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I attended this year's Sirikt conference and participated in a round table discussion on copyright in Slovenian education together with renowned Slovene copyright lawyer experts Miha Trampuž, Mojca Pečar and Katarina Krapež.
I did a bit of thinking and reading on this topic in preparation for this event and saw that the more I read the more questions I ended up with... It's true, educators, kids and web folks in general often don't remember to credit authors, cite sources, and ask permissions for publishing things online... I think mostly unintentionally, because we tend to do things fast these days and do them the way we see others do them.
My schoolmate at secondary school had this fabulous T-shirt saying 'no school, no job, no problem' - if you can't tell right from wrong you are blissfully unaware of mistakes you make... it was sort of along these lines that my thoughts rambled as I was trying to make sense of the copyright act restrictions.
As I said, the more I read the more questions I had… Many of them were kindly answered during the round table discussion and earlier workshop given by Katarina, still many remain unclear.
There are no national borders on the web… which is just great. I understand I need to follow Slovene copyright law in Slovenia – also when I use foreign copyrighted works? E.g. I think that according to the Slovene law I could freely use copyrighted music in a non-commercial school performance as long as I credited the authors and cited my source… I’m not sure I could use e.g. American copyrighted music the same way here…
Theory and practice are a challenge to match if you are not a lawyer.
Katarina, a cc advocate, mentioned that people sometimes surprisingly know more about cc than about the copyright law. I don't find that too surprising since cc terms are written way more humanely and are a much appreciated successful attempt to reconcile the legalese with the language understood to common web folks. I'm a big fan of the 'for dummies' trend and think we should all create meaningful contents for our target users (teachers too ;-)) if we expect them to take it seriously.
Here's a lovely view I from my hotel window:
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The American Presidents
From George Washington’s love of the theater to Harry Truman’s surviving high-school essays on The Merchant of Venice, a surprising number of US presidents have well documented connections to Shakespeare and his plays.
John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams were avid Shakespeare readers, though John Quincy had far more chances to see the plays onstage. Abraham Lincoln, another frequent theatergoer, often read and recited favorite passages from the plays in private conversations; it was one of many cruel ironies that his assassin came from a famous American acting family. Bill Clinton, influenced by memorizing a long passage in high school, once said that “Mr. Shakespeare made me a better president.”
Folger Shakespeare Library has a special place in its history for Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Former president Coolidge (like Henry Folger, an Amherst graduate) headed the library’s trustee committee from 1931 until his death in January 1933. As president, Herbert Hoover attended the library’s opening ceremonies in April 1932, accompanied by First Lady Lou Hoover. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum also holds several letters to Hoover from Emily Folger, who worked with her late husband to found Folger Shakespeare Library. Dating from 1934, the letters from Mrs. Folger asked the former president to give serious thought to becoming director of the library. He politely declined, preferring to remain in the West.
President Hoover and George Arthur Plimpton at the dedication of the Folger. Photograph, April 23, 1932. Folger Shakespeare Library.
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A four-year Texas Ag Experiment Station study found that adding a cool-season clover to a warm-season perennial grass was more profitable than applying high amounts of nitrogen for increasing calves' average daily gain. The clover extended the grazing season, had higher nutritive value and provided summer weed control, in addition to adding nitrogen to the pasture system, according to Gerald Evers, experiment station researcher.
Evers compared three systems:
- A high-input system on dallis grass pastures using 150 lbs/acre of nitrogen and herbicides for weed control.
- A medium-input dallis grass system where winter clover was overseeded into a stand of warm-season grass pasture.
- A no-input pasture system using no nitrogen, no herbicide and no clover.
Average daily gains for the calves were 1.57, 1.82 and 1.66 lbs/day for the high-, medium- and no-input systems. "Using 2007 costs for pasture and animal inputs, production costs per pound of calf gain were $1.12, 58 cents and 81 cents for the high-, medium- and no-input pasture systems, respectively," Evers states. Additionally, using clover in the medium-input system proved "as effective as applying herbicide in April for controlling summer weeds" in the high-input system, he says.
The original study was using dallis grass and white clover, both of which are well-adapted to the upper Texas Gulf Coast region. The system is just as applicable to more-northern regions of Texas, though different grasses and legumes would need to be used, he suggests. North of Interstate 10, soils are sandier and better drained. Bahia grass and bermuda grass are better adapted to these areas than dallis grass or white clover, he says. As for the clover component, arrowleaf, crimson and ball clovers are better adapted. Instead of only planting pure clover, Evers recommends mixing annual ryegrass with the clover to help alleviate concerns about bloat.
"By adding clover we started grazing five weeks earlier than if we didn't have clover, so that helped us by about $60/cow," Evers says. "So if you add ryegrass to the clover we could even start grazing another four to five weeks earlier than when we started grazing clover, and that would give you another $50-60 in winter feed cost savings per cow."
Evers cautions producers to take note of soil acidity before overseeding clover this fall. "You like to see the pH at 6 or higher," he says.
Contact Evers at 903-834-6191 or email@example.com
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Tickets: $15/$10 students
Garth Knox: fiddle, viola, viola d’amore
Agnès Vesterman: violoncello
Sylvain Lemêtre: percussion
A delightful NPR interview: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/05/14/152667784/garth-knox-one-viola-and-1-000-years-of-musical-history
Many instrumental compositions in music history, even if they’re called sonata, suite, sinfonia or even fantasia, are essentially dances or else exhibit an unmistakable dancelike character. Not a few examples of so-called art music also have their origins in the folk music of a particular country or make use of popular or folk elements. Under the title “Saltarello”, a 14th-century fast Italian dance in ¾ time that survives today as a folk dance, viola player Garth Knox couples works stretching from the 12th century to the present day and demonstrates how fragile, even arbitrary, is the line drawn between art and folk music, but also that between old music and new sounds. Taking up fiddle, viola and viola d’amore, accompanied by cellist Agnès Vesterman and percussionist Sylvain Lemêtre, Knox presents his own works alongside music by Hildegard von Bingen; he juxtaposes the exquisite Renaissance sounds of John Dowland against pieces by Kaija Saariaho that make subtle use of electronics, and sets arrangements of traditional melodies and anonymous dance movements against Vivaldi’s D minor Viola d’amore Concerto – a sensuous survey of 1000 years of musical events.
D’Amore, previous album by Garth Knox and Agnès Vesterman was a Gramophone album of the month. The reviewer stated “This is quite simply one of the most outstandingly magical discs I have heard. From the very first notes one is totally captivated by the fantastic richness of the sound produced by the combination of viola d’amore and the cello... an undoubted feast of the senses...” And the new recording Saltarello is a stunning follow-up.
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January 2010 Articles & Features
By MOTOR Editors | January 2010
Ohio Tech College offers classic car restoration course, WIX Filters launches Spanish-language eLearning Center, plus other news of interest to shop owners and technicians.
Ohio Technical College Offers All-Inclusive Classic Car Restoration Course
Anyone who has a passion for working on vintage automobiles and a desire to learn about automotive restoration might want to check out the 72-week Classic Car Restoration course offered by Ohio Technical College (OTC). The program combines the historical significance and time-honored methods of classic car restoration with modern technology used in automotive and auto body technician training.
Included in the program are courses on engine and drivetrain restoration; ignition, fuel and exhaust system tuning; metalworking; upholstery and trim restoration; welding; damage repair; suspension and chassis restoration; painting and refinishing; and final assembly and testing.
Upon completing the program, students are prepared for entry-level positions as autobody/collision repair and refinishing technicians, restoration technicians, fabricators, service writers, service and parts managers, specialty shop technicians, repair business owners and welders.
“Students with a passion for classic cars can really excel in an 18-month program, which provides the special skills needed to stand out in the fast-growing restoration industry,” said Tom King, director of enrollment management, OTC. “To be even more competitive in the job market, OTC offers an Associate of Applied Science degree, putting new technicians in a strong position for career advancement.”
The hands-on training OTC provides is currently with several early-model cars, among them a ’53 Ford, ’54 Dodge Royale, ’55 Buick Roadmaster, ’57 Chevy, ’59 Cadillac, ’60 Metropolitan, ’61 Chrysler Imperial, ’64 Pontiac GTO, ’65 Pontiac GTO, ’66 Oldsmobile 442, ’68 Buick G.S., ’68 Mercury Cougar, ’72 Dodge Challenger and ’72 Ford Ranchero. For additional information, log on to www.ohiotechnicalcollege.com/classic_car_restoration.
Wells Videos a Big Hit on YouTube, Company Website
The growing library of free driveability diagnostic videos from Wells Manufacturing has gotten more than 100,000 customer views via YouTube, the world’s most popular online video community. The new video series, which tackles more than a dozen common vehicle service topics in both English and Spanish, is also available for free viewing via Wells’ website, www.wellsmfgcorp.com.
The videos can be accessed on a 24/7 basis by searching “Wellstech” on YouTube or by clicking the “Technical” link on the Wells website. No customer login information is required. Each segment of a video covers a common diagnostic challenge—based on customer input through Wells’ Technical Service Hotline—and details each step in identifying and resolving the issue.
There are 15 Wells diagnostic videos now available online, the most recent one being “Evaporative (EVAP) Training.” Some other topics covered are distributorless ignition (DIS) training, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) training, ABS diagnostics and repair, oxygen sensor heater circuit testing and digital mass airflow (MAF) sensor diagnostics, along with several manufacturer-specific topics covering GM, Ford, Chrysler/Jeep and Nissan vehicles.
WIX Filters Launches WIX Filtration eLearning Center For Spanish-Speaking Techs
WIX Filters has created a fully translated Spanish version of its popular WIX Filtration eLearning Center, claimed to be the industry’s only free online courses on light-duty and heavy-duty filtration. Participants who earn a 70% or better grade on course-ending quizzes will earn the title of Certified Filtration Specialist. Throughout the process, students can earn several certificates that will distinguish them as a provider of excellent filtration knowledge and customer service.
“WIX has always strived to reach out to the global community and to help educate and meet the needs of our loyal users,” said Luanne Finch, Web marketing manager for WIX Filters. “Because we understand the time and effort that goes into completing the eLearning courses, we provide a certificate of completion after each of the three levels, as well as a final diploma, in both English and Spanish.
Founded four years ago as an offshoot of the WIX Institute of Filtration Technology, the WIX Filtration eLearning Center provides students with multiple curriculum levels in both light-duty and heavy-duty filtration in a convenient medium that can be completed at their own pace. The free online courses, available at www.wixconnect.com, provide intensive, specialized training involving filter construction, system functions and performance dynamics.
Honeywell Announces New Training Schedule, Promotion, Sales Support at AAPEX
Honeywell Consumer Products Group (CPG) made some news on three fronts at the recent AAPEX Show in Las Vegas—three new training courses, the largest promotion in its history and new FRAM Advantage sales support services.
The three new courses being added to the group’s comprehensive training schedule are: Automotive Electrical/Electronics Seminar, which covers the fundamentals of electrical theory, including Ohm’s law, Kirchoff’s law, electrical circuits and electronic components; Heavy-Duty Truck Cooling Systems and Antifreeze/Coolants, which provides an understanding of cooling system failures and anti-freeze/coolant technologies used on today’s heavy-duty vehicles; and Heavy-Duty & Commercial Vehicle FRAM Filter Product Knowledge, which gives heavy-duty technicians and sales personnel complete product knowledge of FRAM filtration products for on-road and off-road heavy-duty vehicles.
The three-hour-long classes are available exclusively to Honeywell CPG customers and cost $500 each. Customers can host a class for an unlimited number of participants, although a minimum of three is required. The courses are taught by the CPG Technical Training Team. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis; call Jay Buckley at 248-629-3680, or e-mail to email@example.com.
The Autolite team at Honeywell CPG has announced the all-new 2010 Autolite Challenge, a comprehensive program that the company says is part instant-win game, part money-back guarantee for consumers and part training and rewards opportunity for technicians.
In the 2010 Autolite Challenge National Consumer promotion, do-it-yourselfers who purchase a set of four or more Autolite spark plugs and register online have a chance to win a Grand Prize of free gas for a year, or be a daily instant winner of a $50 gas card.
The second portion of the promotion, the 2010 Autolite Challenge Professional Technician program, is an in-depth training opportunity for technicians focused on ignition systems. Starting in March, techs will have access to a new monthly online training module that will cover a topic of professional interest, ending with three to five relevant questions, in an easy-to-understand format. Technicians can enroll at www.autolitechallenge.com/pro in March of next year. Both the consumer and professional technician promotions will run simultaneously from Mar. 1 through Aug. 31 of this year.
Finally, it was announced that the FRAM Advantage program has added new services to help the do-it-for-me (DIFM) channel improve sales and customer foot traffic. New oil and air filter part numbers for increased coverage, downloadable training videos on cartridge oil filters and cabin air filters and new point-of-purchase materials will help repair shops succeed in today’s competitive oil change marketplace. To learn more about the FRAM Advantage program, contact your local Honeywell CPG sales representative or call 800-890-2075.
MAHLE Clevite Implements New Strategy Designed to Streamline Brand Portfolio
MAHLE Clevite recently announced the implementation of a new brand strategy for its North American Aftermarket products designed to streamline the brand portfolio. Rebranding initiatives include a number of product line transitions to the MAHLE Original brand, as well as changes to the MAHLE Original logo and packaging. The moves are designed to improve awareness and consistency among North American brands.
Currently, MAHLE is transitioning all light vehicle engine parts categories—except engine bearings—to the MAHLE Original brand. All engine bearings, as well as heavy-duty products for American applications, will keep the Clevite brand.
Consistent with the MAHLE Original light vehicle engine parts strategy, light vehicle Perfect Circle piston rings will also transition to the new MAHLE Original brand, while heavy-duty Perfect Circle rings move to the Clevite brand. The goal is to phase out the Perfect Circle brand from the North American Aftermarket by the end of 2010.
“Rebranding our product lines with the MAHLE Original brand helps to create a new identity that combines the benefits of quality brands like Perfect Circle with the international brand awareness of MAHLE,” said Ted Hughes, Team Leader – Program Development for MAHLE Clevite.
Light vehicle engine parts products that will not change to the MAHLE Original brand include Clevite engine bearings and Victor Reinz gaskets. For more information, log on to www.mahleclevite.com or contact your local service representative.
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EPFL is launching "EssentialTech," a unique program in which engineers will in particular produce medical devices custom-designed for the difficult conditions encountered in developing countries.
Medical equipment has a tough time in developing countries; the supply of electricity is unreliable, components are costly and fragile, and there is a lack of qualified personnel for maintenance. To solve this problem, EPFL's Center for Cooperation and Development is launching an ambitious initiative. The EssentialTech program brings together companies and research institutions from north and south with the common goal of developing new technologies that are custom made for the needs of developing countries. Scientists are currently working on a medical imaging device that can operate in extreme and difficult conditions. A prototype of a power source and a high-voltage circuit, jointly developed between EPFL' Distributed Electrical Systems Lab and the Universities of Applied Sciences in Sion and Yverdon, are already being tested.
More than two-thirds of medical equipment is never used
The WHO statistics are alarming. More than 70% of high-tech medical equipment sent to Africa is never used, due to lack of adequate infrastructure or trained maintenance personnel. Even when the equipment can be put into service, electrical surges or hot and humid conditions often result in failure after just a few months of use. "Sometimes, we have to deal with problems that are as trivial as they are unsolvable," explains EssentialTech program director Klaus Schönenberger. "For example, some material we simply can't even plug in, because it requires three-phase current, such as we use for our electric stovetops, and the hospital is only equipped with standard single-phase current."
A custom-made imaging device
EssentialTech's basic idea is simple but ambitious – to totally rethink the design of medical equipment. The first project is a medical imaging device designed specifically for the needs of developing countries. Engineers are working on a power supply and a high-voltage circuit that can provide uninterrupted power in the presence of power surges and power outages.
Two-thirds of the world population doesn't have access to imaging technology, explains Schönenberger. By combining x-ray and ultrasound technology, the machine will be able to cover 90% of the needs of a typical district hospital.
In Switzerland, more than 20 engineers are working together with the EPFL team to design the prototype. The Universities of Applied Sciences in Yverdon and Sion are involved in developing the electrical circuits. The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is in charge of developing the imaging component, and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) is providing practical expertise. On the industry side, scientists are benefiting from the know-how of Swiss company Betschart AG.
Cameroon is a partner in the project. EPFL and the Ecole nationale supérieure polytechnique de Yaoundé recently signed an agreement for a joint laboratory. Swiss and Cameroon researchers, with the participation of local partners, will field test the imaging device and put in place a strategy to deploy it at an affordable price.
Going beyond traditional philanthropy
For Schönenberger, a project like this is much like working with the space industry. "Once it's launched, a satellite must be able to function for years. It's the same with medical equipment destined for the outback. Except in our case, we have to take into account cost and mass-production considerations."
EssentialTech has a clear and unique philosophy. The goal is clearly to establish a trade chain that can benefit each participant. This is an important issue, according to Bertrand Klaiber, head of commercial strategy in EssentialTech. "It's a situation in which traditional philanthropy shows its limitations. To ensure the survival of the system, you can't be dependent on sporadic donations; you have to develop chains for production, distribution, education and maintenance in which every actor is paid for his or her work."
Energy and water treatment
Engineers are also working on an incubator for newborns, and looking into developing modules that could stabilize electricity supply in hospitals. The EssentialTech team is also already applying the basic idea in other critical areas such as drinking water treatment and energy. A complete first prototype of the imaging device should be ready within two years.
Explore further: Low cost design makes ultrasound imaging affordable to the world
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This is my official, one-year-until-the-digital-TV transition post. Consider it part primer, part Motorola perspective.
Why are we having a digital TV transition?
The original impetus behind moving to all-digital television was a regulatory push to reclaim broadcast channels for public/civic use. However, with the rapid growth of HDTV, on-demand television and streaming video on the Web, reclaiming bandwidth has become a high priority for network operators as well. As it turns out, the DTV transition is proving far more expensive than cable operators originally bargained for (a result of the CableCARD mandate combined with must-carry rules), but in the long run it still represents a bandwidth boon.
The other major benefit of the move to all-digital is the rendering of all kinds of content and communication into simple ones and zeroes. In other words, when everything is made up of the same basic materials, it becomes a lot easier to offer cross-platform and interactive services. As a wild example, think about being able to clip a section of a ball game on TV, overlay it with your own commentary, and then ship it off to a friend’s cell phone, all in the space of a few minutes from your living room couch. I’m not saying anyone is about to offer such a service, but technically speaking it should be entirely possible in an all-digital world.
How will the DTV transition happen?
The truth is it won’t happen all at once, and anyone who pays for cable or telco TV won’t feel much impact one year from now at all. Many operators will continue to broadcast analog signals for several years despite the cost in bandwidth. And those operators that do make the digital transition will have to provide free digital set-tops to any subscribers with analog TVs.
The biggest impact of the official transition will be on the consumers who watch TV over the air (OTA) and still own analog television sets. In one year, if these consumers are still in the dark about the DTV transition, they’ll really be in the dark when they try to tune to network television. Even those folks watching OTA with digital converter boxes may be in for an unpleasant surprise. With analog signals if you’re in a bad coverage area you might get a fuzzy picture. With digital signals if you’re in a bad coverage area you won’t get any picture at all.
What Happens on February 17, 2009?
That’s the million-dollar question. As Motorola exec Nick Chakalos pointed out to me, someone could make a nice niche business out of proactively offering customer support services to ease the DTV transition. For example, what happens when a consumer isn’t happy with his retail digital converter box? Does the store provide support, or does it come from somewhere else? It will be interesting to see what surprises are ahead for the average OTA TV household. With the right education efforts over the next 366 days (it’s a leap year…) We may see nothing but a few isolated cases of DTV mishap. That’s certainly what everyone – broadcasters, operators, retailers, the FCC, CE vendors, consumers – is hoping for.
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ENHANCING DISEASE RESISTANCE AND OIL QUALITY ATTRIBUTES OF PEANUT
Location: Wheat, Peanut and Other Field Crops Research
Title: Occurrence of Sclerotinia blight on peanut in Lee County, Texas
Submitted to: American Peanut Research and Education Society Abstracts
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: May 1, 2010
Publication Date: October 1, 2010
Citation: Melouk, H.A., Grichar, W.J., Chamberlin, K.D. 2010. Occurrence of Sclerotinia blight on peanut in Lee County, Texas. In: 2010 Proceedings of the American Peanut Research and Education Society, July 12-15, 2010, Clearwater Beach, FL. 42:73-74.
A peanut field, north of Giddings in Lee County, TX, planted with the peanut cv. OLin in 2009 had about 5% incidence of Sclerotinia blight on October 29. Diseased stems of peanut plants were collected, and a culture of Sclerotinia minor (SM.TX1) was generated from a single sclerotium, and maintained at 25+2 C on Potato-Dextrose-Agar medium containing 100 ppm streptomycin sulfate. The pathogenicity of the SM.TX1 isolate along with an S. minor isolate from Oklahoma (SM.M6) was tested on two peanut cultivars, Okrun (OK) and Tamspan 90 (T-90). The pathogenicity tests were performed as described by Faske et al (Peanut Sci. 33:7-11, 2006). Starting three days after inoculation, lesion length measurements were recorded for the infected stems and continued on a 24 hour basis through day 7, after which time the rate of lesion expansion (RLE) in mm/day was calculated. The pathogenicity test was conducted twice. In the first experiment, mean RLE on cv. OK for SM.TX1 was 31, which was significantly (P > 0.001) higher than that of SM.M6 at 26. On cv.T-90, RLE for SM.TX1 was 22, which was significantly (P > 0.022) higher than that of SM.M6 at 19. In the second experiment, mean RLE on cv. OK for SM.TX1 was 19, which was significantly (P > 0.006) higher than that of SM.M6 at 10. On cv. T-90, RLE for SM.TX1 was 19, which was significantly (P > 0.005) higher than that of SM.M6 at 8. These findings demonstrate that the new S. minor isolate SM.TX1 is more virulent than that of the Oklahoma isolate SM.M6 under greenhouse test conditions, and the new S. minor isolate SM.TX1 has the potential to be more damaging under field conditions.
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Tim Pereira was an altar boy and his father played guitar in the church's folk music group. The family often gathered in the church basement after Mass to drink coffee and eat doughnuts with friends in their tight-knit parish. They ate spaghetti dinners with the rest of the church, browsed church bazaars, and went on family retreats. Their priest was a caring man who oversaw a close congregation.
Pereira remembers only community and warmth from his childhood in the Roman Catholic Church. He has no horror stories of cold churches or abusive priests. So why is Tim Pereira, 30, now an evangelical?
Pereira joins the 10 percent of Americans who have left the Catholic faith. While some high-profile Protestant intellectuals, such as Richard John Neuhaus in the 1990s, have converted to Roman Catholicism, the overall trend seems to be in the opposite direction. According to David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the Roman Catholic Church is "hemorrhaging members." The Pew Forum's 2007 "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" found that Catholics have experienced the greatest net loss of any American religious tradition. Although Latinos are now the church's most faithful and orthodox members, church leaders have been worried about their exodus for over a decade. The numbers show a more diverse-and if immigration slows, a smaller-Roman Catholic Church in the coming years.
Faithful immigrant Catholics have enabled the Catholic Church to keep a steady 25 percent of the American population, but as immigrants come in, young people and second-generation Latinos trickle out. In 1997, Andrew Greeley, a priest and sociologist, reported with urgency the news that one in seven Hispanic Catholics was abandoning the church. According to a Pew Hispanic Center study issued 10 years later, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion, that number is now almost one in five for all Latinos, and it is 23 percent for second-generation Latino Americans.
Pereira, whose grandparents immigrated from Portugal, said his Catholic identity was "almost like a nationality." Chris Castaldo, author of Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, echoes Pereira: "Catholicism is more than propositions that you believe. It's your culture. It's your identity. . . . It's hard to just walk away from that."
David Campbell told me that the breakdown of Catholic culture-the dissolution of tight-knit ethnic communities and the "hollowing" of Catholic education-is part of the reason the Catholic church is losing members. Latinos, like the Italian-American immigrants of decades ago, tend to congregate in ethnically and religiously homogeneous communities and see their religion as part of their ethnic identity. But as Latinos assimilate into American culture, they may cease to see their Catholic faith and cultural identity as intertwined.
Manuel Vasquez, professor of religion at the University of Florida, said that he expects Hispanics will continue the trend toward Protestant conversion, especially since more and more Latinos are encountering Protestantism in their native countries before they even immigrate. He believes that Latinos will continue to change American Catholicism with their vibrant, more charismatic form of worship. He adds, though, that it's unclear whether charismatic worship keeps young Latinos in the Catholic Church or pushes them toward Protestantism.
According to Campbell, most cradle Catholics who leave the church (roughly 60 percent) end up saying they have no religion, but the second-largest percentage (about 40 percent) turns to a more evangelical form of Christianity. Castaldo said that evangelical converts often mention that they feel a liberation from rituals and a freedom from a guilt that they are never doing enough to ensure their salvation. According to the Religious Landscape Survey, most ex-Catholics report that they simply "drifted away" from Catholicism, but those who become evangelicals say that the church was not meeting their spiritual needs. Ninety percent of Latino evangelical converts say that they were looking for a more direct and personal experience with God.
Pereira's spiritual life turned around in college when he listened to a tape by inspirational business speaker Robert "Butch" James. James said problems and answers preclude each other: If you have an answer, you don't have a problem. "So what happens if you have an omnipresent answer?" James asked, and Pereira began to wonder: "Is it possible to be OK with life no matter what's going on around you?" In what he too describes as "a drifting process," Pereira started searching for that answer in religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. He still went to a Catholic church but only intermittently and when he felt guilty.
Then a girl he liked (his future wife) took him to a Protestant Bible study and he kept coming, forming a friendship with the leader and finally finding an "omnipresent answer" to his quest for peace.
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|Iraq's fractious politicians have ended an eight-month deadlock that raised fears of renewed sectarian war [REUTERS]
Barack Obama, the US president, has urged Iraqi leaders involved in a fragile power-sharing deal to aim for an "inclusive government'' for the country.
The White House said in a statement on Friday that the president spoke in recent days with Iraqi politicians including Ayad Allawi, head of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, and would be speaking shortly with Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister.
The statement said Obama stressed the need for Allawi, others from Iraqiya and all the winning blocs to hold leadership posts in the new government.
Obama's comments came a day after politicians belonging to the Iraqiya coalition left parliament just hours after apparently cementing a power-sharing agreement that would have seen a government formed after eight months of disagreement.
The walkout was staged after newly elected speaker Osama al-Nujaifi declined the politicians' request to vote on removing members names from a list of those associated with former ruler Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
In the new government, politicians returned Jalal Talabani to the largely ceremonial post of president and voted to make Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni Arab member of the Iraqiya coalition, the new speaker of parliament during a late-night session on Thursday.
As expected, Talabani nominated al-Maliki to serve another term. Al-Maliki now has a month to form a cabinet and present his government to parliament for a vote.
The Iraqiya alliance, led by former prime minister and US favourite Iyad Allawi, won two more seats than Al-Maliki's State of Law coalition during the March 7 vote, but neither side won a majority, leading a political deadlock.
'Lack of confidence'
The politicians claimed that the removal of three names of their senior colleagues from a list of alleged Baath party members kept by a "de-Baathification" committee was part of a broad power-sharing agreement that all sides in Iraq's ongoing political dispute had agreed to, reported Rawya Rageh, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Baghdad.
"There's an atmosphere of a lack of confidence about the sessions," she said.
Al-Nujaifi, a member of the Iraqiya coalition who had just been elected by his colleagues as speaker of parliament, would not allow the de-Baathification vote to come before politicians chose a new president, as mandated by the constitution.
He told parliament his loyalty was to Iraq's government and no longer to the Iraqiya coalition.
But after Iraqiya members continued to protest and began the walk out, Al-Nujaifi joined them and left his two deputies - also just elected - to lead the session, Rageh said.
Allawi also walked out.
The power-sharing deal, clinched after three days of heated talks, stipulated that a Sunni hold the post of speaker, and that Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Kurdish coalition, and al-Maliki retain their posts.
The agreement also established a statutory body to oversee security as a gesture to Allawi, who had held out for months to take the job from al-Maliki after his Iraqiya bloc narrowly won the most seats in the March 7 polls.
Iraqiya has said its participation hinged on four conditions: a bill forming the security body, a committee examining cases against political detainees, codifying the power-sharing deal and annulling the bans against the three Iraqiya members.
The bloc expressed hope it "would not be obliged to change its decision to participate in the political process if these conditions are not met."
On Thursday it appeared that Iraqiya, which had been opposing allowing al-Maliki to remain in power, had finally decided to join his government.
Iraqiya won two more seats than al-Maliki's State of Law coalition in the legislative election, but neither alliance had enough seats for a majority in parliament, forcing the factions into a negotiation process.
Al-Maliki has 30 days to form his cabinet, and the next parliamentary meeting is scheduled for Saturday.
Despite receding Shia-Sunni violence, the long parliamentary deadlock has fuelled tension as US forces prepare to withdraw in 2011.
The backing of Iraqiya was seen as vital to prevent a resurgence of violence.
A series of attacks on Christian targets across Baghdad on Wednesday stirred renewed fear in the minority community.
The bomb and mortar blasts occurred just 10 days after a bloody siege at a Catholic cathedral in the capital that killed 52 people.
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Sacred-Texts Classics Index Previous Next
BEFORE all things that essentially exist, and before the total principles, there is one God, prior to the first God and King, remaining immoveable in the solitude of his unity; for neither is the Intelligible immixed with him, nor any other thing. He is established, the exemplar of the God who is the father of himself, self-begotten, the only father, and who is truly good. For he is something greater, and the first; the fountain of all things, and the root of all primary Intelligible existing forms. But out of this one, the self-ruling God made himself shine forth; wherefore he is the father of himself, and self-ruling: for he is the first principle and God of Gods. He is the monad from the one; before essence, yet the first principle of essence, for from him is entity and essence; on which account he is celebrated as the chief of the Intelligibles. These are the most ancient principles of all things, which Hermes places first in order, before the ethereal and empyrean gods and the celestial.
But, according to another division, he (Hermes) places the god Emeph1 as the ruler of the celestial gods: and says that he is Intellect understanding himself, and converting other intelligences to himself. And before this he places the indivisible One, which he calls the first effigies, and denominates him Eicton; in whom, indeed, is the first intellect and the first Intelligible: and this One is venerated in silence. Besides these, other rulers are imagined to exist, which govern the fabrication of things apparent: for the demiurgic Intellect, which properly presides over truth and wisdom, when it proceeds to generation and leads forth into light the inapparent power of the secret reasons, is called Amon, according to the Egyptian tongue: and when it perfects all things not dcceptively, but artificially according to truth, Phtha; but the Greeks change the word Phtha into Hephæstus, looking only to the artificial: regarded as the producer of good things, it is called Osiris, and according to its other powers and attributes it has different appellations. There is also, according to them, another certain principle presiding over all the elements in a state of generation, and over the powers inherent in them, four of which are male, and four female; and this principle they attribute to the Sun. There is yet another principle of all nature regarded as the ruler over generation, and this they assign to the Moon. They divide the heavens also into two parts, or into four, or twelve, or thirty-six, or the doubles of these; they attribute to them leaders more or less in number; and over them they place one whom they consider superior to them all. Hence, from the highest to the last, the doctrine of the Egyptians concerning the principles, inculcates the origin of all things from One, with different gradations to the Many; which (the Many) are again held to be under the supreme government of the One: and the nature of the Boundless is considered entirely subservient to the nature of the Bounded and the supreme Unity the cause of all things. And God produced Matter from the materiality of the separated essence, which being of a vivific nature, the Demiurgus took it, and fabricated from it the harmonious and imperturbable spheres: but the dregs of it he employed in the fabrication of generated and perishable bodies.—Jambl. sect. viii. c. 2. 3.
The glory of all things is God, and Deity, and divine Nature. The principle of all things existing is God, and the Intellect, and Nature, and Matter, and Energy, and Fate, and Conclusion, and Renovation. For there were boundless Darkness in the abyss, and water, and a subtile spirit, intellectual in power, existing in Chaos. But the holy Light broke forth, and the elements were produced from among the sand of a watery essence.—Serm. Sac. lib. iii.
The world appears to them (the Egyptians) to consist of a masculine and feminine nature. And they engrave a scarabæus for Athena, and a vulture for Hephæstus. For these alone of all the Gods they consider as both male and female in their nature.
Chæremon and others believe that nothing existed prior to the sensible worlds, and they place among the foremost of such opinions the sentiments of the Egyptians, who hold that there are no other gods than those which are called the planets, and the constellations of the Zodiac, and such as these. They say, also, that the honours paid to the ten great gods and those which are called heroes, whose names appear in the almanacks, are nothing else than charms for the cure of evils, and observations of the risings and settings of the stars, and prognostications of future events. For it seems that they esteem the Sun to be the demiurgus, and hold that the legends about Osiris and Isis, and all other their mythological fables, have reference either to the stars, their appearances and occultations, and the periods of their risings, or to the increase and decrease of the moon, or to the cycles of the sun, or the diurnal and nocturnal hemispheres, or to the river: in short, that every thing of the kind relates merely to physical operations, and has no connexion or reference whatever to incorporeal and living essences properly so called. Most of them, also, suppose that some indissoluble connexion exists between our concerns and the motions of the stars, by a kind of necessity which they call Destiny, whereby all sublunary things are connected with these gods, and depend upon them. Hence they serve and honour them with temples and statues and the like, as the only beings capable of influencing Destiny.—Eus. Pr. Evan. iii. c. 4.
1 Generally supposed to be a mistake for Κνὲφ, Cneph.
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The Secret to Productivity: Cute Videos of Kitties?
Kittens riding a Roomba, sloths chillin’ in a bucket, a geriatric basketball-playing otter. What do they all have in common? They’re undeniably cute. And while your coworkers may think you’re putting off a deadline by taking in all that cuteness, science says cute images may boost productivity and focus.
A Japanese study, released last fall, set out to examine the effects of viewing cute images on human behavior. The researchers rallied up 48 college students and conducted three experiments — one to test motor skills, another involving a number-based concentration task, and the third tested level of attention — before and after viewing images of baby or adult animals. So what did the researchers find? In all three experiments, the people who looked at images of cute baby animals outperformed the others.
Though images of baby animals improved performance even more than those of adult animals, both made study subjects happier and more focused. The researchers referenced other studies that also associate a positive effect of cute images on human performance in tasks that require carefulness.
So next time you’ve got to untie a massive knot, beat your grandma in a game of setback, or kill it on a presentation at work, we prescribe a video (or seven) of babies, kitties, or an elderly otter cruising along his aquatic basketball court.
Otter Playing Basketball
Kitties ride a vacuum
Sloth friends hang out in a bucket
Orangutan baby gets its groove on (with oversized hat)
Baby polar bear gets a belly rub
Bulldog puppies make nice with human baby
Image via Ingret/Shutterstock.com
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Back in the 1970s we were making our own ground beef when I got into trouble by cutting too close to the bone.
It was at the point in the butchering process that anything not in the burger went into the big dog waiting patiently outside the door. Our new electric grinder would handle just about anything I could mash in. Big Dog did not contribute to the bottom line, so my primary concern was saving every ounce of edible beef.
I should explain: In home processing, there’s always test grinding. A fresh beef patty is formed and fried to determine lean or fat, based on melted grease in the skillet. No grease and scorched meat meant we needed to add tallow to the mix. Shrunken burgers implied too much fat already.
It was noon time. As always we ate our tests for lunch. Then someone found a ground up grain of something in their first mouthful. All eyes turned to me, the grinder, as a chorus rose up:
"Don't put gristle in the hamburger!!"
There are worse things than gristle. Several years ago I went to see Food, Inc., the movie. That’s how I learned why my pasty fast food burger smelled like ammonia. It was the ammonia wash used to reclaim contaminated packing-plant waste. Ammonia is good for nitrogen hungry plants, but anyone who's ever changed a soggy diaper knows what it smells like. That’s the way the dollar burger I got in town smelled.
I ain't no plant.
Way-back-when, my community decided to build our own packing plant. We said the new business would use every part of the cow but the moo. That meant the processing plant would be efficient and fast. Every bone, hoof, and hide...even blood... would be gleaned and sold just like we sold the beef. But not all together.
Quality was job one. Lucrative markets back East would give as good as they got. One thing we'd never do is sacrifice excellence, because excellence was what we were selling. So for us, eliminating waste meant utilizing all the parts -- without mixing them.
There's a whole bunch of stuff we take into our bodies today because someone stirs it into our food. Some kills bacteria, some adds flavor or color to make us think we're eating something we're not, some extends shelf life into the hereafter, and some contains filler just because it's cheap and yields a tidy profit.
Thanks to pink slime, consumers are beginning to question food-industry/government rubber-stamp joint partnerships that do more for corporate profits than quality assurance. They're asking questions, like: Where does food really come from? Or, Why should ammonia-treated bacterial gristle be added to my hamburger?
And let’s not just interrogate meat. How about bottled water? One particular brand gives me heartburn. When I checked the label I found there was something in my drink besides plain old H2O. The label said I was also drinking calcium chloride for a "clean taste" and purity.
Calcium chloride is a heavy, corrosive salt that farmers add to water in tractor tires for weight and better traction. It also kills bacteria and keeps water from freezing. That’s why bottled water gave me indigestion.
It’s all about making cheap stuff into expensive stuff.
Take, for example, antibiotics. Big Livestock says it's ok to use antibiotics continuously in livestock feed rations because germ killers make animals more feed-efficient. Actually, the germs that kill animals in raised in concentration must be controlled for the same reasons we treat adulterated hamburger or less than perfect water. Because eating the wrong stuff can kill us.
They say mixing it all together makes food cheaper. That's not exactly true. In fact it's not true at all. What it really does is add things to our food that make more money for the sellers. If all the things we ate were mixed in deli-style, before our eyes, it's doubtful anyone would ask for pink slime, tractor fluid, or anti-bacterials. We buy them not by choice, but because most of the time we don't know even know enough to ask if they're there.
Good food, water and air are three things everyone requires. Maybe some of us just think of food as fuel, the stuff our bodies process for energy, but there are other ramifications. Good food really is spiritual. The Bible talks about hunger and thirst all the time. One of the last things Jesus did on earth was have supper with his friends. And in Genesis 3:17-19 it says "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Something to keep in mind.
One question Americans should never have to ask is whether the food we eat is safe or pure. But now it looks like we need to do just that. Too often, the tests that are intended to prove our food is safe and good are actually carried out by those with the most to gain – corporations -- while neutral government looks on. Lately, the governors of three states have even risen up in defense of pink slime. Is that public service or corporate service?
Real ground beef, I learned long ago, is clean. Significant amounts of e-coli bacteria aren't normally found in muscle tissue. For e-coli to find its way into hamburger, someone has to put it there. Ammoniated impure stuff is mixed with our best and healthiest ground beef because the guys who profit from it say it's OK.
I say it's unholy.
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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand visited Glen Cove Monday to announce new federal legislation that would offer grants for the revitalization of waterfront Brownfield sites in communities like Glen Cove.
"It's sites like this that saw some of the worst economic times," said Gillibrand of former industrial locations like the nearby Li Tungsten site, which went defunct as manufacturing evolved and left behind polluted production facilities.
Standing at the future site of the city's ferry terminal, close to several Brownfield superfund sites that have been mostly remediated, she called on government to assist communities with such picturesque waterfront properties and all their economic potential - communities whose waterfronts attracted environmentally damaging production because of the access to shipping.
"Now it's up to Congress to do our part and put the legislation in place," said Gillibrand, who is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Let Patch save you time. Get local stories like this delivered right to your inbox or smartphone everyday with our free newsletter. Simple, fast sign-up here.
The Waterfront Brownfields Revitalization Act would provide competitive grants for as much as $500,000 to eligible public entities and nonprofits that apply. It would also establish a task force commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the purpose of examining existing and potential funding and easing the process of making it happen.
The act would authorize $220 million each fiscal year between 2013-2017.
Glen Cove Mayor Ralph Suozzi said the legislation would be a help to communities like his which are dealing with the leftovers of their industrial pasts.
"We did not create these problems, but it is we who are tasked with remediating them. This will help reverse almost a century's worth of environmental damage," he said.
Eric Alexander of Vision Long Island, an organization that works for "smart growth" of local communities, said in a statement: "Direct incentives are needed to revitalize LI's vacant waterfront properties. We are hopeful that the legislation advanced by Senator Gillibrand will move us past planning stages and towards redevelopment."
Glen Cove began a Waterfront Revitalization Plan in 1993 to address the cleanup and redevelopment of 214 acres on either side of the Glen Cove Creek. More than 50 acres along the creek's north bank have been remediated over the last decade, with the final brownfield site in that area, 10 Garvies Point Road, to begin remediation later this month.
The city received a Brownfield Pilot Grant from the EPA in 1997 and was designated a Brownfields Showcase Community a year later by the Brownfields National Partnership.
Follow Glen Cove Patch on Facebook
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Increase your productivity.
Time management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase your productivity.
Manage your time.
If we do not respect the importance of time, we can't achieve big things in life. If you can't complete a designated task within deadline than it is time to change, and change in our self is particularly important. Have you ever realized how people get the task completed on the same time as it is allocated for us? Time management strategies reduce stress, Bad time management is not an organized way of life. You need to plan your life and priorities to work.
Simple tips to get organised :
- Time is precious. Every second is important. Do not hook to your computer to check E-mail or spend more time to talk with a co-worker unnecessary, try to focus on pending work and get it done as quickly as you can.
- It is important to keep the schedule at work: Write or log your task. Strike the task when it is completed during the day. This gives you the sense of what is real achievement , and help you to manage your time based on prioritize your work.
- Prioritize Your Work: This is one of the most important time management techniques that will help manage time. Keep the unimportant tasks for the end of the day and complete the major work early as possible.
- Learn To Say 'NO': Do not get tempted to anything other than the tasks on your hand.
- Delegation of Work: You can always delegate your work to your subordinates. Simple tasks that can be completed by the juniors can be passed on. It will take off a load from your schedule and develop a sense of responsibility to your juniors.
- Focus On The Quality: Complete your work with concentration and dedication.
- Eat healthy food and drink water. Healthy Body will cause your optimal health and healthy brain will improve the efficiency to complete work on time.
- self-evaluation: Ask yourself have you completed the work in time or are you still looking for any excuses?
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Using Storyboards and Sentiment Charts to Quantify Customer Experience
Published: November 7, 2011
In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen.
Way back in ancient times, there was a great Australian TV game show called Perfect Match. The ever buff and polished Greg Evans hosted the show, and a lovely young lady or a peppy gent would ask three questions of three contestants who were seated on the other side of a screen. The lady or gentleman then chose one of the contestants, and the new couple went on a holiday together to see if they were, indeed, the perfect match.
It was all good, clean fun, but what really gave the show its spark for me was Dexter, the robot. Once the couple negotiated the receding screen and met each other, Dexter would announce—in a voice that sounded vaguely like a Dalek crossed with Kryten—their compatibility score as a percentage. Who knows what zoopy, algorithmy nonsense went into its calculation? That score was official, because it came from a robot. A fake robot at that, but we played along anyway.
And that’s when the magic would happen. Whatever judgments we, the viewers, had just made about the couple—based on their answers and the expressions on their faces when they met—we would find ourselves submitting to the authority of that compatibility score. During the brief interview the couple had with Greg Evans at the end of the show, the score would either hang over them like a damp cloud or bestow a glowing aura of approval.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Amazing things, official scores. But I’m not speaking of just any score. Unlike scores in sports, where you see players earn their scores with your own eyes, the types of scores that are of interest here quantify the intangible. These scores lend the mark of authority to something that we might otherwise gauge only with our intuition. These sorts of scores are of immense interest to disciplines like human resources, marketing, and social media marketing.
One example of such a score is the NPS, or Net Promoter Score. The NPS is an aggregate of three types of data, leading to a score of how likely it is that people would recommend a certain brand or company to a friend. Although not without its critics, this score’s authority has grown over the years, and I’ve increasingly seen it become a factor in clients’ official KPIs. They run something like this: Improve online customer service experience to increase NPS by 15% over the next quarter.
Using Storyboards to Illustrate Experiences
So, what do scores like these have to do with using storyboards in UX and service design? It’s well documented that storytelling in general and storyboards in particular are highly useful in these disciplines, mainly in bringing the various elements of personas, user requirements, business goals, and functionality together into one engaging—even entertaining—visualization that all stakeholders can understand and empathize with.
One touted advantage of storyboards—and quite rightly, too—is their ability to show the emotional state of the main character. This is very important in making the particular case a storyboard exists to make. Clients need to empathize with this character and his or her situation, feel the full weight of a particular customer experience problem, or experience the relief and joy a new design engenders. The simple storyboard in Figure 1 plots a lady’s experience in trying to book a holiday. This story ends with a problem: each of the channels she tries has a different weakness that leaves her with no good answer.
Figure 1—A simple storyboard
Quantifying Emotion Using Sentiment Charts
But feelings are subjective, right? And how delighted about a new smartphone app feature is that customer really? Or how frustrated are people really that they can’t comment on a blog post without signing in first? It can be a stretch for clients and stakeholders to relate the experiences you’re illustrating to their business rules, budgets, timelines, and technical constraints.
To prevent our stakeholders from dismissing our ideas and hard work by rationalizing them away, we can embrace the fact that many stakeholders are more comfortable with numbers and measures rather than just emotions. We can graph what our characters are going through with sentiment charts—and, thereby, give our ideas the ring of rigor and authority.
A sentiment chart is basically a worm-line that plots a character’s emotional state as he or she progresses through the plot of a storyboard. Changes in the line’s level may go either up or down and be gradual or abrupt, depending on the story the chart tells. A sentiment chart usually sits above a storyboard, though in some cases, may appear without a storyboard. However, both work best when they are viewed together. Indeed, depicting a character’s emotional journey as a chart may tell an extra story in itself. The simple sentiment chart in Figure 2 shows an abbreviated version of the same scenario the storyboard in Figure 1 illustrates. Note the gap representing a passage of time the storyboard does not depict.
Figure 2—A sentiment chart above a storyboard
Add Points to Reflect Specific Moments
Any storyboard should include clear moments in the story where triggers occur, where the main character makes decisions; and his expectations are met, exceeded, or not met at all. These point to what service design professionals call service moments. These moments are important in the measurement of sentiment, so try to ensure that each moment resides in its own frame. The sentiment chart above the storyboard can then denote that specific moment and change in sentiment with a dot or circle. As Figure 3 shows, adding points to a sentiment line makes the changes in the graph more specific to the events in the storyboard.
Figure 3—Points on a sentiment chart denoting service moments
Add Bands to Show Behavior Thresholds
By adding positive and negative sentiment bands to a sentiment chart, as shown in Figure 4, we can indicate to our audience the points where customer sentiment strays into the more extreme ends of the spectrum. Adding positive and negative sentiment bands to a sentiment chart makes threshold behavior clearer and highlights moments when you can extend a positive threshold or avoid a negative threshold. Taking an NPS as an example—along with any user research you are working with on your project—it may be useful to show, if your character’s sentiment rises into the green band of positive sentiment, he is more likely to recommend your client’s brand to others. What opportunities might there be in that character’s experience to try to push his sentiment into that band and keep it there?
Figure 4—Positive and negative sentiment bands
Likewise, research results for your project may show that customers would leave your client for a competitor if their sentiment dipped below a certain threshold. Seeing this on a sentiment chart could be a powerful reminder of such dangers to all stakeholders, prompting everyone to ask: What can we do to prevent that from happening, in this given scenario?
Further Quantification Using Service Features
You may be thinking that sentiment charts give a bird’s eye view of sentiment over time, but are still a little bit too arbitrary, because it’s largely up to the researcher or designer to decide where on the scale a character’s sentiment lies from moment to moment.
And, on one level, you’d be right. After all, there are many times on a project when a UX professional must use his or her best judgment, based on the available evidence and ideas. But, thankfully, there is a way to better quantify each moment’s sentiment by analyzing what service features have contributed to that sentiment. Service features are best thought of as heuristics of the experience that are valuable in some way to a customer. These are not functional features, so much as they represent the value that those features provide. Was the experience convenient? Personalized for the customer? Easy to use?
Each service feature can increment the score by one, and together they represent cumulative value to a customer. It’s important to realize that a feature’s perceived value decreases the more aware of it we become, so each feature has progressively less value the more a character experiences it in a story. Figure 5 shows a range of service features that are often present in people’s experiences of systems and services. I have a growing collection of nearly twenty service features at the moment, but I’m sure there are more. These are the ones that have come up time and time again in the user experience and service design projects I have been involved with.
Figure 5—Service features customers are likely to encounter
Figure 6 shows an example of using service features and a sentiment chart to quantify the level of positive sentiment that an experience engenders. It shows two versions of the scenario that I depicted earlier, picking it up at the point where Penny uses a search engine, but this time with a more optimal experience. The second version includes some extra functionality with more service features that generate higher sentiment levels. This demonstrates how extra customization and recognition features can make the difference between a good experience and a great experience worth sharing.
Figure 6—Combining service features with a sentiment chart and storyboard
Quantifying the extra sentiment by using service features demonstrates the connection between the new functionality and the benefits it brings, enabling you to make a clearer business case to stakeholders for the extra investment necessary to achieve that benefit.
Measure Your Experiences
If you use storyboards in your user experience practice, try adding the extra dimension of sentiment charting and quantification through service features, then use them in your presentations to your clients or stakeholders. It’s also possible to use the service features as a form of currency, facilitating the prioritization of one feature over another, if necessary. But that’s something for another article.
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This hotel dates back to the second half of the 18th Century. Ideally situated in a truly picturesque setting overlooking the lake, it exudes character and charm. In 1768, the first Virginia Water, constructed by William Duke of Cumberland, burst its dam and flooded the neighbourhood. In the ensuing repair and rebuilding work, The Wheatsheaf was constructed on the edge of Windsor Great Park.
George III began spending more time at Windsor and decided to extend and improve the lake but The Wheatsheaf stood in the way of his plans. The Crown tried to buy the Inn but the owner, a natural businessman, kept raising the price and happily the Inn survived.
In June 1801, The Wheatsheaf received a visit from George III, Queen Charlotte, Prince Adolphus and an unnamed Princess. The ladies remained at the Inn for some time whilst the King and his son visited Windsor Great Park to inspect the work being carried out at the “Pond Head”. With the work complete, the King’s third son William IV opened Windsor Great Park to the public in the 1830s and the fortunes of the Inn increased as tourists came to admire the Lake. There was trouble in 1851 however, when it was found that the Innkeeper was charging the public for going through the gate into Windsor Park and employing two disreputable characters as guides.
In 1862 The Wheatsheaf was enlarged, for the coming of the railways meant even more custom. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, The Wheatsheaf flourished as never before. The British Empire was at its height and The Wheatsheaf even today exudes the tranquil confidence of those halcyon days.
The hotel has 17 fully air conditioned en-suite rooms, plus family and four-poster bedrooms available. All rooms come with unlimited free Wi-Fi, flat-screen TVs with Freeview™, tea & coffee facilities, an iron and a hairdryer. Meetings, conferences and weddings can all be catered for at the hotel where ample on-site parking is available.
These are general hotel policies for
As they may vary per room type; please also check the room description.
Cancellation Policy24 Hours Prior to Arrival. (unless specified otherwise in the room description)
Payment PolicyYour card is only used to secure the reservation. Full payment will be debited upon arrival/departure.
BreakfastRates exclude breakfast (unless specified otherwise in the room description)
Children and Extra Bed PolicyChildren Welcome.
Accepted Credit CardsAmerican Express. Diners Club. Maestro. Mastercard. Solo Debit Card. Visa.
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- SPECIAL REPORTS
- THE MAGAZINE
The University of North Carolina, Charlotte (UNCC), is implementing an integrated facilities management system based on Esri's ArcGIS Server and ARCHIBUS Web Central software. The system will store and display data based on the facilities' geographic location. This will add location-based intelligence to the university's structural asset database as well as speed work order processing, improve business insight, and extend the life cycle of asset information.
UNCC is working with PenBay Solutions LLC of Brunswick, Maine, an Esri partner, to establish an enterprise geographic information system (GIS). UNCC was initially interested in simply locating all buildings, equipment, and grounds to help with work order execution. The extensive capabilities of ArcGIS Server expanded the scope of the project.
"We are able to include 3D representation of the buildings on campus as well as visually query assets," says Ray Dinello, director of Facilities Information Systems, UNCC. "Being able to link to the university's building automation system is providing us with the ability to pull together an integrated perspective of our facilities."
- Identifying employee locations at both the building and floor levels
- Visualizing work requests on a map according to total per building, dollar value, and work order system
- Accessing information about design services projects including project costs via maps
- Determining emergency phone locations and status of assets
For more information on Esri's offerings for facilities managers, visit esri.com/fm.
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|The early designs for the science library show a central tower -- about half the height of Fine Tower at right -- surrounded by two wings, all faced with metal and glass.
In September, the trustees' Committee on Grounds and Buildings reviewed preliminary designs for the two projects: Whitman College, the University's sixth residential college, which will be built between Baker Rink and Dillon Gym; and the science library, which will be constructed on the corner of Washington Road and Ivy Lane near Fine Hall.
Demetri Porphyrios, a Princeton graduate alumnus and one of the world's leading traditional-style architects, is designing Whitman College. Frank Gehry, who is known for his body of provocative, expressionistic work, is creating the plans for the science library.
Whitman will be designed in the collegiate gothic style that ties in with nearby dormitories built in the first third of the 20th century. The model of the 275,000-square-foot structure shown to the trustees features three courtyards. The north court is three sided and joined to a south court, which is four sided but is accessible through an open arcade, according to Jon Hlafter, director of physical planning. Current plans also show an open, three-sided east court that incorporates a master's residence.
"All of that openness is very intentional," said Hlafter, who pointed out that Goheen Walk will penetrate the south courtyard. "Demetri Porphyrios has described Princeton collegiate gothic courtyards as much more open than their precedents at Oxford and Cambridge, which tend to be completely enclosed quadrangles that can only be entered through a gate."
The current design features exterior stone walls, peaked slate roofs, oak doors and traditional leaded glass casement windows.
|This initial model for Whitman College shows three courtyards incorporated into the design. At the top left is New South and at the top right is Dillon Gym. The four-sided south courtyard is accessible through an open arcade.
Hlafter said that reaction among the trustees was "very positive." The Committee on Grounds and Buildings has authorized the University administration to further examine the current design, he said. The next step is to assess the plans to make sure the college can be built within its $100 million budget.
"In the interactions that occurred over the summer and early fall between the architect team and the various University constituencies -- particularly the program committee -- the architects were encouraged to incorporate a number of features and program components that have expanded the size and scope of the building," Hlafter said. "Now we're in a period of consolidating what we require and trying to make sure that we can produce a building that's within our budget range."
The Four-Year College Program Planning Committee also presented its report to the trustees at their September meeting. The report proposes modifications in advising/staff, programming, housing and dining to convert the University's current system of five two-year colleges into a system of paired two- and four-year colleges. (See page 1 of the Sept. 30 Princeton Weekly Bulletin.)
Gehry's signature bold, curved shapes that seem to defy gravity are evident in the design of the science library. Initial plans show a central tower -- about half the height of Fine Tower -- surrounded by two wings, all faced with metal and glass. Hlafter noted that some of the elements of the structure may be brick, tying in with the surrounding buildings.
"This is 180 degrees away from what we're working on at Whitman," he said. "Obviously, Frank Gehry is one of the truly innovative architects of the 21st century. Rather than look to the past for inspiration, he has his own unique personal style, which is very sculptural and makes use of metal and glass in ways that no other architect does."
The tower will house the library component of the building, consolidating the geosciences, chemistry, ecology and evolutionary biology and molecular biology branch libraries and connecting below grade to the math and physics library in Fine Hall. "Unlike many historic libraries, this one will have relatively few book stacks, and virtually all of those will be at the lowest level below grade," Hlafter said. "What comes out of the ground and into the air is a series of spaces that are surrounded by smaller cubicles or rooms that are either offices or study areas or small conference areas, where people who are doing research will work and meet together."
In the center will be other workstations and access to information, usually in electronic form. "Since all of the floors have not yet been fully programmed, it will be hard to describe what will happen," Hlafter said. "It may differ from floor to floor. We hope those areas will respond to the changing needs of libraries in the future."
One of the wings will have the Digital Map and Geospatial Information Center on the upper levels and an auditorium and classrooms on the lower levels. The upper levels of the other wing will house the Office of Information Technology's Academic Technology Center (including the Educational Technologies Center and the New Media Center) and the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. Classrooms will be on the lower levels. The budget for the project is $60 million.
Hlafter said that the reaction to the early plans so far has been excitement and optimism -- combined with some uncertainty.
"Frank Gehry's buildings are unusual, and people aren't quite sure what to expect," he said. "A collegiate gothic building is something that you can go to another part of the campus and see what it's like. There's nothing else in Princeton that will be quite like the Gehry building.
"There are some concerns about very mundane things, like whether we'll be able to wash the windows that are high up on the façade -- things that people don't worry about in more conventional buildings because there is a better sense of how the work gets done," he said.
As with Whitman College, the next step is estimating the costs represented in the schematic design. "We're hoping that, by the first of the year, we will have satisfied ourselves that both projects are on budget and that both will continue into design development and working drawings," Hlafter said.
He said it is hoped that construction can begin in early 2004. The projects are scheduled to be completed by the middle of 2006 and occupied in that fall semester.
Kahneman reaches across boundaries to win Nobel
A mug in the hand is worth . . . Experiment shows how consumers make 'myopic' choices
A study in contrasts: Initial plans revealed for Whitman College, science library
Editor: Ruth Stevens
Calendar editor: Carolyn Geller
Staff writers: Jennifer Greenstein Altmann, Steven Schultz
Contributing writers: Marilyn Marks, Evelyn Tu
Photographer: Denise Applewhite
Design: Mahlon Lovett, Laurel Masten Cantor, Margaret Westergaard
Web edition: Mahlon Lovett
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[DarkTherapy] wrote in to tell us about his garage door opener that works with Siri and a Raspberry Pi. It’s pretty hard to find a picture that tells the story of the hack, but here you can see the PCB inside the housing of the garage door opener. He patched the grey wires into the terminal block. On the other end they connect to a relay which makes the connection.
On the control side of that mechanical relay is a Raspberry Pi board. This seems like overkill but remember the low cost of the RPi and the ability to communicate over a network thanks to the WiFi dongle it uses. We think it’s less outrageous than strapping an Android phone to the opener. To make the RPi work with Siri he chose the SiriProxy package. We’ve seen this software before but don’t remember it being used with the Raspberry Pi.
There is certainly room to extend the functionality of a system like this one. It would be trivial to add a combination lock like this one we build using an AVR chip. It would also be nice to see a sensor used to confirm the door is closed. Even if you don’t need to control your garage this is a great reference project to get the RPi to take commands from your iOS devices.
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CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (AP) - About 2,000 people are expected to show up for a free dental clinic in southeast Missouri.
The Southeast Missourian reports that the clinic is known as the Missouri Mission of Mercy.
More than 100 dentists and 1,000 volunteers are expected to participate during the Friday and Saturday event at the Show Me Center in Cape Girardeau. It's being put on by the Missouri Dental Association and the Missouri Dental Association Foundation.
Extractions, cleaning and fillings will be provided. Paul Roberts, of the Missouri Dental Association, says patients also will receive literature designed to teach them how to avoid oral diseases.
The first Missouri Mission of Mercy clinic was held in 2011 in Springfield. It provided about $1 million in dental care services to more than 1,800 people.
POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. (AP) - Missouri has recorded its first fishing record of the year.
The Department of Conservation says a southeastern Missouri man caught a record gizzard shad in the Black River last month.
Brian Taylor caught the fish by jigging. It measured 16 inches and weighed 1 pound, 14 ounces. That was 6 ounces heavier than the previous state record for gizzard shad in the alternative-methods category. The old mark was set in 2011.
Gizzard shad live in quiet waters of lakes, ponds, reservoirs and backwaters. They can be found at least occasionally in every major stream system and are most abundant in reservoirs and large rivers.
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Re: Pterosaur wing membranes (a couple of short questions)
----- Original Message -----
From: "James R. Cunningham" <firstname.lastname@example.org>
To: <email@example.com>; <firstname.lastname@example.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: Pterosaur wing membranes (a couple of short questions)
> While it is indeed generally accepted that 'almost all pterosaurs had
> lost the capability of voluntary motion of the interphalangeal joints',
> there is a distinct need for active, powered ventral bending at the
> joints between phIV-1&2, and phIV-2&3, and in Quetz, those joints are
> spoon-shaped and allow exactly that motion. It appears to have been
> critical to roll control, and to gust load alleviation. As I'm sure you
> all know, passive upward bending of the phalanges in response to gust
> loading can lead to increased tensile stress in the membrane sufficient
> to collapse the outer phalanges in compression. There are several
> mechanisms that can inhibit the effect, and active ventral bending is
> one of the most effective. Perhaps other extant pterosaur phalanges
> should be reexamined with that thought in mind. That said, in Quetz
> joint phIV-3&4 is indeed fixed and is very robust both vertically and
> horizontally, possibly to resist loading from both water slaps and the
> generally increased tensile stress near the wingtip.
Jim, here is yet another example of why it is so interesting to have your
input into pterosaurology. You have just said that something
that I always assumed was undesireable and impossible (i.e., adduction of
the interphalangeal joints), was not only desireable, but necessary as well.
Note that despite the weird folding of the pterosaurian metacarpus, the
movement of the interphalangeal joint that would deflect the distal phalanx
ventrally when the wing was extended in a flight position, would technically
be adduction (i.e., movement toward the midline of the manus). I am happy
to stand corrected that adduction was desireable, but I am not convinced
that it was possible. So, I must ask, what would happen to pterosaurs if
they could not adduct the IP joints? But first:
In support of my assumption that adduction of th IP joints was impossible I
can offer the following:
1. I am not aware of any animal that has muscles in a position to actively
adduct or abduct its IP joints. IP joints seem to allow only active flexion
and extension, and any adduction, abduction, and rotation that may occur at
the IP joints seems to be involuntary and passive. Note that I have sent an
accompanying e-mail message to the dinosaur and vertpaleo listservers to see
if anyone knows of any animal that can do it.
2. In typical non-pterosaurian tetrapods the metacarpophalangeal joints are
provided with interossei muscles, whose action is to adduct and abduct the
digits. The fourth metacarpophalangeal joint of pterosaurs, the
wing-knuckle, seems to be highly modified so as to essentially lock the
joint in an extended position spreading the patagium. Adduction, abduction,
and rotation of the extended metacarpophalangeal joint seem to be strictly
prohibited, though as I dicussed in the functional part of the Pteranodon
monograph, the joint seems to have been set up so as to allow the metacarpal
to rotate about its long axis when the wing-knuckle was strongly flexed so
as to fold the wing more compactly, though this rotation may have been a
result of the arrangement of the ligaments rather than direct . Given that
pterosaurs seem to have lost the ability to adduct and abduct the
wing-knuckle even though they presumably inherited muscles to do just that
from their non-flying ancestors, it seems unlikely that they would have
evolved other muscles to adduct their IP joints when typical non-flying
vertebrates have no such muscles.
3. It sounds to me that you are suggesting that the third IP joint is fixed
because its joint surfaces are subcircular whereas the first and second IP
joints are mobile because the joint surfaces are oval. My interpretation of
the difference is that the proximal joints are oval so as to strongly limit
rotation of the distal phalanx relative to the proximal phalanx, whereas the
third IP joint is subcircular because it is not as important to limit
rotation and perhaps a little more rotation is desireable. Despite the
spoon-shaped articular surfaces, their large radius would mean that even a
little flexion, extension, adduction, and abduction of the distal phalanx on
the proximal would lead to a lot of displacement of joint surfaces, which
would be strongly limited by the interphalangeal ligaments.
I think that ventral deviation of the bowed wingfinger would have to have
been produced by rotation of the wing metacarpal about its axis. Supination
of the wing metacarpal would increase the apparent downward curvature of the
wingfinger in a flight posture when viewed from the front and would turn the
wingtip downward. This may not be what you would like, but it might
suffice. This then brings us back the question, what would happen to
pterosaurs if they could not adduct the IP joints?
> Alfred (A.D.
> Sneyd) has given me some of his unpublished work on pterosaur wings and
> it is well worth reading too. I wish he would actively participate in
> this field again. I think math is mandatory in the analysis and
> understanding of pterosaur wings, if one keeps in mind that the math
> must either be compatible with the preserved physical evidence or
> alternatively, be used to help predict potentially valuable avenues for
> further research.
My inability to read music has not prevented me from playing guitar, and my
inability to comprehend Sneyd's math should not prevent me from
understanding pterosaur wings.
> I think that the distal end of phIV-1 in Qsp shows some potential
> evidence of muscle attachment markings appropriate to modulate the
> cupping of the outboard phalanges, but it is not distinct. Chris,
> sometime when you have the opportunity, I wish you'd look at that, as it
> is more down your line than mine. I think it deserves some additional
> attention as it is one of the things that potentially converts the
> pterosaur wing from crappy to viable, even extraordinary.
I illustrated what I interpret as ligament attachment scars about the
interphalangeal joints in my Pteranodon monograph, and noted that the ones
on the ventral surfaces of joints were largest, presumably because upward
bending stresses on the joint were larger than other stresses. Indeed the
ventral ligament attachment sites were largest on all the wing joints. Is
there any reason to think that the features that you are interpreting at
muscle attachments are not ligament attachment scars?
> Keeping in mind that they are intercalated rather than continuous, and
> that I think the column slenderness ratio is such that they could not
> have carried substantial compression, I see them as extensible BETWEEN
> fibers, and relatively inextensible within fibers (also, actually
> visco-elastic rather than elastic). That said, my scenario has many
> consequences similar to those that Chris describes and I agree with him
> that they would not have been stiff enough to substantially affect wing
> camber by themselves. They must work in conjunction with the pressure
> jump to do that, and I expect that Chris would probably agree in that
> regard. Chris?
Huh? what? my eyes just glazed over and my mind was beginning to wander.
S. Christopher Bennett, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Basic Sciences
College of Chiropractic
University of Bridgeport
Bridgeport, CT 06601
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UFO expert and ESL teacher Scott C. Waring presents detailed photos and video evidence on his website, UFO Sighting Daily’s Website. Waring now claims that these are evidence of the entrance to an alien base on the side of Mount Adams, Washington.
Mount Adms has been the focus of UFO enthusiasts for many years, and people come from all over the world to see firsthand the glowing orbs that fill the sky almost every night. The frequent UFO sightings have leadto public discussion about the possibility that Mount Adams is actually a large scale alien base.
Scott C Waring, the founder of UFO Sighting Daily, has researched this matter for years. He has an interest in certain areas of the mountain, especially the ECETI ranch area. “Many people, from ordinary people, news agencies, to military officers have witnessed sightings in the area. From documented videos, many people said that the UFO came or went into the side of the mountain.”
Using the latest satellite map technology, Waring examined the ranch from above. He zoomed into the surface and eventually found a strange object, suspected to be an entrance door to an alien base.
“Using earthflash.com, one of the leaders in satellite map technology, I examined the ranch from a bird’s eye view. I was looking for images with certain distortions, like a glitch in their cloaking, which can indicate an entrance into the underground. Certain light waves are not visible to the human eye, but can be captured by the digital eye,” Waring explained his methods.
Sure enough, when Waring zoomed in close enough, he found the anomaly he was looking for. “In this one area, the image goes fuzzy, while everything around it has crisp, clear detail. In the middle of the blurred area there is a circle which can only be the entrance to an alien base.” This contention is supported by the fact that, “Many people, from ordinary people, to military officers, even Fox News have witnessed sightings in the area. From documented videos, many people have said that the UFOs came or went into the side of the mountain.”
The ECETI (Enlightened Contact with Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has grown up to provide a base for spiritually aware humans to gather and make contact with the aliens living deep within the mountain. James Gilliland, owner of the ACETI ranch, claims to have been invited abourd one of the UFOs as a guest. With so many sightings in this one area, it made sense to look for evidence of an underground base.
“I’ve analyzed the evidence. The conclusion is that the entrance is real. The next question we have to answer is: how do we open that entrance?” Waring concluded.
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Word count with grep
I've got a text file with some data in it and I want to know how many times the letter 'x' occurs in it, my problem is that x occurs many times on one line so I can't use grep -c.
What's the best way to do this? I'm sure there must be a simple solution, but I can't seem to find it!
Thanks for your help.
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- Special Sections
- Public Notices
The closing of a prison in Frankfort last week inspired a union leader from Eddyville to picket outside the walls of the Kentucky State Reformatory on Thursday.
Larry Bland, who works as a correctional officer in the segregation unit of the Eddyville prison, said he knew he was going to picket outside the La Grange prison as soon as he heard about the closing of the Frankfort Career Development Center.
“I got off work at 1:30 in the morning, and drove straight here to this very spot,” he said.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the Oldham Era, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
If you are new to the award winning Oldham Era and wish to get a subscription or simply gain access to our online content then please enter your ZIP code below and continue to setup your account.
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Social work distinguishes itself through its own body of knowledge, values, and ethics. While graduates of the other fields listed may be employed by social service agencies and perform many of the same functions as social workers, their education and background knowledge are not distinctly that of a social worker.
Social Work education combines knowledge, theory, and field experience in actual practice settings (CSWE), and offers the opportunity to become licensed at the baccalaureate level. Being a Licensed Social Worker (LSW) at this level is a distinct advantage over other disciplines. You become more marketable and gain the possibility of completing a master's degree in social work in just one year!
Beyond the BSW
Graduating from Metropolitan State Universityís Social Work Program may earn you Advanced Standing when applying and entering a masterís degree program. Because we are a CSWE (Council on Social Work Education) accredited program, many, if not all, MN MSW programs will allow you to complete your MSW degree in one year (usually two academic semesters and an internship).
The MSW is invaluable when applying for any social work employment, but especially for school social work, supervisory or managerial, program development and academic positions.
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http://metrostate.edu/msweb/explore/chcps/departments/sw/index.html
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U.S. Green Technology specializes in connecting those seekingto quality employers. Whether you’re looking for a specific green-collar job, or are open to opportunities at companies with sustainable practices, U.S. Green Technology provides resources for all skill levels and industries. Check out any of the popular searches above!
The overproduction of solar materials in the U.S. and China has led to a glut in the market, which has driven prices down significantly. While this is great for homeowners–it’s definitely a buyer’s market–it’s not good for the industry as a whole. Solar jobs at two of the biggest manufacturers in China, Suntech and LDK, are being cut.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that China’s solar industry has been “dumping” huge quantities of solar panels into the U.S. This resulted in an over-supply of Chinese products. It also meant Chinese products were less expensive, so U.S. homeowners could install them more affordably. However, the more expensive American-made solar products, and the solar jobs that went with them, were at risk. The same thing was happening in the European Union.
Hence the tariff on Chinese products.
China, suddenly faced with a vastly decreased market, is being forced to scale back its production and cut solar jobs. Suntech has plans to cut solar cell capacity by 25 percent. Some staff will be shuffled around between plants at other locations, but some will unfortunately lose their jobs. LDK is also suffering. On Monday, its shares sunk to an all-time low of $1.18, and it has cut over 5,000 solar jobs this year.
One analyst, Aaron Chew with Maxim Group, said the two solar firms need to take even more dramatic action. “These guys are responding a bit, but they have to run even tighter ships to survive a 65-cent module environment.” He says scaling back production is “a necessary step they have to take just to keep their head above water, but it’s not like it is transformational and will keep them afloat.”
Most experts agree that solar will play a major role in tomorrow’s energy landscape, but first the industry has to survive this trying economic time.
For assistance with your solar jobs search, check out the Career Builder Resource Center at U.S. Green Technology. There you can get help crafting your resume, tailoring your job hunt, and connecting with employers who will share your values and appreciate your skills.
Sign-up for U.S. Green Technology‘s weekly newsletter to receive the latest green technology information, including the latest green jobs, blogs, news, and events.
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Corticothalamic dysfunction and cognitive deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease
Presented at: Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans, LA Oct 12-17, 2012
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with cognitive decline as well as a 5-10 fold increase in seizure incidence.
Although seizures were once thought to be secondary to disease, recent experiments suggest they may contribute to cognitive deficits early in disease progression. To investigate the underlying mechanisms, we use transgenic mice overexpressing human amyloid precursor protein (APP) bearing mutations that result in high levels of Aβ production. The type of seizures exhibited by APP mice suggests involvement of the corticothalamic network.
The corticothalamic network regulates a number of brain functions, including attention, learning and memory, cortical processing, and sleep maintenance which are all also affected in AD. To determine whether this network is indeed dysregulated in APP mice, we mapped activity in specific components of the corticothalamic network by assessing the expression and distribution of neuronal activity markers. We found decreased activity in an inhibitory thalamic control nucleus, and associated disinhibition of thalamic relay nuclei that project to hippocampal and cortical regions. APP mice also exhibited disturbances in sleep/wake patterns that were consistent with dysregulation of corticothalamic activity and were associated with hippocampal memory deficits. Thus, corticothalamic dysfunction may be a common denominator in AD pathophysiology and deserves further investigation.
Recommended citation: Corbett B, Zhang X, Zhao L, and Chin J (2012) Corticothalamic dysfunction and cognitive deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Soc for Neurosci Abstr 343.12.
Corbett B, Zhang X, Zhao L, and Chin J (2012) Corticothalamic dysfunction and cognitive deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Soc for Neurosci Abstr 343.12.
This document is currently not available here.
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- The Accuracy of Web Analytics – Roderick Ioerger in Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience’s reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on Java Script are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.
- The Future of Consumer Behaviour – Martin Lindstrom in Branding Strategy Insider
A typical 21-year-old has played 5,000 hours of computer games, exchanged 25,000 emails, SMSs and chat messages, has used a cellphone some 10,000 times and spent 3,500 hours online. Surprised? Well that’s your future consumer.
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When it comes to the planet, it's hard to get a great sense of what Mitt Romney would actually do as president. His campaign website includes a long list of issues—Puerto Rico, Medicare, Values—but environment doesn't merit its own section. Anything on the subject is buried under energy, where he promises to make the US an "energy superpower" and calls the Obama administration's green energy policies "nothing short of a disaster."
1. States would oversee fossil fuel development on federal lands. Romney's campaign has promised that as part of his plan to "dramatically increase domestic energy production," states "will be empowered to control all forms of energy production on all lands within their borders, excluding only those that are specifically designated off-limits." That could include some national parks.
2. Regulations would be weakened.
Romney has pledged to "take a weed whacker"
to federal environmental regulations. His plan
lacks specifics, but calls for "streamlining"
environmental review periods for energy development plans and "allowing state reviews to satisfy federal requirements." (See Nos. 3 and 6 for more.)
3. Coal companies would get to do pretty much whatever they want. Romney has accused the Obama administration of waging a "war on coal," and has pledged to reverse many of the administration's regulations. As president, he would likely approve the most extreme anti-environmental bills offered in Congress—like the "Stop the War on Coal Act," passed in September. The bill was a grab bag for coal interests, taking away the EPA's ability to regulate mountaintop-removal coal mining, greenhouse gas emissions, coal ash disposal, mercury and air toxins."I like coal," Romney said at the October 3 debate. "I'm going to make sure we’re going to be able to burn clean coal." However, he has offered few specifics on what he would do to make coal "clean" as president.
4. He would open new areas to drilling. Romney has pledged to open new areas to drilling off the coasts of Virginia and the Carolinas and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He also wants to ramp up drilling in already-available areas.
5. The Keystone XL pipeline will be approved. Romney has said he would approve this massive proposed pipeline running from Canada to Texas "on day one."
6. Greenhouse gas emission regulations would be halted. Romney now treats climate change as a punchline, despite the fact that he at least pretended to care about it as governor of Massachusetts. Thus, he doesn't see a reason that the EPA should be regulating carbon dioxide emissions at all. "I exhale carbon dioxide," he joked at an event last November. "I don't want those guys following me around with a meter to see if I'm breathing too hard."
7. Say good-bye to new fuel-economy rules. Romney has pledged to throw out the new miles-per-gallon standards for cars and light trucks set by the Obama administration. "Gov. Romney opposes the extreme standards that President Obama has imposed, which will limit the choices available to American families," according to his spokeswoman.
8. No more clean-energy loans. Romney has regularly attacked the Obama administration's tax breaks and loans for the clean-energy industry, particularly the loan to now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra. He says he will end support for electric vehicle companies and clean-tech companies as president.
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Index of Memorial Resolutions and Biographical Sketches
DEREK S. HOARE
Derek S. Hoare, professor of microbiology, died on May 16, 1971. He was 43.
Professor Hoare was born on November 29, 1927, in London, England. He earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of London in 1947, 1950, and 1953, respectively. He taught at the University of Sheffield and the University of London prior to joining the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1964.
Dr. Hoare's academic specializations were microbial physiology and ecology. In 1967 he was awarded a three-year Welch Foundation grant to study photosynthetic microorganisms. He also held research grants from the National Science Foundation. Professor Hoare served on the editorial board of the Journal of Bacteriology and was a member of the Society of American Microbiologists.<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
Biographical sketch prepared by Teresa Palomo Acosta and posted on the Faculty Council web site on November 17, 2000. Additional biographical sources can be found in the Barker Texas History Center and the UT Office of Public Affairs.
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Peter Kerr (architect)
Peter Kerr (21 April 1820 – 31 March 1912), a Scottish-born architect, was the principal designer of the Parliament House of Victoria, Australia, commencing from a government architect's basic design.
Kerr migrated to Melbourne in 1852 after working under Sir Charles Barry on the design of the Palace of Westminster. Having also associated with Augustus Pugin, he was well versed in the Gothic Revival style in which, over 40 years, he developed one of the city's great buildings.
- History of Parliament House at Parliament of Victoria
- Entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography Online
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Sir Mervyn said that despite the recent return to growth, output could shrink again in the final three months of the year.
The governor warned families that they should be prepared for an "unappealing combination" of sluggish growth and above-target inflation as he presented the Bank's latest gloomy quarterly inflation report.
The economy grew 1 per cent in the third quarter, bringing the longest double-dip recession since the 1950s to a close but experts have warned that the figures gave an overly optimistic impression.
Sir Mervyn explained: "Continuing the recent zig-zag pattern, output growth is likely to fall back sharply in the fourth quarter as the boost from the Olympics in the summer is reversed - indeed, output may shrink a little this quarter."
The Bank said the outlook for UK growth remains uncertain, with the problems in the eurozone remaining a major threat to the recovery.
Continuing the recent zig-zag pattern, output growth is likely to fall back sharply
The pace of the recovery will also depend on the extent to which recent reductions in bank industry funding costs spur an increase in lending, the Bank said.
David Kern, chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said the Bank's report paints a "grim but realistic" outlook for the economy.
"The Government should accept that the private sector must be the main driver of any sustainable recovery, and therefore should adopt the necessary growth policies that will make such future growth possible," he said.
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http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/358189/Britain-s-economy-could-shrink-again-warns-Sir-Mervyn-King
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- News Blog
- Scripture Engagement Essentials
- Ways of Engaging with Scripture
- Engaging Different Audiences
- Kinds of Ministry
- Bible Translation
- Language Issues
- Culture and Contextualisation
- Using the Arts
- Using Media
- Tools and Methods
- Events and Training
- About Us
- Contact Us
Engaging Different Audiences
Bible engagement resources for children’s workers everywhere
Published by: Max7
BibleMAX from Max7 is an excellent collection of free-to-download resources for helping children engage with the Bible.
BibleMAX lessons have 4 main sections: Activate (welcome, song, opening activity), Communicate (read the Bible, explore the Bible story), Investigate (discuss, ask questions) and Commit (memory verse, prayer, challenge).
Lesson plans are available in several major languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili...) and translation into other languages is in progress.
There is a Leader's Guide giving 7 different ideas on how to... welcome children, explore a Bible story, reinforce a Bible passage, ask questions, transition between activities, memorize Scripture, pray with children and dismiss the children at the end of the lesson.
For example, 7 ways to explore a Bible story: make a model, interviews, draw the main events in the story, still-frame drama scene, story-telling, act it out, write a song. [more...]
Author: Hanni Gruenig
How can we start women reading their Bibles when they have never done it before?
Many women in Africa do not realize that the Bible has answers to their daily life questions. Hanni Gruenig describes how she used a course of Bible studies to address relevant issues for the women who had completed the literacy course. She describes its impact on some of them. [more...]
This video from Theovision, Ghana, tells of how they set up a Bible listening programme for school children and the effects they have seen coming from it.
The children are split into three age groups. After prayers, the youngest listen to Bible audio cassettes in Akan, the local language, while the older groups listen in English. This is then followed by a time when the pupils can ask questions about what they have heard. Finally, at the end of the hour, there is prayer focussing on what has been learned. [more...]
Author: Kenny McKie
Published by: Scripture Union Scotland
A new resource for leaders of small groups of young people. Designed to let the Bible speak to young people, and to allow you to train yourself to be a Bible Mentor. For use in school SU groups, primary or secondary, SU holiday group-times, Bible class groups, seeker groups.
"I believe we should re-commit ourselves to relational ministry with open bibles, and I want to invite all who are involved with young people to live by the Book and to open it with young people throughout our Land... I want to offer this simple tool to encourage volunteers and “professionals” alike to spend good quality time mentoring regularly with groups of children and young people, by simply opening the bible, reading it together, and asking one another some good questions.” (Kenny McKie)
A tool which churches perceive to be of value in furthering their goals
Author: Keith Benn
What excites us most is that people who have never before led a Bible study are now having regular studies in their homes.
This article relates how Bible study cassettes on Genesis 1-11 and James have had a big impact on the Central Bontoc people of the Philippines. It outlines the format of the Bible studies and the ways they have been used both within churches and in evangelism, and how they support the development of literacy. [more...]
Leader's Manual and Child's Book
Authors: Margaret Hill, Debbie Braaksma, Lyn Westman
Published by: Paulines Publications Africa (2009)
"Even though Joseph had the opportunity and the power to get revenge on his brothers, he chose to forgive them. He even provided for their future rather than return evil for evil. Though it may be very difficult to forgive, in the long run it brings healing for those who have harmed us and for ourselves."
Church leaders, youth leaders, teachers and other concerned adults often find it difficult to help children recover after a trauma. The Leader's Manual is a guide for these caring adults and is accompanied by a Child's Book. Through stories, group exercises and games, and a Bible story, children are assisted in working through their trauma.
The Bible stories are from the book of Genesis: Creation, the Fall, and the life of Joseph. [more...]
Link: Publisher's Website
Child Evangelism Fellowship® is a Bible-centered, worldwide organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God and establish them in a Bible believing church for Christian living.
Como tornar a Bíblia relevante para todas as línguas e culturas
Authors: Harriet Hill, Margaret Hill
Published by: Vida Nova (2010)
This is the Brazilian Portuguese version of the book Translating the Bible into Action by Harriet Hill and Margaret Hill.
A tried and tested resource that encourages meaningful Bible use in multi-lingual contexts through both written and oral media. Includes activities, assignments, further reading resources and links to useful websites.
This version has two extra chapters in addition to those found in the English version - "Addressing human concerns: Alcohol abuse", and "Sharing your faith with animists". [more...]
Advocacy for SE | Bible Reading | Churches | Bible Study | Bible Storying | Bible Translation | Language Issues | Culture and Contextualisation | Books
A Children’s Video Series of Bible Stories
Author: Rick McArthur
Producer: Viña Studios, Sololá, Guatemala, Central America
Deditos is a video Bible story series targeting children between the ages of 4 and 14. Considering the challenges faced by children throughout the two‐thirds world, the stories are carefully chosen to reveal God's character, his dealings with mankind, and his never‐ending desire that we draw closer to him.
Each episode includes:
- the Bible story dramatized in roughly 23 minutes with real‐life fingers as actors, incorporating a song the kids can learn;
- PDF files of five dynamic lessons based on the story, including print and audio versions of the teacher’s guide and pages with interactive activities for the children.
The complete Deditos series will include 21 stories with a major emphasis on the Old Testament. The videos are being produced originally in Spanish, in sets of three each year.
Audio downloads, Proclaimer, BibleStick, MP3 CDs
Faith Comes By Hearing is committed to reaching the nations with the Word of God in audio. Their strategy includes setting up listening groups which meet weekly to listen to the Scriptures in the local language. In 40 weeks such groups can hear the whole New Testament from start to finish. This is done with the help of the solar-powered Proclaimer audio player. [more...]
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Katrina: The Rich Folks' Opportunity and Our Dismal Failure
by Glen Ford, originally published in the Black Agenda Report, August 29/07
Katrina laid bare the racism of the class that rules the United States. Their goal is to eliminate Black power in the great cities, to sweep the urban landscape clean for white habitation. The hurricane was a godsend for the corporate nation-planners, and they jumped to the opportunity to exile hundreds of thousands, and create the conditions that made return to New Orleans impossible. Apologists claim the fault lies in "incompetence." Bullshit. The Diaspora exists, so the killers of New Orleans have accomplished their goal. We have been collectively betrayed by assumed allies and a Black misleadership that is afraid to tackle capital. They want money, more than freedom.
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http://mostlywater.org/node/29120
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This work addresses an understudied and little appreciated construction type—rammed earth—and argues that understanding its history helps us better evaluate the relationship between our built environment and cultural values. Historically, rammed earth has expressed itself as an economical do-it-yourself project for farmers, enthusiasts, and environmentalists. It has also been understood as a way to correct social ills, minimize financial difficulties, and remedy overabundances of labor. During the Great Depression, these factors came together and pushed the federal government to experiment with the technique, erecting seven rammed earth homes as part of the Resettlement Administration’s Gardendale Homestead north of Birmingham, Alabama. They remained an experiment, as a true federal rammed earth initiative never fully developed. Gardendale thus provides an example of an alternative building technology that has not received wide cultural acceptance in the United States, despite a history that reaches back to the 19th century. This reluctance to adopt rammed earth could be attributed to the groups that have utilized the technique, who until recently, were considered marginal. Documenting and preserving Gardendale’s extant rammed earth homes is necessary because of their unique construction type and the story they tell about our nation and the way we live. Moreover, the successes and failures of Gardendale provide context for rammed earth’s latest reincarnation within the current green building movement.
Read the full study
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http://arch.umd.edu/student_work/app.cfm?id=1281
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Biology Sponsored by
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have published a report on microbes in the skin that they hope will help to prevent skin diseases. In a report featured in Science, researchers studied the DNA of all microbes that inhabit human skin and found that human skin holds a larger variety of bacteria than previously thought.
The researchers studied skin's microbes with modern DNA sequencing technology and computational analysis. They took skin samples from 20 skin sites predisposed to certain dermatological disorders on the bodies of 10 healthy volunteers. They then extracted DNA from each sample and sequenced the 16S ribosomal RNA genes, a type of gene that is specific to bacteria. The researchers identified more than 112,000 bacterial gene sequences, which they then classified and compared. The analysis detected bacteria belonging to 19 different phyla and 205 different genera, with diversity at the species level being much greater than expected.
The study also showed that in healthy individuals, the greatest influence on bacterial diversity appeared to be body location. For example, the bacteria that live in a person's underarm area are more likely to be similar to those in the underarm area of another person than they are to the bacteria on the same person's forearm.
The skin sites selected for the study represented three microenvironments: oily, moist and dry. The oily sites were between the eyebrows, beside the nose, inside the ear, in the back of the scalp, and on the upper chest and back. Moist areas were inside the: nose, armpit, inner elbow, webbed area between the fingers, groin area and top fold of the buttocks; behind the knee, bottom of the foot and the navel. Dry areas included the inside surface of the mid-forearm, the palm of the hand and the buttock.
Researchers found that dry and moist skin had a broader variety of microbes than did oily skin. Oily skin contained the most uniform mix of microbes. To look for changes that may occur in the skin microbiome over time, the researchers sampled some volunteers twice, taking samples about four to six months apart. Most of the re-sampled volunteers were found to more like themselves over time than they were like other volunteers. However, the stability of the microbial community was dependent on the site surveyed. The greatest stability was found in samples from inside the ear and nose, and the least stability was found in samples from behind the knee.
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There are two major challenges (maybe more) in doing genealogical research online; knowing where to look and knowing to look in the first place. You can't find what you don't know exits because you don't even know to ask the question. The FamilySearch Research Wiki is a hugely helpful resource. It answers both questions telling you why to look and where also. But the Research Wiki is mostly invisible and unknown. And guess what? A lot of the other FamilySearch resources are also in the same invisible condition.
What do I mean by "invisible?" I mean that the resources, although overwhelmingly valuable, are relatively unknown, relatively difficult to find on the Internet and relatively difficult to understand. So what can be done to solve this problem? I am aware that the staff and volunteers at FamilySearch have these issue as those of the highest priority. But there is still a long way to go. Here is a list of some examples of invisible websites, starting with the Research Wiki:
The FamilySearch Research Wiki
Just for a start. By the way, FamilySearch Labs has a whole new look and a new addition, Ohio Research Assistance.
So what can be done about these invisible programs? Of course FamilySearch.org gets millions of visitors every day, year in and year out. According to Alexa.com, FamilySearch.org is ranked 5,077 in the world today out of all of the websites and 1,355 in the U.S. In places like Norway, FamilySearch.org is rank at 537. Clearly, the overall website has a huge audience. But what about the invisibles? Unfortunately, they are not all broken out by Alexa.com into different websites. trying to get the ranking for any one of the individual sites just gives you the overall statistics for the entire FamilySearch.org. So outsiders have no idea about the number of visitors to the individual sites. In addition, many of those within FamilySearch itself are not only not acquainted with the statistics, they are unaware of the existence of the websites at all. It is not at all infrequent in talking to employees or full-time volunteers for FamilySearch that they express ignorance at the existence of other segments of the FamilySearch.org that they are not specifically supporting. One person I talked to recently, worked for FamilySearch for over a year and half in the Family History Library helping patrons before he learned of the existence of the FamilySearch Research Wiki.
So where are the statistics for each of the invisibles? Over the years, I have seen and heard some statistics but not recently. FamilySearch.org keeps the individual rankings pretty much to itself. One indication, checking today the Research Wiki had 297,021,810 accesses to its main startup page, dating back to its inception in 2008. What does that say? Not much. Since that could be one person or a million. But it is apparent that these sites are not invisible to everyone, but my perception is that they are far from well known in the greater genealogical community.
One thing that FamilySearch could do to raise the awareness of these sites is to feature them on the main FamilySearch.org home page. But if you look at the home page today, not one of these sites is so much as mentioned in a footnote or link of any kind. Why is this? Isn't this sort-of like putting your main products out in the storage room instead of on the sales floor where people can find them? Could it be that the people who are in charge of designing the Home page don't know about or use these other websites and therefore have no perspective about their value?
By the way, hidden down in the depths of FamilySearch.org there is another website called GetSatisfaction.com (the link may not work). You get to the this website by clicking on the obscure "Feedback" link at the bottom of the FamilySearch.org Home page. Then you click on Share Your Ideas. That link takes to the GetSatisfaction.com page. There has been a topic of discussion on that site about not hiding the Wiki now for almost two years! There has been no response from FamilySearch at all about the subject.
So, all we can expect in the near future is that the invisibles will remain invisible. Is there hope? Yes, I have seen demos of suggested Home pages for FamilySearch.org that give some, not all, of the invisibles some mention. I have no idea about the time table for such changes.
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The Transportation Security Administration’s known shipper program does not provide the security intended, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General.
In a report dated March 5, the inspector general said that TSA does not sufficiently define the ways a carrier may verify a known shipper, nor can it validate entries in a database of known shippers.
At the same time the Known Shipper Management System, which is to replace existing verification programs, has been delayed by technical problems and unresolved policy questions.
TSA established the known shipper program after the 9-11 terrorist attacks to improve passenger aircraft security only taking cargo from parties that were known to the airline.
The report noted that TSA had set an October 2007 target date for mandatory use of the shipper management system. In March 2008 it notified carriers to use the other accepted methods of validation until further notice.
In addition to fixing the problems with the Known Shipper Management System, the inspector general’s office recommended that TSA provide more guidance to carriers verifying known shippers, and to inspectors who validate compliance with the program.
A redacted copy of the report may be found online at http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtrpts/OIGr_09-35_Mar09.pdf
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Ashley and I attended the Singularity Summit at Stanford yesterday – an event focused on examining the future when artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies reach an “event horizon” that dramatically exceed or augment humanity’s abilities. Four of the presenters in particular stood out: Ray Kurzweil, Erik Drexler, Bill McKibben, and Cory Doctorow.
Ray Kurzweil started the conference off by reading a page of text from his new book, The Singularity Is Near, using a compact device designed to read books for the blind. Using the device, Ray took a picture of the page with the device and had it read the page aloud on his behalf. This is apparently a project that Ray started working on with the National Federation of the Blind about five years ago, but at the time the technology was not sufficiently advanced to enable the application. At the time of original investigation, digital cameras didn’t have enough resolution to enable good pattern recognition, and pattern recognition algorithms had not yet been designed to handle the difficult environment in which such a device would need to operate. All this changed in the intervening five years. This ever increasing rate of change, which Ray terms the Law of Accelerating Returns, was the central focus of Ray’s keynote.
Ray blazed through a presentation that exposed a lot of the core data that he uses in his book to support his thesis of the accelerating rate of change. Particular items which I found to be interesting:
- The expectation is that traditional photolithography will allow 4nm features by 2018, providing sufficient computing power to emulate the human brain for under $1000.
- The majority of Ray’s slides consisted of graphs showing either capabilities trending linearly up and to the right (on a log-scale diagram), or price/performance ratios trending linearly down and to the right (on a log-scale diagram). What I found amazing was just how steady, how predictable these trends appeared to be, despite the fact that the success of any given individual project or technology’s development was essentially unpredictable. Not to sound overly optimistic, but I did find there to be something comforting in the apparent inevitability of progress these graphics presented when contrasted with the uncertainty we see in everyday life (for example: war, oil prices, global warming, American Idol results).
- Ray highlighted the possibility (or possibly the current reality?) of a respirocyte – an artificial red blood cell. Using such a device to replace red blood cells would allow you to do an Olympic sprint without taking a breath, or sit on the bottom of your pool for four hours!
- Advancement in state of the art brain scanning technology is starting to bear fruit, providing researchers with insights into how the brain processing information. One example of success is the work Ray and his team did in reverse engineering some of the transforms performed by the brain’s audio cortex as part of researching improvements to their speech recognition technology.
- The growth of the Internet is providing a vast data set to use in training pattern recognition systems. For example, Google has developed an English-to-Arabic (and vice versa) translation tool using the large set of texts available online in both languages to train the system. No one on the team developing the program speaks Arabic.
- In a rather impressive demonstration, Ray showed a video of himself demonstrating a speech-to-text-to-speech system that accepted voice input in one language, and output speech in a different language.
- An observation on biological and other systems that seems to apply increasingly in the world of online social networking tools, and other collaborative software: “decentralized, self-organizing systems are inherently stable”.
I found Erik Drexler‘s presentation to be somewhat confusing – he provides abundant examples of recent success in manipulation of DNA and proteins into arbitrary structures, and yet seems dedicated to a vision of a world where we manipulate individual atoms like so many Lego blocks. It would seem to me that the biological route is more likely, and in the nearer term will achieve the end goal of humanity being able to build whatever they want with arbitrary precision. I just can’t understand why Drexler is so dedicated to the idea of applying existing mechanical principles on the molecular scale, when manipulation of biological systems appears to be a more ready-made solution.
Cory Doctorow delivered a tailored version of his standard speech on the evils of Digital Rights Management, spinning his argument to focus on the need for users to remain in control of their technology. I thought his best point was that doing so provides the raw material for future innovation. For example: he proposes that consumer’s investment in unprotected CDs has paid an enormous ‘dividend’ in the form of the mass of unrestricted innovation resulting from the development of portable MP3 players (driven primarily by user’s ability to fill said devices with the contents of ripped CDs); the success of these devices drove the miniaturization of storage technology, large scale collaborative filtering web sites, online music stores, etc. This innovation is not available to the users of DVDs because of the provisions of the DMCA that prevent them from ripping their movies to use with other devices. Food for thought for legislators that appear more interested in protecting the current media regime, than trading up for a much greater public good.
Bill McKibben brought a welcome element of calculated sobriety to the discussion, questioning the drive towards additional technological development. In particular, Bill questioned whether or not our advanced technology have made us any happier. By analogy, he questioned the idea that more is better – if more is better, faster is better, why then would it be worthwhile to run the Boston marathon? We could just as easily drive the distance with our technology – but getting there was not the point! The arguments for pursuing the Singularity, in his opinion, sometimes sound like observations shared by concert-goers on the way out of a Phish concert.
A few items of note on the other presenters:
- Douglas Hofstadter followed Ray Kurzweil and delivered what can only be described as a thinly veiled personal attack on Ray’s book. While I believe his central thesis, that scientists in general are not considering the ramifications of the Singularity and taking it into consideration as they advance research, was reasonable, his style of delivery marred what might have been an otherwise constructive presentation. Though he lampooned Ray for “hand-waving” too much, Hofstadter provided little substantial material to support his own claims. A disappointing and somewhat unproductive session.
- Nick Bostrom provided a moment of humorous respite in his presentation considering possible changes that result in a catastrophic end to the human race – one of his possibilities: “We are living in a computer simulation and it gets shut down”.
- Sebastian Thrun showed a number of highly entertaining videos from the DARPA Grand Challenge. He presented a compelling reason for the importance of this work that I hadn’t previously considered: the potential to save significant lives and improve quality of life for the elderly by automating driving. Of particular note: there are 42,000 deaths due to automobile accidents in the US each year – equivalent to the number of deaths in Vietnam, and 3X (though I question this number) the number of deaths resulting from September 11th, 2001 – imagine eliminating these deaths through automated driving.
All in all, an excellent event – not the standard fare for tech events of late in Silicon Valley. My thanks to the Singularity Institute for putting on the event. See Renee Blodgett‘s blog for more in-depth coverage of the summit.
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I’ve moved to WordPress. This post can now be found at Why Are OHC Observations (0-700m) Diverging From GISS Projections?################
INTRODUCTIONMy post “NODC Corrections to Ocean Heat Content (0-700m) Part 2” illustrated the divergence between observed Global Ocean Heat Content (OHC) and the GISS projected rise. Figure 1 shows that GISS models projected a rise of 0.98*10^22 Joules per year, but, since 2003, global OHC has only been rising at 0.079*10^22 Joules per year. How could there be such a significant difference between the projection and the observed OHC data?
GISS FAILS TO MODEL ENSO
Roger Pielke Sr discussed the disagreement between the GISS OHC projections and observations in his February 9, 2009 post ‘Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions’. There he refers to a communication from James Hansen of GISS, a response to Pielke Sr and Christy, in which Mr. Hansen offers the GISS OHC projection. Refer to the linked response from Hansen here:
NOTE: In his response to Pielke Sr and Christy, Hansen writes, "Contrary to the claim of Pielke and Christy, our simulated ocean heat storage (Hansen et al., 2005) agrees closely with the observational analysis of Willis et al. (2004). All matters raised by Pielke and Christy were considered in our analysis and none of them alters our conclusions.” The Hansen et al (2005) paper is “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications.“ And the Willis et al (2004) paper is “Interannual Variability in Upper Ocean Heat Content, Temperature, and Thermosteric Expansion on Global Scales.” Link to abstract:
Back to the topic of this post…
In his response to Pielke Sr and Christy, Hansen acknowledges that GISS does not account for ENSO in its models. He writes, “We note the absence of ENSO variability in our coarse resolution ocean model and Willis et al. note that a 10-year change in the tropics is badly aliased by ENSO variability.”
What Mr. Hansen fails to acknowledge is that ENSO also has significant impacts outside of the tropics.
SIGNIFICANT TRADITIONAL ENSO EVENTS CAUSE UPWARD STEP CHANGES IN OHC OF OCEAN BASINS
In my post “ENSO Dominates NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Data”, I illustrated the upward step changes in OHC anomalies caused by significant traditional ENSO events such as those in 1972/73 and in 1997/98. This was done through simple comparison graphs of NINO3.4 SST anomalies, Sato Index data to illustrate the timing of explosive volcanic eruptions, and NODC (Levitus et al 2009) OHC anomaly data for individual ocean basins. Figures 2 through 4 are examples. In them, I’ve also highlighted the period GISS elected to model. Hansen explains the selection of those years in the response to Pielke and Christy linked above, “Our analysis focused on the past decade because: (1) this is the period when it was predicted that, in the absence of a large volcanic eruption, the increasing greenhouse effect would cause the planetary energy imbalance and ocean heat storage to rise above the level of natural variability (Hansen et al., 1997), and (2) improved ocean temperature measurements and precise satellite altimetry yield an uncertainty in the ocean heat storage, ~15% of the observed value, smaller than that of earlier times when unsampled regions of the ocean created larger uncertainty.”
But examination of the data illustrates variations that are caused primarily by natural variation, and much of these variations are apparent responses to ENSO, a variable that GISS does not model.
Figure 2 illustrates the monthly Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC anomaly data from January 1955 to June 2009. Note how the Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC anomaly data declines from the early-to-mid 1960s to 1973, then rises during the extended La Nina of 1973/74/75/76. And even though greenhouse gases (not illustrated) are rising from the late 1970s to 1999, there is a gradual decline in Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC anomalies. Some of this decline may be caused by the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991, but their impacts are difficult to determine with the ENSO-related variability of the data. Then in 1998, Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC anomalies rise again during the multiyear La Nina that followed the significant 1997/98 El Nino. So regardless of the impacts of the El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo eruptions, the largest rises in OHC occurred during the two multiyear La Nina events associated with the El Nino events of 1972/73 and 1997/98. Also note that the period GISS elected to model captures one of these natural ENSO-induced upward step changes.
Figure 3 illustrates the long-term OHC anomaly data for the South Pacific. The South Pacific OHC anomalies oscillate at or near 0 GJ/sq meter from 1971 to 1996 even though greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. The dip between the late 1960s and 1970 could be related to the volcanic eruption in 1963. If so, then the period of relatively flat OHC anomalies could be extended further back in time. What is certain is that there was a shift in South Pacific OHC anomalies, an upward step, in response to the 1997/98 El Nino. This happened, of course, during the period modeled by GISS.
Like the Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC anomalies, the South Indian Ocean OHC anomalies decrease until the early 1970s, then rise in two steps in response to the La Nina events associated with the El Nino events of 1972/73 and 1997/98. Note the response of the South Indian Ocean OHC anomalies to the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption. Without that decline, the South Indian Ocean OHC anomalies are relatively flat though greenhouses gases are rising, similar to the South Pacific OHC data. And once more, the period GISS modeled captures the ENSO-induced rise associated with the 1997/98 El Nino.
BUT ENSO RELEASES HEAT FROM THE TROPICAL PACIFIC
If ENSO events release heat from the tropical Pacific to the atmosphere, how then could they cause upward step changes in the OHC of other ocean basins?
During El Nino events, warm waters in the Pacific Warm Pool shift eastward to release heat that has been stored since the last La Nina event. Some of this warm water returns to the Pacific Warm Pool during the subsequent La Nina; some of it is transported to nearby ocean basins. This transport of warm water causes the OHC in those nearby oceans to rise. ENSO events also cause changes in Hadley and Walker circulation, changes in wind stress, and changes in cloud cover outside of the tropical Pacific. GCMs that do not model ENSO cannot account for these changes and cannot estimate their impacts on SST and OHC.
NORTH ATLANTIC OHC IS ALSO GOVERNED BY NATURAL VARIABLES
Over the past 50+ years, North Atlantic OHC anomalies rose at a rate that almost tripled the rise in global OHC anomalies. Refer to Figure 5. I discussed and illustrated the natural factors that impact the long-term North Atlantic OHC anomaly trends in the post “North Atlantic Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Is Governed By Natural Variables”. These natural variables include ENSO, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Unfortunately, the NODC OHC data only extends back to 1955. It is therefore impossible to determine how much of the excessive rise in the North Atlantic is related to AMOC.
The Tropical North Atlantic OHC anomalies, Figure 6, show responses to ENSO events that are similar to the Tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean OHC data, Figure 2, except the tropical North Atlantic variations are imposed on what appears to be an AMOC-related positive trend. The period modeled by GISS included the response of the Tropical North Atlantic OHC anomalies to the 1997/98 El Nino.
Also discussed and illustrated in my post “North Atlantic Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Is Governed By Natural Variables”, Lozier et al (2008) in “The Spatial Pattern and Mechanisms of Heat-Content Change in the North Atlantic” identifies the North Atlantic Oscillation as the driver of decadal OHC variability in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic. Link:
The decadal variations in the NAO (inverted and scaled) do appear to agree with the High-Latitude North Atlantic OHC anomalies, Figure 7, until the aftermath of the 1997/98 El Nino. Note again that the period that GISS elected to model captures this NAO-related rise in High-Latitude North Atlantic OHC anomalies. Did the GISS model include the NAO in its analysis of OHC? I can find no mention of it in Hansen et al (2005) “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications.“
It appears that the North Atlantic OHC anomalies peaked in 2005. Are they on a multidecadal decline now? If the North Atlantic OHC is, in fact, governed by the same processes that cause the multidecadal variations in North Atlantic SST anomalies known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), this would have a major impact on the GISS projections. Did GISS include this natural variability in its model? I can find no reference to it in Hansen et al (2005) “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications.“
It appears the reason OHC observations are diverging from the GISS projection is GISS failed to recognize the impact of natural variables such as AMOC, the NAO, and ENSO on OHC. GISS assumed the rise in OHC from 1993 to 2003 was caused by anthropogenic forcings, when, in fact, there is little evidence to support this in the OHC data of the individual ocean basins. In order for OHC anomalies to rise in agreement with the GISS projection, there would have had to have been another significant traditional El Nino followed by a multiyear La Nina, and there would have had to have been another shift in the NAO, and there would have had to have been a continued rise in North Atlantic OHC anomalies. Unfortunately for GISS (and for the IPCC who relies on GCMs that fail to model natural variables properly), these natural variables have not cooperated.
A CLOSING NOTE ABOUT THE IMPACTS OF ANTHROPOGENIC GREENHOUSE GASES ON OHC
I was once asked by a blogger at another website, “What is the source of the energy necessary to raise SSTs?” I have revised my response to include OHC.
The ultimate source of energy necessary to raise SSTs would be an increase in solar insolation, regardless of whether the increase in solar insolation resulted from variations in the solar cycle, or from changes in cloud cover, or from a reduction in stratospheric volcanic aerosols. The impact of shortwave radiation (visible light) on SST depends on factors such as the turbidity of the water and sea surface albedo, which in turn depend on other variables including wind speed and chlorophyll concentration. Downward shortwave radiation reaches ocean depths of a few hundred meters. Therefore, changes in downward shortwave radiation would have a significant impact on OHC.
An increase in downward longwave (infrared) radiation caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, on the other hand, can only warm the top few centimeters of the oceans. So an increase in downward longwave (infrared) radiation only warms the top few centimeters while downward shortwave radiation (visible light) warms the top few hundred meters.
However, it has been argued by AGW proponents that through mixing caused by waves and wind stress turbulence, the downward longwave (infrared) radiation would warm the mixed layer of the ocean. This in turn would affect the temperature gradient between the mixed layer and skin, dampening the outward flow of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. The end result: OHC would rise due to an increase in downward longwave (infrared) radiation caused by increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
The OHC data illustrated in this post provide little support for the argument that downward longwave (infrared) radiation causes OHC to rise. OHC anomalies for the Tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans and for the South Indian and South Pacific Oceans show little upward trend from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The only significant rises in OHC for those datasets occur in response to significant traditional ENSO events.
To emphasize this, the North Pacific OHC anomaly graph, Figure 8, illustrates a long-term decline in OHC from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, followed by a sudden upward shift. This long-term decline does not appear to be consistent with arguments that accelerating greenhouse gas emissions cause OHC to rise. The upward shift in the late 1980s appears to be associated with the 1986/87/88 El Nino. This El Nino is one of the two El Nino events since 1976 that caused upward step changes in SST anomalies of the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans and in the TLT anomalies of the Mid-To-High Latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere--the second being the 1997/98 El Nino. Why did the 1986/87/88 ENSO event cause the upward step in North Pacific OHC anomalies? Or was it caused by a shift in some other natural variable?
As illustrated in this post, the impacts of natural variables such as ENSO, NAO, and AMOC dominate short-term and long-term OHC variability. ENSO events also cause upward step changes in SST and TLT anomalies, as noted above. These impacts on SST and TLT anomalies were discussed and illustrated in my posts:
1.Can El Nino Events Explain All of the Global Warming Since 1976? – Part 1
2.Can El Nino Events Explain All of the Global Warming Since 1976? – Part 2
3.RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots...Show Climate Responses That Cannot Be Easily Illustrated With Time-Series Graphs Alone
If and when GCMs like those used by GISS, and in turn by the IPCC, are capable of reproducing ENSO events and their multiyear aftereffects on SST, TLT, and OHC anomalies, they may be capable of determining “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications.“ At present, they are not.
The NINO3.4 SST anomaly data is based on HADISST data available through the KNMI Climate Explorer. The NODC OHC data is also available through Climate Explorer:
Sato Index data is available through GISS:
UPDATE October 25, 2009: At the suggestion of Philip_B on the WattsUpWithThat co-post, Why does Ocean Heat Content diverge from GISS projections?, I’ve changed “solar irradiance” to “solar insolation” and “downwelling shortwave” to “downward shortwave”. Thanks, Philip_B.
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"When we sit with the quiet of nature we are reminded of time, that it can take hundreds of years to grow a mature tree, thousands to make a mountain, but only a day or a year to destroy them for short-term gain. It is here in nature that we can best learn the practice of foresight, of actually seeing ahead, and adopting the long-term goal of care for “the seventh generation,” an elegant concept of sustainability long held by the Iroquois Nation in their Great Laws. We need laws that will not harm future generations. What would happen if meetings held by world leaders and decision makers were to take place over a slowed-down, two-week period in a wild forest or mountain wilderness – instead of within the insulated urban chambers of the most frenetic cities?"
— Osprey Orielle Lake
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SHAPE: A Smorgasbord Of Choices
This was Part 3 of the B. INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN unit and would incorporate Line and Texture as well. For art newbies, the thought of "drawing" in itself could cause interior fright. We took an approach encouraging students to consider a variety of shape catagories: geometric, naturalistic, free form, and abstract, with possibilities within each.
Of course, we began with the usual prerequisite of simple sketches in different styles.
Typically, sketches showed single items, few overlapps, and little size variety. These would be some of the design elements we'd develop in succeeding sketches.
Sketch 2 would encourage some creative departures. First, categories could be singular or combined and planned in the final 9"X12" format. Next, considerations must be given to how shapes would be evaluated in importance, allocating appropriate sizes. And finally, arrangements of shapes had to show overlap, variety of positions, and "unordinary" placement---that is, avoid centering everything, plus a few more requirements for good measure.
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EDF Nuclear Plants Get Boost From U.K. Low Carbon Funds
The U.K.’s plan to collect 7.6 billion pounds ($12 billion) for low-carbon projects by 2020 would advance Electricite de France SA’s nuclear plants and add about a third to consumer electricity bills, analysts said.
The sum, announced yesterday by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, will help pay for the 1.1 billion pounds of support a year needed to build two European Pressurized Reactors made by Areva SA (AREVA) for use at EDF sites in England, as well as renewable plants, according to Credit Suisse Group AG.
European nations seeking to meet climate change targets have adopted mechanisms that reward generators of low-carbon power, paid for by consumers on their electricity bills. Leaders from the U.K. to Germany are debating the costs that burden imposes on consumers as they pursue goals to lower emissions. British Energy Secretary Ed Davey tripled the sum utilities can collect from consumers in 2020, which amounts to 9.8 billion pounds after inflation.
“The key uncertainty is, can the capacity be delivered, and will there be a consumer backlash once customers actually realize just how much their electricity bill will be jacked- up,” said Lakis Athanasiou, an independent equity analyst in London.
The cap may add as much as 28 percent to consumer bills if the subsidies proposed were put in place on top of the existing levy and with a planned tax on carbon dioxide emissions, he said by phone. Davey’s announcement, made in advance of publication of energy legislation next week, prompted calls for Britain to monitor the effect on bills.
“The government should ensure that those households and businesses most vulnerable to increased energy prices are protected,” John Cridland, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said in a statement.
The issue is particularly sensitive after utilities including SSE Plc (SSE) and Centrica Plc’s British Gas put up their charges for power and natural gas, blaming an increase in wholesale price and government environmental policies.
Davey said the impact of supporting clean technology accounts for 2 percent of customer’s bills and will grow to 7 percent, or about 95 pounds for the average home, by 2020. Savings from energy efficiency will counter part of that.
Credit Suisse said in its note that the levy “effectively allows” for a 150-percent increase in renewable subsidies in the second half of this decade.
“We remain skeptical, as the cost to be passed-through to consumers is high, and a return to economic growth or high fossil fuel prices is still required to keep the consumer impact manageable,” the bank said in a note to clients.
Based in Zurich, the bank said in earlier research that the cost of subsidizing renewables in Europe’s five largest power markets is becoming unaffordable for consumers and utilities who will share the 570 billion-euro ($739 billion) bill, at current values. Those markets are in Germany, France, the U.K., Spain, Italy.
The levy control framework pays for government programs to support renewable energy including the Renewables Obligation, feed-in tariffs and the contracts for difference that come into force from 2017. The “subsidy envelop” should allow the government to reach its goal to get 30 percent or more of its electricity from renewables by 2020, Athanasiou said.
EDF Energy, planning atomic reactors in Somerset, southern England, said the contracts for difference that guarantee a price for power have the potential to unlock significant investment and jobs in U.K. infrastructure projects. Credit Suisse said Davey’s announcement was of particular importance for EDF Energy and Centrica Plc (CNA), which sought the arrangements.
A spokesman for SSE said, “We are pleased to see that the Levy Control Framework means that the U.K. will be building new power stations, including nuclear and renewables.”
The levy will help “diversify our energy mix to avoid excessive gas import dependency by increasing the amount of electricity coming from renewables,” DECC said in a statement. The department said it also will support new nuclear and carbon capture and storage projects.
The levy’s budget is currently 2.35 billion pounds for 2012 to 2013. For 2013 to 2014 it’s 3.18 billion pounds, and it’s 3.87 billion pounds in 2014 to 2015. The cap does not include efficiency measures called ECO and Warm Front.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at firstname.lastname@example.org
Bloomberg moderates all comments. Comments that are abusive or off-topic will not be posted to the site. Excessively long comments may be moderated as well. Bloomberg cannot facilitate requests to remove comments or explain individual moderation decisions.
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- Posted September 9, 2011 by
This iReport is part of an assignment:
Share your 9/11 story
What I wrote on 9-11-02 After 1 Year
- nsaidi, CNN iReport producer
I wrote this on 9-11-02 as a Junior in High School...
One year, One Nation
One year later… and the world still turns. The nation that was on the brink of chaos is still united under one nation… one flag…one dream. The old times are returning, with people getting their lives back in order. The nation watched American Idol, and the MTV Video Music Awards, as they would have, if this event had not occurred, but there will always be something different. The one thing that will never be the same, is the gaping hole in our souls, and our pride. Nobody will ever be the totally the same again.
On that day, one year ago, our world was supposed to change. Our pride was to be broken. Our indivisible nation needed to be divided. The terrorist’s attempt to change our nation succeeded. We were a nation of prideless patrons and became a nation of flag flyers. The affects of a year, allowed our nation to realize we should be proud of our freedoms and civil liberties.
We cannot dwell on the past, or attempt to change what happened. Nothing could have been done to prevent this event. Simply remember all those lost, and give a prayer to the people most directly affected by September 11th. Do not cry for the buildings, but weep for those who were lost. The buildings can be replaced, but anyone who lost someone will never be able to see them again.
We will rebuild, with new designs and safety precautions. We will heal, but not fully. We will win the war on terrorism, and make the world safe again. We will never forget what we almost lost, but will remember what we gained. We as individuals will go on with life as we did before, but we will remain one nation.
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How old, dodgy dentures have given way to beautiful, permanent replacement teeth
Truly transformational: the full arch titanium/acrylic fixed implant bridge:
Times (they are) a changing. I’m actually not listening to Bob Dylan as I write this, but times are definitely changing in the world of UK dentistry, and where dentures are concerned, the change is accelerating.
20 years ago if you had lost all your teeth, false teeth or ‘falsies’ were your only option. Cheap and cheerful, available free on the NHS…and utterly hopeless as a functioning pair of teeth. Some of them looked ok and even stayed in when you were talking, sometimes!
20 years ago dental implants were in their infancy, only a few brave dentists with hugely rich patients ventured into such unchartered territory..
Fast forward 10 years and things had changed dramatically:
10 years ago if you had lost all your teeth (or a complete top or bottom set) then it was possible to find a few dentists with the ability to replace a whole set of top or bottom teeth - but the costs, although vaguely affordable for those with serious property equity, were still somewhat eye-watering. A full set of porcelain teeth needed 10 implants to support them and each tooth was lovingly crafted – the dental technician would spend days or even weeks making them.
Some dentists realised that there must be ‘another way’ and started to use fewer implants to fix dentures in place: the implant-denture was born. The beauty of the implant denture is that instead of needing 10 implants to hold a complex custom made porcelain bridge in place, with the extra support that the implant denture gained from resting on the gums, the implant dentists could use fewer implants to hold these teeth in place:
Result! Dentures that stay put and can be used for eating most food without any fear of them falling out when discussing the latest episode of the Simpsons [Grandpa should have implant-retained dentures by now surely? -ed]
The only problem with implant retained dentures is that in patients’ eyes they are still dentures! They need to be removed for cleaning purposes every night….and no matter how well they stay in with their super-duper implant-connectors, they still have the ‘false teeth’ label.
Enter the new era of ‘full arch’ implant dentistry [full arch: aka a top set, bottom set or complete set of implant-teeth].
Combining the ease of construction of implant-dentures with the satisfaction of having a set of fixed teeth that really feel like your own, without resorting to using 10 implants at a time and without the days and weeks of painstaking construction time at the dental lab…..it has become possible to completely replace a top set, bottom set or both for a rather less eyewatering fee than those huge ceramic bridges….
This has been made possible by using digital scanning/CNC technology to produce titanium ‘backbones’ with micro-tolerances that are screwed into place on as little as 4 implants for a full set.
Top quality acrylic teeth are then firmly attached to the titanium backbone and the full arch titanium/acrylic fixed implant bridge is complete.
How do they look? The photographs speak for themselves.
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The biggest and most populated country in South America, Brazil is the world's 10th largest economy and also one of the biggest democracies. Despite the immense economy there is a wide gap between rich and poor, and high levels of urban violence combined with an epidemic of corruption. Brazil is also home to a diversity of wildlife, stunning landscapes, environments, and extensive natural resources. Conservation of the Amazon rainforest has become a major concern and is always a hot topic. Tag your stories, photos and videos "Brazil" to see them featured.
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The Leveson inquiry completed its 17-month official investigation into the filth and the fury of the British press today, pulling into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center opposite Westminster Abbey. There, its leader, Lord Justice (Brian) Leveson, delivered the inquiry’s 1,987-page report on the London newspaper phone-hacking scandals, wild invasions of privacy by the press and covert surveillance by newspapers, and recommended new regulations of the press.
The regime proposed by Leveson would replace the current — and toothless — self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission with a body that would possess investigatory powers and authority to levy fines of up to £1 million for transgressors. The new body would be “voluntary,” funded by newspaper membership fees, as the 56-page executive summary explains, and “independent” of the press and government, though governed by statute. The advantage of submitting to the invitation to volunteer would be an “arbitration” service that would reduce the legal awards newspapers would have to pay when complainants brought their libel and invasion of privacy charges to the new body rather than to the courts.
Anticipating that some publications — namely the tabloids that routinely hacked phones, harassed people, co-opted the police, and published damaging lies — would refuse to volunteer, the summary recommends that those outliers be conscripted by the government’s broadcast overseer, Ofcom, which would operate as a “backstop regulator.” So there’s nothing voluntary about the regulatory scheme Lord Justice Leveson proposes. It surveys the landscape that is the British press — an institution sufficiently demented that one of its organs, News of the World, hacked dead schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile phone in pursuit of lewd headlines — and proclaims that all publications, be they guilty or innocent of the numerous offenses catalogued by Leveson, be subject to a new government-mandated order. With that nose under the tent, it wouldn’t be long until the entire camel was calling the place home.
Leveson can’t avoid noting that it was a newspaper — the Guardian — and not a regulatory body, not a police force, not a parliamentary committee, and not an official inquiry trucked in by limousine that exposed the crimes of News of the World and the purported police cover-up in the first place. Without the diligence of Nick Davies and his Guardian colleagues (plus a terrific assist by the New York Times, which advanced the story and kept it alive), the Milly Dowler case and other press outrages would likely have remained buried. That British newspapers and journalists broke laws and breached ethical standards must be paired with the finding that it was a righteous newspaper operating in the same environment at the same time that revealed the wrongdoing. Leveson’s reaction is akin to a judge proposing that all projectiles be regulated by a sub-judicial body because of a spate of window-breakings: If the devils are misbehaving, make sure to bind the angels in barbed wire, too.
For all its long-windedness, the Leveson recommendations aren’t as much about making British journalists do their work legally as they are about making them perform ethically and produce ethical work. The first obstacle to those goals is that a generous portion of British readership appears to prefer sordid news collected on the dodge to meaningful journalism produced ethically and in the public interest. They love the steaming swill the Daily Mail, the Express, and the Sun serve them, and would still be bolting the mash that the Milly-Dowler-violating News of the World conveyed had owner Rupert Murdoch not euthanized it in 2011 before torching the place. For a window on how ridiculous (if entertaining) these papers are, point your browsers to the watchdog site Mail Watch and scan its archives for deconstructions of tabloid lies and grime. The British audience seems to love this stuff, even when they know it’s half-cocked and ginned-up. Even former Brit Tina Brown makes it a part of her daily media diet, telling New York magazine that “for my sheer hit of trash, I’ll go to the Daily Mail Online, which is so great. It’s just got the best human-interest garbage.”
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Risk-taking can be a two-faced monster
Share with others:
The very intensity that drives Ben Roethlisberger to make thrilling plays on the football field may also make him more prone to ride a motorcycle sans helmet.
Stunned Steelers fans are shaking their heads at the maddening judgment of the Super Bowl quarterback, whose decision not to wear a helmet cost him dearly in an accident on Monday.
But those exasperated groans overlook the essence of the risk taker -- the person who for better and for worse always goes for the gusto, psychologists say.
"They want an exciting, interesting and thrilling life," said Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist. "At the end of their lives, they want to say they lived it. ... They tend to be natural-born rule breakers. You can look at these people and say, 'They are stupid.' I might say, 'That is their personality.' "
Dr. Farley has traveled the world to talk to some of the most extreme risk takers of our time, from Mount Everest climbers to NASCAR drivers to the man who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny sailboat.
He even coined a term to describe them: the Type T personality, with the T signifying "thrill."
Like others interviewed, Dr. Farley said he does not know enough about Mr. Roethlisberger to ascertain how much of risk taker he is.
Mr. Roethlisberger, 24, has vehemently denied he is a risk taker. But risk takers often deny that what they do is risky, Dr. Farley said. They are supremely confident beings who believe their fate is in their own hands.
The job of NFL quarterback is by definition risky and creative.
"There are rules, but as the quarterback, you are in a sense making your own rules," he said. "You live by your decisions, in real time, under the gun. The play starts and everything is moving fast."
Likewise, he said, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is a pure Type T thrill with the adrenaline rush, the open air, the roar of the bike.
Dr. Farley divides risk takers into Type T positives -- inventors, entrepreneurs, explorers -- and Type T negatives -- compulsive gamblers, criminals, people who engage in unsafe sex.
In his view, a multimillion dollar athlete's decision not to wear a helmet is veering into the T negative column.
Often a risk taker has both elements to his personality. Albert Einstein took brilliant risks with his thinking, he said, but on the negative side, had illicit affairs. The late John Belushi was a gifted improvisational comedian, a risky form of comedy, but he abused drugs, a risk that killed him.
Risk-taking tends to peak in people in their late teens through their early 20s.
But is it a cocky young guy thing?
Researchers are divided on this.
Citing the rise of women competing in extreme sports such as snowboarding and skateboarding, Dr. Farley said, "I don't think it is something hard-wired between men and women."
He cites Margaret Mead and Helen Keller as famous female risk takers who were thrilled with the adrenaline rush of their original thinking. Ms. Keller once said, "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing," the Type T mantra.
But Adam Goodie, associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, said, "Some people find a thrill in risk itself. It is more of a male thing."
Mortality rates bear that out. Young men 18 to 24 are three times more likely to die than women of the same age, mostly from automobile and motorcycle accidents, suicide and homicide, said Daniel J. Kruger, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.
Throughout history, young men trying to attract a woman have to compete with each other for social status and resources, he said, so they engage in risky behavior.
"There is some component of guys at the bar, strutting around and getting into fights over women," Dr. Kruger said. "But a lot of it is not conscious. Women find it attractive in a partner, someone who is likely to protect them and provide for them." So men, he said, take risks competing for social status.
There appears to be a link between elevated testosterone levels and risk-taking, he said.
"When men get married, their testosterone levels go down. There is a shift in strategy from settling down and becoming a dad," he said. "But when they become divorced, their testosterone level shoots back up" as they look for a new mate.
Risk takers can be as maddening as they are exciting. Although terrible accidents involving risk takers often lead to calls for more rules, Dr. Farley cautions people not to hem in Type T people too much, lest you kill some of their creative spirit.
"This nation was founded by risk takers," he said. "Ben Franklin didn't wear no freakin' helmet when he rode his horse."
First Published June 14, 2006 12:00 am
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I will be the guest speaker tomorrow at the Milwaukee West Suburban Branch of the Association of American UniversityWomen (“AAUW”) annual fundraising tea. The organization was founded in 1881 by a group of 17 women—all college graduates. Their purpose was to create broader opportunities for women in higher education. One of the founders, Ellen Swallow Richards (photo below from Wikipedia.org), was the first woman to receive a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she did so in 1873.
Today, the AAUW consists of a network of more than 100,000 members and donors, 1,000 branches, and 500 college and university partners. The work it does to foster equity and positive societal change, through funding for education, research and development programs for women, is impressive. Each year, the AAUW Educational Foundation provides $3.5 to $4 million in fellowships, grants, and awards for outstanding women and for community action projects.
For 20 years, the AAUW’s Legal Advocacy Fund has raised money to support women fighting sex discrimination in higher education. As an attorney who represents women in sex discrimination cases I know first-hand how important it is for a woman who brings a sex discrimination to have financial resources to prepare and advance her case.
The bottom line is the AAUW is all about women helping other women and that is a mission I enthusiastically support.
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Medicine, Healing and the Jewish Tradition
Despite early theological objections, Jewish law views the practice of medicine as a mitzvah.
Reprinted with permission from the author's book Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice, published by the UAHC Press (Union of American Hebrew Congregations), 2001.
The practice of medicine is a mitzvah, a fundamental religious obligation incumbent upon the Jewish people.
While this statement might strike us as obvious and unexceptional, the attitude it conveys is far from unanimous in Jewish tradition. The Torah never explicitly commands us to practice medicine, and some biblical passages are highly critical of physicians and those who resort to them. This negative attitude stems, in large part, from the fact that for much of its history, medical "science" was not far removed from the arts of black magic, which the Bible condemns in no uncertain terms.
Theological Objections to the Practice of Medicine
Yet there are weighty theological objections to medicine as well, and these have to do with the Bible's conception of God as Creator of the universe and therefore the Source of both sickness and health. If God is the cause of all that happens to us, it stands to reason that illness is a sign of divine displeasure, a punishment for our misdeeds. And if such is the case, the proper response to illness is not medicine but prayer and repentance. Do we not read that "I am Adonai, your healer" (Exodus 15:26)? Does this verse not teach us that all healing belongs to God? If so, then to employ the services of a physician in search of a natural cure for disease betrays a lack of faith in the mercy of Heaven.
Thus, the biblical author criticizes King Asa of Judah because "in his illness he sought not God but rather physicians" (II Chronicles 16:12). The Talmud contains statements in a similar vein. According to one legend, King Hezekiah wins praise for hiding away a medical book as a means of encouraging the people to turn to God, and not to physicians, for healing. Elsewhere, the Talmud suggests that human beings committed a serious error when they began to practice medicine; "they should instead have learned to seek God's mercy." Perhaps this is what the Mishnah has in mind when it declares in no uncertain terms that "the best physician is deserving of hell."
This point of view finds a powerful expression in the commentary of Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (13th-century Spain), known as Nachmanides or Ramban, to Leviticus 26:11. God, Ramban tells us, offers us an existence entirely distinct from that which is the lot of all other peoples, whose lives are governed by the normal workings of nature. Israel, by contrast, is to receive blessings and suffer curses as a direct result of its success or failure in keeping God's covenant.
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By Patrick Nicholson, Head of Communications at Caritas
Jesuit Refugee Service is celebrating 30 years of work. I’ve had the pleasure to visit many JRS projects over the years as Caritas works very closely with them, and have always been amazed by what they achieve with the resources they have. Although they support hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, they are the antithesis of a ‘big aid’. They live with the communities they work with cheek-by-jowl, carrying out the amazing life changing programmes. So for all the lifts in the back of rickety old vans, the cold concrete floors that have served as beds, the companionship, integrity and example they’ve given to so many of us over the last 30 years, Happy Birthday!
For those of you in Rome, to commemorate 30 years of service to refugees, three Jesuit organisations – JRS, Centro Astalli and Magis – have organised a calendar of events:
• on 9 November at 16:00, a lecture at the Gregorian University, The world mobilised. The Jesuit Response to Refugees,” given by former JRS International Director, Mark Raper SJ; and
• on 14 November, a mass in the Chiesa Gesù, followed by a concert of young musicians Sonidos de la Tierra
The orchestra, comprising a group of 40 young musicians from marginalised communities, some of whom are displaced, will play modern and traditional music from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. The theme, overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers, is a testimony to the dream of a world at peace without borders.
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Without Geometry, Life is Pointless
What beliefs and attitudes about mathematics do you see in your students, in society, in the media, and elsewhere? Try and think of both positive and negative beliefs and attitudes. These can be beliefs that you agree or disagree with. I’ll start with a few, but please add your own in the comments.
- If you’re good at math, math problems can be solved in a relatively short amount of time.
- People do not solve math problems for fun; they do it for school, for their job, or to balance their checkbook.
- Every math problem has been solved by someone.
- Math is about numbers.
- Math is a language to describe the world.
- If you are good at math, you are smart.
- If you can do computations accurately and quickly, you are good at math.
- People who are good at math are eccentric and/or not socially adept.
- Boys are good at math.
- Asians are good at math.
- There can only be one correct answer.
- If I don’t know how to solve a homework problem, I must be doing something wrong.
- Math topics/classes are sequential; I need to understand A before I can learn B.
- It is socially acceptable to say you’re bad at math.
- Math is more analytical than creative.
- Using a procedure correctly to get the right answer is more important than understanding why the procedure works
- With current technology, arithmetic is not important.
- To be an engineer, you need to be computationally strong.
- Math is a gatekeeper.
- The value of math is in its connection to real world applications.
- Math teachers sleep under their desk at school.
Ok, I guess that was more than “a few”. Hopefully I left some for everyone else.
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A health body has been handed a six-figure penalty after publishing sensitive personal details of more than 1,000 NHS staff on the internet.
Employees with the Torbay Care Trust (TCT) in Devon found details of their sexual orientation and religious beliefs were published online, alongside their name, date of birth, pay scale and national insurance number. It did not contain any patient or clinical data, the trust said.
TCT was given a £175,000 penalty on Monday, following the investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which described the data breach as "serious" and "extremely troubling".
The ICO said the trust published the information in a spreadsheet on its website in April 2011, and only spotted the mistake when it was reported by a member of the public 19 weeks later.
It was estimated that the spreadsheet was viewed 300 times during that period, although investigators were unable to identify all of those who accessed the information.
The ICO's investigation found that the trust had no guidance for staff on what information should not be published online and had inadequate checks in place to identify potential problems.
Stephen Eckersley, ICO head of enforcement, said: "The fact that this breach was caused by Torbay Care Trust publishing sensitive information about their staff is extremely troubling and was entirely avoidable.
"Not only were they giving sensitive information out about their employees but they were also leaving them exposed to the threat of identity fraud.
"While organisations can publish equality and diversity information about staff in an aggregated form, there is no justification for unnecessarily releasing their personal information. We are pleased that the trust is now taking action to keep its employees' details secure."
In its report, the ICO adds: "The contravention [of security] is serious because [the trust's data protection policies] did not ensure a level of security appropriate to the harm that might result from such unauthorised processing.
"If the data has in fact been accessed by untrustworthy third parties then it is likely that the contravention would cause further distress and also substantial damage to the data subjects such as exposing them to identity fraud and possible financial loss."
The ICO said it had not received any complaints from NHS employees, adding that it was not aware of any previous data breaches at the trust, which has now introduced a new web management policy to make sure personal data is not mistakenly published on the internet.
Apologising to staff, TCT chief executive, Anthony Farnsworth, said: "This was an organisational issue, in which the absence of sufficient checks within our processes made an error possible, and we have treated this with the utmost seriousness.
"We have since implemented far more robust procedures for managing staff information to make this more secure, and to remove the risk of any such incidents occurring in the future.
"We are of course disappointed that the information commissioner has found it necessary to impose a fine for this incident, but we accept the findings. Provision was made to potentially pay such a fine, so there is no affect on budgets for staff, or health and social care services.
"I would like to apologise, again, to these individuals for any concern that has been caused."
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Monday: Are You Ready for Some Football?
Try one of these great looks for sports pages!
Are you ready for some football? How about soccer? Maybe a little baseball? No matter what sport you or your family members are watching or playing, you can create a great layout to document this exciting part of your lives. Here are six fantastic sports-themed layouts and a couple challenges to get you warmed up.
("Tough" by Lori Anderson)
Challenge 1: Group your photos into a collage.
Re-create the experience of watching the game with a photo collage. Leave enough white space within each photo to create a visual separation between them when they're butted up against each other. Vary photo sizes for additional visual interest.
("Chicago Bulls" by Kelly Purkey)
Challenge 2: Incorporate star accents and striped patterns into your design.
Watching sports is a favorite pastime of many people. Give a patriotic nod to your sports-themed pages by accenting it with stars and stripes--or any symbol of your nation.
("Batting Practice" by Ria Mojica)
Challenge 3: Capture motion with a series of photographs.
Much of the excitement of an event comes from those magical moments when a batter hits a home run or a sprinter makes it to the finish line just seconds ahead of the competition. Document this moment in a series of photos on your layout.
("Swim, Bike, Run" by Elizabeth Kartchner)
Challenge 4: Use numbers as decorative accents on your page.
Numbers are important in just about every sport--the numbers on the scoreboard, the numbers on players' jerseys, the number of innings, the number of miles to the finish line, and more. Use the numbers that are significant to the subject of your page as accents on your layout.
("Goaaal!!!" by Lisa Dorsey)
Challenge 5: Use a ball shape to create an accent on your layout.
Whip your page into shape--the shape of a ball, that is! Let the ball used in your favorite sport inspire an accent on your page. You could create a football-shaped title block, a circle journaling block embellished with baseball-style stitches, or even flocked circle accents reminiscent of tennis balls.
("My Kid Is a Sports Fiend" by Shannon Taylor)
Challenge 6: Celebrate several of your hobbies or interests on a single layout.
What do you do for fun? What activities do you carve time for in your busy schedule for? Create a layout that shows why these hobbies are important to you and describe what you love about them.
Daily Creative Challenge: Create a layout based on one of these six challenges, and upload it to our CK Scrapper Bowl online gallery.
|You might also like...|
|To comment on this article you must be logged in. Not a member?|
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<urn:uuid:25766172-75c9-4151-8632-9d9d26f3add8>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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.- Following recent revelations that a Planned Parenthood youth site has been promoting pornography to teenagers, three House representatives have called for the termination of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, Cybercast News Service reports.
A 2007 article on the Planned Parenthood-sponsored Teenwire.com website advised pornography use as a “lower-risk form of outercourse.” "Many couples can read or watch sexy stories or pictures together," the article stated. "They can also share or act out sex fantasies.”
Another advice piece, “Porn vs. Reality,” noted that it is against federal law for anyone under 18 to view pornography. The article then says “however, not everyone follows the rules, and you may run across some porn before you turn 18.” The also article said that many people enjoy pornography “alone or with a partner.” It continued, “People have different ideas of what is arousing, and there are many different kinds of porn that appeal to people's different interests."
Three House Republicans spoke to Cybercast News Service after reviewing the materials from Teenwire.com.
Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado said the site "is another reason we should pull all federal funding from Planned Parenthood." He continued, "Time and time again this organization has used taxpayer dollars to promote interests that are not in step with the values of the American people."
"We should shut off all federal dollars to any organization that provides abortion services or counseling," Iowa Rep. Steve King added. "There should be no money that goes to any Internet site that promotes promiscuity or sexual license in any way. If there is going to be sexual license promoted, let that happen some place else. But the federal government should not be subsidizing it," he said.
Rep. Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania also condemned the funding of the material. "I don't believe taxpayer funding should be going to groups that put sexually explicit material on the Internet targeted at minors," he told Cybercast News Service. "Parents today already have their work cut out for them trying to keep their kids from viewing smut on the Internet.
"The federal government shouldn't be funding groups that produce this sort of material under the pretense that it is educational," he said.
Planned Parenthood and similar family planning organizations are funded under Title X of the Public Service Health Act. In its 2005-2006 annual report, Planned Parenthood Federation of America reported that $305.3 million, 34 percent of its annual income, came from government grants and contracts.
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Looking Back at a National Tonic
from “Country Life” - November 11, 1976 by Hugh Casson
“ ‘A Tonic to
the nation’. That at any rate is what Gerald Barry called it. (He was
the man who thought up the idea of the Festival and rightly was given
the job of running it!) Certainly we all needed something to cheer us
up in those disenchanted post-war years. True we had survived a war. Behind
us also by now were the great reform programmes of the National and Labour
governments, the 1944 Education Act, the National Health Service, the
Town and Country Planning Act. Yet Utopia seemed as far as away as ever
and the rationing of food, clothes and building materials was sharper-edged
even than it had been in the war. We were more than ready for a reassuring
word or an encouraging event.
I joined in September 1948. "There won't be any building", said Barry. "It's just keeping an architectural eye on things, but it looks like being fun." Fun it certainly proved to be and not just for those of us in the engine room. It was genuinely nationwide. All over the country the Festival was celebrated in locally organised events of every size and kind.
The centrepiece of the official programme was the South Bank exhibition in London- two small versions of which toured the country, one of them aboard the converted aircraft carrier "Campania" . There were supporting shows at Belfast (agriculture), Glasgow (industry), Kensington (science) and Poplar (architecture). There was also an unprecedented (for England) explosion in national patronage of the arts - opera, films, painting, poetry, sculpture and crafts. In sum, a lot of people enjoyed themselves and it was all a great success-achieved let us remember against two preparatory years of almost universal derision and hostility. The press, either snooty or abusive was against it throughout. The establishment suspected it was all a smokescreen for advancing Socialism. The Left decided it was middle class; the academics that it was populist; Sir Thomas Beecham said it was imbecile; Evelyn Waugh that it was pathetic;Noel Coward that it was not worth more than a mild giggle. But Morrison and his Council stood firm, and we in the Festival office were any way far too busy to despair.
Our main concern
was the South Bank Exhibition- 27 acres of treeless and derelict mud flats,
split in half by a railway bridge, but bang in the centre of London and
commanding splendid views of the river's curve. The theme we were given
- largely devised by Ian Cox - was the British development in the Arts,
Science and Industry. The job of putting this story into visual terms
was given to the Design Group- three architects and two designers. These
were later to be assisted by an army of designers and engineers, landscape
artists, typographers, painters, sculptors and scriptwriters- all comparatively
young and experienced. We had to work hard and fast and we did. We were
given the site in Autumn 1948. By Christmas the Master Plan had been approved.
By the following March the architects had been given their briefs, their
sites and their budgets. By May their sketches were in, and on July 29,
work had started on site. It was open on time and virtually within its
budget. In five months it was visited by over eight million people-something,
I think everyone concerned should be proud of.
Nothing could start until it had been approved and costed - whether fireworks or cleaners overalls, fodder for exhibition cattle or fees for scriptwriters, models of Viking ships or crockery for restaurants. One of the principal organisational difficulties was where to put anything on this cramped and busy site-bricks or concrete mixers, cranes or huts. For two years every inch of the site seemed to be either dug up or in constant use. When the exhibits arrived it was an even worse nightmare of controlled confusion. Every object-cricket bats, railway engines or prize sheep- had to be labelled, installed, catalogued and protected, and all the crates and packing had to be cleared away promptly. It was all by any standards a remarkable achievement.
But was it anything else? Was it really a tonic, as Barry claimed or, as some critics suspected, a tranquilliser- a political device to distract the national from its discomfort? Was it an architectural milestone or just a rehash of Paris and Stockholm? A true release of creative activity or another retreat into our national artistic hideyhole of whimsy and nostalgia?
A bit of everything no doubt. Certainly it was a bit priggish. There was a whiff of Workers Educational Association, a touch of didactics about the South Bank Exhibition. (You would expect that from the background of the people running it.) It was also "professional" rather than participatory. (It had to be-you cannot get an exhibition up to that speed by holding public meetings to discuss attitudes and content.) Some of it perhaps- as Robert Lutyens said in a sadly dismissive article in "Country Life"- was "fearfully silly". Yet though modestly self congratulatory it was not boastful nor nosily nationalistic. Nobody was taught to hate anybody. It was intelligent (in Bertrand Russell's sense of being the rational execution of something conceived in passion) and it was light hearted and visually it was certainly a knock-out.
The South Bank became- as we had intended it to become-not just a complex of buildings but a "popular place", relaxed , enchanting, informal, human in scale. The solution, it seemed, suggested itself. On such a small site, and with an unpredictable variety of building, axial planning and formal symmetry even if desired were physically impossible. So the South Bank was arranged with deliberate informality - with "rooms" of different uses and character opening one out of the other, rather like some roofless Victorian Mansion.
Such a planning device requires dexterity and skill in the use of recognisable but unobtrusive barriers- using changes of level and paving texture and planting or water barriers to delineate areas and to guide the visitors from one section to the other. There were no "Keep Off" notices, and interestingly, no vandalism. Sculpture and murals were not stuffed into a hallowed Pavilion of Art but were made frankly part of the general scene. All the details -lamp posts and litter bins, direction signs and cafe furniture-were as carefully considered as the buildings. It became in its way, a pattern book for our new urban landscapes, and its influence-with all its faults- is with us still.
Could we do it all again? Of course and better. There is today much more design talent about. The annual flood of designers from the new art schools positively foams with talent and energy. Dockland is empty and just waiting for some hot waterbottle to warm it up for future use. We all long for more places to walk about in free from noise and motor cars, to listen to music in the open air, and to be bewitched by the unexpected or the beautiful. Who would run it this time? Again the Herbivores (as M. Frayn termed the Festival Team), or the Others? Jonathan Miller,as it were,or Lew Grade? I wonder."
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One of the goals of all animators (especially the lazy ones like me) is to have the opportunity to reuse pieces of animation. It allows you to save a lot of time if you can insert some portions of animations already recorded into any other position in time.
This is especially useful for making characters speak because you have to move your character's mouth to repeated positions depending on the phonemes it describes while speaking.
This can be done easily just using a combination of keyframes and exported canvases.
Our goal is to record some sort of animation and reuse it later. This can be done using keyframes. If you create some keyframes at the beginning of your animation you can reuse these "poses" at a later point in time just by duplicating the keyframes at another time position. To do that just do following:
- Create a Keyframe at a frame (all of our keyframes should be created close to each other to use a small portion of time. We only want to record a "pose" not a transition)
- Modify your objects in the way you want (for example make an eye close just by moving the points of the eyelid).
- Give a name to the keyframe just by clicking on its corresponding Description cell.
- Repeat the above steps as many times you need to make a new "pose". Let's say you have created a keyframe at frames number 2 (eye open) and 4 (eye closed)
- Once done then go to another frame with the time cursor, select the keyframe you want to introduce and press the "Duplicate keyframe" button. You'll obtain a copy of the selected keyframe at the current time cursor position.
There is a problem with this technique. You are making copies of the entire animation poses that you have stored in the first keyframes of the time (frames 2 and 4 of the sample) and therefore you have made copies of all the other objects existing in the scene (following the example, the eyeball).
If you already have an eyeball animation recorded and you overlap an eyeblink (open and closed) set of keyframes in the middle, then the eyeball animation would be broken by the insertion of the copies of the eyelid movement keyframes.
Exporting the Canvas Parameter
Every time you group the layers, you obtain a Group Layer that prevents the composition of the contained layers over layers outside of it.
One of the parameters of the Group Layer is the Canvas. The canvas is like a workspace that represents all the grouped layers.
To avoid the problem described in the previous section (the keyframes affecting all the objects in the scene) you can do following:
- Before creating the keyframe poses of the eyelids, group all the layers that form the eyelids.
- Select the Group layer and select the Canvas parameter in the Parameter Dialog.
- Right click the Canvas parameter, export it, and give it a name (in the sample this will be "eyelids").
Go to the Canvas Browser Panel and select the just exported canvas.
Double click it and a new workarea window will open with just the layers that were grouped at the step 1 - the "eyelids" canvas in the sample.
Create all the keyframes you need to store your "poses". Once done go to the proper frame and insert a copy of the pose keyframe. It will produce a keyframe in the "eyelids" canvas, but will not produce any keyframe on the other layers (for example the eyeball). This allows to independently animate of a portion of the model separated from the rest. Be sure that the exported canvas is as long as the animation.
Now once you have stored the eye blinks (open and closed) at the desired position you can go to the main window (just close the "eyelids" canvas work area). You'll see that all the modifications have been transmitted to the main animation but they haven't created any keyframes in the main work area. Even the layers that are inside the "eyelids" Group layer don't have any keyframes (you can see an indication that there are keyframes in the exported canvas - dashed vertical lines - but no keyframe is displayed in the keyframe dialog). Anyway, you can see the waypoints created by the keyframes and tweak them, but not the keyframes themselves. To modify the keyframes you should edit the exported canvas again in its own work area. If you modify the grouped layers from the main work area, waypoints will be created according to the main work area keyframes, not the exported canvas work area, so you will get different effects depending upon which work area you use to modify the grouped layers.
Now, once you have created your animation of the eyelids you can go to the eyeball and modify it to your taste, inserting keyframes or waypoints with no worries about interfering with the eyelid animation. Also you can animate the eyeball before and make the animation of the eyelids later. They won't interfere with each other.
It would be a great improvement if you could connect the time cursors of the main work area and the exported canvas work area to show both windows at the same current time. This would give feedback on where to insert the 'pose' keyframes in your local animation.
Here you can find a sample animation of a blinking eye (the closed and open positions are copies of the keyframes "Open" and "Closed", while the eyeball moves independently in its own animation.
I have stored the poses "Open" and "Closed" at frames 0 and 2. The animation is defined to start at frame 6.
All comments are welcome.
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Here's an incredibly ancient hack, which still isn't known well enough. A linked list is a venerable data structure; every node on the list contains a
next pointer, allowing us to advance one position in the list in O(1) time. On a doubly linked list, we also keep a
prev pointer, to we can go back. But we're using twice as much space for our pointers! A doubly-linked list of 1-byte chars, when every pointer is another 4-byte word, will require at least 9 bytes for every 1 byte usefully stored (and often 12 bytes, assuming today's usual memory alignment restrictions).
Can we have a doubly-linked list with just the (singly-) linked list overhead? Surely not!
It turns out that we can. On each node, keep the XOR of the
prev pointers in the single
link field. When traversing the list, keep an iterator
<cur,prev>, consisting of a pointer to the current element and a pointer to the previous element. Then (abusing C notation)
next = cur->link ^ prev, so we know how to advance our iterator. All of these operations are also easy:
- Reversing the direction of the iterator:
- Just do
prev = cur->link ^ prev.
- Checking for end-of-list:
- Assuming we use the special address 0 to mark the ends, we just check that
next->link == prev (similar expressions exist for any other sentinel value you may pick for the ends, of course).
- Passing iteration starting points to a function:
- Just pass an appropriately-initialised iterator pointing to the starting point and its predecessor.
And an unexpected bonus is that now all functions work equally well on the list and the reversed list!
Unfortunately, there is no portable way of implementing such a list in C or C++: neither language allows you to XOR two pointers (what could the type of the result be?), and while you could cast a pointer to a large-enough integer type, you are not guaranteed even to have such a large-enough int, and you are not guaranteed that these XORs will work. However, it appears that the C++ STL
list<> templated type could be implemented in such a way, assuming sufficient cooperation between the writers of the compiler and the library. I'm not aware of any implementation which actually does this, though.
Agthorr below is not quite right. Of course if all I have is a pointer into the list, I cannot traverse it. But the thing to realise is that the correct object to store is an iterator -- a pointer to two adjacent nodes of the list (depending on the application you might also need to know the iterator's direction, ``forwards'' or ``backwards''). For this data structure, typically you'd have many nodes in the list, and only a few such iterators from outside it, so the savings remain.
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<urn:uuid:1c0c6fef-eb1d-402d-aa4e-700e10472811>
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http://everything2.com/title/Storing+a+doubly-linked+list+using+just+a+single+pointer+field
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|About this Abstract
||Materials Science & Technology 2011
||MS&T'11 Poster Session
||050 Investigation of ZnO:N and ZnO:(Al,N) Films for Solar Driven Hydrogen Production
||Sudhakar Shet, Yanfa Yan, Nuggehalli Ravindra, Heli Wang, John Turner, Mowafak Al-Jassim
|On-Site Speaker (Planned)
ZnO thin films with significantly reduced bandgaps were synthesized by doping N and co-doping Al and N at 100oC. All the films were synthesized by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering on F-doped tin-oxide-coated glass. We found that co-doped ZnO:(Al,N) thin films exhibited significantly enhanced crystallinity as compared to ZnO doped solely with N, ZnO:N, at the same growth conditions. Furthermore, annealed ZnO:(Al,N) thin films exhibited enhanced N incorporation over ZnO:N films. As a result, ZnO:(Al,N) films exhibited improved photocurrents than ZnO:N films grown with pure N doping.
|
<urn:uuid:07a4fdf7-01b1-4180-a6ec-1a6dc0720567>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.programmaster.org/PM/PM.nsf/ApprovedAbstracts/373B85C36C6B61A285257868001246A8?OpenDocument
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
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|
People with celiac disease and a gluten sensitivity avoid wheat products… (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles…)
This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details.
The gluten-free crowd is growing cranky. So-called prominent members of the “gluten-free community” are gathering next month in Washington, D.C., to clamor for attention. They want the FDA to get cracking on setting label standards for gluten-free products.
Small wonder. Their condition, in which proteins in grain called “glutens” damage the small intestines, is a hard one.
Known as celiac disease, the condition causes stomach pain, bloating, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. Over time, the lining of the small intestines is unable to absorb nutrients properly, leaving its sufferers malnourished. About 1 in 133 people in the U.S. have celiac disease, according to a study published in Archives of Internal Medicine and reported by the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse. There’s no cure, except for a lifelong diet of gluten-free foods—a headache that would be made easier if food labels clearly stated whether gluten is an ingredient, say organizers of the first Gluten Free Food Labeling Summit.
We understand the desire for more reliable labeling. But that’s not to say that “gluten free” products are somehow better or more healthful on their own. The only difference is the absence of gluten, which is commonly found in pasta and bread —anything made of wheat, rye or barley. Some people may be sensitive to gluten, but don't have celiac disease—the symptoms are similar to irritable bowel syndrome and some research indicates 6% of the U.S. falls into this category. But there's no evidence that eating a gluten-free diet is healthful for people without gluten sensitivities.
Still, some dieters with a healthy gut seem to have jumped onto the bandwagon...the gluten-free market has ballooned to $2.6 billion in the last year.
So here’s the bottom line: If you are lucky enough to digest gluten without a problem, sit back and enjoy the pasta.
For the record, 12:07 p.m., April 14: A previous version of this post said that gluten is commonly found in rice. It also said that rice is made of wheat, rye or barley. Rice is gluten-free, and it too is a grain, like wheat, rye and barley.
|
<urn:uuid:5de7b1ae-3335-4399-9584-7ef27ab6ad0a>
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I believe this is one of the most challenging questions to answer because it's so painful to see such terrible suffering in the world that occurs especially when it's at no fault of the suffering soul. Therefore, this question requires a sincere answer in response to the emotions it invokes as well as the possible contradiction posed by Epicurus.
In response to Epicurus; he makes a fatal error in his logic by not considering the possibility that God has a sufficient reason for allowing such suffering in the world. If this is even possible it completely eliminates any logical contradiction concerning the existence of a good God and the existence of evil. In God's omnipotence He can choose to allow terrible things to occur in order to bring about a greater good later. Think about the story of Joseph (Gen 37-50), or, most importantly, the betrayal of Christ which brought about atonement for our sins. In this past century alone, our world has seen the most despicable dictators such as Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein to name a few. Even in the face of the massive killings of China people are rushing to the Lord at a rate faster than any where else in the world. In Pakistan you can receive the death penalty for conversion yet they still are unable to stomp out the forest fire of belief in Christ. In Africa, from the early 1900's to date, the population has gone from less than 5% Christian to around 50%, in the face of famine, raping and brutal murders. God exchanges the suffering of the world, not only for many good things, but also for His most cherished affection, which is us.
Some may say if God is Omnipotent (all powerful) then why not just eliminate evil altogether and let us live in happy harmony. I suggest this premise has not been thought through very carefully for if God's standard is perfection He would ultimately have to either revoke our free will or eliminate all mankind since we have all fallen short of His glory (Rom 3:23) and deserve death (Rom 6:23). Even the atheist must admit that he has committed some evil according to God's standards, thereby qualifying for elimination. But as we have seen, God doesn't want to eliminate us but wants all people to be saved (1 Tim 2:4).
What about the children who die before being baptized, where do they go. I would first like to say that although Jesus commands a professing Christian to be baptized, he never requires it for salvation. In fact, he tells the criminal on the cross next to him who had a repented heart, "Truly, I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). This thief did not have the opportunity to be baptized yet Christ is telling him he will be in heaven. I would also like to point out in contrast to the Christadelphian claim, that the bible indicates here and in Luke 16:22 that believers will indeed be in heaven immediately after dying. Romans 10:9-13 tells us how to be saved and baptism is not part of it. Furthermore the bible indicates that a child who dies goes to be with the Lord. (2 Sam 12:23) When Davids son dies he says, "I will go to him, but he will not return to me", meaning David will see him again in heaven. And again in Ezekiel 16:21 God calls the young children of Israel who were being sacrificed by fire, His children, and we know from John 1 that to be a child of God is to be saved.
Lastly, about the people who are unreached by the gospel before there death. Read Romans 1 and 2 very carefully and you will find that although a man may not have heard the gospel he still has the testimony of God's existence from creation and an inner conviction (also see John 16:8). This conviction is the same conviction that drives any person to repentance. Christ is not limited to just using people to share the gospel, he can do so by coming Himself to a believing and contrite soul, in a vision, as he has done for so many people already. Many Muslims who have come to Christ will testify that they were met by Christ having never heard the gospel a day in there life, Amazing!! Read Acts 10 and you will see the story of a man who loved God but never heard the Gospel, and God sent Peter to him so that He may hear.
I hope this makes sense, I know it's very long answer but these are questions that many have written entire books about. I really hope and pray that you would reconsider your disbelief. Think about this, you lost your faith because of all the injustice going on, meanwhile the people being treated unjustly are gaining such strong relationships with God. James 1 was written just for these people to remain strong during trials, and I plead with you to do the same.
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UK energy legislation has changed greatly over the last few years to reflect the country’s necessity to meet projected energy demands as well as carbon emission reduction targets. With the UK Energy Act 2008, the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Planning Act 2008 all now published, these important legislative changes indicate the country’s commitment to the UK’s 2006 Climate Change Programme, which sets a framework for domestic policy initiatives in the final years of the Kyoto agreement to 2012.
The biggest carbon capture plant yet installed at an Australian power station has begun operation at International Power Australia’s Hazelwood plant in the Latrobe Valley.
With some 26 million homes in the UK, including seven million social housing properties, the widespread introduction of low-carbon refurbishment techniques could see millions of tonnes wiped off the country’s carbon footprint each year and hundreds of pounds off the average home’s fuel bill.
The UK Government, like others in Europe and around the world, has set itself a target of 20% renewable energy by 2020. Last week the UK Government unveiled its Renewable Energy Strategy1, which set a target of 30% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020, up from the current level of 5.5%.
We are similar to donkeys in many ways, says UK tax expert Shimon Shaw. When it comes to taxation policy, we respond to both force (sticks) and positive incentives (carrots). The UK Government is using a mixture of the two when it comes to its environmental policy.
The Government’s new mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme could save businesses £1 billion by 2020. Douglas McLeish, Corporate Markets Director at npower discusses why businesses need to start planning now and why an effective energy management programme is essential.
Early 2009 is set to be a key time in determining the future role of smart meters in the UK with an announcement expected from Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, as part of its ongoing consultation into the models for smart meter roll out across the country.
Two years after the introduction of the ESCOT system, Brian Jones, MD of Sinergy Ltd., comments as this highly innovative meterless energy data collection system approaches maturity.
Smart metering promises to give customers real-time, easy-to-understand information about their energy consumption – the most energy-hungry appliances, comparisons with similar properties and even their neighbours, as well as a host of other data.
Renewable energy – particularly the main contenders of wind and solar – may be on the point of moving into the mainstream as governments around the globe look to a clean energy future as a way out of economic gloom and looming environmental catastrophe.
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For the past several weeks, Spirit has been examining spectacular layered rocks exposed at "Home Plate." The rover has been driving around the northern and eastern edges of Home Plate, on the way to "McCool Hill." Before departing, Spirit took this image showing some of the most complex layering patterns seen so far at this location.
The layered nature of these rocks presents new questions for the rover team. In addition to their chemical properties, which scientists can study using Spirit's spectrometers, these rocks record a detailed history of the physical properties that formed them. In the center of this image, one group of layers slopes downward to the right. The layers above and below this group are more nearly horizontal. Where layers of different orientations intersect, other layers are truncated. This indicates that there were complex patterns of alternating erosion and deposition occurring when these layers were being deposited. Similar patterns can be found in some sedimentary rocks on Earth. Physical relationships among the various layers exposed at Home Plate are crucial evidence in understanding how these Martian rocks formed. Scientists suspect that the rocks at Home Plate were formed in the aftermath of a volcanic explosion or impact event, and they are investigating the possibility that wind may also have played a role in redistributing materials after such an event.
Images like this one from panoramic camera (Pancam), which shows larger-scale layering, as well as those from the microscopic imager, which reveal the individual sand-sized grains that make up these rocks, are essential to understanding the geologic history of Home Plate.
This view is an approximately true-color rendering that combines separate images taken through the Pancam's 753-nanometer, 535-namometer, and 432-nanometer filters during Spirit's 774th Martian day (March 8, 2006).
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Should the B.C. government have "expressed regret" last weekend for the wrongful hanging of two aboriginal men almost a century and a half ago, before the province even existed?
Governments in Canada have apologized for a lot of things over the last few years, including the abusive native residential school system, the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War and the head tax applied to Chinese immigrants.
The wrongs might have been committed decades or even generations ago, but an apology or more nuanced expression of regret, is seen as a way to close an old, still open wound and perhaps open the door to compensation.
Ida Chong, B.C.'s minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation, took part in a reconciliation feast Saturday to "close the door on this past hurt," the ministry said in a news release.
The event was organized and hosted by descendants of Aniestsachist, a member of the Hesquaiaht First Nation, who along with another man named Katkinna, was hanged in 1869 for allegedly murdering two survivors of a shipwreck off Vancouver Island.
The men were convicted in a trial conducted by officers of HMS Sparrowhawk while British Columbia was still a Crown colony, two years before it joined Confederation. They were hanged in front of members of their community on a beach about 30 kilometres north of Tofino, B.C.
[ More Daily Brew: Critics slam B.C. program to renovate flophouses as a costly waste of money ]
Historians today think the convictions may have stemmed from problems with translation of testimony given in the Hesquiaht language.
"The Province expresses its sincere regret and laments that Hesquiaht members — and family in particular — were forced to bear witness to such violence and for the trauma and pain they have endured," Chong said. "It is our hope that from this time forward the relationship between B.C. and the Hesquiaht people is strengthened and flourishes."
Chong said an expression of regret, and not an apology, was fitting because British Columbia was not a province, the National Post reported.
In turn, Aniestsachist's descendants offered forgiveness for the execution of their ancestor, who they maintain was innocent.
"We have to accept that. If we didn't accept it, we wouldn't get anything at all," said Tim Paul. "And for our family, it gives us a chance and a clear path to move forward and work at developing and creating a new history for our family."
It's not the first time the B.C. government has apologized for a historic incident involving aboriginal people.
In 1990s, the province apologized for the hanging of six chiefs of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation for attacks in the so-called Chilcotin War in 1864. More than 20 people were killed by aboriginals opposed to a road being pushed into their territory, opening it up for settlers and gold prospectors.
The six chiefs, who felt they were simply defending their territory, had come to a meeting on what they thought were assurances of friendship but were arrested for murder.
The expression of regret for the 1869 hangings also came one day after the Nov. 16 anniversary of the 1885 hanging of Louis Riel, the Metis leader, for treason after the North-West Rebellion. Though some consider him a father of Confederation for his part in the creation of the province of Manitoba, he's still officially a traitor to Canada.
The idea of modern governments begging pardon for the sins of their predecessors still doesn't sit well with some Canadians.
[ Y! Awards: Dark Knight shooting story year's most memorable ]
"Why are we apologizing and not the British Crown?" one commenter asked on the CTV News web site. "Public relations and propaganda I'm thinking."
"Good God, could we wipe the slate clean if we could get Christopher Columbus back from the dead to apologize?" asked another, reacting to the Post's report.
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The Kewanee Police Department is receiving complaints from citizens about possible scams being attempted in the community.
These possible scam attempts range from alleged local police-endorsed security systems, calling solicitor elimination programs and other alleged police-related solicitations.
Phone numbers left to return are often not in service or ask one to leave personal information.
“Although there are many legitimate professional and charitable organizations who solicit donations and/or provide legitimate services, there are also many scam artists who will attempt to mimic such honorable solicitations for illegal means and ill-gotten profits,” Police Chief Jim Dison said. “Be wary of any callers wanting account or personal information as it may be a ruse to get information to steal an identity.”
Dison added, “Do not allow yourself to become a victim by letting your guard down. Research any organization or business who may ask for donations or wish to provide you with a service before agreeing to take part.
“Everyone should strive to become a well-informed consumer,” Dison said. “Everyone has the right to say ‘no thank you’ and end the call. Do not feel high pressured into any decision.”
Anyone who feels they may have been scammed or may have had their identity stolen, should file a police report immediately, Dison said.
The police department has booklets available with information on contacting organizations that may be able to assist them if they have become a victim of identity theft.
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The Department of Electrical Engineering prides itself on the state-of-the-art equipment in our teaching and research labs. The undergraduate program places a heavy emphasis on laboratories and design projects. There are six lab courses in the undergraduate curriculum and two additional lectures which feature a significant laboratory component.
Smart Grid and Protection Laboratory
Initially, this industrial grade laboratory is an effort by local utilities, local IEEE Power Engineering Society section, relay manufactures, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to stimulate students’ interest in the power system field by building a modern microprocessor-based relay industry grade laboratory. The laboratory has been evolved in becoming state-of-the-art facility to train the current workforce in use of advanced technology for power applications and to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for future power industry needs.
The laboratory features the latest in power protection relays and test equipment, including transmission line protection relays with 61850 networked communications. It is composed of seven stations with state of the art relays donated from well know relay manufactures such as ABB, GE Multilin, and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, such as line distance relay SEL 411L and GE D90 Plus, differential relay 487E, and transformer protection relay ABB TPU 2000R. These relay stations are setup with breaker simulators, GPS units, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), and residential smart meters. The testing equipment such as Omicron 256, Real-Time Digital Simulator, Opal-RT, are used for dynamic relay testing, IEC 61850 testing, and real time simulation of the power system. The GPS units are available for stamping data received from PMUs and relays for IEC 61850 testing.
In this laboratory students set the relays using a personal computer, application software, and communication processor. Relays are tested using SEL AMS low-level testing systems or Omicron CMC 256, and a Real-Time Digital Simulator. Students gain familiarity with test equipment and procedures when testing modern microprocessor-based multifunction transmission, generator, motor, and bus protection relays. Experience will be gained in configuring and operating test equipment (60Hz voltage and current signals, as well as digital representations of those signals), calculating test quantities, making connections between relay and test sets, and analyzing results including all available sources of fault records (relay targets and internal oscillographic records).Students perform experiments on transmission, distribution, generator, and transformer protection. In this laboratory students are familiarized with overcurrent, overvoltage, distance, and differential relays as well as pilot relaying. They are able to set and test digital relays, select current and voltage transformers, determine relays and transformer taps, conduct research on power system protection, and test their protection design schemes in a laboratory environment.
ETAP/TVA Power Simulation Laboratory
The ETAP/TVA Power Simulation Laboratory, located in EMCS 402, is the result of a three-way partnership with TVA, Operation Technology, Inc. (OTI), and The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This state-of-the-art lab contains the latest in electrical power simulation system design and analysis software. The ETAP software, made available to the Department through a generous donation from OTI, is used by TVA and other electric power companies to drastically reduce the cost of design, analysis, maintenance, and operation of power systems.
TVA Power Engineering Laboratory
The Power Lab, located in EMCS 308, was furnished with the help of a grant from TVA, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and UTC. It consists of six Labvolt stations that support two undergraduate courses.
Each of the station as shown above features with dc motor/generator, four-pole squirrel-cage induction motor, three-phase synchronous motor/generator, resistive, inductive, and capacitive loads, single- and three-phase transformers, synchronizing module, power supply, four-quadrant dynamometer, and data acquisition and control interface.
Students are able to conduct various experiments on single- and three-phase power measurement with resistive and reactive loads configuration, transformer’s polarity, parameters, and characteristics, and ac/dc machine behavior and loading characteristics.
Students use a computer based system, a data acquisition interface module, and data management software to measure, observe, and analyze electrical and mechanical parameters in electrical machines and power systems. Students also observe waveforms displayed in the time and phasor domain, as shown above.
Power Electronics & Electric Drives Laboratory
The power electronics laboratory is built around a reconfigurable circuit board, termed the power-pole board, along with accessory daughter-boards design by the University of Minnesota. The board can be configured to work as a buck, boost, buck-boost, flyback or forward converter. The board can also be operated in voltage/current feedback mode using an external control circuit mounted on a daughter board which plugs into the power-pole Board.
In addition to the power board, high wattage resistor, power supplies, a multi-meter and differential probes were obtained to create a student work station. Currently, there are six work stations for the power electronics lab at UTC.
Above figure shows the hardware set used for the electric drives lab station which consists of a motor coupling system; power electronics drive board, and a DSP-based controller card. The motor coupling system contains the motor that needs to be characterized or controlled. The system has a mechanical coupling arrangement to couple two electric machines. The motor under test could be either a DC motor or three-phase induction motor or three-phase permanent-magnet AC (PMAC) motor. The motor demands a controlled pulse-width-modulated (PWM) voltage to run at controlled speed or torque which is generated by power electronics drive board.
EPB Electrical Circuits Laboratory
The bulk of the entry-level circuits labs are held in the Electrical Circuits Laboratory in EMCS 307. Stocked with electrical test equipment, including digital oscilloscopes, this lab exposed sophomore students of all engineering disciplines to fundamental electrical principles.
Instrumentation and Advanced Electronics Laboratory
In the Instrumentation and Advanced Electronics Lab in EMCS 310 are held courses in microprocessors and advanced electrical design.
Electrical Systems Laboratory
Students are exposed to real-world design and instrumentation in the Electrical Systems Laboratory, using GE Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and National Instruments LabVIEW to automate industrial tasks as part of the Electrical Engineering senior capstone design. The lab is located in EMCS 322.
Electrical Communication Laboratory
Utilizing the EMONA Tims system of educational communications equipment, the Electrical Communication Lab in EMCS 303 provides a hands-on environment for implementing a variety of radios.
Configurable Systems Laboratory
The Configurable System Lab in EMCS 305 is used for research in reconfigurable computing, software defined radio, and processor architectures. The latest in programmable logic devices and software development tools are used to create custom digital designs.
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Lecturer: Richard Pious – Columbia University, Barnard College
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; four days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Yet America’s involvement in World War II had been predetermined as early as May of 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt circumvented an isolationist Congress by making a secret deal with Winston Churchill and the British.
Full price is $89 - but friends of NCC can buy up to 4 tickets at the special discount price of $49 by using coupon code 'NCC'.
To register simply CLICK HERE or call One Day University at 1-800-300-3438.
Don't forget to use coupon code "NCC" to lock in your special low price.
Space is limited.
Monday - Friday: 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday: 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sunday: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
525 Arch Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19106
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Designed as a trainer and light combat aircraft for use by the British Royal Air Force, the British Aerospace (BAe) Hawk was mainly used to teach air combat, air-to-air firing, air-to-ground firing, low-altitude flying techniques and operation procedures. There are currently over 900 Hawks in operation and nearly 2 million flying hours have been logged on the Hawk.
E-flite’s BAe Hawk 15 DF ARF is a sport scale version of the British trainer. Constructed of fiberglass and balsa, the fuselage is prefinished with scale details. The Hawk boasts the rare and very visible Central Flying School airshow trim scheme from 1987 in red, white and blue.
This exciting model was designed around E-flite’s Delta V 15 (69mm) fan unit and matched 15 DF brushless motor. Pilots can use a 3-cell battery pack or utilize a 4-cell battery pack for increased vertical performance. The built-in fan mounts make installing the fan easy—just drop in the fan unit and tighten four screws. The removable front hatch also allows easy access to the radio equipment and battery. The entire trim scheme is prepainted, pre-trimmed, the wings are covered in UltraCote and all the decals have already been applied. Created for the advanced sport scale pilot, the BAe Hawk 15 DF ARF easily lives up to its reputation of being a stable flying jet.
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Empowering Public Wisdom: Chapter 3
The following is the third installment of Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. You can visit the Empowering Public Wisdom homepage here.
CHAPTER 3: Why We Need Public Wisdom
Is it asking too much to ask for wisdom—especially from the public?
No, it isn’t.
Isn’t wisdom a quality that we find in ancient traditions and in certain old people with much experience?
Yes, we often find wisdom in these places. But they are not the only places we find wisdom.
When I speak of public wisdom—the people’s wisdom—
I define wisdom as “the capacity to take into account what needs to be taken into account in order to produce long-term, inclusive benefits.”
This is a very practical definition. When our public decisions take into account the full complexity of an issue, we can justifiably call them wise. When the public—as a whole or in the form of randomly selected “mini-publics” —engage in learning, reflecting, and talking amongst themselves in ways that consider all the factors and viewpoints related to an issue in order to make decisions that produce long-term, inclusive benefits, then we can fairly say we are generating public wisdom.
Today most decisions about public issues are made in ways that serve short-term and/or exclusive interests more than “the general welfare” (the U.S. Constitution’s phrase for the common good). We’ve watched the rich getting richer with bail-outs, subsidies, low taxes, and financial deregulation. We’ve watched powerful teachers’ unions impeding important reforms in education. We’ve seen lobbyists for insurance and pharmaceutical industries blocking national health care policies that the vast majority of Americans want. We’ve watched oil companies block climate change legislation and escape taxes and liability for oil spills. We’ve seen marijuana legalization blocked by corporations that run private prisons and value the “market” in nonviolent offenders. Lobbying by powerful special-interest groups seems to run the country and many states and communities. Clearly wisdom is not what we get from politics as usual.
Even when a policy is well intentioned and aimed at broad benefit, it all too often fails to take into account important factors, and those omissions then generate problematic side effects. For example, it is good to save lives by feeding the hungry and healing the sick, but we also need to keep population and consumption in check or we end up generating more hunger, disease, and environmental degradation through overpopulation. It is good to end a war, but we also need to fix some of the messes we’ve made in the process and to provide jobs and trauma care for returning soldiers. It is good to provide funds for rebuilding war-torn nations or aiding developing countries, but what if the money ends up in the hands of corrupt officials and sleazy businesses?
So wisdom demands both: a strong motivation to serve the general welfare over the long haul and a firm grounding in reality, taking account of all aspects of an issue without being blinded or biased by ideology, ignorance, laziness, or manipulation. It would be nice if we could depend on wise philosopher kings to do all this for us. Unfortunately, such people (like all people) have a habit of being negatively affected by the attentions and privileges of power—or else dying from causes that may or may not be natural.
We’ve seen that the governmental structures our Founders left us—for all their brilliantly designed checks and balances—have become inadequate to restrain the abuses of power that are rampant in our current democratic constitutional republic.
We are in a time of mounting and increasingly interrelated crises—economic, political, social, and ecological. These problems will not resolve easily. The longer we go without wisely addressing them, the more complex, resistant, entangled, and dangerous they become. Their persistence and messiness have earned them the name wicked problems from social scientists. Many social scientists also see their development in even more dire terms: systemic collapse.
I join with others who see these emerging crises as signs of an impending transformation. The old systems are no longer working the ways they did. Increasingly they are creating problems and dangers rather than good lives and a better world. One way or another, something is going to shift. It is hard to imagine how that shift will be positive unless we can muster the collective wisdom to guide it in life-serving directions.
We can only do that if we make a real effort—as a society— to take into account everything that needs to be taken into account to generate long-term inclusive benefits.
We need to awaken our public wisdom. We need to engage additional sources of wisdom to enhance it. We need public power to get our public wisdom applied to public policies, programs, and budgets. And we need our public wisdom to come alive in the awareness and activities of millions of people in our communities, in our country, and in our world.
Where can we get these things?
From Empowering Public Wisdom by Tom Atlee, published by Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books in collaboration with Evolver LLC, copyright © 2012 by Tom Atlee. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
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Saving the Ocean – 2012 PBS TV Series
Join Carl as he chronicles the unsung heroes who are creating hope — people who are hard at work inventing and implementing solutions to save the world’s oceans.
Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution, and climate change are having on the world’s oceans.
It’s time for some good news.
Carl introduces us to marine biologists, fishermen, fisheries scientists, conservationists, and activists who are helping fish populations to rebound, bringing endangered species back from the brink and creating hope for today’s oceans.
Now airing on PBS, Saving the Ocean is composed of half-hour episodes, tailored to weekend and early evening broadcasts. The first two episodes, aired in 2011, are Shark Reef and Sacred Island.
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Simple password reset bug is squashed in Skype mishap
Skype has fixed a security hole which allowed anyone with your email address to hijack the account.
The somewhat embarrassing password reset bug meant anyone with an email address of a Skype user could reset the password via a simple form and without the need to access the associated email inbox. Skype was made aware of the security vulnerability yesterday and has fixed the problem. See also: Skype for Windows 8 review.
Skype said in a blog post: "Early this morning we were notified of user concerns surrounding the security of the password reset feature on our website. This issue affected some users where multiple Skype accounts were registered to the same email address. We suspended the password reset feature temporarily this morning as a precaution and have made updates to the password reset process today so that it is now working properly."
"We are reaching out to a small number of users who may have been impacted to assist as necessary. Skype is committed to providing a safe and secure communications experience to our users and we apologize for the inconvenience."
The password reset bug was originally discussed on an underground Russian forum three months ago but got publicised late on Tuesday night, according to The Register.
Microsoft recently announced that it will ditch Windows Live Messenger, aka MSN Messenger, in favour of Skype which it acquired last year.
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|
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Weight Gain During Menopause
If youre a woman between the ages of 35-55 and youve noticed a little extra weight around your midsection, you're not alone. According to statistics, almost 90% of women in this age group experience weight gain during menopause. Obviously, this is not pleasant news for any woman to hear, but the upside is that it may not be your fault.
Research findings show there are multiple reasons why you may be packing on the pounds. Causes for weight gain during menopause may include the following:
- Fluctuation of hormones that can increase appetite and slow down your metabolism.
- Insulin resistance which causes your body to store all calories as fat. (Typically occurs in women over the age of 40.)
- The hormones activated when a woman is experiencing stress during menopause can contribute to weight gain.
Excessive weight gain during menopause can be avoided. Be sure to eat a balance of healthy foods that include whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Try eliminating refined white sugar, caffeine and alcohol, which can contribute to your weight gain and increase the severity of your menopausal symptoms.
Increase your water intake and get plenty of exercise. Staying active and fit will not only keep you from gaining weight during menopause by increasing your metabolism, it will also keep your bones strong and help decrease the chances of developing osteoporosis.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.thirdage.com/menopause/weight-gain-during-menopause
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|
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Talk about good timing. It's Valentine's Day and, as luck would have it, couples looking to have an 11-11-11 baby should get started tonight.
Any baby conceived right around Feb. 18 has a good chance of being born on 11-11-11 according to Dr. Samuel Pang, medical director at the Reproductive Science Center of New England.
The time from the date of conception to the expected date of delivery is usually 38 weeks. But, fair warning, that can vary by one to two weeks before or after the expected due date.
"They can certainly try to time when they get pregnant but the variable is when the woman is ovulating and once you become pregnant there are so many other variables, the exact date is really up to Mother Nature," said Pang.
While things might ultimately be up to Mother Nature that hasn't stopped couples from doing everything they can to have a baby with a memorable birth date.
On Babycenter.com one mom wrote about planning to "time everything right" and that included having a Caesarean section on Nov. 11.
Why all the fuss about this particular date? Numerologists think they have the key.
"There's no way a child born on that day will not be significant. ... It's that cool of a date," said Glynis McCants, a numerologist who has studied numbers for over 20 years and runs the website Numberslady.com.
"Anyone born on the 11th is here to master their life," McCants said. "It's a master number that encourages intelligence."
But that's not all. Numerologists believe that each number has a trait and a "vibration" attached to it. So, you take the number by itself and then you also break down each two-digit number into a single digit. In this case, you add one plus one to get two and two in numerology equals love.
Then you take the month and the day and reduce those to single digits as well to get four.
A four, according to McCants, is someone who seeks knowledge. Finally, when you add all the numbers together, including the year 2011, you get eight and "eights love the finer things in life."
McCants also said that people who meditate and have faith in the power of numbers have long believed that one of the best times to meditate is at 11 in the morning or 11 at night.
"The belief is that the universe is open to whatever you want at that time, the number is so significant," said McCants.
Valentine's Day is also one of the most popular days to get engaged. And many happy couples are already eyeing 11-11-11 as a wedding date -- despite the fact that it falls on a Friday.
A Facebook contest offering a free wedding on 11-11-11 down in Key West, Fla. was swamped with more than 1,400 entrants. The lucky winners, Kristin and Billy from Campbell, Ohio were announced today.
And Twitter is abuzz with people announcing their wedding plans for 11-11-11 like @BMareeR. And the folks at @EternalBride tweeted they had three brides in one day alone looking for dresses for that date.
@SoCalBarbie_619 is also hoping to get married on 11-11-11, though unfortunately she doesn't have a groom in mind - yet.
Couples have also approached McCants for her advice on whether to plan a wedding for 11-11-11.
"I have dozens of people who have contacted me and want to get married on that day. They wanted to know if it's a good day, a lucky day," said McCants.
Her advice? "Two means love. You always want a two in your wedding day. And four is about couples and commitment." In short, said McCants, the numbers say yes.
"I'm very, very excited about that date," said McCants.
And so apparently are lots of other people.
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Ask a question about 'Coulwood'
Start a new discussion about 'Coulwood'
Answer questions from other users
is a collection of neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. In 2010, Charlotte's population according to the US Census Bureau was 731,424, making it the 17th largest city in the United States based on population. The Charlotte metropolitan area had a 2009...
located between Brookshire Freeway and Mount Holly rd. This small town area was created around 1953 and in 1958 the Coulwood Community Council was created. This area is home to Paw Creek Elementary School and Coulwood Middle School as well as Coulwood Park and the Coulwood community pool. This area also is home to an annual 4 July parade and celebration that starts at the middle school and ends at the elementary school ending with a celebration at the park and pool.
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The Senate has the following organs :
• Plenary Assembly
• Conference of the Chairperson
• The Bureau
1. The Plenary Assembly is composed of :
All members of the Senate.
2. The Conference of the Chairpersons is composed of :
- Members of the Bureau of the Senate
- Chairpersons and Vice Chairpersons of Standing Committees.
3. The Bureau of the Senate is composed of :
- The President of the Senate ;
- Two Vice-Presidents.
4. Standing Committees
There are four ( 4) Standing Committees and a Committee in Charge of Conduct of Senators and evaluation of the Senate activities :
- Committee on Political and Good Governance ;
- Committee on Economic Development and Finance ;
- Committee on Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and Security ;
- Committee on Social Affairs and Human Rights and Petitions.
The Plenary Assembly can appoint adhoc Committees to deal with specific issues
The administration of the Senate is under the responsibility of a Clerk who carries on his or her duties under the supervision of the Bureau of the Senate.
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For Veteran’s (Mon)Day
“A vast array of young men fell on the battlefields; today we are here to honor their graves,” Pope Benedict XVI, “The Responsibility of Christians for Peace.”
Veteran’s Day is a day which we set aside to reflect upon and honor the heroic self-sacrifice of those who served our nation and the world with military service. Catholics know and realize the difficulty of being involved in the military, yet they know and realize that those who engage such service with dignity and moral integrity deserve our respect and appreciation. We must recognize the need for the military in a fallen world, but we also understand that soldiers can be put in difficult situations where they must wrestle with their conscience and decide if the actions they are being called upon to do are moral or not, and if they are not, they are required to follow their conscience even if it costs them their lives. In doing so, they honor the real integrity of military service and its rightful limits, because military service clearly has limits and if they are abandoned, then the soldier must abandon their post as Sts George and Demetrius did in the past (which, as a result, helped sanctify that very post).
One who desires peace does not have to be opposed to the military. They should respect those who take up service because that is exactly what it is, service, and service for the sake of others is a high calling reflecting in part the service Christ has done for us. That their service can be abused should not be used to denigrate the service itself. Catholics should understand all dualistic interpretations of the world are in error. What is good can and should be praised wherever it is found so that the good can increase. Of course, for the good to be good, it needs to be beautiful and united with the truth, and any privation of one is a privation in the good and shows what needs to be worked upon, that is, what needs to be perfected. But that is the point: we are called to serve others, to be for others in communion with others, and thus the noble soldier can be and indeed often is a great saintly image for us to look up to and imitate. Of course, as with all such figures, we must learn what it is that makes them holy and not imitate them in folly – no one would want to follow St Jerome in insulting St Augustine, I would hope—and thus, it does not mean we must do exactly as the heroes of old did. We must recognize what good their work aimed for, such as helping to provide a place in the world where human dignity could be recognized, and work for that same goal, perhaps with different means according to the different situation we find ourselves in. Yet it is in doing so, by continuing their good work, we do what is the best thing we can do to honor them.
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| 0.980088
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Date: Wed, 6 Nov 96 22:00:54 CST
From: firstname.lastname@example.org (Peoples Weekly World)
Subject: ‘Give us the future—we've had enough of your past’
Organization: Scott Marshall
Michael Collins is a welcome addition to the collection of films depicting great revolutionary fighters for the cause of peace and justice.
Like Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Neil Jordan's new biographical film is a high point in his career. It was a project nurtured for 12 years, waiting to be born at the right time under the right conditions.
The controversial and mysterious revolutionary hero, Michael Collins, has long been considered by Jordan an ideal subject for a historical film study. After gaining political clout as an accomplished director with such films as The Crying Game and Interview With the Vampire, Jordan felt confident to get funding for his monumental epic about this misunderstood revolutionary and the history of the Irish struggle for independence.
In the life of one person you can tell the events that formed the
north and south of Ireland as they are today, Jordan has said.
This story is more about history than any political statement. When historical films are created, decisions have to be made on how to represent the real life people and events. Depending on the source of funding (usually large corporations) and the sentiments of the director, among other things, the final production can have varied meanings.
Although based on gathered facts, the judicious editing of information
and interpretation of events can produce different results. Even
though Collins lived only about 75 years ago, much of the information
we have about him is as mysterious as the existence he maintained,
I wanted to make this story as accurate as possible
without killing it dramatically and I think I have.
The film covers the period in the Irish struggle against British rule, from the doomed Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, to Collins untimely death six years later. But it's also about the British oppression of Ireland that's lasted for over 700 years. The first scenes show the leaders of the six-day standoff at the Dublin General Post Office being captured and taken off to be executed by the British. Among them is the great Irish socialist James Connolly. His life struggle ends at the beginning of this story, hopefully to be examined in another film.
Of the revolutionary leaders, only Eamon De Valera, because of his American birth, was spared the firing squad. Many followers, including Michael Collins and his friend Harry Boland, were imprisoned along with De Valera. On their release, they became the new leaders of the Irish independence movement.
In the following years, Collins became the military genius of the republican movement—masterminding impossible prison breaks, setting up an intelligence network and establishing an invisible army that eventually brought the British to the negotiating table. Forced to confront an enemy far superior in size and strength, Collins is credited with developing the art of guerrilla warfare and helping to found what is now called the IRA (Irish Republican Army).
When a truce was declared, De Valera insisted Collins lead the negotiations with the London government. Despite Collins lack of confidence as a politician, he made an attempt and returned with a plan that created the Irish Free State, but still owed allegiance to the British Crown. The plan also included partitioning the country with the northern six counties (now called Northern Ireland) remaining under British rule. The treaty fell short of the expectations of republican De Valera and his followers. Despite Collins' pleas for peace, De Valera's group left the government eventually creating a civil war between the pro- and anti- treaty forces, with Collins being branded a traitor by many of his former followers.
To add to the drama, a romantic triangle ensued between Collins and
his friend Harry Boland, both vying for the attention of Kitty
Kiernan, played by Julia Roberts. Accused of being pro-IRA by some
critics, Jordan defended the project by saying,
I believe that this
inaccurate description is being used simply to inflame an already
He feels that, although Collins started out as a guerrilla fighter, in his later years he endorsed the plan to take guns out of Irish politics. For viewers unfamiliar with Irish history, it would appear that the production credits Michael Collins with nearly single-handedly bringing about the development of democracy in Ireland's first state free of total British rule.
By choosing the handsome charismatic Irish actor, Liam Neeson in the
lead, the director has locked in the image of the tragic hero brought
down by unfortunate circumstances. The true tragedy of the story is
voiced in Collins' denunciation of the British occupation:
hate them for making hate necessary.
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<urn:uuid:8b052125-5c2a-42ff-8518-353e3262308b>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/296.html
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|
en
| 0.962329
| 971
| 1.6875
| 2
|
I love watching food shows. Who would have thought cooking would become a competitive sport? Certainly not my mom.
But is what you see being prepared on these shows actually good for you? I understand these might be recipes you are proud to serve at your next get-together, but what about the nutritional value?
A recently published article in the British Medical Journal indicates that most of those scrumptious recipes flunk the nutrition test. Good for the palate, bad for the body.
Researchers took 100 recipes randomly selected from celebrity chefs and compared them to nutritional guidelines for carbohydrates, protein, fat and fiber. Not one meal – not one – met World Health Organization standards for balanced eating. They had too many calories, or too much fat, or too much salt, or too much sugar. And they all lacked fiber.
If nutrition is your game, these recipes would not be your thing.
Researchers then looked at packaged meals, such as Lean Cuisine. They found that these were actually more nutritious than the celebrity chef dinners – and I must tell you I don’t find frozen-food entrees to be the epitome of nutritional cuisine.
What’s a person to do? I certainly don’t recommend you serve Healthy Choice or Hungry Man at your next family gathering. And I don’t expect you to stop cooking fun stuff you see on TV. But you can adapt what you see to make interesting, tasty foods you would be proud to serve.
Buying a software program to analyze the nutritional content of each meal is possible, but that takes time.
So here are some tricks I use when I’m crafting recipes.
• Start by using a nonstick skillet sprayed with nonstick spray. This allows you to saute with less oil, and less oil means fewer calories
• If a recipe calls for sour cream, substitute nonfat yogurt. If it calls for sugar, use half the amount and substitute honey for the rest.
• Leave out the salt. Studies have shown that if you use salt at the table, especially chunky sea salt or kosher salt, you’ll often consume half as much as if you mix it into the food.
• Spice up your dishes with the amazing variety of non-salt seasonings on the market. I recommend buying several so you can decide what you like. If you want great taste, consider Penzey’s. They have a dynamite variety of seasonings to please any palate (penzeys.com).
Everyone should learn how to cook, because it puts you in control. You can customize your meals, and it’s cheaper, too – always a bonus for me.
Improving nutrition is critical, especially when Centers for Disease Control estimates show that 70 percent of us will be overweight by 2020.
My spin: If your dish looks too good to be true, it probably is. Take those celebrity recipes and be creative in improving their nutritional value. Maybe you’ll become a celebrity yourself. Stay well.
Dr. Zorba Paster is a family physician, university professor, author and broadcast journalist. He also hosts a popular radio call-in program at 3 p.m. Saturdays on WNED.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130129/CITYANDREGION03/130129153/1057
|
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|
en
| 0.949666
| 666
| 2.171875
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|
From field to fork: The value of England’s local food webs, a report by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England was released earlier this month.
Farming Online reports that it indicts government food policy and the supermarket model, revealing the role both have played in undermining the UK’s local food networks and jeopardising the vibrancy of rural regions.
Evidence has been provided by a five year research project ‘Mapping Local Food Webs,’ which examined 19 locations across England and identified over 2,500 local food businesses, over 800 outlets and 1,700 producers.
It includes information that:
- local food outlets serve 16.3 million customers a week;
- local food sales through independent outlets are worth £2.7 billion a year to the economy;
- These food outlets support over 100,000 jobs, of which over 61,000 are due directly to local food sales.
The report states that such local networks support diversity, distinctiveness and innovation in the food and farming sectors, broaden choice for shoppers, promote seasonality and reduce food miles. Though researchers found that money spent within local food networks is recirculated in the local economy, amplifying the positive effect on communities, the number of supermarkets continues to rise and encroach on food retailers in marketplaces and town centres:
- between 1980 and 2007 the number of hypermarkets and superstores in the UK grew from 300 to 1,500 by 2007, and the number is increasing;
- visits to supermarket chains accounted for 77% of main shopping trips in the locations studied by CPRE;
- supermarket chains have expanded their share of the market, grown in size and moved to the edge of towns;
- over the same period, local speciality stores such as butchers and greengrocers have been in freefall;
- town centre vacancy rates now average 14% and can be as high as 30% per cent.
The Environmental Audit Committee has criticised the government’s lack of action on creating a sustainable food policy and called for more government action to support local food webs, with increased consideration for sustainable food procurement.
CPRE is calling on local authorities to form partnerships to develop food strategies and for community groups to become more engaged in promoting local food. The organisation also wants more commitment to local food from supermarkets, which would help support local economies and reduce the businesses’ environmental impact.
The full report can be downloaded here.
A CPRE fact sheet detailing facts uncovered over the course of the group’s research is available here.
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<urn:uuid:5564226d-5ffd-432b-b492-9b6edb6ef29f>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://localisewestmidlands.org.uk/2012/calls-to-support-local-food-webs/
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en
| 0.944919
| 524
| 2.828125
| 3
|
Last week, White House economic aide Gene Sperling engaged in what became a controversial email discussion
with veteran reporter Bob Woodward.
Sperling told Woodward he would “regret” his decision to write a column on President Obama. The journalist said it was a threat; the White House called Woodward's claim nonsense.
The big lesson for PR professionals was to choose your words cautiously.
Whether you’re pitching reporters or writing emails to colleagues, word selection is important. Crafting prose is mostly a matter of using the right words for the job.
Here are some steps to help you achieve that goal.
1. Look up the definition of an unfamiliar word to ensure you understand the meaning before you use it.
It’s easy to deploy a word you’ve just read or heard, mistakenly believing you understand its definition or its connotation, only to confuse or accidentally mislead your readers. Always double-check a term you’ve never used before. Consider doing the same with words you’ve used before and think you know.
2. Search a thesaurus or a synonym finder for the precise meaning, taking care to notice the different connotations of similar words.
Flag stock words and phrases, and thumb or click through a print or online resource to select a more exact or accurate synonym. Be alert to seemingly similar words with distinct senses.
3. Keep your writing clear and coherent, and avoid pretentious or overly formal language.
Write to communicate, not to impress. Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Don’t let your writing get in the way of your message. There’s a fine line between elegance and pomposity.
4. Select the strongest nouns and verbs before you select adjectives and adverbs.
Words that modify nouns and verbs can enhance clarity of thought and vividness of imagery, but if they upstage the words they’re supposed to support, strengthen the noun and verb. When you do so, an adjective or adverb may no longer be necessary.
5. Seek opportunities to use repetition for rhetorical effect, but watch for careless redundancy.
Don’t repeat yourself unless it’s done to emphasize your point.
6. Read your draft aloud to help you refine grammar and usage.
If something doesn’t sound right to you, it probably doesn’t read right to your audience, either. Recitation is time consuming, but that’s how you find the awkward wording or phrasing you didn’t stumble over in your silent review.
7. Ask someone else to read your writing and critique it.
People you draft to read your prose need not offer solutions to problems of grammar, usage, organization, and logic; they can simply highlight problematic words, phrases, sentences, and passages, and offer more detail if necessary while leaving the problem solving to you.
The last step isn’t practical for every writing task or assignment, but if a piece of prose is important enough to you, and you have a reliable, word-savvy person on hand, ask to borrow their expertise—and be sure to reciprocate when the time comes.
A version of this story first appeared on DailyWritingTips.com
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<urn:uuid:2c0db9d2-ae9e-4a16-8bdc-1a2478e31d0f>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.prdaily.com/WritingAndEditing/Articles/11e15d8c-7ccb-4bd6-b27c-7ac73764ca77.aspx
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|
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| 0.915257
| 679
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| 2
|
[issue1589] New SSL module doesn't seem to verify hostname against commonName in certificate
report at bugs.python.org
Wed Oct 6 21:15:00 CEST 2010
Antoine Pitrou <pitrou at free.fr> added the comment:
> From a Python user/programmers point of view it would be nice if
> http://docs.python.org/library/ssl.html also clarified what
> "validation" means (apparently that the cert chain all the way from
> one of ca_certs is valid and with valid dates, except that CRLs not
> are checked?). It could perhaps be mentioned next to the ca_certs
> description. It would also be nice to see an example with
> subjectAltName, both with DNS and IP entries.
As mentioned in the patch, IP entries are not supported.
I'm planning to do a couple of doc updates as part of the commit, but
any doc suggestions should go in a separate issue IMO. This will make
things more manageable.
> Has it been tested that the way Python uses OpenSSL really checks both
> notBefore and notAfter?
I just checked and, yes, it does (but only if you specify CERT_OPTIONAL
or CERT_REQUIRED, of course).
> AFAICS * shouldn't match the empty string. I would expect "fail(cert,
> I would prefer to fail to the safe side and only allow a left-most
> wildcard and thus not allow multiple or f* wildcards, just like
> draft-saintandre-tls-server-id-check-09 suggests.
Well, RFC 2818 allows them, and I see no point in being stricter.
> I would prefer to not use re for such an important task where clarity
> and correctness is so important. If we only allow left-most wildcards
> it shouldn't be necessary.
I'm not convinced that manual parsing is really more readable than
regular expressions, and wildcards are a pretty obvious use case for
regular expressions. Perhaps it's a matter of habit.
> I don't understand "IP addresses are not accepted for hostname". I
> assume that if commonName specifies an IP address then a hostname with
> this address is valid. So isn't it more that "subjectAltName iPAddress
> isn't supported"?
Indeed. But, strictly speaking, there are no tests for IPs, so it
shouldn't be taken for granted that it works, even for commonName.
The rationale is that there isn't really any point in using an IP rather
a host name.
> But wouldn't it be better and simpler to simply support iPAddress -
> either as the only check iff hostname "looks" like an IP address,
> alternatively in all cases check against both DNS and IP entries?
Well, that's additional logic to code. I'm not sure it's worth it,
especially given that the function is called match_hostname in the first
> "doesn't match with either of (%s)" ... isn't the paranthesis around
> the list elements too pythonic for a message intended for end users?
> Separate error messages for subjectAltName and commonName could be
That depends if you're an end user or an SSL expert, I guess. end users
don't know what subjectAltNames and commonNames are.
> I assume it should be "no appropriate _commonName_" to match
> cert for example.com is defined twice.
> How about unicode and/or IDN hostnames?
I haven't looked how these work in the context of certificate checking.
I would prefer to tackle that separately if needed, but someone can
provide a patch for this if they want.
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
More information about the Python-bugs-list
|
<urn:uuid:75442e6c-ba96-4aad-962c-1b660865d764>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2010-October/115695.html
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American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Recovery.gov is the official website for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). For the first time, the general public can see how states and agencies are benefiting, and will be able to observe how monies are being spent. The act itself, H.R.1, was signed by President Barack Obama on February 17, 2009. Public comment is welcome and an online form is available.
Michigan’s Recovery and Reinvestment Plan allows residents to see where federal recovery funds are going within the state. Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm, identified five key areas for the spending of Michigan’s share of the recovery money. These priorities, as outlined on the website, include:
- Creation of jobs to jumpstart Michigan’s economy.
- Training Michigan workers and educating Michigan students so they will be qualified for the good jobs that already exist as well as the jobs to be created.
- Rebuilding Michigan’s infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, mass transit, broadband, health information technology, and schools.
- Providing assistance for families in Michigan that are struggling.
- Investing in energy efficient, renewable energy technologies to create jobs, save money, and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Financialstability.gov is a full force, comprehensive set of financial initiatives that seek to stabilize the financial system and get credit flowing again. This site lists four initiatives towards that goal that include:
- A Capital Assistance Program that ensures banks have adequate capital
- A Consumer and Business Lending Initiative to unfreeze secondary credit markets
- A Making Home Affordable Program to help families stay in their homes
- A Public-Private Investment Program to address the challenge of legacy assets
A timeline, put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, tells the story of the current economic crisis with a chronological list of significant events beginning in February 2007.
Other Reference Desk Items:
16th Poet Laureate Named!
2008 Summer Olympics - Beijing, China
Booster Seat Law - Effective July 1, 2008
Cinco De Mayo
Deleting Website Accounts
Do you have a healthy car?
Earth Hour 2008
Economic Info: How Recessions Work
Free 411 Telephone Directory Assistance
Fuel Economy Guide
Gas Price Watch
Influenza A (H1N1) Outbreak (Swine Flu)
Lifesavers for a Sinking Economy
Michigan Minimum Wage Goes Up
TV Converter Box Coupon Program
Understanding Your Telephone Bill
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IVU (Intravenous urogram) or IVP (IV pyelogram)
This page tells you about a test called an IVU (or IVP). There is information about
What is an IVU or IVP?
An intravenous urogram (IVU) is sometimes called an intravenous pyelogram (IVP). This test uses X-rays to look at the kidneys, bladder, and the tubes that connect them (the ureters). Together these are called the urinary system. An injection of dye (contrast medium) into your bloodstream helps to show up any changes on the X-ray, including cancer.
Having a IVU or IVP
You have this test in the hospital X-ray department. Most people have it as an outpatient. You change into a gown, and lie on a couch. Then a nurse or doctor injects a dye into one of the veins in your arm. The radiographer takes X-rays as the dye passes through your system. The medical staff can also watch this on the X-ray screen.
The test takes about an hour. It is painless apart from the small injection of dye. You may feel hot and flushed when you have the injection. This does not harm you and the feeling passes within a few minutes. You can go home after the test.
It can take a couple of weeks to get the results. Contact your doctor if you have not heard from the hospital after this time.
An intravenous urogram (IVU) is sometimes called a intravenous pyelogram (IVP). It is a test that looks at the whole of your urinary system. It looks at the
- Tubes that connect them (ureters)
The male urinary system
The female urinary system
The test uses a dye, also called contrast medium. This shows up the soft tissues of the urinary system on a normal X-ray. It can show if cancer is growing in any part of your urinary system. The cancer will show up as a blockage or an irregular outline on the wall of the bladder or ureter.
You have this test in the hospital X-ray department. It takes about an hour. It is quite usual to have this test done as an outpatient. Apart from a small injection of the dye, the test does not hurt at all.
After you have changed into a hospital gown, the radiographer will take you into the X-ray room and help you onto the X-ray couch. First, you will have some dye injected into one of your veins, usually into an arm. Before you have this, the nurse or radiographer will ask you about allergies or asthma as some people can be allergic to it. The injection may make you feel hot and flushed for a minute or two. But it is not harmful and this feeling soon disappears.
The dye circulates through your bloodstream and goes to your kidneys. The doctors can then watch the dye on an X-ray screen, as it goes through your kidneys and then through the tubes that carry urine from the kidneys to the bladder (ureters). The radiographer will take X-rays as the dye passes through your system.
You can go home as soon as the test is over.
It can take time for test results to come through. How long will depend on why you are having the test but it may be a couple of weeks. Usually, a specialist in radiology examines the X-rays and dictates a report. The typed report and X-rays are then sent to your specialist, who gives the results to you. If your GP has sent you for the test, the results will be sent directly to the GP surgery.
Understandably, waiting for results can make you anxious. If your doctor needed the results urgently, it would have been noted on the scan request form and they will be ready quickly. Try to remember to ask your doctor how long you should expect to wait for the results when you are first asked to go for the test. If it is not an emergency, and you have not heard a couple of weeks after your test, ring your doctor's secretary to check if they are back.
Rated 4 out of 5 based on 17 votes
Question about cancer? Contact our information nurse team
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Software-makers were caught off guard by a July judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union on the UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp case.
The court ruled that “An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licenses allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet”.
“The Court of Justice interprets EU law to make sure it is applied in the same way in all EU countries. It also settles legal disputes between EU governments and EU institutions. Individuals, companies or organisations can also bring cases before the Court if they feel their rights have been infringed by an EU institution.”
The recent ruling on the rights of used software mirrors other rulings in cases such as SusenSoftware v SAP and UsedSoft v Microsoft. Analysis of the ruling shows that:
- Exhaustion Rule is now the rule of the land. While the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) on July 6th, 2000 upheld this legal foundation, many vendors have continued to challenge the case. In this instance the BGH sent the case to the Court of Justice to interpret the UsedSoft v Oracle International Corp case. The court deliberated and finally ruled that “The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a license is exhausted on its first sale”.
- Point of View: UsedSoft’s primary business model is to market licenses acquired from Oracle customers. After acquiring rights to the license, UsedSoft’s customers who do not possess the software download the licenses directly from Oracle’s website. Applied to the “Exhaustion Rule”, this means that the developer’s copyright expires at the time of sale. In summary, a developer can only make money on the initial sale and any attempt to restrict trade of used software through specific trade terms conflicts with the exhaustion rule.
- Exhaustion Rule applies to physical and downloaded software. This applies to any on-premises software purchase in person and on-line anywhere in the territory of a Member state of the EU. The ruling states that “the principle of exhaustion of the distirbution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD), but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website.”
- Point of View: Oracle’s main argument in the case that the directive does not apply to licenses downloaded from the internet is struck down. As the highest court in the EU, this ruling is the final ruling. Downloaded or bought in physical form, exhaustion rule applies to all software including both enterprise, personal, and games. New acquirer of the licenses can download it directly from the vendor’s site.
- Software publishers can no longer oppose the resale of the copy of software. The court clarified two points on resales of copies of software. The first, “Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy- tangible or intangible - and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a license agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that right holder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right.” The second, “Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the license agreement prohibits a further transfer, the right holder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.”
- Point of View: The clarifications on the resale of the copy of software have huge ramifications. Based on the ruling, “the distribution right extends to the copy of the computer program sold as corrected and updated by the copyright holder”. Users basically have rights to all updates at the time of the sale and this can version can be sold to the secondary market. Users who fail to download updates have rights to resell those alterations to the next customer. The subsequent customer would not have such rights.
- Software licenses can not be divided in the resale and be reused. The ruling clarifies ownership provisions upon reselling. “If the license acquired by the first acquirer relates to a greater number of users than he needs, that acquires is not authorised by the effect of the exhaustion of the distribution right to divide the license and resell only part of it...An original acquirer of a tangible or intangible copy of a computer program for which the copyright holder’s right of distribution is exhausted must make the copy downloaded onto his own computer at the time of resale.”
- Point of View: The court wisely upholds copyright law by requiring the seller to remove the property from their possession prior to resell. However, the inability to divide licenses means that users will have to be careful about the number of licenses they purchase upfront or purchase with separate contracts to allow for the resell of licenses in the future.
The Bottom Line For Buyers: In the EU you own your software free and clear of vendor encumbrances
Prior to this ruling, customers could resell hardware to a secondary market but not their software. This inefficiency and inconsistency in the law has led to billions dollars of wasted expense by organizations around the world, perplexing buyers for decades. Pioneering efforts by SusenSoft and UsedSoft should be applauded by customers for fighting the legal battles to reinforce their rights.
Other efforts by Rimini Street and TomorrowNow to free up the third party maintenance market should be supported by the software users around the world and the European Union. As with reselling software, the anti-competitive practices of software vendors to limit access to third party maintenance is as heinous as limiting the ability to resell used software. This practice is akin to only being able to service one’s Toyota at the Toyota dealer.
One major concern for users – the cloud presents the next big lock-in. Why? Users do not own their licenses. This ruling may lead to all software publishers to deliver software via access in the cloud. In effect, no on-premises software would ever be sold again and users could only rent their software. This unforeseen ramification could prove even more costly as vendor lock-in will increase unless cloud users are granted protections in the market.
Kudos go out to the Court of Justice of the European Union for continuing to protect both the consumer’s software rights and in general the individual’s privacy rights. The only complaint, the inability to divide licenses in a resell. Buyers should learn to buy in separate contracts and refuse bundling to preserve their resell options. Users around the world should push for similar provisions in the World Trade Organization as well as the US Department of Justice.
The Bottom Line For Software Publishers: The US will be the Next battleground
Software publishers should take note that anti-competitive practices are no longer tolerated in the EU. This ruling will require new strategies covering multiple areas of the software distribution process:
- Appstores must account for new license rules. Software publishers will need to track ownership before and after exhaustion with each download. Companies such as Flexera and Avangate stand to benefit as their software can ensure that the necessarily updates and alterations will be delivered upon exhaustion.
- Wholesalers business models disintermediated. Business models of Arrow, Avnet, CDW, Ingram Micro must radically change. While the cloud put large pressures on the business, each distributor will have to rethink what part of the reseller market they intend to participate in and what services will they have to focus on to make it into the next transition.
- Software publishers will move entirely into the cloud in the EU. Faced with the exhaustion rule, on-premises distribution will seek to be profitable for many vendors. Expect most vendors to move purely to cloud delivery and the rental model in the next 18 to 24 months. Most vendors will lobby for protections in the US Department of Justice and the FTC to avoid the EU debacle.
Expect users and other rights groups to free the US market from the same practices. In the meantime, savvy users will purchase their software in the EU so that their organizations can benefit from these new consumer protections.
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Still from Washington some
traveller, tempted by the easy grades,
Through the Long Old Fields continues cantering in the evening shades,
Till he hears the frogs and crickets serenading something lost,
In the aguey mists of Marlb’ro’ banked before him like a frost.
Then the lights begin to twinkle,
and he hears the negroes’ feet
Dancing in the old storehouses on the sandy business street,
And abandoned lawyers’ lodges underneath the long trees lurk,
Like the vaults around a graveyard where the court-house is the kirk.
He will see the sallow old
men drinking juleps, grave and bleared—
But no more their household servants at the court-house auctioneered;
And the county clerk will prove it by the records on his shelves,
That the fathers of the province were no better than ourselves.
When I admit that these reminiscences are real, it will at once be inferred that I am a preacher’s son. The general reputation of my class has been bad since the day of Eli; but I affirm and maintain that reason does not bear out this verdict, however obstinate experience may be. For why should the best parents have the worst children? and that our itinerant sires were godly and self-sacrificing men the most prodigal of their boys must confess. No flippant or errant example rises before me when I take my father’s portrait in my hand and recall the humility and heroism of his life. A stern and angular face, out of whose saliences look two ruddy windows, lit by a steadfast cheerfulness, is thinly thatched by hairs of iron-gray, and around the long loose throat a bunch of frosted beard sparkles as if the painter’s pencil had fastened there in reverence. I do not need to study the bent, broad shoulders and thin sinewy limbs to measure the hardness and steepness of his path; he climbed it like a bridegroom, humming quaint snatches of hymns to lull his human waywardnesses, and all the fever and errantry of our own vain career shrink abashed before his high devotion.
That I have turned out a rover is not odd; for the travelling preacher’s son is cradled upon the highway. Three months after my birth we “moved” a hundred miles; by my sixteenth year we had made eleven migrations.
We children little sympathize with our weak and sickly mother on these occasions, but look forward to a change of abode as something very novel and desirable. We count the days between Christmas and April, after which the annual “Conference” assembles in the distant city, and we see our father, in his best black suit, quit the parsonage door with an anxious face, cut to the heart by his wife’s farewell, “May they give you a good place, Thomas!”
Then come letters—one, two, three: “The bishops are friendly;” “The Presiding Elder has promised to do the best for us that he can;” “The influential Doctor Bim has praised our missionary sermon, and Brother Click, the Secretary, has applauded our Charge’s large subscription to the Advocate;” “Our character has passed even the severe approval of the great theologian, Steep;” “Take courage, my dear, and hope for the best!”
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Museu Tèxtil i d'Indumentària is home to the permanent exhibition titled 'El Cuerpo Vestido' which is a real treat for fashionistas and lovers of period clothing. The collection is dedicated to trends in apparel throughout the ages and on the whole the exhibit highlights how different styles influence our appearance.
Arts & Museums
- Nearest Train: Palau Reial
- Venue Description:
This museum is divided into three sections: textiles, clothes and lace. It gives visitors the chance to trace the history of fabrics and fashion from Ancient Egypt up to the present day. Moreover, it includes a collection of mannequins, textile tools, carpets, embroidered pieces and liturgical ornaments, among other items. There is also a terrace-bar all year round that is one of the most pleasant spots in Barcelona. Furthermore, there is a nice shop where they sell any kind of fabric, and clothes made from natural materials and fibers. During school holidays, they organize workshops through which children can learn arts like how to weave a tapestry.
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This article has been moved to the location below
Human = Computer God? Sunday, Sep 2 2007
Ekam Sath = One Earth Friday, Aug 31 2007
Darwin’s theory is only about adaptation not evolution Sunday, Jun 3 2007
Never allow your mind to get prejudiced about an idea or a thought. The key to really understand things is to have an open mind. If what you have been believeing ever since your birth is found to be false, enquire into it with an open mind and if all evidences point towards it being false, immediately give up your childhood belief.
Do not stick to your old belief inspite of knowing it is false, and do not try to find evidence which will prove that it is true, just for the sake of proving it true.
On the contrary, the best way to prove something right is always to try to prove it wrong! In this way you will always strengthen your beliefs because you would have tried to prove it wrong in n number of ways and it should pass the test every time.
I hate when people start arguments based on prejudice. I do not argue with such people. I am not here to change anybody, I am here to increase my knowledge. Those who stick to their prejudice, to their egos and blind faith are just making fools of themselves.
Let us talk about evolution. When I was first taught Darwin’s theory of evolution I actually liked that idea. But then no prejudice please. Upon enquiry I had a doubt. Life started evolving from carbon and other raw materials available on earth. Well, in that case all these raw materials as we know do not come under the definition of life. So as things evolved where did LIFE exactly start? Was it when the first cell was formed? Or was it when the first amino acid formed? Was it when the first protein molecule formed?
As I studied further, I came across viruses which are defined as intermediate stage between life and lifeless chemicals. This is because viruses cannot reproduce on their own. They need a host to multiply! One of the basic properties of life is the ability to multiply on its own by reproducing. So viruses do not fit into this category unless the definition includes a host cell!
So as I continued my thoughts on this I am yet to find a satisfactory answer to whether some intelligent designer designed life or was it purely natural evolution with random mutations.
But I am sure that darwin’s theory cannot account for the formation of complex life forms. I feel darwin’s theory is right only within its own domain and the problem exists because it has been extended outside its domain as something which explains the entire evolution of life on this planet.
Even the evolution of a simplest of the simple proteins from random combination of amino acids is not possible, even looking at it as a probabilistic chance in terms of earth’s age! Not possible even in terms of universal age known to us!
Then all these proteins have to assemble together, form sub cellular entities, then cells.. looks like proteins were already intelligent Not possible. Then DNA, genes, replication, repair mechanism, translation… No way possible that it evolved on its own, unless and until there is a totally different type of operational procedures at molecular level, which I dont think is the case..
If we say that we evolved merely from random mutations, then I would like to quote Einstein but in a different context as “God does not play dice”
The domain of the darwin’s theory as I think is adaptation of life, NOT evolution of life. Darwin’s theory explains the process of natural adaptation very well, the most suitable design will survive in an environment. Like for instance consider the birds of gallapagus which he found. Some have soft beaks and some have strong beaks. During a drought the soft beaks birds do not get fruits to feed on, while the strong beak birds can break open the shells of dried fruits from earlier seasons and survive on it. So in this case the soft beaked birds will not survive.
So what darwin’s theory explains is the survival and adaptation within a species. But there is no way that it explains the evolution of a completely different species from one species. Nor there is any way that is explains the very basic evolution of life where mitochondria, lysosomes, DNA etc form on their own(?!) and then form a cell, and then cells group together to form multi cellular life.. all this does not look scientific enough. Its not logical, its highly probabilistic. And as I have said in my earlier articles, this definitely does not explain the creation (or evolution) of new species. It is simply impossible for chromosome numbers to change and new genes to be formed by a genetic mutation and for opposite sex individuals of the same species to be formed at the same time so that they reproduce to continue the new species!
So in a nutshell, darwin’s theory only explains the adaptation of a particular species or the survivability of a particular species. But it does not explain Evolution of life, there is simply not enough data to support this.
Probably Darwin’s theory is just a subset of the real theory of creation/evolution of life on this planet.
Time Travel and Future Friday, May 18 2007
We classify time as past, present and the future.
Past is what has passed off, and future is the unseen, while present is the ongoing transition from past to future. This is what our entire life is all about. A transition from past to future.
Lets talk about this ‘present’. What we see, is it really the present thing ? Or is there a gap ?
I look at the night sky and see a star say 100 light years away. What does it mean ? That the light of that star that I’ve been seeing NOW left the star 100 years back. In other words, what I see NOW is how the star was 100 years ago. Then, how does the star look NOW? Well, to know that I have to wait here for another 100 years!
In other words, the star I see is a thing of the past, not the present. I shall meet the present in the future by when it would have been a thing of the past.
The sun we see is how it looked 8 minutes back. The moon a few seconds back. Even when I see other people right in front of me, its how they looked a few nano seconds back.
THERE IS NOTHING FROM THE PRESENT THAT WE SEE OR EXPERIENCE. WE ALWAYS SEE THE PAST, AND LIGHT IS THE MESSENGER WHICH TELLS US ABOUT THIS PAST.
Just like the way we always see the past, is there some way where we can see the future? In other words can we see light from the future ? But for this to happen, Future should have already happened. So what is the distinction between Past, Present and Future ? Does time exist only within our minds? Our consciousness moving in a given direction at a given speed of 1 second per second experiencing events like being a part of a movie, giving rise to the illusion of an unidirectional time ?
What is time travel ? We normally travel at the rate of one second per second in time into the future. This is our default speed in time. Suppose we increase or decrease this speed. Then that is something not normal. Lets look a bit more deeper.
Suppose I want to travel into the future at a faster rate than our default one second per second. So I somehow increase the speed say to 10 seconds per default second. So by the time other people move from say May 18 2007 to May 18 2008, I would have moved to May 18 2017!
Here is an interesting thing to be noted. If this kind of time travel has to be possible, where one is able to visit the future, then that future should have already taken place!
Note that for the normal people who are not doing time travel with me, they would still be in 2008, where as I am in 2018. So from our normal point of view for such a time travel to be possible, future should have already occured !
So I conclude this new theory that for time travel into the future to be possible, future should have already taken place. In other words, such a time travel is possible simply means that future is a thing of the past ! It again means that our perception of past present and future is just an illusion created out of our recognition of our own existence somewhere in the already existing timeline.
What we see aint what it is Tuesday, May 15 2007
What we see is not what it is!
What we see is just a custom mapping and interpretation by the brain of the data received from the eye. What we hear is a mapping of the data received from the ears. What we smell is a mapping of the data received from the nose, etc
Lets take for instance, sight.
We believe that what we see is what the real world looks like. But let me tell you the truth. Real world exists only inside our brain. The world has no real existence of its own outside our brain. In other words, the world has no form of its own. This is what is called ‘Niraaakar Brahmand’ (formless universe) in the vedas.
Let me explain how the world has a form only inside our brains.
We cannot see in the night/darkness. But still we know there are things out there. Why is this ?
Because our eyes depend on the light to perceive things. In other words eyes believe whatever light tells it.
Now can we see all the light ? In other words can our eyes perceive all the light that reaches it ?
NO. Our eyes can only see the visible range of the electromagentic spectrum (which we call light) which ranges from 400 nanometers to 800 nanometers.
Our eyes cannot see light in the range of Infrared, Ultraviolet, Radio waves, Gamma rays, X rays etc.
So our eyes send to the brain light signals which they receive only in the visible range. Then our brain creates a mapping of these signals and tries to interpret them using color coding, shades and depth. Probably there are other species or aliens whose brains perform a different kind of mapping of the light signals their eyes receive and for them sky, oceans etc look quite differently than it looks for us.
Except for monkeys and one or two other species all other animals see the world in black and white. They dont have the concept of color. Probably there are aliens whose eyes can sense a more wider range of light signals than us and hence probably they can see more colors than we can!
Also more importantly, even the colors we see are a result of our eye – brain interpretation. There is nothing like a ‘color’ in the nature. Light is an electromagnetic continuity and is not quantized as different colors.
We know that there are three primary colors, Red, Green and Blue and that all other colors are a mixture of these three colors. Do you know why ?
Not because there are three primary colors in the nature out there. But because the Cone cells in our eyes which identify color, can recongnize only three color ranges in the visible range and our brain perceives them as Red, Green and Blue. All other colors that we see are a combination of these three colors in different ratios.
So the colors we see are created in our eyes and interpreted by our brain. They do not exist out there in the nature. Other animals might see and perceive nature quite differently. And then there are other species which cannot see at all. They perceive the world only by sound. Some animals use the smell sense to preceive the world. And so on…
Probably there are aliens who have completely different kind of sense organs than we have. Something other than sense, tough, sight, hearing and taste.
In other words the universe is not what we or any other life forms see or perceive. In fact, different species perceive universe in different ways. Even in humans there are variations. For instace for a person who is blind since birth the perception of universe is completely different than the rest of us.
Universe by itself has no form. What we think to be the universe is just a perceived form of the custom mapping done by our brain of the limited range of electromagnetic spectrum which the Cone cells in our eyes perceive in three different ranges with their intensities being identified by the Rod cells in the eyes.
In other words, the universe is formless and exists only inside the brains of an aware consciousness called life. That is why ancient Indian vedic sages have said, ‘Change your perception and the world changes accordingly’
Artificial Intelligence and Awareness Sunday, May 13 2007
artificial intelligence and artificial life and asimov and bacteria and code and gurudev and hitxp and Information Technology and IT and life and programming and robots and Science and Software and technology 5:42 am
‘I Robot’ – Remember this movie ?
Robots made up of intelligent software, want to overtake human beings and rule the earth, bla bla bla
The key is artificial intelligence, software that could mimic human intelligence and by the sheer processing power of the processors even overcome(?) human intelligence.
Some fear that one day computers will be more intelligent than humans. Artificial Intelligence will take over human intelligence. Then the computers/robots feel that humans are less intelligent than they are, and hence will take over humans as the dominant species(?!). Asimov suggested what is called Asimov’s laws to be embedded into the robots to ensure that robots never take over humans.
The Asimov’s laws are the fundamental laws which a Robot should always obey while executing any action. The robotic software should have these laws at the fundamental level preventing a robot from executing any action which violates any of these laws.
These are the Asimov’s laws
Law #1: A Robot should never harm a human being.
This ensures that a robot can never even think of anything which is dangerous or harmful to humans
Law #2: A Robot should follow all commands given by a human, provided first law is not violated.
This ensures that a robot always obeys to humans, but at the same time cannot be used by one human against other humans.
Law #3: A Robot should always protect itself, provided first and second laws are not violated.
This ensures that robots can save themselves in adverse situations, but not at the cost of a human life, and not at the cost of not following a human order.
Later on Asimov also inluded a Zeroth law, an even more fundamental law than the above three, and this says
A Robot should always protect the human race
And First law was modified as
A Robot should never harm a human being provided Zeroth law if not violated.
In other words, the Zeroth law ensures that robots not only are prevented from doing harm to human race, but also ensure the protection of human race. So tomorrow if there is an alien attack then Robots will fight the aliens as per the Zeroth law. OR say some wicked human tries to carry out a nuclear explosion which wipes out a large part of this planet, then the Robots will terminate that human, because the modified First law says that ‘A Robot should not harm a human only if Zeroth law is not violated’, in this case since the wicked human is causing a potential danger to human race, Robots will observe that Zeroth law is being violated by his action and hence will terminate him.
Looks like a science fiction? Well, for me it is common sense to hardcode these four laws as the basic of all robotic actions in every robot that we manufacture. Probably a more detailed and refined version of these laws will be more practical.
Now lets look at a more fundamental level. When we say Robots want to take over humans, or computers become more intelligent. What do we mean ?
Does it mean that Computers will be able to mimic or simulate intelligence on par with human intelligence ?
Computers will become really more intelligent?
My view goes that Computers just mimic human intelligence and are never truly intelligent. Why ?
My view dates back to those days when I used to think about a true answer for the meaning of life. In my +2 classes my professor asked a question.
A very tough question indeed. If we say things that move on their own consist life, then plants dont do so. (Except for some slow motion trees which over a period of years slowly move by spreading out their roots far away and cutting of older roots)
The text book answer was reproduction, things that can produce forms of their own. Things that can multiply and evolve.
I was not satisfied though. I used to think at a more fundamental level. For me being alive meant, being aware of one’s existence. ‘Awareness’ is the key. I know I am alive because I am aware of my existence. So my definition of life was ‘awareness’, textbook definition was ‘reproduction’.
My professor then was surprised by my answer, he asked me ‘Do you think bacteria or plants are aware of their existence’ ? I replied, ‘they have to be, probably the mechanism is different, we have brain, they have something else, Jagadish Chandra Bose had shown that plants have feelings and respond to things like music, heat etc. To respond they have to feel and to feel they have to be aware’.
Lets apply the textbook definition and my definition of life to Computers.
If we go by textbook definition, well computers/robots can be created which create more robots and computers. That is not a difficult thing to do. We just have to write programs which tell how to manufacture another robot/computer. So can we now say that since robots can manufacture more robots, robots have life ?
I dont think so. Because my definition is being aware. Awareness leads to information, interpretations, thought and then to actions. Key for robots to think that they are more intelligent, and are slaves of humans and hence should overpower humans and build an empire of their own, results from the feeling of ‘being ambitious’, ‘sense of slavery to humans’, etc. But to get all these feelings first the robot has to be aware of its own existence, which I think is the essence of life, and since Robots DO NOT HAVE THIS AWARENESS I conclude that robots or software only mimic intelligence coded in them by the truly intelligent humans.
My assumption is based on the fact that ‘Awareness is a proprietary of life, and only natural life possesses awareness, and that awareness is not a byproduct of neural network or the process of being able to think’
Because if awareness results from the ability to think, then well robots could also gain awareness as they are able to think. Please note here that when I say ‘I am aware of my existence’, I mean that I am truly aware of it, not that I have some boolean variable which says that ‘I exist’
So forget about having some variable stored in a robot to tell it that its aware, that will be again mimcking awareness, not actual awareness
To summarize, my current views are that artificial life based on artificial intelligence in the form of computers, robots, software or what not is not true life or true intelligence, but only a simulation of life or intelligence, just like the way computers simulate a nuclear explosion, weather, flight etc
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A Quote by Lesslie Newbigin on acquaintance, agreement, christ, christianity, church, cities, civilization, community, control, culture, earth, family, force, god, home, individuality, jesus, jobs, loneliness, machines, men, nations, nature, neighbors, p
Western European civilization has witnessed a sort of atomizing process, in which the individual is more and more set free from his natural setting in family and neighborhood, and becomes a sort of replaceable unit in the social machine. His nearest neighbors may not even know his name. He is free to move from place to place, from job to job, from acquaintance to acquaintance, and - if he has attained a high degree of emancipation - from wife to wife. He is in every context a more and more anonymous and replaceable part, the perfect incarnation of the rationalist conception of man. Wherever western civilization has spread in the past one hundred years, it has carried this atomizing process with it. Its characteristic product in Calcutta, Shanghai, or Johannesburg, is the modern city into which myriads of human beings, loosened from their old ties in village or tribe or caste, like grains of sand fretted by water from an ancient block of sandstone, are ceaselessly churned around in the whirlpool of the city - anonymous, identical, replaceable units. In such a situation, it is natural that men should long for some sort of real community, for men cannot be human without it. It is especially natural that Christians should reach out after that part of Christian doctrine which speaks of the true, God-given community, the Church of Jesus Christ. We have witnessed the appalling results of trying to go back to some sort of primitive collectivity based on the total control of the individual, down t o the depths of his spirit, by an all-powerful group. Yet we know that we cannot condemn this solution to the problem of man's loneliness if we have no other to offer. It is natural that men should ask with a greater eagerness than ever before, such questions as these: "Is there in truth a family of God on earth to which I can belong, a place where all men can be truly at home? If so, where is it to be found, what are its marks, and how is it related to, and distinguished from, the known communities of family, nation, and culture? What are its boundaries, its structure, its terms of membership? And how comes it that those who claim to be the spokesmen of that one holy fellowship are themselves at war with one another as to the fundamentals of its nature, and unable to agree to live together in unity and concord?" The breakdown of Christendom has forced such questions as these to the front. I think that there is no more urgent theological task than to try to give them plain and credible answers.
Source: The Household of God
Contributed by: Zaady
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How do I know if I have a urinary tract infection?
Possible signs of a urinary tract infection include the following:
- A burning sensation or pain when you urinate
- Feeling like you need to urinate more often than usual
- Feeling the urge to urinate but not being able to
- Leaking a little urine
- Cloudy, dark, smelly or bloody urine
Sometimes germs can grow in the urinary tract but you won't have any of these symptoms. This is called asymptomatic (pronounced: "a-simp-toe-mat-ik") bacteriuria. Your doctor can test to find out if you have this. Asymptomatic bacteriuria should be treated in pregnant women, but does not need to be treated in most other women.
How do I know if my child has a UTI?
In a child, symptoms may include any of the symptoms listed above and may also include the following:
- Irritability or fussiness
- Less active
- Stomach pain
- Back pain
- Wets his or her clothes even though he or she is potty trained
See a list of resources used in the development of this information.
Written by familydoctor.org editorial staff
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Stand on the shoulders of giants? Pshaw, how about on the hands and heads of 180,000 very tiny people. This incredible art piece lets you do the latter and look down upon your new helpful friends.
This work, entitled The Floor, is a stunning piece created by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh. It is made of thick sheets of glass and more than 180,000 small PVC figurines. You can walk on it and see the world as Godzilla does. But are these little people benevolently holding you up, or are they just trying not to be crushed? That is a question you must answer yourself, my friend.
If you happen to be in Singapore now through February 11th The Floor is on display at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery show at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Drop by and let us know how those little people are holding up. Ba-dump-bump. [My Modern Met via Laughing Squid]
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- To enable a balanced diet throughout the year
- To prepare for celebrations and special events
- To meet a catastrophe or emergency
- To protect against insects, mites, rodents, fungi and bacteria.
- To meet the needs in scarcity or famine
Considering the importance of food grain storage, we at SS foundry, have come up with some sophisticated techniques for storage and transportation of food grains. Our facility storage of food grains is fully equipped with aeration and fumigation facilities. We are your one-stop-shop for complete food grain storage systems. We provide a premium selection of food grain storage systems in the industry. Today, traditional methods of food grain preservation or chemical pest control are not acceptable for the reduction of post harvest losses due to health hazards, ecology and economy. Considering these drawbacks, we are your workable storage solution providing a wide variety of environment friendly storage systems for food grains.
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Iran wins reprieve on UN sanctions with Russian offer
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Published: 22 November 2005
Iran has won more time in its standoff with the West over its suspect nuclear programme after European Union countries agreed to allow consideration of a Russian compromise that would avert a referral to the UN Security Council at this stage for possible sanctions.
The governing board of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, meets in Vienna on Thursday and had been expected to discuss referring Tehran to the Security Council. However with the IAEA chief and the US now backing the Russian attempt to broker a diplomatic solution with the Iranian regime, it now appears that plans by Britain, France and Germany to push for a referral have now been shelved.
The new hardline regime of President Mohamed Ahmadinejad rejected out of hand in the summer proposals from the three EU countries that would have barred Iran from any nuclear fuel cycle activities, amid fears that the country could be working on a nuclear bomb. Iran denies any such intentions, saying that its nuclear intentions are peaceful, and insists on its right to enrich uranium under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Under the Russian compromise, Iran would be allowed to continue to convert uranium into gas at its Isfahan facility, but the most critical stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, uranium enrichment, would be transferred to Russia as part of a joint venture. Such a plan for the enrichment of uranium is already envisaged for Iran's civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr which is being built with Russian help. It is expected that the IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, would travel to Iran to discuss the Russian compromise.
Iran is still expected to face criticism from the IAEA board, in the light of a report from Mr ElBaradei, whose inspectors have obtained documents from Tehran showing that the Iranians had obtained a blueprint from the AQ Khan black market network in Pakistan on how to build the core of a nuclear warhead.
However, the decision to pursue the Russian proposals effectively defuses the crisis at a time when the US is backing a diplomatic, rather than military, track in dealing with Iran. "We're encouraging Iran to get back to the negotiating table with the EU-three at this point," said a state department spokesman, Sean McCormack, last night.
Postponement also allows more time to assess the new government in Tehran, which has created widespread suspicions and unease about its intentions since taking office in August. Mr Ahmadinejad risked diplomatic isolation for his country last month by calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
Its outgoing ambassador to London, Seyed Mohamed Hussein Adeli, hosted a farewell dinner at his residence last night after being sacked along with three other pro-reform ambassadors - in Berlin, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur - by the incoming government. A litmus test for the new administration will be whether Mr Adeli's political and economic think tank, which he is founding with other Iranian moderates, will be allowed to flourish in Iran under the hardliners.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: LaVita Strickland
September 25, 1998
Phone: (202) 216-2404
IMMIGRATION LAWYERS LAUD PASSAGE OF BIPARTISAN MEASURE TO EASE HIGH-TECH SKILL SHORTAGE AND ENSURE NATION’S GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS
House Passage of Temporary Foreign Professionals Legislation Brings Nation
One Step Closer to Resolving High Tech Skill Shortage
Washington, D.C. — Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would bring the nation’s high tech industry one step closer to averting a nationwide skills crisis, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
Today’s action ratified an accord struck by the White House and key Congressional leaders. The legislation overwhelmingly adopted today addressed the dual needs of American businesses and labor. The measure expands the temporary skilled worker (H-1B) program to maintain economic competitiveness and protects U.S. workers from unfair labor practices. The Senate is expected to take up the measure within the next week.
"AILA and its more than 5,500 members applaud the efforts of Congress and the President to work out their differences. The H-1B bill represents a bipartisan effort to expand the visa program to enable U.S. companies to fill important vacancies with top-flight foreign professionals. At the same time, the bill would invest in upgrading the skills of our current workforce and educating younger generations so that they can successfully compete in the future," said AILA President Jimmy Wu.
Currently, no more than 65,000 foreign temporary visas (known as H-1B visas) are issued each year. This year, that cap was reached in May. High demand for high-tech professionals has created a enormous backlog. Without an increase in visas, the fiscal year 1999 cap for this category could be reached as early as December 1998. The bill passed today by the House temporarily would increase the number of H-1B visas for foreign, high-skilled professionals from 65,000 to 115,000 for fiscal years 1999 and 2000, and 107,500 in 2001. It would also bolster labor protection for U.S. workers, and provide additional funding for college scholarships and job training for American workers.
"This legislation will ensure that America’s competitive edge is not paralyzed by its inability to reach some of the world’s best and the brightest, many of whom are locked in a backlog," added AILA Executive Director Jeanne Butterfield. "The H-1B legislation will provide enough visas this year to avoid major backlogs and disruptions in research and production."
"What distinguishes America from its world-wide competitors is our willingness to invest in the human skills and intellectual capital of American and foreign professionals," Ms. Butterfield continued. "We commend the efforts of the White House and congressional negotiators in this regard. We are encouraged by their recognition that this is not a zero-sum game. By extending a welcome mat to individuals who come here to contribute their unique skills and dynamic vision, and coupling that with a commitment to enhance our own domestic talent base, the American people as a nation wins in the end."
The American Immigration Lawyers Association is a voluntary bar association of over 5,500 lawyers and law professors practicing and teaching in the field of immigration and nationality law. Its members represent the entire spectrum of those involved in our country’s immigration laws, from aliens seeking immigration benefits to employers, U.S. citizens and other U.S. entities seeking to sponsor foreign nationals.
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Dave Burke makes the interesting claim that Community Server is an open source application. Whether this is true or not of course depends on your definition of the term Open Source. Here is Dave’s definition.
To talk about Community Server and Open Source we should start with a baseline definition of an Open Source application: All of the source code is available. For free.
But is that all there is to Open Source, access to the code? Is mere access to the code the fairy dust that has inspired such a passionate movement in the software community?
Certainly the term Open Source has had a history of ambiguity, so that definition might contain some validity. But I do not think that is the commonly agreed upon minimal criteria for something to be considered Open Source.
Open source isn’t just about whether the source code is available, it is all about the license to the source code.
My favorite definition of open source software is The Open Source Definition (or OSD for short) on the Open Source Initiative website.
The definition starts with the following introduction and then lists serveral criteria for open source software.
Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
The first criteria listed is Free Redistribution which states...
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Contrast this to the Community Server license agreement 2.0 which states...
3g. Distribution. You may not distribute this product, or any portion thereof, or any derived work thereof, to anyone outside your organization. You are not allowed to combine or distribute the Software with other software that is licensed under terms that seek to require that the Software (or any intellectual propertyin it) be provided in source code form, licensed to others to allow the creation or distribution of derivative works, or distributed without charge.
For many people, the terms of the Community Server license might not be a problem. They are not terribly restrictive. If you plan to use Community Server under the community license your only requirement is to display the Powered By Community Server logo on every page of the site that uses Community Server.
However for many others, these terms are restrictive enough. For example, suppose you don’t like the way development is progressing on Community Server. You cannot fork the code base and start a new project based on the source code. Although a fork may seem like a bad thing, Karl Fogel points out in his book "Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project that the threat of a fork is what keeps the leader(s) of an open source project from being tyrannical. It is this threat of a fork that motivates and requires open source projects to be well run.
Not every open source license is created equal as I pointed out in my guide to Open Source Software Licensing. For example, under the BSD license in which Subtext is licensed, you and I are free to create a commercial derivative version of Subtext and keep your changes to the code closed source and proprietary. That’s right. If you wanted to (and had the ability to), you could package up the Subtext source code in its entirety and start selling it as a packaged product.
Note that you can’t turn around and claim that you have the copyright to the Subtext code. You would only have copyright to your changes to the code. Pretty much the only restriction is that the original license must be retained with with the code, but it does not have to be publicly visible in your site (such as in an about box).
In contrast, with a GPL Licensed project, you could start selling it, but you couldn’t keep your changes closed source without violating the terms of the license.
In the end, I think we need to agree on a term for unique products such as Community Server in which the source code is freely available, but does not fit the definition of an open source product. I suggest the term Source Available.
Please do not misconstrue this as an attack on Community Server or its licensing. I have met both Scott Watermasysk and Rob Howard and they are both very smart and capable leaders of a strong company. Community Server is a great product and deserves the recognition it gets. I am not a zealot and have no beef with closed source products. Certainly my livelihood depends on many such products.
At the same time, I am passionate about Open Source software and it is important to me to help keep the distinctions clear and educate others on what open source software is and the value it provides.
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Catforms Testing Service takes a unique approach to achievement tests for private schools and homeschools. We use the California Achievement Tests, 1970 edition, with our own twist on scoring and reporting test results. Here's what we believe; we think you'll agree:
... that you should be in control of your testing.
- Testing is available any time of the year.
- Our prices are very affordable.
- You have sixty days to test once we ship your test booklets and other materials.
- Results will be returned to you promptly. See details on our order form.
... that test administration should not require a rocket scientist (or even a certified teacher).
- Everything you need is included: booklets, answer sheets, and clear directions.
- The 1970 CAT is nationally normed and is accepted in most states for homeschool use and reporting.
- A few states do require homeschool students to be tested by a certified teacher, or with a newer or specific test. Check your state requirements or other information on our Frequently Asked Questions page. (Click "Back" on your browser to return to this screen)
... that your test results should be easy to understand.
- We give detailed explanations of potentially confusing terms like grade equivalents, percentiles, stanines, and more.
- Color line and bar graphs help you make sense of the numbers at a glance.
... that you should get practical use from your tests.
- The CAT measures the basic skills needed for academic success: reading, math, language, and spelling.
- Cumulative results show your student's progress from year to year.
- A detailed analysis shows your students' specific strengths and weaknesses.
- Comparisons are made with current private schools and homeschools, as well as with 1970 public school students.
- You receive professionally printed results to submit to school authorities, if you need to do so.
How the Catforms Program Works
We provide testing materials and scoring services for the 1970 CAT for schools and homeschools. This test is now out of print, but we have an inventory of reusable test booklets for grades 4-12. To order homeschool testing online, click here. For specific details and paper order forms, see our School and Home School pages. For contact information, see About Us.
Benefits of the Catforms Program
- Cumulative Results: Each student’s test records show both the current test results and also those of previous years, giving you a better picture of his/her progress or lack of it.
- Color: The test results you receive will be graphically displayed in color, giving you an abundance of information in a readable format. Home schools especially appreciate having professionally printed results to present to school authorities.
- Detail: The Test Analysis for Levels 3-5 gives details impossible to achieve with hand scoring and generally unavailable with other testing services, or else mind-numbing in their complexity.
- Multiple Scores: Your student’s test results show a variety of scores, including percentiles, grade equivalents, stanines, and Achievement Development Scale Scores (ADSS). We even have a percentile score based on the tests we have on file, which gives you a current point of reference in addition to the original 1970 norms.
- Convenience: There is no comparison between the drudgery of hand scoring and the ease of using the Catforms program. Use the time you save to actually make use of the information we provide, instead of stashing your test results in a file and forgetting about them.
- Accuracy: Computer scoring, even with occasional sloppy marking of answer sheets, is much more accurate than hand scoring. Our system has recorded over 60,000 tests since 1994, with almost no accuracy issues.
- Value: Our prices are lower than testing services provided by the national publishers, and the features we offer are unique.
- Speed: We guarantee fast turnaround time on orders and test scoring. Restrictions apply.
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| 823
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Health News: Two Genes Increase Risk of Developing Diabetes-Associated Kidney Disease
Researchers analyzed over two million DNA markers per person and found that changes associated with two genes (AFF3 and ERBB4) increased the risk of kidney disease. Findings were published in the journal PLoS Genetics.
Kidney disease is a common and serious complication of diabetes and is associated with a greatly increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Diabetic kidney disease is the leading cause of kidney failure requiring dialysis or kidney transplant worldwide. Up to now scientists and clinicians were aware that some patients developed kidney disease but not why this happened.
In the largest study of its kind, the investigators recruited 4,750 patients with diabetic kidney disease and almost 7,000 patients with long-standing diabetes but without kidney disease.
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2007 Environment Policy Review
The 2007 Environment Policy Review reports on progress in European Union (EU) policy during 2007 and analyses coming challenges.
Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament of 2 July 2008 “2007 Environment policy review” [COM(2008) 409 final – Not published in the Official Journal].
The Commission highlights that a certain number of decisive steps were taken in 2007 in European Union environmental policy, with in particular the endorsement by the European Council of the energy and climate change package. In January 2008, the Commission translated the commitments into concrete action by adopting a Climate Action and Renewable Energy implementation package which includes proposals on the improvement of the greenhouse gas emission allowance trading scheme, the participation of Member States in efforts to reduce emissions from non-ETS sectors, the promotion of renewable energies and the geological storage of carbon. The Commission also published new guidelines on State aid for the protection of the environment.
In other fields, the commitments under the 6th Environment Action Programme have almost all been delivered. The Commission presented seven thematic strategies (air, waste prevention and recycling, marine environment, soil, pesticides, natural resources and urban environment) and the accompanying legislative proposals have been adopted or are being adopted. Moreover, an Industrial Emissions Directive has been adopted. The REACH Regulation, the Environmental Liability Directive and the Regulation on hazardous waste shipment came into force.
New financial instruments for environmental policy became operational in 2007, including LIFE+, the Thematic programme for the environment and the sustainable management of natural resources, including energy, and the financial instrument for civil protection.
The Commission has also continued to take action to simplify legislation and to improve its efficiency, in particular by presenting a Green Paper devoted to market-based instruments and guidelines to clarify standards for monitoring and declaring greenhouse gas emissions.
The environment in other policies
Integration of the environment into other policies progressed in 2007, particularly in transport with the entry into force of the Regulation on pollutant emissions from light vehicles (Euro 5 and Euro 6 standards) and proposals on new norms for CO2 emissions from new vehicles and heavy-duty vehicles, and on fuel quality. This integration has also been continued in the fields of agriculture, cohesion policy, development, health, industrial policy, research and commercial policy.
Internationally, 2007 was marked in particular by the decision taken in Bali to work on a global agreement on the warming of the climate system after 2012, the decision of the 14th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to declare a nine-year moratorium on ivory sales, and the launch of negotiations between the Commission, Indonesia, Ghana and Cameroon on logging.
Challenges in 2008 and beyond
Despite progress made in 2007, the Commission highlights that efforts must not be relaxed because there are still many challenges ahead. It also stresses the need to strengthen implementation of environmental policy, which is often slow or incomplete in Member States. To this end, the Commission will step up its efforts to support Member States through better information exchange, guidance and training.
In 2008, the Commission will present an Action Plan on Sustainable Consumption and Production, a revision of the Community Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) and the Ecolabel scheme, and will present a White Paper on adaptation to climate change.
This annual activity report aims at ensuring that the 6th Environment Action Programme is monitored. It also aims to contribute to the Lisbon Process and the European Sustainable
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In recent weeks, the Government of Burundi and representatives of the armed group Palipehutu-FNL have taken important steps forward in the peace process. The increase in Norway’s support to the country is intended to help Burundi meet its economic obligations during a very difficult and decisive period.
Norway’s Minister of the Environment and International Development, Erik Solhiem, commented: “We are very pleased about the political breakthrough in negotiations. Norway wishes to support this important process. What we are now doing is to indicate to the parties that the international community is ready to provide further support for Burundi. We are rewarding good political decisions. Without additional support from the international community, Burundi would have no economic security net for the many poor people in the country.”
After many years of internal conflicts, Burundi is still in a difficult economic situation.
Norway has increased its development cooperation with Burundi in recent years in order to support the peace process in the country. In connection with these efforts, Norway has established an embassy branch office in the capital, Bujumbura. Since 2006, Norway has also led the efforts of the UN Peacebuilding Commission in Burundi. Mr Solheim took part in a major international donor conference in Burundi in May 2007 together with Bert Koenders, Minister for Development Cooperation in the Netherlands, among others.
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http://www.norway-un.org/NorwayandUN/Selected_Topics/Peace_Efforts/062308_IcreasesSupporttoBurundi/
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'"Dom-bey and Son"...Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.' The hopes of Mr Dombey for the future of his shipping firm are centred on his delicate son Paul, and Florence, his devoted daughter,is unloved and neglected. When the firm faces ruin, and Dombey's second marriage ends in disaster, only Florence has the strength and humanity to save her father from desolate solitude. This new edition contains Dickens's prefaces, his working plans, and all the original illustrations by 'Phiz'. The text is that of the definitive Clarendon edition. It has been supplemented by a wide-ranging Introduction, highlighting Dickens's engagement with his times, and the touching exploration of family relationships which give the novel added depth and relevance. The Notes and Bibliography have been substantially revised, extended, and updated.
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http://www.amazon.ca/Dombey-Son-Charles-Dickens/dp/0199536287
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