a screwdriver, but that's not what it's for. Sodium thiopental is used in executions in 34 US states, normally in conjunction with two other drugs. Two states, Washington and Ohio, use sodium thiopental alone.
I strongly disagree with the death penalty. Then you'll like the newsworthy peg on which today's Pass Notes hangs: shortages of sodium thiopental have delayed executions in several states. Texas, which executes more people than any other US state, only has enough supplies to last until March.
Hooray! Not to give them any ideas or anything, but why don't they just make some more? US production has stalled for lack of a key ingredient. The only American manufacturer of sodium thiopental, Hospira, has had to abandon a deal to produce the drug in Italy as the Italian government would only grant a licence if assurances could be given that the drug wouldn't be used in executions.
I bet someone – someone bad, obviously – could make a lot of money if they knew where to get some of the stuff. Possibly, but it's getting harder. Britain banned the export of sodium thiopental after supplies from a UK wholesaler were used to execute a man in Arizona in October.
Do say: "You can't give me that stuff, warden. It's contraindicated for people with a history of heart disease. Read the label!"
Don't say: "We're all out of sodium thiopental. Prepare the lethal screwdriver." | <urn:uuid:0a10d99b-8da9-4272-b499-e6458df9bf6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/24/lethal-injection-drug-sodium-thiopental | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968572 | 422 | 1.992188 | 2 |
“Revelstoke’s City Hall was designed by well-known architect C. B. K. Van Norman and was constructed in 1939 at a cost of $33,000. The building was originally designed to house both the city offices and the fire department. This architectural structure is unique to the Revelstoke area, as it is one of the earliest in the art moderne style built outside of a major city. The horizontal emphasis in the large windows and grooves in the wall surfaces create a ‘streamline’ effect that is closely associated with speed and technological advances of that time.”
Although the Goldstein residence was never built, the plans that Markovich completed in April 1945 show a sophisticated and strikingly modern design. She later remarked, “I feel modern life requires modern surroundings,” and this design philosophy is evident in the house’s simple clean lines, abundant plate glass windows, and flat roof with deep overhangs. Markovich was the fifth woman to register with the Architectural Institute of British Columbia in 1949. | <urn:uuid:9eed3f59-011c-4ad5-b879-da2d6e31dbbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bc150.ecuad.ca/museum/09_01.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967489 | 217 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Around a billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent globally each year – about a quarter of all seasonal cards and then think of all those flowers and boxed chocolates covered in plastic and unrecyclable packaging! (Source here).
A no waste Valentine’s Day could consist of the following:
- Handmade card out of what you can find at home (or a recycled paper card).
- Homemade baking and/or dinner, breakfast or even lunch.
- Only give presents with no, minimal or recyclable packaging or an experience gift like a romantic walk or night in a bed and breakfast.
- Give flowers from the garden – lots of roses still out in flower. And steer clear of any unnecessary packaging or that green oasis which goes straight to landfill. Get the flowers wrapped in plain paper (that can be reused or composted) or biodegradable cellophane.
- Give a hug (no packaging or waste at all!).
- Give a second hand or vintage gift (like vintage jewellery).
- Ensure you compost the flowers once they have died (and check where the flowers are coming from to reduce your impact on the environment).
- Buy fair trade organic chocolate – like Green and Blacks.
- Or the gift that keeps on giving like books (on FSC certified paper) or plants.
- Take your valentine to the new Valentine’s Day movie which has been produced with the environment in mind during production reducing their carbon emissions by 67 tonnes and reusing 350 water bottles instead of 21,000 throw away plastic bottles. Read more about how Warner Brother’s Greened their production here.
Love to know any other ideas that for a green Valentine’s Day. | <urn:uuid:fe870b15-7b65-493b-9898-b25b45f8c4dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sift.net.nz/blog/tag/green-valentines-day/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903429 | 358 | 2.40625 | 2 |
HER LEFT EYEBROW IS RAISED AND beckoning. A tantalizing half-smile, just one quiver short of a full pout, plays across her lips, and beneath the huge cocked hat her glance is mischievous. In one hand she grasps a blooming rose and in the other, pinched suggestively between thumb and forefinger, a ripe pink rosebud.
1785: PORTRAIT OF A LADY
The sitter with the uniquely flirtatious expression is Georgiana, fifth Duchess of Devonshire, at age 28. The portrait, by Thomas Gainsborough, a renowned society painter, is quickly deemed a masterpiece and becomes famous.
At age 17, Georgiana Spencer (born in 1757) is already feted as both the loveliest and wickedest woman in England. Her sex life -- a menage a trois involving the Duke, the Duchess and her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster -- is scandalous even by the louche standards of the day.
Just as outrageous is Georgiana's willingness to trade kisses for votes in support of her friend, the politician Charles James Fox, behavior many regard as clear proof of nymphomania.
But in other quarters, Georgiana's reputation for sexual immorality only increases her allure. Horace Walpole expatiates breathlessly on "her youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty." An eloquent Irishman is said to have sighed, "I could light my pipe at her eyes."
(Another woman who has had a comparable effect on the English pulse rate is the current Princess of Wales, Diana, who also happens to be Georgiana's great-great-great-grandniece.) 1806: THE LADY VANISHES
The voluptuous Duchess gambles, drinks, flirts and philanders with staggering energy; by the end of her heroically dissolute life at age 49, Georgiana loses most of her hair, all of her money and the sight of one eye, but her brio remains undimmed. In a sharp note, she warns posterity: "Before you condemn me, remember that at 17 I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess." Meanwhile, Gainsborough's portrait, which presumably hung at Chatsworth, the ducal country seat, vanishes.
1841: HELLO, DOLLY
The painting mysteriously reappears in 1841 in the home of a Mrs. Anne Maginnis, an elderly English schoolmistress, who, in a singular act of vandalism, has cut it off at the knee to fit above her fireplace and burned the remnant.
Six years later, John Bentley, an art dealer, sees the painting and buys it for around $200 dollars. It passes to Wynn Ellis, a silk manufacturer and art collector, who identifies it as the Duchess in 1870. He dies five years later. 1876: LOVE FOR SALE
On May 6, the portrait goes up for auction at Christie's in London, causing a sensation. "All the world had come to see a beautiful Duchess created by Gainsborough, and so far as we could observe, they all came, saw and were conquered by the fascinating beauty," The London Times reports. After furious bidding, it sells to a London art dealer, William Agnew, for $51,540, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction.
Two days after the auction, crowds of visitors admire the Duchess on display at Agnew's gallery. Among them are two Americans: one is the banker Junius Spencer Morgan, who decides to buy it for the expanding art collection of his son, the financier J. Pierpont Morgan; the other is Adam Worth, a.k.a. Henry Raymond, a diminutive, highly accomplished international crook, who decides to steal it.
1876: THE HEIST
Ben Macintyre is the New York correspondent for The Times of London. | <urn:uuid:5d3650a4-21ce-477c-8bec-63273bf3e724> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/31/magazine/the-disappearing-duchess.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945123 | 830 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Updated: November 12, 2011
You have all seen candles burn, glazed at your barbecue set sizzling and spitting, used a blowtorch to peel paint or melt a favorite childhood toy, or enjoyed the warmth of logs cracking in the fireplace while sipping wine with your mistress in the cabin lodge far away from home. Ahem, yes. Which brings me to a joke. There are three things that people never get tired of doing: looking at a fire burning, water running and other people laboring. Hence, the greatest joy of all is to watch firemen at work. But that's neither here, nor there. Back on topic.
Anyhow, whether it's a stove, an oven, a Bunsen burner or anything else, you've noticed that flames come in different colors and shapes. But mostly, the flames are yellow or blue. The question is, why? If we consult the physics books, we will learn about the so-called black bodies. This physics concept tells us that black bodies are supposed to emit radiation that is equivalent to their temperature. Hence, an object emitting blue light should have a temperature of about 6000K. That's hot. But that's not what happens. So what does?
Wikipedia has beat me to it and published a number of rather interesting articles on both the flames and black body radiation, so you can read all the fancy stuff there. But I'd like to focus on the more down-to-earth aspects of the problem at hand. First, we will talk some more about the black bodies.
Black bodies are an ideal concept and do not really exist. Still, the reality is good enough. Black bodies emit radiation that reflects their internal thermal energy. The human body is a good example. The warmth of human bodies comes from infrared radiation that we emit. Our eyes cannot see in the infrared spectrum, so we perceive heat as something magical, but it's just low-energy photons doing their work.
A counter-example would be the neon lights we sometimes use in our homes. They shine bright-white, brighter than incandescent bulbs, and yet they are perfectly safe to touch. The reason for this is that the radiation comes from a different mechanism than thermal excitation. Hence, neon lights are not black bodies.
So, we know that red color signifies lower temperatures, blue stands for higher temperatures, with yellow somewhere in between. Purple and white means we're already doubling in ultra-violet, while beyond, there's x-ray. This means that yellow flames are cooler than the blue ones. But this creates a bit of a problem for us.
First, why would you have candle flame that has two distinct colors, yellow and blue, so close together? How can you have a temperature gradient that is so steep, if you will? Second, why there's no green? Finally, is it really possible for some of the materials we use in cooking and home improvement to burn so hot? According to all kinds of chemistry brochures, gases and liquids used in household sammich making do not have very high temperatures. For example, propane peak flame temperature at a normal atmospheric pressure is 1,990 degrees Celsius. This is hardly sufficient to justify the blue color. So what gives?
When you kickstart your oven burner to boil some water or dump fresh lumps of coal onto into the fire ring pending the sacred steak ceremony, you introduce a whole new range of elements [sic] into the equation. The resulting change in flame color has less to do with the thermal properties of the fuel and more with how clean the fuel is and how even and rich the air fuel mixture is. Let me elaborate.
Combustion requires an oxidant. Most oxidant have some portion of oxygen, including air, ozone, many halogens, some acids, and more. The richer the oxidant is, the more complete the combustion will be, resulting in higher temperatures. But for all practical purposes, the only oxidant we will have is the air surrounding us.
Anyhow, a good example is when you fan the coals to get them glowing white. You introduce a high volume of oxygen into the fire, allowing a better combustion. Normally, the coals are starved, burning at a sub-optimal temperature, which reflects in their dull, red color. But when you stir the flames, they glow white and hot. You also help create a more uniform air-fuel mixture, again helping the combustion process.
But that's only part of the equation. There's the fuel purity to consider. The cleaner the fuel, the fewer combustion residues will be created in the burning process. Household gas is normally pure, thus you will see little to no unwanted by products, like soot or smoke. If you take a look at your pans, they do not blacken after being used, because there's little dirt in the gas. Compare that to barbecue grills and you'll see the difference.
If you burn an unclean fuel, a part of the process will also include the secondary products in the fuel. At home, most of these will be low-energy products, burning at lower temperatures, hence you will see predominantly red, orange and yellow flames, even though the pure fire color should be different. There's your yellow.
Finally, the blue color has nothing to do with super-hot black bodies. It is the result of excited molecular radicals in the flame, which mostly emit their light in the blue spectrum. A candle flame is a good example. At the base of the wick, the flames will be blue. Farther away, there will be less molecular radicals and more soot, resulting in yellow flames. You won't see all of the colors of the spectrum, because they have less to do with the black body properties of the candle and more with the fuel composition and purity.
Fire colors can easily be manipulated. You all must have seen that one experiment where university students impress high-school children by sprinkling metal powders into flames, changing their color. So yes, there's that trick. You must have been amazed. I know I was.
All of what I've written above changes when you remove the gravity from the equation. Microgravity is the shizzles. When you remove the gravity factor from a combustion equation, all kinds of wonders happen. The fire burns more uniformly, there less soot, you save fuel. Sounds too good to be true, but there it is.
Quoting from Wikipedia: The common distribution of a flame under normal gravity conditions depends on convection, because soot tends to rise to the top of a flame, such as in a candle, making the flame yellow. In microgravity or zero gravity, such as an environment in outer space, convection no longer occurs, and the flame becomes spherical, with a tendency to become more blue and more efficient. There are several possible explanations for this difference, of which the most likely one given is the hypothesis that the temperature is evenly distributed enough that soot is not formed and complete combustion occurs. Experiments by NASA in microgravity reveal that diffusion flames in microgravity allow more soot to be completely oxidized after they are produced than diffusion flames on Earth. Premixed flames in microgravity burn at a much slower rate and more efficiently than even a candle on Earth, and last much longer.
This thing is tight. Take a look at some breath-taking images below. Awesome.
Some more fancy stuff for you:
Black body on Wikipedia
Flame on Wikipedia
Combustion on Wikipedia
Smoke on Wikipedia
Microgravity on Wikipedia
There you go, the pyromaniac fanboy club article of the day. But seriously, this is such a trivial and yet so difficult question. Something we see and do every single day of our lives, and yet, it has such an elaborate and elusive answer. Now, if you've never wondered why something as innocent as the candle flame is the way it is, you must be leading a happy, blissful life, full of ignorance and whatnot. And if you did, hopefully, there's the explanation, right there.
So that would be all. Soon, we will dabble in alchemy and try to make gold from other elements, w00t. Stay tuned, and if you have any wicked ideas that you would like to see explored in unique and unfunny ways the way I do, feel free to use the mail service.
P.S. The microgravity and the sun flare images are in the public domain. | <urn:uuid:39190411-3027-4054-a595-b9ca377258cf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dedoimedo.com/physics/flames-yellow.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939887 | 1,753 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Leftovers for All
When you throw leftovers in the fridge, they end up in the trash far more often than in your stomach-a dilemma that some conscientious restaurant-goers solve by leaving their doggie bags on top of city garbage cans, where the homeless can find an easy free meal. Josh Kamler and Axel Albin, owners of a San Francisco design studio, would like to take this practice mainstream. They've come up with a catchy name ("replating"), a website, and a logo not unlike the now-ubiquitous recycling icon. Kamler says, "If you throw your beer bottle in the garbage, people are like, ‘Dude, you're not going to recycle that?' We hope the idea of replating will get to such a place in the culture that people will say, ‘Hey, you're not going to replate that?'" | <urn:uuid:0ce79dc2-396e-41ff-b540-b67e3a4bbd20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.good.is/posts/leftovers_for_all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94397 | 179 | 1.734375 | 2 |
This recent post on the Bad Archaeology blog provides a much-needed antidote against the Piri Reis paleobabble contagion. As author Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews notes at the outset:
Maps of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries are a favourite source of information for fringe writers, who use them to make a wide variety of claims. To Erich von Däniken, for instance, they are evidence for a survey of the Earth from space, carried out by extraterrestrials, while for Graham Hancock, they are evidence for an ancient sea-faring civilisation, lost beneath the sea after the melting of glacial ice at the end of the Pleistocene.
Anyone who’s put any time into the Piri Reis issue knows the above is on target. What you may not have known is that the Piri Reis discussion is based in part on selective use of evidence. I highly recommend the essay, as it covers the alleged anomalies (e.g., knowledge of Antarctica before it became ice-covered) and the Charles Hapgood trajectories that are so frequently used to defend the paleobabbling perspective of Piri Reis. | <urn:uuid:f6a78476-8c03-43e6-9be1-caf4a626338a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabble/tag/map/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924146 | 239 | 2.5 | 2 |
Jonathan Haidt is everywhere these days, giving interviews and TED talks, promoting his working papers in the media, writing for the websites yourmorals.org and civilpolitics.org, and publishing The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012). A moral psychologist by training, Haidt has successfully cleared the jump to public intellectual, now dispensing didactic advice to Americans about what ails their politics. The Righteous Mind reflects those aspirations, not just summing up his own original research on the psychological foundations of political ideology for a general audience, but also shoehorning in some surprising interpretations of moral philosophy and conjuring out of the whole stew some advice for American politicos (and what could be more important than that?).
Did you know that moral philosophers do not believe in intuition? Did you know that David Hume thought that reason was weak and ineffectual against the tide of passions? Did you know that Bentham and Kant were probably on the autism spectrum, and that that fact explains their moral philosophies? Did you know that Kant was a philosophical rationalist, and that philosophical rationalists think that morality is all about justice and fairness? Philosophical rationalists also think that children learn about morality through experience, just like Lawrence Kohlberg, Haidt’s nemesis in moral psychology — and totally not like Hume.(*)
If you did not know these things, which might especially be the case if you are a moral philosopher, Haidt is here to enlighten you. As he helpfully informs us, he took a couple of philosophy courses as an undergraduate, before he realized that it was all bunkum.
Haidt begins his story of discovery with the conventional wisdom in moral psychology that reigned a couple of decades ago. Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and others had shown, so they believed, that children learned about justice and fairness through their own interactions with other children, and that by a few years of age, they could understand the difference between universal morality and social convention. For instance, if asked whether it was morally wrong not to wear a uniform to school if the school required it, they would answer yes, whereas if the school did not require it, they would answer that it was not morally wrong not to wear a uniform. Haidt labels Kohlberg’s empiricist theory “rationalism,” and he tries to persuade us that rationalism is wrong. Haidt uses the word rationalist “to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge” (7). Note how Haidt sneaks normative pretensions (“reliable”) into an ostensibly scientific discussion. This is typical of the book.
Haidt’s own theory is that our moral judgments come largely from our intuitions, which are genetically ingrained in almost all of us and manifest themselves even in infants. He has some good evidence on this point, about which more later. In WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies, many people have suppressed some of their moral intuitions, especially about authority, loyalty, and sanctity, in favor of care/harm and fairness/injustice. For instance, many University of Pennsylvania undergraduates do not think that it is morally wrong to have sex with a dead chicken one has bought from a grocery store. But in poorer societies like India and among the working classes in Western countries, a more “holistic” (and therefore, he implies, better) morality still reigns. For instance, he claims that working-class Brazilian school-children think that it is always morally wrong not to wear a uniform to school, even if the school does not require it. (Really?!) This allegedly shows that they do not even have a concept of social convention. The whole distinction between universal morality and social convention is just a Western cultural construct (and therefore bad, he implies).
Nevertheless, it is possible to get even WEIRDies’ inner social conservatives to come out. For instance, if you ask Harvard undergraduates whether it would be morally wrong for a consenting brother and sister using multiple forms of contraception to have sex, most answer that it would. When asked to give a reason, they can’t, beyond saying that it’s just wrong, a phenomenon Haidt calls “moral dumbfounding.” “Affective priming” refers to how the environment (“priming”) can affect survey takers’ responses. For instance, spraying fart smell makes people answer surveys about moral questions in a more socially conservative fashion. So does asking people to wash their hands before taking a survey.
Haidt believes that these findings support the claim that people’s moral judgments are based on their intuitions — a “flash of feeling,” as Haidt puts it — not calm reasoning. When people use reasoning, it is “motivated”: aimed at persuading others of our point of view, not actually getting at the truth. Nevertheless, there is evidence that reflection can make a difference. When Harvard undergraduates are posed the incest dilemma mentioned above, but are also required to read an argument that the act of incest would be morally permissible and to wait two minutes before registering a response, the proportion of respondents saying the incest is permissible increases dramatically. So it turns out that reasoning is not helpless.
Moreover, Haidt does not acknowledge a weakness of using surveys to establish the sources of moral judgment: surveys are always a low-cost, low-reflection way of getting people to express their opinions. The responses one finds on surveys are likely to differ dramatically from the responses one would find after a period of debate, deliberation, and reflection on a matter of critical personal importance. Still, one important political activity is akin to survey-taking: voting. Because the personal costs and benefits of voting are low, we should expect people to express offhand and uninformed judgments in the voting booth. Introit the vast literature on voter ignorance.
Yet Haidt believes that intuitionism and “motivated reasoning” are not problems. His advice to us is just to give in to our instincts and to respect all the moral intuitions of others, no matter how silly. By way of contrast I am reminded of another book of pop psychology, Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini shows how human psychology can be manipulated, yet his advice is not to give in to the manipulation, but to use our minds to resist tools of manipulation when we encounter them. Haidt derives exactly the opposite conclusion from Cialdini’s.
Haidt also has advice for liberals and Democrats. He believes conservatives have a natural advantage in politics, because conservatives show roughly equal concern for all five dimensions of moral intuition, while liberals care much more about care/harm and fairness/injustice than the other three. Therefore, conservatives find it much easier to relate to voters, who care about all dimensions.
Haidt is making two basic errors here. First, he assumes that responses to his survey questions correspond to some absolute, context-free scale of value. Conservatives score about 3.0-3.5 out of 5 points on each of the five moral dimensions, on average. But the average liberal also scores above 1 on all 5 dimensions, so liberals also care about all 5 dimensions. They just care less about authority/disrespect, loyalty/betrayal, and sanctity/impurity than do conservatives. We could only infer that liberals care less about the latter three dimensions than care/harm and fairness/injustice if responses across survey questions were comparable, that is, if there were some absolute, Goldilocksian standard of “just right” one each dimension, of which liberals are falling short.
Haidt’s second error is to assume that the median voter has the same moral intuitions as conservatives. But what if the median voter is closer to the liberal pattern? Then conservatives’ harping on about sanctity and authority might actually repel the median voter. Haidt fails to address any of the findings in political behavior about what American voters actually want and how political rhetoric and issue positions matter to vote choice. Certainly, recent election results give little credence to the view that conservatives hold an inherent advantage in American politics.
Finally, Haidt wants to make normative claims about how society should work. We should all care about tradition, authority, loyalty, purity, and sanctity. Why? Because they are useful to the social fabric. (Haidt calls himself a “Durkheimian utilitarian” to indicate a utilitarianism that cares about human connectedness.) They are, in essence, noble lies. Scratch the surface, and Haidt is just as WEIRD as his undergraduates in the end.
But of course, people who really care about sanctity don’t share this view. For a Durkheimian utilitarian, it matters not whether the social fabric is Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or maybe even secular humanist; it just matters that it works. Haidt therefore fails to take seriously the reality of fundamental moral and philosophical disagreement and in so doing disrespects the very worldviews he urges us to take seriously.
The book is not entirely terrible. The “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment clearly applies to political ideologies and is consistent with the experimental political science literature on “partisan rationalization” (people tend to adopt the judgments of ideological compatriots but resist those of ideological adversaries). More civility in politics and understanding where other people’s judgments come from seem like good things. Jonathan Haidt is a decent enough moral psychologist, but he makes some basic interpretive errors, and when he wades into the deep waters of political science or moral philosophy, he finds himself at sea very quickly.
(*) For non-philosophers: Intuitions and arguments are the basic particles of moral philosophy. Hume argued that reason and the passions were different categories of mental activity and did not struggle against each other at all. Hume also thought that justice was an artificial virtue, not innate, having been created by humans to make society and markets possible. Kant thought that he was systematizing ordinary, “commonsense” morality and certainly didn’t think you needed to be a moral philosopher to be a good person. He also didn’t think that morality was all about justice and fairness (nor did Bentham). | <urn:uuid:41371dbf-cec9-4f06-a562-a9a014f87335> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=f9c0eced4e | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958903 | 2,200 | 2.375 | 2 |
Author Powers's Book
In his sixth novel, Powers's antagonists are a 42-year-old real estate broker and a corporation. Divorcee Laura Bodey lives with her 17-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son in Lacewood, Illinois. The story of her relations with her kids, her work, her ex, a married boyfriend, and contraction of ovarian cancer is told in tandem with the history of Clare Soap and Chemical, whose roots go back to Boston in 1830 and progress through wars, labor struggles, e...
In this, Powers' fifth novel, he pushes the envelope of self-conscious storytelling. The narrator/protagonist has his name, goes where he has been (Champaign-Urbana, Holland), and relates the circumstances of the writing and some of the critics' comments on what are clearly his first four books. Perhaps the romantic entanglements are all but autobiographical too. The fictional part involves a project to create artificial intelligence -- a computer known ...
Operation Wandering Soul
Powers's fourth novel centers on the activities in the pediatrics ward of a Los Angeles hospital. The protagonist physician tries to help the various children with rare and often fatal diseases to cope. References to the Children's Crusade and other historical events that crushed children and their wishes and futures are woven into the story; at the climax, the kids on the ward stage a production of the Pied Piper. This is perhaps Powers's darkest, most ...
Plowing the Dark
At the turn of the 1990s, a team of young hotshots and middle-aged artists and teachers work for an R&D spinoff of a Microsoft-like corporation in the Seattle area. Their project involves computer-generated virtual realities. At roughly the same time, a 33-year-old American teaching English in Beirut is taken hostage by Arab terrorists and remains in their grip for more than 2 years. Their stories cross in the end, in a somewhat mystical way. In this, hi...
Although it starts out seeming to present the portrait of a family, and the relations between siblings, Powers's second book is also out for bigger game: the nature and hidden traps of history. Teacher Eddie Hobson seems to have gone a little off his nut as well as developed a mysterious sickness; most puzzling to his wife and four kids, he labors ceaselessly on a secret project called Hobbstown, which he claims will save him, the world, and everything i...
The Echo Maker
Mark Schluter has been in a serious car accident. Soon after his sister Karin arrives at the hospital, Mark slips into a coma. Karin finds a mysterious note at Mark's bedside. When Mark regains consciousness, he believes Karin is not his sister, but an imposter. The diagnosis is Capgras syndrome. Karin writes to well-known neurologist Dr. Gerald Weber, who arrives in Nebraska to discuss Mark's case. Mark begs Weber to find his "real" sister. He has no re...
The Gold Bug Variations
This is NOT summer beach reading. Powers writes rich, powerful, intellectual novels and this is his masterpiece (so far). Two couples -- a pair of scientists working on the secrets of DNA in 1957 Champaign-Urbana (the woman is already married to someone else), and a reference librarian and computer programmer/art history dropout in New York circa 1982-86 -- fall in love and provide the human quartet that matches the four base constituents of DNA. Bach's ...
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Powers published this stunning debut novel at the age of 28. An actual photo taken by August Sander, the Austrian photographer of the common man, of three farmers walking down a road in western Europe in August 1914 serves as the centerpiece for a meditation on history (especially the Great War) and its undercurrents, mass production (Henry Ford is a character in the story), photography, solitude and loss. A young computer designer in 1980s Boston tries ...
View these reviews in summary mode
Richard Powers Message Board
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Powers has written! | <urn:uuid:3fff446f-0670-46de-875b-6a2e99879f0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allreaders.com/Topics/Topic_548.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958976 | 850 | 1.507813 | 2 |
I heard John use the term "hypostatic union."
What does that mean and where did it come from?
The theological term "hypostatic union" has its origins in the Council of Chalcedon and emphasizes that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man at the same time. It is used to affirm the union of Jesus' divine and human natures in one person--that Jesus Christ is perfectly God and perfectly man. Or, as theologians say, He is consubstantial with God as to His deity and with mankind as to His humanity.
Soon after the establishment of the church, doctrinal errors arose concerning the person of Jesus Christ. In October of A.D. 451, a large church council convened in the city of Chalcedon near Constantinople. After much discussion, the Council issued a statement to correct the errors and to establish an accurate theological statement concerning the person and nature of Christ. The fruit of their labor is perhaps the most significant Christological statement in the history of the church:
We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [coessential, of the same substance] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeable, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has been handed down to us.
So what errors did the Council of Chalcedon correct?
In order to correct the view of Apollinarius, who believed Christ did not have a human mind or soul, the Council wrote that Jesus was "truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body ... consubstantial [coessential, of the same substance] with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us."
To correct the teachings of Nestorianism, that Christ was two different persons united in one body, the Council wrote that He was "indivisibly, inseparably ... concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons."
And finally, in rejecting the errors of Monophysitism, which taught Christ had but one nature and that His union with the Divine nature obliterated His human nature, the council wrote that Christ was "to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably ... the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved."
For more information about the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, consider these resources: | <urn:uuid:a58d0583-3886-4f1a-9f4b-39a203215d66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gty.org/resources/questions/QA137/I-heard-John-use-the-term-hypostatic-union-What-does-that-mean-and-where-did-it-come-from | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966671 | 736 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Viewing entries tagged with 'things to see '
I'm teaching a spring dying class at the Textile Arts Center starting MONDAY! Come learn how to make beautiful fabrics and clothing with me!
Fiber Reactive Dyes with Shabd
In this 4 week class, I will teach you the basic procedures for dyeing with Procion dyes, by immersion and direct dye methods, with both cellulose and protein fibers. You will learn various tying, dying and shibori techniques, as well as basic color theory and design concepts for dying. It will be fun, and colorful and bright! Discover the dyer in you and design your own dye patterns! Students will focus on swatches to perfect technique and in the last class work on individual projects.
No experience necessary. Classes are designed to focus on a learned skill rather than a final product. At TAC, our mission is to provide skills and knowledge for a lifetime! All necessary materials are included for swatch making. Any additional fabrics and materials will need to be supplied by the student based on their vision. Also, we have Open Studio time for students to put their new knowledge to practice.
The Textile Arts Center is a beautiful 3200sf space in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens dedicated to providing support to fiber artists and everyday people interested in working with fibers. TAC holds classes, workshops and special events as well as running open studio hours, hosting gallery exhibits and running an artist in residency program.
Mondays 6:30 - 9:30PM, April 30-May 21
The Textile Art Center in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn | <urn:uuid:f51c7280-99cf-4936-a198-063c17f7b1e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shabdismyname.com/blog/tag/things+to+see+%26+do | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946037 | 329 | 1.632813 | 2 |
At the end of 2008, approximately 19 per cent Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps — a 21 per cent increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007.
This is according to the State of the Internet report, a quarterly study by Akamai Technologies, the US-based Internet content distribution giant. The State of the Internet report tracks average connection speeds for countries around the world.
Check out the top 10 nations in terms of average Internet connection speed.
1. South Korea
South Korea rules supreme when it comes to Internet connection speed and broadband connectivity. It is the world’s No.1 with average connection speed of 15 Mbps, ten times the global average!
During 2008, South Korea’s rate of quarterly change appeared to be locked into a cyclical pattern, with quarterly decreases being recorded in the first and third quarters, and increases seen in the second and fourth quarters.
For the whole year, South Korea saw a modest 7 per cent rise in their levels of high broadband adoption. South Korea is also ranked first in terms of high broadband connectivity with 69 per cent connections above 5 Mpbs.
Japan ranks 2nd in terms of Internet connection and high broadband connectivity. Japan ranks 2nd in terms of high broadband connectivity. About 54 per cent of the connections in Japan are above 7 Mbps.
3. Hong Kong
Hong Kong ranks third with an Internet connection speed of 6.9 Mbps. The country ranks fifth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 38 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.
Romania is at the fourth position with a Internet connection speed of 5.7 Mbps. The country ranks third in terms of high broadband connectivity with 45% of the connection above 5 Mbps.
Sweden is at the fifth position with a Internet connection speed of 5.6 Mbps. Sweden ranks fourth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 39 per cent of the connection above 5Mbps.
Switzerland has bagged the sixth position with an Internet connection speed of over 5 Mbps. The country however does not figure in the top ten list of countries with high broadband connectivity.
Netherlands ranks 7th with an Internet connection speed of 4.9 Mbps. The country ranks 7th in terms of high broadband connectivity with 28 per cent of the connections above 5 Mbps.
Belgium is at the 8th position with an Internet connection speed of 4.7 Mbps. The country ranks sixth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 31 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.
Slovakia bags the ninth position with an Internet connection speed of 4.5 Mbps. The country does not figure among the top ten in terms of high broadband connectivity.
Norway ranks tenth with an Internet connection speed of 4.5 Mbps. The country ranks fifth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 38 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.
United States is at the 17th position with an Internet connection speed of 3.9 Mbps, up approximately 8 per cent from the average connection speed for the first quarter of 2008.
In terms of Internet connection speed, China is way behind leading economies with an average Internet connection speed of 833 kbps.
India has been ranked at a dismal 115th among 223 countries in terms of average Internet connection speeds. India has an average Internet connection speed of just 772 Kbps compared with the global average of 1.5 Mbps.
Well, if you’re the one always wanna beat the speed limit, surely you’ll burn your pocket with those speeding tickets or perhaps would also cause you your life.
For those live in Europe, the Pogo Alert will help the speeding ones at least to save their pocket for the speeding tickets. It is a GPS-enabled device, which its memory stores the location of thousands known speed traps across Europe.
Once you’re speeding and approaching a speed trap, it will give you audible and visual alert that tells you the type of speed trap, speed limit and possible accident blackspots. It also has an option of attaching a modular infrared laser detector, for detecting mobile laser based speed traps and safety camera vans. Since it’s modular, you can detach it in areas where it is illegal to own it. The most important is this device also gives you the kind of urge to slow down, which would save you your precious life!
Of course, what firstly clicks your mind is, yes, this is the greatest sex toy ever and it guides you to locate where the right spot is! Well, no! It’s not. So, a big disappointment? It’s just a GPS interface, definitely, it’s true that it’ll guide you to the right spot. The vibrating ring, even though works only as a GPS interface, but it seems to work a little bit funny. Its way of guiding you is by using combinations of gentle vibration and buzz. The ring comes in pair, which you wear on your fingers, it’ll vibrate and buzz gently to direct you to move either backward, forward, left or right until you get to your destination safe and sound. If you get to the wrong spot, both rings will buzz. Since the ring is pretty small in size, it comes with a remote control, so you can use it for inputting some text up to 8 characters, which is sufficient for a zip code. The remote control can be worn either round the neck or clipped onto clothing. Anyway, it’s still a concept.
How often that you misplace stuff that you’ll have to search high and low to look for it? For us, nowadays, seem to be getting more and more forgetful, it’s time to depend on some high-tech solution to help locate your stuff around. This credit card-sized gadget, Loc8tor Lite is the latest member from the Loc8tor family. Like other members, it uses GPS technology to help you locate almost everything that has the homing tag attached to it. The gadget comes with two tags, but you’ll surely need more than two as you’re having more than two important everyday objects around. But no worry, additional tags can be purchased.
The Loc8tor uses audio and visual cues to point and guide you to the exact location of the missing tagged item, which could be stuffed down the sofa or you’ve left behind in a shop. It takes only minutes to lead you up to an inch/2.5cm close to the lost item, whether you’re outdoor or indoor, in complete darkness or in a noisy room. To find your item, turn around in a full circle then walk in the direction of the strongest signal shown on the handheld – It’s as easy as that!!
The nüvifone smartphone supports full-fledged GSM HSDPA, runs on its own properitary OS and of course loaded with GPS navigation as the core. Besides, it’s also equipped with email and web browsing functionalities and also a built-in camera (Does it support geo-tagging?). It sports a 3.5-inch LCD display. And equipped with wireless capabilities including WiFi and Bluetooth.
Other eatures at a glance
• Google local search
• Garmin Online services – traffic, weather, fuel prices, hotel discounts, etc.
• nuvi-like navigation on the road or in pedestrian mode
• Email, text, IM functions
• Camera, video camera, MP3 and MPEG4/AAC
If you’re highly suspicious that yourself or your vehicle has fallen into the GPS tracking network of some secret agents or spies. No worry, here comes a gadget that can produce the counter effect to let you be free from their tracking.
The GPS tracker defense is a simple device which you just need to plug it into the cigarette light of your car. It can then start functioning by scrambling the GPS signal of any GPS tracking device which might have been planted around you by some secret agents. The device sends out some sort of debilitating frequency that surely fails any GPS trackers within the 5-meter range.
Your suspicious wife’d have got little smart lately which she’d have installed a little GPS tracker in your car to trace wherever you go. But no worry, now you can use the GPS tracker defense to counter attack to make her trackers fail to work.
With the advent of technology, tiny GPS chips could be easily embedded in a name badge, it wouldn’t be a surprise that your nasty employer has incorporated the technology to trace every single step that you take. With the GPS tracker defense, you can be sure that your privacy is safe now.
GPS technology is now being used to track every object in our life. One great use perhaps is to track your snail mail. Oopps, it should be more appropriately used for tracking some important parcels.
When you wanna send an important parcels or an extremely important mail that would take couple of days to the destination, and it’d cause you lots of worries during its long journey, then it’d be good to equip your mail or your parcels with a GPS mail logger.
The GPS mail logger is letter-sized gadget that has a GPS chip embedded, so you can trace using GPS technology along your important mail’s or parcel’s journey. The GPS mail logger is bendable so you can slip it in an envelope or the box of your parcel, which it can then record every position it’s traveled through, and the timestamp to a microSD card for you to peruse.
Something is puzzling about this GPS mail logger. The position and the timestamp recorded along its long journey can only be downloaded once the recipient has received the mail or parcel, and take the microSD card off it to download to the PC for analysis.
Um, it’s kind of hard for me to imagine how it appears to be useful to the users. My assumption is perhaps, this device could be requested as an additional service when you’re ordering for an extremely expensive or important good. So, the seller could slip in this GPS mail logger with your good, once it’s reached you, you could then download the GPS data collected and to ensure that your good never traveled through any risky routes that could have got it sabotaged etc. But this logger costs you about $700. As I said, it’s meant to go together with important goods. | <urn:uuid:20b177e3-5b6c-4e15-b75c-ed7b72e5baee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://technology.nicefun.net/category/gps-navigation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928341 | 2,157 | 2.1875 | 2 |
MOUNT VERNON — Out of sight isn’t necessarily out of mind, the Mid-Ohio Transit Authority discovered lately when they were assessed a $1,500 penalty by BUSTR, the Bureau of Underground Storage Tank Regulations, a division of the State Fire Marshal’s office.
According to paperwork submitted to the Knox County Board of Commissioners by Jim MacNaughton of MOTA, BUSTR levied the fine against MOTA and/or Knox County because their inquiries about follow-up investigations into a small fuel spill which was discovered 14 years ago have gone unanswered.
“This is a perfect example of bureaucracy run amok,” Commissioner Allen Stockberger said when the county was first notified.
The history outlined in the paper trail is that a set of three underground fuel tanks (5,000 gallons, 8,000 gallons and 10,000 gallons) were removed at the MOTA facility at 25 Columbus Road on May 18, 1995. Benzene tests in the cavity at the time showed levels of 24.3 parts per billion. A level greater than 5 ppb is considered a violation.
A smaller, 1,000-gallon tank was removed on June 21, 1995. Benzene testing around the small tank cavity showed a higher level of benzene at 1.26 parts per million, as well 14.2 ppm of toluene, 71.1 ppm of ethylbenzene, 330 ppm of xylene, and 4,790 ppm of TPH.
According to BUSTR, a site assessment letter was sent in September 1995. After the assessment was completed in May of the following year, BUSTR allegedly directed MOTA to define the spill/pollution further and submit documentation about sampling, field screening and methodology. MOTA allegedly responded that the contamination was so small that it needed no further definition.
The battling between the two agencies continued, off and on, for the next 10 years, before BUSTR referred the matter to enforcement in late 2006. Despite claims by BUSTR they contacted Knox County at this point, current staffers and commissioners at the county are unaware of any such communications from the State Fire Marshal’s office, and only became involved once MacNaughton forwarded the matter to the commissioners in late May.
According to commissioner Teresa Bemiller, BUSTR refused to meet with the commissioners and declined to rescind the fee assessment, which called for the fine to be paid by June 12, or else face fines which could be set as high as $10,000 per day up to a potential penalty cap of $1,000,000.
Finding no way to maneuver around the penalty once the situation had progressed to enforcement, the commissioners advised MOTA to go ahead and pay the fee assessment, and have entered into discussions with Geotechnical Consultants, Inc., of Westerville to perform earth boring and testing to prove officially that the small amount of contamination from 14 years ago has since dissipated. | <urn:uuid:604f7236-1f48-47a3-8ff7-8ce0d6e0ae1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mountvernonnews.com/local/09/06/12/mota-pays-fine-for-delayed-follow-up | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966286 | 610 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The Birth of Krishna
Mother Earth, unable to bear the burden of the sins committed by evil kings and rulers, appealed to Brahma, the Creator, for help. Brahma prayed to Supreme Lord Vishnu, who assured Brahma that Vishnu himself would soon be born on earth to annihilate tyrannical forces.
One such evil force was Kansa, the ruler of Mathura (a city in the northern India state of Uttar Pradesh). Kansa's people were utterly terrified of him. On the day that Kansa's sister Devaki was married off to Vasudeva, a voice from the sky was heard prophesying that Devaki's eighth son would be the destroyer of Kansa. The frightened Kansa immediately unsheathed his sword to kill his sister, but Vasudeva intervened. Vasudeva implored Kansa to spare his beloved Devaki, and promised to hand over every one of their newborn children to him. Kansa relented but imprisoned both Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva.
When Devaki gave birth to her first child, Kansa came to the prison cell and slaughtered the newborn. In the same way, he killed Devaki's next six children. Even before her eighth child was born, Devaki and Vasudeva started lamenting its fate and theirs. Suddenly, Lord Vishnu appeared before them and said that he himself would be born to them and would rescue them and the people of Mathura. Vishnu asked Vasudeva to carry him right after his birth to the house of Vasudeva's friend, the chief cowherd Nanda in Gokula. There, Nanda's wife Yashoda had given birth to a daughter. Vasudeva was to exchange his boy and bring Yashoda's baby daughter back to the prison. Vishnu assured them, "Nothing shall bar your path."
At midnight, the divine baby was born in Kansa's prison. Following Lord Vishnu's instructions, Vasudeva clasped the child to his bosom and started for Gokula, but he found that his legs were in chains. He jerked his legs and was unfettered! The massive, iron-barred doors unlocked and opened by themselves.
While crossing the River Yamuna, Vasudeva held the baby high over his head. The rain fell in torrents, and the river was flooded. But the water parted for Vasudeva, and miraculously a five-mouthed snake followed him from behind and provided shelter over the baby.
When Vasudeva reached Gokula, he found the door of Nanda's house open. He exchanged the babies and hurried back to Kansa's prison with the baby girl. As Vasudeva entered, the doors of the prison closed and barred themselves behind him.
When Kansa heard about the birth of the baby girl, he rushed inside the prison and tried to kill the infant. But this time the baby slipped from his hands and flew into the air, reaching toward the sky. The baby was transformed into the goddess Yogamaya, who spoke to Kansa: "O foolish one! The one who was born to kill you still lives and is elsewhere!" Then she disappeared.
Krishna grew to be a very mischievous child, who constantly annoyed his adoptive mother, Devaki, and his nanny with jokes and miraculous tricks. Demons frequently tried to kill him and his adoptive family, but even as a baby he vanquished them all.
As a young adult, Krishna killed the tyrannical ruler Kansa, along with all his cruel associates. Krishna then at long last liberated his parents from prison and reinstated Ugrasen, the true King of Mathura.
This work is made possible by the generosity of individual donors and congregations. Please consider making a donation today.
Last updated on Thursday, October 27, 2011.
- Workshop Overview
- Workshop Plan
- Entire Workshop
- Entire Workshop (Paper-Saving Version) | <urn:uuid:4be00784-df57-4edb-90e6-4982a2dcee26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/youth/bridges/workshop4/workshopplan/stories/183280.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985236 | 830 | 2.484375 | 2 |
Insights from the UK and beyond
Police fired plastic bullets and water cannon at Catholic youths in Northern Ireland's provincial capital Belfast on Tuesday after rioting erupted when a Protestant parade passed their estate. Sporadic violence erupted across the British-ruled province on the culmination of a season of parades by pro-British Protestants to mark a 17th-century military victory, a tradition many Catholics say is provocative.
Around 200 people threw bottles, slates and petrol bombs in the mainly Catholic Ardoyne area of Belfast after police moved in to prevent them confronting the passing Orange Order parade. Two cars were set on fire and dozens of rounds of plastic bullets were fired. Police said a number of officers were injured.
Most of the 500 or so parades across the province passed peacefully, but police reported rioting in Londonderry, Newry and Armagh as well as the Markets area in central Belfast.
Rate Your Politician, billed as an “e-democracy” website for users in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales by its Belfast-based founders, provides a grassroots voting platform on politicians and political topics. | <urn:uuid:aa9c3675-27b5-4536-9040-1416248a4af9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/tag/belfast/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962784 | 231 | 1.796875 | 2 |
For Release: January 25, 2006
Peper Long (202) 633-3082
John Gibbons (202) 633-3083
Asian Elephant Euthanized
Toni, a 40-year-old Asian elephant, was euthanized Wednesday morning at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, following a dramatic decline in her physical condition and quality of life.
Toni had a long history of arthritis, resulting from a leg injury she received before arriving at the National Zoo in 1989. The condition worsened last summer and then improved in the following months, as Toni responded well to medical treatment for her arthritis, which included ibuprofen and Cosequin, a glucosamine-based joint supplement.
However, despite her strong appetite and normal disposition, Toni continued to lose weight and muscle mass. Zoo staff investigated all available diagnostic and treatment protocols to identify and treat possible contributing factors. However, despite their best efforts and extraordinary care, Toni’s condition and quality of life continued to decline.
Zoo staff made the difficult decision to euthanize based on the elephant’s rapid decline. A final pathology report may not be complete for many months. “As director of the National Zoo, I must ensure that our animals receive the highest quality care. I can say with confidence that Toni, a beloved member of our family, received the highest standards of care, both from the professional and careful attention of our keepers and from the expert medicine practiced by our veterinary staff,” said John Berry, National Zoo director.
The Elephant House will be closed to the public Jan.
25 through Jan. 29; it will reopen on Monday, Jan. 30.
Visitors may be able to view the National Zoo’s
three elephants in their outdoor yards during that time.
Toni Elephant’s History
Elephants at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo
Kandula, a male, was born on Nov. 25, 2001. He weighed 325 pounds at birth and now weighs more than 3,500 pounds. Kandula means “strength and virtue” in Sinhalese, a language of Sri Lanka. His mother is Shanthi, who was artificially inseminated in February 2000.
Shanthi, a female, was born in approximately 1975. Shanthi came from Sri Lanka, where she was hand-reared at the Pinnewela Elephant Orphanage. The children of Sri Lanka gave her to the National Zoo in 1976 as a gift. Shanthi means “peace” in Sinhalese. It also is translated to mean “blessing.” Shanthi weighs more than 9,000 pounds, and is the largest elephant in the National Zoo’s herd. Kandula is Shanthi’s second calf; her first, a female born in 1993 died two years later of what is now known as elephant herpes virus.
Ambika, a female, was born in approximately 1948 and weighs nearly 8,000 pounds. She was captured in the Indian forest when she was about 8 years old and placed in a logging camp. In 1961, the children of India gave Ambika to the National Zoo. She is one of the five oldest Asian captive elephants in North America.
# # # | <urn:uuid:21ca108b-0825-4ad8-aa17-ada9642f3ddf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/PressMaterials/PressReleases/NZP/2006/Toni.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971643 | 687 | 2.265625 | 2 |
After years of wilting, gardens strengthen roots with help from MDS
Like a flower pushing up from parched soil, a rebirth of sorts is occurring at the Western Colorado Botanical Gardens. In the past eight months, workers have ripped bindweed from gardens, repaired a faulty irrigation system and trained a scrutinizing eye over the nonprofit group’s books.
Workers such as Shannon Orr, Dale Clements, Don Wens and Don Irwin are a big part of the solution to bring the ailing gardens back from the brink of closure.
“We’ve done a little bit of everything,” Shannon Orr said proudly while installing new interpretive signs at the gardens, 655 Struthers Ave. “I like to work.”
The four workers are clients of Mesa Developmental Services. Thanks to a partnership between MDS and the gardens, the future of the gardens is looking rosier than ever.
For years, the gardens suffered from a revolving door of executive directors, mounting debt and spotty public relations. During the gardens’ latest plea for a hand-up late last year, MDS offered to step in. While it’s not uncommon for nonprofit groups to coordinate efforts, the role MDS took on with the gardens goes far beyond a helping hand. MDS agreed to take over operations of the gardens for a six-month period, and then extended it three more months. That time will be up in August, after which MDS officials will decide how they want to proceed.
Since taking over, MDS has dedicated some staff to straightening up operations, bolstering marketing and investing in a remodel of the gift shop. The gardens had long been running in the red upwards of $100,000, but over the course of the past year with MDS’ help, those numbers are now in the black, to the tune of about $15,000, said Ed Wieland, MDS vice president of finance, who also has been tasked with acting as treasurer for the gardens.
While the relationship may be the saving grace for the ailing gardens, it’s more of a head scratcher as to what the gardens provide for MDS.
MDS Executive Director Jeff Nichols cites other relationships between gardens and agencies that cater to developmentally disabled people. Besides, he said, as MDS comes off a successful campaign to quickly build three group homes to accommodate the closure of the Grand Junction Regional Center’s skilled-nursing unit, helping out the gardens is small potatoes.
“It’s not totally off the map,” Nichols said. “This pales in comparison. Here, we’ve just got weeds to pull.”
MORE EXPOSURE FOR CLIENTS
A number of the 720 clients served by MDS work in the community every day. Clients craft goods such as birdhouses, Adirondack chairs and candle holders and sell them at Uniquely Yours, 443 Main St. They create a number of products in their wood shop. They take on work orders and fulfill contracts through Labor Solutions, the vocational division of MDS. Other crews perform landscaping work.
Having clients work at the gardens offers a new opportunity for interactions with the public and for them to test out a variety of skills, said Kristie Braaten, vice president of quality enhancement and resource coordination with MDS.
At the gardens, clients can work in the gift shop, perform landscaping or assist with special events. Workers are paid minimum wage while working at the gardens. They earn money on a per piece basis while constructing other wood-working projects.
“That’s something that we really want to capitalize on, bridging the gaps between individuals who do have disabilities and those who don’t,” Braaten said. “What we do is fine tuning that psychological orientation to understand how everybody fits in.”
Although the partnernship is in its early stages, MDS officials are tossing around some ideas to incorporate clients into the gardens model, while inviting the community in. That could include opening a cafe to be staffed by clients, starting a vegetable and herb garden in which the food supplements MDS’ group homes and renting bikes to better connect visitors with the nearby Colorado Riverfront Trail. Only recently, under MDS management, the gardens’ gift shop began offering some refreshments, which have been a hit with hungry walkers and visitors, Braaten said.
The remodeled space has now started earning money. Previously, the gardens had always lost money on the gift shop portion of operations. Braaten said MDS is looking at how botanical gardens in other areas such as Denver make a go of operations, and MDS hopes to piggyback on some of those success stories.
“The question is how do we bring in concessions,” she said. “We’re looking at licensing and how we can provide additional resources like lunch or some sort of food options.”
WHAT WENT WRONG
Every year for years, it seemed, staff at the gardens would publicly lament about how the organization was flailing and on the verge of closure. The pleas for help followed a similar trend. The organization stressed that it needed cash donations or help from the city fast to survive operations another day, week or month. Sometimes help was needed when the utility bills skyrocketed.
Utility work in 2003 that preceded construction of Riverside Parkway drove away visitors, staff said. That same year, the irrigation system to the gardens was compromised. After a series of pleas for help, Ashley Furniture Homestore, which has since gone out of business in Grand Junction, offered its assistance with marketing and paying down some costs. Over the years, the city stepped in to offer in-kind services, and a couple times city councilors begrudgingly offered cash assistance.
Gardens board president Jon Schler makes no excuses for the gardens’ management. In the past, the gardens operated on about $300,000 a year, an amount that cover things like salaries for an executive director and staff and heating bills, which could run up to $3,000 a month. Simply keeping a stock of butterflies in the Butterfly House cost $600 to $700 a month, Schler said.
In addition to the regular costs, fresh faces to the organization always wanted to alter, tear down or add new gardens. As new gardens were being made, maintenance waned on other plots.
“That’s the one thing Jeff said when he came in: ‘What the heck are you doing building another garden?’ ” Schler said. “It is a business. It is a good place for therapy. It has all these things, but if the basic site isn’t taken care of, what’s the use?”
Schler said board members initially protested temporarily discontinuing butterflies in the pavilion. While MDS is working on licensing to eventually get the butterflies back, board members were tasked with taking a long look at the costs to house and display the fluttery creatures, Schler said.
“Without sponsors, you could never get enough people in the door to afford it,” he said. “You’ve got to have the temperature at 80 degrees in the winter. It’s too expensive. People think seeing butterflies in the winter is a nice idea, but 90 percent of them didn’t go there.”
Visitor numbers over the years to the gardens are spotty. In the early 2000s, Gardens staff said the place received more than 20,000 visits a year. After closing for a few months this winter and opening in April, monthly visits hovered around 1,500 people. Like before, most of the visitors arrive for free days, which are Tuesdays.
Since MDS took over operations, it has spent about $6,000 to $7,000 on plants. Under board leadership, the gardens would be lucky to spend $300 to $400 a year on plants, Schler said.
Now, Schler said, MDS is working with board members to create a master plan for the future of the gardens. And Nichols’ reputation and reach extends further into the community than gardens’ board members and staff could have achieved, Schler said.
“I’ve learned that working with small nonprofits, they don’t have the expertise,” Schler said about the gardens’ mistakes in the past. “What (MDS) has been doing is building continuity. Jeff spends a lot of time talking to people. He does a lot of bigger things in the community.” | <urn:uuid:2e420207-323e-46ee-8e2a-6ae27b7bfd1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/articles/botanical-bounty/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958112 | 1,808 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The seventh son of a Yorkshire baker, William Etty showed a precocious talent and was sent by a wealthy uncle to the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1806. The following year he was made a pupil of Thomas Lawrence, a great influence. He travelled widely in Italy, where he encountered the paintings of Titian and Veronese, which had an enormous impact on his work. He adopted their warm, rich colours and also the compositional rhythms of Rubens. Like his hero Titian, Etty would become a painter of great natural bravura and ambition.
His career flourished from the 1820s and his large exhibition pieces of historical and biblical subjects were based on a large number of nude studies made in the life room at the Royal Academy.
Maas, Rupert. British Pictures. London: The Maas Gallery. 2006.
Last modified 8 February 2005 | <urn:uuid:671dee44-0ce4-4be1-8ac7-d395c1c56cb3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/etty/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983162 | 177 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Mourning MJ: Worldwide Memorials
The official memorial ceremony for Michael Jackson may have taken place at and been broadcast from the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, but fans around the world held vigil in their own unique ways. So many fans, so many countries – it proves Michael Jackson was truly one of the greatest performers in the history of music.
People gathered outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building in Harlem, N.Y. to watch a telecast of the Michael Jackson memorial on giant screens.
Huge posters of Michael Jackson were displayed at a Tower Records store in Tokyo.
Fans cried uncontrollably at a farewell memorial in Hong Kong.
People pay their respects by lighting candles at a tribute to Michael Jackson in Hyderabad.
The Middle East
An giant tribute to the King Of Pop was displayed outside a shop in Nablus, West Bank.
Hundreds of fans placed flowers and cards in front of The Lyric Theater in London.
Michael Jackson impersonators performed for mourning fans in the main square in Mexico City.
People walk past a memorial mural to Michael Jackson on a wall in Port-au-Prince.
The service was broadcast live in Berlin in front of many emotional fans. | <urn:uuid:f1797910-e85a-431c-a113-645491ad6e37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kidzworld.com/article/18923-mourning-mj-worldwide-memorials | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916612 | 247 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
I Just Had To Know: What Is Dystopian Literature? L.W. Rondeau Sets Me Straight!
What is Dystopian Literature?
When I set out to write the America II trilogy, I wasn’t thinking in terms of a genre, especially not a genre within a genre. Sci-fi-speculative-futuristic-political-thriller-dystopian and all those labels were something I hadn’t anticipated. I merely entertained the idea: If societal trends that exist today continue full speed ahead, what would the world look like in 2073?
Then someone reviewed my book and called it dystopian. Someone else said it reminded them a little of Hunger Games, a book I hadn’t even read. I’ve heard other writers refer to their book in the same manner. So I did some research, and sure enough, America II falls within the definition of Dystopian Literature, although, it really is vastly different than Hunger Games, though it does contain some of the elements commonly seen in Dystopian books.
With the onset of the wildly popular The Hunger Games, dystopian literature is now the fastest growing preference in young adult fiction. Some experts argue the reason is because today’s young people are disaffected with today’s culture. They see little hope on the horizon.
Such was the climate of George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, a poignant story of a totalitarian government, a few years following the end of World War II. People were frightened of the growth of communism as well as the advent of the Atomic bomb. Hysteria and fear were rampant. World War II vets, returning from their service, could not get jobs.
C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, written post World War II, also explores this loss of hope in the world as it is an allegory of the fall of mankind. Narnia was once Utopia (The Garden of Eden) but became Dystopia, ruled by an evil Snow Queen.
With a stagnant economy, housing crunch, and wide unemployment, not just in America but world-wide, I wonder if we have not grown into another aura of paranoia regarding our future. Hence, the resurgent popularity of Dystopian topics.
Dystopia is derived from the Ancient Greek and means a bad place. By definition, Dystopia is the opposite of Utopia which is a derivative of the Greek word meaning place and sounds like the English homophone (eutopia) which is derived from the Greek to mean good or well. In combination then, Utopia, has come to mean a good place. Utopia is often thought of as Heaven on earth, paradise today, where the world lives in peace and no one dies of hunger. Where there is no such thing as crime. In the classic, The Time Machine, a scientist creeps into the future to see if the world can cure its ills. He stumbles upon a seeming Utopia until he realizes human beings are being raised as food for underground monsters.
According to Wikipedia, Dystopian literature has these in common: idea of a society, generally of a speculative future, characterized by negative, anti-utopian elements, varying from environmental to political and social issues.
Most Dystopian themes will characterize society as oppressive or totalitarian. While the world seems dark and unappealing to the reader, the minor characters or society sees nothing wrong with the way things are. There is generally a character or characters that is dissatisfied and wants things to change. Therein is the conflict, the character pitted against society, like Don Quixote, flailing his sword at windmills.
Other classic dystopian literature includes: Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and The Iron Heel.
Unlike most Dystopian themes, and more like Chronicles of Narnia, America II: The Reformation offers hope for an improved society. It also reminds the reader of God’s continued interest and involvement in the affairs of His creation.
A native of Central New York, Linda Rondeau met and married Steve Rondeau, her best friend in life, and managed a career in human services before tackling professional writing. After thirty-four years of marriage, they have relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, leaving rural America to live in a city of one million.
While writing is her greatest passion, the more favorable temperatures of Florida allow her to follow another great passion--golf.
Linda is the wife of one patient man, the mother of three, and the grandmother of nine.
An award winning author, L.W. Rondeau first book, The Other Side of Darkness (written under Linda Wood Rondeau), released Fall 2012, and won the 2012 Selah Award for best first novel. America II: The Reformation is L.W.’s debut sci-fi book and is the first of a futuristic, political thriller trilogy. A prequel is planned in the form of serial editions.
America II: TheReformation is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
You can reach L.W. through Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Linked In. Soon to be on PInterest.
Or visit L.W.’s website: http://www.lindarondeau.com
Blogs: Geezer Guys and Gals
This Daily Grind
Posted by Helping Hands Press at 11:39 AM | <urn:uuid:36e3dab1-10ed-495a-bd5b-0ee8e934ada0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gelatisscoop.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-just-had-to-know-what-is-dystopian.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941072 | 1,137 | 1.875 | 2 |
A Human Resource Introduction to Latino Employees
Don Bower, DPA, CFCS
Associate Professor and Human Development Specialist firstname.lastname@example.org
County Extension Agent
Muscogee County Extension Agent
During the past few years, we've seen some new faces around -- in the grocery stores, at work, or walking down the street. There are some new neighbors in town.
Who are these new neighbors? Where did they come from? And some of us ask ourselves, "How do I manage this new workforce with the skill, integrity and success that I am accustomed to?"
Our new neighbors, these recent immigrants from Latin America called Hispanics or, more correctly, Latinos, can be a terrific asset to our companies. Many work
This publication is written to give you a better understanding of "Latino" or "Hispanic" employees.
It's an introduction to the cultural differences and barriers we face in the work place, while including some tools for more effective management and improved productivity.
hard and long hours with minimal complaint. However, as some have discovered, managing this new Latino workforce is different from what we're used to. Language can be a barrier. What seems fair and just to the manager might get a negative response from the employees. Also, even simple instructions might produce misunderstandings and frustrations. But once cultural differences are understood and language barriers removed, many Latinos become loyal, dependable employees who increase the value of any business.
Your business is your livelihood. You understand the importance of a productive and efficient workforce and agree with the business experts that employees are the biggest investment (and biggest potential headache) in any business. Effective employee management consists of motivating employees to be their productive best. The keys to motivation are good communication, defined tasks, rewards and discipline. Applying these keys keeps your business growing and the profits high.
How do we communicate with, reward, and discipline our new Latino employees wisely so as not to lose money or our workforce? Some suggestions for a successful business employing Latinos follow.
Our new neighbors may not speak much English. Why? Many come from Mexico, or Central America, Puerto Rico, or other Caribbean islands, the countries that lie south of us. This area of the Americas was conquered and colonized by Spain in the early 1500s. Before the Spaniards came, there were many indigenous (or Indian) communities, such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and the Tainos, and they spoke many different languages. As the Spaniards extended their government and control over the whole of Mexico, Central and South America, these societies and their education were based on the Spanish language (as the United States was based on English).
Key #1 - Learn and Teach
Some Americans assume that Latinos don't want to learn English. In fact, most do.
Learning a new language, however, can be difficult, especially for adults -- not everyone is gifted in languages, and many don't have formal education. Many Latino children growing up in the United States, however, are fully bilingual.
The best managers often provide their employees with opportunities to learn English. In turn, these managers begin to learn Spanish. Local school districts and
community colleges often provide English-as-a-Second-Language programs at minimal cost. For the manager, there are many ways to learn simple phrases in Spanish. Don't be shy! Attempting to learn Spanish shows respect on a personal level, something very important to Latino employees. Latinos are not as nervous about making friendly mistakes as Americans are; many Latinos appreciate the effort by managers to understand and learn more about who they are. This appreciation is often rewarded in improved job motivation and performance.
It is important to realize that, even though many of our new neighbors speak Spanish, they come from diverse countries. These countries each have a distinct national identity and a separate set of customs.
We all work with each other according to certain expectations, assumptions and behaviors. Academics call this 'culture,' which can best be explained with the phrase, "That's the way we do things around here." Working with people who are "not from around here" can become frustrating as they bring with them a different way of doing things and looking at things. We explain something, which is evidently very clear, and yet something completely different gets done! You may have experienced this even when working with people who grew up in different parts of the United States.
Our new neighbors, our Latino employees, come from cultures very different from our own and often different from each other. The potential frustrations and miscommunications are great. However, the best of Southern life is also important to many Latinos: family first, personal relationships, high regard for history and tradition -- and excellent food!
Key #2 People First
Suggestions for Managers:
- Learn to pronounce names properly, as this shows respect on a personal level.
- Express your understanding of the importance of visiting family on the holidays and provide adequate time off for your workers.
- Take an added interest in your employees' adjustments to life here: Do they know how to access medical facilities, insurance and public safety? Are their families getting involved in community programs?
- Many Latinos have extra difficulty securing transportation to and from work. Helping in this area encourages your employees.
- Some managers have helped their employees by offering phone cards and money transfers to their home countries.
In Latin America, life can be hard. Food can be scarce. Finding a decent home with clean water and sanitation is often an on-going struggle. There are limited insurance and social security nets. In order to survive and thrive, families need to stick together and friendships must be maintained. Therefore people, in the form of family or working friendships, come first before any allegiance to companies, businesses, countries or other seemingly non-personal entities.
If you've been managing Latino employees, you've probably experienced a thinning of the workforce around the holiday season, because many employees leave to visit their relatives. Latino employees take their family obligations as top priority, even above their own safety and well-being. Employment may come and go, but family is forever.
There are a number of other areas of cultural differences that can affect the work place. Celebrations (or fiestas), food, humor and courtesies are all areas where cultures are different. These differences can be quite complex and are very fascinating. Try to be sensitive to the differences while still being fair to everyone. Remember that Latinos come from many countries and they may celebrate different cultural occasions. For more information about these different traditions, see the books suggested on the last page of this publication.
Key #3 The Boss
Respect is a very important part of Latino culture. There is respect for elders, for women, and especially for those in leadership and power positions, such as bosses and managers. There is a strong sense of that those in authority make the decisions -- and those not in authority follow without causing disruptions.
In the United States, there are many management strategies for including workers in decision-making and employee empowerment. We have a strong sense that everyone is the authority! Our new neighbors and employees, however, find it uncomfortable to question authority or be involved with the boss in making decisions. They are more comfortable when the boss is the Boss. What does this mean?
In a survey of Latino landscape employees during the fall of 1999 in Columbus, Georgia, by the local Georgia Cooperative Extension Service, respondents offered the following suggestions for their managers:
- communicate clearly the job task and performance expectations;
- realize their uneasiness with a boss whose uses profanity and who is impatient;
- the respondents indicated a strong desire to work hard for managers who had taken a personal interest in them.
Workers in a recent Metro-Atlanta survey expressed similar comments.
Key #4 Achievements and Rewards
Suggestions for Managers:
- State job instructions clearly, and be careful about being too impatient with language.
- Don't be shy to give out pats on the back and praise good work, but praise a team publicly and an individual privately.
- Encourage employees to take a greater role in decisions and management tasks, and provide them with management skill training.
Those who grew up in a United States school system learned that the highest-achieving students usually get the prize. We look at our work as a place to achieve
and we get satisfaction in winning awards or raises based on our achievements. We often take extra effort to increase our education, knowing that this effort may reward us with a better paycheck.
Latino employees often see this differently. Personal achievement, in front of and at the cost of co-workers, is often to be avoided. This can include education and training. Rewards and social standing in many Latino cultures chiefly come from family ties (being born to the right family), good luck or blessings or, most often, from age (elders are honored and respected above younger, more aggressive achievers), and not always through achievements.
This view of achievement can have a tremendous effect on management strategies. Some managers tell of near-mutiny in their company simply because a pay raise system, based on achievement, was set up. It was simple to the manager: the more extra classes and certifications a worker got, the higher the pay. Why were the Latino employees against such a system? Why did many find it unfair? Perhaps because personal achievement above some older co-workers caused tension within the team, or because the concept of rewards based on educational achievement doesn't quite make sense (and so, some might think, the boss is simply playing favorites).
Personal respect and friendly attention are stronger motivations than a system based on personal achievements. Taking a few minutes to connect on a personal level
increases employee satisfaction, encouraging an increase in loyalty and production. Personal praise and encouragement are recommended to be done privately.
In conclusion, learning key strategies to improve Latino employee management may result in greater productivity and job satisfaction, and therefore has great potential in improving any business. The most successful managers and business-persons realize that employees are a crucial investment, one that can propel the business to higher profits -- or be a continuous source of frustration and lost revenue. Key strategies in improving Latino employee production and job satisfaction include:
- learn languages to reduce the frustrations of a language barrier;
- keep people, and the personal relationships, first;
- understand the hows and whys of rewarding and praising worker achievement in a more culturally appropriate manner;
- differentiate language from cultural misunderstandings;
- work to legitimize and legalize this workforce.
Learning more about these key areas will help you and your company stay profitable.
For more information:
Ball Floriculture Dictionary. 1995. Ball Publishing Company, Batavia, IL.
Condon, J.C. 1997. Good Neighbors: Communicating with the Mexicans. Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME.
Heusinkveld, P. 1994. Inside Mexico: Living, traveling, and doing business in a changing society. John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.
Pastor, R. 1988. Limits to Friendship: the U.S. and Mexico. Vintage Press, Newbury Park, CA.
Hellman-Adler, J. 1995. Mexican Lives. The New Press, New York, NY.
Clough, C. J. Clomegys, & J. Saddler. 1990. Spanish in the Field. AgAccess, Davis, CA.
Temporary Lien Labor Certification. US Dept of Labor (H-2A), Employment and Training Administration, 2001. (http://workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/foreign/dflc.asp#h2a)
CHFD-E 52/July, 2001
The University of Georgia and Fort Valley State University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the counties of the state cooperating. The Cooperative Extension Service offers educational programs, assistance and material to all people without regard to race, color, national origin, age, sex or disability.
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ORGANIZATION
Issued in furtherance of Cooperative Extension work, Acts of May 8 and June 30, 1914, The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the U.S. Department of Agriculture cooperating.
Gale A. Buchanan, Dean & Director | <urn:uuid:9c546805-4506-49e2-9ecf-ea1ff4f315eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fcs.uga.edu/ext/pubs/html/CHFD-E-52.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 | 0.951953 | 2,550 | 2.578125 | 3 |
An informative report for anyone who owns a pet including the latest breakthroughs in fighting arthritis in pets, a debilitating disease for 30% of all dogs and cats.
Is your beloved pet not as active as they used to be?
Approximately 25-30% of family pets suffer from osteoarthritis. The stiffness, pain and swelling in a pet with arthritis is really no different than what you as a human being would experience. Arthritis in pets, as is humans, is a debilitating disease that greatly affects your pet's health and wellbeing. With the onset of arthritis, also known as Degenerative Joint Disease (DJD), a happy, playful Fido or Fluffy can quickly turn listless and pain ridden.
Types of Pet Arthritis
- Osteoarthritis (general term, also known as OA)
- Degenerative Joint Disease (DJD)
- Hip Dysplasia
- Elbow (dysplasia)
- Knee (dysplasia)
- Knee (stifle joint)
- Hypertrophic arthritis
- Shoulder (degeneration)
- Wrist Arthritis (carpi)
- Kneecap (dislocation)
If you are not sure which condition your pet has, or wish to read more information on the specific types, a full description can be found here.
What's really going on to cause this pain in your pet?
The physiological changes that occur in pets are virtually identical to that of the human body. Essentially, it is the ""breakdown"" of the (protective) cartilage that covers or protects the ends of bones at the joint.
Primary vs. Secondary Osteoarthritis
Since pets by their nature are very active, it follows that they are constantly subjecting themselves to trauma. Where trauma is the cause of the onset of one of many (osteoarthritis) conditions (as opposed to hereditary conditions), the course of the disease is extremely rapid. While a human may sustain a traumatic injury that does not develop into an arthritic condition for many years, quite the opposite is true with pets. Unlike humans, most of pet arthritis develops almost immediately after trauma to their bodies. The onset can and is often within weeks of even a minor injury as opposed to years for a human. This is referred to as secondary arthritis compared to the more usual primary arthritis in humans.
They Can't Discuss their Pain
Pet owners often ask if glucosamine can be used for pets to help thier joints even though your pet does not have a diagnosis of OA from your veterinarian?
As most of you know, many human beings take glucosamine to build and rehabilitate joint cartilage and slow the progression of OA. You can do the same for your pet.
There are signs, however, that will tell you your pet is at risk.
How Do You Know?
- Reluctance to walk, climb stairs, jump, or play
- Lagging behind on walks
- Difficulty rising from a resting position
- Yelping in pain when touched
- A personality change
- Resisting touch
The Typical Veterinarian Response
If your pet is showing any of the above signs, it is always a good idea to take your pet to the Vet. They will be able to tell you exactly which type of arthritis your pet has (listed above).
A typical response to these conditions (if diagnosed) by a veterinarian is to prescribe NSAIDS (aspirin, aleve, motrin, etc.) for pain. In the more severe cases, steroids or even surgery may be suggested. The use of NSAIDS (and even veterinarians will agree, is not without some element of risk. Just as in the case of humans, pets run the risk of side effects even though they do get some pain relief. It goes without saying that the use of steroids and/or surgery poses even greater risks.
Side effects of NSAIDS include stomach ulcers and liver damage. COX-II Inhibitors have been shown to increase chance of heart attacks and strokes. Furthermore, while these treatments do reduce the pain, they do nothing to treat the disease.
There is an alternative...
More progressive veterinarians who are knowledgeable about recent studies, clinical trials, and overwhelmingly positive patient response will know that glucosamine not only eases pain, but also assists in the rehabilitation of damaged cartilage. While of course, the comfort of your pet is paramount in your mind, glucosamine (in the right form and quality combined with other ""driving"" and synergistic ingredients) not only eases the pain quickly, but it goes to the root of the disease and slows its progression.
Glucosamine, when combined with the appropriate ingredient mix, will ease your pet's arthritis pain in about ten to fifteen days. In extremely severe cases, it may take as long as thirty days. What should not be overlooked is that this can be accomplished without the dangerous side effects of NSAIDS and COX-II inhibitors.
It must be stressed that these kinds of results will only be seen if you are using an extremely high-quality liquid glucosamine formulation. The use of pills or capsules is not going to produce these kinds of results. A pharmaceutical quality liquid formula is recommended for maximum effectiveness, absorption, and minimum time to relief.
It is also important to understand that in order to maximize both the impact on pain relief and rehabilitation, other ingredients are essential. Those ingredients include: Bromelain, Boswellin; Omega 3 & 6 fatty acids; and Manganese Ascorbate, among others. These and other ingredients play a major role in both easing pain and assisting the rebuilding process. "
The author's statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not provided to diagnose any disease or to suggest that liquid glucosamine and chondroitin will treat, cure, or prevent any disease. | <urn:uuid:4eb82865-602a-4bcd-b6df-cc6a76cb5005> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arthritis-cats-dogs.com/article-detail.php?ID=134 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94719 | 1,225 | 2.40625 | 2 |
HONOLULU (AP) — Asian-Pacific leaders gathering in warm, sunny Honolulu this week will be searching for ways to kickstart faster growth through freer trade, moving on from the gloom over European debt that prevailed days earlier at the G20 summit in chilly Cannes.
In an era of debt crises and protests over inequality, the role of the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit may turn out to be just as much about confidence building as it is about combating protectionism.
The leaders of the 21 regional economies "do see freer trade flows as critical to growth and jobs," said Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center, a think tank in Honolulu.
"The main contribution APEC can make in the short-run is to restore the feeling that the leaders, ministers and central bankers of the major economies are indeed working closely together," he said.
APEC's activities encompass a wide range of issues, including climate change, energy and food security, and politics. But the spotlight in Honolulu will be on its original mission: promoting growth through trade and closer economic ties among Pacific Rim nations from Chile to China.
For President Barack Obama, the Aloha APEC, as the event is being dubbed, is a chance to spotlight progress on re-energizing exports, while pushing for a major Pacific rim trade pact.
The U.S. recently clinched long-sought free trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama — agreements that if ratified will bring to 20 the number of countries that have free trade agreements with the U.S.
Such arrangements are potentially worth billions to American exporters, and thousands of new jobs. Despite a recent surge in exports, the U.S. share in Asian international trade has fallen 9 percent since 1990 as other nations have set trading agreements among themselves.
Europe's debt troubles remain a concern, with talks Wednesday among deputy ministers focusing on how that may affect the global outlook and on the need for willingness to act to counter those headwinds, said a senior U.S. Treasury official.
Officials agreed on the need to push ahead with reducing trade gaps, especially through flexible management of exchange rates. China's willingness to make that commitment both in Cannes and in Honolulu could encourage similar moves by other Asia-Pacific economies, he said.
Prospects for major progress in Hawaii on establishing a Pacific-wide free trade zone, encompassing more than half the world's economic output, remain unclear.
The U.S., Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Peru are negotiating to join the bloc, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which already brings together the smaller economies of Chile, New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore.
Bringing onboard other big regional powers such as Japan and China, the world's third and second-largest economies, would vastly expand the bloc's scope and impact.
But Japan's debate on joining the TPP, sidetracked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster, remains in limbo, with the ruling party split. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is expected to hold a news conference in Tokyo where he may announce a decision before leaving for APEC.
Supporters view membership as a way to revive Japan's sagging economy, enabling it to better tap into Asia's dynamism, but politically influential farmers say that cutting tariffs — the duty on imported rice, for example, is 778 percent — would destroy them.
Such moves are risky for other countries as well.
"It's very difficult for countries to make concessions on significant sectors like agriculture or things like that in an environment where there's not enough to go around in the first place," Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing.
"In this environment, when the world's gone through the worst contraction since the 1930s, it's actually pretty miraculous that everybody's not at each other's throats over trade. That is something of an accomplishment," he said.
China, which has not been invited to join the Pacific trade pact, says Washington's goals are overly ambitious and run the risk of requiring concessions that might not take into account regional disparities in development.
Despite qualms over the pace and scope of any push for a regional free trade bloc, the 20,000 business and political leaders meeting in Hawaii appear to share a general consensus over the region's potential — and need — to compensate for malaise in the U.S. and Europe.
"Our goal for the meetings is to build a commitment for practical policies that will strengthen the global recovery," Charles Collyns, the U.S. Treasury assistant secretary for international finance, told reporters at a briefing Monday to preview the meetings.
"The dynamic emerging markets must play a bigger role in bolstering global growth," he said.
The share of exports in the U.S. GDP has risen to 14 percent from 11 percent over the past few years, the highest share in over 200 years, helped by the rebound from the global crisis, a weak U.S. dollar, strong growth in China and South America as well as by policy.
But so far, the export boom has not provided the oomph needed to make a significant dent in unemployment, partly because most growth has been concentrated in sales of corn and soybeans, coal and other resources, rather than in more labor intensive manufacturing, said Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"The export sector has done really well, but the general economy hasn't," he said. "In farm areas there are jobs, but in the cities and suburbs we still have 14 million out of work." | <urn:uuid:4628aff4-2576-4711-8249-596b6b46f971> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iptv.org/mtom/story.cfm/news/8883/mtom_20111110_3711_news_6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953542 | 1,159 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Donald E. Knuth was born on January 10, 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Case Institute of Technology, where he also wrote software at the Computing Center. The Case faculty took the unprecedented step of awarding him a Master's degree together with the B.S. he received in 1960. After graduate studies at California Institute of Technology, he received a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1963 and then remained on the mathematics faculty. Throughout this period he continued to be involved with software development, serving as consultant to Burroughs Corporation from 1960-1968 and as editor of Programming Languages for ACM publications from 1964-1967.
He joined Stanford University as Professor of Computer Science in 1968, and was appointed to Stanford's first endowed chair in computer science nine years later. As a university professor he introduced a variety of new courses into the curriculum, notably Data Structures and Concrete Mathematics. In 1993 he became Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming. He has supervised the dissertations of 28 students.
Knuth began in 1962 to prepare textbooks about programming techniques, and this work evolved into a projected seven-volume series entitled The Art of Computer Programming. Volumes 1-3 first appeared in 1968, 1969, and 1973. Having revised these three in 1997, he is now working full time on the remaining volumes. Approximately one million copies have already been printed, including translations into six languages. He took ten years off from this project to work on digital typography, developing the TeX system for document preparation and the METAFONT system for alphabet design. Noteworthy by-products of those activities were the WEB and CWEB languages for structured documentation, and the accompanying methodology of Literate Programming. TeX is now used to produce most of the world's scientific literature in physics and mathematics.
His research papers have been instrumental in establishing several subareas of computer science and software engineering: LR(k) parsing; attribute grammars; the Knuth-Bendix algorithm for axiomatic reasoning; empirical studies of user programs and profiles; analysis of algorithms. In general, his works have been directed towards the search for a proper balance between theory and practice.
Professor Knuth received the ACM Turing Award in 1974 and became a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1980, an Honorary Member of the IEEE in 1982. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and a foreign associate of l'Academie des Sciences (Paris) and Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi (Oslo). He holds five patents and has published approximately 160 papers in addition to his 19 books. He received the Medal of Science from President Carter in 1979, the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for expository writing in 1986, the New York Academy of Sciences Award in 1987, the J.D. Warnier Prize for software methodology in 1989, the Adelsköld Medal from the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1994, the Harvey Prize from the Technion in 1995, and the Kyoto Prize for advanced technology in 1996. He was a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1982, after having received the IEEE Computer Society's W. Wallace McDowell Award in 1980; he received the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal in 1995. He holds honorary doctorates from Oxford University, the University of Paris, St. Petersburg University, and more than a dozen colleges and universities in America.
Professor Knuth lives on the Stanford campus with his wife, Jill. They have two children, John and Jennifer. Music is his main avocation.
Featured Title: The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set By Knuth, Donald E. For the past 20 years I've been making copious notes in my personal copies of The Art of Computer Programming, whenever I've noticed how those books could be made better. Finally the time is ripe to typeset those books from scratch, using the tools of digital typography that I worked on during the 1980s. The new editions incorporate literally thousands of improvements, including hundreds of instructive new exercises and answers to exercises. I think most readers will enjoy these new things as much as I did when I first learned them. I've been especially careful to include any new historical details that have come to my attention, and to provide up-to-date information about all the research problems stated in previous editions. Computer Science has been changing and growing at a fantastic rate, yet I believe nearly everything in The Art of Computer Programming is crucial information that will never become obsolete. | <urn:uuid:48336d53-86ff-4d2f-87d9-641160bb78cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://literateprogramming.com/knuthbio.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966816 | 946 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Tue November 1, 2011
When Lactose Intolerance Makes You Scream For No Ice Cream
Babies digest milk with ease, but it can get harder with age, unless you picked up a gene from your Northern European ancestors. Between 30 to 50 million American adults can't crank out enough of the enzyme that digests lactose, or milk sugar, which can turn a bowl of ice cream into a roller coaster of stomach discomfort.
Lactose-intolerant people who want to indulge in dairy without suffering the consequences have two options: take supplements of the enzyme lactase, or buy lactose-free dairy products, which are made by adding lactase to break down the milk sugar.
But new survey of lactose-free milks and lactase supplements by ConsumerLab, an independent testing laboratory in White Plains, N.Y., found that the amount of lactase in supplements varies widely, and one, Lacteeze, contained no lactase enzyme at all. (The organization charges for Web access to their results, so we're giving you the key points here.)
The dairy industry sees all these lactose-free and lactase products as a "273-million-gallon" opportunity to keep dairy-shy adults as customers, not only through milk, but also cheese, yogurt, and other products, according to a a 2010 survey. But the Food and Drug Administration has no guidelines or standards for lactase supplements or lactose-free foods, and not all supplements actually contain what they say they do.
In its report, ConsumerLab also calculated how much a person would pay to get enough lactase in a supplement to avoid symptoms. The cost ranged from 8 cents for Costco's Kirkland Signature Fast Acting Lactase, to $6.79 for an equivalent dose of KAL Lactase Enzyme.
The three lactose-free milks tested by ConsumerLab — Lactaid Fat Free Milk, Land O Lakes Dairy ease Fat Free Milk, and Organic Valley Lactose Free Organic Fat Free Milk — all tested as having no lactose.
These milks can be used for cooking and baking. Lactose-free milk tastes sweeter than regular milk because the lactose has been broken down into two different sugars, glucose and galactose.
But if by now you're wondering why you can drink milk and eat ice cream without pain, the answer may well be that it's in your genes. Lactase persistence – the small intestine's ability to produce lactase into adulthood – appears to be a recent genetic variation that developed among people in Northern Europe within the past 10,000 years, after the origin of dairying. More than 90 percent of Swedes and Danes are have lactose persistence, while just 50 percent of Spanish and French people do.
But most people of African and Asian heritage (in other words, most of the world's population) are lactose intolerant. Only about 1 percent in China have lactose persistence.
The theory is that being able to digest milk and its protein, fats, carbohydrates and calcium, gave people with the genetic variation enough of survival advantage that the variation became common very quickly – within 400 generations. Adults in regions of Africa where dairying has been practiced for thousands of years also tend to have lactase persistence, but scientists think the genetic variations that make that possible are different than the one common in Europeans.
But if eating ice cream makes you burp, it's worth considering abstaining as your ancestors did – or find some tummy-friendly alternatives. | <urn:uuid:a4305126-8a0d-4afd-b4b7-4babbcab0528> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kccu.org/post/when-lactose-intolerance-makes-you-scream-no-ice-cream | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952058 | 730 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Speaking of drones, the DARPA guys offered up a prize and some really smart people took up the challenge - to create a vehicle capable of self-direction over rough terrain from Point A to Point B and the results are impressive as reported here:
It's an incredible feat. Giving robots the intelligence and the vision to manuever over all that rough terrain was considered closer to science fiction than science fantasy not too long ago. I'm beyond impressed. And so is the Pentagon. "I don't know if I'd go 'moon shot,'" Darpa director Anthony Tether told the Merc-News. "It's closer to the Wright brothers."Image from Stanford Racing's website. Carnegie-Mellon is also heavy into this as you can see from their racing team site. Besides, they let their teddy bear wear the 2nd place medal.
Should note that Zoe Brain reported on this race a couple of days ago here.
Unmanned, self-directing vehicles? More safety for troops. Cool. | <urn:uuid:d5df0113-e53b-47ad-9aa7-08b8bf24c7ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eaglespeak.us/2005/10/major-innovation-stanford-wins-robo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959106 | 209 | 1.851563 | 2 |
EXCEPTIONALLY strong El Nino events may have contributed to the downfall of two early civilisations in Peru, according to American researchers. El Nino is the name given to a cyclical change in the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere over a large part of the south Pacific.
Michael Moseley, an anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has consulted historical records in Peru. He says that severe flooding devastated coastal cities around AD 600 and AD 1100.
The evidence that this flooding was associated with strong El Nino events comes from ice cores taken from a glacier about 1000 kilometres to the southwest of the afflicted cities. The cores indicate that the Andes suffered unusually severe droughts at around AD 600 and AD 1100. Normal El Nino events are known to produce droughts in the highlands, although these are much shorter than the two on record.
Researchers stress that ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content. | <urn:uuid:e810c9af-6d47-4408-a839-dac949dcb449> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517063.100-science-el-nino-events-devastated-two-ancient-civilisations.html | 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 | 0.951706 | 211 | 3.90625 | 4 |
He would be the first African-American general to lead US Central Command.
An experienced combat leader, Gen Austin headed the 3rd Infantry Division which marched into Baghdad in March 2003.
He returned to Iraq in late 2010 to direct the final troop withdrawal and end of the war.
He also served in Afghanistan in 2008-09, leading the 10th Mountain Division.
Nearly all international combat troops are to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. | <urn:uuid:1f753c04-7a77-4bc4-b8ca-1f119d0da604> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/world-news/obama-names-afghan-pullout-general-28944486.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953034 | 91 | 1.679688 | 2 |
It isn't a question of skill. It isn't a question of whether older employees can handle a rapid pace in their workday, or whether they can make snap judgements. They were doing the job and doing it well before they were laid off because of the recession, and there's no reason to expect them to do otherwise if they're rehired.
Except they wander the halls of those unemployed and over age 50. In the hiring world, the older applicants are generally filed in the 'undesirable' folder in the drawer of last resort.
Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their résumés often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.
Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.
Um, yep, that more or less tells the tale. Interesting comments posted on my post on Bill Clinton's comments yesterday expand the narrative:
I don't know where Bill is hanging out but here in northern California the only jobs are entry level caregivers.Was chatting with a 54 year old former realtor and she said even the manager at McDonalds told her "don't call us, we'll call you." What kind of skill set do you need at McDonalds? When there are (at least) five people for every job, one of those five is going to have a sufficient skill set.
And, I might add, they're going to be younger than 54.
I know a lot of 40 - 50 aged professional people who have never been unemployed a day in their life until Chimpy's reign of fascism.
They are almost all college educated, many have graduate degrees, and they were making $$$$$$$$ until their jobs got outsourced. Engineers from top level Big Ten Schools, nurses, computer experts, you name it. Many of these folks were tops in their companies for years.
It's not that they cannot find qualified people in America. They just can't find people who will work for $5,000 a year.
Yes, the other experience common to all of us, including me, is that we cannot find jobs that paid us what we were making before we weren't.
I have over 15 years customer support/network management experience and have had nothing but "consulting"/contract work for the last 3 years. Being 57, as soon as the interview process get's started and they find out my age it's "sorry, but we have found a more qualified candidate." These are desktop support positions I'm going for! Anything! As soon as they find out my age that's it. Heaven forbid I ever get any further and they find out I'm a lung cancer survivor. I feel like my working career is over.
I'm tired and I feel like I may as well declare myself obsolete and live ghetto fabulous on the public dole. There is no reward for being an honest citizen and I'm tired of being unemployed, broke and hungry.
Beyond the financial is the emotional. I have never been as jarred as I was the day I was laid off. I had worked from the time I was 15, had been through other recessions that felt worse than this one (of course, I was one of the first to go in 2008), and had always received glowing appraisals. They let me go with sorrow and the promise that they'd give me the highest recommendations, gave a decent severance package and I started looking. That was December, 2008. This is September, 2010. Imagine what that does to someone's confidence. Just imagine. For some of you, imagination is unnecessary. You know it.
But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse’s income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.
“That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.”
As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.
Stunned and depressed, she sent out résumés, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.
Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.
As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. “If I let myself think like that all the time,” she said, “I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning.”
As do we all. But I don't want this to end on a sour note, because I have been lucky in two ways. First, my spouse was able to find a full-time job with benefits and a decent salary. In order for him to take it, I had to take over the day-to-day responsibilities for running his small business, which was suffering from the recession as it was, but at least deserves to have someone oversee the daily responsibilities and keep work flowing through. He is over 50, but his employer doesn't seem to care. So here's encouragement #1: There are some good guys out there and there is a reason to keep trying.
The second encouragement I have for older workers: Try to leverage your skills into something you can do as a self-employed person. If you're going to be unemployed anyway, might as well try out your writing skills or sales skills or something related and see where you go with it. Not everything will work, but something might, and you just never know.
If you've been reading here for awhile, you know I'm an optimist who can't be discouraged for very long. Besides, I've never forgotten the advice a trusted relative gave me: Roses grow best in sh*t. And they truly do. As depressing as the prospects seem, all it takes is one good employer to turn the whole thing around. They are out there and one of them will want you.
In the meantime, maybe a little water in the desert in the form of a 5th tier unemployment extension is in order, hmmmm? | <urn:uuid:877fd1be-2ecb-4035-a742-e44acd8c10c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/wandering-desert-50-and-over-unemployed | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987674 | 1,429 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Washington Redskins, meet Negro Mountain.
One is the name of the Washington, D.C., football team; the other a mountain ridge that stretches from Western Maryland into Pennsylvania. One name is patently offensive to a large majority of Native Americans; the other name overwhelmingly rejected by African Americans.
After decades of fighting separately to change each name, perhaps the time has come for African American and Native American leaders to take a unified stand against this common problem. No name rooted in systemic efforts to dehumanize can be accepted as a so-called honorific by any of us.
When lobbying to change the name of the mountain begins in the Maryland General Assembly and in the Pennsylvania legislature, Native Americans should lend their support. And when the National Museum of the American Indian holds a conference Feb. 7 on the name "Redskins," enlightened African Americans should show up in solidarity.
For those African Americans who see nothing wrong with the use of the word "redskins" - and there appears to be many - the controversy over the name Negro Mountain ought to be an eye-opener.
By the same reasoning used to justify Native American stereotypes in sports, defenders of Negro Mountain say African Americans should be happy to have a geological monument that honors their own kind.
But for all we know, the original designation might not even have been "Negro" but the other "n-word," as some residents who live near the mountain recalled at a Maryland Senate hearing in 2011. It took a long time for people to stop calling it that, too.
Either way, the name is hardly a tribute. Sometime around 1756, during the French and Indian War, a man named Nemesis was accompanying frontiersmen on an expedition to kill Native Americans. Nemesis, who was a slave or a manservant by most accounts, was shot and killed by Indians while protecting his master. In turn, the master memorialized the sacrifice by naming the site Negro.
Pennsylvania state Rep. Rosita Youngblood, D-Philadelphia, has teamed up with Maryland state Sen. Lisa Gladden, D-Baltimore, to lead the effort for the name change.
"The mountain should be named for the man, not the race of the man," Youngblood told me. She noted that the peak of Negro Mountain is called Mount Davis - for a prominent white landowner, John Davis. White top; black bottom. Some honor.
Now, personally, I don't find anything particularly honorable about going out to kill Indians and then dying to protect "Massa" from his comeuppance. But the name Nemesis Mountain would work nonetheless, representing a mountain of torment to this nation wrought by slavery and the colonists' wars against Native Americans.
Although the legislators are seeking the name change through executive orders from the states' governors, the U.S. Geological Survey's Board on Geographic Names usually has the last word on such matters. And its policy on name usage is fairly straightforward:
"The guiding principle of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for the names of places, features, and areas in the United States and its territories is to adopt for official Federal use the names found in present-day local usage," reads the board's policy statement.
"An exception to this principle occurs when a name is shown to be highly offensive or derogatory to a particular racial or ethnic group, gender, or religious group."
So changing the name Negro Mountain need not be difficult. And while the "Redskins" moniker will be more difficult to dispense with, following the same principle of decency will no doubt lead to victory in that fight, too.
Courtland Milloy writes for The Washington Post. | <urn:uuid:b10167ce-d6ef-46d9-aa12-d11e8bd443d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/commentary/courtland-milloy-redskins-negro-mountain-have-to-go/article_3cdecf5f-4184-5617-9d2f-9ae4e4b3b398.html?mode=story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952354 | 751 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Filipino teachers among lowest paid in Asia, lawmaker says
WITH only a starting salary of $9,200 yearly, it is no wonder that university teachers are forced to leave the country to seek greener pastures, legislators said during World Teachers’ Day on Wednesday.
“Our teachers are among the least compensated in the region. Salaries of teachers in Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan almost doubled after 15 years of teaching experience while those in the Philippines receive a meager 10 to 15-percent increase,” Gabriela Women’s Party Representative Luzviminda Ilagan, who taught at Ateneo de Davao University for four decades, said.
Citing data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), the starting salary of Filipino teachers after 15 years only increased to $10,150. Their highest salary amounts to $10,930.
Countries like Korea and Japan provide starting salaries of at least $25,000 which may double or triple depending on years of teaching experience.
Ilagan said “not only is it a dishonor, it is also an injustice for our teachers to teach amid conditions of scarcity and slave-like compensation”.
A legislator also found the opportunity to call on President Benigno Aquino III to address problems in the education sector.
Alliance of Concerned Teachers party-list Representative Antonio Tinio meanwhile joined hundreds of public school teachers to protest the declining state subsidy to the education sector.
Together with the Cebu City teachers, Tinio attended the “Grand World Teachers Day Parade”, which commenced from Cebu Normal University to Fuente Osmena Circle.
“No appreciation would be greater than a higher priority given to education and its workers, not just formally but substantively through a higher budget,” he noted.
Tinio called on his fellow lawmakers to study, deliberate, and debate on the legislation of a new round of salary increases for government employees beginning 2013. (Kathrina Alvarez/Sunnex) | <urn:uuid:97c9c83d-e436-4192-9ca7-3ea943d42ea5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.act-teachers.com/filipino-teachers-among-lowest-paid-in-asia-lawmaker-says/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942338 | 424 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Notes: The age-sex pyramid of the foreign-born population from El Salvador shares some features of the “diamond shape” population pyramid of the total foreign born. This includes the largest number of immigrants in the economically active ages of 20 to 54 and relatively smaller numbers under age 20 and over age 54. Unlike the population pyramid of the total immigrant population, the middle part -- representing the economically active population -- is streched out, while the top and the bottom -- representing the children and elderly population -- are small. Like the Mexican immigrant population but unlike the Filipino immigrant population, the foreign-born population from El Salvador overall has more men than women. This is reflected in a high male-to-female ratio that indicates there were 107 males to every 100 females. However, this is not the case among Salvadoran immigrants who are older than 50. There are more women than men in each of the age groups in the older adult population.
There were more than 1.26 million immigrants from El Salvador residing in the United States in 2011. Male-to-female ratio: 107.3
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2011. | <urn:uuid:276e0e66-ab85-4f6b-8f9a-4e5e7c7f965a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.migrationinformation.org/DataHub/charts/pyramid_10.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932241 | 235 | 2.71875 | 3 |
People take hudreds of snapshots of their loved ones and with digital cameras over time — digital cameras have only inreased that number. What if you could compile the photos of a face and see it animated, showing how it changes over time?
Well, now you can. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in computer science and engineering, worked with a group of programmers to make a tool that takes thousands of photos and strings them together in a few seconds, creating an animation of a person's face. The team presented their work at the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) conference in Vancouver.
The idea wasn't out of the blue; people have been taking single pictures of themselves and aligning the face in the image to create a kind of time-lapse picture for some time. But the movement is jerky and can look odd. Kemelmacher-Shlizerman's team wanted to get a smoother effect.
The software starts with photos that are tagged with the same person. It locates the face and major features, aligns the faces and picks photos with similar expressions. The tool uses a standard "cross-dissolve," or fade, between images. The effect looks smoother than simply placing several images in sequence and cutting between them. Picasa's face movie feature is based on this approach.
Of course, it isn't clear how many of us want to see in real time how much older we look than we did before. | <urn:uuid:811eab30-355e-4c4e-aeff-23e362eec4f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.discovery.com/tech/looking-animated-in-your-photos-110812.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953297 | 318 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Pilot demonstrates value of mobile PHR to engage difficult to manage patients
Fort Wayne, Ind. – December 13, 2012 – Jubilee Community Health, a safety net clinic in rural Paoli, Indiana, has announced the successful results of a personal health record (PHR) pilot program for patients with diabetes, part of an ONC grant awarded to the HealthLINC and HealthBridge HIEs to help improve consumer access to healthcare information.
The U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices (HHS) data reveals that diabetes currently affects 20.8 million people — about seven percent of the U.S. population — and is the leading cause of adult blindness, kidney failure, non-traumatic amputations, as well as a major cause of heart disease and stroke. Each year, the disease costs the nation an estimated $132 billion in direct medical costs as well as indirect costs, such as disability, work loss and premature death. In Indiana, 10.1 percent of the adult population reports having some form of diabetes.
The PHR pilot program at Jubilee Community Health focused on helping uninsured diabetes patients better manage their chronic health condition using a personal health record (PHR) from NoMoreClipboard. Project objectives included:
- Explore the use of a PHR by rural, uninsured patients with diabetes
- Improve patient health outcomes by providing patients with a PHR to share and track daily glucose readings
- Improve diabetes care management by sharing health information between a clinician and patients using a PHR
Beginning in December 2011, 28 diabetes patients at Jubilee Community Health were provided with a NoMoreClipboard PHR by a patient engagement coordinator who trained patients on actively monitoring their condition by providing blood sugar measurements on a daily basis, as well as utilizing an electronic health diary to track their symptoms and diet. The PHR was configured for smartphone access, making it easy for patients to provide data. Patients were also provided with a laminated card containing instructions on how to access and use the PHR. As patients submitted blood glucose results, they were presented with immediate feedback based on entered values.
When the PHR was set up, the patient coordinator helped patients populate the PHR, and lab results were integrated into the PHR from the clinical messaging service offered by the HealthLINC HIE that serves the area. Lab results were provided after a 72 hour delay to allow clinic staff the opportunity to review results.
Over the course of the study, 37.5 percent of the patients remained actively engaged and regularly entered blood glucose readings via NoMoreClipboard. Of these patients, 28.6 percent had improved A1C levels and reported feeling better. Conversely, of the patients who did notremain engaged, 21.4 percent of them had no improvement or increased A1C levels, and one of the patients whose A1C level increased suffered an MI.
“The problem we see with non-compliant patients is that they rarely have the tools to help them manage their healthcare in an effective and easy way and they don’t feel as if they have someone who is listening and understanding their healthcare frustrations,” said Linda Wells-Freiberger, the nurse practitioner who manages Jubilee Community Health. “This pilot program helped us find solutions to these challenges. Our patients found the NoMoreClipboard PHR tool easy to use and they were able to integrate it into their daily lives rather seamlessly. We also gave patients access to a patient engagement coordinator who not only trained them on how to use the PHR technology, but listened to the problems they were having and helped them create a customized healthcare plan for their individual situation.”
“We were amazed at some of the transformations we saw with our patients,” Wells-Freiberger continued. “One of our patients is a long-haul trucker who has struggled to control his diabetes for the past five years. Being on the road all the time, he never actively managed his health. His hemoglobin levels regularly came in at 12 (7 is ideal), making him a high-risk diabetes patient. After being trained on the NoMoreClipboard PHR and providing him with blood test strips he couldn’t otherwise afford, he began to actively track his blood sugar and hemoglobin levels and manage his diet. If he forgot to enter data one day, the PHR would text him a reminder on his mobile phone. Over the course of the study, he went from a starting level of 12.2 down to a 6.8!”
“The ability to transfer data from a lab, to a provider and then into the patient’s PHR in a secure format is revolutionary,” said Todd Rowland, MD and Executive Director at HealthLINC. “We were proud to partner with NoMoreClipboard and Jubilee Community Health on a project that helps solve some of the HIT industry’s biggest challenges and is making patient access to healthcare information easy, secure and cost effective.”
“This project reinforces the value of electronic patient engagement in helping underserved patients manage chronic conditions,” said Jeff Donnell, president of NoMoreClipboard. “Providers are often skeptical that populations including seniors and safety net patients will be able to cross the digital divide and use a PHR. Our experience with rural and urban uninsuredpatients makes it clear that these individuals are looking for tools to help them take a more active role, and they will use those tools when they provide benefit.”
About Jubilee Community Health
Jubilee Community Health was established in 1999 to provide medical care at a modest cost which people on limited incomes can afford to pay. Jubilee Community Health is a community-based non-profitorganization, relying on the resources of the local community. The organization keeps its costs low by using volunteer staffing, using a low-cost facility, eliminating expensive billing systems, and avoiding high-cost technologies when possible. For more information, visit http://www.jubileecommunityhealth.org/
HealthLINC is a not-for-profit corporation, which through its technology and business partnership with HealthBridge, supports health information technology (HIT) adoption, health information exchange (HIE), and innovative use of information for improved health care outcomes. HealthLINC is connected to the 2 largest, most advanced, andmost financially sustainable health information exchanges (HIE) in the United State via its collaborations with HealthBridge and the Indiana Health Information Exchange. www.healthlinc.org
NoMoreClipboard, a wholly owned subsidiary of Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE), is a web-based, personal health record management system designed to consolidate medical information in one convenient and secure location for easy retrieval and updates. NMC enables consumers to share personal or family member medical information with medical professionals electronically; reducing the need for repetitive medical paperwork. For more information, visit www.NoMoreClipboard.com | <urn:uuid:4b0ccd3a-bb31-430b-87fc-5e18b5d410e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emrandehrnews.com/category/personal-health-record/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95759 | 1,434 | 1.695313 | 2 |
History turned on the success of the invasion, but the scene on the beach was desperate. The ships could not get close enough to put the soldiers ashore. Hands full and weighed down by the heavy burden of their arms, the soldiers had to simultaneously jump from the ships, get a footing in chest-deep waves, and fight the enemy, who, standing unencumbered on dry and familiar ground, could so easily kill and maim the invaders.
The war correspondent reporting the scene in those terms observed: "These perils frightened our soldiers, who were quite unaccustomed to battles of this kind, with the result that they did not show the same alacrity and enthusiasm as they usually did on dry land."
may strike an odd note. In the mythology of war, our men are never beset
by elemental fear, still less paralyzed by it. The lexicon of defeat,
if it has to be admitted, is of gallant retreats against overwhelming
odds. But the war correspondent writing the story of the battle on that
beach was uninhibited. He faced none of the frustrations and dilemmas
of the modern war correspondent because he was taking part in the battle
himself, as the commanding general of the invasion of Britain in the year
Julius Caesar is one of a very long line of soldiers who reported their own campaigns firsthand. Thucydides was a military officer and his "History of the Peloponnesian War" was informed by his experience in command of the Greek fleet at Thasos in 424 B.C. and his defeat by the Spartan general Brasidas. The professional independent war correspondent, the unarmed civilian whose pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword, does not arrive on the scene until the Crimean War (1853-55) in the persons of William "Billy" Howard Russell of The Times of London, Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the London Daily News and G.L. Gruneisen of the Morning Post. So it is as well to acknowledge that our perennial appetite for news of war has been served by "amateurs" from time immemorial, in oral history, in poem and song, in legend and myth, in drawing and painting and tapestry.
how English axmen cut down the Norman armored knights at the Battle of
Hastings in 1066, and how King Harold died on Senlac Hill with an arrow
in his eye, because it is all recorded on the Bayeux Tapestry. Mark Kellogg,
a Western free-lance newspaper reporter, set out to tell us what happened
on the morning of June 26, 1876, on a hill at Little Bighorn in Montana.
"By the time this reaches you we will have met and fought the red
devils with what result remains to be seen," he wrote from Rosebud
Creek the day before. "I go with [Lt. Col. George] Custer and will
be at the death." And indeed he did die with the dashing officer
who had disobeyed orders and allowed the reporter to ride along with the
7th Cavalry. Our idea of how every man with Custer perished
comes from individual oral accounts retold by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors,
father to son and grandson, vividly supplemented by 41 pictographs drawn
by Red Horse, a Miniconjou Lakota chief at the battle. Only in 1999 were
all the elements of this war story properly compiled in book form by Herman
J. Viola ("Little Bighorn Remembered").
Whoever is the chronicler, there is an eternal and compelling curiosity about war, about wars in which our own survival is at stake, and wars long past. So much heroism; so much folly; so many brilliant moves; so many blunders; so many might-have-beens. In a current conflict, we fret about loved ones; but in all war reports we share vicariously in the terrible excitement of combat. We exult in victories; but we want to know whether the cause is just, the means proportionate to the end, and the execution honorable. We relish the drama of the front line, but we expect to be advised if a decent patriotism is being exploited. Do the Viet Cong represent a nationalist rebellion or aggression by international communism? Are there really vital national interests in sending 500,000 U.S. troops into battle to eject Iraq from Kuwait? And the arguments go on long after the battlefield has been cleared of its dead.
For the modern war correspondent, the imponderables are more numerous and the canvas broader than it was for battle participants like Caesar, who practiced war journalism before it was invented. The soldier-reporters were more exposed to risk than the professional correspondent, but in reporting they had a simpler task. They had access, by definition. They were their own censors. They had no worry that their messages and histories would inadvertently cost lives because communication was so slow and restricted. They could take their time in reporting; they had no competition and their eyewitness accounts were idiosyncratic.
Nobody could match Capt. Robert Blakeney's account of the battle of Nivelle in 1813, when the French were finally driven out of Spain. Rushing an enemy redoubt at the head of his regiment, his sword raised, he was struck by a shot that shattered two bones of his left leg. The regiment went on without him, but lying unmolested among the dead and the dying he had a unique view of the battlefield:
In my view, the birth and maturation of the unarmed professional war correspondent had four midwives: Democracy. Time. Scale. Speed.
Democracy, nurtured by nearly universal suffrage and popular education, meant governments had more and more to justify the blood, tears, toil and sweat of going to war. And the advent of total war widened the risks beyond the fighting men to every man, woman and child in the nation. Newspapers naturally played on the notion that only independent reporting would satisfy the popular appetite. The fact that war stories sold more newspapers than anything else only demonstrates that high-mindedness and commercial gain are not always in conflict. Governments, for their part, became willing to provide battlefield access for reporters because they presumed the journalists would wave the flag.
Timeliness was the second midwife, first recognized by The Times in London. The newspaper abandoned the traditional practice of relying on letters from junior officers at the battlefront when its readers clamored to know what was happening day by day in the Crimean peninsula, where England, with France and the Ottoman Turks, was fighting the Russians. Lt. Charles Naysmith of the East India Company's Bombay Artillery was covering the fighting for The Times, but he was thought to have no sense of urgency; perhaps his first priority was staying alive. The frustrated Times manager rebuked the foreign editor: "I wish you would impress upon Naysmith with all your eloquence the absolute necessity of writing as often as he can and sending letters without delay." The letters took more than a week to arrive anyway, coming by horse and steamer. The appointment of a stocky Irishman, William Howard Russell, was the trailblazing result, and the term "war correspondent" was apt, for the editor of The Times, John Delane, asked Russell to write him letters. Delane decided what he would take from them, for use in his news and opinion columns. When Russell saw the scandals in the Crimea, he asked, "Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?" Delane urged Russell to report all he saw, then withheld from publication any material he deemed too sensitive. But the information he kept from the public he made certain to circulate among government ministers.
The third midwife was Scale. Bigger, longer and more far-flung wars required more trained observers, more coordination of their efforts.
Speed. Finally, communication speeded up and with it competition between publishers and editors to have reporters cunning in the means of transmission and the evasion of bureaucracy. Curiously, in the 21st century communication is so transformed that we are at the dawn of a new era where the war correspondent yields ground to the ordinary citizen. Today, people may speak directly to others by e-mail and the Internet, reporting their own experiences unfiltered by journalist, editor or censor.
During the 1999 Kosovo war, a Web site organized by The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net) attracted contributions from ordinary citizens. One described what it was like to be caught up in ethnic cleansing in Pristina.
Later, when Kosovo was occupied by NATO, the same nonpartisan Web site was open to Serbs reporting attacks on them by returning Kosovars. Web site and e-mail reports like this will enrich the coverage of war, but they have the weakness of their openness: they can easily be manipulated. I don't believe they will ever supplant the professional correspondent and the authority of a recognized news organization in the way the reporter supplanted the literate soldier.
The real explosion of professional coverage came with the U.S. Civil War. As in all things, America went in for mass production. Newspapers in the South still relied heavily on telegrams and letters from serving officers, but at least 500 reporters covered the war for the North after a fashion. In the summary of Phillip Knightley, author of the seminal history of war reporting, "The First Casualty," the adjectives that could be pinned on the reporters' chests were ignorant, dishonest, unethical, inaccurate, partisan and inflammatory.
The nonprofessionals had a better record than that. In the Napoleonic Wars, brilliant firsthand accounts of the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo come to us from soldiers and sailors. Caesar had as good an eye for a story as any tabloid reporter. This is how he related what happened to the Roman legionnaires skulking in their ships rather than face the Anglo-Saxon javelins:
Caesar's report is eerily reminiscent of the scene at Omaha Beach on D-Day when the men of the 1st Division and 29th Division, supported by the 2nd Ranger Battalion, tried to get ashore. Men carrying 66 pounds of equipment had to jump into water that not only was deep but laced with booby traps and mines; many drowned. Those who made it to the beach mostly to the wrong sectors, for which they had not been trained curled up in the sand behind the seawall, pinned down by intense machine-gun, rifle, mortar and artillery fire from the sheer cliffs above. Gen. Omar Bradley's beachhead, like Caesar's, would have been lost but for inspired leadership in a richer idiom. "Get the hell off this damn beach and go kill some Germans," screamed Col. Charles Canham at an officer taking refuge in a pillbox. "Get your ass out of there and show some leadership." Col. George Taylor famously yelled, "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach: the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here."
these scenes to postwar writers who have made an attempt to reconstruct
Omaha Beach. At the time, the reality of the landing, its full horror,
its blunders and the awesome nature of its heroism did not come through.
There were 558 accredited print and radio correspondents for the five
Normandy landings, but the arena was vast and chaotic. The reporters were
restricted by censorship as well as by German soldiers doing their damnedest
to nail anything that moved. Censors went on the beaches with the reporters,
checking that none of them wrote or radioed dispatches that would help
the enemy or dismay people at home.
filed 700,000 words on the first day. Columnist Ernie Pyle, arriving on
the second day, sent three dispatches from Omaha Beach, and Martha Gellhorn
reported from one of the hospital ships after getting ashore as a stretcher-bearer.
Radio transmitted into living rooms the sound of gunfire and men's cheers
and ship's whistles and planes. The reports were all very exciting, but
readers and listeners were not encouraged to imagine men in a funk, or
told that infantry were landing with weapons inferior to the Germans'
in every category, except artillery, or that the U.S. Navy launched assault
craft so far out that most of the amphibious tanks and guns were swamped
and sank in heavy seas, or that among the 2,500 Americans dead at the
end of the first day were 40 percent of the combat engineers. The much-loved
Pyle, who footslogged with the grunts in North Africa, Sicily, Italy,
France and the Pacific, was laconic: "Our men were pinned down for
a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that
beach and accomplished our landing."
The cryptic reticence is explicable, but the consequence of the way the landing was covered at the time was well summed up by Max Hastings in his 1984 reconstruction of D-Day ("Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy"): "Few Europeans and Americans of the postwar generation have grasped just how intense were the early [Normandy] battles." The folk memory is of an effort of fearless superiority. Steven Spielberg's epic film "Saving Private Ryan" has finally done something to redress this notion. The film is a work of singular imagination. Spielberg was not even born when the Americans went ashore. He does not attempt to suggest what went wrong. His portrayal of the landings is impressionistic, but it is a masterpiece of cinematic art. It evokes the ordeal of the men on the beach; it makes their achievement all the more memorable. "Saving Private Ryan" is very like Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." Crane had not seen military action anywhere when he published his novel in 1895. Spielberg was unconcerned with the larger picture or the logistics, with the essential pith of war reporting, and Crane was unconcerned with "Stonewall" Jackson's tactics in the woods at Chancellorsville where his soldier-coward had his epiphany.
But works of such artistic imagination give us a sense of the emotions and chaos of the battlefield. And there are many: Virginia Cowles in the middle of the panic-stricken flight from Paris in June 1940; John Hersey in the jungle on Guadalcanal in 1942; Tom Wolfe on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea in 1967, recreating life-and-death minutes in the day of a Navy pilot on missions over North Vietnam; Michael Herr a year later evoking the spirit of the besieged Marines at Khe Sanh. They are answers to the questions Walt Whitman posed so poetically:
Who are the writers and photographers and artists who have dared to answer Whitman's cry, risking all in the cannon's mouth for the elusive words or pictures that in the wild dark might light up a fragment of truth? | <urn:uuid:d8493fca-da0d-4931-aef2-2d5e604a8cf5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newseum.org/warstories/essay/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973322 | 3,113 | 2.8125 | 3 |
The churches are being offered free student manuals and other materials to reach
10,000 young people in 2013. The program will be expanded Australia-wide at a later stage. Dare to Be a Daniel helps 9 to 14 year olds to better understand their Christian belief and equips them to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with their peers.
The hope is to see this generation of boys and girls established and confident in their faith in Jesus, and with a love and desire to share their faith with their friends.
Churches will attend free teacher training half day seminars in Sydney, Parramatta,
Orange, Dubbo, Tamworth, Newcastle, Nowra, Wagga Wagga and Broken Hill on how to teach the Dare to Be a Daniel discipleship program.
Churches in Broken Hill contacted Billy Graham Evangelistic Association because their town was not on the list of regional Dare to Be a Daniel seminars and a seminar was hastily arranged for Broken Hill.
St Andrews Church in Hong Kong heard of the project through social media and have arranged to link in to the half day seminar via Skype as they want to run the program in their church at their own cost.
“A survey by the International Bible Society (Biblica) indicates that 83% of all US Christians make their commitment to Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14. There is no reason to believe that statistics in Australia are any different”, said Jorge Rodrigues, Executive Director of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. “This is a critical age of decision for our sons and daughters and it is imperative that we reach out to them in a way that is both relevant and effective”.
For more information go to billygraham.org.au/Dare-to-be-a-Daniel | <urn:uuid:5a685361-e9dd-47cd-8e5e-76bf1946d237> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://au.christiantoday.com/article/billy-graham-program-hopes-to-raise-10000-young-evangelists-in-nsw/14854.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955842 | 363 | 1.757813 | 2 |
LONDON: British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Thursday that any attempt to disrupt elections in Yemen will be met with a "serious" response from the U.N. Security Council.
The warning came as Hague welcomed representatives from 39 countries and organizations to the fifth meeting of the Friends of Yemen group for talks on challenges facing the nation.
Hague said the U.K. stands "shoulder to shoulder" with Yemen as it takes steps to tackle extremism and engage in a national dialogue, noting that instability in Yemen threatens regional security and causes immense suffering to the Yemeni people.
"Yemen matters to the UK and it matters to the international community," Hague said in London, speaking alongside his Yemeni counterpart and Saudi Arabia's minister of state for foreign affairs. "The international community cannot afford to let Yemen's transition falter."
Yemen went through political and security upheavals during a 2011 uprising, when millions of Yemenis took to the streets demanding the ouster of longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh. Al-Qaida took advantage of the security vacuum and overran parts of southern Yemen before it was driven out over the past year.
Welcoming an elections roadmap created by the Yemeni government that sets out plans to overhaul the voting system and implement a new constitution, Hague also announced that the U.K. will give 11.4 million pounds ($17.1 million) to support elections and a national dialogue in the country.
Hague added that any attempt to spoil the fragile political process "will be met with a serious response and further measures from the United Nations."
The U.S. will give $10.4 million toward the dialogue process, which is slated to start March 18, according to the State Department. It will also provide $1.2 million in support of constitutional reform projects and $8.4 million in technical assistance to prepare for national elections in February 2014.
Thursday's meeting of the Friends of Yemen focused on how $7.9 billion in aid pledged to Yemen in 2012 is being disbursed.
The group urged donors to ensure that aid committed to projects is spent quickly and for pledges to be allocated "without delay" amid a "severe humanitarian situation" in Yemen.
Of the $7.9 billion pledged, only $1.8 billion has been disbursed, according to the statement. A further $2.7 billion has been approved for projects and $6 billion has been allocated. | <urn:uuid:bb88651f-e5bf-46f3-890a-4f8be942c156> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2013/Mar-07/209251-friends-of-yemen-group-urges-faster-aid.ashx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961749 | 496 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Community Livability: Issues and Approaches to Sustaining the Well-Being of People and Communities
- Routledge - Taylor & Francis Ltd
What is a livable community? How do you design and develop one? What does government at all levels need to do to support and nuture the cause of livable communities? Using a blend of theory and practice, experts in the field look at evidence from international, state and local perspectives to explore what is meant by the term "livable communities". Chapters examine the various influencing factors such as the effect and importance of transportation options/alternatives to the elderly, the significance of walkability as a factor in developing a livable and healthy community, the importance of good open space providing for human activity and health, restorative benefits, the importance of coordinated land use and transportation planning, and the relationship between livability and quality of life. While much of the discussion of this topic is usually theoretical and abstract, Wagner and Caves use case studies from North America, Brazil and the United Kingdom to provide substantive examples of initiatives implemented across the world. This book fills an important gap in the literature on livable communities and at the same time assists policy officials, professionals and academics in their quest to develop livable communities.
|Extent||304 pages, 7 black & white tables, 46 black & white halftones||ISBN||9780415779913|
|Format||N/A||Published||09 Jan 2012|
|Availability||In Stock - 3 to 5 days||Delivery||Delivery options and charges| | <urn:uuid:eff13cd8-618a-4e80-b91c-a73f462896aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tsoshop.co.uk/bookstore.asp?Action=Book&ProductId=9780415779913 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.900926 | 318 | 2.8125 | 3 |
In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a word was revealed to Daniel, who was named Belteshazzar. And the word was true, and it was a great conflict.
When God reveals a word, there is one thing that is always absolutely guaranteed: it will create “great conflict.” God’s word is, in our fallen world, essentially combative, for the powers, principalities and spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places occupy this world like usurping princes fending off the approach of the True King. Any word from the King is always going to be dismissed as Enemy Propaganda, or twisted into a sound bite supportive of the existing regime, or muted, downplayed, and otherwise treated as a threat. And threat it is. For the word of God aims to liberate the prisoners of the prince of this world, to raise a rebellion of love against hate, of peace against war, of humility against pride, of hope against despair, of health against sickness, of virtue against sin, of life against death. Jesus wasn’t kidding when He said He came to bring, not peace, but a sword. But His sword is not the worldly weapon of steel. It is the spiritual weapon of the gospel against which no sword and no conflict can ultimately stand. Today, cause a great conflict with the prince of this world by forgiving somebody, praising God, speaking the truth, or loving an enemy. | <urn:uuid:c73e8f97-8c05-4399-85b0-46157f109b9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://catholicexchange.com/great-conflict/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955929 | 292 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Highly anticipated open-source releases coming in '09
When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new "point release" of the software is really remarkable.
And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I've rounded up 25 of the most notable here.
There are browsers and operating systems, mobile platforms, development tools, productivity applications, IT administration tools, collaboration software and a few hard-to-classify items. Some of these you've heard of; others may be relatively obscure but should give you the wriggly "Oooh, cool!" sense of discovery.
You're sure to feel that one or two really important upcoming releases are missing. ( You try paring the list down to a couple dozen candidates!) But the FOSS community spirit can serve here too. Please add your nominations for can't-miss open-source releases of 2009 to the article comments, including links to the project sites, and we'll all benefit.
Browsers and operating systems
Ten years ago, who'd have thought there could still be so much innovation in Web browsers in 2009? Microsoft Corp. may intend to keep up the pace with Internet Explorer 8, but the FOSS options are at least as compelling.
And then there's whatever Google Inc. is planning for its Chrome browser, based on the open-source WebKit engine. The company is playing it close to the vest, but we do know Mac and Linux versions of the browser are in development.
Linux fans have much to look forward to, too. Following the release of Ubuntu 9.04, the "Jaunty Jackalope," in April, the Ubuntu team is planning for Ubuntu 9.10, the "Karmic Koala," to see the light of day in October 2009. Among the promised new features are integration with the Amazon EC2 APIs, so users can set up their own cloud using entirely open tools, and a kernel mode setting for a smooth and flicker-free start-up. The Ubuntu Netbook Edition will get the latest technology from the mobile Internet project Moblin, including better screen support.
Every other Linux distribution is sure to get better, too, along with associated operating system components. For example, Novell openSUSE 11.2, scheduled for November, should include KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, Linux kernel 2.6.30 (or higher), a Web-based YaST interface and netbook support.
Red Hat Fedora 11 is slated for release by this summer, with several updates. The project's goals include making Fedora boot and shut down faster (you'd be at the log-in screen in 20 seconds), changing supported architectures and default installed kernels, and improving support for fingerprint readers.
It's easy to keep our eyes focused on the proprietary technologies behind the iPhone and BlackBerry, but the FOSS community elves have been hammering out their own mobile innovations.
Android is Google's software stack for mobile devices, including an operating system, middleware and key applications. The current beta version of the Android SDK, released in early 2009, has tools and APIs for programmers to begin developing applications on the Android platform in Java.
Current focus is on support for input methods, such as devices other than physical keyboards. Later this year, Android should get support for displays beyond HVGA. Nobody is talking dates yet, but the entire mobile community is watching.
Maemo is a Linux-based software platform built by an open-source community (with Nokia as its principal sponsor and contributor) to support mobile devices, particularly tablets like Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet. The Maemo 5 Alpha SDK, introduced in March, has a new UI framework and APIs so developers can build location-aware applications that control vibrations and respond to changes in device orientation. Maemo 5 is also expected to have OMAP3 support, cellular data connectivity and high-definition camera support.
For all the delights of Wikipedia, its mobile offering is ... underwhelming. Fortunately, Wikipedia Mobile is under active development. The new version (written in Merb) will give you access to Wikipedia on modern 3G mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Android phones, and also will have tailored versions. It's in alpha testing now and should be released sometime this year.
Also worth watching:
- Openmoko, which produced the Neo FreeRunner GSM mobile phone in mid-2008 as a starting point for developers and product designers to build open mobile appliances with integrated communications. Its FreeRunner mobile hardware platform, which includes the Debian and FDOM distributions, the Qt application and UI framework and the Android software stack, lets developers alter the fully operable mobile phone design for their own purposes.
Programming tools and languages
Open-source developers understandably invest a lot of effort in improving the tools they use to write better software, whether it's a programming language, development platform or content management system. This category could have filled up an entire article by itself, but here are a few of the highlights.
In December 2008, the communities behind the Web development frameworks Merb and Rails agreed to merge rather than maintaining parallel development tracks. They intend to preserve the flexible configuration and advanced features appreciated by Merb users, along with the rapid productivity and ease of use that has given Rails so much attention from developers.
According to the Rails blog, the "overly optimistic" date for the Rails 3 beta is for the Rails Conference in early May, but it'll be worth paying attention to whenever it arrives.
Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in for streaming video and Internet apps. The result of a technical collaboration between Microsoft and Novell Inc. and related to the open-source .Net implementation Mono Project, Moonlight is primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11-based operating systems.
The Moonlight community has access to Microsoft's test suites for Silverlight and distributes a media pack for Linux users with licensed media codecs for video and audio. Moonlight 1.0 was just released in February, and work is already under way on Version 2, to keep it in sync with Silverlight.
(You might also keep an eye on Moonshine, a Firefox browser plug-in and desktop player that encapsulates any WMV or WMA content into a Silverlight container.)
In fact, it's worth calling attention to Microsoft's active open-source involvement simply because so few imagined that Microsoft would ever show up at the party. Among the successes is IronPython, a Python implementation designed to run on .Net and Mono; Version 2 was released in February. Now that that's done, the team can turn its attention to an IronPython version to support Python 3.0. While the team is vague about a release date ("after 2.x is out the door," according to a spokesperson), it will likely arrive sometime this year.
Microsoft also created IronRuby, a Ruby implementation for .Net, and the Dynamic Language Runtime, a set of shared services for implementing dynamic languages on .Net. All three projects are distributed under the terms of the Microsoft Public License.
Also worth watching:
- The MariaDB project, a community-developed branch of the MySQL database using the Maria storage engine; the brainchild of Michael "Monty" Widenius, founder of MySQL AB and Monty Program AB.
- CodeIgniter 2.0, a PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant tool kit to create full-featured Web applications. (While Version 2.0 hasn't exactly been announced, you can pre-order a book about it on Amazon. Hmmm.)
- Eclipse Galileo, a coordinated release of different Eclipse projects, due to ship at the end of June 2009.
Most of the preceding projects are of interest mainly to geeks (and we mean that in a nice way). Increasingly, though, businesses are adopting open-source software for productivity use and line-of-business applications.
Primary among these is the open-source "replacement" for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org 3.1, expected imminently, is currently available as a "developer snapshot." It promises grammar checking, anti-aliased drawings, improved charting and better outline features.
That's on top of the new features from Version 3.0 (released in October 2008), including compatibility with ODF 1.2 and OOXML and native Mac OS X support.
But business-quality open source isn't limited to traditional desktop apps or enterprise software. Kaltura is an open-source platform for creating and viewing video applications. It's aimed at Web publishers, integrators and application developers. Kaltura currently has extensions for several platforms, including content management (such as Drupal), blogging (WordPress) and collaboration (MediaWiki).
In the second quarter of 2009, Kaltura's Community Edition will be launched under the GNU General Public License, allowing any Web site to build its own YouTube-like video portal, fully independent of Kaltura. Optional enterprise support includes streaming and hosting, ad serving and content syndication.
Dimdim claims to be the first open-source Web meeting company; its software has been downloaded nearly half a million times. Among its existing features are unlimited use, multiparty video and audio conferencing.
Dimdim has big plans for 2009 (though it didn't get more specific than that on timing), including a commercial version. The Dimdim open-source platform will become a full webinar product, allowing meetings of more than 1,000 participants, which will make it attractive to anyone who needs to conduct general meetings or training sessions.
Also worth watching:
- LedgerSMB, a fork of the SQL-Ledger accounting package aimed at small businesses. Its rapidly approaching 1.3 release promises better contact handling and security that integrates with a company's network security infrastructure, such as Kerberos.
- The Lucid Desktop (formerly the Psych Desktop), a Web desktop (maybe a Web operating system) that integrates with the Web, existing desktop technologies and mobile devices, acting as a portable, online workspace to store files, play media and manage your office documents. Version 1.0, still in beta, is overdue, but it shouldn't be long now.
IT administration tools
Some categories of open-source software are of interest mainly to a niche set of users, such as network administrators or Web developers. That's fine; it just means that these tools are correctly tuned for their audience, and everyone else can turn to the next page. Or as Abraham Lincoln said, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."
For IT administrators, the most exciting release this year may be Samba 4.0, which is supposed to have active directory support, an internal Kerberos server and full NTFS semantics for sharing back ends. You might have heard all that before, as Samba has been stalled for a while, but the development team is actively working on it now, and there's a new build as of late February.
You can certainly expect action in the configuration management space -- tools that help system administrators get more work done, faster and more consistently. Among them is Reductive Labs Inc.'s Puppet 1.0, due to be released sometime in 2009.
Reductive Labs intends to fully rewrite Puppet's networking functionality, as well as optimize modeling, language enhancements and reporting. Preliminary testing shows the server will be about three times faster with a memory footprint that's a third of its current size, says a project spokesperson.
In April, Zenoss Inc. will release Version 2.4 of Zenoss Core, its open-source monitoring and systems management suite, with a new dynamic Web-based user interface and with agent-less Linux and Unix command-line collection via SSH to improve system-level monitoring. The group will also launch a Zenoss community collaboration platform, Zenoss.net, for users to submit and share network monitoring and management best practices and Zenoss extensions.
These aren't the only new and improved tools for IT admins. Longtime Unix configuration tool Cfengine, which bills itself as "autonomous engineering for the data center," is now in Version 3.0 and backed by a commercial support company; an enterprise edition is planned for this year.
Also worth watching:
- Enomaly Inc.'s Elastic Computing Platform, a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure. Version 2, now in alpha, includes a Web services API, automated VM deployment with Elastic Valet and multiserver support.
- OpenQRM, a suite of data center management tools that may excite people dealing with configuration management and other administrative tasks in the cloud. As an example of the work under way, Version 4.4 (just out) includes remote control for the cloud using a SOAP Web service.
Content management and collaboration tools
Don't you hate it when perfectly good descriptive terms become buzzwords? That's been the case for "collaboration tools" and "content management" and maybe (just maybe) "knowledge management." These are useful categories, but the terms are so mushy that the products become hard to describe.
We humans are pretty good at creating meta-tools for organizing, sharing and presenting data ... and that's what this category is about.
Several open-source development frameworks and content management systems are in between major versions. Django 1.0 shipped recently and Plone 4 probably won't arrive this year, though each has incremental upgrades planned. (For example, Plone 3.3, currently in beta and due in the next few months, brings better support for multisites, better locking support and iCalendar support for events.)
Nevertheless, content management fans will find plenty to keep themselves occupied.
MindTouch Deki is an open-source application for enterprise collaboration that sports a wiki-like interface. It allows users to organize raw data into actionable information and ensures that it's dynamically updated from disparate, disconnected data sources.
Slated to be released in early 2009, MindTouch Deki Lyons will expose more ways to interact with the core Deki application by coupling Deki's traditional mashup strengths with new tools for developers, such as the ability to trigger actions based on activity inside Deki or use a built-in local storage mechanism.
Foswiki is enterprise-ready wiki software that's a fork of TWiki (which has apparently moved its attention toward commercial products), initiated by former developers and users of the TWiki project. They just released Version 1.0 in January and are under way on 1.1, aiming to improve usability as well as interaction with updates in skins and plug-ins. Version 2.0, also planned for this year, will give attention to performance and scalability.
WordPress has grown to be more than a blogging system, with all sorts of plug-ins to extend its functionality. Version 2.7 just shipped, and Version 2.8 is under way with its top priorities widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. Beyond that, WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for August.
Other really cool stuff
Among the neatest things about open source is that its philosophy of collaboration isn't limited to strict "applications." Here are a few examples of work under way that may make a difference beyond ones and zeroes.
Literacy Bridge created the Talking Book Device, an open-source digital audio player and recorder specifically designed for people living in poverty. Over the short term, Talking Book Devices will serve as mechanisms for the rapid and free distribution of essential, accurate information via device-to-device sharing. Over the long term, say its organizers, Talking Books facilitate literacy learning.
A pilot project was launched in Ghana early in 2009, enabling undergraduate students at MIT and other volunteers to collect information regarding device functionality and durability.
Literacy Bridge isn't the only company extending open source to the hardware realm. For instance, SparkFun Electronics is also providing "open-source schematics" for its microcontrollers, such as the LilyPad wearable technology -- the next iteration of the "wearable computer." Since these boards are meant for hobbyist experimentation, the definition of "wearable technology" is left up to you. It's released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, so you can download all the engineering files and hack on the hardware to your heart's delight.
EveryBlock is a microlocal news Web site funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It has a distinctive approach to local news: You enter an address in one of 11 U.S. cities to see the news immediately near you. In June, the EveryBlock team will open source its publishing system, so that any news organization, government or citizen can create an EveryBlock-ish site for its own town.
Whew. That's quite a pile of cool open-source software (and hardware!) to look for in the coming year. Nonetheless, there's a good chance that you're thinking how unfathomable it is that I left out your favorite project, which is apt to change the face of computing. Groovy -- it's time to share it with the world. In the article comments, tell us about the open-source release you're most looking forward to seeing this year, and why it's such a big deal.
Esther Schindler has been writing about technology since 1992. She has a tropism for techie topics that make other people's eyes glaze over -- particularly software development, operating systems and open source.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a Computerworld columnist, provided extra reporting on this article. | <urn:uuid:4097cd45-4fb0-4587-be6e-91f2be3e9588> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.itworld.com/print/65480 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938094 | 3,748 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Lambic is a traditional Belgian style of sour beer. After boiling the wort —made from pale malt and 30–40% unmalted wheat — the brewers expose it to airborne yeast and bacteria overnight. Then it is pumped to casks (where it is likely inoculated with more microorganisms). The fermentation by many different wild yeasts and bacteria produce a beer that is not only sour, but shows a variety of other characters, including a horse blanket or barnyard character that varies from subtle to pronounced.
There is no detectable hop contribution in a lambic. Sorry, it just isn’t a style for hop heads. Lambics range from nearly flat to effervescent. The beer may be cloudy or clear, the head may be strong to weak to non-existent. The color may be straw or pale gold, but I have also noticed some subtle hints of pink in some well-aged examples of straight lambic and gueuze. Fruit is added to some lambics to make fruit lambics, including kriek (cherry) and framboise (raspberry).
I have won several medals for my homebrewed lambic, so people often ask me about how I brew them. Although the traditional wort production techniques involve some unusual aspects — including using unmalted wheat in the mash and large doses of aged hops in the boil — the distinct character of lambic comes mostly from what occurs after the wort has been boiled.
The Lambic Family
The starting point for the family is the traditional (straight or unblended) lambic — a complex, dry, sour, yellow or deep gold colored beer. A gueuze is a blend of young and old lambic, typically containing from 15% to 70% old lambic in the blend. Some, however, like the Boon Mariage Parfait, are much closer to 100% old lambic.
Various fruits are used to flavor some lambic styles. The original fruit lambic was probably the kriek (Flemish for cherry). A kriek lambic is traditionally made using the tart Shaarbeek cherries that are only grown in Belgium in a region to the northeast of Brussels. Now days the Shaarbeek cheery is fairly hard to find and expensive so some brewers also use the Moreno or Northern cherry as part of the fruit addition. Tradition calls for the use of whole cherries including pits. The belief is the pits add to the flavor depth. The framboise (French for raspberry), which apparently originated in the 20th century, is made from red raspberries.
The lambic family is the only one still in commercial production that uses spontaneous fermentation — the brewer does not pitch a cultured yeast strain into the wort. A spontaneous fermentation that produces the flavor characteristics of a lambic is said to only work in a small area around Brussels, where the proper microbiota exists in the air between October and May. Some writers claim the microbiota is in the brewery’s equipment rather than the air. Major organisms involved in the spontaneous fermentation include the traditional brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevesiae, the “wild” yeasts Brettanomyces lambicus, Brettanomyces bruxellinsis and Kloeckera apiculata, the bacteria Pediococcus and Lactobacillus and various enteric bacteria such as Enterobacter, Klebsiella, and Hafnia. The Brettanomyces strains produce the signature horse blanket, leathery or barn-like aroma. Pediococcus and Lactobacillus produce lactic acid.
The acidity of a lambic can range from mild in commercial examples such as Lindemans or Timmermans to extremely sharp as in examples such as Hanssens or Cantillon. I assume that there is also a significant impact on the acidity from the brewer’s barrels, since they are impregnated with the cultures from previous batches. In young lambic, the sourness is mostly from lactic and acetic acids. As the age of the lambic increases the acidity becomes more complex and balanced.
In many ways a lambic is a varietal product — even if the brewer was able to exactly control the brewing session and get exactly equivalent ingredients, each batch will vary due to the variation in the environment within the brewery over the several years between when the wort leaves the kettle and when the bottles leave the brewery. Most lambic breweries do not heat or cool the bulk of the brewery. The changes in the temperature and the humidity will change the growth rates of the various organisms that contribute to the flavors. Temperatures in the brewery can range from the mid 30s Fahrenheit (~2 °C) to the upper 70s (~25 °C). In addition, the atmosphere contains varying amounts of the various relevant organisms on different brewing days.
Finally, since the barrels are not coated on the inside, there can be barrel-to-barrel variation due to the organisms that have permeated the barrels. When it comes time to bottle, the commercial lambic brewer blends the product from various barrels and batches to achieve the desired character. The palate of the brewer or blender is really what determines the “house” character of a lambic brewery.
Contrary to what you may read in many articles, lambic is not fermented in large, open-air fermenters. After boiling, the wort is pumped into the traditional shallow coolship that is usually in the top floor or attic of the brewery. The wort typically stays in the coolship overnight where there is a limited exposure to the atmosphere. Within 24 hours, the wort is typically transferred to wooden (continental oak or chestnut) barrels.
Advanced Planning Details
Brewing a lambic does take a little advanced planning as lambic is the only style that needs well-aged hops. There should be no hop aroma, flavor or bitterness in a lambic, but you do need the hops for their preservative properties. You want old hops that have aged beyond the “cheesy” state. Since pellets don’t age as rapidly, you should plan on using one to three year old whole hops. I store my hops for lambics in paper bags in the attic of the uninsulated garage. On sunny summer days it gets well over 120 °F (49 °C) in the attic, so the hops age rapidly.
You also need to acquire the proper brewing yeasts and other organisms. You can and should buy pure cultures of the main lambic cultures, including a Brettanomyces strain, Lactobacillus delbrükii, and probably Pediococcus damnosus. As additional research into the style, and as a source of some of the other microbiota found in a lambic, it will be necessary to drink some commercial examples of the style. Yes, it is hard work but it is research that must be repeated over and over again. I keep a starter that I add the dregs of the bottle to after pouring the beer into a glass. Beware that some of the less traditional examples seem to be pasteurized and therefore have nothing left to culture. You need to use a little care to avoid contaminating the dregs. I wipe the neck down with vodka before opening and then flame the neck with a small butane lighter after pouring the beer into the glass. The starter will probably develop a pellicle (skin) from the Brettanomyces and Pediococcus. If you see green floating mats, however, you have probably collected some undesirable mold. I also save the dregs from a batch when I bottle it and use those dregs in the next batch.
Traditional lambic is brewed in wood (continental oak or chestnut) barrels. Wood is somewhat porous and will allow a slow penetration of oxygen into the fermenting beer. I use the plastic bucket fermenters available in homebrew supply stores. Like the wood barrels, most plastic is also slightly porous to oxygen. I have taken to placing a small, approximately 1 by 3 by 6 inch, piece of American oak in barrel to become a home for the microorganisms. Initially, the oak pieces were soaked in water treated with sulfite (1 Campden tablet per gallon) for a few months, soaked until no color or flavor was extracted from the wood. The wood is rinsed in hot water between batches, but is not sanitized since that would evict all the microorganisms.
In Belgium, the barrels and even the bottles in aging are subjected to some temperature variations with the seasonal changes though the changes are probably gradual due to the large size of the barrels and the large numbers of bottles stacked in the brewery. Many of the best examples of the styles are aged for extended periods in the bottles. The wall of bottles on their side aging is impressive to see.
While the beer is in the fermenter, the pellicle provides some protection from oxygen. There are indications that barrels stored near vibrating machinery can end up more vinegary due to the vibration breaking the pellicle allowing more activity by acetic acid bacteria.
You can brew a lambic with an all-grain process or with extract, but I take the easy approach — I brew extract versions. (For all the details on a traditional lambic mash, see Jean-Xavier Guinard’s book, “Lambic,” 1990, Brewers Publications).
My fermenters are normally in the basement that ranges from the upper 50s in the coldest part of winter to the upper 70s in late summer. The beer is never transferred or racked until it is time to bottle. In commercial lambic breweries, the beer might be coarse filtered on the way to the bottling line. For a homebrewer, a racking a day or so prior to bottling should be sufficient to remove most of the sediment. Priming can be with the typical corn sugar dose. However, it is a good idea to prime your lambic with the addition of a package of dried yeast just to improve the likelihood of getting some carbonation in the bottle. Since the pH is out of the norm for brewers yeast there is always a chance that the beer will never carbonate. I have had some batches carbonate with no problem and other batches that haven’t carbonated after several years.
If the lambic is to become a fruit lambic, the fruit will go in sometime around one to two years after brewing and the beer will sit on the fruit from three months to a year or more. If trying a kriek, a few months on the fruit should be sufficient. Some people claim the lambic will pick up too much bitterness from the pits if left in contact with them more than a few months. Other authors claim that kriek is left on the cherries and pits until the pits dissolve. In Belgium, after a beer sits on the cherries for a few months, it will be racked off the pulp and pits and a second batch will be racked onto the remaining fruit.
Of the fruit lambics, the framboise is the easiest for US homebrewers to approximate. Raspberries in the US are very similar to those used in Belgian lambics.
The cherries we are able to obtain in the United States don’t really do justice to the kriek style. If you want to try making a kriek, tradition calls for a kilogram or more of whole cherries per 5 L (~1.6 lbs./gallon) of lambic. Given the time required to produce a lambic, I would avoid the bottled fruit flavors sold in most of the homebrew shops.
For a batch of framboise, I typically use three cans (just over nine pounds) of Oregon Fruit Product’s Raspberry Puree. Since the puree is seedless, Oregon claims you can use 10 percent less puree than whole fruit. So, the three cans are equivalent to just over ten pounds of fresh raspberries. My most recent framboise used 20 pounds of frozen raspberries. I think the presence of the seeds in the frozen raspberries may also help provide some of the astringency noted in some of the classic commercial framboise examples.
I have just started a couple batches of fruit lambic using fresh wine grape juice, but at this point I have not determined the proper amount of juice for the best results. I have also tried blending several different (young and older) batches of lambics to produce a true gueuze. It is interesting to see how the flavors and aromas meld. Blending is an area of experimentation that could last a lifetime.
There are other opinions on how to produce a homebrewed lambic. All I have provided is a technique that seems to produce a decent homebrewed lambic for me. My process isn't quite the same as the brewers at Cantillon, De Cam or Boon use. There is no one tried and proven correct way to produce a homebrewed lambic-style beer. Remember the commercial examples have a pretty broad range. Please feel free to experiment and share your results with other lambic homebrewers.
Piatz’s Basic Lambic
(5 gallons/19 L, extract only)
(5 gallons/19 L, extract only)
OG = 1.056 FG = 1.016 or lower
IBU = 0 SRM = 3 ABV = up to 5.2%
- 3.0 lbs. (1.4 kg) light dried malt extract
- 3.0 lbs. (1.4 kg) wheat dried malt extract
- 0.25 lbs. (0.11 kg) malto-dextrin powder
- 3 oz. (85 g) well-aged hops
- mix of brewers yeast, “wild” yeasts and bacteria
- (Wyeast 3278 (Lambic Blend) or mixture of commercial cultures and microbes cultured from commercial lambics)
Step by Step
The malto-dextrin is to be sure there are a few complex sugars left for the extra organisms to eat after the brewers yeast gets finished with its work. I use the dried extract since lambic is a very light colored beer and most liquid extracts seem to be too dark for the style. The wheat extract is a poor man’s approximation of the unmalted wheat used in the commercial lambic breweries. I don’t know of an extract equivalent of unmalted wheat.
The water is brought to a boil and the extract and malto-dextrin are added. After re-establishing the boil, the hops are added and the boil is held for 90 to 120 minutes. I don’t bother with Irish moss in a lambic, but you can use it if you feel the need. I run the hot wort directly from the kettle to the plastic bucket without chilling and will leave the wort in the bucket for a day or so with the lid partially open to the kitchen air, which is typically full of enteric bacteria. This exposure will allow the enteric bacteria present in the air to add their components to the beer. After the exposure to the air, I place the lid on the bucket and wait a few days before I pitch a normal brewers yeast. The variety doesn’t matter very much; I either use yeast from a prior “normal” beer or a packet of dried yeast. By this time the beer is starting to get a little “funky” and the surface may look a little oily. At this point I also add the treated piece of oak back into the bucket — do not run the hot wort onto it or you will be sanitizing it. The brewers yeast will rapidly change the pH and generate ethanol, both of which will help kill off the enteric bacteria but their byproducts will still be there. After a few weeks I add the other organisms, the Brettanomyces, Pediococcus, Lactobacillus and the dregs from commercial lambics and prior batches of homebrewed lambic.
Steve Piatz is a member of the Minnesota Home Brewers Association. | <urn:uuid:75618c90-af87-4adb-b1dc-394c9695d318> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.byo.com/stories/item/975-lambic-brewing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944601 | 3,345 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Standards of Authority
Text: II Kings 17:7-23
I. How do you determine what is right or wrong?
A. How does your neighbor decide? Or your co-workers?
B. We all base our behavior on standards that we have accepted as authoritative, but those standards vary.
C. What makes a good standard?
1. It needs to be fixed
a. A standard that constantly changes would be difficult to follow.
b. “Let’s see, today is Tuesday so it is wrong to eat catchup on hamburgers today, but tomorrow we can’t have mustard on hot dogs.”
2. It needs to be fair and equitable
a. Standards that differ because one is rich or poor, or based on ethnic origins, or gender are not good standards
b. We don’t like it when celebrities are released from crimes, mostly because of their celebrity status.
3. It needs to be reliable
a. The standards need to produce good results.
II. Personal Standards
A. In answering people’s questions, I have been struck with the realization that many people look no further than their own feelings as a guide.
1. One woman wrote that she feels her husband no longer loves her. She was frustrated because he wouldn’t discuss divorce with her.
2. A fan of Binny Hinn ignored evidence that Hinn was a false teacher, saying he saw the empty wheelchairs. He knew that Lord was behind the work. He wouldn’t trade that feeling for all the world.
3. A young man wanted to know what he should do because he felt he couldn’t wait to have sex.
B. In all these cases, an appeal is made to personal feelings.
1. Feelings are given greater weight than facts.
2. Yet, feelings change. They can be manipulated.
a. You can watch a movie and laugh, cry, get angry, or feel embarrassed.
b. But if I asked you, you would admit that the movie was not real. You know that it is just actors reciting lines made up by other people.
c. Even knowing it is not real, you let your feelings change based on imaginary circumstances.
3. If feelings can be so easily altered, why do people trust them?
a. Instead of reasoning things out, he foolishly follows his heart - Proverbs 18:2
b. A fool to trust your own heart - Provers 28:26
4. Feelings are neither fixed, nor reliable
C. One’s conscience is not a adequate guide
1. Paul acted always in good conscience - Acts 23:1
a. But this is the man who in younger days killed Christians - Acts 9:1-3
b. This man later said he was the chief of sinners - I Timothy 1:15
c. Because he persecuted the church - I Corinthians 15:9
d. If we appeal to Paul’s conscience, at what point was he right?
2. A conscience can be seared - I Timothy 4:2
3. It can be trained - Hebrews 5:14
4. If a conscience is trained well, it can make a good rough guide, but it cannot be a standard - Romans 14:22-23
D. Can a person be his own standard?
1. Too many people think this is the case - Psalm 12:4; Judges 21:25
2. “I don’t see anything wrong with it.” Means that I find it acceptable, so therefore I’m doing it - Psalm 10:3
3. People make mistakes
a. Jacob “knew” that his son was killed, but he was wrong - Genesis 37:33-25
b. Man is not capable of directing his own way - Jeremiah 10:23
c. Doing your own thing was forbidden - Deuteronomy 12:8
4. That is why the Old Law required two or more witnesses
a. One man is easily wrong, but it is harder to fool many
b. Seek the advice of many - Proverbs 15:22
III. Scholars as a Standard
A. It is common to hear people quote some commentator or biblical scholar and say that if a wise man believes it, then it must be so
B. Our faith is not to be in the wisdom of men - I Corinthians 2:5
C. It should not be who says, but why they believe it.
1. A true wise man should be able to explain why they came to their conclusion.
2. But that means we are not accepting the man’s conclusion but learning how he applies an authority greater than himself.
IV. The Majority as a Standard
A. Well, if it is harder to fool multiple people, then the more who follow something, the more right it must be.
B. I had a man call the other day wanting money, but he quickly began berating the church. He asked if I knew of Karl Ketcherside and Max Lucado. How, he wanted to know, could I condemn them when so many follow their teachings. Had I noticed that conservative churches tend to be small? Didn’t that tell me something?
1. I directed his attention to Matthew 17:13-14
2. Israel fell as most of them turned to idolatry - II Kings 17:7-17
C. How can this be?
1. Many will not think for themselves, but will assume that if others are doing it, it must be right.
2. We have a tendency toward a herd mentality, following the crowd, caving in to peer pressures.
D. The truth is the majority is rarely right.
1. Yet, we use it all the time.
a. “All my friends are doing it!”
b. Everyone is investing in XYZ, there must be something there
2. Proverbs 1:10-16 - Right and wrong is not based on peers
E. “Other religions do it”
1. Many practices are justified in a manner of keeping up with the Jones.
2. If the church done the street gives food to the poor, serves coffee in the morning, or has a camp, then others want it too.
3. Like Israel’s argument for a king - I Samuel 8:5
4. It is another form of making men the standard for what we do.
V. Government as a Standard
A. Governments exists to uphold standards - Romans 13:3-4
B. But are governmental decisions a determiner of right and wrong?
1. Many act this way. Things once seen as sins are felt justified because people managed to get governmental allowances for their sins.
2. Abortion was once wrong, but is now legal. Homosexuality was once wrong, but is wining more allowances daily. Divorce was once frowned on, but now we have “no-fault” divorces.
a. People are seeking to legalize marijuana usage. Why?
b. Does government allowance make it use good?
c. Is alcohol or smoking good because the government permits it?
3. It is not only in civil governments, but we find people striving the same in denominations’ religious governments
a. Denominations have voted that hell isn’t real. That living together without marriage is not a sin. That homosexuals can be clergy members.
C. But governments can and have been wrong!
1. German government once allowed the destruction of their Jewish population. Because it was authorized, did it make it right?
2. Government laws are constantly changing. At what point were they right? Is every change necessarily an improvement.
D. Just like the majority view, governmental views are no standard.
1. We get lulled into following them. Especially when those laws have been mostly good in the past.
2. Once again, we yield to the herd mentality - Acts 4:18-20
VI. Cultural Traditions as a Standard
A. Different societies have different traditions
1. In America bribery is seen as wrong, but in many small countries it is accepted as a way of life.
2. Filipino culture states that something is right if you don’t get caught.
3. Sweden has a culture that accepts sex outside of marriage as normal (and we are rapidly changing to the same standard in America).
B. Just because society accepts it, does it make something right?
C. Jesus condemned Jewish traditions - Matthew 15:1-6
1. Jesus wasn’t condemning traditions.
2. A tradition in and of itself is not a determination of right or wrong. It just shows currently accept practice.
3. But we already have shown that the majority is often wrong.
D. Then too, culture changes.
1. The standards for dress accepted today are wildly different from 50 or 100 years ago.
2. Practices accepted today are different than 50 or 100 years ago
a. Living together without marriage
b. Carrying a gun
3. Society is too fluid to be a standard
E. “We’ve always done it this way”
1. Even in the church there can be cultural traditions. But traditions are not proof.
2. The Jews had long standing traditions that turned out to be wrong - Matthew 15:1-14
3. We have to guard against man-originated traditions - Colossians 2:8
4. If we say “faithful brethren” have always done something, then isn’t the standard men instead of God? - Galatians 1:10; I Thessalonians 2:4
F. “It does good; therefore, it must be right”
1. Basically the claim that the end justifies the means.
2. If we as a whole see it as “good” then it must be good.
3. Romans 3:8 - Cannot get good from evil
4. But then, who defines what is good?
a. This is a standard that needs a standard behind it.
b. Does instrumental music become right because it sounds nice or that it is claimed to keep people on key?
c. Can we change the elements of the Lord’s Supper because we like the taste of chocolate cookies and milk?
VII. The One True Standard
A. The one common thread is that each prior standard was based upon men, individually or in groups.
1. We tease about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps
2. But this is what is happening when man looks to himself to be his own standard - Jeremiah 10:23
B. Man’s standards must be higher than man - Isaiah 8:20
1. Proverbs 14:12 - Man is easily deceived
2. Isaiah 55:8-9 - God is higher than man
3. Proverbs 3:5 - Trust God, not your own understanding
4. Jesus claims, and has been proven accurate that he holds all authority - Matthew 28:18
5. Jesus’ words will judge us - John 12:48-50
C. God has given us a standard in His word - II Timothy 3:16-17
1. It is the truth - John 17:17
2. Has everything we need - II Peter 1:3
3. Was given once for all - Jude 3
4. It is perfect - James 1:25
D. You cannot alter perfection and get something better
1. The Old Law was not to be changed - Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32; Proverbs 30:5-6
2. The New Law is not to be changed - Galatians 1:6-10; Revelation 22:18-19
VIII. A good standard does no good if it is not followed
A. John 14:15 - Show love for your God this day. | <urn:uuid:851c64e0-7521-4d7f-b518-d81b8dd01cce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVstudies/Fundamentals/18Standards.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954639 | 2,532 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Devise a method and stick with it. Also, never give up on a passage.
Whether you read the entire passage first, or jump directly to the questions is largely irrelevant, as long as you practice in that way. CR is tough, but like I said, it's a matter of meticulous practice in a single way, as well as a bit of reading brawn.
Read the entire passage first, and fully understand it.
Answer specific questions by rereading the line reference questions, rereading those parts.
Answer any remaining questions.
This way is a bit more challenging time wise, and is more appropriate for faster more adept readers, but it provides you with a more thorough understanding of the passage. Reliable for yielding 700+.
Mark up the text with line referenced.
Read through the line reference and answer questions.
Answer questions as you get to them.
This way is generally easier, but allows for some lapses in understanding, and sometimes you don't catch the full idea of the passage. Reliable for yielding 650+.
Last edited by teteatete; 03-25-2012 at 05:51 PM. | <urn:uuid:fa6dad86-aaff-4fa8-9197-2754099288f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/1309438-any-tips-improving-critical-reading-score.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937108 | 234 | 2.609375 | 3 |