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According to this article only two in every three children now have married parents. It appears that the number of children being brought up in the traditional family unit is at a historic low, that’s according to official figures. The findings come after the Government’s family pressure group has claimed the state should no longer try to preserve the traditional family. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show that there are 8.3 million dependent children living with married parents, that’s a fall of 1.3 million since 1997. The number of dependent children in cohabiting households has risen from one million to 1.7 million during the same period. Studies show that children from cohabiting parents are also more likely to end up in single parent households because of the higher break up of these relationships. Research also shows that children from married homes do better at school, get better paid jobs and are more likely to steer clear of drugs and crime.
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Subject Basque Children.
Reference John Bull, 5th. June, 1937.
HEART OF HUMANITY CAMP
By a 'John Bull' Investigator
In the peace and security of their camp at Southampton these refugee children are being helped to forget the horrors they have left behind them
I HAVE just seen 4,000 children who yesterday were in fear of death, but today are enjoying every moment of life. They are the little Basque refugees, just brought to England, who will remain our guests until the Spanish war is over.
They have been terrified so often and for so long, and seen such horrors, that, with some, nerves had been strained to breaking-point. Others, stunned beyond power to endure any more, had come to a state of cold fatalism. In that condition they arrived. But what a miracle a few days in the camp at Southampton, with its peace and security, have wrought.
The older ones, boys and girls of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, are a little more serious. But in the little ones life is again beginning to bubble on the surface.
All are eager to make friends and to learn English, the language of the people whom they look upon as their saviours.
Before I reached the entrance gate, youngsters sitting on the grass waiting for their midday meal, scribbled their names on scraps of paper and threw them over the fence to me and to others who had come from Southampton to see them.
One boy called out "O.K." and felt proud of the achievement. Another begged for the newspaper I was carrying. When I passed it over he scanned the front page excitedly, though he could not read a word.
Immediately a dozen others fell upon him and nearly tore it out of his hands in their eagerness to look at the strange new language.
The thing that strikes you most as you go among them is the deep sense of gratitude for all that is being done for them.
I do not know Spanish, so an interpreter was put at my disposal. She was born in Colombia, South America, married an Englishman and now lives in Southampton. Every day she goes to the camp to help.
Wherever we went Mrs. Parker put the same question, " Esta contenta? " ( Are you happy?) And the reply was always the same. " We are happy." It was surprisingly rare to see any tears.
As we passed one tent several children were still waiting for their dinner — long past the usual time. With only a couple of days' notice the National Joint Committee had to get ready to receive 4,000 children instead of the 2,000 they had prepared for. For the first few days, there was some disorganisation which could not be avoided.
This little group waiting for their dinner was a result of that. One girl, about fourteen, was hungry and crying, and complaining bitterly. Her companions sat about, just as hungry, but patient.
As I passed, three girls from another tent, about her own age, came up and opened a regular barriage of reproach. She ought to be ashamed of herself after all that was being done for her. She was lucky to be alive — to have got away safely from Bilbao.
Suppose she hadn't had her dinner. What of it? She ought to wait patiently and be thankful there were no bombs to run away from. She was ungrateful. They stormed at her for about five minutes until she was thoroughly quelled.
That little incident expresses perfectly the attitude of them all. A deep, deep gratitude, bursting to express itself in any way it possibly can.
It shows itself in their orderliness and good behaviour and patience. I spent a whole afternoon going round every part of the camp, talking to as many as I wished. And though I saw thousands of children I did not see one single incident of serious misbehaviour.
They keep themselves beautifully clean. Hair is well brushed and neatly done. Tents are orderly. Many of the children were busy washing their clothes.
Water has been laid on from the Southampton supply and there are taps all over the camp and plenty of buckets. One firm sent £3,000 worth of camp equipment.
Ysabel Arroyo is fourteen. I found her busy outside her tent doing the washing for her younger brother and sister. They come from San Sebastian and were already refugees in Bilbao. She was studying to be a teacher when war drove her from her home.
But despite all the hardships she has been through, she has a bright, cheerful face and always wants to be doing something. She and her sister and brother will remain together.
In no case will brothers and sisters be separated when they are finally sent from the camp to permanent homes. And Ysabel is determined to be a conscientious " mother " to her little family while they are in England.
Many of the children come from quite well-to-do homes. Even the majority, whose fathers are artisans and the like, come from comfortable homes. Many of them have brought money with them - so many that a special bureau had to be set up where they could get it changed into English money.
Señora de Eguia is there with six of her children three boys, three girls, the eldest thirteen, the youngest two. She has left four other children behind her to fight in the war.
Her husband is an official in the Government propaganda department in Bilbao. At home she had servants and a nurse to look after her children. Small, slight and amazingly young-looking, she told me how, in twenty-four hours, she packed for her family of six to come away.
" I took just one trunk," she said, " and put in three complete sets of clothes for each of the children. Nothing more. Things have been so scarce in Bilbao for months that though we had money we could not buy new clothes. So I just brought the old ones."
She, too, is full of gratitude for all that is being done for them.
When I saw her she did not know where she would go when she left the camp. I learned later through Dr. Audrey Russell, the British doctor who worked in Bilbao examining the children. Señora Eguia and her children will stay as the guests of a private person.
Señora de la Torre is another mother with three boys. Her husband is in a shipping office and she herself was a teacher employed by the Government. At first her three boys were coming alone in the Habana.
Then teachers were asked for. She applied, was accepted, and now is pathetically happy to be with her children
The youngest, little Augustin, had his seventh birthday in the camp a few days after he arrived. I asked Pedro, the eldest, tall, manly, and thoughtful for his ten years, what he thought about being in England.
He said he was very glad to be here, and added " But it doesn't matter about us here. It is those others left behind who will settle this thing." So quickly does war mature children.
Another boy told me without a flicker of emotion that any of them would be very lucky if they ever saw their parents again.
Wherever you go the children beg for paper and envelopes to write home.
One little boy of about seven had found some sticky stuff somewhere and made a primitive envelope for himself with the address scrawled in faint pencil. If it ever survives the journey to Bilbao it will be a miracle.
The Boy Scouts have given very valuable assistance in helping to organise the camp, and a film has been made which will be sent out to Bilbao and shown to the mothers who have been left behind.
The real personality behind the whole thing is Mrs. Leah Manning. She has been working in Bilbao for a long time and when the British Government refused to give any money to evacuate the children she set about getting it herself.
In contrast, the French Government has voted £1,000,000 and has already taken 10,000 children.
Through Mrs. Manning's efforts a thousand pounds came to the fund from Chicago. One man in London gave £5,000. Lord Davies gave £1,000 and his two sisters £500 between them.
For the actual organising this end three Members of Parliament have been mainly responsible — D.R. Grenfell (Labour), Capt. Macnamara (Conservative), and Wilfred Roberts (Liberal). All political Parties and religions are represented among those who are working for these children. The Catholics are taking 1,200 of the children and the Salvation Army 1,400.
At Derby, Mrs. Noel Baker is running a local committee to look after fifty. At Worthing, the mayor is doing the same thing for another fifty. Bournemouth Girl Guides are taking 150.
But much money will be needed to take care of these children while they remain in England. Sir Walter Citrine has issued an appeal for £30,000. Donations should be sent to him at Transport House. London S.W.1.
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Famous Advice on Writing
The collected wisdom of great writers, including Vonnegut, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Kerouac, Atwood, Steinbeck, and more:
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.
It was not oppressive government policies, but decisions of the people, under the influence of technologies that sped up human experience too much, that undermined humanistic values and intellectual curiosity in the first place. Not state censorship, but a more general failure to value the mind, the imagination, nature, and a civilization’s hard-won insights, is the main target of criticism in that novel.
INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?
BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference? Action is hope.
At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
When I left high school, I had all my plans to go to college, but I had no money. And I decided then, the best thing for me to do is not worry about getting money to go to college — I will educate myself. I walked down the street, I walked into a library, I would go to the library three days a week for ten years and I would educate myself. It’s all FREE, that’s the great thing about libraries! Most of you can afford to go to college, but if you wanna educate yourself completely, go to the library and educate yourself. When I was 28 years old, I graduated from Library.
Don’t think about things, just do them; don’t predict them, just make them.
For when all is said and done, we each share the mystery. We live with the miraculous and try to interpret it with our data correctors or our faith healers.
, whose bittersweet 92nd birthday we celebrate today just months after his death, on science vs. religion
It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity.
We live in a time of paradox — man is confronted with a terrifying, magnificent choice: destroying himself utterly to the atom, or survive utterly with the same means. Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer. The very real fear is that now he’ll destroy himself just as he’s about to attain his dreams. Today we stand on the rim of space — man is about to flow outwards, to spread his seed to far new worlds — if he can conquer the seed of his own self-destruction. But man, at his best, is a mortal, and from his beginnings, he has dreamed of reaching the stars. I’m convinced he will.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers. | <urn:uuid:fcd9ce74-365b-4dbf-8b9a-334aa5a98ddb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://exp.lore.com/tagged/Ray-Bradbury | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959319 | 836 | 2.265625 | 2 |
3ds Max 2011, Fusion 6, UVLayout, Photoshop CS5
What you will learn
In this series of lessons we will learn some of the different techniques used to create an image from start to finish.
This tutorial is aimed to show you a variety of techniques utilized to create a finished piece starting from a painting. We will go through several different stages including modeling, lighting and texturing where we will learn various methods which will help us to reach our goal. So by the end of the tutorial, hopefully, you will learn how to avoid turbosmooth, how to give variety in your texturing, how to quickly unwrap objects in UV Layout and etc. | <urn:uuid:e397db65-3b8f-4ab7-8d30-346df22dea79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=187 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93576 | 137 | 2.84375 | 3 |
COLUMBUS, Ohio—“My impression of the show is overwhelming beauty, exciting dance routines, powerful stirring music, color, beautiful women, handsome men, talented people,” said Deborah Sevigny. The South Carolina coalition chair was talking during intermission about her thoughts of Shen Yun Performing Arts.
Ms. Sevigny, who during the Newt Gringrich presidential campaign once worked for Ruth Shurlock & Leslie Gaines out of Greenville, South Carolina, saw New York-based Shen Yun at the Ohio Theatre on Feb. 10.
Shen Yun aims to restore 5,000 years of divinely inspired civilization, and its most celebrated means is classical Chinese dance.
“I liked that fact that 5,000 years of cultural history that we would never see if … the company didn’t bring it to our audiences in America. We don’t know much about the ancient Chinese culture because all we know is post-revolution. So to see this, the exquisite nature of their chorography, the precision of their hand movements, the delicate movement of their hands, and the skirting and fabric,” Ms. Sevigny said.
Through vignettes less than 10 minutes each, Shen Yun delves into Chinese culture through its vast library of lore, presenting legends and myths as well as dances of different minority groups. The ancient and traditional culture gives the company much to draw from.
“I loved it all. I loved the fact that [Shen Yun] had the Mongolian culture represented, the rice plantation people, the Yi people … I liked the fact that all ethnic groups within the continent of China were represented during the evolution of Chinese culture for 5,000 years. And it was portrayed in dance, and color and it was recognized!” she said.
Ms. Sevigny mentioned a particular dance that struck her, An Unexpected Encounter. A story of modern day China, the dance depicts the struggle against persecution, but the ultimate redemption. A heavenly being “came down during the prison [scene] and healed the people of turmoil with her compassion,” Ms. Sevigny said.
“Overwhelmingly beautiful,” was her impression of the whole show.
Reporting by NTD Television and Sharon Kilarski.
New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has three touring companies that perform simultaneously around the world. For more information, visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org
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CAP Updates: 15
Jay D. Evans, USDA-ARS Bee Research Laboratory, Beltsville, MD
Beekeepers, inspectors, and researchers have a shared interest in checking bees and hives for clues related to bee health and disease. These checks take many forms, from lifting fall supers prior to feeding decisions to carrying out sticky board or jar tests for estimating varroa populations. Most decisions for managing beehives are, appropriately, made in the field using these and other traits presented by the bees themselves. Nevertheless, some tests are best carried out on hive samples that have been gathered and brought to a home or laboratory where different tools can be used. In the laboratory, genetic tools are becoming the norm for everything from disease diagnosis and research into bee behavior and nutrition to validation of promising bee stock.
Diagnostic genetic tools are available for each of the major honey bee pests and pathogens and these tools offer new avenues for screening bees and colonies to predict ailments and causes of colony declines. In addition, the sequencing of the honey bee genome (Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2006) and associated efforts to define the genetic and protein makeup of bees have generated informative genetic tags for bee proteins involved with development, immunity, physiology, and behavior. These resources for bees and their disease agents can be exploited in order to improve bee breeding schemes, manage diseases or bee nutrition, and regulate the movement of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other infectious agents.
Interest in such ‘forensic’ tools has surged in the past several years, triggered by enigmatic colony losses that have defied typical explanations. Currently, molecular diagnostics are a routine part of national surveys (Genersch et al., 2010) and research efforts (de Miranda, Fries, 2008; Johnson et al., 2009; vanEngelsdorp et al., 2009) aimed at understanding disease risk factors in the field.
Two recent national disease surveys provide a hint of the power of genetic tools for identifying the major honey bee pathogens and predicting their impacts on bees. Genersch and colleagues (2010) describe extensive methods and target sequences for a national survey carried out in Germany for several years. Their major findings (a connection between mite and virus levels and winter losses), were consistent with a biological cause of colony losses. Similarly, vanEngelsdorp and colleagues (2009) used genetic markers to show higher microbial loads in collapsed colonies from a U.S. survey than in healthier controls. This survey exploited markers for a group of well known and newly recognized viruses (Evans, 2006; Cox-Foster et al., 2007).
Building a better toolkit
A useful toolkit for understanding bee health faces four major hurdles in order to become a lasting component for bee diagnostics or research:
1) Tools must be robust and reproducible. This stage weeds out many promising tools. Diagnostics that can not be reproduced, ideally via a new technique and by an independent team of researchers, will soon be forgotten. This is a sobering fact of science. While credit is given for proposing novel diagnostics, true validation is more precious and most fleeting.
2) Tools must have a purpose and predictive value. Scientists, or companies, can develop a very precise and accurate diagnostic for a genetic trait or something like the exact degree of darkness on a bee’s backside that in the end offers little insight into bee biology, breeding, or management. Research notebooks, including ours, are riddled with brilliant tests that have not yet found, and likely will never find, their niche as a useful genetic tool. Still, these tools are often made public in hopes that someone with more insights or other experiences will find them a niche. Few will actually fulfill that promise. On the plus side, there is an abundance of new tools right now and chances are great that gems will emerge for understanding bee health or giving great fundamental insights into what it means to be a social insect, or an insect at all. These gems, and the toolkits built around them, are what keep scientists going.
3) Tools must be adopted and further tested across the community. Imitation is flattery, and new tools have a greater impact if they are tested and then adopted in many places, after being proven reliable in different parts of the world. Scientists, while we try to think independently on the bigger questions, are eager to adopt a technique that has worked elsewhere. This tendency, in fact, unites scientists and beekeepers. While it is useful to keep a critical mind, imitation can push some really useful behaviors into the community. Maybe 10% of a scientist’s work (o.k. at least THIS scientist’s work) actually gets imitated in this way.
4) Diagnostic tests must be cost effective and ‘portable’ to different labs. This last stage is one in which genetic techniques excel and will continue to do so. Many genetic toolkits revolve around the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a decades-old technique (Nobel Prize already bagged) that imitates the cell’s replicative machinery by making a measurable amount of DNA for a specific marker by ‘priming’ replication of that, and only that, region of the genome. As a tool, PCR is quick, cheap, sensitive, and specific, MOST of the time. It often fails for identifying novel or rogue targets like unstudied viruses, driving constant efforts to tag those targets by more tedious sequencing efforts (e.g., Cox-Foster et al., 2007). Nevertheless, most would-be targets of interest for bee health can be studied with robust and sensitive PCR assays. Since nearly every University, government lab, or small tech outfit has the machinery needed to enact PCR, this technique also leads the way currently in terms of portability. Victories are temporary in science and completely novel diagnostics are in the background, but PCR has some years left in it as a key part of any genetic toolkit.
One Lab’s toolkit for Disease Diagnostics
With help from the CAP program and with insights from many colleagues and especially my coworkers Judy Chen and Dawn Lopez, I have pieced together a modest genetic toolkit for diagnosing honey bee disease and addressing some of the many bee health and regulatory issues. After much taxpayer support, all of the actual diagnostics we use have inched past stage ’1’ above, most have passed stage ‘2’ and a few are knocking on the doors of stage ‘4’. The routine we use is illustrated in Figure 1 and in more detail at the Bee Health website Protocol for Honey Bee PCR Diagnostics . We stick more or less to the same script whether samples are generated in laboratory experiments (Evans et al., 2009), field experiments, or field crises. The hope is that a cycle of diagnostics will lead to new insights into a general health issue of bees or a local collapse of bee colonies.
Genetic markers have had great impacts on honey bee research and on the discovery of potential disease agents. It is hoped that these insights will now lead to more cost-effective screens that can be used to assess management and regulatory practices and speed the selection and maintenance of desired bee stock. All of the technical pieces are in place to do this in a big way, and in fact genetic insights into bee behaviors including the switch from nurse bees to foragers (Whitfield et al., 2006) and specific tendencies (Hunt et al., 2007) are well established, as are indicators of honey bee immunity and stress (e.g., Johnson et al., 2007). On the pathogen side, genetic markers gave unique insights into the distinctiveness of Nosema ceranae from Nosema apis, and helped map the great recent spread of N. ceranae (Klee et al., 2007). Genetic sequences for N. ceranae also allowed for the first field diagnostic test for this species (Aronstein, 2010). Genetic signals are now known for each of the major honey bee pests, and diagnostics based on these signals are ready to complement other measures of honey bee health and disease.
Cox-Foster DL, Conlan S, Holmes EC, et al. (2007) A metagenomic survey of microbes in honey bee colony collapse disorder. Science 318, 283-287.
Aronstein (2010) Detect Nosema Parasite in Time to Save Bee Colonies, American Bee Journal, 150 (1), pp. 63-65.
Evans JD (2006) Beepath: An ordered quantitative-PCR array for exploring honey bee immunity and disease, Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, 93 (2), pp. 135-139.
Evans JD, Chen YP, Di Prisco G, Pettis J, Williams V (2009) Bee cups: Single-use cages for honey bee experiments. Journal of Apicultural Research 48, 300-302.
Genersch E, Von Der Ohe W, Kaatz H, et al. (2010) The German bee monitoring project: A long term study to understand periodically high winter losses of honey bee colonies. Apidologie 41, 332-352.
Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium (2006) Insights into social insects from the genome of the honeybee Apis mellifera. Nature 443, 931-949.
Hunt, G. J., G. V. Amdam, et al. (2007). Behavioral genomics of honeybee foraging and nest defense. Naturwissenschaften 94(4): 247-267.
Johnson RM, Evans JD, Robinson GE, Berenbaum MR (2009) Changes in transcript abundance relating to colony collapse disorder in honey bees (Apis mellifera). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, 14790-14795.
Klee, J., A. M. Besana, et al. (2007). "Widespread dispersal of the microsporidian Nosema ceranae, an emergent pathogen of the western honey bee, Apis mellifera." Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 96(1): 1-10.
vanEngelsdorp D, Evans JD, Saegerman C, et al. (2009) Colony collapse disorder: a descriptive study. PLoS ONE 4 (8).
Whitfield, C. W., Y. Ben-Shahar, et al. (2006). Genomic dissection of behavioral maturation in the honey bee. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103(44): 16068-16075. | <urn:uuid:4686d5df-15da-4ece-89fc-f19383730fa7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.extension.org/pages/54518/genetic-toolkits-for-bee-health | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906603 | 2,187 | 3.140625 | 3 |
We thought we knew the script in the Catholic-priest sex-abuse scandal. Both the victims and the perpetrators were male. But a recent story in The New York Timesseemed to suggest that this scenario ignored a whole segment of victims: young girls. The Times reported on a Catholic priest who was permitted to move to India instead of facing accusations of molesting two Minnesota girls. Meanwhile, Slate's June Thomas asked, "Is anyone else wondering if young women have been left out of this story, and if there's some agenda that's driving that absence?" a question that Andrew Sullivan’s readers have also been discussing. (Slate and NEWSWEEK are both owned by The Washington Post Company.)
In the case of the priest scandal, boys were the victims of sexual misconduct much more often than girls, by a factor of about four to one, says Margaret Leland Smith of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But what has gotten scant attention is the fact that the female victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests tended to be younger than the males. Data analyzed by John Jay researchers, including Smith, shows that even though there were many more boy victims than girls overall, the number and proportion of sexual misconduct directed at girls under 8 years old was higher than that experienced by boys the same age. Specifically, between 1950 and 2002, there were 246 girls younger than 8 who were sexually abused by priests (representing 14 percent of all girl victims), compared with 236 boys (3 percent of all boy victims). However, the most likely age of victims—for girls and boys—was between 11 and 14.
The John Jay study, commissioned and financed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops after the uproar in 2002 over the priest-sex-abuse scandal, also indicates that the girl victims were more likely than boys to be the sole victims of their abuser. Priests who targeted one girl or one boy were more likely to focus on someone older than 14 than those with multiple victims. (Overall, 27 percent of the girls and 34 percent of the boys were between 15 and 17 years old.) The duration of abuse involving a sole victim was more likely to last a year or less. Priests who preyed on multiple children were more likely to continue the abuse for five years or longer. In the case of both boys and girls, most of the abuse occurred between 1960 and 1980, and fell sharply after that, but most of the charges were not reported to authorities until after 1992. Smith says that as the Catholic Church continues to turn over any newly made charges of abuse to the John Jay team, the researchers continue to see the same trends in terms of gender, age, and dates when the abuse occurred.
Researchers can't yet explain the gender and age gaps (it's possible it may have something to do with that particular period in society or the church). But they do know that the Catholic-priest data do not mirror national trends in child sexual abuse. Overall, experts say, it's still very much the case that girls are much more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse than boys. In fact, Ernie Allen, president of the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children says that best estimates are that two thirds of victims of molestation are girls, although offenders who target boys tend to have much larger groups of victims. "For [those offenders], this is not a lapse of judgment, it's a lifestyle," says Allen.
Barbara Blaine, 53, the founder and president of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a national support group, was one of several girls who were abused by Chet Warren, a Toledo priest who was defrocked. in the mid-'80s after she and others filed complaints. She said Warren would take girls out of class at the Catholic school she attended and rape them in his bedroom off the rectory. The first time it happened, she said she was in seventh grade. The abuse continued until she was a senior in high school, when she says she was finally able to break free of Warren's psychological hold on her and realize that her feelings of shame and guilt were misplaced. It was almost another decade before she told her parents, and even then, she says her father's initial response was that she should just confide in the local bishop. Her experiences have led her to conclude that there is "far more urgency when the victim is a male."
Barbara Dorris, a victim of priest abuse as well as the national outreach director for SNAP, concurs: "In part because of sexism and homophobia, journalists, police, prosecutors, attorneys, and sometimes even parents feel even more outraged when a boy is sexually abused by a powerful man than when a girl is assaulted, and are thus more apt to take action, pursue charges, file lawsuits, and talk publicly." Dorris says she's come to believe that church officials are "more apt to write down, save, and take seriously an allegation by a boy than a girl, and that's one reason the bishops' stats on this are skewed."
Today, about half of SNAP's 9,000 members are female and include victims (male and female) of nuns as well as priests. There's never been a formal study done of sexual abuse committed by nuns, says Smith of John Jay, and no one really knows how prevalent it is. Blaine says the church has yet to address this issue seriously enough, perhaps because society still finds it difficult to accept that women can be predators too.
While research shows that 99 percent of sexual predators who abuse children are men, the bigger point is that it's rarely a stranger who is a threat, and all children may be at risk. Allen puts the national rate of abuse at about one in five girls and one in 10 boys, while Smith says her review of the data puts it closer to one in three girls and one in five boys. In any case, there's no arguing with Smith's assessment that the "behavior is profoundly widespread."
Abusers are typically trusted family members—fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers, uncles—as well as friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, youth-group volunteers, doctors, or priests, ministers, or rabbis. If we are to learn anything from these disturbing stories of sexual abuse by priests, it should be this: it's up to parents and schools to make sure our kids know that adults stand ready to protect them against those who would prey upon them. We need to make it clear to children that they can talk to us or another trusted adult about any situation that doesn't feel right to them. And no one—no one—is beyond suspicion. | <urn:uuid:780e9790-803f-4e12-bca0-d9ccf108bd8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/14/what-about-the-girls.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984305 | 1,359 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Saturn's moon Mimas has many large craters, but its Herschel crater dwarfs all the rest. This large crater 130 kilometers wide (80 miles) has a prominent central peak, seen here almost exactly on the terminator. This crater is the moon's most prominent feature, and the impact that formed it probably nearly destroyed Mimas. Mimas is 398 kilometers (247 miles) across.
This view is predominantly of the leading hemisphere of Mimas. The image has been rotated so that north on Mimas is up.
This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Jan. 16, 2005, at a distance of approximately 213,000 kilometers (132,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. Resolution in the original image was about 1.3 kilometers (0.8 miles) per pixel. A combination of spectral filters sensitive to ultraviolet and polarized light was used to obtain this view. Contrast was enhanced and the image was magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org. | <urn:uuid:a43ada64-1b8d-4784-8f05-176524d6354d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06582 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928307 | 363 | 3.75 | 4 |
“I wanted to show you something you don’t ordinarily see,” Giovanni told a recent visitor as he prepared his Pizza con Zucca Fiore, which features sautéed zucchini, mozzarella, squash blossoms and freshly torn mint leaves. The dish exudes a remarkable blend of flavor and aroma unlike anything you’ve experienced. This isn’t what you grew up thinking pizza was.
Giovanni, 48, has been distributing pizza ingredients, tools and advice for 26 years. The Antioch resident is also probably one of the few people in the area with a wood-fired oven in his backyard, an encyclopedic knowledge of pizza and pizzaiolo (Italian for “pizza maker”) and a powerful desire to share his passion with guests.
“It’s all about community,” said Giovanni, 47. “You could put some cheese on bread and call it pizza. The main thing is to do it with family and friends and have fun.”
The most important rule about making a pizza, said Giovanni, is that there are no rules. As homemade pizza grows in popularity, an increasing number of “experts” offer advice on how it should be done.
“There are lots of people who will tell you what you’re doing wrong,” Giovanni said. “Well, the first thing that’s wrong is listening to those people.”
While some pizza fans prefer mountains of toppings, Giovanni’s preference is for three or less. Too many ingredients – too many flavors and textures – prevent each from playing its own starring role. Giovanni even keep the basics as simple as possible, preferring to use plain, crushed tomatoes rather than a tomato sauce laden with spices.
That’s not to say his pizzas are always simple. At the most recent gathering at the Giovanni home last weekend, guests were offered more than two dozen toppings from which to choose, from sautéed zucchini and new potatoes to fresh meats and cheese made from sheep’s milk. Some are prepared according to old family recipes – Giovanni is just as proud of his Italian heritage as he is knowledgeable about Italian cooking (and yes, he insists: pizza is an authentic Italian meal) – while others are simply plucked fresh from the gardens tucked into every nook and cranny of his backyard.
And while Giovanni’s pizzas cook quickly, his pizza-making is not a quick task. He requires a minimum of 24 hours to prepare a quick dough, and prefers to use three days. The result is worth it: his “quick” dough requires at least 24 hours to rise, and others require three days.
Toppings and dough aside, the greatest contributor to Giovanni’s pizza is probably the oven it’s cooked in. His wood-fired, brick oven can take as long as three hours to reach its optimal 800 F temperature, but the fiery blast cooks pizza in between two and four minutes. The bricks cook the crust, fire fuses the ingredients, and the natural convection of the open-hearth oven blends the flavors perfectly. Although not the same as a brick oven, Giovanni said an attachment now available for Weber Kettle barbecues offers an alternative to fire-cooked pizza without the need to hire a masonry contractor.
Giovanni’s love of cooking and sharing led him to open his own online store at www.fgpizza.com. Tools, advice and ingredients for making pizza and bread are abundant, as are videos teaching visitors how they can be used to best effect. In addition to making sure pizza lovers have what they need, proceeds from the site are putting his daughter through school.
Even if you’re not ready to start your next pizza dinner three days in advance, there are some things you can do to make the most of your pizza-making experience. Giovanni said the fresh dough available at Trader Joe’s is good, and more grocers are offering it every day. Keep your ingredients fresh, too, and invite a friend or two to join you.
“Just have fun,” he said. “Be willing to experiment – and eat your mistakes.”
Pizza con Zucca Fiore
For video instructions on how to prepare this and other dishes, visit www.fgpizza.com.
• From a fresh vegetable garden, select the longer squash blossoms. Pick them in the morning, when the flowers are open, then refrigerate until ready to use.
• Prepare dough according to instructions, and stretch into a 12-to-14-inch circle.
• Top the skin with extra virgin olive oil
• Add fresh mozzarella, or any cheese you prefer.
• Add sautéed slices of squash.
• Dot with more fresh mozzarella.
• Add whole flower blossoms.
• Top with grated parmesan cheese.
• Season with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.
• Bake in a wood-fired oven at 800 degrees for three or four minutes, turning frequently.
• Remove from the oven, add freshly torn mint leaves and serve.
Frankie G’s wood-fired oven pizza dough
Time to make: 1½-2½ days
Biga: 12 hours
Final dough: 24-48 hours
Rise time: 2-3 hours
Bake time: 1½-2 minutes
Makes: Two 350-gram dough balls
High-gluten flour: ⅔ cup
Yeast: ⅛ teaspoon
Filtered water: ¼ cup
High-gluten flour: 3½ cups
Biga: 2½ ounces of biga
Yeast instant: ½ teaspoon
Sea salt: 1 teaspoon
Filtered water: 1 cup + 3 teaspoons
MORNING OF DAY 1 – MAKE BIGA
Start with a clean bowl. Add water, high-gluten flour and yeast. Mix with Danish dough whisk or spoon until incorporated well. Place in a non-reactive food container, seal and let stand at room temperature for 12 hours, when the Biga should be doubled and very spongy.
DAY 2 (12 HOURS LATER) – MAKE FINAL DOUGH
Start with a clean bowl of stand mixer. Add water, resin biga, and high-gluten flour and yeast. Mix with dough-hook attachment until dough forms and let it sit for 20 minutes, covered, before salt is added. Add salt and continue to mix for 13 minutes on medium speed.
Place in a non-reactive food container, seal and store chilled in refrigerator for 24-48 hours. Dough should rise 100 percent.
DAY 3 (24-48 HOURS LATER) – FORM DOUGH BALLS AND LET RISE
Divide dough in two equal pieces. Form each piece into dough balls. Place in rising pan or on counter and cover with an oiled towel. Let rise till doubled (45 minutes to one hour).
DAY 3 – MAKE PIZZA
Dredge dough ball in flour and flatten ball on counter with hands. Hand-stretch or roll pizza to 12 to 14 inches. Now you’re ready to make the pizza of your dreams. | <urn:uuid:94ca28f1-aa19-4061-9655-7d3d45647367> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thepress.net/view/full_story/19589492/article-Pizza--the-art-of-having-fun-?instance=lead_story_bullets_left_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936241 | 1,520 | 1.859375 | 2 |
This article was originally distributed via PRWeb. PRWeb, WorldNow and this Site make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.
Kettlebell trainer Lorna Kleidman comments on an article published by PC World which reports on some new additions to the fitness tech industry that can inspire fitness fanatics.
Bohemia, NY (PRWEB) January 21, 2013
On January 21, Lorna Kleidman shares some comments on the latest health and fitness gadgets that recently hit the market, as reported by PC World.
According to an article from PC World, 6 out of 10 consumers are looking for a personal fitness device, and “the fit tech industry expects to see over 300 million body sensors in use by 2016.”
Fitness devices are expanding to new demographics as well, with experts creating gadgets for kids as well as seniors. According to PC world, the company GeoPalz came out with a device for kids that offers prizes after they play or exercise. For seniors, Philips as well as Lifecomm developed new lifeline devices that can be worn around the neck and have two-way communicators.
The article reports that electric bicycles, smart-forks and treadmill desks are just some of the fitness gadgets we could see in the coming years. There are even some apps and other hardware that measure physiology and fitness habits. As consumers buy these devices, reports the article, they will be able to keep track of fitness data from a huge group of people. “The next step in the fit tech revolution is going to be what we do with all that data—a likely step looks to be to link fitness and health data to our doctors or personal trainers,” the article states.
Lorna Kleidman, a fitness expert and kettlebell trainer, responds to these new technological advancements. “These gadgets definitely have a lot to offer for people looking to keep track of their personal health and fitness,” she said. “If they help you stay motivated and offer a new way to work out, I say give it a try.”
Kleidman added that incorporating new exercises is an important part of staying fit. When people pick up kettlebells and find out how easy and fun they are to use, Kleidman said that this usually leads to them sticking with the KettleX program. Kleidman adds, “While these devices offer a great motivation to work out, people must stay inspired and encouraged in other to reach their fitness goals.”
Lorna Kleidman is a Three-Time World Champion and World Record holder in kettlebell sport and the most decorated kettlebell athlete in the country. She developed the innovative methods used in KettleX as a way to bring the benefits of the bells to everyone in an easy to use, comprehensive and fun format. Lorna has been teaching individuals and group classes for the past six years.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/1/prweb10334374.htm | <urn:uuid:3b844ff0-f24b-4812-b8e3-46fd9aff3469> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wsfx.com/story/20637800/kettlebell-trainer-lorna-kleidman-comments-on-new-fitness-gadgets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95403 | 637 | 1.757813 | 2 |
More than a half-century after John F. Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing a man on the moon in less than a decade, Washington has set another, far more ambitious deadline for itself: prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer disease (AD) by 2025.
That goal is one of five “building blocks” of the new National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease. The others are: optimize care quality and efficiency, expand support for people with AD and their families, enhance public awareness and engagement, and track progress and drive improvement. The 69-page report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) calls itself “the initial blueprint for achieving the vision of a Nation free of AD.”
“HHS will prioritize and accelerate the pace of scientific research and ensure that as evidence-based solutions are identified, they are quickly translated, put into practice, and brought to scale so that individuals with Alzheimer’s disease can benefit from increases in scientific knowledge,” the National Plan declared. “HHS will identify interim milestones and set ambitious deadlines for achieving these milestones in order to meet this goal.”
To date HHS has taken two steps toward fulfilling the plan: creating an implementation-monitoring tool and publishing a Request for Information inviting comment from public agencies and private organizations on their interest in contributing to the development of an International Alzheimer’s Disease Research Portfolio. HHS has said it will compile portfolio information and make it accessible through a searchable online database.
Drug Development Hurdles
Some 5.4 million Americans among about 36 million people worldwide have AD. These numbers are expected to balloon to 15 million Americans among 115.4 million people worldwide by 2050.
It’s fair to say the disease and its related illnesses constitute one of the last untapped markets for new blockbuster drugs. The size of the market has been estimated at $5.4 billion in 2010, set to nearly triple to $14.3 billion by 2020, according to Decision Resources.
Yet only five medicines are approved by FDA for the disease: Cognex, Aricept, Exelon, Razadyne, and Namenda. None are a cure; all treat only symptoms, and none for more than a few months. Several potential new medicines have been grounded in recent years by failed clinical trials. In January, Pfizer and Medivation ended a co-development and marketing collaboration on Dimebon (latrepirdine) after a Phase III trial did not meet either of its co-primary endpoints of improving cognition or self-care and daily function. Pfizer had paid $225 million up front and agreed to pay $500 million tied to milestones.
In 2010, Eli Lilly ended development of the peptide semagacestat after a Phase III trial showed that the gamma secretase inhibitor failed to improve disease progression. Additionally, the treatment was associated with worsening of clinical measures of cognition and the ability to perform activities of daily living. Similar Phase III failures ended development of Myriad Pharmaceuticals’ nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug tarenflurbil earlier that year and of Neurochem’s amyloid B antagonist tramiprosate in 2007.
“Perhaps the disease is being treated too late, when damage is irreparable?” The Lancet posited in an editorial. “The best time to treat Alzheimer’s disease is likely to be before memory loss and tissue destruction occurs, but this is hard to model in animals. That means identifying people at risk of developing the disease, perhaps because of a genetic predisposition or by measuring biomarkers.”
A key factor in the dearth of treatments for AD has been lagging federal basic research funding compared with diseases whose stakeholders have shown more activism and Washington savvy. During FY 2012, the agency expects to spend $5.451 billion on cancer research and another $3.075 billion on HIV/AIDS. That’s more than $8.5 billion combined.
By contrast NIH spent $448 million in FY 2011 on Alzheimer disease research and expects to spend about the same this year and $449 million in FY ’13. President Barack Obama has asked NIH to squeeze out another $50 million from its current budget and $80 million next year. Of the total for FY 2012, $25 million will come from ongoing research on whole genome and whole exome sequencing at the National Human Genome Research Institute. The $80 million for next year would come from the Administration’s FY 2013 budget for the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was created by the Affordable Care Act to focus on pressing public health needs. Next year’s budget proposal also includes another $26 million for other agencies for caregiver support, education, and public awareness.
Lack of funding isn’t the only hurdle for AD research. So too is the difficulty of getting patients and their families to participate in clinical trials. The National Plan calls for increasing enrollment in trials “through community, national, and international outreach.”
A Plan Needed for the Plan
“For a long time we just naturally thought there would be a silver bullet somewhere that would take care of this disease,” Eric J. Hall, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America and member of the advisory council advising on the National Plan, told GEN. “For the last decade that has not been the case.”
“The Plan by itself really sends out a message: This is no longer an orphan disease. This is center stage in the government’s purview, where resources are being brought to bear,” Hall added. “The Plan itself, I think, sends hope to families that they don’t suffer in silence or isolation. There’s a lot of hope in that families know that someone actually cares about what it is they’re struggling through.”
Other than creating patient registries and helping states build skills in serving people with AD, the Plan leaves many needed action steps to future meetings among “representatives from across the federal government, state and local governments, academic medical research institutions, and the private sector.” Meetings for the trials enrollment action plan are envisioned for June, with the to-do list set to emerge in August and be implemented by December.
Stakeholders deserve more specifics rather than the promise of another plan within a Plan. Some details exist, however, on who will conduct the additional clinical research. Public-private partnerships will carry out “voluntary disclosure of new and ongoing clinical trials” and coordinate “annual review of the status and progress of the trials and emerging opportunities” by January 2013.
In addressing multiple constituencies, the National Plan was bound to disappoint in spots, since many of its action steps will require months of coordination before anything happens. Yet the Plan remains valuable both for its vision of stopping AD and related dementias and especially for its spotlight on the need for more research, patient participation, and especially funding if the disease is to be conquered. Money will be both the biggest need and the hardest to secure since both political parties have committed to cutting spending. | <urn:uuid:aced2723-7229-4c85-910a-a2479ad3269f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://genengnews.com/insight-and-intelligenceand153/national-plan-long-on-vision-of-conquering-alzheimer-disease-sketchy-on-details/77899614/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950603 | 1,481 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Siri six months later: Community report card
Siri, the iPhone 4S' flagship feature has been on the market now for 6 months. On one hand, Siri is absolutely amazing -- the first real virtual personal assistant with a personality right out of Pixar. On the other hand, Siri is obviously still in beta and often fails or works just enough to frustrate more than any outright failure. That makes it an odd choice for a flagship feature, but given the lack of a physical redesign and the obvious potential for awesome demos, rightly or wrongly, Siri was what Apple had to work with.
But does it work for us?
Survey says: Siri usage is low
iMore is an iPhone enthusiast site, so our community is predisposed to adopt new features quickly and use them extensively. Yet Siri usage among the iMore nation remains curiously low. As of today, with over 4000 votes cast, nearly 50% of our readers seldom, if ever, use Siri.
That's... astonishing. Here's the full break down:
- Almost 5% use Siri often, many times a day.
- Over 15% use Siri frequently, on a daily basis.
- Roughly 23% use Siri infrequently, at least several times a week
- Nearly 50% almost never use Siri, monthly or less.
- Just over 7% might use Siri, but it's not yet available in their native language.
Taken together, only 20% of our iPhone 4S users are using Siri on anything approaching a regular basis. That leaves 80% using it irregularly at best, and 50% barely using it at all.
This in spite of Apple showcasing Siri during the iPhone 4S introduction, putting it front and center on Apple.com, and making Siri the focus of most of the iPhone 4S advertising. They gave it the iPhone event keynote. They gave it Santa. They gave it Samuel L. Jackson.
And still few of our readers are using it.
That's not unprecedented, of course. The 2010 iPhone 4 launch saw a lot of attention placed on Apple's video calling service, FaceTime. But it's still interesting.
Siri community commentary: six months later
So why are -- or mostly aren't -- you using Siri six months after it was introduced? Here's what you've told us:
I prefer dictation to Siri most of the time. Use Siri not quite everyday, but I think several times a week is still pretty often. Now my 5 year old thinks Siri is great, talks to her several times a minute when i let her.
Some of you in the US who think its bad should try Siri in the UK. It’s virtually useless. I’d love to ask Siri to locate the nearest pub or something, but we can’t even do that. Yes I know it’s in BETA, but I really had hopes they’d be releasing updates more frequently when I purchased my 4S to be perfectly honest.
It’s always down, or something else is wrong. Or it just hangs when I tell her to call someone. Kind of giving up on it. Needs a few more years of seasoning.
I’ve stopped differentiating between Siri and voice dictation, as I believe it is largely the same animal. Siri interaction is a bit more problematic, so I often leave Siri alone and then dictate directly within a given app. For appointments and reminders, I ONLY want to use Siri. I almost won’t set the calendar/reminder item until Siri is no longer “sorry.” So, I use it a good once a day, at least, if you consider the above under the same umbrella.
I use Siri daily.. with 90% success rate. I use it for meetings, reminders, appointments, looking stuff up, texting and calling. So easy to say call Wife at work and it is done.
Siri NEVER works for me. I'm always in full signal 3G or Wifi at work and home and it takes her at least 30 - 60 seconds and I get to frustrated and turn it off. I am not a fan.
I use Siri all the time. Reading, writing texts. Setting up reminders, making and editing notes, getting directions (navacon), toggling Bluetooth, wifi, flashlight etc... I'd be lost if I couldn't talk to my phone.
I use Siri for reminders. The few times I've tried using it to send a text while driving I've gotten so frustrated I could have just as easily been texting. The whole idea is to to not take your mind off the road.
I still use Siri and it is very helpful. As I stated in another thread, I use if primarily to text & respond to text messages while driving, set reminders, look up information and to dial contacts for me. I have never asked it frivolous questions and it did not factor in to my reason for buying my iPhone 4S. Could it be better? Heck yeah. Do I depend on it? Absolutely not. I've had a smartphone or a PDA phone for so long and I'm so used to doing things manually that I forget about Siri sometimes.
I use Siri everyday and every time Siri comes up I can't help thinking 3 things: 1. Why didn't we have this 10 years ago? 2. Why isn't this better? (Can't launch apps or modify settings) 3. How do people still "type" messages, it feels so archaic to type in 2012. It's great for reminders and meetings. Sending texts, timers for cooking or whatever it is you are doing. Why type???? I just don't get it besides being in an environment where you it wouldn't be appropriate to speak.
Deciphering the disuse and discontent
For a few readers Siri has become important or even quasi indispensable. (Some of our editors have even joked Siri has made them so lazy that, if it's unavailable, they'll wait rather than actually type out a text message...) However, for many more readers, Siri simply wasn't part of their iPhone usage pattern. Based on the feedback we've gotten, it seems the disuse or discontent with Siri can be broken down into a few categories.
- Some people just forget Siri is there. Siri is something new and new things don't always enter into, or find a place in, established workflows.
- Siri not working -- either because it doesn't understand certain accents, because the required network connection fails, or because it simply takes too long to respond -- causes enough frustration that some users simply abandon it and don't go back. How many people would use Google if searches routinely took 30 seconds or more to return?
- The inconsistent implementation -- ability to read texts but not emails, ability to launch some apps for specific functions but not simply launch an app, etc. -- creates an unpredictable or incomplete enough usability model that many simply exclude it entirely.
- The lack of timely and consistent updates from Apple -- only one new language in 6 months and no new features or integration -- creates a wait and see attitude that, so far, is still waiting but not seeing.
- The amount and type of Siri advertising creates expectations that the actual service (point #2) and support to date (point #4) don't live up to, leading to dissatisfaction.
There's also another alternative -- Siri is a new kind of interface meant for a new kind of user. iPhone sales numbers indicate it's the first smartphone to capture a predominantly mainstream audience. That audience isn't familiar with how smartphones historically worked, and something like Siri might ultimately prove more accessibly and less intimidating than a traditional app-launcher style interface. All of the factors listed above absolutely hurt Siri's chances of achieving that right now, but Siri could still achieve that in a future where it's both more reliable and more functional.
If that's the case, our iPhone enthusiast audience may never be the target for Siri, but the mainstream audience that is its target isn't using it, or isn't enjoying the use of Siri just yet.
Siri next steps
So six months later and Siri usage among iMore readers is low. What can be done to change that? The opposite of what we conjecture is causing it.
- There's not much more Apple can do to boost Siri awareness, given that it's already the centerpiece of their iPhone 4S advertising, and making Siri popup like Microsoft Assistant would cause most of us to throw our phones at a wall. They can't just make people more aware of Siri, they have to make Siri more usable.
- Improve Siri's ability to understand accents in the U.K. Since Siri claims to support U.K. English, supporting U.K. English is something important to do. No doubt the beta period, where Siri is fed more and more voice data, will help with that. Network connection issues are tougher. There's absolutely no excuse for Siri's servers on Apple's data centers to go down or even be slow to respond. Apple is rich enough to support the best technology and ensure among the best up times and availability in the business. Carrier connection problems. especially notorious in the U.S., are beyond Apple's ability to address unless/until they can put some base level of Siri functionality locally, on-device, as a fallback.
- Adding more well-rounded features may be non-trivial but is necessary to create consistency in the Siri experience. If text entry or basic navigation was different, or non-existent, from app to app, it would make the iPhone unusable (see early versions of Android). Siri working differently, or not working at all, with some core apps makes it likewise difficult to count on. Adding the basics like Settings toggles, app launching, email reading, etc. would increase consistency and also solve general iOS pain points. ("Siri, turn Bluetooth off!" alone would likely bolster usage considerably.)
- Roll out incremental updates. The power of online services is that they can be updated on the server-side, which means they're less disruptive and can be more frequent than larger software patches. Updates create confidence. Japanese was a great addition in iOS 5.1, but it was the only addition in 6 months and that's a long time.
- Obviously Apple isn't going to stop advertising Siri unless and until they have something just as compelling to replace it with, and they're not going to make it tell Zooey Deschenel it can't connect to the network when she wants to get her dance on. That's the cost of marketing based on a beta feature that sets expectations the product can't meet. Apple doesn't often do it, but they've done it in this case and they're stuck with it now.
No doubt Apple is working away on Siri, and adding Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and other languages is certainly non-trivial. Nothing about voice and context parsing is easy. Yet positioned the way it is, as the flagship feature of the iPhone 4S, Siri legitimately brings equal and opposite expectations down on Apple.
Six months later and a lot of you simply aren't using Siri. If you're one of them, let us know what Apple could do to get you on board. If you are using Siri, why do you think so many others aren't? The first developer betas for iOS 6 may be just around the corner, and the next generation iPhone 5,1 may just be on track for a fall release. What does Apple have to do to turn the corner on Siri and make it as mainstream and popular a feature as the iPhone itself?
Georgia contributed portions of this article
Image credit: iDoodle by Jason Harrison | <urn:uuid:e23956db-60a3-46c0-b0af-96fb0f7b1997> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imore.com/comment/291305 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956551 | 2,412 | 1.523438 | 2 |
It is difficult to navigate the healthcare system. Teens need to learn how to advocate for themselves in obtaining the best medical care.
Plan of Action
1. Teach teens how to communicate with healthcare providers
2. Provide a place for teens to share their stories about navigating the healthcare system
3. Provide a forum for sharing information, resources, and support | <urn:uuid:99c89998-0e5f-4889-ac2e-ae8e45393c2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dosomething.org/project/get-heard | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9262 | 72 | 2.46875 | 2 |
The study of inscriptions on ancient buildings and statues, many of which are relevant to the NT. After discovery, they are deciphered and then related to the history of the period. For example, that officials at Thessalonica were called ‘politarchs’ (Acts 17: 6–8) is confirmed by an inscription at the western side of the city, and the date of Gallio's proconsulship at Corinth is established as 51–2 CE by an inscription found in 1905 at Delphi.
More generally, inscriptions from Palestine in Greek testify to the widespread use of the language and to the influence of Hellenistic culture—previously it had been supposed there was much resistance to it. Light has also been thrown on social life and customs which parallel descriptions in the NT of the Christian communities, as also on those at Qumran as revealed in the Manual of Discipline. | <urn:uuid:a0527fb7-7f08-4ec7-8648-7c66ae55fd77> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t94/e615 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98585 | 186 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Officials in Kansas are bracing for blue-green algae problems after toxic blooms sickened more than a dozen people last year.
A small lake in Great Bend is the only body of water in Kansas with an official algae bloom so far. But officials say more algae blooms are expected.
Tom Langer is the head of environmental health for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. He says his office is already getting phone calls about algae blooms in other waters. Some major lakes in nearby Oklahoma have officially reported blooms.
The problem is expected to increase slowly before taking off in June.
Skin contact with the bright green algae can cause allergic reactions and ingesting infected water can cause diarrhea, vomiting and worse | <urn:uuid:43f430a2-e964-42b1-8720-f65c914d000d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Kansas_Officials_Prepare_For_Toxic_Algae_Bloom_151246525.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951996 | 152 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Harvey Whipple was born in Cornish, N.H. 8 April 1798 and died 20 January 1872 in Malone, Franklin Co., N.Y. He was married three times: Sophia Shepherd of Branton, Vt., Mrs. Frances (Gove) McHutcheon in Whippleville, N.Y., and Sarah Blanchard Haskell in Whippleville. He moved to Whippleville in March 1819 which was then a wilderness. He farmed and ran a milling business until 1868 when he moved to Malone. He was a deacon in the Baptist Church from 1845 until his death. His son George Jacob was born to his wife McHutcheon and his son Harvey to wife Haskell. He was an eighth generation member of the Matthew Whipple family. The rest of the details are found in my book on 15 Generations of Whipples. Click on Buy Now to order through Pay Pal.
Archive for the ‘17th Century American Witch’ Category
Abigail Faulkner, Sr., of Andover, Mass., my great (7) grandmother, was indicted twice on August 11, 1692 for the “detestable crime of witchcraft.” The Grand Jury said she practiced “sorceries wickedly, maliciously, and felonously” on Martha Sprague, 16, of Boxford and Sarah Phelps, 9, of Andover. The indictments were handed down “in the name of our Sovereign Lord King William and our Lady Queen Anne.”
The wife of Lieut. Francis Faulkner, she was one of the most prominent women in the township. She was 40, the mother of five, and pregnant. Edmund Faulker, her father-in-law, one of the founders of Andover, was one of the few original proprietors dignified with the title of Mister. Her father, Rev. Francis Dane, was Andover’s senior Minister, appointed in 1648. She was tried in Salem Mass. before the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer (hear and determine), Magistrates John Hathorrne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson presiding. A guilty verdict would mean a sentence of death by hanging.
In February of 1692 a group of girls in Salem ranging in age from 9 to 17 began acting strange and bizarre. They had fits, uttered foolish and nonsensical speeches, made odd gestures, and contorted themselves into grotesque postures. Their actions evoked remembrances of the bewitched children in Rev. Cotton Mathers Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions, published in Boston in 1689. Mather was a Minister at Boston’s North Church.
Dr. Griggs of Salem examined the girls and finding no physical cause for their afflictions concluded they were bewitched. Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem — whose 9-year-old-daughter was among the group — and clergy and elders from surrounding towns met privately with the girls and decided they must name their tormentors so the witches could be brought to justice. To help the girls discover their tormentors, a dog was fed a cake of rye meal made with the children’s urine and baked in the ashes. After the dog ate, the “afflicted” children went into fits and convulsions and claimed to see into the invisible world “ruled by the Devil and inhabited by specters and ghosts.” This new-found spectral sight made it possible for the girls to see who was causing their afflictions. Spectral evidence could now be used to name witches and wizards.
Almost everyone in 1692, the educated and the unlearned, believed in a material (visible) world and a spiritual (invisible) world. Heaven with its Angels was a reality as was Hell and its Devils. People believed inhabitants of the invisible world could intrude on the visible world. Consequently, every accident, sudden or unusual illness of man or beast, inexplicable or menacing circumstance of any sort was apt to raise the cry of witchcraft.
People then believed the witch, while appearing harmless and innocent in the real world, had a specter in the invisible world which inflicted excruciating pain by pinching, pricking, and tormenting. Judges conducting witch trials deemed irrelevant and frivolous testimony based on the fact other people, including themselves, could not see what the girls saw. They believed the girl’s spectral power was the way God provided to detect witches. (more…) | <urn:uuid:d7e9f875-cd3e-42a8-98e2-20841846d429> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blainewhipple.com/category/17th-century-american-witch/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975395 | 935 | 2.125 | 2 |
This is a sampling from Bay Area News Group's Political Blotter blog. Read more and post comments at www.ibabuzz.com/politics.
A Southern California lawmaker has introduced a bill to create a statewide earthquake early warning system costing at least $80 million.
In a news conference this morning at the California Institute of Technology, state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, noted Caltech and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology recently published a study concluding that a statewide California earthquake -- affecting both the Bay Area and Los Angeles -- may be possible.
"California is going to have an earthquake early warning system; the question is whether we have one before or after the next big quake," Padilla said, joined at his news conference by seismologists from Caltech, UC Berkeley and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Building upon the California Integrated Seismic Network, seismologists envision a system that would process data from an array of sensors throughout the state to detect the strength and the progression of earthquakes, alert the public within seconds and provide up to 60 seconds advanced warning before potentially damaging ground shaking is felt.
"A fully developed earthquake early warning system would provide Californians critical seconds to take cover, assist loved ones, pull to the side of the
Michael Gurnis, a geophysics professor who directs the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, said earthquake early warning is a ripe area for development that "would save lives and help California in many ways if it is rolled out as a fully operational system."
Padilla said that with the magnitude 6.7 Northridge Earthquake of 1994 having claimed 60 lives and caused at least $13 billion in damage, spending $80 million for such a system is a smart investment.
"About 90 percent of the world's earthquakes and over 80 percent of the world's strongest quakes occur along the Pacific Ring of Fire," Padilla said. "The Ring of Fire includes the very active San Andreas Fault zone here in California. We all know a big quake will hit again in the future. We should be smart and use our advanced science and technology to detect seismic activity and alert people in advance of an approaching quake."
The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast released in 2008 predicted a 99.7 percent likelihood of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in California in the next 30 years and a 94 percent chance of a magnitude 7.0. Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Turkey, Romania, Italy and China either already have or are working on earthquake early warning systems.
With Assembly Democrats having proposed a slew of new gun control legislation in the wake of the school massacre in Connecticut, Assembly Republicans are about to roll out a gun-violence plan of their own: Arming teachers or other school employees in secret.
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, is holding a news conference tomorrow morning at the Capitol to announce the introduction of "The School Marshal Plan" to protect children from violent intruders in the classroom.
"This measure authorizes school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools to use general purpose funds to provide training to qualified, volunteer teachers, administrators, or janitors who are willing to carry firearms on campus as part of the school marshal plan," the news release says.
"In light of recent tragedies involving violent intruders in our classrooms, we have a moral imperative to protect the children in our schools. We must do so without abandoning our oath and duty to safeguard the Constitutional rights of every Californian," the release says. "This bill will empower local school districts to protect the lives entrusted to their care, and will protect the School Marshal from identification so they do not become targets." | <urn:uuid:dc786248-a515-4476-bc0e-1ad2e665fc6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sbsun.com/breakingnews/ci_22506967/political-blotter-lawmaker-seeks-statewide-earthquake-early-warning | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941389 | 755 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Last week, many Americans were stunned to pick up their newspapers and learn that AIG was suing us taxpayers for saving them. We shouldn’t have been. That’s what any corporation would do. Indeed, the directors of AIG had to consider it or else get sued themselves.
Corporations are the Burmese pythons of the economic ecosystem.
Burmese pythons are the giant snakes now taking over Florida. Not native to Florida and relatively recent arrivals, they are nonetheless thriving, growing to tremendous lengths and having babies by the basketful. In the process they are driving out the native species and terrifying parents of toddlers and owners of small dogs. Pythons are successful because the indigenous species are not large enough or strong enough to challenge them. We humans did not realize the threat they posed until we woke up one morning and found a 200 lb snake in the swimming pool. That’s why today Florida kicked off a state-wide Burmese python hunt, complete with prizes.
Which brings us back to corporations. Corporations are so successful, and so ubiquitous, that it would probably surprise most people to learn they are a very recent introduction into the economy. While most economic entities—companies, countries, trading blocs, markets, etc have been around for thousands of years, modern corporations were started in 1855 in England with the passage of the Limited Liability Act. And in just over a century, they had already grown to the point where they could strangle and devour small nation-states (ARAMCO in the Middle East, United Fruit in Latin America, Rhodes in Africa). Now corporations are becoming large and bold enough to challenge large countries.
Corporations are advantaged in the economic ecosystem because of five factors.
First, they are dictatorships, not democracies. Dictatorships are inherently advantaged over democracies in terms of speed and action. In the short term, the advantage created by minimizing discussion allows for rapid decision-making and follow-through. Of course dictatorships tend not to be advantaged over the long term because they are have succession and resource allocation issues, and in fact we have seen many very large and successful corporations fail or atrophy, e.g., Kodak, GM.
Second, limited liability gives them the ability to grow to tremendous size. Before the corporations act, if a company failed, creditors could come after the investors for their money. As a result, investors were very careful what they invested in and very careful of the obligations that company took on. Investors did not want to own giant companies with potentially giant downside risks. However, with limited liability, the potential downside was capped. Capital flooded into these new entities. And it turned out that capital was the natural constraint on company size. Before that, those needing capital had to take it out of their own pockets or get it from tight-fisted bankers. Once the capital constraint was removed, companies turned into corporations and exploded in size.
Third, and back to the python analogy, corporations are remorseless in pursuit of a very simple set of goals. Pythons want to reproduce. Corporations want to grow profits for shareholders. Just like the human species, a nation is juggling dozens of objectives, and economic goals are only a few of the many. Simple goals are a tremendous advantage in a Darwinian economic world, in part because…
Fourth, corporations are mobile, both literally and figuratively. If Alabama, say, is doing poorly, the U.S. can’t just close it and walk away, leaving obsolete people and infrastructure behind and moving to Pennsylvania or Arizona. (Although, I admit the idea of simply closing Alabama is appealing.) But a corporation can. And will. In 2007, when war profiteer Halliburton became concerned it might have to compromise its profit objective by obeying U.S. laws, it simply moved to Dubai. But often corporations don’t even need to move physically, they can move “virtually” to a better or less risky place. In every large accounting firm, there exists a unit called “Transfer Pricing,” the whole purpose of which is to create plausible, if not necessarily true, allocations of costs to ensure that a corporation that operates in 20 countries can earn huge profits in 20 countries and effectively pay taxes in none of those. That allows the giant General Electric to use the roads, airports, schools, and stability of the U.S. and pay only nominal taxes here. Corporations even can, in the case of AIG and GM, be insured from the ineptitude of bad leadership without paying for it. By operating across national boundaries, they are able to avoid their rightful obligations to any one nation.
Finally, corporations are stealthy. Take for example annual reports, where “revenues” by segment are reported in such arcane aggregations that the true position in any market or segment is impossible to figure out. Even experienced analysts only learn as much about corporations as corporations want them to know. Of course, we have units of the government, like the SEC, charged with penetrating this secrecy, but the SEC is compromised by lack of resourcing and a relentless assault on their authority from corporations. The corporate world camouflages its motives by promoting the widely-held falsehood that lack of government oversight is essential to successful operation of the free market, and that in turn is essential to freedom and our way of life.
We could keep working the python analogy, comparing gradual constriction of a helpless raccoon to the squeeze on the recent elections created by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow corporations to participate in the political process. But after some point every analogy becomes tiresome, no matter how apt.
My point, though, is a simple one. Corporations are amoral by design. Their objective is not necessarily aligned with the objectives of society overall. They are large, powerful, and will continue to get bigger and more powerful. Their growth in both size and brazenness is not without consequence. Like the Burmese pythons in Florida, it may already be too late to stop them.
I have spent my life working for the world’s largest and most powerful corporations. I’m not anti-corporation. I’m not anti-python either. I just don’t want them loose in the kiddie pool. | <urn:uuid:ce2a55a9-d658-43e6-8c01-fabbf16266e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scholarsandrogues.com/2013/01/14/burmese-pythons-and-the-economic-eco-system/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967364 | 1,311 | 2.15625 | 2 |
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"American Bloomsbury" by Susan Cheever
(Harvest Books, $26)
Cheever painstakingly paints a portrait of 1850s Concord, Mass., and the literati who put New England on the map as the birthplace of American literature and the transcendentalist movement. Full of interesting and often tragic anecdotes and insights, Cheever's research uncovers much from letters and other biographical accounts.
At the center of it all is Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose inherited fortune allowed him to create a place of intellectual companionship in an idyllic landscape. The writers literally depended on Emerson he paid Bronson Alcott's rent, supported Henry David Thoreau and invited Nathaniel Hawthorne to be part of the Concord community. Thoreau was not simply a noble Walden Pond-dwelling environmentalist; he was self-righteous, reclusive and extremely dependent on Emerson.
Hawthorne was self-centered and calculating, dependent on the generosity of others, be it President Franklin Pierce or Herman Melville. Louisa May Alcott's success with "Little Women" was bittersweet, her adulthood spent carrying her family's financial burden, while her father lived only for his intellectual principles. Also of interest is Cheever's focus on the dynamic Margaret Fuller, an editor and foreign correspondent who shared an "intense friendship" with Hawthorne and Emerson she was Hawthorne's inspiration for "The Scarlet Letter."
Ultimately, this idealistic utopia implodes, the writers still bound by social conventions and their own character flaws, despite the spirit of their leftist philosophies. In attempting to chronologically detail all of the intertwining events, Cheever bites off more than she can chew. Important connections are made between people and places, but the narrative gallops too quickly from one subject to another, never gaining a coherent momentum. Cheever provides interesting sketches of social and literary life in Concord in the mid-1800s, but not much more. Shannon O'Neill"GV6 The Odyssey" (DVD) by Bob Bryan
(Graffiti Verité, $24.50)
Filmmaker Bob Bryan has put together a collection of interviews, recitations, idiotic graphics and "wise words of encouragement" from 31 obscure poets on a DVD entitled "GV6 The Odyssey." Like horrifying Christian zealots and "American Idol" contestants, poets of this ilk are convinced that they need to proselytize the benefits of having the gift, the jingle, the passion or whatever one might call it, and they are compelled to bring that message to the masses much the same way Prometheus brought fire to the world.
The problem is, no one really needs it. Being a contemporary American poet is much like being a baseball fan in England. I couldn't think of a single audience who might find this film helpful, though it does have mockumentary potential. In fact, there were times when I wasn't sure if it was meant to be taken seriously. For instance, poet Askew used the phrase "fortress of solitude." Another, Aleida Rodriguez, cried when reading her rather plain work. And Johnny Masuda, with pro-wrestler bravado, looked into the camera and said he was going to kick my "f ing ass." (Yes, they bleeped out most expletives, making an ironic argument for censorship.)
The objective of the film is to show "the complex face of poetry," and in that it succeeds. There are a few interesting readers Jennifer Tseng and especially Kamau Daaood but it is obvious that these people do all their talking on the page. On the whole, "GV6 The Odyssey" should not rival the works of Shel Silverstein for this year's American schoolhouse poetry shootout. And it's too bad, because I despise Shel Silverstein. Darren Morris"Reflections of a Purple Zebra: Essays of a Different Stripe" by Nancy Wright Beasley
In her new book, Richmond writer Nancy Wright Beasley ponders the ups and downs of life in a collection of 60 essays from the monthly columns that she's contributed to Richmond Magazine since 1988. While Beasley sometimes writes about world events such as 9/11, issues such as domestic violence, and profiles of local people she encounters, her main topic is her own life. She returns many times to her grief over her husband's death, the challenges of caring for seriously ill parents, her experiences as a parent and her struggles to survive and succeed as a freelance writer.
Some of Beasley's essays shine. She tells of an encounter with an injured eagle on the side of the highway in unvarnished language that lets the power of the experience and its impact on her grief over the loss of her husband stun the reader. However, in most of the essays, Beasley favors a cute, folksy tone that wears thin. She also tends to become bogged down in the minutiae of her own comings and goings, which adds nothing of interest to her writing and distracts the reader from the topics at hand.
When Beasley sticks to plain language and compelling subjects, her essays hit the high standard she set in her 2005 book, "Izzy's Fire: Finding Humanity in the Holocaust," which earned her a People's Choice nomination by the James River Writers. Unfortunately, those essays are in the minority here. Mary Mullins"The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World" by Kati Marton
(Simon & Schuster, $27)
"The Great Escape" analyzes the achievements of nine men who helped shape the modern world. All were geniuses; all were Hungarian Jews born during a brief golden age in Budapest; all were tortured by the isolation and loneliness of their subsequent exile and disillusionment; and all rose to the highest levels in their respective fields.
One was dubbed the world's greatest war photographer, marshalling anti-fascist sentiment; one created "the most popular romantic film of all time," "Casablanca," based on Budapest's flamboyant golden age; four were mathematicians and physicists who helped develop the atomic and hydrogen bombs; and one was the brilliant author of "Darkness at Noon."
An exiled Hungarian Jew of the next generation, Marton has a unique perspective on the forces shaping and motivating these brilliant men as she deftly ushers the reader into their worlds. Claiming from her insider's vantage that it is the very pain they endured as secular Jews and exiled Hungarians that largely accounts for their monumental achievements, she quotes from the movie "The Third Man":
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy, and they produced the cuckoo clock."
With 15 pages of notes, a 10-page bibliography, a 13-page index, and more than 10 pages of photos, and written in the author's second language, this volume is itself an extraordinary achievement. Jennifer Yane S
VCU Comics on collectica.com
Not everyone knows that VCU boasts one of the most thorough collections of comic art and memorabilia in the United States, with more than 100,000 categorized items in its archives. Started in the 1970's thanks to a large donation of comics by editorial cartoonists Fred Seibel and Bill Sykes, the collection has been greatly augmented by VCU professor Tom Dehaven, author of "It's Superman!" Now anyone interested in learning more about VCU's collection can do so in virtual time, just by following the library link on collectica.com. The first of its kind, the site was launched by graduate students from the business school at the University of Chicago in September. Expressly designed by collectors for collectors, it also sells coins, stamps, memorabilia, dolls, antiques, vinyl and automobiles. Jay Leno is featured with some of his infamous 200 cars, alongside a group of female video players called the Frag Dolls, men's vintage clothing and rare Indian coins from 400 A.D. The VCU comics collection is impressive and fun, but just look, don't touch; it's not for sale. Valley HaggardClick here for more Arts & Culture | <urn:uuid:6cf1494a-1488-4e71-bfe4-656bb5d1ed64> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/recently-read/Content?oid=1364605 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961475 | 1,705 | 1.90625 | 2 |
At the provincial level, public debate in Ontario began among members of the Toronto Women's Literary Club, a screen for suffrage activities created 1876 by Dr Emily Howard STOWE, Canada's first woman doctor. She and her daughter, Dr Augusta STOWE-GULLEN, spearheaded Ontario's suffrage campaign for 40 years. In 1883 the club became the Toronto Women's Suffrage Association, then in 1889 the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association - a national group in name only.
Despite numerous petitions and bills, Ontario's lawmakers, confident that they had public opinion behind them, repeatedly blocked changes. Suffrage groups were thus forced to undertake long years of public education. Valuable support came in the 1890s from the WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION, whose leaders saw votes for women as necessary in achieving PROHIBITION. In 1910, the respected and influential NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WOMEN spoke out for suffrage.
The WCTU was also active in Manitoba, where women's suffrage had first been proposed in 1870 by the Icelandic community. Among Manitoba's early leaders were Mrs M.J. Benedictssen, Mrs A.V. Thomas, Dr Amelia Yeomans and Mrs J.A. McClung. McClung's daughter-in-law, Nellie MCCLUNG, later became the Prairie movement's dominant figure. Between 1912 and 1915 there was a sharp, concerted campaign. Then on 28 January 1916 Manitoba women became the first in Canada to win the rights to vote and to hold provincial office. They were followed by Saskatchewan on March 14 and Alberta on April 19. BC approved women's suffrage on 5 April 1917, and Ontario suffragists, after many years of struggle, celebrated their hard-won victory on April 12.
Meanwhile, pressure was mounting on federal politicians. In the controversial WARTIME ELECTIONS ACT of 1917, the federal vote was extended to women in the armed forces, and to female relatives of military men. At the same time thousands of loyal citizens naturalized after 1902 were disenfranchised. It was not an honourable victory for Canadian women.
On 24 May 1918 all female citizens aged 21 and over became eligible to vote in federal elections, regardless of whether they had yet attained the provincial franchise. In July 1919 they gained the complementary right to stand for the House of Commons, although appointment to the Senate remained out of reach until after the PERSONS CASE of 1929. Throughout the preceding debates, the compelling argument in women's favour was their service, sacrifice and proven competence during WWI - just as Prairie women had gained provincial rights largely on their record in helping to settle and build the country. Although democratic right did have a place in the argument, service was the keynote.
The provincial franchise for Nova Scotia women came on 26 April 1918, after a lacklustre campaign. The cause was even less popular in New Brunswick, which approved women's suffrage on 17 April 1919. PEI, with practically no popular agitation, changed its franchise Act on 3 May 1922, and Newfoundland women gained the vote on 13 April 1925. In Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland, the right to stand for provincial office accompanied voting rights, but New Brunswick avoided that radical step until 9 March 1934. In Québec, under the courageous leadership of Thérèse CASGRAIN, the struggle continued until 25 April 1940, when women finally achieved the provincial counterpart to the federal vote they had been exercising for over 20 years.
Author SUSAN JACKEL
Links to Other Sites
The website for the Historica-Dominion Institute, parent organization of The Canadian Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. Check out their extensive online feature about the War of 1812, the "Heritage Minutes" video collection, and many other interactive resources concerning Canadian history, culture, and heritage.
First Women in Provincial and Territorial Legislatures
See biographies and related resources about distinguished women political pioneers in Canada. Produced in recognition of Women's History Month. From Library and Archives Canada.
The Famous 5
This website focuses on the Famous 5 and their struggle to advance the legal rights of Canadian women. From the Alberta Online Encyclopedia.
Are Women Persons? The “Persons” Case
An online feature about the legal implications of the "Persons" Case. From Library and Archives Canada.
Changing Women, Changing History: Canadian Women
This Library and Archives Canada site features biographies of women activists who have made substantial contributions to the lives of all Canadian women. Also offers teaching guides and reference sources.
“Give us our due!” How Manitoba Women Won the Vote
A fascinating story about the women who fought for, and won, the right to vote in Manitoba, the first province in Canada to grant women the right to vote. From the Manitoba Historical Society.
Towards Equality for Women: A Chronology of Change and Achievements
A chronology of milestones in the quest for equality for women in Canada. From the website for the Canadian Federation of University Women.
Ten Thousand Roses
An excerpt from "Ten Thousand Roses," a book about the "making of a feminist revolution." From Penguin Group (Canada.)
Constance E. Hamilton
A brief profile of Constance E. Hamilton, Toronto's first woman councillor. From the City of Toronto website.
Canadian Women's Christian Temperance Union Fonds
An overview of the history of the Canadian Women's Christian Temperance Union, an organization that fought to expand the role of women in Canadian society. From the Archives of Ontario website.
Manitoba: Life and Times
A great information source about Manitoba's history and its many noteworthy pioneers. Features an extensive online archive of newspapers, first-hand accounts from letters, memoirs and diaries, drawings, maps and photos - all of which record the early development of the province. From the Manitoba Library Consortium and its partners.
The Famous 5 Foundation
The Famous 5 Foundation honours the Famous 5 and other Canadian women. See their biographies of the "Famous 5" as well as the latest news about programs and events. | <urn:uuid:447dcbee-df8a-4a34-8ba6-50bc1c2258a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/womens-suffrage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948577 | 1,260 | 3.90625 | 4 |
The ILO Mission
"The Primary Goal of the ILO Mission is to Expand Human Understanding of the Cosmos Through Observation from Our Moon."
ILOA, with four active lunar missions and a robust Galaxy 21st Century Education program, continues to establish itself as a pioneer in Observation and Astronomy from the Moon. These four missions will enable the international ILOA teams the opportunity to participate and observe the Galaxy / Stars, local lunar environment, and Earth with various wavelengths, for differing durations, and from various lunar locations. They will also help to secure Hawaii’s leadership in Astronomy for the next 100 years.
Human Service Mission to the ILO on Moon South Pole is being advanced to high priority through newly-developing collaboration / partnership with Golden Spike Company of Colorado, USA. ILOA is now part of a distinguished team of organizations conducting a cutting-edge study to initiate development of a Human Lunar Lander. The goal of GSC and ILOA is to achieve a Human Moon mission within the decade.
In September 2012, ILOA signed a MoU with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC-CAS) allowing ILOA scientists to conduct Galaxy Observations with the UV telescope aboard the Chang’e-3 lunar lander in 2013.
ILO-1, the original ILOA mission, will see a multifunctional 2-meter dish observatory placed near the South Pole of the Moon. The mission (NET 2015) will conduct radio astronomy, including Galaxy First Light Imaging Program; and Commercial Communications, including Space Calendar Lunar Broadcasting, while serving as a beacon for lunar base buildout. ILOA is working with MDA of Canada to develop the scientific payload for ILO-1.
ILOA is teaming with the Google Lunar XPrize Team Moon Express on a precursor mission known as ILO-X. For this mission, ILOA will place a 10-cm optical telescope on the team’s lunar lander scheduled for 2015.
ILOA Galaxy Forum is a successful 21st Century Education Program held regularly in cities, countries and continents all over the world. Already active in Asia, North America, Europe, Africa and Hawaii, the program is expanding to South America and Antarctica 2013-2014. The Forums connect Galaxy researchers and local educators to help bring Galacticity / Galaxy consciousness into every class.
The ILOA is an interglobal enterprise incorporated in Hawaii as a 501(c)(3) non-profit to help realize the multifunctional ILO -- to advance human knowledge of the Cosmos through observation from our Moon, and to participate in lunar base build-out. The ILOA also since 2008 has co-sponsored with its Space Age Publishing Company affiliate an international series of Galaxy Forums and a Lunar Commercial Communications Workshop. | <urn:uuid:7c95fc8b-96b0-43b0-ad0d-949c71d8486c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://iloa.org/mission.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901681 | 572 | 2.25 | 2 |
English cocker spaniel
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...a soft, flat or wavy coat. The tail is usually docked. The coat may be either solid coloured or variegated; colours include black and black with tan, reddish brown, buff, and black and white. The English cocker spaniel is similar to the American cocker spaniel but is larger and has longer legs and a longer muzzle. It stands 15 to 17 inches (38 to 43 cm) and weighs 26 to 34 pounds (12 to 15...
What made you want to look up "English cocker spaniel"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:10884ca4-0f21-421e-abdf-f317a0e54ce6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/187970/English-cocker-spaniel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904127 | 162 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Barack Obama came into office as an anti-petroleum crusader. He made no bones about the fact that he wanted gas prices to rise; likewise, his Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, explained that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels. In those days, global warming alarmists were riding high, and the Obama administration accepted the idea that to prevent climate change, it should suppress production of domestic oil and gas, thereby raising the price of fossil fuel energy (gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, coal-fired electricity, etc.) so that Americans would not be able to afford as much of it. This was, of course, a strategy for impoverishing the American people, but in those heady times, the administration considered that a minor inconvenience if not a positive virtue.
Now, however, Obama is running for re-election, and the American people have not enjoyed being impoverished on his watch. Moreover, global warming alarmism has been largely discredited. So Obama is pretending that his administration hasn’t spent the last three years driving energy costs up, on purpose. Chu, however, is a true believer. When he testified before the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee yesterday, he was asked whether the administration’s goal is to bring down the price of gas for the benefit of consumers. His answer was shocking to those who haven’t been paying attention:
“I can’t look at motivations. I have to look at results. And under this administration the price of gasoline has doubled,” [Congressman Alan] Nunnelee told Chu.
“The people of north Mississippi can’t be here, so I have to be here and be their voice for them,” Nunnelee added. “I have to tell you that $8 a gallon gasoline makes them afraid. It’s a cruel tax on the people of north Mississippi as they try to go back and forth to work. It’s a cloud hanging over economic development and job creation.”
Chu expressed sympathy but said his department is working to lower energy prices in the long term. …
“But is the overall goal to get our price” of gasoline down, asked Nunnelee.
“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”
Obama hasn’t changed his mind any more than Chu has, as you can see from his administration’s actions. For the president, expensive energy that depresses all Americans’ standards of living isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. | <urn:uuid:20afb3db-58a2-4c31-8576-90862b2f8db0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/02/chu-lets-the-cat-out-of-the-bag.php?tsize=large&tsize=large | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972865 | 607 | 1.8125 | 2 |
How it's made (PDI)
Untempered regular glass is coated in three runs in a chemical bath (sorry, but I won't share recipes). The glass is coated using a diving process and each bath is different.
At this stage preferences in regard of light transmission, glare and contrast are set.
After the glass has been coated it has to be cut to the right size with corners and edges sanded.
The tempering process is the last in the line.
Here the reflection color of the glass changes and the final product is finished.
Jack shows comparison pictures on his website where his glass has a greenish reflection and PDI is bluish. The reflective color (green, blue, purple, grey..) can be designed to the customer needs.
Jack never said that his glass is better than PDI, he only stated that it looks better to him.
As soon as the first WOZECLE's are in Germany, we will test Invisiglass in the lab.
That means that we will be able to exactly specify the reflection and transmission in % and won't use phrases like better, newer, more beautiful, sexy, modern, less expensive, stronger a.s.o.
Furthermore we should be able to tell who made it. Beside that I think Invisiglass is made in Germany too,´cause there are not many companies left who know how to coat and who own the machines.
The coating technology is not new, so there is nothing to develop for months...
just to make that clear. | <urn:uuid:8e7f2b0a-a583-4fbc-b56c-15f80fa2b787> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/invisiglass-is-shipping | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968582 | 323 | 2.296875 | 2 |
A while back, I read that building non-cognitive skills helps produce a number of positive characteristics. One of them is resilience.
I began to wonder, “How resilient am I as a person?” I thought about my life story. I had to admit that while I believe in my inner strength, I have also disappointed myself more than once by not bouncing back from difficulty. Hmmm … could I use some resilience building?
After watching Jane McGonigal’s TED talk, I think that we all can use this. Not just to become more resilient in general but to understand the various forms of resilience and how they contribute to better living. | <urn:uuid:c87a366e-cbe3-429b-912a-0fe8b48d05f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://laf.ee/wp/?p=5023 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980568 | 137 | 1.695313 | 2 |
~from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Book 2, Chapter 5, translated by Richard Peavear and Larissa Volokhonsky (pg 67) circa 1880.
Miusov describes his discussion with a spy - in larger context of debate about separation of Church and State:
Omitting the main essence of the conversation, I shall quote only one most curious remark that this person suddenly let drop: 'We are not, in fact, afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionaries,' he said. 'We keep an eye on them, and their movements are known to us. But there are some special people among them, although not many: these are believers in God and Christians, and at the same time socialists. They are the ones we are most afraid of; they are terrible people! A socialist Christian is more dangerous than a socialist atheist.'
Discuss Amongst Yourselves.
While I play library-student and put the finishing touches on other Hot4Jesus posts, my book club reading brought to mind something I hear more and more about - Christian Socialists. Left-leaning Christians LOVE to describe how Jesus was a socialist kind of guy. I highly recommend that you put the quotation in context if possible - (for example - D appeared to die Orthodox Christian which evolved from a far-left youth) but if you can't/won't... it still is worthy of discussion.
So Discuss. Pros. Cons. Indifference. Jesus as Monster.
I insist... or I will send this your way:
500 foot Jesus found and described in detail in Uncyclopedia's article: "Attack of the 500 foot Jesus." | <urn:uuid:44637765-7637-4523-99a3-11cf16b4fd74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hotforjesusformerfundie.blogspot.com/2009/09/dostoevskys-fear-or-hope-socialist.html?showComment=1258700655905 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94557 | 342 | 1.71875 | 2 |
If you're wondering just what in the world is happening with our weather lately, the National Climatic Data Center at NOAA has the answer. According to their recently released report State of the Climate: National Overview for June 2012, the 12-month period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest on record for the contiguous United States. (Their records go back to 1895.) The national average temperature was 3.2 degrees higher than the long-term average, with every single contiguous state except for Washington warmer than average temperatures. In addition, the period from Januray to June 2012 was the warmest first half of a year on record.
Faster: the acceleration of just about everything by James Gleick
Galileo's pendulum: from the rhythm of time to the making of matter by Roger G. Newton
Breaking the time barrier: the race to build the first time machine by Jenny Randles
Chronos: how time shapes our universe by Etienne Klein ; translated by Glenn Burney
The mechanism for how a hot tub can become a time machine isn't well-explained. However, if you acquire a hot tub and the chronological mechanism never works, at least you have a hot tub, right? For further instructions view:
Picture books about the moon are a perfect choice for bedtime reading. If you're a fan of the classic story Goodnight Moon, give these other great books a try.
And if the moon could talk by Kate Banks; pictures by Georg Hallensleben
Papa, please get the moon for me by Eric Carle
Kitten's first full moon by Kevin Henkes
[Star-forming region NGC 3603 is by NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI) as licensed under this notice.]
Since the dawn of time, man has dreamed of traveling through the heavens. Today's students are tomorrow's astronauts! Explore the wonders of the night skies on Saturday, July 28 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. In the comfort of their large inflatable Starlab Dome, Dynamic West Assemblies bring the star-filled presentation to you. An awe-inspiring program that is fully interactive, this one is not to be missed!
We will repeat the same show several times within the two hour program time beginning at 10:00 AM. Please be aware that space is limited.
We can all observe Earth Day this year by educating ourselves about the challenges that face our environment and what we can do about it. Try some of the titles suggested below to get started:
The age of stupid [videodisc] — Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, who spends his days looking at old footage from the years leading up to 2015 - when a cataclysmic climate change took place.
Meet and learn about some of Michigan's animals that wake up when you go to bed! The Organization for Bat Conservation will present their program: Animal Adaptations: Bats! Owls! Flying Foxes!. Discover the fascinating features and adaptations of a variety of Michigan's native nocturnal creatures. In this program, learn what adaptations are, how they are formed and why animals develop these amazing tools for survival. Live animals will be present! Join us on Sunday, April 22nd from 2:00-3:00 PM to kick off our Earth Week celebrations.
This post is part of our Earth Day 2012 celebration.
Join Dominic Crea of Science Wonders on Thursday, March 8 from 7:00-8:00 PM as he answers these and many other questions of a scientific nature. You will learn how electricity and magnetism, sound, heat, mechanics and chemistry permeate our everyday lives. This program is designed for kids aged 8 and up. Parents welcome.
We invite you to register for the final workshop in the series titled Build the $6 Million You: Making the most of your health. The event takes place in the Community Room on Saturday, March 10, 2012, from 1:00-2:00 PM. You will learn what you can do to improve and maintain your health. You will examine how your environment, healthy eating and exercise influence your health and well-being. Workshops are designed for children ages 6-11, accompanied by an adult. Online registration begins February 25 at 9:00 AM.
Health Discovery Day is the final celebration of the Vital Signs Health programs CPL has offered over the last few months. Discover the connection between health and evolution. Come find out if you are a "super taster", and what that might have meant for our ancestors' survival. Ever wonder what's in a cell? Explore some specimens under a microscope and make you own model cell to take home. Test your vital signs just like the doctors do and learn about some of the things you can do to make sure your body continues to run like a well-oiled machine. So many activities and so many guests… who knew health could be so much fun?! The event is free, open to the public and takes place throughout the entire Museum.
The bus will be leaving Canton Public Library on Saturday, March 24th at 9:00 AM and returning to CPL at 5:00 PM. Please bring a lunch with you or plan to walk to one of Ann Arbor's great eating establishments. Online registration begins March 10th and is required for all participants. Open to children age 6-11. All children must be accompanied by an adult.
As part of CPL's 100 Days of Health series, we invite you to register for the second workshop in the series titled Germs, Bacteria, and Allergies, Oh MY!: What makes us sick and what makes us well? The event takes place in the Purple Room on Saturday, February 11, 2012, from 1:00-2:00 PM. You will look at some of the things that make us sick, and find out what our bodies do to protect themselves. Workshops are designed for children ages 6-11, accompanied by an adult. Online registration for this event begins on January 28, 2012 at 9:00 AM.
In commemoration of Black History Month we are celebrating some of Black America’s firsts in aviation and aerospace. Through the month of February, stop by and view our display case near the Receptionist Desk highlighting some of these pioneering aviators. From the first known Black pilot to the youngest African American (12 yrs) flyer. Their lives and stories are a celebration of the human spirit and an inspiration to all that against all odds and great adversity you can achieve your dream… you can touch the sky! To learn more about blacks in aviation visit some of these exciting resources: | <urn:uuid:2c356233-fd83-4abe-9831-3aa27359c7ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cantonpl.org/topic/science?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946365 | 1,382 | 2.671875 | 3 |
NEW YORK — Long ago, I wrote about the Internet pioneer Julf Helsingius, who ran a precursor to WikiLeaks called anon.penet.fi. As I said then: “Anonymity in itself should not be illegal. There are enough good reasons for people to be anonymous that it should be [allowed] — at least in some places on the Net (as in real life).”
But anon.penet.fi got little notice: there weren’t enough people on the Internet at the time to read what was posted, and Julf did not use the WikiLeaks “business model” of cooperation with “establishment media.” Eventually, he had to shut down the site in a tussle with the Church of Scientology, which used copyright law to keep its secrets.
There can be no clear line marking what needs to be kept secret (or never uttered) from what does not, but it should be drawn far from where most authorities put it — at least in a world where authorities are imperfect. If we are unwilling or unable to demand transparency from the institutions that have power over us, we should be grateful for those who put their lives (and their consciences) at risk to do so.
So I was eager to meet WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum in Barcelona. At that time, Assange was just gaining visibility outside the tech community. He was opaque and playfully cryptic, already a little paranoid — perhaps justifiably so. More recently, it appears that he ruled his little organization with no tolerance for dissent. That makes him a jerk, and presumably we will soon find out whether he is also a rapist according to Swedish law.
But you probably need to be a bit weird and callous to devote your life to transparency for others. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned ex-CEO of what was Russia’s largest oil company, is another example of a flawed, uncompromising person who challenged the flawed people in power and their unaccountability. Such people do not die for our sins; rather, they sin on our behalf, so that we may live comfortably while they afflict the authorities at great personal risk and in disregard of (authorities’ interpretation of) the law and sometimes even ethics.
Assange’s motives, as far as I know, are not anti-American, but anti-authority. He would argue, I believe, that he has no power other than to authenticate and publish documents that others send to him about people with power, and thus that he has no obligation to reveal anything about himself.
This is and should be the principle behind WikiLeaks and its successors — to publish information that officials would keep secret, not information about private lives. In a world where governments, corporations, and other institutions have so much information about us, it is only right that we should have more information about them and about the activities of people acting on their behalf.
If institutions are not fully accountable, it is useful to have an unaccountable countervailing institution to reveal their secrets. In fact, the WikiLeaks model is fairly sensible: it solicits documents from anyone, assesses whether they are real, and posts them with alerts to the establishment press, which operates as de facto gatekeeper to the masses. After all, how many people actually visit the WikiLeaks originals? Few, compared to the millions who see them interpreted in the mass media.
What about the possibility of endangering lives? What about real secrets about terrorists and delicate negotiations? By all accounts, that point has not been reached. If it is, I would support throttling WikiLeaks’ revelations . . . and most media would not republish its content.
The irony is that little has been revealed that we didn’t know already. What we’re getting is the details — the personal comments, the texture of diplomats’ lives and those of the people they watch, the horrible toll of war and its daily indignities, the hypocrisies and lies of those in power.
Will all this make us more cynical rather than more demanding? Will it make governments more opaque rather than more transparent? Are we headed for an era of more paranoia about secrets, including less sharing of useful information?
If the cure is to be worse than the disease, to quote Personal Democracy Forum cofounder Andrew Rasiej, let’s find a better cure: let’s make the proper distinction between what should be secret and what everyone knows. Let’s foster more transparency about the institutions that have power over us so that a WikiLeaks is no longer necessary or justifiable.
So far, little damage has been done — and little positive change accomplished. The U.S. reaction has been over the top. It called on Amazon to cancel its contract with WikiLeaks, while PayPal shut off WikiLeaks’ account — apparently without even being asked. Why is it that the call for transparency seems to apply only to countries that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits, rather than to the one that she represents?
I recently talked with an establishment stalwart who told me how much more difficult these leaks will make it for the U.S. diplomatic corps to accomplish its putatively worthy goals. But is diplomatic convenience really so important? Perhaps it’s useful for us all to understand how things actually work. In any case, the official reaction is overkill.
In the long run, WikiLeaks matters for two reasons. The first is that we need a better balance of power between people and power. Information — and specifically the Internet’s power to spread it — is our best defense against bad, unaccountable behavior.
Second, we do want to trust our governments and institutions. The point of openness is to make those in power behave better — and to make us trust them more. Rather than viewing them as enemies, we should know what they are up to, and perhaps have a little more say in what they do.
Making that happen requires someone willing to face opprobrium, jail, and a life of surveillance. I wish Julian Assange were a better person, but better people are not rising to the challenge.
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of startups around the world. Her interests include information technology, health care, private aviation and space travel. © 2010 Project Syndicate | <urn:uuid:5ef63c1c-8956-46e1-b33f-b9581a323a01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2010/12/18/commentary/wikileaks-flawed-answer-to-a-flawed-world/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966241 | 1,313 | 1.585938 | 2 |
If the reproduction of this photo appears grainy and the colors slightly off, that is because it was made in 1956 — of early Port Royal. Gordon Pass would be off the bottom left corner; mangroves of Keewaydin Island are at lower right. Daily News reader Sheila Varnum said her sister, Pat Barnes, in High Falls, N.Y., spied the print at a street fair. A sticker on a plastic sleeve says "1956 Naples FL $9.00.'' Look closely to see the wood and rock groins that were early methods of beach renourishment; some fragments remain to this day. | <urn:uuid:cb440b94-4e2d-4e0c-94b9-a65baa4391f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marconews.com/photos/galleries/looking-back-historic-photos-naples-2011-edition/191756/?enlarge=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963891 | 127 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Complementary therapies are treatments and approaches to healthcare which people use as a complement to conventional care. They are used in addition to and not instead of seeking medical advice from a doctor or taking prescribed medication.
Examples of these approaches could include, for instance, acupuncture, Alexander Technique teaching, aromatherapy, herbal medicine, massage therapy, reflexology and yoga therapy.
Around one in five people in the UK have used some form of complementary healthcare and there is a great deal of public interest in the subject.
Choosing a practitioner
When considering using complementary therapy it is important to choose a qualified practitioner who has undertaken all the necessary training to understand the theory and practice of the discipline concerned.
The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) is the UK regulator for complementary healthcare practitioners. The CNHC provides a register of practitioners that have been assessed as meeting national standards of competence and practice. You may find practitioners from the following disciplines by searching the CNHC”s register.
Registration is currently voluntary and not all complementary healthcare practitioners from these disciplines are yet registered. This does not necessarily mean that they are not qualified, but it does mean that the CNHC knows nothing about their qualifications, professional background, knowledge and / or experience.
The Department of Health and CNHC recommend that members of the public always consult with a CNHC-registered professional, where CNHC registers the professional discipline concerned. Where CNHC does not currently register a discipline (such as acupuncture, herbal medicine and homeopathy) it is advisable to seek advice from a relevant professional association.
In 2010 and 2011 the CNHC will open the Register to more disciplines, as they become ready and wish to register. Those in this category are cranial sacral therapy, healing, hypnotherapy, microsystems acupuncture, naturopathy and reiki.
Registered practitioners are able to use the CNHC quality mark on certificates and publicity materials. You can look to see if a practitioner is displaying a current certificate with the CNHC quality mark in their place of work or on promotional literature such as leaflets, headed notepaper or on their website.
If in any doubt as to whether a practitioner is registered, you can search CNHC”s online register. Use the “Check the Register” facility on the bottom right hand corner of the CNHC website screen.
To find out more about the CNHC go to: www.cnhc.org.uk or call 0203 178 2199
This page was sponsored by the CNHC. | <urn:uuid:792a8c65-70e9-4f12-9146-60f0d37035db> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.anxietyuk.org.uk/get-help/complementary-therapies/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938739 | 516 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Published in OBGYN and Reproduction Week, December 10th, 2007
The findings are published Nov. 28 in the online edition of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The drug, taken by pregnant women with epilepsy because of its mild risk of birth defects, has been linked to increased seizure activity in up to 75 percent of pregnancies, according to some prior research studies.
"This is important data considering current treatment guidelines do not...
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Learn more about a six-week, no-risk free trial of OBGYN and Reproduction Week | <urn:uuid:400ab899-22a3-4ce9-99a4-9d2b13bac94a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsrx.com/newsletters/OBGYN-and-Reproduction-Week/2007-12-10/31121020072OR.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94393 | 133 | 1.695313 | 2 |
When designing an intranet for corporate use, what design practices should I follow that are different from those targeted to the internet/customer world? What kind of questions should I be asking ...
I need an easy to read web usability book for my web programming students. Which one do you consider is the best? I have heard good things about "Don't make me think" from Steve Krug, but I need some ...
What would be a good web based open source or low cost learing collaboration tool for high school students?
Have about 60 kids that are working on a science projects in two groups. Each group would like a web portal where they can discuss topics relating to what they are building, post questions, pictures, ...
Assuming a non-commercial site where users login with a user name and pw, do I need to enforce unicity of usernames? Note: The db will use a separate unique index to identify the users. The site is ...
What are the best books you suggest me about: web design HCI for web applications / websites thanks
Often you'll see websites with a "For any questions, please contact us..." followed by a box for your name, email, subject, maybe some invoice data... When should these be implemented on a website? ...
The typical design for a paging panels (of search engines and the like) looks like this: Previous 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Next But if you read that you would expect (if not educated by ... | <urn:uuid:3f6bcabe-fa35-4b19-a978-9b68d66a2962> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/website-design+usability | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930223 | 310 | 1.507813 | 2 |
HHS New Media Webinar Series
The HHS New Media Webinar Series highlights innovative projects, shares expertise from across HHS and creates collaborative opportunities to discuss the latest trends in New Media. The webinar occurs on the 4th Wednesday of each month at 2pm ET.
If you think you have a project of interest to others in HHS and would like to present, please contact firstname.lastname@example.org.
If you would like to receive updates on upcoming webinars, join the HHS-NewMedia ListServ.
|Twitter Chats - August 1, 2012|
Three speakers, from CDC, NHLBI, and ODPHP, discuss best practices and their experiences on hosting Twitter chats.
|New HHS Open Government Plan – January 25, 2012|
Two members of the HHS Innovation Council discuss the purpose of the Open Government plan, and seek HHS input on organizational changes that enable collaboration and participation to enhance open government activities.
|Online Outreach Tactics – December 14, 2011|
Two members of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs office (ASPA) discuss how to integrate the web when doing press roll-outs.
|Strategies for Efficiently Using New Media – November 16, 2011|
The New Media Strategist and Communication Director for AIDS.gov present on strategies for using new media effectively and efficiently, including how to develop a plan, repurpose content, and measure success.
|Innovations in Mobile Health – October 26, 2011|
The Senior Health Technology Advisor at HHS discusses how HHS is leveraging mobile health (mHealth) initiatives, and how the Text4Health Task Force is working to accelerate the growth of mHealth and health innovation at HHS.
|Building an Online Community – September 28, 2011|
A speaker from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) discusses how to develop a community, meet the needs of your audience, and measure success along the way.
|Building a Business Case for Social Media - August 24, 2011|
The Chief of Communication Technology at the National Cancer Institute discusses how to a business case for social media, how your organization and audience play a role in the process, and how to develop a plan.
|Challenges and Competitions – July 27, 2011|
Six speakers discuss challenges, HHS resources available on challenges, and guidance on developing a challenge for your office.
|Third Party Websites and Applications – June 22, 2011|
An HHS Cybersecurity team representative discusses privacy requirements and guidance for implementing new requirements for protecting individual privacy on third-party applications.
|Ideation Tools – May 25, 2011|
Seven speakers from across HHS discuss what ideation tools are and how government agencies are leveraging them to collaborate and share ideas.
|YouTube - May 3, 2011|
A member of the YouTube politics team discusses how and why to use YouTube and how government agencies can utilize the power of YouTube and video to engage the public.
|Integrating Social Media Platforms – April 27, 2011|
A legislative liaison with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration discusses how you can integrate social media platforms to increase your engagement with the public. | <urn:uuid:c3c91c50-9dfd-4f1a-b29b-686db2722485> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newmedia.hhs.gov/resources/webinar.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905586 | 648 | 1.515625 | 2 |
This parashat has some themes that are difficult to deal with. For example a Kohen with certain physical imperfections is not allowed to bring an offering. I’m not going to get into this, but feel free to look it up (Leviticus 21:16-24).
What I want to delve into is another verse, Leviticus 21:7. “They (the Kohanim) shall not marry a woman who is a harlot or has been desecrated, and they shall not marry a woman who has been divorced by her husband; for each one is holy to his God.”
According to Rashi (according to the Stone Edition Chumash):
A harlot is “a woman who has lived with any man who is not permitted to her because of a negative commandment. This includes not only relationships punishable by death or karet, but also living with a mamzer or a non-Jew.”
A little side note: It’s important to keep in mind that when we translate from Torah Hebrew to English something is always lost. The Hebrew word that is used here for harlot is zonah. I’m going to come back to this, so keep this in the back of your mind. Or just scroll back up later, whatever works for you.
What bothers me about Rashi’s definition is including a woman who has been with a non-Jew in the definition of a harlot. Having sex with a gentile does not make a woman a harlot. The definition that comes to my mind is a woman on a street corner selling her body for money often with a man providing the management services.
In fact if we go back to the previous Parashat Kedoshim, specifically Leviticus 19:29, the Torah states:
“Do not profane your daughter to make her a harlot, lest the Land become lewd, and the land become filled with depravity.”
The Hebrew word for harlot here uses the same root as the above passage from Emor. Furthermore, this verse talks about making your daughter a harlot, implying that a woman does not become a harlot on her own but is made into one by the actions of someone else. This brings to mind the modern definition of pimps, money, and street corners.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in my humble opinion, Rashi got it wrong. A harlot is a woman who has sex for money, not a woman who has sex with a gentile.
To paraphrase that Queen of England from way back in the day:
Let them (Kohanim) have women who have been with gentiles. | <urn:uuid:87ff480a-b2d1-422a-8668-28413d592c5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cbdyag.wordpress.com/author/ishtov/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962865 | 569 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Vitamin D May Extend Lifespan
The case for higher vitamin D levels is strongest for preventing heart disease, cancer, respiratory infections, tuberculosis, falls and fractures, and multiple sclerosis
Having enough vitamin D on board is essential for preventing disease and maintaining health, but the optimal blood level of vitamin D to ensure these benefits remains controversial. Preliminary research published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition estimates that by doubling current recommended vitamin D levels across the globe, more people would avoid disease and an early death, and people might extend their lifespans.
Higher levels, lower risk of death
Certain experts have questioned whether the current recommended blood levels and daily amounts of vitamin D are enough to best prevent disease and support health. This study looked at vitamin D levels across many countries and reviewed studies on the topic to explore whether higher blood levels of vitamin D, specifically 25-hydroxyvitamin D, were associated with a decreased incidence of death from common diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and respiratory infections.
Specifically, in this study, researchers reviewed the current scientific data on vitamin D to estimate whether higher blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (doubled from 54 nmol/L to 110 nmol/L) would reduce the death rate in the six global regions where vitamin D-sensitive diseases are prevalent.
The study authors comment, "Increasing . . . D levels is the most cost-effective way to reduce global mortality rates, as the cost of vitamin D is very low and there are few adverse effects from oral intake and/or frequent moderate UVB (ultraviolet-B) irradiance with sufficient body surface area exposed." As the conclusions from this study are based primarily on preliminary research (that is, observational studies rather than randomized controlled trials), further research is needed to support these findings.
Tips and facts about vitamin D
(Eur J Clin Nutr 2011; 1-11,doi:10.1038/ejcn.2011.68)
Jane Hart, MD, board-certified in internal medicine, serves in a variety of professional roles including consultant, journalist, and educator. Dr. Hart, a Clinical Instructor at Case Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, writes extensively about health and wellness and a variety of other topics for nationally recognized organizations, websites, and print publications. Sought out for her expertise in the areas of integrative and preventive medicine, she is frequently quoted by national and local media. Dr. Hart is a professional lecturer for healthcare professionals, consumers, and youth and is a regular corporate speaker. | <urn:uuid:ba4c2e0b-3d06-4dee-a4b4-5546eee7f9b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vitaminshoppe.com/content/en/healthguide/hncontent_printable.jsp?resource=/assets/feature/vitamin-d-may-extend-lifespan_14408_4/~default | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925291 | 520 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Tuesday's security update brings the number of Chrome flaws fixed in September to 26.
Of the 10 bugs patched earlier this week, one was rated "critical," the highest threat warning in Google's four-step system. Six were ranked as "high," the next step below critical, and three were labeled as only "low."
Google paid out $4,000 in bounties to four independent researchers for the six bugs they reported.
No details were available on any of the bugs, as Google's practice is to lock down its bug tracking database for entries that have just been patched. The company usually unlocks access several weeks after a patch ships to give users time to update before the vulnerabilities go public.
The one critical flaw is a Mac-only bug that Google said was a second crack at an earlier bug. Two others, both categorized as low-level threats, were Linux-only vulnerabilities.
Other just-patched bugs included a pair that addressed problems with parsing SVG (scalable vector graphics) elements embedded in Web sites, and a memory corruption vulnerability in Chrome's geolocation API, which lets Web application and site developers pinpoint users' location, typically on a map service like Google Maps.
Google switched on geolocation in Chrome in May.
Although Google raised the maximum bounty for reporting Chrome vulnerabilities to $3,133.70 in July, it has yet to issue any researcher that top-dollar reward. So far during September, Google has paid out $8,337 in bounties.
Hunting down Chrome bugs can be profitable. One researcher, identified only as "kuzzcc," has earned so far $3,000 this month -- and $5,000 in the last four weeks.
Researcher Sergey Glazunov has been paid $6,274 in the same period for reporting six browser flaws.
Tuesday's update to the "stable" channel -- Google maintains three different build lines for its browser -- was the second this month. Two weeks ago, Google celebrated the second anniversary of Chrome's launch by debuting Chrome 6 on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Google has picked up Chrome's upgrade pace, and has promised it will release a new version about every six weeks.
Chrome 7, which Brian Rakowski, Chrome's director of product management, said will ship in the next two months, will feature the first attempt by Google to accelerate page rendering and composition on Windows.
Chrome 6.0.472.59 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux at Google's Chrome home page. Users running the "stable" or "beta" builds will receive the security update automatically. | <urn:uuid:05eb45cd-5c5f-4957-9b4a-066d7fa0c2ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/security/3239951/google-patches-google-chrome-browser-again/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958833 | 538 | 1.5625 | 2 |
About Livable City
To create a balanced transportation system and promote complementary land use that supports a safer, healthier and more accessible San Francisco for everyone.
Download our 40-year plan, The Path to a Livable City.
Promote policies which shift travel from automobiles to more appropriate means.
Safety, livability, and economic vitality in a growing city are dependent on a reduction in our dependence on the automobile. To accomplish this goal, Livable City will promote the alternatives to the public, work with public agencies at their request to improve the provision of alternatives, and assist the various alternative transportation advocacy groups.
Improve the pedestrian environment.
Livable cities are built for walking, with bicycling and public transit as complementary modes. Livable City is working to integrate pedestrian improvements into neighborhood plans and street and corridor projects, advocate for completion of pedestrian projects citywide, support revitalization of the City's plazas and public open spaces, and support the efforts of neighborhood groups to improve the walkability of their neighborhoods through technical support and advocacy.
Livable City works with other pedestrian advocacy groups, including Walk San Francisco and Senior Action Network, to advocate for better planning, design, traffic management, education, and enforcement to improve pedestrian safety and promote walking in San Francisco.
Improve conditions for bicycling.
Support the Bicycle Coalition's charitable and educational efforts to promote the bicycle for everyday transportation. Livable City's goals include creating a bold and thorough bicylce plan for the city that will facilitate an increase in the percentage of trips made by bicycle from 3-5% today to 10% by 2015.
Improve public transit.
Muni will need continued public support to secure needed funding for operations, maintenance, and capital improvements and to establish transit priority in important corridors. Livable City worked to secure funding for Muni improvements in Propostion K, San Francisco's successful transportation sales tax, and is working to implement a citywide network of rapid transit and transit-priority routes that will improve Muni's speed and reliability, lower its operating costs, and attract new riders. Livable City also supports upgrading Caltrain to rapid transit-type service and extending it to the Transbay Terminal, and improving the accessibility and connectivity of the BART system.
Build an effective coalition for broad-based transportation reform.
Projects include our organization of a sustainable transportation summit, our participation in the Housing Action Coalition, greater participation by Livable City in the regional coalitions that already exist, and a new project to gain consensus support for the construction of significant amounts of affordable housing in walking-, biking-, and transit-accessible locations.
Integrate ecological design into the transportation system.
Transportation has an enormous impact on the local and global environment. 27% of the energy generated in the US goes to transportation, and transportation accounts for two-thirds of the petroleum consumed in the US. The waste and inefficiency built in to our automobile-based transportation system also threatens to consume greater and greater amounts of government and private resources; parking expert Donald Shoup estimates that the amount of money spent in the US each year subsidizing parking alone is equal to the amount spent on Medicare or national defense.
Livable City is dedicated to lessening the impact of transportation on the environment by encouraging human-powered transportation (walking and bicycling), discouraging automobile use, promoting compact and mixed-use development that minimizes the distance and cost of transport, and greening public transport by encouraging electrification of diesel bus and rail lines and improving the energy and resource efficiency of lighting, buildings, and vehicles. Livable City also supports integrating more "green infrastructure"street trees, landscaping, permeable paving, parks and squares, "green streets", greenways, and greenbeltsinto the city's transportation system.
Create a long-term, comprehensive traffic-calming plan for the City.
Livable City has worked over the past few years to change city standards and policies to include greater emphasis on pedestrian accessibility and safety in street design. We are working to make the city's upcoming streetscape master plan an opportunity to institute traffic calming measures on a citywide scale, as well as create detailed neighborhood-scale transportation and streetscape plans.
Create livable neighborhoods that support living, working, commerce, and culture, and maintain a diverse and distinct character.
The Livable Downtown campaign is working to create a neighborhood that feels like home to the thousands of new residents expected to live there within the next decade. Livable City scored a major victory for this campaign with the pending approval of reduced parking requirements for new housing in the downtown neighborhoods. The new downtown will definitely be a crowded neighborhood. Thanks to Livable City's advocacy it is more likely to be crowded with people walking and biking and playing and eating, and less likely to be crowded with traffic jams.
Reform parking policy to support livable and sustainable neighborhoods, reduce traffic and pollution, and direct subsidies away from cars and toward housing, transit, complete streets, and other neighborhood needs.
Complete the streets so that San Francisco's most important public spaces, its streets, should be safe and pleasant for all users in safety and comfort.
Create a great transit network for San Francisco and the region that is fast, reliable, sustainable, seamlessly connected, and fully accessible.
Build a greenway network, in collaboration with the Neighborhood Parks Council, seeks to create a network of “green streets” connecting green spaces throughout the city. Streets that feel more like parks than thoroughfares will go a long way toward making the city more livable!
Promote and support car-free living to ease the lives and increase the numbers of the 29% of San Francisco households who don't have cars.
A new name, and a new look...
In 2006, Transportation for a Livable City became Livable City. Transportation will remain a focus of what we do, but transportation is ultimately a means to the goal of livability, not an end in itself. In fact, the best cities require the least transportation, because they offer the greatest diversity of options for living, working, shopping, services, and experiences in the least space more joy with less waste. Our work also addresses issues such as housing, environmental quality, a sustainable economy, and public health that are essential elements of a livable city.
Livable City lacks the cute acronym, but the new name and our new tagline Great Streets, Complete Neighborhoods succinctly sum up our agenda to transform our city's neighborhoods into better, safer, more sustaining and sustainable places for people to live. | <urn:uuid:4bec9bce-3665-4788-8cdc-70d4c9fd0376> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.livablecity.org/about.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93834 | 1,336 | 1.765625 | 2 |
The last large-scale test of Mark 16 took place 15 years ago today (Nov. 18, 1978) in Jonestown, Guyana. Needless to say, it was a miserable failure. 909 persons died- -so many that a US Army Graves Registration Unit was sent in to identify and return the bodies.
The massacre was precitated by the visit of Congressman Leo Ryan who went to investigate charges that some members of the People's Temple, the Rev. Jim Jones's religious church, were being held there against their will. As Ryan's group prepared to depart, some members of the People's Temple opened fire, killing Ryan, three reporters, and a defector. Ten other people were wounded by the gunfire.
Following this, a vat of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide was prepared and Jones told them to drink it. Reportedly, most did so willingly. Those who resisted were shot or injected with poison. A few escaped. Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Jones had dabbled in numerous Christian denominations. He was ordained by the Disciples of Christ in 1964. He had been told by his mother since childhhood that he was a messiah and reportedly believed it.
The People's Temple was founded in Indianapolis in 1955 and moved to Ukiah, California in 1965. New People's Temples were opened in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1971. Jones became active in San Francisco politics and was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1976.
In that same year (1976), New West magazine published an expose of Jones, charging him with corruption, sadism, sexual perversions, and drug addiction. Jones quickly left San Francisco and a large part of his congregation followed. Two years later, most were dead.
Religious fanaticism and proclamations of prophethood can be much more than harmless eccentricities. | <urn:uuid:d542b197-814c-4b63-b35a-3bf8616b3351> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/rev-jone.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988449 | 384 | 1.960938 | 2 |
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The moral case for doing more to help the very poor is unanswerable. The practical case is more problematic: much foreign aid has been spent poorly in the past and we still have plenty to learn.
No one has done more to draw attention to the moral case than Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. But some other development economists argue that Professor Sachs’s flagship project, Millennium Villages, has passed up a chance to advance our knowledge of what works. A new report, written by Michael Clemens of a pro-aid think-tank, the Center for Global Development, and by Gabriel Demombynes of the World Bank’s Kenya office, criticises the Millennium Village programme for a lack of rigorous impact evaluation.
The Millennium Villages are over a dozen clusters sprinkled across Africa, with an average population of about 40,000 people. The basic idea is that an intensive package of aid – fertiliser, agronomical advice, mosquito nets, school meals, clinics, irrigation and more – can transform the lives of these very poor people. The project aims to become self-sustaining over time, so that villagers can “get on the ladder of development and start climbing on their own”. Another important element is the multifaceted intervention: Sachs says this is necessary because there will be “important synergies”.
Given the complexity of the aid package and the small number of pilot projects, it’s not feasible to evaluate every possible element of the villages with the gold standard of a randomised trial. But several evaluation experts told me that it would have been possible to evaluate the impact of the entire project by randomly assigning control and treatment villages, which would have provided a measure of whether the villages were achieving their goals.
Why might this matter? China’s Southwest Project, supported by the World Bank in the late 1990s, also took a multifaceted approach. At the time, the project looked terrific, but a later evaluation by the World Bank showed that non-project villages largely caught up with project villages within five years. The Millennium Villages hope for a longer-lived impact, but Clemens and Demombynes claim that the current evaluation methods in place will not determine whether they succeed.
They point out that the evaluations published so far on the Millennium Villages website offer simple before-after comparisons showing what’s happening on the ground. These are not the only plausible indicators of success. Demombynes says, “It’s very clear that you can’t use a simple before-after comparison, especially in Kenya.” For example, the evaluation shows that mobile phone use in the first village, Sauri in Kenya, has quadrupled. But, says Demombynes, “Mobile phone uptake has quadrupled in Sauri, in the region, and in Kenya as a whole.”
Adjusting for regional trends, Clemens and Demombynes conclude that the impact of the villages is real, but roughly half what the project’s backers claim. And they are worried about sustainability. They stress that their alternative estimate is itself imprecise compared with a true randomised trial.
Jeffrey Sachs robustly defended the Villages when I asked him to reply: he said it wasn’t appropriate to try to control for regional or national trends. Clemens and Demombynes, he wrote in an e-mail, “don’t seem to realize that the interventions we are pursuing in the MVs are also taking place, albeit more sporadically … in the rest of the country.”
Sachs and his colleagues argue that we will learn a lot from the ongoing process of managing, measuring and observing what works within the villages themselves. I agree. But I think it would have been possible and desirable to learn much more.
Tim Harford’s latest book is ‘Dear Undercover Economist’ (Little, Brown)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. You may share using our article tools.
Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. | <urn:uuid:3144b8d1-773c-48b2-a8da-ec244d8a8ba2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/692bb448-d66b-11df-81f0-00144feabdc0.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940928 | 901 | 2.375 | 2 |
Legacy in the Americas
The V7 was a low cost, high performance compact drive, operable in V/f or Open Loop Vector mode. In addition to good speed regulation, open loop vector control also provided higher torque at lower speeds. The V7 was ideally suited for applications such as conveyors, grinders, centrifuges, pumps, fans,blowers, machine tools, packaging, food processing, and commercial laundry.
The V7 / Configured package provided a V7 in a NEMA 1 or NEMA type12 enclosure, with space for several commonly used options, such as reactors, input filters, circuit breakers, etc.
The V7 Drive is a Legacy product and is no longer promoted in the Americas. Earlier versions of this product were named GPD 315/V7, GPD 315 or VS Mini V7. | <urn:uuid:825bb935-cd8f-4e9c-aa29-5435b0d75ebc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://yaskawa.com/site/products.nsf/products/Industrial%20AC%20Drives~V7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935715 | 175 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Bennett Dam spill ends
BC Hydro's spill on the WAC Bennett Dam is now over. Over the last 16 days, the power company conducted the spill - gushing a thousand cubic metres of water a second out of the Williston Reservoir.
Over 380 million litres of water poured into the Peace river, causing the river level to rise by a noticable amount.
This was the first time in a decade that a major spill was done at the bennett dam. According to Bob Gammer with BC Hydro, that caused a bit of a tourist boom. He says as many as 1100 people a day visited the Bennett Dam to take a peek at the spill. Gammer calls it a significant amount of traffic, as the dam usually sees about 11000 visitors a year.
Unusually high snow pack in the mountains prompted the spill, as BC Hydro worked to lower the Reservoir level. | <urn:uuid:dd719bd1-50d4-456d-ad25-54c76e5e46de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peacesunfm.com/News/Story.aspx?ID=1737158 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959853 | 182 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Zombie apocalypses are terrible for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the loss of the human race generally and loved ones more locally. It can be especially difficult to adjust to the zombification of a child, but before one literally throws the baby out with the bathwater, there are some important considerations to remember.
1. Assess if the baby or child is in fact, a zombie—Babies may cry through the night, or gurgle, but whatever they’re doing, all but the very youngest will change emotion or expression. Zombie babies will make more of a moaning sound with no other affect, and zombie children will persistently seek to bite others. Another telltale symptom is the lack of physical healing. Intentionally injuring a child to see if she or he recovers is anathema to human society and is not recommended, but it is understandable in the most dire of circumstances. The popular notion that one can try to watch their reaction while waving cow brains near them is a terrible, awful idea and should not be entertained.
2. Once zombie status is determined, children and babies must be carefully quarantined—Fortunately, zombie babies can be swaddled anywhere from several days to indefinitely, depending on the reason for the zombification, as they need little to no sustenance. Swaddling babies can be difficult, however, and should only be approached with multiple layers of long sleeves and gloves. Under no circumstances should a mother attempt to breastfeed a zombie baby. For children under 90 pounds, quarantine should occur in rooms with no windows, because these are easy exits for a small zombie with a craving for brains. Sheds are also poor quarantine quarters; zombie children will not hesitate to dig under the outbuilding in order to escape. Call your local Zombie Infection Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to schedule a transfer to a nearby Quarantine Center.
See: Pamplet on Locating a Quarantine Center
3. Direct anger away from zombie babies and children—Scientists around the globe are searching for a remedy to our collective predicament; in case of a cure or treatment, we need our youngest generation to be in the best condition possible for re-introduction to human life. While it is reasonable to defend oneself by any means necessary against adult zombie attacks, zombie children and babies should still be considered somewhat more vulnerable, and pains should be taken to avoid misdirecting frustration at them, even during this crisis.
4. Register with the Zombie Infectious Service of the CDC—In addition to providing quarantine services free of charge, an identified baby or child will be among the first to receive new treatments or cures. Do not hesitate to tell health officials that you know of a zombified minor. Dedicated staff want to protect our citizens pre-infection, during zombification, and post-infection. | <urn:uuid:74927820-4996-4685-a8c9-5b388af4b42d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://transplantportation.com/2011/06/27/how-to-care-for-your-zombie-baby/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941927 | 589 | 2.578125 | 3 |
(September 2010) 16 tracks: The King Has Landed In Moidart (The Drambuie Kirkliston Pipe Band) * An Fhideag Airgid (Karen Matheson) * Came Ye Ower Frae France (The Whistlebinkies) * Charlie's Landing (Jean Redpath) * McLean's Welcome (The McCalmans) * Glenfinnan Highland Gathering / John Roy Stewart / Eight Men Of Moidart (The Drambuie Kirkliston Pipe Band) * Agus Ho Mhorag (Joan Mackenzie) * The News From Moidart (Wha'll Be King But Charlie?) (The Corries) * White Cockade (Sangsters) * Bonnie Prince Charlie (The McCalmans) * Rise, Rise, Lowland And Highland Men (The McCalmans) * Wha Widnae Fecht For Charlie (1st Battalion The Black Watch Pipe Band) * The Battle Of Prestonpans (The Corries) * Lady Frances Gardiner's Lament (Coreen Scott) * Johnnie Cope (Ceolbeg with Davy Steele) * Sound The Pibroch (The Panel Beaters). A companion album to The Prestonpans Tapestry, one of Scotland's most significant and ambitious community projects.A compilation of music and songs connected with the Battle Of Prestonpans, featuring artists Karen Matheson (Capercaillie), The Corries, The Whistlebinkies, The Panel Beaters, Jean Redpath, The McCalmans, Ceolbeg (with Davy Steele), Coreen Scott, Sangsters and The Drambuie Kirkliston Pipe Band. The Prestonpans Tapestry is 104 metres in length, was stitched by 200 women and 2 men, involved 25,000 hours of work, has 10 million stitches, used up 3,000 metres of thread and took over 18 months to create - both The Baron Of Prestongrange, who gave birth to the idea, and Andrew Crummy, the tapestry designer, believe it to be the longest tapestry in the world. The Tapestry was launched in Prestonpans in July 2010 and subsequently went on exhibition in Eriskay, followed by other locations around Scotland and abroad. The music on this album was played at all these exhibitions.Much of the music and song on this compilation is depicted in the panels of the Tapestry. The album opens with a very atmospheric arrangement of a fraction of the pibroch The King Has Landed In Moidart, followed by songs welcoming Bonnie Prince Charlie to Scotland, such as the Gaelic song An Fhideag Airgid (The Silver Whistle), Came Ye Ower Frae France, Charlie's Landing, McLean's Welcome and the well-known tune Eight Men Of Moidart. These all herald Charlie's arrival, his landing in Scotland and the raising of his standard on 19th August 1745. We then follow with the stirring News From Moidart and songs urging support for the Cause, calling the Clans to arms. Examples are Bonnie Prince Charlie, Rise! Rise! Lowland And Highland Men and Wha Widnae Fecht For Charlie. The White Cockade is the badge worn on the bonnet to symbolise the white rose identified with the Stuart Cause. Agus Ho Mhorag is a second Gaelic song, seemingly expressing love for, and a welcome to, 'a golden-haired girl', but is actually worded to mask Jacobite sympathies. The Battle Of Prestonpans is a shortened version of the vivid and at times humorous account of the battle, while Johnnie Cope mocks the rout of General Sir John Cope's army and his flight from the battlefield. These two songs are separated by a recent poem, The Lady Frances Gardiner's Lament, set to the music of the Robert Burns' song Lord Gregory and recounts the death of Colonel Gardiner of Bankton House, Prestonpans. These are amongst the finest songs and music, old and new, relevant to the events of 1745.While the tapestry was being completed, Ian Green of Greentrax dropped in to view it and found several of the stitchers singing as they worked, a well-documented Scottish tradition. It occurred to him it would be most appropriate to record the women for a track on the album - the ladies named themselves The Panel Beaters and were recorded singing a spirited version of Sound The Pibroch. | <urn:uuid:bf15addb-743c-4af3-a712-44b02c68bc7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.musicscotland.com/cd/the-battle-of-prestonpans-1745-music-and-song-of-the-campaign.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923526 | 935 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Hands On: Sports massage is bringing new clients—and additional
revenue—into health club spas.
When people come into the spa at Old Palm Golf Club's fitness center in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, it's most likely that they're coming in for a massage. And nine times out of 10, even when members and nonmembers schedule a traditional Swedish massage, they're looking for more.
Shayne Kohn, spa and fitness director at the facility, says that the “more” they are looking for is improving their golf games.
“Sports massage is probably our No. 2 or No. 3 most popular offering on our menu,” Kohn says. “Traditional is most popular, but we're a golfing community, and we hire massage therapists that have extra training in deep tissue massage and sports massage just for that.”
Although the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) reports that fewer clubs are offering massage (45.5 percent of IHRSA club members offer massage today, down from 50 percent in 2001), experts say that sports massage is becoming more popular in the clubs that do offer massage. Forty percent of all massage therapists in the United States offer sports massage, according to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA), a nonprofit professional association for massage therapists. Sports massage is a specialized form of therapeutic massage that focuses specifically on muscles that are used most during a client's sport or regular activity.
Health clubs and massage go hand in hand, says Robert King, founder and past president of the Chicago School of Massage Therapy and past national president of the AMTA.
“Since health and fitness clubs promote exercise, weight training, and group sport and exercise activities, it stands to reason to have massage therapists on staff who specialize in repetitive strain and other types of injury as well as myofascial or deep tissue massage, which is anatomically precise to specific areas of breakdown in the athlete,” King says. “The always popular relaxation massage does not adequately address soft tissue adhesions or tendinitis injuries. Nor does it offer the specific stretches or techniques to maximize peak performance.”
As more health clubs offer sports-specific personal training and programming, the demand for sports massage in fitness facilities is even greater. Sports massage can offer another dimension of service to a health club, King says.
“[Sports massage] receives tremendous acceptance and approval from athletes in all major sports,” he says. “Many baseball, football and basketball teams now have their own sports massage therapist on staff. Why shouldn't a premier membership club?”
Here's the Rub
Part of the reason that massage — including sports massage — is becoming more popular is that many members no longer see massage as a luxury item. Many members treat sports massage as an essential part of their sports training or as the key to better workouts in the gym, experts say.
Many of the members of the Old Palm Golf Club get sports massages to increase their flexibility and have a quicker recovery from games, Kohn says.
“Getting a massage used to be for only the high end — an indulgence — but we're seeing more [members who see massage] now as something they need to incorporate in life for health and wellness,” she says.
Sports massage sessions have picked up in popularity at Zenergy Health Club and Day Spa, which is located in a resort community in Ketchum, ID. During the facility's peak usage times of summer and December, sports massage therapists provide 30 to 40 sessions a week. During slower times of the year, the spa provides about 10 sessions a week, says Elizabeth Furuiye, day spa manager for the facility.
“Our clientele includes former professional athletes, as well as former Olympians — all the way down to those who simply live here to experience the outdoor environment to the maximum,” she says. “In order to accommodate the needs of these people, we have found that sports massage is a fantastic fit for the high-end athlete, as well as the weekend warrior.”
Club One's 13 locations in Northern California have offered sports massage since the inception of its massage program in 1991. About 2 percent to 3 percent of the facility's members use the Club One spas, says Phil Okazaki, regional spa director for the club company.
The clubs' spas are open to both members and nonmembers and have seen a marked improvement in revenue in the past few years, Okazaki says. The facility offers traditional therapeutic massage for acute and chronic injury rehabilitation, pre-event sports massage 48 hours to 20 minutes before a client's athletic event or competition, post-event sports massage at least 20 minutes after an athletic event, and maintenance sports massage.
Club One locations, which include Frog's Fitness facilities in San Diego, charge $70 to $95 for 60-minute massages and $95 to $120 for 90-minute massages. The charge varies depending on the location and whether or not the client is a member.
Sports massage has “absolutely been profitable” at Zenergy Health Club and Day Spa, Furuiye says. Pricing is in line with other massages offered, she says.
According to the AMTA, an average 60-minute massage costs $60, although this can vary widely from city to city, experts say. Many facilities charge a bit more for sports massage, too. Old Palm Golf Club charges $80 for a 50-minute traditional massage and $120 for 80 minutes. For sports massages, the club charges $90 for 50 minutes and $130 for 80 minutes.
Sports massage isn't bringing in just additional revenue. It's also bringing in more men than traditional massage, which typically draws a female crowd.
At Mill Valley Health Club & Spa in Mill Valley, CA, the demographics for sports massage is diverse, says Karsson Bartlett, certified massage therapist at the club.
“I see women and men, old and young, new athletes and those that have been athletes their whole lives,” she says. “The one commonality, however, is that each person realizes the positive effects that sports massage can have on their particular workout, as well as the overall success associated with taking care of your body as a whole.”
Although there are no statistics on sports massage specifically, AMTA research shows that Baby Boomers pay for more traditional massages than other age groups. Those surveyed between the ages of 45 to 64 years old had an average of seven massages during the last year, compared to an average of five massages for people 18 to 44.
That's the case at Zenergy's spa, where Boomers are the largest client group for massage, including sports massage. Other clients include triathletes in their 30s and former professional athletes in their 70s and 80s.
“Most often, though, I would say it is the 40- to 55-year-old range — those who have played hard for a long time and are now facing rehab from an injury or surgery, or are trying to avoid either of those two things,” Furuiye says.
Clubs must educate their members on the benefits of sports massage to sell the service, experts say. Facilities can do this through cross promotion. Club One locations encourage their fitness, group exercise and Pilates staffs to refer their clients to the spa for a massage. The company also displays marketing and educational messages throughout their clubs to promote the benefits of massage, Okazaki says.
“We use the many special events that Club One hosts to promote and educate our members and their guests,” he says. “The best form of marketing is word of mouth.”
Bartlett works closely with Mill Valley Health Club & Spa's personal training department staff members to show them the positive effects of sports massage first-hand. The trainers then promote sports massage to their clients, she says.
To attract more golfers, Kohn sets up a massage chair at most of the facility's golf tournaments and offers complimentary short massages to the golfers. The tournaments are one of the best ways for the Old Palm Golf Club to recruit new clients.
“Men who have never had a massage can get acquainted in a comfortable atmosphere and meet the therapists,” Kohn says. “Later on, they'll call for that same person because they felt comfortable with that staff member. Men don't even normally realize what we have at the spa.”
Old Palm Golf Club also packages its services, combining a 10-session personal training package or a golf conditioning class with a complimentary sports massage. The sports massage acts as a teaser, and most people who get one return for another, Kohn says.
Offering sports massage doesn't take many additional resources beyond what's needed for traditional massage. A massage table, linens (sometimes heated blankets are used, too), laundry services, oils and lotions are the staples. A quality massage table costs anywhere from $250 to more than $400, and lotions and oils are a nominal cost, Kohn says.
Philippe Therene, manager of the Spa Accounts division at SpaEquip Inc., says additional planning is necessary when adding sports massage. Although most sessions can be done in a traditional massage room, a facility may need to hire additional certified and qualified massage therapists to cover the additional sessions.
“The number of treatment rooms will depend on the demand, and a member survey can help determine the need for such services,” Therene says. “Also, an analysis of competitive clubs and how successful they are with their spa services [is needed].”
Therene recommends that clubs in markets where massages have become mainstream among the general population should consider offering sports massage, which may give a fitness center a competitive edge to attract new members, he says.
If a club doesn't have the space to offer sports massage or even a spa, Kohn, who also is president of Spachitects, a spa and fitness development company, suggests finding a nearby day spa and beginning a referral program. Both businesses can offer special rates for their respective services.
“Try this for a bit before you add it, and be sure to track your results,” Kohn says. “Ask yourself if it's something really worth adding.”
If the market is right, though, and programming is planned well, sports massage can add credibility and excitement to a facility, King says.
“It has been shown to enhance range of motion, reduce trigger points and areas of soreness, and return the athlete or club member back towards optimal function as quickly as possible,” he says. “This adds integrity to the various massage therapy offerings of any club.”
Tips for Implementing A Successful Sports Massage Program
- Create a clear identity
Find therapists who have a strong knowledge or background with kinesiology, physiology and anatomy, and try to create an environment that is both comfortable and somewhat clinical.
- Educate your members
Most members don't understand the value of a massage as an integral part of a health and wellness program. Put up posters, hold seminars or distribute brochures on the positive effects of sports massage.
- Find the right therapists that fit your demographics
Find a quality therapist, regardless of gender. Some members may feel uncomfortable with a male therapist, but don't let this limit your hiring pool.
- Find the right massage director
A good massage director has previous hands-on experience in the field, along with a deeper understanding of the demands of the position. Many times, spa staff members can feel misunderstood and alienated from the main fitness center staff. A quality director bridges that gap.
Source: Phil Okazaki, regional spa director, Club One
“How to Take the ‘Fluff’ Out of Sports Massage,” http://fitnessbusinesspro.com/stepbystep/spas/sports-massage-business/index.html
“What Is Therapeutic Sports Massage?” http://fitnessbusinesspro.com/for-profits/therapeutic-sports-massage-2606
“Strengthen Your Competitive Edge with Massage,” http://fitnessbusinesspro.com/stepbystep/spas/fitness-facility-massage/index.html | <urn:uuid:d9990893-1738-482a-a3ab-50b5efab4ba3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://clubindustry.com/forprofits/sports-massage-gaining-popularity-spas | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95389 | 2,570 | 1.539063 | 2 |
About the Author
Brenna Maloney learned at a young age to look at ordinary things in extraordinary ways. She started by making sock bunnies as baby gifts. After her “4 millionth” rabbit, she realized there were lots of other critters to create. Brenna and her family live in Washington, D.C.
Let your imagination run wild!
- 16 new fun-to-make sock creatures, from cute and cuddly to weird and wild!
- Transform any sock—new socks, stray socks or even socks with holes in them—into an adorable critter
- Projects can be sewn by hand or machine
Brenna is back with a new posse of cute creatures! Take your socks a step further with slightly more complex construction and endless inspiration. From a lovable bear to some very fluffy sheep to a quirky alien, these 16 projects will surely keep you entertained for hours. Detailed hand-drawn templates are included to guide you along the way. | <urn:uuid:8bbca349-c6e0-4cf5-b966-1c6618d74c24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stashbooksblog.com/products/sockology/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941032 | 207 | 1.546875 | 2 |
This is an important new book published to accompany a major new British Library exhibition, Henry VIII: Man and Monarch (22nd April-6 September 2009) and the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession to the throne. There is renewed public interest in Henry VIII. 2009 marks the 500th anniversary of his accession to the throne, plus several high profile publications and events. This book is co-edited and with contributions from David Starkey, the highly-regarded historian and author of many books on Tudor history, most recently 'Henry: Virtuous Prince' (HarperPress 2008) and Dr Susan Doran (the same team that produced the bestselling 'Elizabeth I' exhibition catalogue in 2003). The catalogue will be very handsomely produced. It will include colour illustrations of all 250 exhibits, together with related material. More than a dozen notable scholars have contributed to it, including Eamon Duffy, James Carley, John Guy, Diarmaid McCulloch and Eric Ives. A related 4-part series by David Starkey will be broadcast simultaneously on Channel 4. | <urn:uuid:384084f4-4d6b-4994-97ae-c3f9dcb6a9fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amazon.co.uk/Henry-VIII-Monarch-Susan-Doran/dp/071235025X | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949887 | 219 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Teaching Shakespeare Workshop
An intensive credit-bearing weekend course:
combination of face-to-face learning on June 23 - 25, 2012
& online learning from May 14 - July 6, 2012.
A collaboration between the Departments of Theatre and English at the University of South Dakota.
Teaching Shakespeare Workshop:
Course: THEA/ENGL 493/593: Teaching Shakespeare
Current USD Students, please register through WebAdvisor
If you are not a current USD student please Register using this Registration Form.
Designed for high school teachers, graduate students, and undergraduate students interested in teaching Shakespeare, this 3-credit course will expose participants to a wide variety of new techniques and approaches to bringing Shakespeare's work and words to life for today's high school students and lower-level undergraduates. The course will culminate with participants creating, teaching, receiving feedback on, and revising their own Shakespeare lesson plans. Students will engage with one another on-line and then spend an intensive three-day weekend in Vermillion for classroom work. Students must be prepared to engage through on-line access prior to the course and after the weekend to enrich and continue the experience. This course is being team-taught by faculty of Theatre and English and will expose participants to a rich and diverse experience in learning fresh, new approaches to teaching Shakespeare.
South Dakota K-12 teachers who register for the Teaching Shakespeare Workshop may be eligible for South Dakota's reduced tuition program, which typically pays half tuition.
Workshop Activities Include:
Engaging students in Shakespeare's drama
Putting Shakespeare in its feet
Unlocking the language of the plays
Scene work and analysis from Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet
And much more!
Who Should Attend?
High School Teachers: Use this program to re-invigorate your high school students' interactions with Shakespeare in theatre programs and English classrooms.
Graduate Students (in Theatre, English or Education): Apply these credits toward your USD graduate degree or check with your University about transferring the credits.
Upper-Level Undergraduate Students (in Education): Apply these credits toward your USD undergraduate degree and gain valuable material for your teaching portfolio.
Workshop Schedule:Classes will be held from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Saturday- Monday, June 23 - 25, 2012 in the Arena Theatre in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts on the University of South Dakota Campus. Coffee and rolls will be provided in the morning, and there will be an hour lunch break each day. The course will conclude with a closing reception.
For More Information:
For more information about the Teaching Shakespeare Workshop, please contact The Division of Continuing & Distance Education at 605-677-6240 or email@example.com; Chaya Gordon-Bland at 605-677-5419 or Chaya.Gordon-Bland@usd.edu; or Darlene Farabee at 605-677-5229 or Darlene.Farabee@usd.edu. | <urn:uuid:de2583a7-42a0-458b-a07d-0920af2f0355> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usd.edu/summer-school/teaching-shakespeare.cfm?renderforprint=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903212 | 632 | 1.773438 | 2 |
ENB - Region 7 Notices 01/13/2010
Broome and Chenango Counties - The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC), as lead agency, has determined that the proposed Adoption of the Chenango Trail Unit Management Plan will not have a significant adverse environmental impact. The action involves the identification of the goals, objectives, and management actions for 5,458 acres of State forests located in southern Chenango County. The plan addresses issues on six separate State forests: Chenango RA #10, Chenango RA #13, Chenango RA #27, Chenango RA #30, Chenango RA #33 and Broome-Chenango RA #1. The management activities are proposed over a 20 year period, ending in 2029. A review and update process will take place at the end of the 10th year. Public comment was solicited through a public meeting held in 2007. The public input received full consideration prior to the completion of the final plan.
General management activities proposed in the plan include: boundary line surveys and maintenance; forest cover inventory; commercial timber harvesting and timber stand improvement cuts; shrub land maintenance; protection of wetlands and riparian areas; protection of natural areas; maintenance of public forest access roads; establishment of forest information kiosks and accessible parking areas; maintenance of recreational trails; development of natural gas wells and infrastructure and monitoring of unique wildlife and vegetative species. The Chenango Trail Unit Management Plan was approved and signed by the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on December 8, 2009. The project is located in the Towns of Coventry, Greene, Oxford, Afton, Bainbridge in Chenango County and the Town of Colesville in Broome County, New York.
Contact: Andrew Goeller, NYS DEC - Region 7 Sherburne Sub Office, 2715 Route 80, Sherburne, NY 13460, Phone: (607) 674-4036.
Oswego County - The Town of Richland, as lead agency, has determined that the proposed Town of Richland Water District No. 2 will not have a significant adverse environmental impact. The action involves the installation of 28 miles of 8 inch Ductile Iron water main, 1 mile of 12 inch Ductile Iron water main, two (2) control valve stations, rehabilitation of existing Schoeller water source wells, a new chlorination facility and a new 300,000 gallon water storage tank. The Full EAF and Negative Declaration were revised to include the installation of a 100 kW vertical wind turbine at the Schoeller Well Site, and the installation of a Central Water Works Facility. The project is located at Schoeller Well Site in the Town of Richland, New York.
Contact: Ron Crandall, Town of Richland, H. Douglas Barclay Courthouse, P.O. Box 29, Pulaski, NY 13142, Phone: (315) 298-5175, E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:c1ad2987-3b94-4577-971e-32cd02e61e1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dec.ny.gov/enb/20100113_not7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916293 | 624 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Among the provisions:
- Creates a new independent watchdog, housed at the Federal Reserve, with the authority to ensure American consumers get the clear, accurate information they need to shop for mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products, and protect them from hidden fees, abusive terms, and deceptive practices.
- Eliminates loopholes that allow risky and abusive practices to go on unnoticed and unregulated — including loopholes for over-the-counter derivatives, asset-backed securities, hedge funds, mortgage brokers and payday lenders.
- Provides shareholders with a say on pay and corporate affairs with a non-binding vote on executive compensation and golden parachutes.
- Provides tough new rules for transparency and accountability for credit rating agencies to protect investors and businesses.
- Strengthens oversight and empowers regulators to aggressively pursue financial fraud, conflicts of interest and manipulation of the system that benefits special interests at the expense of American families and businesses.
A thoughtful individual would have to wonder why any citizen would balk at such corporate regulation. In fact it seems odd that any legitimate corporation should put up such resistance. These changes don’t require an expenditure of money, they don’t require costly changes. At best the corporations involved might have to hire a few clerical employees, and an executive or two to mandate compliance.
Point is, under DeMint’s tutelage the Tea Party favors negation of the Wall Street Reform and Protection Act.
The Tea Party is convinced that Obama is wasting the dollars of American Taxpayers when he stimulates a failing economy with Job Programs. There is some precedent. In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, coming face to face with the Great Depression, created the WPA Work Projects Administration as part of a "New Deal", employing millions of unskilled workers to build roads and public buildings, including parks and schools, in rural and Western areas. Provisions were made for arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. Children were fed and clothed. In nearly every community was a school or road, or public building constructed by the WPA. | <urn:uuid:76308a0d-f13c-47e5-89f8-1c2525ef2762> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/citizen-activism-a-new-designation-for/page-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944608 | 421 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Junior High age kids are the most difficult to parent, in my opinion. They are old enough to want and need more responsibility and more freedom, but too young to allow me to be comfortable in letting them loose on the world unsupervised.
It is a long walk on a frayed tightrope, for sure.
You do have to allow them freedom, and realize that they are going to mess up once in a while. Your child needs to know that you recognize that he is growing up and more mature.
The real concern for me was their safety. At 13 or 14 they are still not too old to be preyed upon by unscrupulous people, you know? For me, the answer has been in a group mentality.
I am not so uncomfortable with my 12-14 year old heading to the movies or the mall with a group of his friends. There is safety in numbers, and a serious problem is less likely when there are several kids together.
Staying home alone and babysitting are two more significant issues. My kids rarely have an opportunity to stay home alone because with a large family, there is almost always someone home. However, I have left kids as young as 10 home alone for brief periods of time.
I do not think it is a great idea to let kids have friends over when adults aren’t present – and honestly that is the rule that stands until my kids leave home. I allow a few exceptions with my older kids if I know the friend very well.
I know that peer pressure is hard to resist, even as an adult, and I don’t want it to be a problem that causes one of my kids to do something dangerous or stupid.
Babysitting is an entirely different thing. When I was a kid, I was allowed to babysit at age 10, but it was for the next door neighbors.
Babysitting for people you know is reasonable at age 12, especially if they are in your neighborhood. I try to wait until 14 before I let my kids babysit for someone I don’t know really well, or someone that lives more than a half mile away.
Then there is the dating thing. I am always amazed that kids pair up as early as they do. I don’t allow dating in the traditional sense – and my kids never really date anyway until after they are 18. They do go places and hang out with a group of friends, which I feel is much healthier anyway.
Obviously, for me, a group mentality is the key.
When it comes to personal freedoms like picking out clothing, shoes, and establishing a personal style, I try to guide without controlling. I do try to give kids as much freedom to experiment with their “look†as possible at this age. Hair, make-up, and clothing (within reason) are areas where kids can begin to establish their freedom.
What are your rules for middle schoolers? How do you give them freedom without giving them more than they can handle? | <urn:uuid:87a07da0-52a8-420a-8bd2-ae3a73805f74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://modernbaby.com/jr-high-freedoms-how-much-is-too-much/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981113 | 698 | 1.515625 | 2 |
A Media Matters analysis of wildfire coverage in July finds that nearly 14 percent of articles and segments mentioned climate change -- over four times more than in previous months.
Seven out of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed that journalists covering wildfires in the Western U.S. should discuss how human-induced climate change increases the risk of wildfires in that region. A report commissioned by the Bush administration stated that "a nearly fourfold increase in large wildfires in recent decades" in the West is "strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt, which have cause drying of soils and vegetation." Yet our previous analysis of wildfire coverage from April through June found that journalists mentioned climate change in only 3 percent of coverage (1.6 percent of television segments and 5.9 percent of print articles).
Using the same methodology, we found that climate change was mentioned in 13.8 percent of coverage in July (10.6 percent of television segments and 17.8 percent of print articles). Nearly every outlet included in our analysis improved by this measure, particularly CBS, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. However, there were still many reports that missed the opportunity to inform their audiences about what scientists are telling us about wildfire risk.
Jill Fitzsimmons contributed to this report. The graphics for this report were created by Drew Gardner. | <urn:uuid:ee7b4e01-cbb2-4f05-aafb-a3a6905165d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/06/study-media-begin-to-connect-the-dots-between-c/189144 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972053 | 274 | 2.625 | 3 |
Media Minute: What’s in a name?
By Jerry Brown, APR
If so, you have FBI Agent Harry Trombitas to thank. Frustrated by being unable to get attention for a rash of bank robberies in central Ohio in the 1990s, Trombitas started coming up with catchy nicknames for some of the criminals he was trying to collar. He’s been doing it ever since. And it’s resulted in a dramatic increase in media coverage that helped solve some of the crimes.
What Trombitas did is an excellent use of PR to get attention. Trombitas himself is in the news this week because he’s retiring. I’d never heard of Trombitas until yesterday, when I saw a story about his retirement. But I’ve heard about some of his bandits who got national notoriety because of the names he gave them. Even if you haven’t heard of any of them, I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who’s lived in the part of Ohio where he works has. And his retirement is making national news because of what he accomplished.
Stumped when it comes to finding a hook to get your story noticed? Maybe you can follow Trombitas’s example and come up with a catchy name or activity that will help you get attention.
One of my favorite examples, which I’ve used before in the Media Minute, is Butterball. Through the simple tactic of renaming their company call center Butterball University and making the woman who manages the center the “dean” of the “university,” Butterball gets an amazing amount of national publicity every Thanksgiving and Christmas by offering free phone help to cooks all over America who need help getting an edible turkey onto the table.
Butterball could get some of that publicity just for the free advice they offer. But the use of the Butterball University name makes it an easier story to sell — and means much more publicity than they would get otherwise.
What’s your hook for your story?
That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours? | <urn:uuid:f7d6a270-e23b-4484-8c6f-b124f295be3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pr-impact.com/mediaminuteblog/?tag=media-minute-whats-in-a-name | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949222 | 452 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Dr. Scott W. Nixon
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Dr. Scott W. Nixon from an apparent heart attack on the evening of Monday, May 21, 2012. Despite some earlier heart problems, he seemed to be in good health, was working actively as usual, and his death is a shock to us all. Scott was a long time member of ASLO and served as a member-at-large to the ASLO Board of Directors in 1984-1987. A memorial service will be held in honor of Scott at 10:30 a.m. on Friday June 8th at The Towers, 35 Ocean Road, Narragansett, RI. All friends and colleagues are welcome. Please check the URI Graduate School of Oceanography’s website for updates and other information:
Scott served the University community and the oceanographic research community for more than four decades, which included roles as director of Rhode Island Sea Grant, vice-chair of a National Research Council committee on Everglades Restoration, URI's UNESCO-Cousteau Chair of Coastal Ecology and Global Assessment, a member of the National Research Council's Ocean Studies Board, a national associate of the National Academies of Science, chair of the NRC committee to review the Florida Keys Carrying Capacity Assessment Model, and member of the NRC committee to review the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Plan. He was a past co-editor-in-chief of Estuaries and Coasts; and a member of the Environmental Protection Agency's Massachusetts Bay Outfall Monitoring Scientific Advisory Committee.
Scott was a world leader in the study of how coastal and estuarine ecosystems work, initially using Narragansett Bay as his laboratory and employing mesocosms to measure respiration and production at a community level. This began a long and detailed exploration of the bay, especially the role nutrients play in its ecology. While his findings helped define our understanding of marine ecosystems locally, Scott applied his knowledge at broader scales, too, exploring marine ecosystems around the world, comparing and contrasting them to shape a global view that he then used to challenge himself to think in new ways and to challenge the scientific dogma of the times.
Scott was dedicated to students and he played a significant role in the lives of many graduate students who have since gone on to impressive careers in the sciences, where they continue his tradition of exploring new avenues of thought and understanding.
Scott was a vital and vibrant member of the ASLO community and he will be sorely missed. | <urn:uuid:5d4e4c05-6068-4dcf-8cad-8340c586f764> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aslo.org/announce/nixon.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964377 | 510 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Found 2 moth specimens at rest in North Point, Hong Kong the last week of September, 1999. Another fresh female was found on September 25, 2001 in Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong. The 2 mature larvae pictured below were found at Fairview Park, Yuen Long, Hong Kong on October 20 and November 7, 1999. They were feeding on Vinca (Periwinkle). Four larvae were found in the first week of January, 1997, near the North Point ferry terminus, also feeding on Vinca. Three were in the final instar. Another mature larva was found October 7, 2002 at Fairview Park, feeding on Apocynaceae Adenium obesum (Desert Rose), reportedly the main foodplant in Africa. As the name implies, it also feeds on Oleander. A mature larva, three 1st-instar larvae and 2 ova were found October 22, 2002 in Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong on Vinca. Also in Shau Kei Wan, two mature larvae were found on January 2 and two 3rd instar larvae on January 8, 2003, on Vinca.
This ova was laid on the underside of a Vinca leaf, near the middle vein.
Diameter was about 1.5 mm / 0.06 inch
1st instar larva, about two days old; length about 1 cm / 0.4 inch.
2nd instar larva; length about 2 cm / 0.8 inch.
3rd instar larva; length about 3 cm / 1.2 inch.
An example of a green larva, 84mm / 3.3 inches long.
The instensity of the blue-green eye-spots can vary.
Note the changing appearance of the tail horn; instar stage
can be determined from these consistent changes.
The mature larva may occur in the 4th or 5th instar.
The brown form of the mature larva.
This form is not common and seems only to occur with the final instar change.
This was only the second brown one found since 1997.
Top and underside of a pre-pupal larva, about 64 mm / 2.5 inches long.
Note the very short tail horn.
Dorsal and ventral views of the pupa, formed on Oct 25, 1999.
The sides have a row of 7 large, black spots.
The male moth emerged at night on Nov 4, 1999.
The moth in rest position.
Top and Underside views of moth;
Wingspan is about 85.7 mm / 3.4 inch
Back to Critters Page
This WebPage and Site authored and maintained wholly by Light Creations.
Please direct all questions, queries and comments to: David L. Mohn
Copyright Light Creations 1993-2005 - All Rights Reserved.
This page last updated 9-Jan-2003. | <urn:uuid:e901191a-8b60-4318-b53a-8fcc8e320220> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ccs-hk.org/DM/butterfly/Sphingid/Daphnis-nerii.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960163 | 615 | 2.09375 | 2 |
By ANDREA JAY
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Let’s do some bean counting: There are 14,000 species in the leguminous family but only 22 are grown for human consumption. That means that 13,978 varieties are like most people who go to work every day — they show up, but don’t actually do much.
Our little bean friends play an important role in helping with crop rotation, sucking up nitrogen from the air and passing it into the soil. Many people can’t tolerate beans which is a nice way to say that they cause flatulence. That’s because beans contain complex sugars which can’t be digested by your enzymes. Enzymes hungrily tear into stomached beans and release gasses as a waste product. So that’s why people don’t eat beans “al dente” — cooking is an important step in reducing gaseous wastes.
When you look at a bag of dry, packaged beans in the supermarket, it looks healthily benign. When you buy beans from a bin, however, they may be harboring the following insidious freeloaders: Pebbles, dirt, leaves, twigs, grit or some kind of foreign matter. Don’t let that stop you! Bet you didn’t know that an Ohio University fact sheet estimates that we eat from one to two pounds of insects a year without knowing it. At this point, you’re saying, “No, no not from my beans!”
Think I’m kidding? The FDA knows that there are “natural contaminants” in your foods and has available a Web site explaining the “Food Defect Action Levels” in your processed and unprocessed foods — go to hhs.gov. and put “defect level handbook” in the search field.) That’s why it’s so important to pour dried beans into a strainer and rinse them, looking for what the FDA calls “unavoidable defects.”
BAD STUFF ASIDE
Now that we’ve gotten that unpalatable information out of the way, let’s soak our beans. Simply put them into a bowl and cover with lots of water overnight. But whatever you do, don’t cook the beans in that water or you’ll be sorry. Do not add salt or baking soda to the water either, no matter what your grandmother told you. This makes them tough and leathery. Well, you would be tough and leathery too if soaked overnight in salt or baking soda!
On the back of most bean bags, a table of soaking and cooking times tells you that you only have to cook soaked kidney beans for an hour and a half; but I cook them for at least two hours. Of course, if you use canned beans, you don’t have to worry about soaking them, though you should drain them before using. Soak overnight. After draining them the next day, put the beans you are not using yet into a plastic bag in the freezer for use another time.
(Makes 4 to 6 generous servings)
1 pound bag dried beans, soaked
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 large onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 peeled zucchini squash
1 large fresh tomato, chopped
½ cup red wine
1 can (28 ounces) of whole tomatoes
1 vegetable bouillon cube, preferably Knorr’s
1 tablespoon liquid amino, preferably Bragg Liquid Amino
1 handful ground pasilla chili or other mild chili powder
1 tablespoon hot chili powder
¾ package (1-pound) red kidney beans, soaked according to package directions
Salt and pepper to taste
Heat oil and sauté garlic, onion, pepper, squash and fresh tomato on medium/high heat until fairly well-done (10 minutes give or take). Add wine, bouillon, chili powders, Liquid Amino, salt, pepper and the drained beans and cook at medium high heat for a few minutes. In a bowl, crush canned tomatoes. Add to the chili. Bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for at least 3 hours and up to 4 hours, stirring about every 30 minutes. Adjust seasoning. Serve hot over rice. | <urn:uuid:b0e93c41-6b21-4b7d-80cc-8e4fb9806cec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.silive.com/entertainment/dining/index.ssf/2010/02/take_the_high_road_with_beans.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901884 | 908 | 2.53125 | 3 |
There has been a major push for the private provision of educational services in many countries. Schooling is progressively being turned into a profit-making commercial venture. In the process the quality of education is being eroded. An early step in this process has been the introduction of business management structures into education, along with the elimination of many of the functions and professional services provided to schools for free by government education departments. This has opened the way for “a host of private agencies, consultants and professional firms” to fill the gap on a commercial basis.
According to the UK's National Union of Teachers (NUT) general secretary Christine Blower:
Those who run and manage schools should be education professionals with a public service ethos, not educational companies whose bottom line is serving the interests of their shareholders. Children and young people are not commodities; they are entitled within school to know that those who run and manage their school have purely their educational interests at heart.
Private provision has occurred at three levels: supplementary services such as catering and cleaning; private consumption services provided outside of school hours, such as tutoring, educational software and after school care; and core education, such as managing or operating schools.
At the extreme end of the privatisation spectrum are schools that are run as businesses for profit. The extent to which for-profit schools are publicly funded varies, but in the US charter schools are almost completely funded by government. In other countries a public abhorrence of for-profit education, combined with a scepticism on the part of the business community that profits can be made from running schools, has ruled out for-profit schools.
In Australia private schools are not for-profit, nor are they totally government funded. However they get as much as 80 per cent of their funding from government.
Similarly in Canada, private schools get up to half their funding from the government.
In the UK, schools that are almost totally funded by government are being run by private sponsors and the boards they appoint. Those sponsors may be businesses. In this way UK academies and trust schools only differ from US charter schools in that they cannot be run for profit.
|Public Schools||government||government or outsourced to private company||curriculum, testing regime, employment practices, admissions regulated|
|Academies (UK)||£25m+ government & £2m private||private sponsors & board mainly appointed by sponsors||can set own employment practices, admissions policy, and curriculum (in compliance with national requirements)|
|Trust Schools (UK)||government & unspecified private contrib.||private trust & trust appointed board||as above|
|Charter Schools (US)||government & private donations||private/ can be run for profit||can set own employment practices, admissions policy, and curriculum|
|Private Schools (Australia/ Canada)||government & private fees||private||can set own employment practices, admissions policy, and curriculum|
The WTO has become a promoter and enforcer of privatised educational services through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Although GATS allows governments to keep control of public services, if those services are not totally provided by the public sector, they are not defined as public services. So countries which have both private and public schools cannot claim school education as a public service. If education services are opened to international trade under GATS – and this is subject to negotiation between nations – then foreign providers of education must be treated the same as domestic providers, with access to the same subsidies and grants, unless an exception is granted by the WTO. Disputes are decided by a panel of trade lawyers. | <urn:uuid:43f65e9a-2477-46a2-932d-9168e565f9bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/education/privatising/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970823 | 739 | 2.390625 | 2 |
The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís – by Mark Kurlansky
Other than the United States, no country has produced more Major League Baseball players than the Dominican Republic — 495 according to Baseball-Almanac.com, over twice as many as Venezuela’s 247 who is next on the list. Certainly, one must wonder what it is about this small country in the Caribbean that produces so much talent?
While this would be an easy approach to take, in The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris, author Mark Kurlansky turns the question around and looks at what baseball has done to one town in particular, San Pedro de Macoris, a fishing town on the southeastern coast of the Dominican Republic that has produced 79 of those 495 big leaguers, in hopes of showing how just how baseball has affected a town that in turn has produced some of the game’s best players.
To say that this is simply a baseball book would be selling it short — and would likely disappoint certain readers who go into it expecting nothing but baseball stories. Baseball is certainly a part of it – and a substantial part at that when you consider how much money baseball players from the town have earned and brought back to infuse into their city, as well as the baseball academies and related jobs that have come about because of a mix of situations. Add in that while the specific origins of baseball in the Dominican Republic are uncertain, there have been links to games played in the late 1800s, and you have a decent history from which to draw.
Of course, baseball is readily present, and the names of players who have made it to the Major Leagues from San Pedro de Macoris are plentiful – Alfonso Soriano, Robinson Canó, Sammy Sosa, Tony Fernandez, Rico Carty, Luis Castillo, George Bell, Joaquin Andujar…the list goes on and on. Each has different stories and struggles – some were heralded as stars early on, while others had to fight for attention and take a longer path to the Major Leagues.
What unifies all of them as Kurlansky points out in his introductory chapter is their shared desire of “making it,” and thus escaping the laborious work of the sugar cane fields or the fishing boats. These players all start out as young boys with improvised equipment such as milk cartons for gloves, balls of socks for baseballs and sugar cane reeds or broom handles for bats, who somehow through a mix of hard work, good fortune and talent make it off the island and into the ranks of professional baseball, with the most elite among them donning one of 30 Major League uniforms.
These dreams are not without their risks however – a bad break in the form of an injury or a bad day at a tryout can cost them potentially millions of dollars, and return them to a life of poverty, often dragging their families along with them.
But what makes the book shine is the context in which Kurlansky introduces you to these players. He is quick to point out the differences between the Dominican Republic and its Caribbean neighbors – even down to the name of the country, that when compared to Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba and others, leaves much to be desired. The Dominican Republic is a nation that has been invaded time and time again over the last 500 years, twice by Spain, three times by Haiti, twice by France, and twice by the United States, as well as by corporations and as Kurlansky so eloquently shows us – by Major League Baseball and its teams in hopes of finding a future talent at a very affordable price.
The Dominican Republic has also been the receiving land of immigrants from throughout the Caribbean who have come seeking work in the sugar cane fields or in a factory – and the resulting multiculturalism has not been without its share of discrimination, prejudice and forced acceptance and change.
It was also a major beneficiary of the United States’ embargo against Cuba, as teams had to look elsewhere to find talent that they could bring stateside without the headache and heartbreak that came along with trying to get a Cuban out of the now-closed country. That benefit is still seen some fifty years later, as more and more kids from the Dominican Republic enter the ranks of Major League Baseball each year.
Which takes the reader back to the players — the early ones who suffered discrimination just like the Negro Leaguers and African-Americans throughout the middle part of the 1900s because of the color of their skin, let alone a language barrier that often separated them from their new world. The cultural differences about how the game was played and life was lived that branded them as hot-headed brawlers who had little use for manners or decorum, only to be proven wrong by players like Alfredo Griffin who made a name for himself as a peacemaker and leader who had the ability to hold teams together.
The Eastern Stars surprised me by how wide-ranging the topics covered were — while I expected to learn about the players who came from San Pedro de Macoris, I also learned more about the sugar industry, fishing and cultural struggles than I expected. It is that wider lens that Kurlansky uses to capture his subject that makes this book a winner and the reader and baseball fan who can watch his or her favorite Dominican-born players with a new appreciation that much better. | <urn:uuid:63f4827a-278c-4dd0-ab96-d422a859b313> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baseballbookreview.com/?p=333 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980801 | 1,106 | 2.390625 | 2 |
The Federal Government (FG) of Somalia is violating the country's Provisional Federal Constitution (PFC), which the elected leaders were sworn to uphold.
The FG has actively interfered with the formation of emerging Federated States, such as Jubaland in southern Somalia, directly contradicting the principles and provisions of the PFC and abandoning the aspirations of the Somali people, who hope for responsible and accountable governance that paves the way for peace, stability and development, and promotes justice, political cohesion, outreach and national reconciliation.
Instead of focusing on principal priorities, the FG has adventured illegitimately on resource exploitation by hiring foreign advisers to build the 'Somalia Petroleum Company' and actively pursue oil companies - former concession holders as well as new companies - to renegotiate old concession or sign new Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) to areas that are not under FG's control. This is contrary to the PFC and the FG should refrain from such broker activities until all Federated States are formed, so the Somali people have a role in the fundamental decisions of their future.
This unilateral move is a dangerous ploy that threatens to unravel political cohesion and potentially imperil stabilization progress in Somalia. The FG is advised to invest its time and energy on repairing and rebuilding the disintegrated Federal Republic, instead of attempting to sell what little remains of Somalia.
The PFC clearly defines power belongs to the people, as represented by the Federated States, and defers political power distribution, revenue sharing, and natural resources management, until the Federated States of Somalia is completed and a negotiated settlement is reached between the Federal Government and the Federated States.
Until such time, Puntland State shall retain and exercise powers endowed in the Puntland Constitution. Puntland calls on the FG to adhere to the country's Federal Constitution, to support the formation of the remaining Federated States, to speed up establishment of the Upper House of Federal Parliament, to promote national reconciliation and justice, and to shun unreasonable maneuvers that trigger political crises in Somalia. | <urn:uuid:ccef0961-4025-46d9-acee-cc84d31eccec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allafrica.com/stories/201302261327.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957967 | 412 | 1.710938 | 2 |
GMO means genetically modified organism, which is a novel organism created by scientists when they genetically modify or engineer food plants. Scientists have cited many health and environmental risks with genetically modified (GM) foods. As a result of these risks, many people in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and other nations are demanding non-genetically modified (non-GMO) foods.
In genetic modification (or engineering) of food plants, scientists remove one or more genes from the DNA of another organism, such as a bacterium, virus, or animal, and “recombine” them into the DNA of the plant they want to alter. By adding these new genes, genetic engineers hope the plant will express the traits associated with the genes. For example, genetic engineers have transferred genes from a bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt into the DNA of corn. Bt genes express a protein that kills insects, and transferring the genes allows the corn to produce its own pesticide.
Genetic modification/engineering is a potentially dangerous technology
One of the main problems with genetic engineering is that the process of inserting genes into the DNA of a food plant is random; scientists have no idea where the genes go. This can disrupt the functioning of other genes and create novel proteins that have never been in the food supply and could create toxins and allergens in foods.
Genetic modification is a radical technology
Supporters of genetic modification say that the technology is simply an extension of traditional plant breeding. The reality is that genetic engineering is radically different. Traditional plant breeders work with plants of the same or related species to create new plant varieties. Genetic engineers break down nature’s genetic barriers by allowing transfers of genes from bacteria, viruses, and even animals—with unforeseen consequences.
Genetic modification is based on an obsolete scientific theory
Genetic modification is based on a theory called the Central Dogma, which asserts that one gene will express one protein. However, scientists working with the United States National Human Genome Research Institute discovered that this wasn’t true, that genes operate in a complex network in ways that are not fully understood. This finding undermines the entire basis for genetic engineering.
What genetically modified crops are currently grown?
The majority of corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets grown in the United States are GM. Fifty percent of papaya grown in Hawaii is GM. Small amounts of yellow “crook neck” and zucchini squash are also GM.
As many as 15% of cows in the US are injected with a genetically modified bovine growth hormone called rBGH (rBST). rBGH is banned in many countries due to negative health impacts on cows.
Below are several documented findings showing health dangers from GM foods.
A genetically engineered form of an L-tryptophan food supplement was responsible for the deaths of thirty-seven people and disabling of several thousand more in 1989.
GM potatoes harm rats
In the late 1990s, Arpad Pusztai, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, conducted a study on genetically modified potatoes for the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland. Pusztai conducted feeding experiments on rats and found that the potatoes damaged the animals’ gut, other organs, and immune systems.
GM corn causes liver and kidney damage in rats
A study conducted by French scientists and published in Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology found symptoms of poisoning and liver and kidney damage in rats fed a GM corn.
GM soy increased mortality in rats, reduced fertility in hamsters
A 2006 study conducted by Irina Ermikova of the Russian National Academy of Sciences found that more than half the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks. In another Russian study scientists found that hamsters fed GM soy had lost their ability to reproduce by the third generation. The hamster pups also suffered slower growth and high mortality
GM corn harms aquatic insects
A 2007 published study by Indiana University environmental science professor found that GM corn produced increased mortality and reduced growth in caddisflies, aquatic insects that are a food resource for higher organisms like fish and amphibians.
GM corn threatens native corn in Mexico
In a 2001 paper published in Nature magazine, University of California at Berkeley researchers Ignacio Chapela and David Quist described how genes from GM corn contaminated native corn varieties in Oaxaca, Mexico. The finding was particularly disturbing because contamination was found thousands of miles from plantings of GM corn and because it threatened the center of biological diversity for corn
GM soy creating “superweeds”
The widespread use of glyphosate herbicide used with herbicide tolerant GM corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton has led to the creation of herbicide resistant weeds infesting millions of acres of farmland throughout the United States.
GM crops increase pesticide use
Genetically modified crops increased the use of herbicides by 383 million pounds in the United States from 1996 to 2008, according to a report by the Organic Center.
Avoid processed foods containing ingredients from corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, and cotton.
More than 70% of processed foods found in retail stores and restaurants contain ingredients derived from GE corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton. In addition, half the sugar used in food products comes from GM sugar beets.
Look for Non-GMO Project verified products.
These food products have gone through a rigorous verification program to minimize the risk of GMO contamination, giving you the best assurance they are non-GMO.
For more information visit www.nongmoproject.org.
Buying organic foods also offers assurance against the risks of genetic engineering because GM substances are prohibited in organic production. | <urn:uuid:97dae31b-9420-4252-9706-9f84a65dc1f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.non-gmoreport.com/whatisnon-gmo.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940464 | 1,181 | 3.5 | 4 |
Andrew Ng, 32
Building household robots
Housekeeping robots are still the stuff of science fiction, but not for want of hardware: there's almost no task too precise or delicate for a robot that knows in advance what it's supposed to do. The problem lies in teaching robots to deal with the unknown. That's precisely what Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, set out to do when he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project a few years ago.
Previous robots have had some ability to improvise--many could locate familiar objects in unfamiliar environments, for example. But Ng has gone a step further: STAIR can deduce how to pick up an object it's never seen before. Using traditional machine-learning techniques, Ng trained STAIR on a database of pictures of objects such as wine glasses, coffee mugs, and pencils, as seen from different perspectives. Each object was correlated with information about the best place to grasp it: the stem of the wine glass, the middle of the pencil. After its training, STAIR could generalize those associations to adapt to new situations--lifting, among other things, a lunch box by its handle and a piece of intricate lab equipment by its metal stem. It was even able to remove dishes from a dishwasher and place them on a drying rack.
The STAIR team has made other advances--its innovative system for robotic depth perception even spawned a side project, software that converts static 2-D photographs into 3-D images. But despite this progress, Ng knows that building a general-purpose household robot is beyond the means of any one lab. So he's developing an open-source robotics operating system that will let researchers integrate a robot's sensor systems and functional components in new ways, without having to write code from scratch. --Larry Hardesty | <urn:uuid:9f2a4ce6-f5ed-4523-ad5a-e669897c0109> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?trid=730 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955843 | 371 | 3.1875 | 3 |
Christo, Emily Dickinson, Monopoly and his middle school history teacher have been the major inspirations of budding environmental artist Peter Krasznekewicz of Carmel Valley, whose "Little White House" project goes on display in Amherst, Mass., again this week.
Krasznekewicz, 17, a senior at Deerfield Academy in Amherst and a 2009 graduate of All Saints Episcopal Day School in Carmel Valley, has been working on the project for the past two years.
"Little White House" consists of a series of simple white peaked-roof houses bearing the words of Dickinson, "The Belle of Amherst," and first appeared last year on the Deerfield campus.
Krasznekewicz's father, John Krasznekewicz, recalled that Peter had mastered the game of Monopoly at an early age and was fascinated with the little green houses used as game pieces.
He was also fond of building things with blocks, John Krasznekewicz said, and his son and daughter Allegra — an All Saints School alumna now studying at Yale — built a child's bed in the shape of a Monopoly house, and also built a miniature white house.
Krasznekewicz's art history teacher at All Saints, Forbes Keaton, suggested a web page devoted to the environmental artist Christo as his graduation project.
Forbes described Krasznekewicz as having "passion for design; he was always building things, sketching plans for houses and working out challenging geometry and physics problems."
Christo's environmental artistry — draping
Krasznekewicz said he built two prototypes of the white houses in a barn on the family's Big Sur ranch in the summer of 2010 after his first year at Deerfield, shopped around for environmentally acceptable plywood panels that did not contain formaldehyde or other harmful chemicals, and founded a nonprofit corporation and raised over $50,000 in cash and donated services in order to complete the project.
Krasznekewicz began construction in earnest in an empty church in Turners Falls, Mass., in the fall of 2011, aided by local craftsmen Bob, Lucian and Nicholas Picariello.
In all, more than 40 of the little white houses, festooned with Dickinson's verse, were built and, with permission of the school faculty and city officials, erected around the Deerfield campus and neighboring parks and other public places.
Krasznekewicz said he offered to donate the materials from the houses to Habitat for Humanity for use in construction, but Habitat found people were interested in purchasing the houses themselves as objets d'art, and used the proceeds to buy building supplies.
In addition, all the scraps from construction were cut into 1-foot-by-1-foot panels and donated to local schools and artists to be used to create paintings that will be sold to raise money for local charities.
Amherst is also the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum, and a smaller version of the exhibit will be put on display at Hampshire College in Amherst and the museum beginning Monday, according to museum director Jane Wald.
Another outcome of the project has been the publication of a book that Krasznekewicz worked on with Marilet Petrorius, a local artist and graphic designer, titled "The Little White House Project," containing photos, commentaries and selections of Dickinson's poems. The first edition has been sold out and a
second printing, with updates and photos from the museum exhibit, will also come out next week.
Krasznekewicz said he hopes that this is the first of many projects that he pursues through his nonprofit corporation, Action Art Inc., in the coming years. He plans on completing projects wherever he attends college, and he would also like to bring a project to the Peninsula someday. Additional information can be found on the website www.actionartinc.com.
Kevin Howe can be reached at email@example.com or 646-4416. | <urn:uuid:4855993f-f26f-426e-9283-a0ed7aed0fc8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.montereyherald.com/yourtown/ci_21721904/monterey-county-student-has-passion-design | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960111 | 856 | 2.140625 | 2 |
It’s pretty common knowledge that Ritalin—a prescription drug with the chemical name methylphenidate—is widely prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the United States.
In fact, it’s one of the most widely used drugs for any condition. Lawrence H. Diller, M.D., a psychiatrist and author of the 1998 book Running on Ritalin, pointed out that it’ s now prescribed to some four million children in the United States annually.
What parents, physicians or anyone else in the American medical establishment hadn’t known was just how Ritalin worked its apparent magic of calming overactive children and helping them focus their attention more productively.
Recent research published in the January 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, however, is being hailed as a big step forward in understanding the drug’s method of action in human beings.
Nearly Half a Century of Uncertainty
According to Peter R. Breggin, M.D., director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in Bethesda, Md., stimulant drugs, including methylphenidate and amphetamine, were first approved for the control of problem behaviors in children in the mid-1950s.
By the mid-1990s, ADHD was the most commonly diagnosed mental health condition of childhood. And the rate at which Ritalin was being prescribed had begun to soar.
But although it has been widely and steadily used for decades for a range of behaviors such as distractibility, short attention span, hyperactivity, impulsivity and emotional lability, even the experts prescribing Ritalin weren’t sure how the drug achieved its results. After many years of mislabeling its effects as “paradoxical,” many in the mental health community admitted the drug’s method of action in the human brain was completely baffling.
It’s only now—after more than 40 years of uncertainty—that the answer has emerged. According to Nora Volkow, M.D., lead researcher and associate laboratory director at Brookhaven, Ritalin works by stimulating the brain chemical dopamine.
Studies in Mice Provide Clues
The Brookhaven scientists’ findings came about two years after researchers at Duke University Medical Center reported that Ritalin and similar stimulant drugs seemed to boost the levels of both dopamine and serotonin in laboratory mice.
Dopamine is believed to be carry messages from one part of the brain to another. Serotonin, by contrast, is a brain chemical associated with a sense of well-being.
VanScoy, H. (2006). What Makes Ritalin Work?. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 19, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/what-makes-ritalin-work/
Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 30 Jan 2013
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:f83e000d-4fbb-442f-8d49-5f3eefb6f876> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/what-makes-ritalin-work/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944389 | 629 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Certified Diabetes Educators (CDEs)
(Educadores certificados en diabetes (CDE))
Certified diabetes educators are health care professionals who specialize in treating people with diabetes. They can be nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, doctors, social workers, or other professionals. People who have the initials CDE after their names have passed a national exam that allows them to teach people who have diabetes how to manage their condition. | <urn:uuid:8d9232f4-1547-4eed-954b-f866cfb0a60d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.childrenscolorado.org/wellness/info/teens/41137.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930248 | 91 | 2.359375 | 2 |
Dr. Patricia Allen will be the keynote speaker at the Canadian Association for Food Studies in Victoria, B.C. in June 2013.
Continuous improvement of Marylhurst's academic programs occurs annually within each academic department, based on the annual program assessment cycle:
Step 1: Write assessment plan (beginning of fall term)
Step 2: Identify assessment tools
Step 3: Collect data
Step 4: Aggregate data
Step 5: Analyze and reflect
Step 6: Plan action steps
Step 7: Write assessment report (end of summer term)
Each year, departments determine key questions about student learning and identify methodologies (including indirect and direct data sources) to answer these questions; they then "close the loop" by using their analysis to make changes within individual courses or the program as a whole. On an annual basis, departments may also choose to assess student experience, faculty/instruction, or curriculum for internal improvement.
Each fall, departments submit an annual assessment plan representing the assessment work planned for the year ahead. At the end of each summer term, departments submit an annual assessment report that identifies what assessment activities occurred in the past year, the findings/results, and changes or improvements made ("closing the loop"). Click here to access these annual plans and reports on My Marylhurst (login required). | <urn:uuid:c2d5f791-457c-4676-b74a-acb0374af8ef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marylhurst.edu/about-marylhurst/teaching-learning-assessment/assessment/program-assessment/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916565 | 272 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Literature as a Topic of Study: Necessary Terminology
Terms to Learn
Christine de Pisan's Christine Writing
at her Lectern, 1404-05
One of the first things students in a literature class must do is understand that everyone can learn to dissect a work of writing but that it takes time, patience, and experience. The more prolific a reader one is the better they will be at analyzing literature. Even the idea of literature can be seen as a reading and thinking puzzle, in part because there are multiple definitions of the word literature. Consider the following, from Word.Net 2.0, Princeton University's online dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=literature):
For our purposes, we will define literature as writing of high merit, whether imaginative or objective, or the performance of such writing, especially as the elements work together in the piece to achieve one unified point. It can come in many forms but the three biggies are usually, prose, poetry, and drama. Prose is typically used when dealing with writing that parallels the way people speak; it uses no regular metrical patterns or verse, whereas poetry can be understood, at least in the Western world, to be language that is written using a specific metrical pattern, or verse. There are certainly pieces of writing that straddle the line, especially as some poems can be written in blank verse (no rhymed lines but with a predictable rhyming pattern, usually iambic pentameter) or free verse (no rhymed lines and no predictable metrical pattern), and recently poets have been producing prose poems, poems that read like paragraphs but seem to have a more concentrated use of the devices that literary scholars typically group under style or figurative language. This concentrated use idea means that poems are thought to communicate their one main idea more artistically or more concisely using images, symbols, or metaphors than prose writers; this is a phenomenon some scholars defines as 'heightened language.' Drama is the word we use to indicate the written form of a work which is ideally intended to be heard or seen as a public performance, like a play or a screenplay. Examples of prose writings are lectures, newspaper articles, novels, and short stories. Poems can appear collected in anthologies, show up in prayers or greeting cards, or be listened to on radio stations in the form of song lyrics.
While most people have been forced to endure years of high school English and may use writing everyday in personal communication (e-mails, the minutes from a meeting, or a grocery list) or for self-fulfillment (praying, watching TV, or singing along with a CD), few would define themselves as literary scholars. Some people even believe that to analyze a work of literature corrupts it, making it less entertaining. As Thomas C. Foster, an English professor at the University of Michigan at Flint, describes in his book, How to Read Like a Professor, there are often awkward moments in literature classrooms which leave students and teachers feeling uncomfortable and making the study of literature feel like grueling work rather than a fun game of wits:
A moment occurs in this exchange between professor and student when each of us adopts a look. My look says, "What, you don't get it?" Theirs says, "We don't get it. And we think you're making it up." We're having a communication problem. Basically, we've all read the same story, but we haven't used the same analytical apparatus. If you've ever spent time in a literature classroom, you know this moment. It may seem at times as if the professor is either inventing interpretations out of thin air or else performing parlor tricks, a sort of analytical sleight of hand.
Actually, neither of these is the case; rather the professor, as the slightly more experienced reader, has acquired over the years the use of a certain "language of reading," something to which students are only being introduced. What I'm talking about is a grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a piece of writing."
Theme is one of these words and ideas that come from this code of rules. A theme, for our purposes--as again, there are multiple definitions for this word, even within the literary profession--is the story or message the writer is using the piece of literature to convey, and it is a message that must be relevant to the reader's own life. I would further clarify this by saying it is a message that can be stated in a complete sentence. So, once again, literary study, like gender studies, requires one to think critically about things that have always before seemed natural.
We will look more closely at how these themes are communicated during the course of the semester, specifically looking at fiction (literary works that rely on the imagination in their creation, at least in part) and poetry, their components, and the elements or devices that they use to create their themes. Please note, also, as you read the selections in this course, the messages the historical writers are conveying and how well they are conveying them. Aristotle, to whom modern literary critics are much in debt, might not have known much about science, according to our modern physicians' standards, anyway, but he surely knew how to write his scientific beliefs and findings persuasively.
Finally, please take comfort in the knowledge that no reader can read everything that's ever been written, but if you can remember what you've already read as you read a new text, you will probably begin to see patterns repeating between them or within them, and you should be looking for other or multiple meanings in the texts you read. Anyone who sees George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith will probably enjoy it on its surface level--unless the person has a weak stomach or an aversion to fire, of course--but for those viewers who have seen or read Shakespeare's Othello, the fictitious drama eerily reenacted by O. J. Simpson in real-life in 1994, there is a deeper meaning there to pull from the film. The Anakin Skywalker character who becomes Darth Vader, the greatest symbol of evil that twentieth-century pop culture has produced, gains a tragic and heroic status as his journey to the dark side originates in his intense, passionate love for his noble wife. Although the power structure is reversed, the Emperor is no less evil or cunning than Iago, as he convinces Anakin that the only way to save Padmé is to learn the dark side of the forces involved, and the intense love Anakin has for her elicits the intense jealousy with Obi-Wan (as Cassio) whose innocent contact with Padmé inspires the husband to murder his beloved wife in a fit of rage. Even Darth Vader's black costume strikes us as more appropriate knowing the Shakespearian play, as black not only represents evil in our culture, but it also resonates with the racial ethnicities of the Shakespearian ancestors: Othello was a Moor married to the Venetian, Desdemona, a literal and symbolic marriage of the dark and the light
Course Home Page
Instructor's Homepage | IVCC Homepage
Contact Kimberly M. Radek, the instructor of Women in Literature, at Kimberly_Radek@ivcc.edu .
This page was last updated on 21 April 2008 . Copyright Kimberly M. Radek, 2001. | <urn:uuid:80dd107c-58f4-40ae-ac19-c211d264a15b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.ivcc.edu/gen2002/Literature_as_a_Topic_of_Study.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959615 | 1,537 | 3.71875 | 4 |
Jan. 27, 2012
University of Michigan director of athletics Dave Brandon will regularly offer his view on a variety of topics related to U-M and intercollegiate sports. All his posts, along with links to related content, will be available on his page, mgoblue.com/brandon, and he is also on Twitter at @DaveBrandonAD.
Injuries often play a key role in athletics. When an athlete in the starting lineup is injured, someone must step up to take his or her place. The more talented the athlete, the bigger the hole needed to be filled. Leadership, of course, is vital.
In the world of intercollegiate athletics, we talk about senior leadership. Players who have experienced the ups and downs know what it takes to motivate individuals. If there are no seniors, it doesn't mean a team is lacking leadership. It just means younger athletes must take on that role quicker.
This is what our U-M women's gymnastics team is now facing. This team has only 11 gymnasts, a relatively small number, and no seniors. There are three juniors, six sophomores and two freshmen on the roster. That number fell to 10 after junior Natalie Beilstein ruptured her Achilles performing her floor routine, an injury that will sideline her for the remainder of the season. Natalie is not only good, she is a two-time NCAA All-American and a Big Ten champion. She was one of Michigan's best individuals in three events: vault, uneven bars and floor exercise. Needless to say, this is a huge loss for our program.
In gymnastics, a team scores 20 of its 24 routines. Natalie comprised three of the 20 scores. And in each category, she was always one of the top performers.
Losing Natalie would be somewhat similar to a basketball team losing a guard and a forward. In gymnastics, you don't guard other players or try to find offensive match-ups. In sports' laymen terminology, there is no strategy for defense or offense against your opposition. You have control only over your own routine.
Now, multiple individuals will be needed to develop strengths in other routines. Physically, the fundamentals are there. The challenge for our coaching staff will be to refine those fundamentals and get the team mentally prepared to fill the void. This is what great gymnastics coaches and teams do -- and we have a great coach and a terrific team.
Coach Bev Plocki has noted that Natalie led by example, and her efforts in training and competition are lessons these women will follow as they look to take her place on the roster. She worked tirelessly to be one of the best gymnasts in the nation in the floor exercise. Her efforts will help this team understand that this isn't a blow to the Michigan team, it is an opportunity -- an opportunity for development, growth, and for others to step up.
The team is home for the next few weeks (Jan. 27 vs. Illinois, Feb. 3 vs. West Virginia) before heading back on the road. This will help them find their new comfort zone as they work to replace this All-American.
For sure, I am not an expert in the sport of gymnastics! The closest I came to connecting with this sport was during my college years at U-M when I took a class taught by the legendary Newt Loken. I do, however, understand leadership and I know the grit and determination of our student-athletes. I look forward to seeing this young team grow and strive to be the leaders and best throughout the 2012 season.
Good luck and Go Blue!
Dave Brandon Home Page | <urn:uuid:e8082d0e-51bd-42bf-8baa-b5a73279964c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mgoblue.com/sports/brandon/spec-rel/012712aaa.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970379 | 749 | 1.546875 | 2 |
by Rémi Coulom. Paper accepted at CG'2008.
Whole-History Rating (WHR) is a new method to estimate the time-varying strengths of players involved in paired comparisons. Like many variations of the Elo rating system, the whole-history approach is based on the dynamic Bradley-Terry model. But, instead of using incremental approximations, WHR directly computes the exact maximum a posteriori over the whole rating history of all players. This additional accuracy comes at a higher computational cost than traditional methods, but computation is still fast enough to be easily applied in real time to large-scale game servers (a new game is added in less than 0.001 second). Experiments demonstrate that, in comparison to Elo, Glicko, TrueSkill, and decayed-history algorithms, WHR produces better predictions. | <urn:uuid:81128f08-06a6-4132-aa66-a906da814e7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://remi.coulom.free.fr/WHR/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903519 | 175 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Current Native Weather for Veiled Chameleons
(Northern Hemisphere. Seasonal temperature fluctuations. The Tai'zz and Ibb sample locations are the center of abundance for this species. The Damt sample location is in the central highlands. Conditions here are more extreme. Veileds are found here even where living vegetation is scarce, even when the nearest water source is several kilometers away in areas that sometimes have had no rain 3 years or more. )
Current Native Weather for Bearded Dragons.
(Southern Hemisphere. Seasons opposite North America. Seasonal temperature fluctuations. Sample location is at southernmost end of their range. More locations soon) | <urn:uuid:9fab15a7-a3a9-4abf-8c26-dc7f1bdec826> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://livingwithlizards.com/2012/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947044 | 132 | 2.5 | 2 |
Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) Summit
25 March 2011
South Africa hosted the SACU Summit on 25 March 2011.
President Zuma delivered the opening and closing addresses.
SACU consists of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. These countries are all members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the Southern African Trade Protocol.
The summit will be followed by the Second Tripartite Summit of the Southern African Development Community - East African Community - Common Market of East and Southern Africa (SADC-EAC-Comesa) on a date to be announced.
Hosting and participating in these summits forms part of South Africa's efforts to deepen regional integration in southern Africa and to extend integration across Africa.
South Africa advocates regional integration in southern Africa and sees SACU as integral to the process for deeper integration in SADC and across southern and eastern Africa.
- SACU held two summits in 2010. That helped to develop a clear work programme for the institution and to enhance its unity of purpose.
- SACU members have agreed to a targeted work programme in the following five areas:
- regional industrialisation
- reviewing the revenue-sharing formula to ensure a sustainable revenue- sharing mechanism that promotes development
- developing a trade facilitation programme to improve border efficiency
- unified engagement in trade negotiations
- establishing common institutions such as a Tariff Board and the Tribunal within an agreed policy framework.
- The upcoming SACU Summit will review the progress made and propose a strategic direction for the union as necessary.
South Africa contributes to accelerating economic integration of the SADC region and is committed to the promotion of intra-regional trade and investment.
- Progress with trade integration in SADC is being facilitated by the establishment of a free trade area (FTA). In 2008, 85% of goods traded were duty free and, by 2012, 99% will be duty free.
- South Africa advocates that the region's limited resources should consolidate the FTA by focusing on improving the rules of origin, enhancing trade facilitation and addressing non-tariff barriers. SADC members that are not yet participating in the FTA, should be assisted and encouraged to accede.
- South Africa believes in advancing work on cross-border infrastructural development and sectoral cooperation with a particular effort to build and diversify the region’s production structures. President Jacob Zuma champions the rail and road infrastructure sector (North-South Corridor), emanating from the July 2010 African Union (AU) Summit which launched the New Partnership for Africa’s Development priority infrastructure initiative.
- The focus will be on consolidating the FTA, and working to extend African integration through pursuit of the Trilateral FTA consisting of the SADC, the EAC and Comesa.
African countries need to strengthen their economic integration and coordinating mechanism through the regional economic communities (RECs).
- The AU has prioritised the establishment of the AEC. A Pan-African Common Market of one billion people without internal borders will unleash the enormous economic growth and development potential of Africa.
- Africa's three main regional blocs, namely SADC, the EAC and Comesa are making significant progress in harmonising their projects to promote full regional integration.
- A milestone of the three RECs is the creation of a Tripartite Free Trade Area (T-FTA) between 26 countries, with a combined gross domestic product of about $625 billion and a combined population of approximately 700 million.
- Africa has a relatively low level of intra-regional trade and the bulk of exports are destined for the European Union, the United States and Asian markets. This is partly the result of an overwhelmingly resources-based export basket.
- A larger, integrated and growing regional market will enhance the interest of foreign investment and provide a basis for enhanced intra-African trade.
The Second Tripartite Summit, to be hosted by South Africa, aims to launch the T‑FTA negotiations and address the issues of regional infrastructure and the free movement of business people.
- Most of South Africa’s trade with African countries is not in commodities but in value-added products. Extending the regional FTAs already in place on the continent has the potential to build and sustain more diverse markets in Africa.
- In the context of markedly improved growth prospects for Africa alongside intensified global competition for Africa’s resources and markets, the need to enhance South Africa’s access to African markets is more urgent.
- Development integration has been a key objective of the South African Government’s foreign economic policy since 1994. The approach combines market integration with sectoral policy coordination and cross-border infrastructural development. It also considers that high-level political cooperation is required particularly at an early stage of the process.
- South Africa’s approach to the T-FTA contains three core elements. Firstly, the T-FTA should be limited to a trade in goods agreement that is flexible and provides sufficient scope for the parties to protect sensitive sectors. Secondly, trade-related issues such as services, including the issue of the business visas, and competition policy should be pursued on a separate track and be the subject for engagement in future. Thirdly, it is proposed reaffirmation that the infrastructure programme, namely the North-South Corridor, proceeds on a separate track.
SACU is the oldest customs union in the world. Read more about how it started.
[ Top ] | <urn:uuid:794c2d21-46b8-4d1c-a16d-93b2fc736ddf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.info.gov.za/events/2011/sacu.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927873 | 1,139 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Yuck!!! Lice!!! I'll bet you're scratching your head just reading these words. This little pest seems to be an ever more common affliction of our kids....and sometimes ourselves....so we may as well face it and try to figure out how we can keep them in check. I put this page together because I had spent so many hours researching lice when I discovered them on my daughter and I want to share what I learned with you.
A great resource for information and advice from those who have been exactly where you are now is at the Parents place Message boards.
Read My Guestbook! | Sign My Guestbook! | <urn:uuid:a826d4a8-b87d-4bb2-b5cc-db37bc6a4ccc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://members.tripod.com/Jodi_F/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981085 | 130 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Thousands of Web Sites Hit With New Twist on Old SQL Injection Hack
A relatively simple hack has been used to compromise at least 500,000 Web sites–and perhaps as many as 1.5 million–in such a way that visitors are tricked into downloading fake PC security software.
Dubbed LizaMoon after the Web site where some users are in some cases redirected, the attack was first documented by the security research firm Websense. The hack seeks to trick Web users into believing that their computer has been compromised by viruses and prompts them to download fake security software that itself causes further problems. Among the sites serving up the links to the fake software sites are some belonging to Apple and used on its iTunes store, though Apple is said to have cleaned up the affected code on its site.
Websense says that so far it appears that sites using Microsoft SQL Server 2003 and 2005 are at risk, though as yet SQL Server 2008 doesn’t appear to be affected. No word yet from Microsoft about any of this, though I’ve asked them for a comment.
Update at 4:25 pm PDT: I just got this statement from Microsoft:
“Microsoft is aware of reports of an ongoing SQL injection attack. Our investigation has determined these sites were exploited using a vulnerability in certain third-party content management systems. This is not a Microsoft vulnerability.” I did not, however, get a hint as to the identity of the “third-party content management system.”
SQL injection attacks take place when malicious code–essentially commands to a Web server to do things it’s not supposed to do–are inserted into routine queries of a Web site’s database. A basic way to carry out these attacks is to add extra commands into the URL bar of a browser when visiting a vulnerable Web site. It’s not entirely clear exactly how this series of attacks has been carried out.
I talked with Josh Shaul, CTO of Application Security, Inc., a database security vendor that specializes in researching attacks on databases. “It’s a very new take on a very old type of attack,” Shaul said. “SQL injection has been the primary way that databases have been attacked for years. What’s different here is that people are putting the code that runs their Web sites in the database itself. And that’s what’s so troubling. Effectively you’ve exposed your code to an attacker so they can go modify it.”
Attackers found hundreds of thousands of sites that use a single user account to query their databases for all visitors, Shaul said. “The databases are clearly configured in an insecure way,” he said. “That’s what it all comes down to. Why is it that the log-in to use the database has the right to modify the code for the Web site itself? That makes no sense at all.”
In this case, the attackers took advantage of the weakness to insert a script that creates a pop-up that sends a site’s visitors to another site that looks like a legitimate place to download new Microsoft security software. That makes the attack on the Web sites themselves just a means to an end–the end being tricking innocent Web users into clicking on a series of links and paying to download fake security software.
Websense produced a video demonstrating what happens. The short lesson is this: If you see a pop-up that tells you you’ve got a virus or that your computer is compromised by a bunch of security issues, don’t click any of the links in it; it’s probably not legit. | <urn:uuid:d04cdcb3-703b-49b0-a928-4a53e553c066> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allthingsd.com/20110401/thousands-of-web-sites-hit-with-new-twist-on-old-sql-injection-hack/?mod=googlenews | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951755 | 761 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Is your body feeling run down from all those dismounted patrols? Take a bite of lemon poppy seed cake in your combat rations and feel the Omega 3 fatty acids baked into it ease that inflammation.
Having trouble staying focused, or feeling generally low? Try a serving of salmon in alfredo sauce, a combat ration under development that’s bursting with Omega 3s shown in tests to elevate one’s mood and improve cognitive function.
Starting to hit the wall, but unable to hit the sack or pause for a cup of Joe? Munch on a caffeinated meat stick in your Frist Strike Ration and get the quick energy charge you need to get through the mission at hand.
Food scientists at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center here are exploring ways to enhance service members’ warfighting capability through combat rations.
Caffeine, for example, is known to increase the ability to think clearly when fatigued or under stress. So in addition to coming up with a caffeine-infused meat stick, Natick food scientists are looking at other ways to deliver caffeine, possibly through a bar, gum or candy product, Jeremy Whitsitt, technology integration analyst for the center’s Department of Defense combat feeding directorate, told American Forces Press Service.
They’re also exploring innovative ways to boost physical and cognitive performance by lacing foods with naturally occurring compounds such as curcumin and Omega 3s, he said.
Curcumin is an anti-inflammatory supplement, and Omega 3s found in fish oils promote a broad range of functions, including reducing cholesterol and heart disease. New research also suggests they play a role in preventing traumatic brain injury -- an obvious concern on the battlefield, Whitsitt reported.
Natick food scientists started exploring dietary additives more than a decade ago to enhance what warfighters could do -- how far and fast they could move and how much they could carry, for example.
But the focus has shifted to preserving warfighter capability, explained Danielle Anderson, a food technologist on the Performance Optimization Research Team. “Now, we’re looking at them to see if there’s a way to enhance their immune systems, stop them from getting sick and stop the decrement that happens” during demanding combat missions, she said.
Ann Barrett, a senior food engineer, said the effort crosses several lines. “A lot of what we do is focused on load injuries, muscle strain and pain, because soldiers have to carry very, very heavy loads,” she said.
So as an alternative to popping excessive oral anti-inflammatories that can irritate the stomach or cause other gastrointestinal distress, she and her team are looking into ways to introduce natural ingredients that deliver the same benefits into combat rations.
And recognizing the health consequences of dirty environments in which warfighters often operate, they’re experimenting with prebiotics -- ingredients found in yogurt and other food items -- that stimulate “good” bacteria in the digestive system.
Fortifying combat rations with these ingredients isn’t as simple as one might think.
Omega 3s, for example, are less stable than many other oils. They tend to get rancid and develop a “fishy” odor and flavor over time.
That can be a problem when they’re incorporated into combat rations that have to stand up to stringent shelf-life and temperature requirements. Meals, Ready to Eat, individual combat rations, must be able to maintain their quality for three years if stored at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or six months when exposed to more extreme temperatures.
As food engineers here develop prototype rations with fortified products, they subject them to some pretty intensive rigors. “We produce the food and store it for six months at high-heat conditions,” said Anderson, comparable to what they’d be exposed to during a three-year shelf life.
The next step is to assess how much of the Omega 3 oils get absorbed into the body. Barrett is writing the protocols to conduct human feeding studies, with hopes of completing them within the next few months. Once they get the required official approvals, she hopes to begin testing within the year.
The test subjects -- soldiers who pull 89-day duty tours at the Natick center serving as human research volunteers -- will eat the food, then have their blood drawn at various time intervals to measure Omega 3 levels in their blood, Anderson explained.
“Hopefully, what they will get from the stored food will be the same as [if they had eaten] the fresh food or taken capsules,” Barrett said. “That’s what we’d really like to see.”
Meanwhile, the Optimization Research Team is investigating other ways to enhance warfighter capability.
One project evaluated the use of condensed tannins found in fruits and beans to determine the health benefits. Another under way now involves phytochemicals -- compounds in cranberries and other fruits and vegetables -- to determine what happens to them during the digestion, and ultimately, how they help the process.
“We’re trying to find out the mechanisms behind what is going on when you eat food and it is introduced into your body, and how it turns into something useful,” Anderson said.
She emphasized, however, that the bottom line for all the research is to support the missions warfighters conduct -- not to create “super-warfighters.”
“The warfighter is not the same as a trained athlete doing the Tour de France,” she said. “We have to demonstrate that the product will be effective in a military-relevant setting. Everything we do here has military relevance.”
Article by Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service | <urn:uuid:ca61ff9d-ff65-4efa-ab66-d36b65536d7e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sofmag.com/print/center-explores-combat-rations-optimize-warfighter-capability | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947297 | 1,196 | 1.921875 | 2 |
A Boulder company's kid-friendly nutritional website is in the running for a $10,000 grand prize from Michelle Obama's campaign to combat childhood obesity.
ZisBoomBah.com is one of 11 nationwide programs and the only entry accepted from Colorado in "The Apps for Healthy Kids" competition, a part of the first lady's Let's Move! The goal: developing engaging software that drives youths to eat better and be active.
The site's online tool "Pick Chow" engages, entertains and teaches kids ages 9 to 12 how to make balanced, healthy meals by dragging and dropping items onto a virtual plate. Then, an "Add It Up!" meter rates the nutritional value of their food choices and rates each breakfast, lunch and dinner from one to five stars. Online users can compete against one another for "Meal of the Week," get recipe ideas and e-mail their "chow" to their friends and as well as recipes, menus and shopping lists.
A screening by a USDA panel will select the top competition submissions and judges ranging from dieticians and software engineers to game designers will choose three winners for the program's impact, content, ability to engage and motivate, and the potential for further development.
ZisBoomBah's creator, Karen Laszlo, said she would use the $10,000 prize to develop a free online curriculum for child nutrition. Members of the public can vote once to help a program win a Popular Choice award and $4,500. Votes can be cast from July 14 to Aug. 14 at appsforhealthykids.com.
Laszlo spent 12 years helping startup companies build development plans with ZisBoomBah. She wants technology to help families deal with one of their biggest daily struggles — eating right. Market research shows healthy families involve kids in the eating process from selecting to preparing food.
"This tool ads real value to families' lives and helps parents share the responsibility of food with their children," says Laszlo. "This empowers kids to go online, make their own healthy food choices and tell Mom and Dad what they want to try for dinner."
Since the site launched in April, more than 1,100 children and their parents have registered. Michelle Somers of Littleton says that instead of her constantly harping about healthy foods, the hands-on experience allows her children to weigh the outcomes of their own choices.
"I like broccoli and cauliflower, but when I put them both on the plate," along with other less-healthy foods, the meal was too salty, says 7-year-old Ashley Somers.
"Because I want to get a (five) star meal, I keep taking away stuff like pastas and putting other stuff back in," says her twin sister, Aspen Somers, whose mac-and-cheese pizza dish (from a recipe on the site), plus an apple and broccoli, earned her a "Meal of the Week" award.
Sheba R. Wheeler: 303-954-1283 or firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:2b15675d-caf6-4ec4-8afd-9e515227fc37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_15460659 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96647 | 629 | 1.804688 | 2 |
How Social Workers Can Help You in Your PH Journey
“I don’t need a social worker.”
Have you ever said that? If so, you aren’t alone. Social workers are an important but often underutilized part of the multidisciplinary care team. Personal experience tells me that this is likely due to confusion and misconceptions about the role of medical social workers. Anyone who’s watched televised medical dramas would no doubt believe that social workers are only called in to deal with troubled families and serve little purpose in the hospital outside child protection.
But the truth of the matter is that social workers wear many hats: supporter, educator, advocate, cheerleader and guide — to name just a few. The services they provide are often intangible. Social workers may not cure PH, but they focus on the patient and family, identify areas of need, and work to restore balance. Where most medical professions are disease-focused, social workers approach each patient with a broad lens, evaluating all the factors that influence the patient’s well-being, beyond their diagnosis.
So, what can a social worker do for you?
Social work is, first and foremost, a helping profession. By nature of their training, social workers are well-equipped to provide emotional support when you need it — at the time of initial PH diagnosis, during hospitalizations or clinic visits, or when facing other life stressors. Crisis intervention and adjustment to illness are critical aspects of their work. They recognize that sometimes simply listening is what is needed most. Don’t be afraid to use your social worker for support. They are neutral, nonjudgmental and, trust me, nothing you say will shock them! Living with PH brings unique challenges. Your social worker can be a wonderful resource for support and encouragement as you learn more about PH and incorporate your diagnosis into your life.
Sometimes dealing with the healthcare system or community resources is like visiting another country complete with unfamiliar languages and foreign customs. Especially at the time of initial PH diagnosis, social workers play a central role in helping patients navigate unfamiliar systems, manage medical needs, and find balance. From identifying who’s who on the medical team to learning how to organize your personal medical record, social workers have information that can help you get the most out of your medical care while also ensuring that you have a life outside of your diagnosis. Not sure what your insurance will cover? Unclear if PH qualifies you for state or federal resources? Worried about what accommodations you might need in school or for travel? Your social worker can answer your questions and give you the knowledge you need to move forward.
Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are focused on your care, but like everyone, they can have strong opinions. Patients need a voice in their care. Social workers can help you express your wants and needs constructively, allowing you to be better heard by your PH team. Because of their understanding of your physical, social and psychological conditions, social workers also play a critical role in helping the medical team understand how to interact with you most effectively.
Living with PH can be isolating and overwhelming at times. It may feel as though no one really understands what you are experiencing or that you lack the resources to meet your needs. However, social workers are an excellent source for connecting you with other PH patients or caregivers and alternative supportive resources. Because of their work within the hospital system and the wider community, they are familiar with other individuals, support networks and community resources, such as PHA’s support communities, that may be helpful for you. A thriving support and educational community exists for PH patients and families — you just have to know where to look! Social workers can assess what your needs are and then make appropriate connections to those missing resources.
A patient or caregiver’s capacity to cope can be significantly diminished when confronted with a diagnosis of PH, a change in baseline function, or other life stressor. Social workers, through education, support and advocacy, provide a bridge for individuals back to stability and control. By helping you identify your own strengths and supports, they work with you to regain control of your life and improve your ability to cope.
Social workers can be your best ally in living (and thriving) with pulmonary hypertension. If your PH program doesn’t include a social worker, contact the social work department at your primary hospital and ask about resources. Better yet, request that your PH program add a social worker to the team and everyone will benefit!
By Heather Langlois, LICSW, C-SWHC, Children’s National Heart Institute, Children’s National Medical Center
This article orginally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Pathlight. | <urn:uuid:77e8997a-3603-4041-bfa5-fbed51f2c1bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phassociation.org/page.aspx?pid=3922&chid=92 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950542 | 968 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Welcome to www.brendadada.net
Software company patent
A Software Company Patent is the Door to a World of Confusion
There is no universal understanding of exactly what a software company patent is. In general, owning a patent allows a company certain rights (or exclusivity) for a prescribed amount of time. Individuals or corporations seeking a patent must apply for a patent in each and every country in which they wish to have one. Unlike copyrights, patents are not automatically granted to applicants and can take quite a while in order to be approved. Another thing to remember, particularly with a software company patent, is that a patent may issue in one or more of the countries in which you've applied but not all of them.
The real problem lies in the fact that there really is no central agreement about what a software company patent actually grants among any of the nations so those who are awarded patents may not be getting exactly what they think they are getting in the process. With no universal agreement there really can't be universal enforcement about the laws and the rights surrounding a software company patent.
The growth of Internet business and e-commerce in general has led to many patent applications for software, particularly software that was designed for specific business applications. The problem is that while the cases are granted and successfully tried and defended in some countries, other countries offer no enforcement or legal recourse for those who do not honor the software company patent even if the patents were granted in those countries. The fine line between nations about what is and isn't patentable is another challenge when it comes to establishing and honoring patents. In other words, the issue of a software company patent is a rather confusing process at best.
Patents differ greatly from copyrights, which are issued automatically and recognized and enforced internationally. Copyrights protect the source code of software from being copied and registration is generally not required in order for your work to be protected.
Lately there is a new term, copyleft, which is an obvious play on words and represents the rights to not only redistribute the works that are covered by this but also to modify and freely distribute those modifications. This term is very much in the spirit of many open source types of software and music. The catch for copyleft protection is that the newly created work be distributed in the same manner and spirit in which it was received. In other words if you were freely given the software, then you must freely provide the improvements and modifications you made to that software. Of course this is a long way from the idea of a software company patent.
It is also important that you are sure you understand exactly what you are applying for as far as your patent goes. Different countries will grant patents for different things and those are closely regulated and carefully regarded when it comes to software-know what you are applying for and understand what you are being granted. A software company patent means different things to different people in different places and it nearly impossible to get other countries to honor a patent that they would not have granted at the same time they shouldn't expect other countries to honor patents based on their decision to do so either.
One unfortunate circumstance surrounding patents is that there seems to be an unequal and obvious disparity between the haves and the have not's. Patent enforcement for software, unlike literature and music is largely subjective. In literature and music, it is rather obvious that the copyright has been abused or that the work has been copied, this isn't as simple with software which is one other reason that software company patent is such a hotly debated subject in the software industry.
Ten Top Things That Make for a Great Employee If there is one thing that everyone can agree upon in the job market it is that great employees are hard to come by. Whether you are an employee yourself and you feel like you are always pulling the weight of the other people in the office or if you are a boss who is wondering how you can actually get some people on board who can do the job, you know that great employees are at a premium. But what exactly makes an employee great? These ten top things are guides to bosses looking for greatness in a new hire and for employees trying to get noticed in the workplace and be the kind of employee who has the potential to move up in the company chain. The first thing that makes an employee great is that they are always dependable. Great employees do the job they are supposed to do every time, and no one has to worry that they don?t deliver the goods. A great employee can be counted to always have their work done right, when it is supposed to be done ? it is a forgone conclusion that they will, and no one else has to spend any time worrying about it. The second thing to look for in a great employee is that they are a team player. A great employee isn?t one who is constantly looking for attention or hogs the spotlight. Instead, a great employee works with everyone else to make sure that the things that need to get done do get done, for the good of the company. The third mark of employee greatness is that they know how to take direction. Great employees know how to take criticism, direction and advice gracefully and make it work for them when doing their job. Fourthly, a great employee can be trusted. They don?t spread office gossip and they don?t dish company dirt. Likewise, they always tell the truth to their employer, even if it lands them in hot water. The fifth sign of greatness in employees is linked to the fourth ? a great employee always guards the confidential nature of their business dealings and protects everyone?s privacy. The sixth thing that makes an employee great is that they participate in the day to day life of the office. They don?t bow out of meetings or skip the office birthday celebrations. These things may not be a fun part of working life, and everyone involved knows that everyone else has some place they would rather be ? but a great employee wouldn?t be any place else. In seventh place comes the fact that a great employee gets along with other employees. Every office has one person that is in everyone else?s business and talks to loud on the phone and generally stirs things up and gets under everyone?s skin. This kind of employee zaps office morale ? a great employee is a good co-worker to everyone. The eighth thing a great employee has is good working skills. It may sound obvious, but a great employee has the abilities needed to do their job, and they constantly seek ways to improve, like going to training seminars or seeking further education. Great workers have great skills. The ninth thing that leads to employee greatness is tact and decorum. If there is a problem in the office, a great employee doesn?t make a scene in front of everyone else. A great employee will deal with such issues with privacy and diplomacy. Further, a great employee doesn?t tell tasteless, political or religious jokes, nor do they send emails that tell these kinds of jokes. Last but not least, a great employee has a great attitude. Bad attitudes bring everyone down. A great employee helps make work great for everyone else by having a good spirit about their job.
News is News All Over the World (writing newspaper articles) Writing newspaper articles is a fun and interesting line of work. Newspapers exist in big cities, small towns, within corporations and on college campuses. Newspapers are printed for special interest groups as well as for world and national news. There are free newspapers and papers that appear for sale on newsstands every day. With such a large variety of newspaper types printed, there are myriads of possible opportunities for writing newspaper articles. There are some basic rules to writing articles for any newspaper and there are also some specific aspects to know about each type. Writing Newspaper Articles In general, to write a newspaper article there are a few rules that apply across the board. First, the news has to be relevant. Because newspapers make up a genre of writing that is constantly refreshing itself, there is no room for common knowledge or historical pieces. The exception is if those kinds of writing serve to connect to a current issue or event. People who read newspapers want to know what?s happening now. For that reason, writing newspaper articles often involves relatively high pressure to get the latest news written each and every day. There are some low-pressure possibilities in writing newspaper articles though. The Infrequent Print Several newspapers are only printed weekly or even monthly. In small towns that must get their papers printed off-site, it is not feasible to create a paper each and every day. That means that there?s a week, every week, to get the news in and written. Another example of low pressure writing for newspapers is working for a free publication. Free newspapers are often geared to a special interest group. Since that group is not paying for its paper, they may only receive the interesting tidbits once a month. Writing for these kinds of newspapers becomes focused on creativity and niche writing because the current events will have already reached the audience through more frequent publications. The Daily News from Top to Bottom The most reliable and frequent publications are those of big, national newspapers. The staffs are very large and are able to print very clean copies of very full newspapers. By clean, that means without errors. Smaller papers are also printed daily, but they seem almost insignificant except to the people of the local community. They receive national news second hand and run very small staffs. Interestingly enough, none of these daily papers are really about the news. Of course that is where most of the effort lies and that is the reason that people buy the papers, but it is not the root of a newspaper. Writing newspaper articles is a job heavily dependent on the advertising industry. A newspaper will only be as large as there are ads to pay for it. Newspapers do not make their money at the newsstand. They pay the bills and the employees with money from advertisers. On Campus News Working for a university paper will not be representative in the area of newspaper advertising. While some businesses do pay for ads in university papers, the funding comes from the school. If for some reason there were no advertisers one day, the paper would still go out. University publications are much more focused on the development of the students than making a successful business. Most campus papers are free and are created by students. School is a great place to get started in writing newspaper articles. The environment is challenging, but nurturing at the same time. The deadlines and standards still exist, but the writer gets great encouragement and training through the work. After working for a college paper, it will be much easier to get a job with newspapers of the cities and towns. Writing newspaper articles can be a great job. There are so many opportunities to get into writing that it is hard to pass them up. Some jobs may be very difficult to get, but others will be steps towards increasing writing success. | <urn:uuid:1f206738-2a59-4041-8c93-e7d164df6da5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brendadada.net/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977523 | 2,220 | 2.109375 | 2 |
I’ve been reading your comments from my giveaway post where I was asking what you wanted to read about on Green Panda Treehouse. Many of you expressed the interest to read more about asset allocation and how to invest savings at a young age.
So I decided to start an “asset allocation series” that will describe which kind of asset classes you may choose to invest in and how to manage your asset allocation depending on your age, financial situation, investment goals and, most importantly, how you sleep at night with your asset allocation (i.e. tolerance for risk). This will probably be a lengthy series since there is so much to read about. This is why you will have an “asset allocation post” about once a week and they will be regrouped in a special section of this blog.
You want to learn how to manage your asset allocation properly? You first need to know which kind of asset classes you can invest in! Today, I’ll first review the major asset class categories and in a second post, I’ll subdivide each of them, but let’s just start with a definition of asset class and asset allocation:
Asset class definition:
“Asset allocation is the strategy used in choosing between the various kinds of possible investments, in other words, the strategy used in choosing in what asset classes such as stocks and bonds one wants to invest.
A large part of financial planning consists of finding an asset allocation that is appropriate for a given person in terms of their appetite for and ability to shoulder risk. This can depend on various factors; see investor profile.” (wikipedia)
Asset allocation definition:
“Asset allocation is the strategy used in choosing between the various kinds of possible investments, in other words, the strategy used in choosing in what asset classes such as stocks and bonds one wants to invest.” (wikipedia)
Asset class #1: Liquidity
This is probably the most simple asset class you can invest in: CASH! Your liquidity can be found as pure cash in your investment account, in a high yield savings account (such as SmartyPig), in T-bills (treasury bills with maturities less than one year out guaranteed by the government of a country) or in a money market funds (a fund where the manager trades different t-bills and short-term notes in order to generate a higher yield).
This asset class is used for transactional purposes. If you want to invest money in another asset class, you will need use your liquidity. Therefore, the objective of this money is to get the highest yield possible considering 2 major factors upfront: #1 capital security, #2 capital liquidity.
Asset class #2: Fixed Income
The fixed income part of your investment portfolio will be the part where you will keep your “safer” investments that generate regular income. It doesn’t mean that this money will be 100% guaranteed, but this is the next safest asset classes. By safest, we often mean the one with least volatility (fluctuations in current value). As they will rarely show a supercharged yield, they will rarely drop by 20% as well. Since you have several types of fixed income, I’ll let you discover them in another post of this series.
Asset class #3: Stocks
If I have to make an analogy, I would compare the fixed income as the body of your car that will protect you and put everything together and I would compare stocks as the engine and fuel of the car.
Stocks are issued by companies so investors can “own” a very small part of the company. For example, if you buy 100 shares of Apple (this will be quite costly ), you will own something like 0.000001% of the company . If the company goes well and shows strong financial results, your stock will increase in value since the company will be worth more overall. There are several ways to invest in the stock market, some riskier than others. We will take a look at them later on.
Asset class #4: Others
Believe it or not, there are tons of other asset classes! While most investment products are covered between fixed income and stocks, you can also go into more complex products such as linked notes, derivative products such as options or commodities (oil, gold, copper, crop, etc.). I’d say that using those other asset classes require more investment knowledge. However, I will still show you how you can participate in those asset classes without running into a brick wall!
If you have any specific questions regarding asset allocation, please comment below. I’ll include the answers to your questions in my upcoming articles. | <urn:uuid:b874f3c6-7c9e-47b7-beb9-b4d1b024eed7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greenpandatreehouse.com/2010/05/asset-allocation-basis-part-1-know-your-asset-classes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95126 | 974 | 2.453125 | 2 |
"Patient Math, Writing, SAT Tutor"
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10+ subjects, including algebra 1 and algebra 2 | <urn:uuid:15f16c0c-cc5e-4f65-bbd5-18c0b939abd5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wyzant.com/West_Los_Angeles_Los_Angeles_CA_Algebra_tutors.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91453 | 101 | 1.96875 | 2 |
COA vows to track down tainted goose meat source
CNATAIPEI--The Council of Agriculture (COA) said yesterday that it will find the sources of three samples of chemical-tainted goose meat taken from markets in New Taipei, Taichung and Tainan and conduct tighter food safety checks in future.
October 18, 2012, 12:06 am TWN
The announcement came following a report unveiled a day earlier by the Department of Health that shows three out of 70 livestock products checked in August contained residues of Florfenicol and Thiamphenicol, drugs used to treat respiratory disease.
COA Minister Chen Bao-ji said use of the drugs is restricted to livestock such as chicken and pork but completely banned in waterfowl products.
However, the amount found in the goose meat samples was only around 3 parts per billion (ppb), far lower than the tolerance level of 100 ppb allowed for livestock products, Chen said, adding that as a result, the meat in question should pose no health concerns. | <urn:uuid:674bce9f-69cf-4cfd-ab56-feaf73962062> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2012/10/18/358066/COA-vows.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95153 | 214 | 1.546875 | 2 |
|Part of the Eastern Front of World War II|
Soviet troops enter Frauenburg, 9 February (?) 1945
|Nazi Germany||Soviet Union|
|Commanders and leaders|
| Friedrich Hossbach (Fourth Army until January 29)
Friedrich Müller (Fourth Army from January 29)
| Konstantin Rokossovsky
(2nd Belorussian Front)
(3rd Belorussian Front until February 18 - KIA that day)
(3rd Belorussian Front from February 19)
|Casualties and losses|
128 planes (According to Soviet information)
The Heiligenbeil Pocket or Heiligenbeil Cauldron (German: Heiligenbeiler Kessel) was the site of a major encirclement battle on the Eastern Front during the closing weeks of World War II, in which the Wehrmacht's 4th Army was almost entirely destroyed during the Soviet Braunsberg Offensive Operation (13 March 1945 - 22 March 1945). The pocket was located near Heiligenbeil in East Prussia in eastern Germany (now Mamonovo, Kaliningrad Oblast), and the battle, part of a broader Soviet offensive into the region of East Prussia, lasted from 26 January 1945 until 29 March 1945.
Attack on East Prussia
The Red Army's East Prussian Operation commenced on 13 January 1945 with the objective of rolling up the substantial German defences in East Prussia and cutting off the provincial capital of Königsberg. The Soviet forces were opposed by the German Army Group Centre, including the Fourth Army, under the command of General Friedrich Hossbach. While the 3rd Belorussian Front initially met strong resistance, the outnumbered German forces soon began to suffer serious ammunition shortages. Colonel-General Reinhardt, commander of Army Group Centre, warned of the seriousness of the situation as early as 19 January, but was not permitted to make a phased withdrawal.
The pocket forms
To save his units from encirclement, Hossbach started to pull the Fourth Army back to the west in direct contravention of orders, abandoning the prepared defences around Lötzen on 23 January. By this time, Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front had already broken through on Hossbach's right; the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army headed for the Baltic coast, cutting off most of East Prussia. Through a series of forced marches in atrocious winter weather, and accompanied by thousands of civilians, the Fourth Army moved towards Elbing, still held by the German Second Army, but found its path blocked by Soviet forces of the 48th Army to the east of the town.
An attack beginning on the night of 26 January initially resulted in lead elements of the 28th Jäger Division breaking through to Elbing, where they linked up with the 7th Panzer Division; however German forces were driven back during the next four days after the 48th Army had regrouped. Hossbach's units now found themselves pushed into a Kessel (pocket) with their backs to the Frisches Haff.
Hossbach was relieved of command on 29 January, and was replaced by Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller. His three corps were given an order to cease their breakout attempt on 30 January. Along with some units of Second Army, they found themselves encircled in the area of Heiligenbeil and Braunsberg; many of the civilians trapped with them attempted to escape across the frozen Haff to the Frische Nehrung and thence to Pillau or Danzig, reinforced paths marked by lamps having been constructed across the ice by Fourth Army's engineers.
As the Nazis had effectively forbidden their evacuation, East Prussia's civil population was undiminished when the Red Army attacked on 12 January 1945. The attack resulted in a mass flight westwards towards the coast. Many people were killed by Soviet troops or by the severe frost. At the coast, in particular in the harbour of Pillau, the German navy managed to evacuate tens of thousands of them over the Baltic sea, and encouraged the very fierce resistance on land, since every hour's delay to the Red Army meant the rescue of additional thousands of East Prussian old people, women and children.
Attempts to break through the German perimeter early in February were fought back, with the Fourth Army receiving heavy artillery support from the ships Admiral Scheer and Lützow, firing across the Haff from the Baltic towards the Frauenburg end of the pocket. Frauenburg itself was taken on February 9, in fierce fighting involving elements of the 170th Infantry Division. During one Soviet attack the 3rd Belorussian Front's commander, General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, was killed by a shell splinter near Mehlsack. His successor, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, having effectively contained the remains of the Army Group, concentrated on assembling reinforcements over the next month: the Germans, under the supervision of Major-General Karl Henke, continued to attempt resupply and evacuations of wounded along the Frische Nehrung, often at night to avoid air attack. A long, narrow corridor through to the besieged garrison of Königsberg was also maintained against the attacks of the 11th Guards Army through a joint effort by the garrison and by the Großdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division.
Though the German forces in East Prussia had no realistic hope of victory, and were severely short of manpower, ammunition, and fuel, they continued to offer strong resistance: the Red Army suffered extremely high casualties in the East Prussian Operation as a whole. Ad-hoc battle groups were often bolstered by civilians press-ganged into the Volkssturm, and many East Prussian villages and towns had been turned into fortified strongpoints, in addition to the substantial fortifications centred on Heilsberg. In part, the fighting was prolonged in order to keep open civilian escape routes; in any case, requests to evacuate the main body of the Fourth Army were refused by the German High Command. The Soviet attack, however, came tragically late for the remaining inmates of the Heiligenbeil concentration camp, along with other camps in the area: even as Hossbach's forces were attempting to break out of East Prussia, the prisoners were driven to the coast and massacred.
Destruction of the 4th Army
The pocket was finally crushed in an operation lasting from 13 March - 29 March, officially known as the Braunsberg Offensive Operation, in preparation for the final assault on Königsberg,
The Red Army quickly moved to cut communication between the Kessel and Königsberg, their troops reaching the coastline about 5 miles from the city on 15 March. A crossing of the Frisching River was forced in a night attack on the night of 17–18 March, further rolling up German defences of the Kessel from the east. Clearer weather from 18 March allowed an intensive aerial bombardment of the Fourth Army's positions.
With most communications cut, German forces remaining in the pocket were now faced with either death or being taken prisoner. Some 'elite' units, such as the Fallschirm-Panzergrenadier Division 2 Hermann Göring and the 24th Panzer Division, were evacuated by sea, but others were gradually cut off in a series of small pockets on the coast, in some cases actually digging into the coastal embankments or beaches. POW reports suggested that many German units were now seriously understrength, with the 50th Infantry Division, for example, able to field only a single incomplete regiment.
The Soviets finally took Braunsberg on 20 March. Heiligenbeil, covering the small port of Rosenberg, was attacked with phosphorus bombs on 22 March and successfully stormed on 25 March, the town suffering almost complete destruction. Rosenberg itself was taken on 26 March, with the remnants of the Fourth Army falling back on the Kahlholzer Haken peninsula, where the perimeter was defended by troops from the Panzerkorps "Großdeutschland" and the 28th Jäger Division. The last evacuations took place on the morning of 29 March from Kahlholz and Balga, where a remnant of the 562nd Volksgrenadier Division was destroyed forming a rearguard (its commander, Helmuth Hufenbach, receiving a posthumous promotion to Major-General). Soviet sources claimed 93,000 enemy dead and 46,448 taken prisoner during the operation; German sources claim that many troops in the Kessel were successfully evacuated to the Frische Nehrung. Given the chaos prevailing at this stage of the war, it is unlikely that accurate figures will ever be determined, many soldiers having simply disappeared. Further elements of the Fourth Army continued to resist around Pillau, and latterly on the Frische Nehrung, until May.
Red Army
The following Soviet units were involved in completing the encirclement of the Kessel:
- 2nd Belorussian Front (Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky)
- 3rd Belorussian Front (General Aleksandr Vasilevsky)
German records list the following units with the Fourth Army at the time of the Kessel's collapse:
- VI Corps (General Horst Großmann)
- XX Corps (General Rudolf Freiherr von Roman)
- XXXXI Panzer Corps (General Helmuth Weidling)
- 50th Infantry Division
Nearly all German units would have been at well below divisional strength even at the start of the East Prussian Operation; also some additional units involved (such as the 299th Infantry Division and 18th Panzergrenadier Division) were destroyed, disbanded or completely evacuated before the Kessel collapsed.
- Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5
- Duffy, Christopher. Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany, 1945, Routledge, 1991, ISBN 0-415-22829-8
- Hastings, Max. Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, Macmillan, 2004, ISBN 0-333-90836-8
- Lanza, Conrad. Perimeters in Paragraphs, Field Artillery, May 1945
- German-language article on Palmnicken massacre at shoa.de. Retrieved June 22, 2007.
- Duffy, p.172
- Duffy, p.173
- Though many accounts describe the Wehrmacht assisting civilians in escaping East Prussia, others describe civilians being forced off the road along the Frische Nehrung to make way for military traffic, and male refugees being compelled to join Volkssturm units (see accounts in Hastings, Chapter 10).
- Duffy, p.204
- See RIA Novosti archives
- Duffy, pp.161-2
- Official Soviet figures gave a total of 584,788 casualties for the entire area of the offensive during the period from 13 March - 25 April.
- Hastings, p.307
- Lanza, p.274
- Duffy, p.205
- See RIA Novosti archives
- Duffy, p.206
- Future German President Richard von Weizsäcker was amongst the military personnel on the final boats from Balga.
- Meier-Welcker, in Die Abwehrkämpfe am Nordflügel der Ostfront 1944-45, states that 57,585 troops and a further 70,535 wounded were evacuated from Rosenberg and Balga after 13 April (pp. 374-5). Soviet figures from Duffy, p.206
- Koenigsberger Express Das Niemandsland gibt ein Geheimnis preis. Koenigsberger Express, ed. 2004/7 | <urn:uuid:6c1cb7d6-6fb0-4b7e-b9fc-9d1ad82bdf1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiligenbeil_Pocket | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951174 | 2,454 | 3.3125 | 3 |
- seed trays
- spray can to keep the soil moist
- fertiliser - such as tomato feed
Creating your own garden
To grow your plants you will need
1. Children and staff brainstorm reasons for creating a garden in the school grounds. Get children to research the benefits.
2. Survey your site. What is there already? Measure the area. Take photographs. Get the children to make a wish list of what they would like to be in the garden, with reasons for their choices. It might not be possible or appropriate to include everything in your garden.
3. Use this activity to get the children to decide what is most important. Find images of the suggestions on their list. Mount onto paper with a wide border. Display round the classroom. Tell the pupils that they are going to move round the room and choose an image, which represents their first, second, third, fourth and fifth choice. These can be identified with dots of a specified colour stuck on to the border. Make sure everyone in the school has a go at this.
4. Count up the dots. Use the data to create bar charts to indicate the top five choices. Display these for everyone in the school and visitors to see.
5. Inform your local community of the ideas and plans. Talk to your school governors. Let parents know via your newsletter - you'll definitely find some willing volunteers, prepared to get their hands mucky! Contact local garden centres or nurseries. Let the local press know what you are doing. Involving everyone will get the best results for now and in the future.
6. Start small! Don't try to get everything in to the garden at once. Work on one area at a time; identify solutions and actions for this area. You could make some plans and drawings. You can expand the garden when you are sure of practical and financial support.
7. Get funding. This isn't crucial as much can be done with some good publicity and enthusiastic volunteers. It can be an on going process and could include school fund raising events such as non-school uniform days, fetes, etc.
8. GET STARTED! Good luck - have fun!
9. Monitor and evaluate what you have done and how it has been achieved. Are you happy with what you have done? Are there things that you will change when working on the next area?
Health and Safety
Write a risk assessment for your garden
When using sharp tools such as spades and forks, children need to be well supervised, a ratio of 1:4 is suitable. BTCV and gardens centres sell junior spades and forks for practical work. It advisable for that everyone wears gloves while gardening. Make sure that cuts are covered up and hands are washed afterwards.
If there is a pond, ensure that the area is well fenced off. Devise a code of conduct for working near water. Be aware of water borne diseases. Do not allow children to pond dip if they have cuts or sores or get them to wear plastic gloves. Make sure that children wash their hands after pond dipping. Do not allow them to eat whilst working in the pond environment.
Some plants can be harmful. You may be working with poisonous plants such as foxgloves, daffodil bulbs and bluebells. Devise a code of conduct for your garden, nothing should be eaten unless permission has been given. Some plants can be irritants or prickly, such as nettles and brambles. These are excellent for encouraging wildlife. If planted, make sure they are away from paths so access is not easy. Don't be put off planting. Investigate what is going into your garden and advise accordingly.
Before you start work check for cat or dog excrement. There is a risk of Toxocariasis infection caused by a parasitic worm found in dog faeces and Toxoplasmosis from cats. Remove! Ensure that gloves are won when working in the garden and hands are washed.
Check for any hazardous litter, such as broken glass. Remove!
Consider the terrain, trip hazards and the stability of anything to be stood or sat on.
Don't forget weather conditions. Ensue that children are appropriately dressed for rain or shine! | <urn:uuid:1f8adf0d-65ff-4ceb-8d54-434057b2e70a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kew.org/plant-cultures/schools/schools_garden_gettingstarted.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955767 | 870 | 3.5625 | 4 |
“Content is King” – the title of an article Bill Gates wrote in 1996 – is an expression used to mean that without original and desirable content any web venture is likely to fail. “The best SEO is great content” is another popular expression used to mean that websites with quality content will become popular purely as the result of the content alone.
On the other side of this coin is human nature. We love to be lazy! We want to know the latest tweak, the coolest plugin, the guru’s trick to get to the top of Google without having to put the hard work in.
Added to this, there are endless stories from unscrupulous internet marketers of “how I made $2,000 in one day with just a few clicks!”, that cajole us into thinking: “maybe if I create great content, do some kick-ass link-building and beg/buy/borrow social signals … I’ll be crushing it!”
Content is King
One possible champion of the “Content is King” camp would be Guy Kawasaki, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, bestselling author, and avid blogger. Guy has been around for a long time, backed the right horses and seen a lot of success. He explained recently How Entrepreneurs Are Getting Social Media All Wrong and said this about SEO:
My recommendation for SEO is very simple. It’s Write Good Stuff. In my mind, Google is in the business of finding good stuff. It has thousands of the smartest people in the world, spending billions of dollars to find the good stuff. All you have to do is write the good stuff; you don’t need to trick it. Let Google do its job and you do your job.
We’ve heard this before. But is it really that simple? Is the world so perfect that, for example, if I write a great article entitled “Great Content vs. SEO” I’ll be top of Google for “Great Content vs. SEO” supposing that there isn’t a better article? Is the web a perfect democratic reservoir of knowledge that serves up what you want when you want?
Of course, not. And in fairness to Mr Kawasaki he probably only meant this as the starting point. The internet is more complicated than “Content is King”.
SEO / social signals / authority / branding / marketing is Queen!
If you’re Guy Kawasaki you can create great content and be rest assured that it will be popular. For the rest of us, creating great content simply isn’t enough.
As Rand Fishkin explains in his article Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong., great content doesn’t necessarily garner links and rankings, instead, those who have “better optimized” content for attracting links tend to far outshine their peers.
The “best” restaurants are often family-owned, hole-in-the-wall, never-marketed-themselves joints whose fabulous epicurean creations are a secret to all but the most diligent culinary Clouseaus. Meanwhile, the affront to humanity and cooking that is Olive Garden advertises relentlessly, conducts impeccable market research and appeals to the lowest common denominator in town after town to achieve geographic and market-penetration ubiquity
(Not being from the US, I’m not familiar with Olive Garden but I guess they’re a sort of Pizza Hut?)
Rand is making a crucial point that is easy to miss. All great content is not created equal. One page with great content, great links, great authority, great social signals will out-perform better than a page with just fantastic content alone. Every time.
If you create great content without marketing, you’ll end up like one of those out-of-the-way restaurants, popular with a very few people but never making any money. If that’s OK with you, fine. Otherwise…
What you can do
It is, sadly, not enough to create great content. Always be thinking of ways to market that content (actually, most of the following bullet points will only take you 5 minutes to do!):
- Promote it through social networks
- Make it easy for others to promote it through social networks (add Tweet buttons, etc)
- Tell people about the great content (email high reputation bloggers in your niche, etc.)
- Sort out your Google authorship
- Promote blogger’s content and they’ll usually return the favor
- Guest post
- Create a Facebook page, add a Like Box in your sidebar and post the latest articles manually
- Create a Google+ Page, add a Google+ Badge on the sidebar and post the latest articles
- Find out what keywords people are using to find you on Analytics and write more content with those words in the heading
- Find out what keywords are popular and you can rank for using the Adwords Tool and write content with those words in the heading
- Find out what keywords are being searched for using Google Suggest and write content with those words in the heading
- Find out what problems your audience has by visiting forums and write content solving them
- Submit articles to web 2.0 sites with links back to your site
- Link to your links
- Keep writing great content, keep it fresh, interesting and original – but keep thinking of fresh, interesting and original ways to promote it as well
Google’s recent Panda algorithm updates have weeded out many low quality sites from the SERPs but SEO is not dead. It just never looked that good anyway.
The quotes from Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki were taken from this Google+ post. | <urn:uuid:7eef061d-4443-4481-89a7-4b10b715a86f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hellomynameise.com/great-content-vs-seo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92658 | 1,194 | 1.851563 | 2 |
AfriGeneas Military Research Forum
Re: Confederate African Americans? Another Referen
In Response To: Re: Confederate African Americans? Another Referen ()
Thanks Art and KWL. I haven't been on this board for quite awhile due primarily to this kind of stuff. You have both done a good job in defusing the post-and of course Bennie's site is the icing.
To address specificaly the Richmond troops-It was illegal until mid February 1865 for Negroes to carry/bear arms. As it became blatantly obvious to even the most obtuse Confederate, there was no way they could win as things stood.
When the organization Blacks to be trained in Richmond began, it was less than a month to Appomattox. They trained in an old factory that also housed a hospital. Indeed they drilled and marched some in Richmond's streets, but to be completely realistic-first-they would never have been trained in time to be of any use. The CSA had so little money that only bills backed by gold would be honored, and at the time they could not equip, arm and field white soldiers. Do you think they actually spent money on arming these few trainees?
Iam not refuting that there were Blacks who served in the Confederacy-but you can bet they were awfully "light", just like those who served in the Union forces prior to the USCT. But companies and regiments? Over and over and over, IT WAS ILLEGAL.
Jordan's book on Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees is only one of several ridiculous books that have been published to support the myth of the "Black Confederate" The Neo-Confederate movement is alive, well, and financially well-supported, carrying their message even into elementary schools.
Hundreds of thousands of Black men, women and even children went to war with the Confederacy as personal slaves, body servants, cooks, teamsters, etc. and were conscripted to build fortifications, work in factories, bury bodies, and do whatever menial labor was needed. THEY WERE NOT SOLDIERS!!!!! As Bennie has reiterated many times-show us a roster that shows they were there. In the light of Confederate, and Southern feelings in general, the concept of an integrated CSA just doesn't cut it. And to be even more realistic, If you arm a few dozen, hundred or thousand slaves and put them behind white officers just how long do you think those white officers would last??? OOPS, sorry massa, my gun just done went off by itseff....
The only way this garbage will stop, is if we continually refute their rhetoric with facts-and especially facts from the Confederate official records. Bennie and I are working together to compile all that into one place.
Okay, I'll step off the soapbox for a minute.
Messages In This Thread | <urn:uuid:b8ebabd6-5b53-4616-a7e5-72da76988eb6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afrigeneas.com/forum-military/index.cgi/md/read/id/5371/sbj/confederate-african-americans-another-referen/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97753 | 596 | 1.921875 | 2 |
TAKING, finally, a somewhat wider outlook over the whole subject of the most intimate human relations than was feasible in the foregoing chapters, we may make a few general remarks.
One of the great difficulties in the way of arriving at any general understanding on questions of sex--and one which we have already had occasion to note--is the extraordinary diversity of feeling and temperament which exists in these matters. Needless to say, this is increased by the reserve, natural or artificial, which so seldom allows people to express their sentiments quite freely. In the great ocean there are so many currents, cold and warm, fresh, and salt, and brackish; and each one thinks that the current in which he lives is the whole ocean. The man of the world hardly understands, certainly does not sympathise with, the recluse or ascetic--and the want of appreciation is generally returned; the maternal, the sexual, and the philanthropic woman, are all somewhat unintelligible to each other; the average male and
the average female approach the great passion from totally different sides, and are continually at odds over it; and again both of these great sections of humanity fail entirely to understand that other and well-marked class of persons whose love-attraction is (inborn) towards their own sex, and indeed hardly recognise the existence of such a class, although as a matter of fact it is a large and important one in every community. In fad, all these differences have hitherto been so little the subject of impartial study that we are still amazingly in the dark about them.
When we look back to History, and the various customs of the world in different races and tribes and at different periods of time, we seem to see these natural divergencies of human temperament reflected in the extraordinary diversity of practices that have obtained and been recognised. We see that, in some cases, the worship of sex took its place beside the worship of the gods; and--what appears equally strange--that the orgiastic rites and saturnalia of the early world were intimately connected with religious feeling; we find that, in other cases, asceticism and chastity and every denial of the flesh were glorified and looked upon as providing the only way to the heavenly kingdom; we discover that marriage has been instituted and defined and
sanctioned in endless forms, each looked upon as the only moral and possible form in its own time and country; and that the position of women under these different conditions has varied in the most remarkable way--that in some of the primitive societies where group-marriages 1 of one kind or another prevailed their dignity and influence were of the highest, that under some forms of Monogamy, as among the Nagas of Bengal, 2 women have been abjectly degraded, while under other forms, as in Ancient Egypt and the later Roman Empire, they have been treated with respect; and so forth. We cannot fail, I say, to recognise the enormous diversity of practice which has existed over the world in this matter of the relations of the sexes; nor, I may add, can we venture--if we possess any sense of humanity--to put our finger down finally on any one custom or institution, and say, Here alone is the right way.
On the contrary, it seems to me probable that, broadly speaking, a really free Society will accept and make use of all that has gone before. If, as
we have suggested, historical forms and customs are the indication of tendencies and instincts which still exist among us, then the question is, not the extinction of these tendencies, but the finding of the right place and really rational expression for them. That the various customs of past social life do subsist on beneath the surface of modern society, we know well enough; and it seems likely that society in the future will have to recognise and to a certain extent transform these. In fact, in recognising it will inevitably transform, for it will bring them out from darkness into light, and from the old conditions and surroundings of the past societies into the new conditions of the modern. Polygamy, for instance, or some related form of union, supposing it really did spontaneously and naturally arise in a society which gave perfect freedom and independence to women in their relation to men, would be completely different in character from the old-world polygamy, and would cease to act as a degrading influence on women, since it would be the spontaneous expression of their attachment to each other and to a common husband; Monogamy, under similar circumstances, would lose its narrowness and stuffiness; and the life of the Hetaira, that is of the woman who chooses to be the companion of more than one man
might not be without dignity, honor, and sincere attachment.
Again it is easy to see, if the sense of cleanness in sex ever does come in, if the physical body ever becomes clean (which it certainly is not now-a-days), clean and beautiful and accepted, within and without--and this of course it can only be through a totally changed method of life, through pure and clean food, nakedness to a large extent, and a kind of saturation with the free air and light of heaven; and if the mental and moral relation ever becomes clean, which can only be with the freedom of woman and the sincerity of man, and so forth; it is easy to see how entirely all this would alter our criticism of the various sex-relations, and our estimate of their place and fitness.
In the wild and even bacchanalian festivals of all the earlier nations, there was an element of Nature--sex-mysticism which has become lost in modern times, or quite unclean and depraved; yet we cannot but see that this element is a vital and deep-lying one in humanity, and in some form or other will probably reassert itself. On the other hand, in the Monkish and other ascetic movements of Christian or pre-Christian times, with their efforts towards a proud ascendancy over the body, there was (commonly sneered at though it may be in the
modern West) an equally vital and important truth 1, which will have to be rehabilitated. The practices of former races and times, however anomalous they may sometimes appear to us, were after all in the main the expression of needs and desires which had their place in human nature, and which still for the most part have their place there, even though overlaid and suppressed beneath existing convention; and who knows, in all the stifled longings of thousands and thousands of hearts, how the great broad soul of Humanity--which reaches to and accepts all times and races--is still ever asserting herself and swelling against the petty bonds of this or that age? The nearer Society comes to its freedom and majority the more lovingly will it embrace this great soul within it, and recognising in all the customs of the past the partial efforts of that soul to its own fulfilment will refuse to deny them, but rather seek, by acceptance and reunion, to transform and illumine them all.
Possibly, to some, these remarks will only suggest a return to genera[ confusion and promiscuity; and of course to such people they will seem inconsistent with what has been said before on the subject of the real Marriage and the tendency of human beings, as society evolves, to seek more and more sincerely a
life-long union with their chosen mate; but no one who thinks twice about the matter could well make this mistake. For the latter tendency, that namely "from confusion to distinction," is in reality the tendency of all evolution, and cannot be set aside. It is in the very nature of Love that as it realises its own aim it should rivet always more and more towards a durable and distinct relationship, nor rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As human beings progress their relations to each other must become much more definite and distinct instead of less so--and there is no likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backward, so to speak, to formlessness again.
But it is just the advantage of this onward movement towards definiteness that it allows-as in the evolution of all organic life--of more and more differentiation as the life rises higher in the scale of existence. If society should at any future time recognise--as we think likely it will do--the variety of needs of the human heart and of human beings, it will not therefore confuse them, but will see that these different needs indicate different functions, all of which may have their place and purpose. If it has the good sense to tolerate a Nature-festival now and then, and a certain amount of animalism 141 let loose, it will not be so foolish as to be unable to
distinguish this from the deep delight and happiness of a permanent spiritual mating; or if it recognises in some case, a woman's temporary alliance with a man for the sake of obtaining a much-needed child, it will not therefore be so silly as to mark her down for life as a common harlot. It will allow in fact that there are different forms and functions of the love-sentiment, and while really believing that a life-long comradeship (possibly with little of the sexual in it) is the most satisfying form, will see that a cast-iron Marriage-custom which, as to-day, expects two people either to live eternally in the same house and sit on opposite sides of the same table, or else to be strangers to each other--and which only recognises two sorts of intimacy, orthodox and criminal, wedded and adulterous--is itself the source of perpetual confusion and misapprehension.
No doubt the Freedom of Society in this sense, and the possibility of a human life which shall be the fluid and ever-responsive embodiment of true Love in all its variety of manifestation, goes with the Freedom of Society in the economic sense. When mankind has solved the industrial problem so far that the products of our huge mechanical forces have become a common heritage, and no man or woman is the property-slave of another, then some of the causes which compel prostitution,
property-marriage, and other perversions of affection, will have disappeared; and in such economically free society human unions may at last take place according to their own inner and true laws.
Hitherto we have hardly thought whether there were any inner laws or not; our thoughts have been fixed on the outer; and the Science of Love, if it may so be called, has been strangely neglected. Yet if, putting aside for a moment all convention and custom, one will look quietly within himself, he will perceive that there are most distinct and inviolable inner forces, binding him by different ties to different people, and with different and inevitable results according to the quality and the nature of the affection bestowed--that there is in fact in that world of the heart a kind of cosmical harmony and variety, and an order almost astronomical.
This is noticeably true of what may be called the planetary law of distances in the relation of people to one another. For of some of the circle of one's acquaintance it may be said that one loves them cordially at a hundred miles' distance; of others that they are dear friends at a mile; while others again are indispensable far nearer than that. If by any chance the friend whose planetary distance is a mile is forced into closer quarters, the only result is a
violent development of repulsion and centrifugal force, by which probably he is carried even beyond his normal distance, till such time as he settles down into his right place; while on the other hand if we are separated for a season from one who by right is very near and who we know belongs to us, we can bids our time, knowing that the forces of return will increase with the separation. How marked and definite these personal distances are may be gathered from considering how largely the art of life consists in finding and keeping them, and how much trouble arises from their confusion, and from the way in which we often only find them out after much blundering and suffering and mutual recrimination.
So marked indeed are these and other such laws that they sometimes suggest that there really is a cosmic world of souls, to which we all belong--a world of souls whose relations are eternal and clearly-defined; and that our terrestrial relations are merely the working-out and expression of far antecedent and unmodifiable facts--an idea which for many people is corroborated by the curious way in which, often at the very first sight, they become aware of their exact relation to a new-comer. In some cases this brings with it a strange sense of previous intimacy, hard to explain; and in other cases, not
so intimate, it still will seem to fix almost instantaneously the exact propinquity of the relation--so that though in succeeding years, or even decades of years, the mutual acquaintanceship may work itself out with all sorts of interesting and even unexpected developments and episodes, yet this mean distance does not vary during the whole time, so to speak, by a single hair's breadth.
Is it possible, we may ask (in the light of such experiences), that there really is a Free Society in another and deeper sense than that hitherto suggested--a society to which we all in our inmost selves consciously or unconsciously belong--the Rose of souls that Dante beheld in Paradise, whose every petal is an individual, and an individual only through its union with all the rest--the early Church's dream, of an eternal Fellowship in heaven and on earth--the Prototype of all the brotherhoods and communities that exist on this or any planet; and that the innumerable selves of men, united in the one Self, members of it and of one another (like the members of the body) stand in eternal and glorious relationship bound indissolubly together? We know of course that the reality of things cannot be adequately expressed by such phrases as these, or by any phrases, yet possibly some such conception comes as near the truth as any one
conception can; and, making use of it, we may think that our earthly relations are a continual attempt--through much blindness and ineffectualness and failure--to feel after and to find these true and permanent relations to others.
Surely in some subtle way if one person sincerely love another, heart and soul, that other becomes a part of the lover, indissolubly wrought into his being 1 Mentally the two grow and become compact together. No thought that the lover thinks, no scene that he looks on, but the impress of his loved one in some way is on it--so that as long as he exists (here or anywhere) with his most intimate self that other is threaded and twined inseparable. So clinging is the relation. Perhaps in the outer world we do not always see such relations quite clear, and we think when death or other cause removes the visible form from us that the hour of parting has come. But in the inner world it is clear enough, and we divine that we and our mate are only two little petals that grow near each other on the great Flower of Eternity; and that it is because we are near each other in that
unchanging world, that in the world of change our mortal selves are drawn together, and will be drawn always, wherever and whenever they may meet.
But since the petals of the immortal Flower are by myriads and myriads, so have we endless lessons of soul-relationship to learn--some most intimate, others doubtless less so, but all fair and perfect--so soon as we have discovered what these relationships really are, and are in no confusion of mind about them. For even those that are most distant are desirable, and have the germ of love in them, so soon as they are touched by the spirit of Truth (which means the fearless statement of the life which is in us, in poise against the similar statement of life in others); since, indeed, the spirit of Truth is the life of the whole, and only the other side of that Love which binds the whole together.
Looking at things in this light it would seem to us that the ideal of terrestrial society for which we naturally strive is that which would embody best these enduring and deep-seated relations of human souls; and that every society, as far as it is human and capable of holding together, is in its degree a reflection of the celestial City. Never is the essential, real, Society quite embodied in any mundane Utopia, but ever through human history is it
working unconsciously in the midst of mortal affairs and impelling towards an expression of itself.
At any rate, and however all this may be, the conclusion is that the inner laws in these matters--the inner laws of the sex-passion, of love, and of all human relationship--must gradually appear and take the lead, since they alone are the powers which can create and uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws--since they are dead and lifeless things--must inevitably disappear. Real love is only possible in the freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality. The subjection of sex-relations to legal conventions is an intolerable bondage, but of course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people are slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries in fact form a sort of natural counterpoise, the one to the other. When love becomes sufficient of a reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet willing servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.
Surely it is not too much to suppose that a reasonable society will be capable of seeing these and other such things; that it will neither on the one hand submit to a cast-iron system depriving it of all grace and freedom of movement, nor on the other hand be in danger of falling into swamps of promiscuity; but that it will have the sense to
recognise and establish the innumerable and delicate distinctions of relation which build up the fabric of a complex social organism. It will understand perhaps that sincere Love is, as we have said, a real fact and its own justification, and that however various or anomalous or unusual may be the circumstances and combinations under which it appears, it demands and has to be treated by society with the utmost respect and reverence--as a law unto itself, probably the deepest and most intimate law of human life, which only in the most exceptional cases, if at all, may public institutions venture to interfere with.
In all these matters it is surprising to-day what children we are--how we take the innumerable flowers and try to snip and shape all their petals and leaves to one sorry pattern, or how with a kind of grossness we snatch at and destroy in a few moments the bloom and beauty which are rightfully undying. Perhaps it will only be for a society more fully grown than ours to understand the wealth and variety of affectional possibilities which it has within itself, and the full enchantment of the many relations in which the romance of love by a tender discrimination and æsthetic continence is preserved for years and decades of years in, as it were, a state of evergrowing perfection.
137:1 See Note on the Primitive Group-marriage, infra.
137:2 Letourneau ("Evolution of Marriage," p. 173) mentions also among the inferior races who have adopted Monogamy the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Bochimans of S. Africa, and the Kurnais of Australia.
140:1 See Remarks on the Early Star and Sex Worship, infra.
146:1 Perhaps this accounts for the feeling, which so many have experienced, that a great love, even though not apparently returned, justifies itself, and has its fruition in its own time and its own way. | <urn:uuid:7d863e17-906e-4e68-831e-b5c0ae2d9ca5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sacred-texts.com/lgbt/lca/lca10.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966554 | 4,088 | 2.296875 | 2 |
It is common to hit the internet when one is looking to buy or sell anything in this virtual market place. The internet is becoming a powerful tool for marketing or advertising ones business compared to other mediums. Online classifieds portals give easy and convenient opportunities to those who are looking to buy a business or sell it.
The important aspects of these classified sites are as follows -It is crucial to understand that one should post their classified ad to buy a business or sell it on authentic websites, which can be relied upon. A good website generally lets to post ads free with an easy sign-up process.
1. A good online-classified website should provide opportunities to buy, sell, trade, and organize, hence, providing its users with a virtual market place to expand and grow their business.
2. While putting the classifieds to buy or sell a business, it is important to use clear, concise language and make the classified stand out in order to grab attention, which generally results in buyers and sellers flocking towards it. Banner and photos can make a classified distinctive from the others.
3. Classifieds should be posted in relevant categories and one should avoid spamming them in all the categories. Even if multiple postings are done in various categories, modified title and contents should always be used.
4. Classified websites generally have nonstop traffic and are a great way of having ones classified viewed by thousands in a particular category. Alternatively, they also have thousands of classifieds for people who are interested to buy a business or certain products.
5. A classified website is ideal for buying any business or even to start as business as it gives ones business a good exposure and helps in promoting it. Online Marketing is more effective in comparison to other mediums such as the television and radio in promoting ones business. Online promotion can make a business accessible to millions of users worldwide.
6. These websites also give a chance to users to experiment, since they do not charge the user for posting the classified. Therefore, users do not have to wait for their ads giving desired results, as they have not invested anything.
Classified websites are user friendly and have good features, which makes this market place experience truly unparalleled. Visit www.publingo.com if you want to buy a business or to invest, find business partners and raise the capital. | <urn:uuid:ee368786-244b-4f21-9527-6eb6a18a2ddc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wooxie.com/blog/4512/online-classified-websites---the-easy-route-to-buy-a-business-or-to-sell-it | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957124 | 476 | 1.546875 | 2 |
For athletes on the go, the best breakfast is something that’s fast, easy, nutritious and delicious. Here’s a super sports breakfast idea from Nina Marinello, PhD, Coordinator of Sports Nutrition at the University at Albany. So good, you might want to enjoy two of ‘em! Thanks, Nina, for the tasty idea.
Whey to Go English Muffins
• Toast a whole wheat English muffin.
• Top each half with part-skim ricotta cheese.
• Sprinkle on cinnamon and add sliced bananas, your favorite fruit or fruit spread.
This breakfast has just what the sports nutritionist ordered: carbohydrates for energy and protein to repair and build muscle. As a matter of fact, ricotta is a good source of whey protein which is essential for repairing and building muscle.
To add more energy-providing carbohydrates, muscle-building whey protein, and health-enhancing vitamins and minerals, top this breakfast off with a glass of low-fat chocolate milk. You’ll have a breakfast that’s a real winner! | <urn:uuid:11567254-6645-4233-a1b6-a183238481a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://community.active.com/blogs/NancyClarkRD/tags/english_muffin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903441 | 226 | 1.679688 | 2 |
I read in some online publications that oly lifts do have amazing bodybuilding applications, but other articles argue that olympic lifts are only for olympic lifting, not for bodybuilding, therefore not providing as much physique development as non-olympic lifts.
That's true - an Olympic training routine won't lead most people to a Mr. Universe title. But Olympic lifters no longer compete in physique contests.
Back in the pre-Weider days of bodybuilding, contestants in bodybuilding contests had to include some sort of athletic activity in their presentation. Bob Hoffman - founder of the York Barbell Company, and the head honcho of bodybuilding at the time - had nothing but disdain for "mirror athletes"., and expected bodybuilders to be real athletes. Although the contestants could choose from a variety of activities, such as hand-balancing, most of them did Olympic lifts. If you look at the physiques of the bodybuilders at the time, they are definitely more muscular than the average person. But none of them would win a modern bodybuilding contest. Once Joe Weider took control of bodybuilding, the athletic performance part of contests was dropped.
A person who does Olympic lifts will become more muscular. But Olympic training isn't bodybuilding training. The typical Olympic lifter, other than Superheavyweights, weighs considerably less than a bodybuilder of the same height. What Olympic training will do is increase your muscular power. After training the Olympic lifts, most people will notice an increase in their veritcal leap and sprinting speed. For people engaged in real athletics, Olympic training is far more productive than bodybuilding training. | <urn:uuid:edd60ac9-8bea-4106-8928-53d039079845> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://exrx.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2531 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965583 | 337 | 1.609375 | 2 |
While normally not on the sight-seeing itinerary of those who do not know someone already living there, Shawnee could prove to be an interesting day trip.
In recent days, Shawnee has become increasingly known for its numerous Native American casinos.
Practically the only method of getting in or out of Shawnee is on the highway. Taxi cabs can be hired by calling a taxi service to have them pick you up, although doing so from another city could prove expensive.
There is a Enterprise rent a car in Shawnee and Shawnee Airport, so car rentals must be made before hand. Many times this is done at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.
Most traffic enters and exits Shawnee via Interstate Highway I-40, although State Highway 3 and US Highway 177 pass through Shawnee as well.
Greyhound buses make daily stops in front of the American Colony motel on the far north side of Shawnee.
From there you will have to either call a taxi or arrange another form of pickup.
Originally established as a railroad hub, Shawnee still has many infrequently used rail tracks. While logistically difficult as well as illegal, it could be feasible to stow aboard a freight car inbound to Shawnee. Not recommended.
Chartered flights can be acquired to fly you in to Shawnee airport, most likely originating from Oklahoma City or Tulsa. There are no commercial flight charter services based in Shawnee, so arrangements for your eventual pickup would have to be made as well.
While towns in Oklahoma are quite spread out, some have been known to hitchhike especially along I-40. Not preferred.
If you are a tourist, getting around in Shawnee means either calling a taxi cab service to pick you up or using a rental car.
Shawnee is very, very spread out and if you will quickly abandon any thoughts of walking if you ever want to get where you're going.
Historical Places of Interest
Many old buildings from Shawnee's early years still remain, although most have changed facade and/or fallen into disrepair.
Notable Downtown Shawnee Buildings:
18 hole course, Pro Store, and Club House dining available. 2501 Augusta, Shawnee, OK, (405) 273-4076 , Golf Shop (405) 273-2764, Greens Keeper (405) 273-0784, Office- 2300 East Highland (405) 273-1763
18 hole course; usually considered to Shawnee's budget golfing: "Golfing for the price of a gordita", Miniature Golf located nearby. 1901 South Gordon Cooper Drive, (405) 275-4471
Driving range and batting cages also available. Shawnee Lodge 657, (405) 275-1060
Since Shawnee's many public parks are used infrequently by locals, a quiet and serene environment can usually be expected.
(Exceptions noted below)
Shawnee's Twin Lakes
Shawnee's Twin Lakes offer enjoyable avocation and adventure to anyone who likes to experience the outdoors and water related leisure.
One lake is reserved for fishing and angling.
Its counterpart lake is for those who wish to swim or take part in non fishing related activities such as water skiing, jet skiing, or drinking. (Consuming alcohol while fishing can be dangerous to yourself and those around you; it is strongly discouraged.)
(Note: Due to pervasive droughts and low water levels, Shawnee Twin Lakes are often closed during the summer)
In recent years, Shawnee has been surrounded by gaming establishments who advertise to be "just like Vegas". For smokers, these establishments offer the convenience of having their own smoke shops, which are not subject to local tobacco tax statutes.
Since the passage of the 2005 passage of a Tribal Gaming Amendment, Native American casinos can now offer card games along with their slot machine mainstays.
As a classic example of middle sized town Americana, Shawnee boasts a variety of shopping opportunities, both budget and luxury oriented.
Books & Magazines
Like most towns of any size in Oklahoma, Shawnee is inundated with most of the fast food restaurants you can think of and also has many all-you-can-eat buffets (mostly Chinese food).
Most places to eat are located either on the northern edge of town along interstate highway I-40, sprinkled along Harrison and Kickapoo Street, or downtown on the south side of Shawnee.
You cannot go very far in Shawnee without running into a Sonic Drive-In of which there are 5, Braum's hamburgers and ice-cream (3), McDonald's (3), Arby's roast beef (2), Pizza Hut (2), or a Taco Bell (2).
Shawnee is home to the first "Sonic Drive-In" and also what has been labeled as "Sonic number 3000". This label is up for debate however, as some state that it was not the 3000th Sonic drive-in to be erected.
Other fast food chains set up around town include Quizno's, Wendy's, KFC, and Taco Bueno. Higher-end chains include Cracker Barrel, Red Lobster, and Chili's.
If you're wanting something more special, authentic Italian cooking with menus that go way beyond pizza and spaghetti can be found at Frateli's, just south of OBU on Kickapoo. Also on south US 177 you'll find Jay's Classic Steakhouse. Perhaps the best Mexican menu in town is at Abuelita's, found at the corner of Harrison and Independence.
Shawnee also has many pizza kitchens, although many of these are carry-out/delivery only.
Don't forget to try "Vans" a local BBQ favorite, located on Highland Street
Also on the menu is Robb's Smokehouse, the 2nd most popular BBQ place in town, located at 2321 N. Kickapoo, across from OBU.
Shawnee's surrounding area can offer almost as much to see as the city itself, if one knows where to look: | <urn:uuid:8dce02ea-0e67-4d04-b3f3-7335505f6346> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Shawnee&oldid=840799 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95638 | 1,255 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen from vanveenbulbs.com and next we're going to talk about where to order plants through the mail. There's so many choices when you're ordering plants and it's very hard to make a decision on where to order plants or even to know where to go to order plants. So, the first thing that I like to do is to check out my local suppliers. Here we are in the Northwest and this is my friend Mary's magazine, called "Northwest Garden News" and it's Online, as well, northwestgardennews.com. It's a great little publication from Seattle and it lists a lot of Northwest gardens, and farmers, and nurseries, and mail order nurseries, and all kinds of articles, and she's got a web page as well. The first thing I like to do, when I try to figure out where to order plants, is go locally. Find some local newspapers and find out who's advertising and then you can go to their web page, and if you don't have the Internet you can always call them up and you can get all kinds of information that way. Here, they've even got a classified news section too. She's even got a map of where you can find different nurseries, in the Northwest, it helps to find out where you can get things locally. There's also a lot of National magazines that have lots of really valuable information in them, not to mention, lots of contacts on where to buy bulbs. Horticulture is great, it's got all kinds of advertisements and in the back, too, they have listings of their different advertisers. So it's a great way to find out where you can buy your plants. Garden design is also a good magazine and has lots of gardening ideas plus different ideas on where you can buy your plants. My favorite method of finding plants is on the Internet. I have a web page vanveenbulbs.com and I'm also listed on Davesgarden.com and I love Dave's Garden because you can actually read other peoples testimonials and experiences with different companies so you can pick which companies you'd like to deal with and find out, write on the Internet what they sale, and where they sale it and where they're coming from. So, all I do is Google Dave's Garden, just like it sounds, and I can go right to Dave's Garden website and it's just a wonderful web page. There's many others, as well, that have similar information but I've found that I get the most links through this web page for my web page, as well. All different types of companies are advertised here and I love it because you can go right to products and sources and it'll tell you exactly where you can buy different things. You can go to the garden watchdog and it's a free directory. You have six thousand four hundred and ninety one mail order gardening companies so I love that about this web page. You can search by the product or you can go by company name, if you search vaveen you'll find Vanveen Bulbs International and it'll get you right to the website. So, this is our website, vanveenbulbs.com, you can go right to shop and view flower bulbs and we've got, either by the flower or even by the category, so if you're looking for deer resistant bulbs, that's what I love, because you have sun, you have shade, you might have deer, there's all kinds of web pages that have different information that can really help you. So, it's a really great way to search. Another way that I go is if there's a certain plant that I really love then I will just Google that plant or I'll go right to, if you go right to flower bulbs, you will find a lot of listings of different companies. I just go down and kind of search through each web page and I was very excited to find out that we're number fourteen, for such a small company, we're above a lot of the other big companies. So, there's all kinds of web pages and different ways that you can find out how to find mail ordering gardening companies. You can order Online or, a lot of companies still distribute catalogs, and either way, it's a great way for you to find out the best suppliers that you can buy from. | <urn:uuid:8f16c734-7338-4d53-9080-a583ad5ce56d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gardenguides.com/video-56646-order-plants-through-mail.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972608 | 902 | 1.617188 | 2 |
There are currently no matches for "Advanced Stretching Shoulders Exercises with Wooden Dowel".
Advanced Stretching Shoulders Exercises with Wooden Dowel
The shoulder is the most movable joint in the body. However, it is an unstable joint because of the range of motion allowed. This instability increases the likelihood of joint injury, often leading to a degenerative process in which tissues break down and no longer function well.
Strengthen your shoulder muscles and reduce the change of injury (such as the rotator cuff) with the exercises found below.
A wooden dowel is a solid cylindrical rod made of wood and is used for a variety of mobility drills.
No Exercises were found under this search filter.
Please change your "Find Exercises" options >> | <urn:uuid:b7355180-205c-47e4-9e63-9e3936c8f9d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trainwithmeonline.com/Exercises/Stretching/Advanced/Shoulders/Wooden-Dowel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955425 | 166 | 1.6875 | 2 |
It's not just the crunchy sweet taste and sugar rush that get people hooked on cereal. Cereal is rich in trivia, thanks to marketing teams that have given us memorable characters like Snap! Crackle! and Pop! and slogans like, "They're grrreat!"
TV commercials, cereals based on licensed characters and promotional tie-ins with movies have all helped cement cereal's place in pop culture. Clay Siegert, 30, who still eats Rice Chex, Life, Frosted Mini-Wheats and Honey Nut Cheerios, is such a cereal fan that he has included cereal-related questions in a line of nostalgic trivia board games created by his company, Intellinitiative Inc. Test your knowledge with these questions from The '80s Game.
A. In 1983, Post introduces this breakfast cereal, which is based on popular cartoon characters that avoid evil characters named Gargamel and Azrael.
B. In 1984, General Mills introduces E.T. breakfast cereal, which features grain puffs that contain these two flavors.
C. In 1983, Ralston Purina introduces Donkey Kong cereal, which features grain puffs shaped like these objects from the arcade game.
D. In the 1985 movie "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," Pee-wee Herman eats this type of breakfast cereal with a giant fork.
E. In 1983, Kellogg's introduces this corn and rice breakfast cereal, which TV advertisements claim is "crispy times two."
F. In 1988, Post introduces Croonchy Stars cereal, which features this Muppets character on the box.
A. Smurf Berry Crunch. B. Chocolate and peanut butter. C. Barrels. D. Mr. T cereal. E. Crispix. F. Swedish Chef. | <urn:uuid:edf70bb0-1e04-4b3a-bdb4-fef1397f50c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-28/news/0506280351_1_breakfast-cereal-two-flavors-crispy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931649 | 372 | 1.710938 | 2 |
In December 2012, Bastyr University's yearlong centennial celebration of the birth of Dr. John Bastyr culminated with the unveiling of the John Bastyr Legacy Wall, detailing his life and commitment to natural health.
More than 50 people attended the event, which included stories of Dr. Bastyr’s past, the reading of an original poem about him and the official unveiling of the wall. Among those in attendance was one of Dr. Bastyr's relatives, who came all the way from Florida.
The wall, which will be a permanent exhibit located next to the Bastyr University Chapel and is accessible to the public, was designed by Terry Duffy from Glyphic Design with text written by Jennifer Hendrix and consultation from the Pacific Science Center. The Legacy Wall details the life of Dr. Bastyr and the role he played in the history of natural medicine.
Amazingly even with all of his contributions to the field, this is the first and only permanent display where people can learn about the man many consider to be the father of natural medicine and gain a deeper appreciation for his impact on countless lives.
While the Dr. John Bastyr centennial birthday year is over, the Legacy Wall is a great way to ensure that every day continues to be a celebration of his remarkable life. | <urn:uuid:5bbc4ead-c5be-4c02-9cc4-f03e7e1d8404> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bastyr.edu/news/general-news-home-page/2013/01/dr-john-bastyr-legacy-wall-unveiled | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971334 | 262 | 2.015625 | 2 |
H. ADRIAN OSBORNE: There Are a Lot of Nonbelievers Out There -- Get Used to It
Have you ever heard of a Kludd?
He is the Protestant chaplain of a very religious group, the Ku Klux Klan. The clan describes him as a minister of the gospel of our Lord and Savior.
I find it very strange that the religion that supposedly supported lynching and terror was the very same one whose Christian ministers and laity laid their lives on the line to help achieve justice for black citizens. They did this without raising a fist. I believe that individual churches should be rated as to their malevolence as well as their benevolence. Pederast priests would certainly be in the malevolent column.
When it came to evaluating the church, some of our prominent forefathers were scathing. With limited space, I will quote only a few.
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading," John Adams wrote in a letter to Charles Cushing on Oct. 29, 1756, "I have been upon the point of breaking out. The world would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it."
In 1785 James Madison, in his "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments," wrote: "During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt on Dec. 6, 1813, wrote: "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."
Many others of our patriot forefathers also scorned the church. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington and Ethan Allen are only a few.
I've always been totally dismayed at the consequences of religious hatred. Throughout history, religious wars have produced havoc. We have to be ashamed because we never mention the words "religious war." We hide it. We refer to ethnic strife in Bosnia. That was not ethnic strife, it was Christians killing Muslims. At random, pick wars throughout history and you'll find religious genocide. The Albigensian war, 13th century: Christians killing heretics. The 30 Years' War in the 17th century: Christians and Muslims killing each other. Siege and massacre of 1099: Christians killing Jews and Moslems. And, of course, in Sudan today, we have Muslims killing Christians and others branded as heretics.
The strangest wars in history are when Christians conduct genocide against other Christians. For example, in Germany a few centuries ago, there were two churches, the Baptists and the Anabaptists. They disagreed on whether babies should be baptized at birth or later on when they were 18. The Baptists waged genocide. The poor Anabaptists either fled to Russia or to the United States. They are still here, as the Amish, still speaking German, and they don't baptize babies.
What is the key to stopping religious slaughters? As a starter, learn the meaning of respect.
While attending a church in rural South Carolina, I listened as a preacher demeaned the Episcopalians in town. While discussing the rapture, he indicated that the Episcopalians were already dead. He said the only thing alive in that church is the ivy on the walls.
Another example of disrespect is when you religiously mug non-Christian children in schools that don't belong to you. Here's a hint. If the school has Christian in the title, you may own it. You don't own a public school.
According to my world almanac, there are 46 million people in North America who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Of the members of the National Science Foundation, 94 percent are atheists. These people are not going to go away. Learn to live with them.
Finally, how should we treat people of another faith? I learned that 70 years ago in Sunday School. Go to your Bible and read Luke 10:25-37 -- the parable of the Good Samaritan.
H. Adrian Osborne lives in Pinehurst and can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.̔
More like this story | <urn:uuid:1aec05f1-8d84-4a47-90d4-53e98376a83e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thepilot.com/news/2009/apr/29/h-adrian-osborne-there-are-a-lot-of-nonbelievers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967573 | 909 | 2.046875 | 2 |
This Week in Durham History
“This Week in Durham History,” a new feature in The Durham Herald, launches today and will be published weekly.
It is a joint project of the Museum of Durham History and Durham Technical Community College, where Jim DePalma’s history students took on this local research as a class project and DTCC’s 50th Anniversary community service committee lent support.
Perhaps fittingly, today’s “This Week in Durham History” event is the founding of this newspaper.
On Feb. 26, 1989 – 124 years ago Tuesday – the first issue of the Durham Daily Sun appeared. Apparently no trace of that first issue remains, but an issue from a month later gives some flavor of the front-page news of the time. For example:
“The meeting of the Y.M.C.A., last night was opned with prayer by the President, J.H. Southgate....The Reading Circle met at the residence of Mr. W. E. Foster, on Main street, last night, and adjourned as a mark of respect to the memory of Col. Eugene Morehead, without attracting any business....Rev. J. L. White, the new pastor of the First Baptist Church, with his family, arrived in Durham yesterday evening and are now with Mr. John L. Markham.”
The Durham Morning Herald began publication four years later, started by four former employees of the shrinking Durham Globe.
The Durham Morning Herald acquired The Durham Sun in 1929, and published the newspapers separately – the Herald in the mornings, the Sun in the afternoon — until merging into The Herald-Sun in 1991. | <urn:uuid:c9841858-7b77-4b92-9e3a-dfe7054bc972> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.heraldsun.com/durhamherald/x670456983/This-Week-in-Durham-History | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948953 | 346 | 2 | 2 |
Make every step count in your leadership journey.
How did American military leaders in the brutal POW camps of North Vietnam inspire their followers for six, seven, and even eight years to remain committed to the mission, resist a cruel enemy, and return home with honor? What leadership principles engendered such extreme devotion, perseverance, and teamwork? In this powerful and practical book, Lee Ellis, a former Air Force pilot, candidly talks about his five and a half years of captivity and the 14 key leadership principles behind this amazing story. As a successful executive coach and corporate consultant, he helps leaders of Fortune 500 companies, healthcare executives, small business owners, and entrepreneurs utilize these same pressure-tested principles to increase their personal and organizational success.
In Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton, you will learn:
This book is ideal for individual or group study as a personal development, coaching, human resource development, or executive training.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©2012 Lee Ellis (P)2012 Oasis
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If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action. | <urn:uuid:8fbd04d7-33fe-4f82-9eb3-f785df998851> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/ref=cat_12?asin=B008FOQKQG | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937767 | 283 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Many opponents of school choice say parents should not have more freedom to choose which schools their children attend. They think greater choice will lead to the re-segregation of students by race and income.
This argument not only displays a serious lack of confidence in the people of Michiganit isn't supported by the evidence.
It just so happens that Michigan schools already are among the most segregated in the country, according to a recent study by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project. If Michigan's schools are already segregated, how could school choice make them more so?
Another thing you may not know: Private schoolsthe very schools opponents of school choice fear parents will chooseare far more racially integrated than public schools. A study by the University of Texas confirms that "private schools tend to offer a more racially integrated environment than do public schools." Public schools replicate the segregation found in their attendance areas, while private schools draw from a variety of neighborhoods.
What it all boils down to is this: If you don't want to see a return to school segregation by race and income, that's no reason to oppose school choice. It's a reason to champion it.
For the Mackinac Center, I'm Catherine Martin. | <urn:uuid:836c6ad9-a6b7-4bf0-b29b-912c8a1d0419> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=2653 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969519 | 245 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University.
Updated March 18, 2012, 7:00 PM
The “parent trigger” must be understood within the current context of vilifying public education. Today, there is a national effort to privatize public schools by turning them over to privately managed charters. This movement is financed by some of the nation’s richest foundations — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.
Collaboration — not hostile takeovers — is the most effective way to improve their public schools.
The demand for parent trigger legislation came from a California group called Parent Revolution. This group is financed by the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations. If these foundations were truly interested in parent empowerment, surely by now they would have underwritten the community-based parent groups in New York City and Chicago that oppose the closing of their neighborhood schools. But they have not.
A parent trigger — a phrase that is inherently menacing — enables 51percent of parents in any school to close the school or hand it over to private management. This is inherently a terrible idea. Why should 51 percent of people using a public service have the power to privatize it? Should 51 percent of the people in Central Park on any given day have the power to transfer it to private management? Should 51 percent of those riding a public bus have the power to privatize it?
Public schools don’t belong to the 51 percent of the parents whose children are enrolled this year. They don’t belong to the teachers or administrators. They belong to the public. They were built with public funds. The only legitimate reason to close a neighborhood public school is under-enrollment. If a school is struggling, it needs help from district leaders, not a closure notice.
Parents in Florida got it right earlier this month. By organizing, they stopped a parent trigger law. No Florida-based parent group supported it. By their actions, they recognized that collaboration — not hostile takeovers — is the most effective way to improve their public schools. | <urn:uuid:46d4b595-2131-4b23-ad88-97cea9498284> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theparenttrigger.com/2012/03/hopes-and-fears-for-parent-trigger-laws/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964295 | 432 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Restriction endonucleases are found throughout the prokaryotic world and function as primitive immune systems to degrade the DNA of invading viruses and bacteriophage. They consist of a restriction enzyme and a DNA methyltransferases enzyme (Figure 1).
Restriction enzymes typically identify a specific DNA sequence, bind to it, and using Mg2+ as a cofactor catalyse the cleavage of both strands of the DNA. They are usually dimeric enzymes, with one half of the enzyme recognising one half of the palindromic recognition sequence: the symmetry of the enzyme is reflected in the symmetry of the substrate.
To avoid digestion of the host DNA, alongside the restriction endonuclease gene is the gene for a DNA methylase. The DNA methyltransferases enzyme binds to the same sequence of DNA as the restriction enzyme, but it catalyzes the transfer of a methyl (CH3) group from its cofactor, S-adenosylmethionine, to either an adenine (A) or cytosine (C) within the recognition sequence. Since, following DNA replication one of the strands will already be methylated, the DNA methyltransferases will only ever have to methylate one strand of a hemi-methylated DNA in the host genome. For this reason the enzymes function as monomeric proteins.
Once both strands of the recognition sequence are methylated the site is refractory to cleavage by the restriction endonuclease. Should a bacteriophage attempt to invade the cell, then its DNA will be un-methylated and liable to cleavage by the host restriction enzyme, which are maintained at higher levels than the methyltransferases.
Restriction endonucleases have proved to be an essential discovery for recombinant DNA technology, and was recognised by a Nobel prize for Werner Arber and Ham Smith. They are extremely specific enzymes, which means they can be used to cut DNA very precisely at known positions. With the use of DNA ligase we can therefore cut DNA up in very precise ways and rejoin it to make new DNA constructs.
In this project you will be provided with a strain of E. coli that contains two plasmids, one contains the EcoRVm gene, which is constitutively expressed. The other contains the EcoRVr gene, which is inducible from the Pr promoter. When this plasmid is introduced into non-lysogenic strains (which do not have the phage integrated into the host genome), the restriction enzyme is expressed since it will not be expressing the repressor. However, over expression of the endonuclease is lethal to E. coli, even in the presence of the methylase, since in very high concentrations it will begin to cleave at other (non-cognate) DNA sites. For this reason, the strain is grown at 28°C up to mid-log phase and then expression is increased by raising the temperature to 42°C for 4h. During this time the cells are able to express a significant quantity of the enzyme before they become too damaged.
You will grow an overnight culture by inoculating a liquid culture from a single bacterial colony taken from a plate. This colony has grown from an individual E. coli cell, and this ensures that you will be growing a culture isolated from a genetically homogenous sample. The overnight culture will then be used to inoculate a larger culture. This will then be induced by increasing the temperature. The cells will be harvested at the end of the day and frozen. You will then lyse the cells to release the restriction enzyme, make serial dilutions of the enzyme and use these to digest a sample of DNA, which will then be run on an agarose gel to visualise the restriction fragments.
2 x 30 ml sterilin universals
2 Inoculating loops
1 ml cuvettes for cell density measurements
4 x 250 ml flasks with 25 ml LB media
4 x foam bungs
2 x 50 ml centrifuge tubes
1.5 ml eppendorfs
Overnight autoclave (mon)
Shaking incubator at 28°C (tues)
Water bath at 55°C (for 30 250 ml flasks) (tues)
Spectrophotometer for OD550 measurements (tues)
25 ml pipette (tues)
centrifuge for 50 ml tubes (tues)
25°C waterbath for eppendorfs (Thurs)
37°C waterbath for eppendorfs (Thurs)
Agarose electrophoresis tanks and powerpacks (thurs)
1000 x Ampicillin stock solution (50 mg/ml)
10 ml LB medium autoclaved
1M Tris-HCl pH 7.5
5 M NaCl
0.5 mM EDTA pH 8.0
1 M MgCl2
10 mg/ml BSA (bovine serum albumin)
Lysozyme 100 mg/ml in 50 mM Tris pH 8.0 (20 l per student) | <urn:uuid:306604f5-ce69-478a-b790-1d8c36aec828> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://openwetware.org/wiki/Imperial_College/Courses/Spring2008/Synthetic_Biology/Cellular_And_Molecular_Biology_Practical/Background | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91818 | 1,052 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Review Workshop of Nigeria Census 2006 took place at Minna, Niger State between 8th and 12th April 2013.
As part of the strategy for preparation for the next census, the Commission organized a workshop to review the 2006 Population and Housing Census. Participants were drawn from the the management staff who were principal players in the conduct and processing of the 2006 Census
Retreat on Population Management for Federal Commisioners took place at the Nicon Luxury between 15th and 18th of April 2013. Financial and technical support for the retreat was provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Health Policy Project (HPP).
It is my pleasure to perform the formal inauguration of one of the Federal Government’s major statutory bodies, the National Population Commission (NPC).
Today, the world is 7 billion people. In like manner, Nigeria is 167 million. The commemoration of the Day of every billion, began in 2005, is a commendable initiative of the United Nations to rekindle the consciousness of the world to the state of her population.
On Monday October 31, Gabriel was born at 12 am at Gwarinpa General Hospital Abuja which made Nigeria to stand at 167 million persons. And that same day the world celebrates 7 billion persons. Nigeria is now the sixth most populated nation | <urn:uuid:d9f6571b-d9ac-4086-ba67-dc55b9d0ac7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.population.gov.ng/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965786 | 269 | 1.804688 | 2 |
I was using Model Builder (ugh!) to select records in one table (CWI.C5ST) that relate to a subset of records ([BHGEOPHYS] = ‘Y’) in another table (CWI.C5IX). There is not an existing tool for doing this in ArcGIS. I did find a post by Layne Seely in ArcForums titled “trying to perform “relate” in Model Builder.” that led me to the Make Table View under Data Management Tools-Make Table View and even had the basic syntax I was looking for (if it hadn’t I probably would have guessed that it would not allow subqueries).
Since I always like to see exactly the syntax someone uses, I decided to show the syntax I used in case that helps anyone else.
It does require that the tables reside in the same workspace, which is a reasonable limitation that I can live with. Another drawback is that if you export the model to a python script, the command can get pretty long, especially if you have many fields. | <urn:uuid:5b48a901-fed5-459b-8b20-7221e5866927> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nodedangles.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/trying-to-perform-relate-in-model-builder/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966229 | 229 | 1.773438 | 2 |
2010 Southeast Region Volunteer Awards
October 14, 2010
Dr. Chanita Hughes-Halbert is an Associate Professor and Director of the Community and Diversity Initiative at Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center, where she provides leadership of community outreach and education activities. She is an internationally recognized leader in cancer prevention and control research and health disparities. At the University of Pennsylvania, she is the acknowledged leader in health disparities and community-based participatory research, and she has distinguished herself for using transdisciplinary approaches to improving health outcomes in medically underserved populations.
The goal of Dr. Hughes-Halbert's program is to identify sociocultural, psychological, and environmental determinants to health disparities and to translate this information into interventions to improve health outcomes to medically underserved populations.
Dr. Hughes-Halbert also has an extraordinary commitment to community service. She applies her expertise in community-based participatory research to ensure that community stakeholders are actively and meaningfully engaged in the development, implementation, and evaluation of community education programs. As a participant in the American Cancer Society Sisters Surviving Breast Cancer conference, she has held workshops on genetic counseling and testing in African American women.
For her commitment to the American Cancer Society, and her research of cancer prevention and disparities, the Southeast Region is proud to present Dr. Chanita Hughes-Halbert with this Cancer Control Award. | <urn:uuid:8b1230f1-f3f3-4fe0-86b5-a55b79f86b2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.penncancer.org/penn_news.cfm?ID=1355 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93709 | 275 | 1.648438 | 2 |