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We stayed here for 1 night. It is unique as it is the only pub in the world to be located within a stone circle. It was built in the seventeenth century.
The pub is supposed to be haunted by a woman who was murdered by her husband in Cromwellian times and she has been seen!! The pub is very cosy and old –fashioned, with exposed beams, fireplaces etc. Both breakfast and evening meals were very good.
The only limitation as it is a listed building, access is restricted to your room by a curfew: so you have to be in your room by 11pm and then cannot come back down to the pub/restaurant until 8am.
Unless you are a keen researcher into the stone circle or you find yourself on late night druid patrol you probably won't need to stay in Avebury. Those who fancy a bit of ghost hunting might however find the Red Lion to their liking. In many old inns - and this building dates from the 17th cenury - one can often find tales of unpleasant apparitions. Normally this simply refers to standard of the 'Ploughman's lunches' but here we have a racy tale of a Cavalier husband and an unfaithful wife. Florrie (apparently that was her name) was murdered by her jealous and avenging who slit her throat and hid the body down the well. Needless to say she was not terribly chuffed about it and can be seen wandering the inn. According to the locals many people have refused to stay here more than one night - but according to some vociferous web critics this might have more to do with the food and accommodation than the haunting! Perhaps best left for the dedicated spectre inspector? Ghostly or ghastly? The choice is yours. (If it has any bearing, I was told that Wednesdays used to be Bikers Night)
Directions: If you're amidst the stones, you're only a stone's throw away.
I didn't stay here, but I did drop in for a bit. It was built in the 18th Century. It's also the only inn in the world that's located inside of a stone circle. Supposedly, ghosts haunt the place, but I didn't see any...as usual. Forget the ghosts, get some food, have a pint in the pub, or try to get a room for the night (only 4 available.) Also, the bus stop is right outside the Red Lion.
The Red Lion, Avebury
Red Lion, Avebury
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Earlier this month, the Mail Tribune ran a story about Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster during nomination hearings on President Obama's CIA nominee. In the accompanying list of length filibusters, it listed Wayne Morse, D-Ore., having the second longest filibuster in 1953. My memory is that Sen. Morse was a Republican in those days, can you help me out?
— Arnold M., via the Internet.
Well, Arnold, we got it wrong and you got it partly right.
The vocal and combative Morse played to both sides of the aisle, ultimately finishing his 24-year career in the Senate as a Democrat. But the Oregon voters sent Morse to Washington, D.C., as a Republican. He remained with the Grand Old Party from 1945 until 1952 before Dwight Eisenhower's selection of Richard Nixon for a running mate caused Morse to defect in protest. But he remained a man without a party until 1955, for a time packing a folding chair to the Senate floor to position himself in the aisle between Democrats and Republicans.
It was during this time that Morse rose to protest the Tidelands Oil legislation before the Senate, maintaining his filibuster for 22 hours and 26 minutes. The mark was later surpassed by South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, in 1957.
Morse moved over to the Democratic side of the aisle in 1955, lured by Lyndon Johnson, who assigned Morse to a coveted spot on the Foreign Relations Committee. With Morse in the fold, the Democrats took control of the Senate and Johnson became majority leader — and years later president.
Send questions to "Since You Asked," Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to email@example.com. We're sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them. | <urn:uuid:560ca01f-2df4-49cb-a72c-b8fe0e62458e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130319/NEWS/303190323 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958887 | 390 | 1.875 | 2 |
Psychologist Organizations React to DSM-5
January 14, 2013
Two national organizations for practicing psychologists are concerned about the potentially harmful impact on patients when the revised DSM-5 is released in May but their efforts are not coordinated in part from a fail- ure to communicate.
The National Alliance of Professional Practicing Psychologists (NAPPP), formed in 2006 by psychologists who felt the American Psychological Association (APA) was not active enough on behalf of practitioners, said even before details of the planned revisions were released that psychologists should abandon the DSM and use the mental disorder descriptions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) for diagnoses.
APA’s practitioner arm, the APA Practice Organization (APAPO), has been more circumspect in its criticism, but APA’s Division 42, Psychologists in Independent Practice, circulated a petition after the American Psychiatric Association (ApA) released a draft of revisions last year seeking the ApA to back off from many changes viewed as based on poor research and heavily weighted with presumed biologic causes for mental disorders.
The petition was endorsed by more than 50 mental health organizations and 13,000 individual mental health care providers concerned that lowered thresholds and the over-emphasis on physical causes could expand what is already viewed as over-prescribing of psychotropic drugs, but only minor changes were made before the revisions were approved Dec. 1 for final publication.
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Takeaway: Internet Explorer 7 is designed to make browsing safer. Here's a quick rundown of some of the new security features, including Active X opt-in, the Phishing Filter, cross-domain security, enhanced privacy protection, and an international character alert.
The code, which was posted on the Internet early Sunday morning, could be used to disable the Windows Firewall on a fully patched Windows XP PC that was running Windows' Internet Connection Service (ICS). This service allows Windows users to essentially turn their PC into a router and share their Internet connection with other computers on the local area network (LAN.) It is typically used by home and small-business users.
This is a cool little trick I’ve picked up in my travels and decided to share it with you fine and ethical individuals =). Log in and go to your DOS command prompt and enter these commands exactly:
copy logon.scr temphack\logon.scr
copy cmd.exe temphack\cmd.exe
rename cmd.exe logon.scr
A vital tool to use when troubleshooting computer networking problems and monitoring computer networks is a packet sniffer. That being said, one of the best methods to use when troubleshooting connection problems or monitoring suspicious network activity in a Cisco Systems PIX firewall is by using the capture command. Many times Cisco TAC will request captures from a PIX in PCAP format for open problem tickets associated with unusual problems or activity associated with the PIX and the network.
Since our talks at Black Hat Vegas and DEFCON, Jon Ellch and I have been peppered with questions regarding how to find vulnerabilities in wireless device drivers and the specific techniques that were employed. Rather than answer these questions one at a time, an article seemed a better course of action. In this first article, we will discuss how to build an auditing environment, how to construct fuzzing tools and, finally, how to interpret the results.
IPsec is a suite of protocols for securing network connections, but the details and many variations quickly become overwhelming. This is particularly the case when trying to interoperate between disparate systems, causing more than one engineer to just mindlessly turn the knobs when attempting to bring up a new connection.
Firewalls are one of the fastest growing technical tools in the field of information security. However, a firewall is only as secure as the operating system it resides upon. This article will take a step by step look at how you can best armor your Solaris box, both Sparc and x86. These steps can apply to any situation, however I will be using Check Point FireWall-1 on Solaris 2.6 as an example. At the end of this article is a script that you can download that will automate most of the armoring process, to include implementing TCP Wrappers.
This white paper shows how to meet the challenge of low fiscal impact by using open source tools and re-purposing equipment in-hand. The challenge of low service impact was met through three layers of analysis before cutover. The methods used to develop this analysis are structured for re-use in other firewall projects and presented for use by others with similar challenges.
This tutorial is a comprehensive guide to the features provided by the Nmap Port Scanner. It is meant as an introduction for new users, a reference on new and existing features for experienced users, and an FAQ list. It is not intended as a replacement for the Nmap Manual Page, but more as a supplement to it.
There are times when you have to restart the fwd deamon. You might have to restart this in case the firewall starts logging locally, or you encounter a runaway process where the firewall experiences high CPU, or other instances where the firewall might start dropping packets for not so well known reasons.You can use this command to restart the Firewall deamon, fwd process using the watchdog services.
Check Point Software Technologies plans to acquire intrusion prevention company Sourcefire in a $225 million deal, as it seeks to expand beyond its core firewall and virtual private network businesses.
A flaw in Windows Firewall may prevent users from seeing all the open network ports on a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 computer.
The flaw manifests itself in the way the security application handles some entries in the Windows Registry, Microsoft said in a security advisory published Wednesday. The Windows Registry stores PC settings and is a core part of the operating system.
If you have given your trusted employees and key contractors remote access to your network via a client virtual private network (VPN), congratulations! By now, you have seen the productivity and cost benefits from allowing collaboration that surmounts geographical separation.
Cross-site scripting, often abbreviated XSS, is a class of Web security issues. A recent research report stated that XSS is now the top security risk. | <urn:uuid:aefb7eb3-9a3d-4f8f-941c-6e07152996d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://secmanager.com/node?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920242 | 991 | 1.992188 | 2 |
Got Milk? Donated breast milk provides healthy option for hospitalized babiesFARGO – Kristen Bratton was skeptical when nurses at Essentia Health suggested feeding her daughter donated breast milk. “The idea didn’t sound very appealing,” she said.
By: Tracy Frank, INFORUM
FARGO – Kristen Bratton was skeptical when nurses at Essentia Health suggested feeding her daughter donated breast milk.
“The idea didn’t sound very appealing,” she said.
But Ava was born more than two months early weighing just 2 pounds, 11 ounces. Bratton’s body hadn’t made very much milk, and she found out that formula can be hard on premature babies’ stomachs.
So after nurses explained to her that donor milk is screened, tested, pasteurized, and comes from a milk bank, Bratton decided to feed it to her daughter.
“I’m so glad that we did it,” she said. “Anything you can do from a health standpoint to help them out because they’re so little.”
Ava took to the milk with no problems, Bratton said. In fact, when Ava eventually had to be fed formula because she had bypassed the cut-off age for donor milk, she went through a few days of reflux issues.
“It’s a great program that not a lot of people know about,” Bratton said. “The benefits when they’re that little and that young – anything you can do to help them is huge.”
Essentia Health in Fargo started providing donor breast milk in April in the neonatal intensive care unit when mothers are not able to provide their own milk.
The milk comes from a donor bank in Colorado, and it’s expensive, but patients are not charged for it, said Jan Medford, Essentia Health program manager for lactation and OB patient education.
Sanford Health also offers donor breast milk in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and has been doing so for a year and a half.
“Our goal is to provide superior nutrition for all of our infants, most especially our smallest, most vulnerable infants who are challenged with growth issues because of their size,” said Kristy Fremstad, a nurse and the NICU lactation coordinator for Sanford Children’s Hospital. “We know breast milk is like a medicine to all babies, but especially to a premature infant.”
At Sanford, any infant with a medical need or younger than 32 weeks old is able to receive donor milk if the child’s mother is unable to produce milk for her baby, Fremstad said.
Parents must consent to using donor milk, but Fremstad said all babies under 32 weeks in the unit are either receiving their mom’s breast milk or donor milk.
“With education, and support regarding breast milk, parents have been very receptive to the use of donor milk,” she said. “Most moms who are unable to provide breast milk are relieved we are able to provide breast milk for their infant.”
Donor milk costs the hospital $3.50 per ounce plus shipping, but the infant’s family is not charged, Fremstad said.
“The benefits of improved health and shortened hospital stay for an infant outweigh the costs,” she said.
The benefits of human milk are numerous.
It has a lot of antibodies, which help strengthen the immune system. That’s especially important for premature babies with underdeveloped immune systems, Medford said.
It fine-tunes the body’s organs and helps protect against allergies, she said.
Human milk decreases babies’ chance of developing necrotizing enterocolitis – the death of intestinal tissue, which most often affects premature or sick babies, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
It’s a serious disease with a death rate of nearly 25 percent. It can also cause a hole in the intestines or peritonitis (inflammation of the abdominal wall), both of which require surgery, according to the Library of Medicine.
“A lot of parents aren’t real familiar with how valuable breast milk is,” Medford said. “Breast milk is like a medicine for babies. It’s very healthy and gentle for the premature digestive system.”
Many NICUs around the country are routinely using donor milk for premature and sick babies, Fremstad said.
The Human Milk Banking Association of North America, a nonprofit association of donor human milk banks, sets the standards for milk banks in North America.
Donors are screened and the milk from three to five donors is mixed together and then pasteurized to eliminate bacteria and viruses while retaining the majority of the milk’s beneficial components, the association states on its website.
Milk samples are taken during the pasteurization process and cultured to check for bacterial growth. Contaminated milk is discarded.
Gov. Jack Dalrymple recently proclaimed the first week in August as Breastfeeding Week in North Dakota.
The week coincides with World Breastfeeding Week, an annual event that draws attention to the health impacts of breastfeeding for both babies and mothers, a news release stated. | <urn:uuid:2490c2f1-dbbc-4ef8-b765-99ae3b0d7976> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/370233/publisher_ID/1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960263 | 1,112 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Perfect Fit lowers voltage on new products
-- Home Textiles Today, 12/18/2002 5:37:00 PM
Charlotte, NC — Touting a safer electric blanket or mattress pad that provides the same amount of heat, Perfect Fit Industries (PFI) has introduced new lower-voltage models of both products.
The blanket and mattress pad uses less than 25 volts and "takes the safety factor to another level," said Allen Robinson, director of marketing for PFI. Traditionally, electric blankets have used 120 volts.
According to Robinson, PFI engineers said the engineering was possible due to developments in the heating element wires used to warm the blanket and pad which were originally very bulky and visible, as well as somewhat uncomfortable. The new wires utilized in both products are roughly one-fifth the size of their older counterparts, are thinner and more supple and are not visible through the construction of either. "It's almost as if you wouldn't notice the wires at all," Robinson told HTT.
The blankets are available in a full range of sizes and colors, with ivory representing the core offering. No patterns or prints are planned. Two constructions are also available — regular fleece and micro-fleece. Both are constructed from 100 percent polyester with the micro-fleece construction representing a higher-end price point. The mattress pad is also offered in the full range of sizes.
We would love your feedback! | <urn:uuid:0ee7a0df-5fa3-4d81-baba-c488cca4c37e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hometextilestoday.com/article/496455-Perfect_Fit_lowers_voltage_on_new_products.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963238 | 296 | 1.929688 | 2 |
June 10, 1998 A year ago, 59-year-old Anthony Capua underwent a double liver transplant-coronary bypass through a pioneering procedure at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Capua is living a normal life and enjoying his retirement.
Done separately, either operation probably would have failed and he would not have survived. After doctors at two Chicago hospitals told him it was impossible to perform the two procedures simultaneously, two University of Illinois at Chicago physicians operated successfully on June 19, 1997.
The La Grange, Ill., resident had been on a waiting list for two months before a suitable liver became available. Surgeon Malek Massad did the bypass first. Then, with Capua's heart once again functioning normally, his colleague Enrico Benedetti replaced his damaged liver.
Only two successful simultaneous coronary artery bypass graftings and orthotopic liver transplantations have been reported in medical literature. But Benedetti believes there will be more as older people at risk for coronary artery disease are evaluated for transplants.
"Forty percent of liver transplants are done on people above 50," he said. "Consequently, more of those people are likely to have coronary artery disease. If you do the transplant without fixing the heart, the patient will die of a heart attack. But you can't fix the heart because of the severe liver failure."
Advanced coronary artery disease has traditionally been considered an absolute contraindication to liver transplantation, the surgeons wrote in a paper about the procedure in the April 1998 Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Chronic liver failure significantly increases the risk for coronary artery bypass surgery, they added.
"The presence of advanced coronary artery disease in a candidate for liver transplantation should not be considered an absolute contraindication to transplant," they said. "In selected cases, performing a simultaneous coronary artery bypass and liver transplantation may provide an ideal treatment for both life-threatening diseases." Considering Capua's active life a year after the surgery, "the outcome has proven we were right," Benedetti said.
The surgical team plans to perform the same procedure on two more patients at UIC as soon as donor livers become available.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University Of Illinois At Chicago.
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Head over to Civil War Memory to watch Glenn Beck pick up Nathan Bedford Forrest’s sword, explain that the weapon likely “skinned people alive,” and proclaim it “a sword of tremendous American evil.” Sort of like the One Ring, I suppose; we should put it in a fire to see if it’s got an inscription.
As you might imagine, the SCV was less than thrilled with Beck’s attempt to paint Forrest as a nineteenth-century Hannibal Lecter.
Beck also had a number of artifacts on hand during a rally in Texas this past weekend. If this broadcasting thing doesn’t pan out, maybe he can get a gig as a museum docent. Hopefully he’ll do some additional reading between now and then.
One of my grad school classmates referred to the Anti-Federalists as “the biggest bunch of losers in American history,” owing to their rout in the battle to define the political aftermath of the Revolution.
I’m not so sure he was right. The Anti-Federalists’ opposition to the Constitution didn’t pan out, but attempts to resist centralization of political power at the expense of the states didn’t stop with ratification. If you interpret the Anti-Federalist impulse as originators of that larger political tendency, then you’d have to admit that their ideological strain has been pretty persistent over the past two hundred years. One thinks of the nullification controversy, the Confederacy, the controversy over civil rights legislation, and so on. Indeed, as J.L. Bell points out over at Boston 1775, the Anti-Federalist strain is enjoying something of a revival in some circles even as we speak.
Of course, over the long haul, federal power has expanded anyway, so maybe there’s still not much of a success story there even if we define the Anti-Federalist impulse as broadly as possible. Even many proponents of a weaker federal government failed to live up to their own rhetoric once they ended up in office, as Bell quite rightly states. (Here, again, one thinks of the Confederacy, which was all about upholding states’ prerogatives until it came time to actually carry on a war.)
Like most people, when I visited Appomattox Court House I was mainly interested in seeing the McLean House. The tiny parlor looked much as it did on that day in April 1865, or at least the way it looked in the painting I recall from my fourth-grade textbook.
But the appearance is a little deceptive. That photo doesn’t show the actual table where Lee sat, and its oval counterpart on the other side of the room isn’t the table used by Grant. In fact, the entire room is something of a replica. The McLean House had quite an eventful career after the two generals left. Purchased by speculators intent on turning it into a museum, it was dismantled in 1893 and then rebuilt after World War II. What you see is basically a reconstruction using original materials.
I knew this when I walked inside, and presumably most other visitors do too, since NPS signage explains the structure’s complicated history. But I still wanted to go inside and be in that room, and once I was in there I forgot all about the fact that it’s sort of like an illusion. All historic house museums collaborate with their visitors in this game of make-believe. The museums use furnishings and paint to mask the building’s post-historical afterlife, and visitors suspend their disbelief and take the restoration for the way it actually was.
Or at least we hope they’re suspending their disbelief. Some visitors, no doubt, assume when they visit historic buildings that the people who lived or worked there just walked off and left it intact, right down to the candlesticks, and there it sat like a hermetically sealed time capsule down through the decades until the tour guides came in and laid down carpet runners and velvet ropes. Interpreters must walk a fine line between two opposing responsibilities, maintaining the illusion while explaining its boundaries at the same time.
If you live in Tennessee, you’re in luck. Looks like a pretty neat program.
For as long as I can remember, whenever I’ve gone on a road trip (either with my family as a kid or taking the wheel myself as an adult) I’ve collected brochures and rack cards at rest stops and hotel lobbies. Actually, “collecting” is the wrong term, because I don’t have a collection in the formal sense of the word, just disorganized stashes and piles all over the house. There’s really no reason to keep them, but for some reason I have a hard time throwing them out. I suppose I could’ve created some system for organizing and labeling them, but it’s really more of an obsessive-compulsive habit than anything else.
Image from the NPS Harpers Ferry Center
The other day I made a passing, tongue-in-cheek reference to NPS brochures. These standardized leaflets are familiar to every heritage tourist—an advertising device, tour guide, and teaching tool all rolled into one. Most of the ones I’ve got are wrinkled and crushed from being clutched in a sweaty fist while tramping around on some battlefield. To me, the sight of that white Helvetica font on a black strip has always been a sign that there’s an adventure in the making.
Modern NPS brochures use the Unigrid system designed by Massimo Vignelli in the late 1970′s. It’s versatile enough to allow each site to customize it a little, but of course it also helps maintain consistency across the park system. Consistency and standardization are important, because when you get right down to it, the NPS is a brand.
That applies to interpretation, too. Every public history institution has to develop an interpretive “voice” that works for its multiple audiences, but the NPS has the added task of maintaining a voice across dozens of different sites. This puts some constraints on the people doing the interpreting, something I’d never really thought of until I read this recent post at Interpreting the Civil War.
When you’re a visitor, it’s easy to forget that the NPS is made up of individual people, each of whom have their own ideas about how to interpret a site and must work within the constraints of the brand. Personally, I’ve always found NPS interpretation to be consistently superb. Would any of you folks out there who wear the gray and green care to share your experiences and opinions about doing public history within an agency framework?
The House of Representatives can now vote to allow the NPS to acquire important Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites. Drop a line to your representative and tell him or her to support the American Battlefield Protection Program Amendments Act (H.R. 2489). It’ll only take you a few minutes.
Historic site preservation keeps getting more and more complicated.
The reality of imminent commercial space tourism is exciting — and threatening. The temptation for tourists to visit Tranquility Base, to walk in Armstrong’s footsteps or to pocket some small treasure as a keepsake may be too strong to resist. Artifacts too small to notice may be trampled. Those too large to move may be vandalized. The three-dimensional relationship of these objects — which tells the story of the Apollo 11 crew’s activities and makes the site so significant — could be destroyed. The integrity of this historical site could be irreparably damaged. It is imperative that these artifacts be protected in their current positions.
Your homework assignment is to design a brochure for Tranquility Base National Historical Park using the venerable Unigrid System.
“Come on, kids! The cyclorama starts in five minutes!”
This one is apparently about Abe’s boyhood, with Diane Kruger as Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln. This carries on a long, proud tradition of filling Lincoln movie roles with actresses who are far more attractive than the historical figures they play.
HNN’s poll to name the “least credible history book in print” has come to a close, and David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies came out on top, just barely beating Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
What strikes me about the poll is that while all the nominated books are undeniably problematic, they’re problematic in very different ways. Whereas The Jefferson Lies has become notorious for numerous errors of fact and interpretation, most of the HNN readers who left comments about A People’s History seemed to take issue with Zinn’s blatant partiality rather than with any specific claims in the book. Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered the World is almost in a class by itself, since its whole premise is open to question.
I also think it’s interesting that we had a string of high-profile accusations of plagiarism, fabrication of evidence, and other forms of scholarly malfeasance in the past several years, but none of the books involved in these scandals made the list of front-runners.
Anyway, they say any publicity is good as long as they spell your name right, so perhaps congratulations are in order. | <urn:uuid:615b4a43-4c71-4e28-bea0-8644e09ea072> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pastinthepresent.wordpress.com/2012/07/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954047 | 1,969 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The news website FiercePhrama has named La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter as one of the 25 most influential people in the biopharmaceutical industry, placing him on a list with such luminaries as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and GlaxoSmithKline CEO Sir Andrew Witty.
Venter, 65, found a way to greatly accelerate the sequencing of the human genome, and in 2010 he announced that he had developed the world's first synthetic cell.
"Venter's boldness and imagination makes him someone who rightfully commands attention in the life sciences world. He thinks big, and likely kick-started a genetic engineering industry with his creation of a synthetic bacterial cell. While it has no commercial application yet, he has argued that the finding could help create fuels or other necessary resources," FiercePharma said.
"But a synthetic biological entity also raises plenty of ethical and environmental concerns. The impact of a synthetic biological life form on the environment, for example, is something that remains fiercely argued and debated globally among scientists and environmentalists alike."
Venter has deep ties to San Diego having earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry at UC San Diego in 1972 and a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from the same institution in 1975. The J. Craig Venter Institute is located in La Jolla, and his organization last year broke ground at UC San Diego on a $35 million research center that is scheduled to open in 2013.
Story sources: FiercePharma, J. Craig Venter Institute, UCSD, Wikipedia | <urn:uuid:856f7fd3-9377-4188-83a7-7446a4077de3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/02/venter-named-among-most-influential-biopharma-indu/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956039 | 319 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The month long annual camel beauty pageant hosted in Saudi Arabia will be missing 13 camels worth millions, as the valuable animals were hit by a truck and killed as they travelled to the pageant.
Camels participating in the annual King Abdel Aziz Festival in Um Raqiba, Saudi Arabia, travel from all over the Gulf to compete for the beauty pageant title. Last year Emirates 247 reported more than 13,000 Arabian camels took part in the pageant which attracted owners from Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar.
Emirates 247 reported that 13 camels en route to this year's pageant were struck and killed by a truck carrying cement, as they crossed a road. The camels were worth millions. France 24 reports that the beauty pageant was once a local desert custom that has now transformed into a competition which is worth millions of Saudi riyals in prizes and can transform the camels owners into celebrities.
Both male and female camels participate in the pageant where a camel's beauty is assessed based on "the size of its head; whether its lips cover its teeth, the length of its neck and the roundness of its hump." | <urn:uuid:867a862e-6a76-42b1-a2ae-8de81438accf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/337142 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979665 | 232 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Although the call for the U.S. to lend some financial support to southern Europe is getting louder with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington saying the country should buy troubled Italian and Spanish bonds, to date, Uncle Sam hasn’t bailed out anyone. Europe is sinking, but the U.S. has no life rafts on its Titanic.
Yet, according to a new poll released Monday by Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, over a third didn’t know who was bailing out whom and nearly a quarter of them thought the U.S. was paying the bills.
Asked which country has had to spend the most money bailing out the financially troubled members of the European Union, just 30% correctly identify Germany, while 36%, admit not knowing, 22% say it’s the U.S., and the remaining 12% name some other country altogether.
The survey also asked what media sources people use to gather information about politics and world affairs. Combined with demographic factors such as gender, education and partisanship, this data allows analysts to calculate the effects of watching various news sources on information. For instance, the act of watching a national evening news broadcast is associated with an 8-point increase in the likelihood of being able to say that Germany is responsible for the bailout.
NPR did the best job of informing listeners about the debt crisis. Listening to NPR is associated with a 26-point increase in the likelihood of correctly naming Germany as the biggest life raft in Europe, and a 12-point decrease in thinking that the U.S. is bailing Europe out.
Sunday morning talk shows and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have similar positive impacts, with Daily Show viewers being 7-points more likely to say Germany, and 10 points less likely to say that it’s the U.S..
On the other hand, Fox News viewers were five-points more likely to incorrectly say President Barack Obama was busy bailing out his European socialist friends with taxpayer money.
“Since we’re controlling for partisanship and education, it seems like there really is something about watching Fox that makes people less informed on this issue than they would be otherwise,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at FDU. “Given that Fox’s ratings are well above their competitors, the findings are very troubling.”
Who is bailing out Europe? Independent voters are least likely to answer that correctly. While 36% of Republicans can, followed by 33% of Democrats. Only 26% of political independents name Germany, with 30% of them thinking it is the U.S. FDU polled 612 adults statewide for its European debt and the media study. | <urn:uuid:71f9e583-07d5-4e68-999a-6cdbbe859d0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/11/28/fox-news-viewers-likely-to-believe-the-u-s-bailing-out-europe/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968063 | 557 | 1.929688 | 2 |
To spend time searching for ancestors is to time-travel, in a sense. I find that as I find information pertaining to a g-g-grandparent or their siblings and the locales of their residences, I also learn more about the era in which they spent their life. To see the dress of the time period or read about their occupations and hardships is to spend time in the early 1900′s or late 1800′s or even further back.
However, there are still surnames that I’m anxious to locate in the censuses, cemeteries, or ancestral photos. These include:
JOHNSON – Jacob Johnson (3rd g-grandfather) born 1787 in New Jersey. Moved to Brown County, Ohio by 1816. Married Ann Shields (daughter of William and Mary Shields) in 1816. They were living in Rush County, Indiana by the 1850 Census. Jacob was reportedly of a family of 6 brothers. I’ve yet to locate his parents – I mean how many Johnson’s could there be, really?
WILT – Jonathan Wilt (3rd g-grandfather) born about 1800 in Virginia (probably) married Catherine Hollinger probably before 1827 in Virginia. There are reports that Jonathan’s father was Peter WILT – but I have no documentation.
HOLLINGER – Looking for Catherine Hollinger’s parents (see WILT above).
NASH – Alexander Nash (also 3rd g-grandfather) born about 1808 in Pennsylvania married Elsy (or Elcie) – maiden name is reported to be Wininger – probably before 1837 in Pennsylvania. Elsy was born about 1812 in Pennsylvania. Alexander and Elsy have been located in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 Censuses living in Henry County, Indiana. They had the following children: Christena (my 2nd g-grandmother), Sarah, Alexander, Catherine, Elsy, Nancy and Mary Adelaide.
WININGER – Parents of Elsy (see NASH above).
AMORE – William Amore (my 2nd g-grandfather) was born in February 1828 reportedly in Albany County, NY. He listed on the 1880 census that his father was born in England and his mother in NY. This is not the Italian pronounciation with the stress on the “e” (like amor-ay) – but A (rhymes with “hay”) – more. Or if it was the British pronounciation – could have been a (rhymes with “hah”) mor.
REED – My 2nd g-grandmother (married to William AMORE) was Charlotte Reed IMONS. I have reason to believe that she was married prior to William to a man named William H. Irwins in Coshocton County, Ohio. Charlotte was born in 1828 reportedly in Ohio. William and Charlotte’s youngest child was named Zachariah. Therefore, I believe Charlotte could have been the daughter of a Zachariah Reed found in the 1850 Census of Coshocton County. Would like to find documentation of this and Zachariah’s wife’s name.
LEWIS – Julia Ann Lewis (my 2nd gr-grandmother) was born in December 1815 in Ohio. She married Florus Allen House probably before 1838 probably in Michigan. They spent most of their married life in Coshocton County, Ohio. Florus was the son of Allen House and Editha Bigelow. Looking for Julia’s parents. | <urn:uuid:f7478930-0142-403f-acdd-24dcec3232d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allmybranches.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/looking-for-ancestors/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=bc4cf9c758 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97995 | 751 | 1.929688 | 2 |
16-year-old sailing solo causes parenting uproar
To the legions of critics online and on cable television who have questioned allowing their 16-year-old daughter to sail solo around the world, Laurence and Marianne Sunderland offered no apologies on Friday.
Los Angeles Times
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — To the legions of critics online and on cable television who have questioned allowing their 16-year-old daughter to sail solo around the world, Laurence and Marianne Sunderland offered no apologies Friday.
"If people are looking at age, they're looking at the wrong thing here," Laurence Sunderland said outside the family's Thousand Oaks home as a rescue ship headed to where Abby Sunderland had been seen the night before, adrift in her damaged boat in the southern Indian Ocean.
"Age is not a criteria. Abby is a fine sailor," he added. "I've never advocated this for 16-year-olds. I've advocated this for experienced sailors."
In an era when social scientists worry about "helicopter parents" hovering over their offspring, shielding them from dangers real and invented, the saga of the globe-circling, teenage solo sailor presents a counterpoint.
From the moment the teenage skipper was reported missing Thursday, debate over her parents' decision to permit the risky adventure has boiled on blogs and among child-rearing experts. Some have suggested the couple engaged in child endangerment and, at a minimum, should be financially liable for all search-and-rescue costs.
The Sunderlands, however, say their critics do not know their daughter, her upbringing and experience or her family. Children, Laurence Sunderland argues, should be encouraged to confront and manage challenges.
"Let's face it. Life is dangerous," Laurence Sunderland said on "Good Morning America." "How many teenagers are killed in car accidents? ... Should we stop every teenager from driving a car?"
Some who have observed the family see a mix of factors at work.
The family livelihood is centered on boats. Laurence Sunderland works as shipwright, maintaining, delivering and repairing boats at Marina del Rey. And the children's lives revolve, at least partly, around sailing. Abby has noted she's been on boats since she was 2 months old.
"It kind of just happens," she said before her departure in January. "You live on boats. You know how to sail."
A solo sailing circumnavigation that would be unimaginable for most families, is "kind of a fit for our family," she said. Her brother, Zac, already had sailed around the world alone at 17, she noted. The family also draws confidence from a regime of meticulous preparation and a certain fearlessness from an intense born-again Christian faith.
"We don't make any decisions just based on a feeling, or even on sound knowledge," Laurence Sunderland said. "We also pray about it. The conviction of prayer and answer to prayer has led to where we are with Abigail's campaign."
Those who criticize the Sunderlands said they can't fathom letting a minor child voyage alone for months in hostile seas and worry about the emotional damage of such isolation.
"I have a daughter who is 36, and if she wanted to do it, I'd tie her down," said Frances Rothschild, a California Appeals Court judge.
Margaret Stuber, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School, said that "as a mother, I would be terrified" of letting her children attempt such a trip. Such a challenge would be inappropriate for most 16-year-olds, she said. But Sunderland grew up with boats and has a unique skill set, she said.
From a developmental perspective, 16-year-olds have the reflexes and intellectual skills for the tasks involved, Stuber said. What is often slower to come is their ability to control their impulses, she said.
"I guess you have to make a judgment about what is reasonable, and what someone's skill level is," she said. "When my 16-year-old first got on the 405 and it was raining, I was terrified."
Laurence Sunderland said allowing Abby to go was an extremely difficult decision. He and his wife agreed only after she proved herself with intensive training. "This wasn't an easy decision to make. It was done very carefully," he said.
Renowned Australian round-the-world sailor Ian Kiernan was unconvinced, saying the teen should not have been in the southern Indian Ocean during the current southern hemisphere winter.
"Abby would be going through a very difficult time with mountainous seas and essentially hurricane-force winds," Kiernan told Sky News television.
The teen set sail from Los Angeles County's Marina del Rey in her boat, Wild Eyes, on Jan. 23, trying to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, and continued her trip after mechanical failures dashed that dream.
Abby set off a distress signal Thursday after rough seas disabled her ship and her satellite-phone reception. There were 20 hours of silence before a search plane launched from Australia's west coast made brief radio contact with her and found her alive and well Friday.
A rescue vessel was expected to reach Sunderland's 40-foot boat, which has a broken mast, drifting about 2,000 miles southwest of Australia, on Saturday.
She told searchers Friday that she was doing fine with a space heater and at least two weeks' worth of food, said family spokesman William Bennett. Support team member Jeff Casher said the boat had gotten knocked on its side several times.
Casher said the teen's vessel is so badly damaged, her attempt to circle the globe was over. "This is the end of the dream. There's no boat to sail," he said.
Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.
Sam and Sara Lucchese create handmade pasta out of their kitchen-garage adjacent to their Ballard home. Here, they illustrate the final steps in making pappardelle pasta.
Furniture & home furnishings
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Allen High School students traveled back in time to the 9th and 10th centuries during a visit to England earlier this month. At the Jorvik Viking Center in York, the 21 students saw recreations of how the Vikings lived, complete with the sounds and smells of a Viking village.
"It really was extremely interesting to go back that far," says Allen English teacher Sara Ann Thomas, one of four chaperones.
The center was the site of digs to see how the Vikings lived. On display were pottery shards, combs, buttons and pieces of ornamental glass found at the site. Students also saw the nearly intact medieval wall around York, and a palace dating back to 1699, used in the filming of "Brideshead Revisited."
In Bath, they toured the excavation of Roman baths.
The group was taking part in an exchange with students from Whitgift School, a private boys' school in Croydon. Students from Croham Hurst, a girls school, also participated. The National Honor Society sponsors the exchange, which dates back about a dozen years. Thomas is the club's adviser.
English students and faculty from both schools hosted Allen students and their chaperones. During their visit, Allen students visited the Tower of London, traveled to Stonehenge, and attended classes with their hosts.
For Meghen Kobli, the trip meant a reunion with the English student who stayed in her home when students from Whitgift and Croham Hurst came to Allentown in April.
Kobli and several others who played host last spring were guests in the homes of the English students they hosted. Several students corresponded with their British counterparts over the summer; some made trans-Atlantic phone calls to each other.
Kobli, a junior, enjoyed the side trip to the seaside resort of Brighton with her host family. She compared it to Cape May, N.J.
Kobli's home stay left her with the impression that the English pay more attention to family values. They all sit down together to eat meals, she observed.
Jonathan Penyack, a senior, liked the free day in London. Students had a travel card which entitled them to ride the train, bus or subway in the city.
The security in the area where the crown jewels were display amazed him. "There's a lot of money sitting right there."
Penyack's grandmother lives in Bath, Northampton County, so he purchased souvenirs for her from Bath, England.
Thomas says the rainy weather didn't stop them from having a good time. There was flooding in England's southwest and snow in Scotland during their visit.
She was surprised to see a gardener planting pansies in a London park and was told that the colorful flowers usually survive England's milder winters. If below-freezing temperatures are predicted, they cover the blooms.
The exchange has really "developed into some nice friendships," Thomas says. "As we were coming home, the kids were asking `when are we going next?'"
Thomas's husband Robert, and Allen teacher Dr. Mary Gosse and her husband Joseph also served as chaperones. | <urn:uuid:a892f60b-71fa-41a6-ae3e-8beb1c4d117f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.mcall.com/1993-11-04/news/2949427_1_host-family-english-students-club-s-adviser | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978955 | 652 | 2.25 | 2 |
History: Adient movement Edit History Back to page | View logs for this page Browse history From year (and earlier): From month (and earlier): all January February March April May June July August September October November December Deleted only For any version listed below, click on its date to view it. For more help, see Help:Page history. (cur) = difference from current version, (prev) = difference from preceding version, m = minor edit, → = section edit, ← = automatic edit summary (cur | prev) 12:01, March 12, 2010 Dr Joe Kiff (Talk | contribs) . . (236 bytes) (0) . . (undo) (cur | prev) 12:01, March 12, 2010 Dr Joe Kiff (Talk | contribs) . . (236 bytes) (+236) . . (Created page with ''''Abient movement''' is movement that is away from something. eg a rat moving away from a predator is exhibiting abient movement. It is the opposite of adient movement …') Retrieved from "http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Adient_movement" | <urn:uuid:9ffbce14-0290-4875-b329-4273165da4c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Adient_movement?action=history | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966898 | 242 | 2.109375 | 2 |
June 21st, 2012 by Hafiz Noor Shams
This economic crisis is a challenge to advocates of small government, especially for those who establish their argument based on finance. Even those who ground their position on something more profound like libertarians are being challenged simply out of the practicality of the situation.
The situation is that the cost of borrowing for several governments with debt considered as flight-to-safety grade like the US Treasuries and the German Bunds are very low now. For some, it is more or less zero.
Risk-averse investors really have nowhere to go and the supply for such fixed-income assets is limited. Demand for such assets will continue to outstrip supply in this situation of widespread economic crisis and yields will likely continue to suffer from downward pressure as individuals, firms, central banks and foreign governments bid the prices of these bonds up.
Cases of negative yields in real terms are aplenty. More profoundly, there have been cases of negative yields even in nominal terms. The Danish and the Swiss bonds are two examples where purchasers pay the government to borrow money from the purchasers. This does not happen too often. The market is saying, just take my money and keep it safe; we will pay you to do that.
In such cases, it is probably optimal for governments to borrow so much money and it does not matter if they actually do not need the money. Just borrow and store it somewhere. And if the relevant government has plan that has been delayed due to funding requirement, then this is the time to do it. With zero yields, financing is free. With negative yields, governments get paid to finance the project.
So, the relevant countries, this trend can be used to massively boost government spending and indeed, this can be a Keynesian case for fiscal expansion. There is no cost to it, at least, in the near future. This suspends the crowding out effect that is embedded in mainstream macroeconomic theories.
With the current situation, advocates of small government have to rely on long-run structural argument. The unfortunate thing with long-run argument is that it is describing a situation so far into the future, that it is hard to capture the imagination of enough persons. To most people, what is real is what they see.
And yields on various governments are zero. And judging from the look of it, increased government spending is unlikely to push yields up by a significant margin. | <urn:uuid:d126e500-67be-48e9-b2bc-dd2a05b51945> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://maddruid.com/?p=10315 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963395 | 500 | 1.8125 | 2 |
“Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably in order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and trade in influence; writing without anger traffics in the seductions of writing.”
Nancy, J-L, The Compearance[ref]
How should we describe the extraordinary consensus that existed in this country — a consensus that united us all around core concepts like ‘free markets’, ‘competition is the only way’, ‘private enterprise good, public enterprise bad’, ‘social partnership’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘greed is good’, ‘conspicuous consumption’? For a long time we lived inside a bubble. The walls of the bubble were invisible to us, they coloured everything we looked at but everything was that colour anyway so we thought it was colourless. It was, nonetheless, a bubble. What we hear these days, in the media, in conversations, in political speeches and union negotiations is the pop of the bubble bursting. We are faced with an absolute incongruence — between what we have been told and what we see.1 What this incongruence will tell us remains to be seen, but it makes us strange to ourselves, wakes us from our dream of shopping and eating and enables us to look back at our days in the bubble with at least the illusion of detachment.
Sometime during his seven-year incarceration at the hands of Italy’s fascists, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed a theory of ideological hegemony. It is probable that the idea first occurred to Gramsci during his meditation on another Italian philosopher and political analyst, Niccolo Macchiavelli, for that acute political analyst had observed the self-defeating nature of oppression as a political weapon. What Gramsci argued was that in modern democracies the powerful do not maintain their power — their hegemony — by coercion alone. In classical Marxist thought the ruling classes have at their disposal the police and the army, the prison system and the courts, the market and the all-important threat of destitution. All of these weapons are experienced as coercive by the poor. None of it belongs to them, and all of it, including the law, favours the rights of property and power.
However, it was clear to Gramsci that something else was needed to explain the fact the people voted for, or gave tacit consent to, a system that favoured a very small minority at their expense, actually voted to give power to the people who coerced them. The answer was ‘ideological hegemony’.2
In Gramsci’s formulation, a vast number of actors within a state contribute to the exclusion of hostile ideas. Thus, in a liberal capitalist democracy groups such as the churches, charities, political parties, special interest groups, schools, environmental activists, trades union, etc., all contribute to an illusion of political debate. It is an illusion because all of these groups, though they would like to tinker with the details, are in agreement on the fundamentals. Gramsci called this the ‘common sense’ position3. Genuinely radical voices are treated with contempt, and characterised as foolish and ‘ideological’ from the ‘common sense’ point of view, because the ideology of the majority is transparent to those who live within its confines — the bubble of my opening paragraph. Slavoj Zizek puts it succinctly:
“[I]n a given society, certain features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked, they appear as ‘neutral’, as the non-ideological common-sense form of life; ideology is the explicitly posited… position which stands out from/against this background.&rdquo:4
For example, it is a given in Western Europe (a) that what we have is democracy (b) that our ‘democracy’ is the best form of democracy that can be achieved (c) that democracy and capitalism are inseparable (d) that western-style capitalist democracy is the form of government towards which all other systems are evolving. These propositions represent the ‘common sense’ view for most people. Nevertheless, in our ‘democracy’, electoral victory usually goes to the wealthiest; once a party has been elected it never consults its electorate for another four or five years; subsidiary democracy (i.e. elections and votes within parliaments) is considered to be adequate to reflect the will of the people; capitalism regards democracy as the perfect ground for its exploitative activities, and ‘democracy’ has guaranteed capitalism 5 and awarded it a free reign by providing what is known as ‘political stability’. We should really coin some new phrase to describe it, something unwieldy like Competitive Plutocratic Subsidiary Democracy! To point to any of this is to question the god — and to be immediately labelled ‘ideological’, which in most cases is roughly equivalent to ‘crank’.
So where has western democracy (and ideological hegemony) taken us in recent years? It has taken us to war with Islam, to the torture palaces of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to ‘greed is good’, to Global Warming, to the wars of Africa, to The New American Century, to peak oil, to the credit crunch and the global depression, to the reduction of Gaza, to financial corruption on a grand scale, to mass unemployment, to blood diamonds, to the super-rich and hyper-poor, the jobbing politician and the cartel. In the meantime it has given us as consolation professional football, the celebrity spectacle, wall-to-wall television, talk shows, reality TV. The culture of complaint has drowned the culture of dissent. Television has drowned politics. Listening and looking have drowned hearing and seeing. To see any of this as an aberration of capitalism that ought to be corrected in some way is to miss the point: this is capitalism. What you see is what you get.
Writing in the Guardian in response to the recent insurrection in Greece, Costas Douzinas said of politics in the western democracies:
Contemporary politics aims at marginal (re)distributions of benefits, rewards and positions without challenging the established order. In this sense, politics resembles the marketplace or a town hall debate where rational consensus about public goods can be reached. Conflict has been pronounced finished, passé, impossible. The convergence of political parties in the centre ground exemplifies this “conflict-free” approach. But conflict does not disappear. Neo-liberal capitalism increases inequality and fuels conflict. When social conflict cannot be expressed politically, it becomes criminality and xenophobia, terrorism and intolerance. Or a reactive violence, the emotional response of those invisible to the political system.6
So where do writers stand in all of this?
What our private views are is of no consequence. Maintaining in private a hostile attitude to power is the prerogative of the servant and the prisoner — ‘We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.’7 What is important is what we write because, as the legal maxim says, qui tacet consentire videtur — he who keeps silent is seen as giving consent.
Two other courses are open to us: we can simply point to the ‘commonsense’, identifying and naming the ideological hegemony that has brought us to this pass, a useful function of art in itself, one of its best works, although tainted by the fallacy of objectivity; or we can take sides in the hope of influencing the outcome and thus become part of the debate. This essay advocates the latter.
The traditional stance of the writer in the twentieth century has been oppositional — even in Ireland. That opposition has been by turns republican, nationalist, fascist, and socialist but, one way or another, it has always been on the side of the counter-hegemony. In the interwar years, for example, Frank O’Connor, Sean O Faolàin, Peader O’Donnell and Liam O’Flaherty harried the confessional Catholic and right-wing consensus, the latter two from very public left-wing positions. Even an allegedly ‘pastoral’ poet like Patrick Kavanagh could kick against the pricks in poems like ‘To Hell With Common Sense’ or ‘In Memory of Brother Michael’:
Culture is always something that was
Something pedants can measure
Skull of bard, thigh of chief
Depth of dried up river
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we be thus forever?
But at no time in the recent past have writers been so integrated into the fabric of power and at the same time strikingly powerless as they are now.
Writers, integrated into the fabric of power, I hear you ask, how can that be?
The Arts Council, established in 1951 with Sean O Faolàin as its chairman, was originally conceived as a conduit for state funding for the arts, including grants and bursaries to writers and artists; Aosdàna, a national body for writers and artists was established in 1981, its only useful function to disburse a cnuas or bursary to deserving members; two further organisations manage grants for translators of Irish literature and grants for Irish artists and writers to travel abroad. Most — probably all — of the festivals that take place around the country on a regular basis are part-funded by these government bodies; most travel by Irish writers benefits in some way from these organisations; many writers who would otherwise be in straitened circumstances draw an honourable pension from Aosdàna. It is, in fact, difficult if not impossible to be a writer in Ireland and not to become the beneficiary of government largesse in some form. And in addition to government funding, most arts organisations draw the balance of their sponsorship from local, national or international business, and, of course, government anyway sees its interests as virtually identical to those of commerce. I do not wish to suggest that a withdrawal of government funding is a good idea — quite the contrary, it is the business of government, among other things, to support the artistic life of the community — rather I am suggesting that it has never been easier for writers to abandon their traditional oppositional stance and cosy up to the political establishment. Of course the political establishment for the most part don’t give a damn about them so long as they’re not rocking the boat — the day when an Irishman might agonise about whether a play of his ‘sent out certain men the English shot’8 is long gone.
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While some of today’s comparisons between Obama and communist dictators may go over the top, the general direction of such thinking is not without merit: since they share a utopian goal of forced equality, it’s logical to expect that their methods may also converge at some point. To wit, recent actions from Obama reminded me of a ploy Stalin used on Western entrepreneurs, which in itself is an illustrative morality play contrasting the differences between socialism and capitalism.
“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Barack Obama told the CEOs of the world’s most powerful financial institutions on March 27, when they cited competition for talent in an international market as justification for paying higher salaries to their employees.
Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room, the bankers struggled to make themselves clear to the president, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He interrupted them by saying, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”
To get the full flavor of the president’s implication we must remember that in Obama’s code language, the word “pitchforks” means “a vigorous campaign of threats and intimidation perpetrated by Obama-sponsored ACORN and union activists in conjunction with theatrical outrage from government officials, amplified by the complicit media, and coordinated from one political center, which has now moved to the White House.”
Accordingly, the words “public” and “the people” denote “an appearance of broad popular movement created by a small but highly organized band of professional pitchfork operators (ACORN) who rely on the government funding and the media’s eagerness to present their deliberately planned actions and pre-fabricated messages as heartfelt and spontaneous.”
In compliance with Orwellian logic, Obama’s “Newspeak” not only redefines existing meanings, it also abolishes ranges of “Oldspeak” meanings such as property, markets, competition, capitalism, political opposition, and the rule of law. The latter is perhaps the most important ingredient missing in his new “pitchfork” formula, signaling that law is now being replaced with mob rule.
In a balanced society, an angry mob is never a part of the equation. But if the goal is to throw a capitalist society off balance in order to change it, an angry mob is the ticket. Anger is known to be the easiest and the most effective tool of crowd manipulation. Angry mobs cancel out the rule of law. Infusing anger into a community and turning it into an angry mob, canceling out the rule of law, and changing the balance in a society — this is what community organizers do for a living.
It was often pointed out during the election that Obama lacked management experience. While having a president with no experience is bad, it’s not nearly as bad as having a president with experience as a community organizer.
Community organizers were instrumental in forcing banks to give subprime loans to unqualified minority borrowers by using the “pitchforks” tactics — protesting in front of the banks, camping on the lawns of the bankers’ family houses, intimidating families, and suing in courts. After the bankers were sufficiently roughed up, a community organizer would show up at their office to “negotiate” the bank’s surrender in the form of bad loans and money for community organizations that pay community organizers for their “services.” | <urn:uuid:535a8595-34c0-45e1-a7dc-a95f46fb3ec9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pjmedia.com/blog/obama-the-pitchfork-operator-a-remake-of-the-soviet-classic/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966234 | 743 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Intended Audience: This educational activity has been designed for radiologists, neuro-surgeons, neuro-oncologists, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, and other healthcare professionals interested in the treatment of gliomas.
This activity is also open to the general public. If you are a not a medical professional, please choose "View Video Only" to view this activity.
Activity Overview: When patients present with neurological or cognitive deficits indicating a possible brain tumor, crucial decisions must be made to produce an accurate diagnosis, effective treatment plan, and hopeful prognosis. This multidisciplinary educational activity outlines the latest innovative approaches to treat patients with newly diagnosed tumors.
Learning Objectives: Following participation in this activity, participants will be better able to: | <urn:uuid:8ac272eb-fd59-41d9-8747-c9e328dd14d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://penncancer.org/BrainTumorCME/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909146 | 156 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Folk frequently say there are 3 things that establish the price of a property: location, location and location. Location is also a major factor in commercial property investment.
For retail properties, location is the key as a lousy business will become successful it is at a good location. When a commercial property is at a good location, it'll attract renters to the property and keep them there. It'll also attract the shoppers of your renters to the property.
As a consequence, you as the owner of the property can demand the higher lease & price for the property. So how does one as a backer establish if the property you want to invest is at a good location? Glance at the property and see whether the property has these features: 1- Near major roads and freeways: This provides simple access to the property so the customers of the renters can rapidly and expediently drive to the property. 2- Near busy street with serious traffic volume: Commercial lists frequently mention the traffic volume in term of Autos a day (CPD). More traffic means more exposure of your renter’s enterprises to more possible clients. This is free advertising to your renters. The traffic could also be foot traffic. As example retail outlets at Pier 39 in San Francisco benefit from the high volume foot traffic from the holiday makers. 3- Near anchored renters: Giant retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Albertsons, and Home Depot straight away bring a lot of clients to their stores. So if you’re commercial property is near an anchored renter, it'll benefit from the high volume traffic. 4- At a junction: this can give the property more visibility as it has more frontage feet. If the property is found at a signalized corner then it's even better. As vehicles stop at the traffic light, folks in the automobiles will see the stores in your property. The traffic light is also a hint the crossing has more traffic. 5- Near local conveniences: Stadium, varsity, enormous mall and surgery will bring more traffic to the mall. Doctors always like the medical building near the local hospice as it is handy for them and their patients. 6- Simple to make left turn: The property should have straightforwardness of ingress and egress. If it is tough to make left turns, buyers will less likely come to the shopping malls. And so it makes the property less fascinating to the renters. 7- Easy to discover a parking spot: Folk don't like going to a place where they can not find parking spaces. Commercial property must have at least one parking spot per one thousand square foot of leasable space. It's more fascinating to have 4-6 parking spaces per 1000 SF. The width of parking spot is also critical. Who would like a ding on the door after a shopping trip? 8- Signage: Signage is a vital part of a commercial property. Clients frequently look for the name of the business instead of the street address. A big and tall monument sign in front of the property with the names of the enterprises in the property is always fascinating. 9- Able to draw in and retain renters: Your renters will look for a building and neighborhood that are appealing to them and their clients to establish if they should sign or renew the leases. So quality of construction, property condition, landscaping, the appearance of the building and surrounding area are all important factors to keep the property a hundred percent leased. 10- In a stable or growing area: you would like to invest in an area where population has increased. Review the demographic data in the property leaflet to see * How many percents the population has increased in the last 5-15 years. * How many new houses have been built in the previous couple of years? * What the average earnings in the area is inside 1-5 miles radius from the property all of these things will give you a picture if the city is growing.
The Noe Valley has for a while been seen as one of the most fascinating districts to live or lease in all of San Francisco. Sadly for plenty of the folks that dream about living in Noe Valley, the price tags reflect the standard of this neighborhood, and many people cannot afford the rent or housing costs here. Noe Valley is a great neighborhood, giving a particularly local and little city feel to the area even in a huge town like San Francisco. Part of this is perhaps because Noe Valley is sheltered from the mist and the franchise rows of many towns. There are numerous local run cafeterias, "mom and pop" stores and shops, and a flourishing farmer's market that's famous in the whole San Fran area. Noe Valley is very hot for many reasons beyond just the good weather, lovely districts, and quality upscale home market. Many residents love enjoying the local sites that are an advantage of living in Noe Valley.
The Dubliner is a local bar that many neighbors describe as having a "glorious" beer selection. Dolores Park is enjoyed by outside types, while being near to the Mission is constantly appreciated by residents who are enjoying living in Noe Valley. Some of the other local shops and attractions that benefit Noe Valley residents include Drewes Bros Butcher Shop, Incanto, and 24th Street. There's a mixture of local and yuppie, and it is not tricky to see why so many San Francisco residents would decide to live in this neighborhood. What is the problem of living in Noe Valley? The most important snag for the general public who need to live in this great higher class neighborhood is that the housing and rent costs are high.
Even after the housing downturn and the prevailing economy, the average lease range for a studio loft is $1100-$2550, while 2 bedroom residences start around $2,200 a month. "Cheap" Noe Valley houses start at $870,000 and the medium price for a single-family home can easily be well over 1 million bucks. If you can afford it there are only a few experiences in San Francisco better than living in Noe Valley.
Commercial property speculators understand the significance of finding locations that give enterprises the chance to become successful. Office complexes must use the surrounding views to make sure that workers give their own companies perfect results. Vital has invested in developing many successful commercial property sites in spotless locations. Developing in successful commercial areas only guarantees the commercial business complexes will maintain their price. Vital targets growing areas that permit stockholders to raise their returns as well as maintaining their locations.
Understanding commercial movements and trends permits investment corporations to take advantage of questionable gain possibilities. Crucial has remodeled and built office facilities that have proved to achieve success, and then sold them to financiers who are looking to make a profit. In late 2k Critical acquired the 650 California St. Office tower found in the finance district in San Francisco, California. Finding spotless commercial property in one of the planet's most business towns shows financiers that Pivotal has a commitment to finding successful locations.
Commercial property investing is more than finding great locations and selling them for a profit. Many times stockholders have to reconstruct buildings, or improve the monetary structure. Pivotal proved its capability to try this when they purchased Pointe Office Portfolio in Phoenix, Arizona. Crucial bought the office complicated and had to improve the hire roll and operational margins. By making the office complicated lucrative they managed to offer potential speculators a very worthwhile investment opportunity. Important was able to net a 58% profit markup from this venture. Crucial experience enables them to make these sorts of investments and these sorts of profits an ordinary circumstance. Permitting investment firms to employ their resources enables backers to maximize their profits. Crucial diversity in a selection of property segments gives Significant the various information that investment firms need to make critical choices about investing.
One of the most significant sectors in commercial investing is fiscal restoration. Improving on, or developing fiscal structures enables Critical to provide moneymaking commercial locations for backers. The most significant sections of the monetary sector are renter retention and building occupancy. Impotent’s handling technique prioritizes these 2 sections permitting the money sector to gradually turn profits each renewing period.
These kinds of enhancements are crucial to any sorts of investment ventures and Significant states their dedication to fiscal discipline inside their development and investment philosophy.
When people decide to go to a location essentially for the advantage of their family, there are a great number of factors which necessarily come to the advance guard of one's thoughts. San Anselmo, CA houses for sale represent some of the hottest decisions among Bay Area families. This area offers many of the advantages which families often seek when they decide to switch to a new area. This area is reasonably affluent and plenty of the houses in the area usually range above 1,000,000 in cost. There are typically about 30 percent of those listings which are available for costs under $700,000. Families who move to this area often do so for a range of reasons. Firstly, San Anselmo, CA houses for sale are found in one of the finest areas for faculties. The high-school district in the town is among the best in the state and provides kids with a safe and nurturing environment in which to learn. The community itself is also really safe and permits folks to enjoy an environment where they need not fret about their children continually. There are lots of community activities and groups which make this a wonderful place to reach maturity. San Anselmo, CA houses for sale are typically smaller houses with anywhere from two to five bedrooms. There are generally about a hundred available on the market at any specified time. These houses have a tendency to go quickly as this area is awfully fascinating. Those families who have breadwinners work in the town of San Francisco will enjoy an exceedingly convenient commuting routine relative to those in other bits of the Bay Area. This aggregate of a secure environment and a convenient position to the town of San Francisco has made this a consistently-popular market for property. While San Anselmo, CA houses for sale are usually single-family houses, there are bigger properties available in nearby communities which offer plenty of the same benefits. The houses in this community represent a range of architectural styles, which has a tendency to differentiate them a bit from almost all of the housing available in enormous urbanized areas. Instead of living in a tract home, children who grow up in this area are afforded the chance to grow up in a real neighborhood. The roads are distinguished by big trees and shady lanes, with tiny traffic and exceedingly comfortable, quiet environs. | <urn:uuid:95b7f3e1-9a73-4e5a-8a28-b0a7cf7426c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arealestatesearch.com/property-valuation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960892 | 2,150 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Gulf oil spill puzzle: A giant piece begins long rise to surface
BP raises the titanic steel blowout preventer, whose failure led to the Gulf oil spill, one of the world's worst. What story will it tell?
The mystery of why the massive blowout preventer at the heart of the Deepwater Horizon accident failed and caused the enormous Gulf oil spill is a step closer to being solved.Skip to next paragraph
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Clearing the way for the drilling of a final relief well to permanently kill the Macondo well, BP and its now well-worn underwater remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) disconnected the troubled piece of equipment at 1:20 Central time Friday in order to lift it to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
The pesky four-story steel structure, part of the BOP "riser package" that connected the rig to the wellhead, failed at the time of the Deepwater explosion, leading to one of the world's worst industrial oil spills. It later continued to thwart attempts by BP's deepwater submarines to manually activate its hydraulic on-board "shearing rams."
The blowout preventer is expected to become a key piece of evidence in several federal probes, including criminal investigations, to find out the cause of the spill.
Investigators are likely to find at least some remnants of the tons of debris -- including golf balls and shredded tires -- that BP attempted to jam into the BOP to stop the flow. The underwater gusher was finally stopped on July 15 after BP placed a large containment cap on top of the riser package to stabilize the well, and then jammed cement into the wellhead. The containment cap was successfully removed Thursday.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal incident commander, said it will take 24 to 36 hours for the BOP to make the long trip from the Gulf's darkest depths to the surface.
"We will continue to closely monitor progress as the BOP, which along with the latching device weighs approximately one million pounds, is lifted to the surface in the next 24-36 hours," Mr. Allen said in a statement.
BP shares rose on the news as did shares for Cameron International, the maker of the device.
According to Reuters, the BOP will be taken to a NASA facility in Michoud, Louisiana, where it will be examined by the US Coast Guard and the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which are investigating the spill.
The blowout preventer "is one piece of evidence that has the potential to provide some answers," the team said on its website.
The spill caused an environmental nightmare in the Gulf, fairly ruined the summer tourist season, and reinvigorated a national debate about America's energy future. Federal regulators fanned out across the Gulf's shallow and deepwater drill rigs to double-test other BOPs as Washington imposed a drilling moratorium in the deep Gulf.
Placing a working BOP on the stymied well will clear the way for BP to move ahead with the final stage of killing the well: By mid-month, a two-pronged relief well effort will inject concrete into the wellpipe and surrounding casing at the bottom of the well, some 18,000 feet into the bedrock, officials say.
Over 200 million gallons of oil is estimated to have flowed into the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and injuring 17 others. | <urn:uuid:927bf214-507c-4ee8-87dd-611e7ec04633> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0903/Gulf-oil-spill-puzzle-A-giant-piece-begins-long-rise-to-surface | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94843 | 711 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Dickens and Music
2nd May to 20th December 2012
Charles Dickens relished the thrill of live performance, be it music, drama or dance. The Academy’s exhibition Dickens and Music delved into Dickens’s connections to the Victorian musical world, from opera to street ballads. The novelist’s social and geographical connections to the Academy itself were also explored.
Dickens’s ties to the Royal Academy of Music and its Marylebone setting were at the heart of the display, illustrated by items from the Academy’s renowned collections. His sister Fanny was a student of the early Academy on two occasions, drawing both siblings into the society of young, gifted musicians. The Academy’s exhibition presented a unique opportunity to read an original unpublished letter penned by Charles Dickens and to see Fanny’s youthful attempts at musical composition.
Dickens was even inspired to write an opera libretto, ‘The Village Coquettes’, to music composed by one of Fanny’s fellow students at the Academy, John Hullah. Perhaps wisely, Dickens stuck to prose after this! One of his Christmas stories formed the basis of Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s opera ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’, the manuscript excerpts of which were on display in the exhibition.
Musical re-imaginings of Dickens’ great works of fiction also featured prominently. From their first publication to the present day, the exhibition showed how his stories are endlessly transposed into popular song, opera, drama and even modern-day West End musicals.
John Orlando Parry’s famous painting ‘A London Street Scene’ also formed part of the exhibition, allowing people to discover hidden references to Dickens amongst the jigsaw-puzzle of 1830s posters.
In his early 30s Dickens regularly stepped over the threshold of the Regency-era Nash building that houses the Academy’s museum now, to visit his great friend William Charles Macready at home. This link provided a suitably hallowed space into which Dickens and Music unfolded.
Watch Wanted: A Governess, one of the Dickensian songs sung by Academy musical theatre students for Dickensian Delights, an exhibition event.
‘This delightful little exhibition forms part of the ‘Dickens 2012’ commemoration of the writer’s bicentenary, and brings to life another fascinating aspect of his life’ – onestoparts.com
‘This small but comprehensive and illuminating exhibition is well worth a visit.‘ - The Dickensian, summer 2012
Celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens - www.dickens2012.org | <urn:uuid:56b0bbcd-7d86-40b1-bc78-52e1acde469b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ram.ac.uk/dickens-and-music | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957963 | 556 | 2.328125 | 2 |
J. D. Heyes
Nov 13, 2012
Big Brother is finding new and inventive ways to keep track of you these days, thanks to an explosion in technology, and that now includes the healthcare industry, once considered a bastion of privacy.
According to Wired magazine, a new “smart” asthma inhaler, which is designed to work in conjunction with a computer suite, allows health professions to track when a patient is having an asthma attack – including tracking the location of the patient when the attack is occurring.
The suite, called Asthmapolis and which is being sold to consumers as a safety feature (sound familiar?), is supposed to help both patients and healthcare providers alike “better monitor the behavior of asthma,” Wired reported.
‘Tracking’ asthmatics – For their own good, of course
The key to the system is a Bluetooth-enabled sensor that patients attach to their inhaler. Every time the inhaler is used, the sensor records both the time and the patient’s location.
“Using a smartphone or base station, that information is in turn transferred to Asthmapolis’ servers where the data can be used by individuals to track their response to treatments or by public health officials to spot and map patterns and outbreaks,” reports Wired.
David Van Sickle, founder and CEO of Asthmapolis, said he was inspired to the concept during his work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the federal health agency investigated outbreaks of respiratory illness, and then once more when he worked in clinical practice.
“There’s a ton of variability of asthma within micro-environments,” says Van Sickle. Experts say getting data about where and how often patients use their puffers is not only vital to obtain but difficult to collect.
“Historically in asthma we haven’t done much except provide patients with a rationale for keeping pen and paper and encouraging them to bring them to their next visit,” Van Sickle said.
The problem is, he and others say, that few patients like to do this because they view it as one more burden that comes with their disease. That leaves them either forgetting to write down their information or trying to guess.
“We know those diaries are often inaccurate. They’re generally fabricated,” Van Sickle said.
The former CDC clinician says the same problem occurs at a public health level; there is a tendency to record where people live when there is an outbreak. “The assumption is that all that happened at their house, which is a bad assumption to make,” he said.
Asthmapolis is designed to close the data gap by making collection of information part of taking the medicine. The puffer sensor is installed on top of the device; when the patient presses down to inhale the medicine, the sensor detects that and a GPS system and clock record the event, documenting time and place.
“Asthma patients are a tough demographic,” says Van Sickle. “We’ve got kids, older folks, people where it’s work related, people who need it when they exercise, and people who don’t use it often.”
Since the data collection is automated, that gives health providers a more accurate picture of when their patients are having difficulty with their disease – and when they are not.
“One benefit that sensor-driven products have is that you know when somebody has used the inhaler and you know when they haven’t,” Van Sickle said. “It makes the absence of data meaningful.”
But there is that issue of privacy.
No mandate to track – yet
Worse, this kind of insta-data approach is a developing trend in healthcare, industry insiders say. Asthmapolis joins other firms like Massive Health that use what they call “indirect surveillance” and data collection to get patient information.
“Data from the medications and how often people use them is the most important marker,” says Van Sickle.
The goal, he adds, is to allow health providers access to what they believe will become a more accurate picture of what’s going on with their patients – regardless of the privacy implications, apparently.
“Our company succeeds to the extent that we make it easier for patients to manage asthma,” Van Sickle said, adding that it was important to make the sensor unobtrusive (perhaps so the patient forgets he’s being tracked?).
“We wanted it to be like a machine that helps them accomplish work rather than adding to the day-to-day burden,” he said.
There isn’t a federal healthcare mandate – yet – to use such “unobtrusive” medical tracking devices, so patients still have a choice over whether or not they want to be tracked.
This article was posted: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 6:56 am | <urn:uuid:a3adeac4-f033-47c3-a60b-2813010f82c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prisonplanet.com/asthma-inhalers-with-tracking-devices-the-future-of-american-big-brother-healthcare.html | 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 | 0.961961 | 1,047 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Kinderbach is a online or dvd piano curriculum for young children that you can do at home. We received a membership as part of our Crew team on The Old Schoolhouse.
So how did we like it? Well, first of all, it is not captioned. There are parts of the videos that have background noise. Andrew WAS able to hear it and discern some parts and not others. I asked them if they had captions via the Internet or DVD option and they said, "I’m sorry. We do not. We learned the technology as we produced the videos. Hindsight is always 20/20." That was a tad disappointing. I always hope a company will have captions at least in their future plans.
Andrew enjoyed the ditties presented in each but it was geared to a younger crowd. (He is 10. And although younger developmentally, this was geared visually to a younger age. It is listed as for ages 3-7.) Each lesson was very short which I liked. By short I mean less than five minutes. This VERY much works for us. We are at the 'preschool' age of attention.
There were also PDF books to download with activities. The activity books for each level are over 40 pages long. There are 6 levels in this program and 10 lessons in each level. Although not all lessons use a piano, you do need a piano or keyboard to do this curriculum.
Because I do play the piano but don't teach it, I found it interesting the way that they presented the material. They would call a quarter note a 'walk' and would speed things up or slow then down depending on the note used. I think that might work well with younger kids but I found myself wanting to describe exactly what the note was called versus a comparison. I was hoping that because this was geared to the younger crowd that it might work well for Andrew because that is where his attention 'age' is at. Sometimes that works..sometimes it doesn't.
Because Andrew had some difficulty understanding the instructor because of the background noise...coupled with the fact that he spent most of his time laughing at the videos instead of doing what they asked.. it provided nice entertainment but not learning of how to play the piano.
I recognize that everyone is different and you may indeed like this. As always you can click on the banner below to find others that reviewed the product. In addition, you can do a free trial lesson. So please look at other reviews and the website yourself to make your own opinions.
You can find the full price structure by going to THIS page on the KinderBach webiste. It is $19.99 a month or $95.88 for the year. You can buy DVD packages or pay the fee for online access.
I received this product in exchange for my honest review. | <urn:uuid:71e2d574-e7de-436e-89b8-c5486daebd2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://growing-fruit.blogspot.com/2011/04/kinderbach-tos-review.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981062 | 584 | 1.773438 | 2 |
There are many reasons why people select certain countries to travel to, but no matter what type of travel activity you enjoy, Thailand offers year-round activities that would no doubt address your needs. The magical holiday destination, sitting in the middle of the poor West Asia and prosperous East Asia, hasn’t put a scratch on its historical monuments, while being one of the most modernized nations in its region.
It is hard to find a country where you experience sun and rain together throughout the year, while at the same time enjoying native tropical fruits, which is something unthinkable in other industrialized nations.
You can spend several lifetimes seeing the splendid capital city of Bangkok, zigzagging between the gorgeous reverse-iceberg-shaped mini islands of the Andaman Sea and sun-bathing on white sands washed by clean light-blue seawater. Briefly, the delightful things you’ve heard about Thai culture and landscape are all true. It is also almost unlikely that you will see a boy with an iguana on his neck, standing near a jammed highway, with a backdrop of a 15-storey building under construction. You don’t have to take a sea taxi to travel from one island to another, there are natural narrow, snake-like bridges made of sand that provide a link, but can be lost for a time if the waves are too high.
Here are the five reasons why you should immediately alter your travel itinerary -- to spend less but enjoy more.
1. Aroma. Oh that smell. It hits you in the face once you step off the plane. It is indescribable and this smell varies across the country, even in the capital Bangkok. Thailand is famous for its flowers, especially for its orchids. With dozens of types, you can find many vendors in the streets selling heart-shaped, beautifully lined-up red, yellow and white orchids that release their scent into the surrounding areas. In most places, you will be greeted with one of these flower bouquets, probably a glass of juice (I’d choose mango juice in its original box, and also a straw in it) and a hand towel to refresh yourself. Thailand is overflowing with flowers, the aromas of which follow you everywhere, while you travel this exotic country.
2. Hospitality. Thai people don’t shake hands, but they do more than that to show their respect, and greet their guests. Palms pressed together with a bow, “a wai,” is a traditional gesture for salutation. If you are not from Asia, it won’t be hard for Thai people to recognize that you are a foreigner. The Thai people do everything they can to be hospitable to foreigners, and to make them feel at home. In the southern provinces of Thailand, where Muslims peacefully live side by side with Buddhists, people’s hospitality will be more visible. The friendly treatment Thai people offer in hotels, restaurants, shops and houses you visit as a guest won’t be the same ordinary welcome you would expect in other nations.
Thailand might not be perfect when it comes to things like road signs and tourist information billboards in the streets, but people’s desire to show or even take you to places you want to go will make it impossible to get lost. They are always smiling and more than helpful. Thai people usually serve a glass of water or juice when you enter a hotel, restaurant or a house.
3. Affordable. Unless you are wandering around the international shops in the heart of Bangkok, most things across the country are cheaper than you might imagine. You don’t have to worry about finding a shuttle service to Bangkok from its huge international airport. Taking a taxi to virtually every part of the city will cost you very little. But don’t forget to tell the driver to switch on the taxi-meter, if you don’t want to have to bargain when you get off. Don’t pack your bags with everything you need during your stay in Thailand. From phones to SIM cards, to a pair of pants, you can basically afford anything you want.
The clean Chatuchak weekend market in Mo Chit (which you can reach using the easy-to-navigate metro) has everything you will need with affordable prices and a large selection of souvenirs that you might want to buy for yourself or take as a gift. The markets in Thailand are very rewarding. It could be slightly wrong to say that Thailand is the most affordable industrialized country, but it is certainly one of the remarks often made by those who visit Thailand. The great deals the country’s markets and bazaars offer on all kinds of goods can encourage you to spend more, since you know there will be more money in your pockets because of the savings. It is also advised to bargain with street vendors and during shopping in bazaars. Discounts to already cheap goods will give you an idea of how cheap things are in the country.
4. Weather. One thing that makes Thailand attractive is that you don’t have to ask people which season is the best to travel to the Asian country, and worry about coinciding your annual leave with a tourism season. Thailand is perfect every month of the year and even visiting in the hottest month of the year -- April -- won’t be irritating. You might want to avoid traveling to Thailand for a month starting from mid-May due to the monsoon season, but if you like tropical rains, don’t postpone your trip.
Most of the restaurants, shopping centers and houses have good air-conditioning systems and it is always easier to find places to cool down in the peak summer months. Unlike other resort destinations, Thailand has open beaches and hot weather, while people in Turkey and in parts of Europe are shoveling snow from in front of their garages to get their cars out. If you love sun and warm weather throughout the year, Thailand is the best pick.
5. Food. Thai food might not be appealing to everyone but it has a variety of flavors that may attract foreign taste buds. Thailand serves up one of the best fried chicken recipes in the world and its chicken industry dominates the region and beyond. Tropical products like coconut, dragon fruit, pineapple, bananas, tangerine and rose apples can be found on streets at a cheap price.
As in most East Asian nations, most of the food is served with rice -- their bread. Even some Thai dessert is made up of rice, what they call “sweet rice.” If you are a vegetarian or prefer less animal products, Thailand couldn’t be better with its variety of food offerings. You can hardly find a Thai meal composed of just a single food product; it is usually a mixture of many vegetables and poultry, meat or fish. Receiving numerous international awards, Thai cuisine is famous for its soups and fish dishes. | <urn:uuid:ec1e768b-a01e-4b30-be88-548911fee37f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=287258 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960742 | 1,423 | 1.5625 | 2 |
It all started during lunch one day. I was happily eating my homemade food while David, a good friend and colleague of mine, was staring at it and paused for a long time. Finally, it started, “Jing, is it true that in China…?”
Hahahahaha! No, we don’t dress like ancient people anymore and we do have cell phones and the internet!! David’s question got me thinking and made me realise how many questions my colleagues must have about this mysterious, unknown Far East land!
I decided to go ahead and tell them more about my country. China is place populated with 1.3 billion people with a high ratio of ‘netizens’, a fast growing economy and some ‘bizarre’ digital trends and behaviour.
It’s hard to understand somewhere’s digital market and trends without acknowledging the local culture and mentality. I guess you can’t talk about China without mentioning our passion for food and self-portrait pictures, our obsession of technology and smartphone products, our busy lifestyle and high pressure living. All these social and cultural factors have a huge impact on our e-commerce, social media and digital behaviour. The popular photo-sharing social media channels, the thriving mobile apps and e-commerce platforms, speed dating and group buy deals are all the ‘products’ born in the big Chinese digital climate.
Starting 14 years ago from icq & oicq age to today’s Facebook, Twitter, and Sina Weibo age. The new era has begun with Sina Weibo integrated into the iOS & Instagram systems , and China recently shared its first ‘home developed’ Wechat app with the rest of the world.
Wechat remains my personal favourite. This app was developed in 2011, managing to double its users from 100 million to 200 million between March and November 2012! This app combines functions of WhatsApp, Skype, iMessage, Instagram and Google Hangouts. Features such as texting, ‘hold to talk’, auto-synch of friends from different social platforms, video calls, group chats, , and you can even use it as a ‘speed-dating’ geo-locator to find people around you! I guess what I love the most about the app is how easy it makes for people to connect and how it manages to provide an ‘all-in-one’ service!
How many of you share the same pain and feel that you have too many apps on your phone? Especially when every single one of them offers a different function but with similar purpose. Good apps and services gain popularity because they stick to the fundamental human truth – make your life easy and simple!
So, do I see China taking over the world? To be honest, I don’t believe in this East/West competition theory. We live in the same world, and we are merging into one. China is catching up on technology and innovation. Instead of being the copycat, they are starting to adapt to and take inspiration from the West. The world is changing, but in a friendly collaborative way. We are becoming more equal and respectful of each other’s culture and knowledge. The digital platforms are emerging but so are our culture differences and technology gaps. The world is spinning like a blender, and our little salad bowl is turning into a lovely yummy melting pot! | <urn:uuid:069aa3f8-1c4a-45bc-9486-cc5f9ebe7291> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.digitlondon.com/tag/digit-breakfasts | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949427 | 701 | 1.71875 | 2 |
What is teething?
Teething is when a baby’s teeth start to emerge through their gums. It can be really painful and it’s no wonder – their gums can become tender and irritable as the teeth push their way through.
It’s a slow process. All babies are different, but most start teething around 6 months, and most will have all their milk teeth by the time they are 2½ years old.
Some children don’t have any teething problems – their teeth come through without any discomfort. But others really feel it.
Of course, if your baby’s upset, it can be hard to tell why, especially when they’re very small.
How can I tell if my baby’s teething?
Often teething pain can make your child restless or irritable, and they might have trouble sleeping.
Lots of dribbling is another really good indicator that teeth are starting to come through, and you’ll probably find your baby is trying to chew anything they can get their hands on – from their favourite toys to your fingers.
You might also notice their cheek becoming hot and flushed on the affected side as the tooth pushes upwards. You might feel a lump on their gum, or even see a white patch through their skin.
The good news is that once the tooth has emerged, the discomfort usually stops – and your little one has a brand new tooth to show off too!
You can keep track of the development of your child’s teeth using the handy teething chart we’ve created.
How can I help my child feel better?
There are lots of things you can try when your baby’s teething.
- Rubbing their gums gently with your little finger can help.
- You can give your baby something to chew on, like a teething ring. Try cooling it in the fridge beforehand, but make sure you follow the manufacturer’s instructions to check whether it’s suitable to refrigerate.
- If your baby is over 3 months, you could use a sugar-free teething gel, such as CALGEL® Teething Gel. It has a mild anaesthetic, which numbs the gums.
- You could also try a paracetamol-based medicine. CALPOL® Infant Suspension is suitable for babies older than 2 months, weighing over 4kg and not premature.
- Or you could try an ibuprofen-based medicine like CALPROFEN® Ibuprofen Suspension, which is suitable for children over 3 months and weighing over 5kg.
Don’t miss the short video we’ve made showing you some more tips to help you treat your children’s teething pain.
- Paracetamol or ibuprofen?Wondering whether to choose paracetamol or ibuprofen to treat your child?What’s the difference?
- Aches & painsEvery child suffers aches and pains as they’re growing up. Find out what might be causing them and what you can do to help.More about aches & pains
CALGEL® Teething Gel
Soothing dual action relief - contains an anaesthetic and antiseptic.. From 3 months.
Fast-acting relief from teething pain.Full product details
Contact the NHS
For health advice and reassurance, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
"My son has a high temperature, what should I do?"
When your child suffers from a fever, it can be a sign that his body is fighting an infection. We've put together a helpful fact sheet of things to do and what symptoms to look out for. | <urn:uuid:5af255c0-fa65-41dd-ae52-00eb8f3c3f7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.calpol.co.uk/illnesses-symptoms/teething-pain | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943516 | 796 | 3.234375 | 3 |
Big touch surfaces are nothing new, but we like the approach taken here. A familiar form factor—the traditional sitting desk—mixed with the (now) ubiquitous tech of touchscreens. Is the BendDesk what your office will look like someday?
The prototype doesn't use the most sophisticated guts—relying on cameras and clunky projectors instead of an actual capacitive touch surface—but looks pretty snappy from the video demo. It may be chunky, but the results are slick. As well, the bottom part of the BendDesk can be used as—gasp!—an actual desk. Which is pretty great, really, as it would free up room for low-tech work, with plenty of screen real estate left over for pinching and pushing digital stuff. Right now the BendDesk is confined to the labs of Germany's RWTH Aachen University, but we hope this kind of clever design slinks its way out of academia. [Core77 via Engadget] | <urn:uuid:445df223-b59d-4b7c-84a5-6e790c0eb12b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.augustinefou.com/2010/11/what-if-your-entire-desk-were.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917914 | 204 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Over the last few months much as been revealed about AMD's
next-generation quad-core architecture. This architecture, previously
dubbed K8L by Henri Richard, now publically dubbed K10, is scheduled to be the first monolithic quad-core
design. AMD engineers still internally refer to this architecture as Greyhound.
Since unveiling the details of the chip, AMD has started to use the codename Barcelona
to describe the server variant. The Barcelona chipset is a member of
the Cities family -- all server-based AMD codenames for 2007 and 2008
are named after Cities. Desktop codenames are all named after Stars
even though architecturally, many Stars and Cities CPUs are
AMD has revealed to DailyTech that Barcelona, which AMD just recently demonstrated, will be "enhanced"
with the Shanghai core in early 2008. AMD's Senior
Vice President, Marty Seyer, would not elaborate on what the enhancements are,
claiming that the new core would simply "bring further performance enhancements,
as well as cache efficiency."
When the Greyhound architecture was publically unveiled this past June, AMD's
Corporate Vice President and CTO Phil Hester claimed that the initial Barcelona
processor would utilize 2MB of L3 shared cache -- hinting that additional
versions of K10 with larger caches are roadmap possibilities. Although we
cannot speak for the other enhancements, the additional cache Hester described
in June 2006 is almost certainly present in Shanghai.
As with previous generations of Opteron processors, Barcelona will only
encompass the multi-socket codename. For single-socket servers, Budapest will
act as AMD's city codename for the 1xxx Opteron processor. There is no
"cache-upgrade" version of Budapest in the way that Shanghai is an
upgrade for Barcelona. This is likely due to the fact that whatever enhancements
are on Shanghai do not necessarily show performance gains on single-socket
According to AMD's roadmaps, Shanghai will still utilize DDR2 memory,
though DDR3 processors are also slated for production around that time as
well. "DDR2 is going to serve us quite nicely for several
years," added Seyer. | <urn:uuid:625734ad-2079-4dda-a948-0fc82df8dc3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5360&commentid=88416&threshhold=1&red=3154 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938021 | 459 | 1.789063 | 2 |
In the past month I have been doing quite a few SEO Evaluations and technical audits of websites, and I have really enjoyed it, after working as Head of Search for quite a while, I am genuinely loving getting back to doing more of the actual SEO work. The technical analysis, the digging into a sites link authority and even keyword and competitor research. In general I’m loving figuring out how a site is doing in the SERPs, why they’re not ranking well and how it can be improved. This is why I love SEO after all, it’s like a riddle or a puzzle, and I just got to figure it out =)
One of the things that keep on popping up over and over again in these evaluations is; websites having canonicalisation issues. So I thought I would write my first proper blogpost on Verve Search about this topic.
What is canonicalisation?
Except from being one of the most difficult words to write and pronounce… From the horse’s mouth: “Canonicalisation is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices…”
Basically, quite often a web page will have several URLs for the same page, for example:
http://vervesearch.com (notice without the dub dub dub)
Both of these URLs load the same page, the homepage! There can also be other versions of the URL loading the same page with additional parameters such as /index.php or even /home.php In addition the owner of a website might have bought several domains (TLDs), for example I also own the .co.uk TLD: http://www.vervesearch.co.uk If this additional domain is just pointed to the website/page this will again load the same page. So potentially I could have 8 different URLs loading the homepage for Verve Search.
This is a problem for several reasons, fundamentally because when the search engine visits your website the search engine spiders is likely to be having this experience:
It would be even more complicated for the search engine spiders if in addition to all these URLs your website also contained URL based sessionIDs (sessionIDs=dynamically generated a separate URL for each user in each session, including the spiders) For example http://www.vervesearch.com/?PHPSESSID=123 . Each page would then be likely to have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of separate URLs for the same page. The real problem then comes when the spiders indexes one of these sessionID URLs instead of your main URL. Yes it will look rubbish, BUT the real problem is that this URL is unlikely to have any link authority as it’s a unique URL just for the session when the spider crawled the site. The real problem is when loads of these URLs find their way into the search engine index, as these sesssion URLs are likely to have any link authority, so if you are trying to rank within a competitive market this could be holding your site back significantly. Worst case scenario the spiders can be indexing a sessionID instead of the main URL to a page.
Note: the reason some sites use sessionIDs is usually to be able to do in depth tracking of each session. For those of you that do this I would recommend using cookie based sessions instead of URL based session IDs. Yes, cookie based tracking might not be as accurate if users disables cookies but I believe it’s better in the long run as session based URLs could potentially harm your SEO efforts and over complicate things
How canonicalization issues affects link authority!
In your mind the http://www.yourdomain.com/ is usually your main URL, but don’t assume this is obvious to users and search engines. If you haven’t chosen a canonical URL (and implemented the appropriate redirects or rel=canonical tags, don’t worry explanation will come) it is likely that some links will go to one of the other URLs, for example a user types in my website direct into browser but uses the .co.uk TLD, it finds the page they wanted to link to and links to it using the .co.uk. Another example could be a user following an internal link and the internal link goes to /page/index.php but your link builders are getting links to the main URL, now you have links going to both URLs and the link authority is being diluted. You still following me? Now imagine you also have sessionIDs on your site and a user have visited your site, gets a sessionID and bookmarks the page (with the sessionID) then links to it via his/her blog. Now you have 3 different URLs to the same page with links, imagine how much more powerful the page would be if all of the links went to one URL??!!
How to fix canonicalisation problems
There is now 2 different ways of fixing canonicalization issues to your site. Quite recently Google announced supporting a new “canonical tag” that lets you specify in the HTML header that the URL in question should be treated as a “copy” and names the canonical URL that all link authority and content metrics should flow back to.
Within the HTML header of the page loading on this URL http://www.vervesearch.com/index.php there would be a parameter like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.vervesearch.com/” />
This would “tell” the search engines that they should index the canonical URL specified in this tag and also weigh any link authority from the /index.php URL to the canonical URL. The rel=canonical tag should be implemented on every URL you have that is loading the same page (except from the main canonical URL you want to use of course).
This tag is really easy to implement and can solve a lot of canonicalization issues, BUT it has its limitations. For example you can’t use this for your country specific TLDs (which essentially a separate domain) or other additional domains you might have bought. There might also be issues with the fact that this tag only “redirects” the engines attention to the correct URL, users will still be able to use all the different URLs and within your analytics these are likely to come up as different pages.
My preferred method and a pretty air tight solution for canonicalization problems is using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another, using a 301 redirect will carry over any link authority from one URL to another, even from a different domain! As opposed to a 302 redirect which is a “temporary” redirect that won’t carry over the link authority and is general just rubbish. Just don’t use 302 redirects ok!! With a 301 redirect you will also avoid any user complications as even if the user types in a URL in the browser it will redirect to the canonical URL! Want to check if a URL is 301 redirecting correctly, try this redirect checker!
The problem with 301 redirects is that it is generally much harder to implement than the rel=canonical tag. To create a 301 redirect you will need to create (if you don’t already have one) an .htaccess file that you upload to the root of your server. More about how to implment 301 redirects in .htaccess files here. If you are not a programmer or very technical, I advise you to get your programmer to do this for you, as messing with the .htaccess file can really mess with your site. Some hosting companies will have 301 redirect capabilities within your cPanel, which I have, in this case you can easily 301 redirect URLs and domains from there. If on the other hand your site is developed in .ASP or worse ASP.NET (only joking)please check out this site for instructions on how to do a 301 redirect when using IIS servers.
Making sure your websites URLs are organised and redirected appropriately, choosing one canonical URL that all other URLs will be redirected to (either by 301 or rel=canonical tag) could potentially have a BIG impact on your SEO efforts. Don’t confuse the search engine spiders or your users, sort it out!
Please feel free to comment or add anything, I would love to hear about your experiences. And if you think you might have canonicalisation issue please comment and I will check it out for you, or alternatively email me:lisa [at] vervesearch.com | <urn:uuid:42bcfa05-190f-48c8-9e6d-6c4c5eed3676> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/canonicalisation-issues-why-its-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914474 | 1,762 | 1.546875 | 2 |
In 1955 the Austin Fire Department created a 12 page pamphlet describing life at Austin’s Central Fire Station #1. Our current Central Fire Station #1, located at 401 E. 5th St. in downtown Austin, was built in 1938 and replaced the Old Central Fire Station (1885) at 114 W. 8th St. When it opened, Centrals was described as one of the most modern fire stations in The United States in a 1945 Fire Engineering Magazine article. Its Art Deco style and street corner location with truck bays facing two different streets made the station stand out as a model design. The fire station is a two-story structure that originally had the Fire Chief’s office, dispatcher’s alarm room, and day-room downstairs. Today, the area that originally housed the Fire Chief’s office and alarm office is occupied by Austin-Travis County EMS Medic 6. The day-room is still used by the firefighters as a TV and training room. The upstairs portion of the station is still very similar to its 1938 design, although it has been slightly expanded and remodeled over the years. There are two brass fire poles that lead from pole closets in the dormitory and are commonly referred to as Engine 1 or Engine 50′s pole due to their location. Of the 45 fire stations in Austin, only Station 1 and Station 2 have fire poles.
In 1962, an annex was built on the eastern side of Centrals to accommodate the need for a Fire Department Headquarters. The Fire Chief’s office, Alarm office, and administrative support staff occupied the Central Annex well into the 1980′s. Today, the front part of the Annex is home to the Austin Fire Museum and the rest of the annex is occupied by the AFD Shift Commander and extra storage room.
Various different apparatus have been assigned to Central Fire Station #1 over the years, but a few constants have remained. Centrals has always had at least two engine companies and one truck company assigned to it as well as some sort of Chief Officer position. Currently the name and number designation of the assigned units are Engine 1, Engine 50, Quint 1, and the AFD Division Chief Shift Commander. The crews of E1, E50, and Q1 also comprise of the AFD Special Operations team that has specialized training in Swiftwater and Search and Rescue. | <urn:uuid:ae22e8d7-c968-4705-874f-a4f54ae1dc0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.austinfiremuseum.org/blog/2009/02/17/welcome-to-central-fire-station-1955/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973631 | 482 | 1.9375 | 2 |
What is a business plan and why do I need one?
In order to be successful in business, it is essential that you create a ''business plan". Creating a good business plan will increase your chances of having and maintaining long-term success. It will also ensure that you prepare for the set up of your business in greater detail and it will be your own personal guide to assist you in your thought process.
So, why do you need one?
Setting up a business is a lengthy and complex process and even after you have created a thorough business plan there will always be something that you haven't anticipated.
Creating a business plan is also essential for further funding, anyone who is going to invest in your business is going to want to see that you are serious about your plans and that you are certain you can succeed. The more information you have to back your business, the more chance you will have of successfully getting a loan or grant.
Setting up a business for the first time can be a scary process, and it could be a lot more daunting if you don't have a business plan. If you are setting up a business alone, without a partner, you may feel like there is little information available to help you. By creating a business plan you will be helping yourself by setting out the key elements of what you need to begin.
What goes into a business plan and what should you include to ensure you are preparing properly?
First you should write about the objectives; personal, business and consequences. Write a business description; consider the details.
• What makes it different to other businesses in your area?
• What will make you stand out against your competitors?
• Write about your marketing plans and how you want to promote the business through advertising, are you going to publicise the business locally in a newspaper or hold an event to launch the business?
• How much will the advertising cost?
• Write about operating procedures; the hours of business, where you are going to be based, who you will be working with.
Consider your options for small business Insurance - there are lots of different types of insurance. Research which insurances are essential for your business and which insurances you don't really need. Get quotations from websites and make sure you are getting the best deal.
Planning your finances carefully is also essential to the success of your business. There are plenty of spreadsheets available online to help manage your finances for your business, research these and write out your profit and loss projections as any lender or investor will want to see these figures - so make sure they are accurate.
Creating a business plan and making it as thorough as possible will help the business seem more realistic in terms of what can be achieved.
The more detail you include, the more certain you will feel that you are fully prepared. The plan can also help others to visualise your ideas and take your business ideas seriously, which could result in successful funding for your business.
A good, coherent business plan is like a bible that you will want to add to constantly as you learn more about setting up a business and without it, your business could be heading for disaster.
Planning for a business is an essential part of the set-up process if you want to succeed, and failing to plan, is inevitably planning to fail.
Top 10 tips to writing a great business plan
The new businesses guide to getting the right insurance
What legal structure is best for my business | <urn:uuid:bff827f4-5e7a-488d-b024-13e84800007a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.constructaquote.com/2422/section.aspx/1200/What-is-a-business-plan-and-why-do-I-need-one | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965782 | 704 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Joseph S. Reynolds papers, 1860-1865.
Creator: Reynolds, Joseph S. (Joseph Smith), 1839-1911.
Collection number: 5060-z
View finding aid.
Abstract: Joseph S. Reynolds was a Chicago high school graduate who enlisted in the Union Army at age 23 in October 1861. He was an officer of the 64th Illinois Infantry Regiment and the Yates Sharpshooters, taking part in 17 battles, including Sherman’s March to the Sea. He was mustered out on 16 July 1865. Chiefly letters written by Joseph S. Reynolds to his family in Illinois during his Civil War service. Most letters are addressed to his siblings. They chronicle the movements of the 64th Illinois Infantry Regiment and the Yates Sharpshooters from the battle of New Madrid, Mo., to camps and battles in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. They provide details about troop movements, military life, Reynolds’s health, and the countryside. On occasion, Reynolds mentioned African Americans in stereotypical ways. In an 1862 letter, he explained why the accounts of troop actions in Chicago newspapers were often wrong. On 10 November 1864, Reynolds wrote about Sherman’s March to the Sea, and, on 26 April 1865, he discussed the meeting of generals William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnson and his belief that Confederate leaders should be punished and not pardoned. Also included are three letters to Reynolds, 1860-1861, two of which are about the difficulty of raising a military company; an ambrotype of Reynolds and photographic copy; and an unused gutta-percha case.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Reynolds, in a letter dated 6 March 1862, describes the abandonment of plantations in New Madrid, MO, and formerly enslaved African Americans left behind. In another instant (dated 26 July 1862), he refers to enslaved African American men and women working in the fields as “baboons” . | <urn:uuid:79b14276-623e-4221-8fcc-461910b83519> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/afam/index.php/joseph-s-reynolds-papers-1860-1865/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959835 | 412 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Car dashboards, along with food spills, had 10 times more bacteria than radio knobs or seat belts, according to the study. You may not touch it often, but bacteria may be hitting the area as air is drawn into vents located there.
More in ForbesLife
Top 100 Worst Cities For Spring Allergies
Ten Steps To A Less Stressful Commute | <urn:uuid:13482bb2-f59f-49fa-b698-906d0c06c8b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/04/germ-car-hotspot-forbeslife-cx_avd_0405germycar_slide_3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9522 | 75 | 2.09375 | 2 |
U.S. Energy Information Administration - EIA - Independent Statistics and Analysis
Today in Energy
The combination of one of the warmest winters (November-March) in decades and low spot natural gas prices contributed to low wholesale electric prices at major market locations during the winter of 2011-2012 (see chart below). Warm weather kept electric system load low across the East Coast and helped dampen the need for coal-fired generation. Natural gas generation was up significantly to take advantage of low natural gas prices. Reduced nuclear generation due to outages and reduced hydropower generation both served to moderate declining electricity prices in much of the country.
Note: Data include day-ahead, on-peak prices from Mid-Columbia (near the Washington and Oregon border), CAISO NP-15 (northern California), CAISO SP-15 (southern California), Palo Verde (in southwest Arizona), PJM N. Illinois Hub (northern Illinois), ERCOT Houston Zone, Entergy (Louisiana), PJM Western Hub, NYISO Zone J (New York City), NE-ISO Mass Hub (New England), MISO Illinois Hub (Illinois), and Into Southern (Southeast) pricing points.
On-peak, wholesale electricity prices generally ranged from $20-$50 per megawatt hour last winter, with some exceptions. Electricity prices dropped during the winter, especially starting in January, as spot natural gas prices neared their lowest levels in the past decade.
Much of the United States saw warmer-than-normal weather during the winter of 2011-2012. The national population-weighted heating-degree days (HDDs) were down 13 to 36% relative to normal weather from November to March. Every part of the country was warmer than normal for the winter except the Pacific region, which was just slightly (2%) cooler than normal, but even in the Pacific region winter load was down.
While the percentage of buildings heated with electricity is smallest in the coldest regions of the country, electric power prices are nonetheless often tied to winter weather. This is because power prices often reflect the operating costs of marginal natural gas generators, and natural gas fuel prices are keenly sensitive to winter weather (colder temperatures mean more gas burned for space heating).
Electric system load was below the five-year average for winter months in New England, the Pacific Northwest, California and much of the central United States (MISO). Winter load levels were elevated in PJM compared to previous years. However, the system footprint of PJM has expanded over time making comparisons difficult. The ERCOT system has seen load growth as well, but unlike PJM, this was due to population and industrial demand growth in Texas. System demand in the Bonneville Power Administration was near the bottom of the five-year average although temperatures were slightly below normal. Spikes in winter demand for electricity are less common in the Bonneville system due to the generally temperate climate in the Pacific Northwest.
Natural gas generation during the winter of 2011/2012 (November through February, the latest electric power data available) was up 69 billion kilowatthours compared to the prior winter, despite the generally low demand for electricity. Natural gas generation climbed far above the five-year range, especially starting in January when spot natural gas prices began to fall. At the start of winter 2011/12 spot natural gas prices at Henry Hub were about $3.50/MMBtu—low by recent historic levels. By the end of winter, spot natural gas prices were heading under $2/MMBtu, nearing 10-year lows.
Coal generation, on the other hand, for the same period was much lower than the most recent five-year range. In November and December 2011, coal's share of total U.S. electricity generation fell to its lowest monthly level since 1978.
Hydroelectric output in the Pacific Northwest was near the five-year average and well below the record levels of last year. Because of the significant hydroelectric capacity in the Pacific Northwest, the level of hydroelectric output can have significant price effects throughout the Western Interconnection.
Nuclear power plants outages were elevated in the late winter and early spring due to the combination of several forced outages and the start of the spring refueling cycle. Because of the low fuel cost and high utilization rates for operating nuclear plants, an extended nuclear outage can have significant electricity market effects. | <urn:uuid:9c1721b9-bcbc-4ebe-a558-789f60ffe4cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=6330 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953263 | 903 | 2.796875 | 3 |
We know, you can check the news and weather anywhere and everywhere on your smartphone, but what about when you’re washing your hands? Japanese company Seraku aims to make your network a little more ubiquitous with a prototype design for an Android-powered mirror. It uses RF proximity sensors to detect where your hands are placed so that you don’t have to smudge it all up in order to check those sports scores, and the display unit here at Smartphone and Mobile Expo included a networked scale built into the floor. There's also a meter that displays water flow and temperature information on the mirror. Overall, it reminds us a lot of the Smart Window prototype design we saw from Samsung at CES, although not as responsive or as fully fleshed out.
An Android tablet is powering everything behind the scenes, but the display is a separate LCD monitor overlaid with a semitransparent piece of reflective glass. The Seraku rep told us that the company doesn’t have a commercial product ready yet, but if and when the product launches, Seraku sees two primary use cases for the mirror: reading the news at salons, and (somewhat inexplicably) filling out questionnaires at drinking establishments. We can’t say drinking beer puts us in much of a questionnaire-filling mood, but the novelty of doing it on a big mirrored display could change our tune. | <urn:uuid:5307ea2e-2c3b-4e5a-8d4f-1d179ac59ce7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/10/3013168/seraku-android-mirror-prototype-hands-on | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924954 | 286 | 1.75 | 2 |
PA: Game Commission investigates alleged illegal hunting
Game Commission investigates alleged illegal hunting
December 14, 2010
CHIPPEWA TWP. — The Pennsylvania Game Commission is investigating a
Saturday incident in Chippewa Township in which residents say a deer hunter
illegally shot a buck, hid it and tried to go back for it later.
Leo and Julie Meier said they returned home Saturday to find another
couple waiting for Game Commission officers at their Winterburn Road
The unidentified couple said they had seen a man dragging an illegal buck
from the Meiers’ property and had alerted the Game Commission. The couple
said the buck’s antlers appeared to have fewer points than the minimum
allowed under Pennsylvania deer harvesting restrictions.
They said the man had left the deer in a small ravine near the road.
Leo Meier said authorities waited in his driveway for the man to return
for the deer, which he did shortly before dusk.
Wildlife Conservation Officer Matt Kramer confirmed that an incident is
under investigation, but charges have not yet been filed. He declined to
provide further details.
Meier said it appeared the man was hunting from a vehicle on the road,
something he believes has been a recurring problem in the Winterburn Road
“We have caught a few people shooting from the road,” Meier said.
“Unfortunately, that reflects badly on all hunters. ... I’m a hunter and I’m
pro-hunting, but this doesn’t fall into the realm of hunting.”.
Return to Hunting Accident Index
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obtain permission from the copyright owner. | <urn:uuid:d3fbd6e0-66e8-4ae8-a553-13bc8e22e52a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/taah-v-20110118-6.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946878 | 429 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Books about Functional Programming
The last semester at college taught me programming paradigms. Since then, I have always thinked twice before deciding to write a piece of code in C or Haskell.
C has a suite of developing tools, easily available. Haskell has another one but I still didn’t use it at the best of their capacity. Maybe, because there are still functional programming topics that I have almost no knowledge about. Probably because of this lack of knowledge I’ve decided to read the following two books, when I find them.
The first one is “Purely Functional Data Structures” by Okasaki. I’m not talking about his Ph.D. thesis but about the book. There is a big list of differences between those two and even if I have the thesis I cannot stop thinking that I need the book for the missing parts.
The other book is “The Fun of Programming”. Although I’ve read some of the chapters individually, I still need a hard copy of the book for quick reference. And I hate Google Books: whenever I reach an interesting topic, the next pages are not available.
Still searching for the books. Back to coding. | <urn:uuid:6760e6a5-555f-47c5-ac55-641a0af0658c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/books-about-functional-programming/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953146 | 250 | 1.585938 | 2 |
My cable company's web site doesn't work in Chrome, and it's really annoying. What's going on and how can I fix it?
A web site may not work properly for a lot of reasons, and sometimes those reasons aren't immediately obvious. Luckily you can hunt down and fix a lot of these problems yourself. Here are a few things you should try before throwing in the towel.
Change Your User Agent
Some web sites will tell you they don't work in a browser like Chrome, but all that normally means is that they haven't updated their "works with" checks in a very long time (if they don't support Chrome, they probably haven't updated since Chrome was released). If that's the case, all you need to do is trick that web site into thinking you're using another browser, and you can do this by changing your browser's user agent. A user agent is just a string of text that tells a web site what browser you're using. So, in this case, by changing Chrome's user agent string to Firefox, you can make that web site think you're using Firefox and let you through.
Changing Chrome's User Agent
To change Chrome's user agent, you can either download the User Agent Switcher extension (which makes the process quick and easy), or do it without any extensions by going to Tools > Developer Tools > Settings > Override User Agent. This will only change your user agent while you have the Developer Tools window open, so don't close it until you're done with that web site.
Changing Firefox's User Agent
On Firefox, you can download the User Agent Switcher extension for quick changes, or change Firefox's built-in setting, which is a bit more involved. To do this, type
about:config in the address bar, promise Firefox you'll be careful, and create a new string by right-clicking on the page and going to New > String. Type in
general.useragent.override for the string's name, and a user agent string as the value, which you can find on the internet. For example, the user agent string for Chrome 19 is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.9 Safari/536.5
Again, this method is a bit more roundabout, but doesn't require any extensions installed.
For more info on user agent strings and how to change them in your favorite browser, check out this how-to from our friends at How-To Geek.
Open Your Browser with a New Profile
Sometimes, your problem can be a bit more complicated, and you'll actually see rendering errors on the page. For example, I recently found that I couldn't view Lifehacker's reader polls in Firefox—the poll portion of the page just wouldn't show up. To determine whether this was an issue with Firefox or an issue with my particular setup, I opened the page with a new Firefox profile and discovered the problem was on my end.
Creating a New Profile in Chrome
To open Chrome using a new profile, open up a Windows Explorer window and type in the following file path:
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\
Mac and Linux users should open up their respective file managers and go to Go > Go to Folder or its equivalent, and type in the following paths:
Once you're there, find the folder called "Default" and rename it to "Backup Default". When you reopen Chrome, it'll open with a clean slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Chrome is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Chrome setup was the problem, and you'll want to keep that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile if you no longer need it by deleting the "Backup Default" folder. Check out Chrome's help page on profile management for more info.
Creating a New Profile in Firefox
To open Firefox using a new profile, open up a Command Prompt in Windows (or, if you're on Mac/Linux, a Terminal window) and type one of the following commands:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox\firefox.exe" -P
Be sure to replace the file path in the command with wherever you installed Firefox or Aurora.
If you entered the command correctly, you should see the profile manager pop up. Click "Create Profile" and give it a name. You should be greeted with a clean Firefox slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Firefox is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Firefox setup was the problem, and you'll want to start fresh with that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile from the Profile Manager if you no longer need it. For more info, check out Mozilla's help article on the profile manager.
Open The Problematic Site In Another Browser
If creating a new profile doesn't help, it's probably an issue with that browser, and you can't fix the problem yourself. Instead, you'll just need to open that page in another browser from now on. It's kind of a pain, but there are a few things you can do to make it easier. Firefox users can download the Open With extension, which will let you right-click on any link and open it in the browser of your choice. Chrome users don't have a comparable extension, but you can always open up Firefox and drag the URL from Chrome's Omnibar into Firefox's tab bar. This is a quick way to open your current page in another browser.
P.S. Got any of your own tips for troubleshooting broken web sites? Tell us about them in the comments. | <urn:uuid:eecf90a5-9dad-4421-9b67-d8a59fb0da96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lifehacker.com/5908903/why-wont-this-web-site-load-correctly-and-how-can-i-fix-it?tag=Webapps | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920745 | 1,298 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Originally published: June 2, 2011
Last updated: June 2, 2011 - 3:53pm
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg frequently proclaims New York as an ideal city to start a technology company, but until now not a single neighborhood offered free wireless access to the Internet. A narrow strip of that void will officially be filled on June 2 when the wraps come off Dumbo Wi-Fi, a network designed to be available outdoors between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. That the network, financed by a developer, is the only one of its kind in New York illustrates how far the city is from becoming truly connected. So far, it has had a patchwork of wireless hot spots in parks and other public spaces, almost all of them arranged by business-improvement districts and sponsored by corporations. At the end of June, one company, Towerstream, plans to introduce what it claims will be “the most robust and fastest portable Wi-Fi network” in Manhattan, though it will not technically be free: it hopes to sell access to cellphone service providers, who could then offer it to their customers. Wi-Fi generally provides a faster and stronger signal than cellphone networks.
- Technology Industry Seen Growing Fastest in New York
- Different sort of free Wi-Fi starts to thrive
- Landlords Are Blocking Rewiring of Cable After Hurricane, Verizon Says
- San Francisco, EarthLink have tentative Wi-Fi deal
- New York advised to study broadband alternatives to municipal Wi-Fi
- Can Wi-Fi make it in Manhattan?
- Philadelphia revives citywide Wi-Fi project
- Where's All the Free Wi-Fi We Were Promised?
- Google a victim of EarthLink woes with cancellation of S.F. Wi-Fi
- SF Mayor sees Wireless Service as Basic Right
- Philadelphia to buy municipal WiFi network for city business
- Lexington rolls out new WiFi initiative
- Whatever happened to free Wi-Fi in San Francisco?
- How to Make Municipal Wi-Fi Work
- Paris Internet access plan | <urn:uuid:1440eb2d-4480-489f-9cfc-f6414fc42c60> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://benton.org/node/75056 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919727 | 418 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Humans usually are not susceptible to infectious diseases suffered by animals. However, there are some important exceptions. Infections of animals may, on some occasions, produce significant disease in people. These infections are called zoonotic diseases. They are communicated from animals to humans. In many cases the animal shows little, if any, sign of illness.
The Occupational Health and Safety Program is designed to inform individuals who work with animals about potential zoonoses (diseases of animals transmissible to humans), personal hygiene, and other potential hazards associated with animal exposure. The following information sheets are categorized by types of animals. | <urn:uuid:6df38c2d-2a4b-4e60-a1eb-3aa4906e7f44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oregonstate.edu/occupationalhealth/book/export/html/55 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953016 | 125 | 3.421875 | 3 |
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Quotation by Henry David Thoreau
When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. "Civil Disobedience," originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 376, Houghton Mifflin (1906).
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Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted by written agreement, the following are prohibited: copying substantial portions or the entirety of the work in machine readable form, making multiple printouts thereof, and other uses of the work inconsistent with U.S. and applicable foreign copyright and related laws.
2013 Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:90480630-3297-46c2-a64b-b246a546b0da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://quotes.dictionary.com/When_I_meet_a_government_which_says_to | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913947 | 224 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Sunday, July 19, 2009
#90 Being pro-life while simultaneously supporting the war
One of the tenets of Christianity is that life is sacred. Because of this Christians oppose abortion. They could talk about it till the cows come home.
By and large, people in Christian culture also support the war in Iraq. The considerable loss of innocent life during war doesn't seem to strike them as any sort of inconsistency.
Christian culture isn't big on entertaining the notion that their political views could be anything other than what God has decreed. Abortion and war aren’t very savory subjects in the first place. They become more palatable when we form black-and-white views on them (from either political side) and cling to them unflinchingly. This often happens at the expense of relationships with whom we disagree. But Jesus taught that relationships and love are a priority, and that politics aren't of much consequence.
It's a lot easier to place issues in a box (whether they’re liberal or conservative) and deal with them remotely, without engaging the people who hold them. | <urn:uuid:323f3b77-e520-4073-9843-cd5575491dbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stuffchristianculturelikes.com/2009/07/90-being-pro-life-while-simultaneously.html?showComment=1248107217222 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977935 | 225 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Honoring Albert Hadley
The celebrated decorator didn’t merely design intriguing and livable rooms—the Parish-Hadley partner also taught America what style was all about
The grandest names in America—Astor, Paley, Rockefeller—brought Social Register swagger to the portfolio of interior designer Albert Hadley. But the Tennessee-born talent, the erudite yang to Sister Parish’s freewheeling yin at Manhattan’s tastemaking Parish-Hadley Associates, left behind more than breathtaking rooms when he died in March at age 91. Simply put, he added backbone to a world of chintz. “Decorating is not about lace curtains and carpets from Paris!” Hadley told Architectural Digest last year in his smoky drawl. No amount of aesthetic folderol, he observed, could make a poorly architected room palatable. “I start with the hammer and the saw—moving doors to line up with windows, straightening out the floor plan, that kind of thing. Once the dust has settled, then you can start thinking about fabrics and paint.”
Refining imperfect envelopes was one of the signature skills that Hadley, a onetime instructor at Parsons School of Design, brought to the decorating firm founded by society figure Parish when he joined in 1962, following a stint at its rival McMillen. “Mrs. Parish couldn’t draw or do a floor plan, but she had a knack for finding the right pieces of furniture to create a look. Albert always thought rooms out intellectually,” recalls designer Bunny Williams, a Parish-Hadley alumna. “And his incredible working drawings were pretty close to how the projects were carried out.” The disparate pair’s respectful if periodically trying partnership—which lasted until Parish’s death in 1994—proved to be surprisingly influential, a collaboration that Hadley biographer Adam Lewis compares to “two flints striking against each other and starting a fire.”
Whether Hadley’s assignment was sketching curtains for the Kennedy White House or choreographing provocative environments for Fifth Avenue duplexes, the mild-mannered son of a farm-equipment dealer left an unmistakable stamp on 20th-century style. “Rooms are meant to comfort you, cosset you,” says Washington, D.C., grande dame Oatsie Charles, a longtime client. “They should be friendly spaces, and Albert understood that.” Friendly, yes, but infused with unexpected flair. Brooke Astor’s sensationally smart Park Avenue library, executed in the ’70s, was his pièce de résistance, its bookcases painted with ten layers of oxblood enamel and trimmed with sparkling brass. That luxurious room—now denuded of its contents, which are going on the block at Sotheby’s in September—was an era-defining space that should have been snatched up by a decorative-arts museum.
The Palm Beach, Florida, residence of philanthropists Sophie and Leonard Davis was another triumphant commission from the ’70s; Hadley humanized the vast, boldly modern stucco villa by architect Milton Klein with deep-dish sofas clad in ethereal pale blue, Chinese antiques, Egyptian-inspired chairs, and black-and-cream carpets of Moroccan mien. Even the Nashville apartment of the designer’s schoolteacher sister, Betty, benefited from his expertise. The cheerful, Victorian-inflected rooms where his only sibling still lives are, in the words of Parish-Hadley veteran Libby Cameron, “pretty great—dainty, not too much color, not too much jumping at you, very chic.” Adds designer Thomas Jayne, who worked at the firm in the late ’80s, “A lot of important people in this profession you can associate with a particular style, but you can’t do that with Albert. Except for those funny hooked zebra rugs, there isn’t much that typifies him.”
Hadley’s indefatigable curiosity is the thread linking his projects. Though he spent more than seven decades at his craft, he never got bored with design and maintained a refreshingly open mind. “Albert was never dismissive of taste that wasn’t his own,” says Annette de la Renta, who worked with Hadley on her family’s idiosyncratic houses in Maine and New York, noting that he was as fascinated by cottages as he was by palaces. Passionate about the history of style, Hadley nevertheless remained absolutely au courant. In his late 70s, when many decorators have hung up their tape measures, he brashly papered the ceiling of his Manhattan living room with a startlingly groovy holographic vinyl. (“Like a magpie, he loved shiny things,” Cameron fondly observes.) And up-and-coming artisans could always depend on Hadley to bring them to the attention of people who mattered—clients, manufacturers, even his competitors.
“Albert led so many of us to the right places,” says lampmaker Christopher Spitzmiller, whose career—and self-confidence—received a boost due to the patronage of the dean of American decorating. “Now we have to pick up the torch of supporting young people. That will be Albert’s legacy.” | <urn:uuid:6011a6d6-138a-4f2c-a73d-7c016f77a960> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.architecturaldigest.com/decor/2012-06/albert-hadley-interior-designer-tribute-article | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953149 | 1,156 | 1.78125 | 2 |
President Barack Obama is in a tough race against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, just four months before US voters go to the polls on November 6.
This can be seen in an average of national polls, which currently gives Obama a narrow 3.7 per cent lead over Romney, according to realclearpolitics.com.
The tight contest is also clear in the increasingly desperate and aggressive tone of the Obama campaign's fund-raising appeals.
The president is momentarily riding high on his Supreme Court victory last week over conservative challenges to health care reform. Afterward, his campaign sent out an upbeat e-mail to supporters with the subject: "Let's win the damn election."
But in early June, the campaign's e-mail to supporters bore the shock label "We got beat" - an urgent appeal for 3-dollar donations because it said the Romney campaign had out-raised Obama in May with 76 million dollars to 60 million dollars.
Barely a day goes by without Obama supporters receiving a money plea. Last week, Julianna Smoot, Obama's deputy campaign manager, wrote supporters: "If we're drastically outspent in this election, there's a very good chance we will lose to Mitt Romney."
Obama's 2008 victory over Republican nominee John McCain was boosted by his internet mobilization of small donors, who helped the upstart Illinois senator far outspend his conservative rival.
Overall fundraising figures still show Obama with a clear lead thus far.
However, the 2012 campaign looks to be dominated by nominally independent "super PACs" - as the newly unfettered political action committees are known - collecting unlimited donations for political advocacy. The super PAC supporting Romney has out-raised Obama's super PAC by 61.5 million dollars to 14.6 million dollars.
In the hours after the Supreme Court turned back most of the constitutional challenges to Obama's health insurance law, Romney's official campaign raised 1 million dollars, media reports said. The Obama campaign refused to disclose if it saw any fundraising bump from the decision.
In a stumbling economy, Obama has much in common with his one-term predecessors Jimmy Carter and George Bush, and has dwindling similarities with Ronald Reagan, an embattled incumbent who saw a rapid turnaround in a bad economy pave the way for him to win a second term in 1984.
At this early stage of a presidential campaign, though, voter surveys are regarded even by pollsters as unreliable but do give the president one consistent advantage: Virtually the entire US electorate is familiar with Obama and every second person professes to like him personally.
By contrast, nearly 20 per cent of the electorate is still unfamiliar with Romney. Those voters will still have to be introduced to the 65-year-old former governor and businessman before voting for him. Romney will get a boost in name recognition during his formal nomination at the end of August at the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay, Florida.
Romney's campaign has raised millions to spend on advertising, especially in nine so-called "battleground states" of Colorado, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Hampshire.
What in the end will decide the race? If it's economic data, then it looks bad for Obama, with unemployment stuck at 8.2 per cent.
Is it the "empathy" factor? Then Romney's privileged upbringing and long career as a business executive, whose personal wealth is placed by his own campaign at up to 250 million dollars, could be an impediment.
His stiff personality and membership in the Mormon Church only further distance him from the everyman. Polls show Obama viewed as a more sympathetic figure by voters.
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The slaughter of a generation of young men in the first world war left a generation of young women without their normal chance of marriage and motherhood. Their fate was already apparent before the war ended. In 1917, the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls stood up before the assembled sixth form and broke the news: “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry.” Her estimate, a former pupil later recorded, proved exactly right. What this generation of women made of their diminished lives, and how the rest of the population regarded them, are the questions that Virginia Nicholson’s pioneering book confronts.
The answer to the second question is – with astonishing spite, resentment and lack of sympathy. When the 1921 census revealed that women outnumbered men by almost 2m, it unleashed a frenzy of vituperation. “The superfluous women,” proclaimed the Daily Mail, “are a disaster to the human race.” They were labelled “limpets” and “bread-snatchers” for taking jobs from demobbed soldiers. They were reviled for forming “unwholesome female friendships” and mocked for lavishing their stifled affection on cats and lapdogs. Sexual psychologists pronounced them unnatural, and Oswald Mosley found them “distressing”. A popular solution was that they should be exported to the colonies. Canada, it was pointed out, had an excess of male trappers and lumberjacks, and even Australia offered many “simple pleasures”.
When, desperate to fill the gap in their lives, they wrote for advice to women’s magazines, they met with heartless optimism (“Cheer up, dears”) or insulting tips on man-catching (“If you use a henna shampoo, don’t overdo it”). Self-help books, with titles such as Sex Philosophy for the Bachelor Girl and Live Alone and Like It, prattled on about taking up folk dancing, astrology or amateur dramatics. But for women whose men had died, the need was to find some way of appeasing their desire for love and their guilt at surviving. An advertisement in the Matrimonial Times read “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war.”
Sunday, September 09, 2007
A penny bun or a Marmite sandwich
John Carey reviews Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War. It starts out pretty bleakly: | <urn:uuid:d2f4b337-aadb-4a0d-929a-23d1ae2100a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jennydavidson.blogspot.jp/2007/09/penny-bun-or-marmite-sandwich.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961809 | 547 | 2.75 | 3 |
The U.S. government has finally decided to take on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, but probably in the worst possible way: toothless sanctions that barely scathe the caudillo. Instead, these sanctions give him a treasure trove of ammunition to undermine U.S. policies and consolidate his own power.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton included Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), parent company of large American refiner and gasoline retailer CITGO, in a list of seven companies sanctioned last month for supporting Iran’s energy sector.
PDVSA “delivered at least two cargoes of reformate to Iran between December 2010 and March 2011, worth approximately $50 million,” the statement says. Reformate is blended with gasoline to improve its quality.
The sanctions bar PDVSA from access to U.S. government contracts, financing through the U.S. Export-Import Bank and export licenses. But the sanctions don’t apply to PDVSA subsidiaries (e.g. CITGO) and don’t “prohibit the export of crude oil to the United States.”
Chávez could not hide his glee on Twitter on May 24: “Sanctions … imposed by the imperialist gringo government? Welcome Mr. Obama! The real impact of the new gringo aggression is potentiating the patriotic and nationalist morale of Venezuela.”
Chávez is right to thank Obama.
Ahead of Venezuela’s presidential elections next year – perhaps the best chance for a democratic transition of power – the administration has handed its biggest antagonist in the hemisphere an ideological missile to rally support against the U.S.
A case in point: “The revolutionary government calls on all the Venezuelan people, laborers and especially the oil workers, to stay alert and mobilized in defence of our PDVSA and the sacred sovereignty of the homeland,” says a statement from the Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Ministry.
Yet the list of accusations runs deep. For example, the U.S. State Department has repeatedly accused Venezuelan officials of aiding FARC in Colombia; a Spanish court is investigating Venezuelan government support of the Basque terrorist group ETA and U.S. authorities are investigating reports that Chávez’s friendly ties to Iran are translating into support for Hezbollah and Hamas.
Ever since Washington’s pressure on Caracas backfired at the beginning of George W. Bush’s first administration, both the Bush and Obama administrations have stuck to ignoring Latin tongue-lashing. Official reactions to Chávez’s provocations are simply useless and, in fact, to his benefit. Sadly, this is the best strategy the U.S. has come up with thus far.
Also of concern, PDVSA is one of the world’s largest energy companies. It is and will remain an influential player in global energy matters. For instance, the U.S. imports between 9 and 10 percent of its oil from Venezuela.
Full sanctions would require replacing heavy oil supplies, for which much of the U.S. oil refining infrastructure on the Gulf Coast is geared. Additionally, oil prices could rise as a result, an unwelcome scenario in a still wobbly recovery. There would also be geopolitical consequences, as Venezuela hosts numerous influential investors (including many Americans). Considering all of these points, it is all the more baffling that the administration is imposing these sanctions.
A senior administration official quoted in a press briefing that followed the unexpected announcement said, “These sanctions send a strong signal to companies around the world about the risks of dealing with Iran. So it serves as a signal, a deterrent, as much as it does as having a near-term, practical impact.”
Except they don’t. Iran will continue to provision itself with gasoline and additives, Chávez will be emboldened without actually enduring any significant sanctions and both governments will benefit economically when oil prices increase if the standoff escalates.
Now it could be that the decision to include PDVSA on the list is a policy decision for other headaches. There is no doubt that the U.S. wants to target Iran’s lack of refining supply, one of its weaknesses. But $50 million worth of gasoline additive supply is not a game changer for Iran, and Venezuela’s efforts to supply Iran with refined products are inconsequential.
Therefore, President Obama might have fallen into a trap. Or it could be that the administration is trying to quell criticism of its policies toward Venezuela. Whatever the case, these sanctions are unwise. They don’t dent Iran’s refined product supply. They are not “a strong signal” to Venezuela, nor do they weaken Chávez ahead of elections. And they could ultimately result in higher oil prices, threatening U.S. economic recovery.
In sum, this is Washington’s thoughtless foreign and energy policy at its best. So one must ask, why does President Obama have such a cavalier attitude towards America’s oil supply, while strengthening a radical politician who, without such slap-on-the-wrist sanctions, would look ridiculous?
Andrés Cala, South American correspondent of the Energy Tribune, co-authored this piece. | <urn:uuid:53a99d54-6f11-4017-b907-9db99361799a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/06/13/silly-sanctions-against-venezuela-boost-hugo-chavez/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952557 | 1,093 | 1.585938 | 2 |
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The Dark Night of the Planetary Soul
by Curtis Lang
The Dark Night of the Planetary Soul
Recently I had a long conversation with a very spiritual friend who is very concerned about world events.
Pointing to some pre-teen boys and girls at our table, he said, “Those children will be drafted into the military, unless something happens soon to change the course of history. This war will go on for decades. Our environment is being destroyed, our health care system is in shambles, our political leaders are rapacious dupes of the corporations who are ripping us off. It makes me mad, but when I try to tell people what's really going on, they act like I'm some kind of conspiracy nut. I work hard at my spiritual practice, but I keep getting discouraged about all this stuff. Why does the world situation seem so bleak? Why is it so hard to educate people about these problems and why do they seem to resist the truth so much? What can I do? I have the feeling I'm witnessing a cycle, a cycle that has probably repeated itself many times in the past.”
Here's my response to my friend.
I think that events in the world reflect this world's status as a midway point between spirit and matter. There are other worlds with more evolved civilizations, more spiritually evolved populations, and other worlds with less evolved and more “barbaric” or more “evil” or more “matter-entrapped” civilizations. Earth is a magnificent place to work out an understanding of the dualities inherent in material creation for this reason alone.
At this time in Earth's history, the human population is reaching the end of a long period of evolutionary history which highlighted the advances of the individuated consciousness, the rational mind, and the scientific model of reality as applied to the material world, considered as separate from the observer and separate from the world of “energy”, ie spiritual worlds.
Thus we find ourselves trapped in a materialistic culture that worships material success and power over nature, power over other sentient beings, and for this reason is self-destructive in the extreme.
The social structure of this society is a reflection of this moment in evolutionary consciousness, highly structured, hierarchical, and driven by mental considerations of perceived self-interest on the part of small elites who govern on the principles of fear, greed and obfuscation.
However, the next evolutionary step for human beings is to re-establish conscious ancient connections with the web of life, with the extended consciousness of the human over-soul, and with the multitude of spiritual beings in higher worlds, to offer in self-sacrifice their highly developed individuated consciousness to the Higher Self, and to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth.
This is the task of the next Cosmic Day, the Age of Aquarius, as we progress from the depths of the Kali Yuga, and the Piscean crucifixion on the cross of matter into the Dawn of the Aquarian moment of stellar synchronicities, which are the material manifestation of spiritual energies accessible to the human mind, and of the dawning of scientific spirituality -- all symbolized by the seven pointed star.
The Piscean moment, which combined blind faith in hierarchical quasi-tribal religious organizations with a primitive kind of scientific rationalism, can be symbolized by the image of the Pieta, the dying god cradled in the arms of the World Mother, and represents a moment of evolution in which the lesson presented was all about the limits of male deification, left-brain rationalism and hierarchical priestly, kingly, judicial, scientific and economic elites organized on the basis of self-interest.
In many ways the Piscean age was the flip side of the late Neolithic moment presenting the myth of the dying and reborn god, consort of the Great Mother, because the Neolithic moment was about the limits of the female dominant, right brain dominant, Taurean, tribal, agricultural elites dependent upon blood line and blood sacrifice.
Now the new Age of Aquarius represents the moment of the balance of male and female, the image is of the Divine Lovers in an embrace of eternal love, and their Union is the union of matter and spirit, mind and Higher Self, humanity and the web of life.
The Piscean age mental & social forms and structures and those people that inhabit them, particularly the elites and the true believers, work to use force and mind controls of various kinds to damage the emerging new world moment so that they can continue their social institutions and individual privileges. They seek to consolidate their waning power through a series of wars, through increasingly autocratic governmental structures, and through religious fundamentalism that will unite social structures in hierarchical domains fighting for dominance, resource control and ideological and religious supremacy.
Drawing by Jane Sherry
There are two ways we can enter this new age as a group, as humanity.
We are currently addicted to oil and to industrialization, to power games and greedy consumption of the Earth's resources without concern for future generations, the web of life called the environment, or the web of life we know as higher worlds, the world of energy forms and signatures.
We can choose to utilize our remaining oil and the rest of our lives to the peaceful replacement of our current deluded lifestyle, consciousness and social structures, as individuals and as groups, or we can choose to squander those resources and our remaining time on earth in fear-based reactive actions which will result in a war of all against all.
Those spiritual forces that feed upon the negative emotions and deluded thought forms of unenlightened humanity may be conscious or merely parasitic in nature, but they work toward the fostering of the war of all against all, and they foster the perception that they and those deluded humans who serve Mammon and material creation at the expense of spiritual worlds are all-powerful and that we who oppose their design must struggle against them by mental and material means in a “war” of good versus evil. This is part of their plan, to suck us into squandering our energy.
My spiritual guides and my research into consciousness have convinced me that there will be a time of reckoning in our lifetimes, in the next fifteen years or so, when humanity will be offered a much more conscious version of this choice than we have now at hand.
Those among our friends and acquaintances who have yet to confront the responsibility of this conscious choice will be offered that choice in greater clarity as time advances.
It is important to have total faith in the workings of the Divine Plan for human evolution, to perform our spiritual practices more and more and with greater and greater single-minded devotion, to advance the cause of scientific spirituality that respects all paths to the Divine, and to quietly work within groups dedicated to humanity's spiritual, environmental, political and social advancement into greater light and greater love, in greater service to the Divine.
That said, it is also true that depending upon the choices humanity makes as a whole, there could be vast differences in the scale of suffering inflicted on the world population in the physical realm in the near future.
Our well-intentioned attempts to educate those around us about world conditions and the current dangerous crossroads of history we inhabit can only be a positive force, if they are carried out without taint of fear, emotional reaction, judgment or desire for revenge against those who would thwart the Divine Plan for human evolution.
You said, "I am beginning to suspect that I'm witnessing a cycle, a cycle that has probably repeated itself many times in the past." Karmically, we all bear memories of past Aeons in which reactionary spiritual forces delayed and perverted the evolutionary current to the detriment of collective human evolution. This trauma created the samskaras (the subconscious imprints created by an individual's past actions) that create fear, emotional reactions, critical judgmental attitudes, cynicism, and the desire for revenge against these reactionary forces today in people like you and I who participated in these earlier cycles of human development. Unfortunately, these negative emotions cause our friends and neighbors to tune us out when we attempt to educate them. It is part of our job to ask for help from God and Guru (our spiritual guides and teachers) to remove these particular samskaras from within us in whatever way is most expeditious so we can be more effective servants of the Divine Light by being more articulate, less aggressive, and less emotionally reactive, as we explain these emotionally charged matters to others around us, and in that way their minds can hear the information more easily.
For instance, the Piscean Age was hampered by the remnants of the Age of Aries. These remnants of tribal warrior elites instilled tribal warfare patterns into the religious, sacrificial initiatory moment embodied by the life of Jesus the Christ, which was intended to unite all tribes and nations in an Empire of Light based upon principles of non-violence, and adherence to the path of Self-realization.
Nevertheless, Jesus the Christ did inject his etheric body into the etheric body of the planetary consciousness at his Death, and this opened a spiritual doorway for all humanity. Today, if you seek him out in Nature, you will find the living Christ available to you, because of this sacrifice and this successful fusion of the Christ within the Natural world. Call to him in the mountains, in your garden, or in the woods and he will speak to you.
Those of us who are old souls are always concerned, sometimes even fearful, that the adherents of past initiations and past social structures flowering from those initiations will hamper the human over-soul's development.
Nowhere is this fear more acute among highly sensitive spiritual souls than in America. America has gone in a few short decades from a shining city on a hill to a dark and dreary society, exemplifying all that is reactionary and backward-thinking in today's world.
Once the model for political and financial democracy, social justice and fair play, America has become a land of increasingly rigid hierarchies, with remote elite politicians and corporate chieftains purveying a bifurcated global culture composed of the super-rich and the disenfranchised masses.
Once a land defined by moral values and spiritual aspirations, America has become the global purveyor of a rancid culture characterized by rampant consumerism, myopic materialism and me-first egotism.
Once a land aligned with the world's freedom-loving and peace-loving peoples, America has become the global bully-boy, intent upon maintaining its privileges, such as control of the world's oil supply, at the expense of the rest of the world.
So it's a difficult time for Americans right now, and I suspect that times will get more difficult over the next couple of decades.
Americans have set themselves up as political and economic role models, cultural leaders and imperial masters of the world, and the world is now rejecting our leadership.
Unfortunately, America's leaders are locked into a herd mentality with little or no room for new thinking.
Their interests are best served by a continuation of the status quo trends of American dominance, less democracy, mindless consumption, environmental degradation and increasingly hierarchical society.
In all these areas, America is now the country whose leaders, values, lifestyles, political system, economy, and foreign policy interests, backed by the world's largest military force, are most at odds with the legitimate aspirations of the rest of the world.
American policies currently stand in opposition to the rest of the world's legitimate aspirations for environmental protection, social justice, worker's rights, abundant social safety nets, financial democracy and international co-operation in the interests of peace among equals.
This is a recipe for disaster.
However, if the citizens of the Soviet bloc could peacefully change the system in a military dictatorship, I think that Americans certainly have it within their power to do the same.
Right now a majority of Americans realize the Iraq war was a mistake, and I believe that within a few years, a majority of Americans will fervently desire to join the rest of the world in pursuing a more democratic, environmentally sound, economically just, thoughtful and spiritual way of living.
It is out of this fervent desire for change that change appears.
Keep the faith and keep your fervent desire alive.
This is the moment of worldwide labor, just prior to the birth of a planetary human consciousness. This is the moment known to mystics as The Dark Night of the Soul.
Will humanity birth a planetary consciousness based on scientific rationalism placed in the service of elite social structures and hierarchical dominance, resulting in environmental destruction and continuous warfare or a consciousness of love and spiritual science, bringing about environmental balance and peace, bringing us untold breakthroughs in every realm of earthly existence?
That is the question, that is the transition we face, that is the opportunity, and that is the clue to the nature of our role, as midwives to the embryonic new World Consciousness.
Let us approach that birth with reverence, with confidence, with bravery, with a clear mind and a heart singing with faith, devotion and yes, surrender, to the New. In this way, we join our life force, our soul force and our mental energies to the Divine Plan and to the legions of lightworkers and spiritual beings who prepare the way, even now, for the coming victory of the forces of Light.
July 19, 2004
(All photos stock photos except where otherwise noted)
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Significance and Use
Sampling of decorated glass containers for the TCLP can vary greatly, resulting from the size and shape of the article relative to the amount of ceramic decoration on the ware. Breaking the glass can cause some of the pieces to have no decoration on them, and others to be heavily decorated and more likely to leach lead and cadmium under the TCLP test. This method provides an effective tool to homogenize the glass containers so that reproducible results can be attained from the TCLP test.
1.1 This test method defines the way in which container glassware should be prepared before performing the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP). The method covers the homogenization of the sample, and the selection of a representative portion of the sample to test and get reproducible results.
1.2 The values stated in SI units are to be regarded as standard. No other units of measurement are included in this standard.
1.3 This standard does not purport to address all of the safety concerns, if any, associated with its use. It is the responsibility of the user of this standard to establish appropriate safety and health practices and to determine the applicability of regulatory limitations prior to use.
2. Referenced Documents (purchase separately) The documents listed below are referenced within the subject standard but are not provided as part of the standard.
E177 Practice for Use of the Terms Precision and Bias in ASTM Test Methods
E691 Practice for Conducting an Interlaboratory Study to Determine the Precision of a Test Method
TCLP; ceramic glass enamels; ceramic glass decorations; TCLP (toxicity characteristic leaching procedure); Ceramic glass enamel; Glass containers ;
ICS Number Code 81.040.30 (Glass products)
ASTM International is a member of CrossRef.
Citing ASTM Standards
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Thomas West, 12th Baron De La WarrArticle Free Pass
Thomas West, 12th Baron De La Warr, De La Warr also spelled Delaware (born July 9, 1577—died June 7, 1618, at sea off the coast of Virginia or New England), one of the English founders of Virginia, for whom Delaware Bay, the Delaware River, and the state of Delaware were named.
The son of Thomas West, the 11th Baron (c. 1556–1602), the younger West fought in the Netherlands and in Ireland under Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. He was imprisoned for complicity in Essex’s revolt against Elizabeth I (1601) but was soon released.
He became a member of the council of the Virginia Company and was appointed (1610) governor and captain general of Virginia for life. Sailing in March 1610 with three ships, 150 settlers, and supplies, he arrived at Jamestown on June 10, in time to intercept the colonists who had embarked for England and were abandoning the enterprise. De La Warr constructed two forts near the mouth of the James River, rebuilt Jamestown, and in general brought order out of chaos.
He returned to London in 1611, where he published, at the request of the company’s council, his Relation (1611, reprinted 1858) of the condition of affairs in Virginia. He remained in England until 1618, when the news of the tyrannical rule of the deputy, Samuel Argall, led him to start again for Virginia. He embarked in May but died en route and was buried at sea.
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I don't think in terms of history about that series. I think in terms of contemporary life. It was such a part of me that I didn't think of something outside. It was like I was doing a portrait of something. If it was a portrait, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my peers.
I did plenty of research in books and pamphlets written during the migration, and afterward I took notes. Sometimes I would make ten or twenty sketches for one incident By the time I started work on the (Migration Series), I was more conscious of what I wanted to do. I was looking consciously at things and for things.
Although the series was originally meant to remain together as one work, that winter the artist agreed to a joint purchase by The Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection.
Lawrences Migration Series depicts the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during and after World War I. The Great Migration was the largest movement of black people since slavery removed Africans to the Americas. Lawrences sixty panels portray the story of people seeking a better life. The captions for each image combine history, sociology, and poetry in a visual narrative.
The railroad is the link in the series of events that comprise Lawrences epic story. The narrative cycle begins and ends with images of a train station. In the first panel, African Americans embark on their journey from the South to the North, through time and geography, conflict and hope. Scenes of the train station are repeated throughout the series ending with the text "And the migrants kept coming."
In the first half of the series, the South is depicted as a bleak, rustic landscape where social inequities and injustice prevailpoverty, hunger, segregation, lynching, and discrimination are commonplace facts of life. Some scenes are portrayed as if seen from a moving train; the North appears only as names of train destinations.
In contrast to the environment of the South, the second half of the narrative depicts the buildings, people, and industry of the urban North. The final section of The Migration Series focuses on the new African-American communities of the Norththe positive effects of improved social conditions as well as the ensuing conflicts of overcrowding and race riots.
1. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1993-94.
2. Elizabeth McCausland, "Jacob Lawrence," in Ellen Harkins Wheat, ed., Jacob Lawrence: American Painter (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the Seattle Art Museum, 1986), p. 60.
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Finding The Determinant Of A Two By Two Matrix Video Tutorial
determinant video, linear algebra video, matrices video.
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Finding The Determinant Of A Two By Two Matrix
This math video tutorial gives a step by step explanation to a math problem on "Finding The Determinant Of A Two By Two Matrix".
Finding the determinant of a two by two matrix video involves determinant, linear algebra, matrices.
The video tutorial is recommended for 10th Grade, 11th Grade, and/or 12th Grade Math students studying Pre-Calculus, and/or Advanced Algebra.
In algebra, a determinant is a function depending on n that associates a scalar, det(A), to every n×n square matrix A. The fundamental geometric meaning of a determinant is as the scale factor for volume when A is regarded as a linear transformation. Determinants are important both in calculus, where they enter the substitution rule for several variables, and in multilinear algebra.
In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular table of elements, which may be numbers or, more generally, any abstract quantities that can be added and multiplied.
Matrices are used to describe linear equations, keep track of the coefficients of linear transformations and to record data that depend on multiple parameters.
Matrices are described by the field of matrix theory. Matrices can be added, multiplied, and decomposed in various ways, which also makes them a key concept in the field of linear algebra.
The horizontal lines in a matrix are called rows and the vertical lines are called columns. A matrix with m rows and n columns is called an m-by-n matrix (written m × n) and m and n are called its dimensions. | <urn:uuid:e4890e39-5aa6-4fee-b993-00619c772002> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tulyn.com/videotutorials/finding-the-determinant-of-a-two-by-two-matrix_by_jess.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908396 | 426 | 3.984375 | 4 |
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Interstellar is an upcoming science fiction film to be produced and directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie, described by Spielberg to be a cerebral sci-fi film, will be themed on wormholes. Interstellar is slated for a 2009 release.
Steven Spielberg stated that his growing interest in science drew him to the project. His father had been an amateur astrophysicist, which influenced Spielberg's interest in science. Spielberg had also previously produced the Stephen Hawking documentary A Brief History of Time with Errol Morris. In a July 2006 interview, Spielberg revealed that the film's initial script would be written by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, who has studied the possibility of traversable wormholes. | <urn:uuid:22a6cd94-e07a-40f1-9fd2-e513b4aff565> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.omdb.si/index.php/ofilm/?i=424904&eps=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952425 | 163 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Eczema is a chronic skin disorder that involves scaly and itchy rashes. Atopic dermatitis is the most common type.
Atopic dermatitis is due to a hypersensitivity reaction (similar to an allergy) in the skin, leading to long-term inflammation of the skin.
Taking care of your skin at home may reduce the need for medications.
Help with Itching and Scratching
Avoid scratching the rash or skin if you can:
Relieve the itch by using moisturizers, topical steroids, or other prescribed creams and taking antihistamines to reduce severe itching.
Keep your child's fingernails cut short. Consider light gloves if nighttime scratching is a problem.
Antihistamines taken by mouth may help with itching or if you have allergies. Often you can buy them yourself over the counter.
Some antihistamines can cause sleepiness, but they may help with scratching while sleeping.
Newer antihistamines cause little or no sleepiness. These include fexofenadine (Allegra), loratadine (Claritin, Alavert), and cetirizine (Zyrtec).
Day-to-day Skin Care
Keep the skin moist (called lubricating or moisturizing the skin). Use ointments (such as petroleum jelly), creams, or lotions 2 - 3 times a day. Moisturizers should be free of alcohol, scents, dyes, fragrances, or other chemicals. A humidifier in the home will also help.
Moisturizers and emollients work best when they're applied to skin that is wet or damp. After washing or bathing, pat the skin dry and then apply the moisturizer right away.
Different types of emollients or moisturizers may be used at different times of the day. For the most part, you can apply these substances as often as you need, to keep your skin soft.
Avoid anything that makes your symptoms worse. This may include:
Foods such as eggs in a very young child (always discuss with your doctor first)
Wool, lanolin, and other scratchy fabrics. Use smooth, textured clothing and bedding, such as cotton.
Sweating by being careful not to over dress during warmer weather
Strong soaps or detergents, as well as chemicals and solvents
Sudden changes in body temperature and stress, which may cause sweating and worsen your condition
Triggers that cause allergy symptoms
When washing or bathing:
Bathe less often and keep water contact as brief as possible. Short, cooler baths are better than long, hot baths.
Use gentle skin care cleansers rather than traditional soaps and only on your face, underarms, genital areas, hands, feet.
Do not scrub or dry the skin too hard or for too long.
After bathing, it is important to apply lubricating creams, lotions, or ointments on the skin while it is damp. This will help trap moisture in the skin.
The skin rash itself, as well as the scratching, often cause a break in the skin and may lead to an infection. Learn to keep an eye out for redness, warmth, swelling or other signs of infection.
Medicines from Your Health Care Provider
Topical corticosteroids are medicines used to treat conditions where your skin becomes red, sore, or inflamed. Topical means you place it on the skin. Topical corticosteroids may also be called topical steroids or topical cortisones.
Topical steroids contain a hormone that helps “calm” your skin when it is swollen or inflamed. Your doctor will tell you how much of this medicine to use and how often. Do not use more medicine or use it more often than your doctor advises you to..
Your health care provider may give you other medicines to use on your skin or take by mouth. Be sure to follow directions carefully.
When to Call the Doctor
Call for an appointment with your health care provider if:
Eczema does not respond to moisturizers or avoiding allergens.
Symptoms worsen or treatment is ineffective.
You have signs of infection (such as fever, redness, pain).
Breternitz M. Placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized, prospective study of a glycerol-based emollient on eczematous skin in atopic dermatitis: biophysical and clinical evaluation. Skin Pharmacol Physiol. 2008 Jan; 21(1): 39-45
Wollenberg A, Schnopp C. Evolution of conventional therapy in atopic dermatitis. Immunology and Allergy Clinics of North America. 2010 Aug;30(3).
Kevin Berman, MD, PhD, Atlanta Center for Dermatologic Disease, Atlanta, GA. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc. | <urn:uuid:d5e96be1-db02-49ad-9871-68a0419c1b47> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conwayregional.org/body.cfm?xyzpdqabc=0&id=467&action=detail&AEArticleID=000418&AEProductID=Adam2004_117&AEProjectTypeIDURL=APT_60 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906136 | 1,038 | 3.390625 | 3 |
I ‘ve been hearing about companies that don’t limit time off for their employees. They are expected to simply get their tasks done, the how and when the process plays out is less important than the final product. That opens up the employees ability to control their work time, their play time, their personal time, and, “shockingly”, they report to be happier and more productive. It works, studies show: trusting them to manage themselves and their time, valuing their time, leads them to be highly effective workers.
Despite these findings, the norm in most places, be it work or school, is a complete lack of trust that people will want to actually “do the work”. In school environments the fact that the students are being forced to learn materials in a very artificial way does make it hard to believe the kids will still “do the work” because, well, they wouldn’t – and why should they? It’s not their work, it’s the school systems work. The kids have no say in what they are doing or why they are doing it. Our society’s assumptions about how people learn presumes that people, and especially kids and teens, wouldn’t learn anything unless compelled to do so.
Of course this is wrong, but we’re so used to this model of how to educate someone that we can’t see how counter-productive it is. By making school systems the de facto “way it’s done” we end up negating any other valid method of learning because it would not work within that type of system.
When people feel more in control over how and where they spend their time, they will, more often than not, choose to do the right thing. When people feel as connected to their work lives as they do to their personal lives, they find themselves more balanced and healthy and like their work – even when it gets challenging, even when parts of the work are frustrating. Most people want to improve themselves and contribute positively to whatever group they belong.
If we want more people to do this we have to stop crushing it out of them and making them believe they don’t have any power or control in their lives which, sadly, is the very thing that happens in schools, a system born out of the Industrial Revolution model of worker conditioning. I don’t want to be just a Worker Bee and I certainly want more than that for my kids. I want my kids to be active participants in whatever job or career they have. It isn’t the job that keeps us down, it’s how we feel about it.
How lovely would it be if our society recognized this and found true ways to empower kids – not just lip-service “Empowerment” exercises – “OK, students, now we’re going to do some self esteem exercises!” – the kids still are being told what to do and when to do it – they aren’t experiencing real empowerment. These same kids grow up to be the kind of employees and employers who can’t believe that people can be trusted to do the right thing because no one trusted them and they learned THAT life lesson all too well.
Photo by Paul Stang. Women and children at work in the field. Stongfjorden, Sogn og Fjordane Fylke, Norway. | <urn:uuid:377a1f20-7b15-43a7-af54-8b98bab83429> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/finding-the-work-life-balance-is-all-about-trust/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97175 | 715 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Start Date/Time: Tuesday, May 17, 2011, 4:00 PM
Location: HCK 123
The biology department has invited Dr. Julie Librakin to give a seminar
entitled "Visual Literacy and Learning" on May 17, 2011 (Tue) at 4 p.m. HCK
123. Julie is an associate professor from the Department of Geological
and Division of Science and Mathematics Education at Michigan State
University. Julie's research focuses on understanding "geocognition", a description of
both the mechanisms by which novices gain understanding of geologic
and the nature of working geological expertise. She has performed extensive
research in areas of science education and cognitive science.
You are invited to schedule individual meetings with Julie. She will be on the Seattle campus on Tue and Wed, and at UW Bothell on Thurs. To sign up, please visit: http://protist.biology.washington.edu/bio2/signups/seminars/.
Please contact Dr. Rebecca Price (email@example.com ) if you are interested in the UWB activities.
For students and postdocs: You are also invited to have lunch with Julie on May 17 (Tue) from 12-1:30 p.m. Please sign up at https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/kychan/131880. | <urn:uuid:dbb9f123-f0c9-438c-aecd-063b1f88f2d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uwpcc.washington.edu/event.jsp?id=687&action=ViewObject&object=event&forward=no | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911998 | 291 | 1.742188 | 2 |
One of the amazing aspects of geology is the ability to travel while simultaneously doing a job -- or is it really a job when you have so much fun? Obsidian Dome (and the entire Mono / Long Valley area for that matter) is a volcanic playground replete with compelling sites like Panum Crater , Mammoth Mountain , Hot Creek, and the infamous "CO2 Tree Kill" area at Horseshoe Lake. All of these site -- and more -- are quite photogenic.
To start off, I will tackle Obsidian Dome, (or as I like to refer to it "my baby" or "the sid"). Since I am studying how Obsidian Dome cooled from phase-observations and textural analysis, it is vitally important to make many observations at the macroscopic all the way down to microscopic scales. Because I had only ~7 days to take field data, I basically had enough time to "skim the surface." Nonetheless, each site I visited has a unique story. I have included three images below that exemplify some of the more interesting patterns found at Obsidian Dome.
This "drip feature" is interesting. Considering that rhyolite melt is quite viscous, it seems somewhat out of character. On the other hand, and perhaps a more likely scenario, it could be a tight fold which would indicate ductile deformation.
All photos (c) 2010 by Cole Kingsbury | <urn:uuid:a424ddfc-aead-41f1-b8d5-8fb48c78fcb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://flowbanded.blogspot.com/2010/12/photographic-geology.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962002 | 293 | 2.171875 | 2 |
The best "big picture" plan for our family that I have come up with to answer the question how to best educate our children to prepare for an ever-changing future and a global market is as follows. I note that I have no clue if this is good enough but it feels right. This is an answer to my blog post earlier this week: How Then To Educate Our Children?
These are in a random order. It would be too hard to put them in some kind of priority order except for religion.
1. Teach my children about God and our family's religious beliefs which we feel will help them develop as people.
2. I am providing my children with a strong foundation in the Three R's. First oral communication, then reading and reading comprehension & a bit later, analytical thinking of the written word, and lastly, strong written communication skills.
Despite what experts say I feel, from experience, that the order that children learn best is: oral communication, communicating about their experiences or what was viewed (videos), reading and communicating what they read from the written word, and lastly, written communications about any topic and lastly, written communications of information that are original thoughts from their own mind.
2. Teaching my kids to question and think and analyze what they hear/read/see and are taught. Critical thinking skills. This includes forming one's own opinion, being an independent thinker, not being overly influenced by groupthink or peer pressure and lastly, being more of a leader than a follower.
3. Homeschool the basic subjects as required by state law to keep our homeschool legal so we are not investigated by the state or told by the government to put our kids in school, or worse, have our kids taken away from us by the state. This means we may teach things that our family doesn't feel are top priorities but they are necessary.
4. If our children's desired career requires college degrees to educate content to fulfill college admissions requirements and hopefully let them into 'good schools' for that career field. Also included is SAT prep to try to get decent/good enough test scores for college admissions. Yes this is "playing the school game" but if our society still requires certain degrees for certain fields then we have to 'play the game'.
5. Realize my children's natural talents or interest areas. Allow superior opportunities for learning content in the areas that my children want to learn. Take advantage of our freedom and flexibility in our lives to do things that schooled kids (sadly) don't have the time or opportunity to do due to school attendance and homework.
6. Have a certain amount of American cultural literacy.
7. Know history enough to realize it is important to know history and to learn from it yet to realize the topic can never be thoroughly ‘know’ that lifelong learning can be done just in the pursuit of learning more about history.
8. Teach my children how to research a topic, how to teach themselves by reading. Have them understand a person can never be 'done' learning as there is too much to know. Maintain a curiosity about a topic (don't kill the excitement in learning) so when they are teens and adults they can always know how to research and learn in whatever areas are necessary or just fun to learn about.
9. Teach my children morals and values; teach them that striving for good character is worthy. Living by one's character will help them all their lives.
10. Teach my children basic social skills and etiquette that we feel is basic and good. This ranges from proper behavior to how to be a good friend to how to deal with stress.
11. Teach my children basics of technology (PC, email, Internet) yet don't over focus on specific applications since programs, technology and platforms are changing so rapidly, what is learned today may not even exist when my kids are 25 years old.
12. Teach my children American history and why this nation is unique and different than other nations. Teach about other countries not in a negative way per se but explaining what makes this country different and letting them come to a conclusion about which they think is a better place to live or which country has ideals and opportunities that seem best to them. Teach my children what it means to be a good citizen. Teach our family's history and why our ancestors left their native lands and chose to live in this country.
13. Teach my children about politics relating to #12 and see which political belief systems lead to the best opportunities or would allow the best kind of life for people. As part of being a good citizen, teach the importance of voting in our elections.
14. Teach my children they have a voice and may affect change if they so desire. Teach them how to be an activist.
15. Know that gaps will always be present. Teach my kids that they don't know it all even if they do all the assignments I give them or if they read a certain number of books, that there is more to learn. Knowing one's ignorance and being humble is better than being a "know it all" as they are even more ignorant than people who know there is yet more to learn.
Technorati Tags: education, homeschooling. | <urn:uuid:a6d12532-c0e9-409e-9c9d-663f503a1aab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thethinkingmother.blogspot.com/2009/04/best-plan-ive-been-able-to-come-up-with.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969049 | 1,072 | 1.929688 | 2 |
DWI PURWOKO, ERIK (2007) THE PROBLEMS IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF SPEAKING AT THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF SMPN 2 PONOROGO. Other thesis, University of Muhammadiyah Malang.
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This study is conducted to describe the problems, the causes of the problems faced by the students and the teachers in the teaching and learning of speaking and the solution of those problems. By knowing these problems and the causes of the problems, it is expected that the teacher, the students and the writer can solve these problems. So the goal of the teaching and learning of speaking will be reached. In conducting the research, the writer used a descriptive research to obtain the information related to the problems and the causes of the problems in the teaching and learning of speaking process. The population of this research was all the second year students and an English teacher who teaches them as the informant to complete the data. The instruments used to collect the data were observation, questionnaire and the interview. The data were collected by giving the questionnaire to the students and the interview to an English teacher. Finally, the writer analyzed the data descriptively. The result of the research shows that the student’s problems in learning speaking are: the material is difficult and boring, the students have low ability and motivation. And these problems are caused by material that contains some unfamiliar words and it is not provided with glossary, the learning material is too much, and the student’s limited vocabulary. Then students are little in practice English in their daily conversation. The teacher problems in teaching speaking are the teacher can not use various teaching techniques to teach the students, and the teaching environment does not support teaching and learning process because the size of the students are large and difficult for teachers to use various methods because the class is noisy. The solutions of those problems are when the causes are very noisy in teaching activities, the teachers speak loudly to attract student’s attention, and she would ask them to sing English songs or call the student’s name then given them some questions. Then, teachers always review some materials given in the previous meeting.
|Item Type:||Thesis (Other)|
|Subjects:||L Education > L Education (General)|
|Divisions:||Faculty of Teacher Training and Education > Department of English|
|Depositing User:||Zainul Afandi|
|Date Deposited:||09 May 2012 07:27|
|Last Modified:||09 May 2012 07:27|
Actions (login required) | <urn:uuid:5cb13467-60e1-47a6-89ef-95070a3978dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eprints.umm.ac.id/4920/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938299 | 541 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Date of this Version
Brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis and other salmonids in Appalachia typically inhabit headwater watersheds, where food resources may limit growth. We monitored the feeding trends of a brook trout population in central Appalachia over the course of 2 years to determine variation in feeding intensity and important prey items. One terrestrial beetle family, Scarabaeidae, provided a disproportionate amount of energy during the only time of year when brook trout were feeding substantially above maintenance ration. Scarab beetles contributed 39.6% of all energy consumed during May and June of both years, though the number of fish with one or more scarabaeids present in the stomach varied by month (22.2-51.7%). The species composition of scarab beetles consumed suggested that four species are of particular importance. Our findings imply that scarabaeids represent a considerably important prey taxon for brook trout in the region. Considering the foraging habits of the scarabaeid species in question, the phenomenon we witnessed probably occurs throughout Appalachia. | <urn:uuid:0ef41fc7-f1a3-4a69-bae2-12a713d9adbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/entomologypapers/135/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919038 | 213 | 3.453125 | 3 |
It seems only yesterday that debate raged, or at least quietly burbled, regarding plate curves and color bars. “Should color bars be curved, or should they be linear?” was the question that inquiring minds wanted to know. Happily, that question has been resolved for most, if not all printers. The absolute condition of the press, as represented by linear color bars, has been deemed to be far less important that the actual net color results as measured by color bars that have received the same curve treatment as the actual images, and the large majority of printers give their color bars exactly the same treatment as the rest of the job. After all, we want the color bars to be a true reflection of the actual appearance of the job.
But what about ink optimization? (AKA ink savings, GCR, or various sorts of secret sauce). Should color bars get the same treatment as the image, as they do with curves, or should they shielded from optizimation treatments? Based on informal conversations, it seems like quite a few users feel that indeed, ink optimization should, like curves, be applied globally, to image and color bars equally; but in fact, the situation is completely different, and ink optimization is not only inappropriate for application to color bars, but is absolutely detrimental to their utility and may even represent a sort of false representation of results, particularly in a G7 enviornment.
To illustrate exactly why optimization is so detrimental to the utility of color bars, I’d like to start with a basic color bar of the kind that is frequently configured to fit onto the end-flap of package products (and thus cannot easily escape the effects of optimization, since it is integrated into the image).
This little collection of just ten patches is just enough to judge compliance to G7 specifications with great accuracy, and can either be spread across the press sheet in the traditional manner, or as stated above, hidden into the end flap of the product. It includes solids of CMY and K as well as 25 50 and 75 percent patches of K and CMY grays, A perfect, minimal and effective QC tool. But will it withstand ink optimization?
To see, I have integrated it into some images we all know very well.
There they are, our three favorite girls, the SCID musicians, with a G7 color bar in the corner to assure that all is fine and in perfect gray balance (subject to the limits of web viewing).
In order to simulate a perfect storm, I have created a rather serious color imbalance, the kind that the G7 specification is designed to monitor and control. In this case, while solid ink values have remained perfectly constant, a shift has happenned in the Cyan and Magenta TVI, causing a shift in gray balance that is equally visible both in image and color bars.
The image here is seriously out of balance, but the color bars have done their job. The 25 50 75 CMY gray bars show the same shift we see in the image, allowing process control specialists to spot the unacceptable color variation and reject the job.
Now let’s take a look at the same imagebut this time including aggressing GCR/ink optimization.
This image looks like at first like a victory for ink optimization. This image of the musicians, which were subjected to the same imbalances as the unoptimized image, looks better than the unoptimized image. There is still shifting of the clothes, the flesh tones, the background, but the shifting has at least been reduced. But what about the color bars? Oh my! They are absolutely perfect! Any objective measurement of the color bars would show that we have a 100% perfect job, with complete compliance to G7 in every way, But there is one small problem. The actual image, while better than the unoptimized image is still visually unacceptable, yet based on the color bars, it would have passed QC inspection. How did this happen?
If we peel away the black to look at CMY and K separately, we see that black tints are reproduced with tints of black, amd CMY tints are reproduced with tints of CMY, just as expected.
Performing the same operation on the optimized file, we see that the black tints are reproduced using tints of black, and CMY tints are reproduced with….tints of black! They have completely lost their predictive power as QC devices, and no amount of TVI shifting will cause the slightest shift in gray balance.
With optimization, the image fares less well than the color bars. While GCR does an excellent job of protecting neutrals from shifting, this effect diminishes as we move away from the neutral axis to more saturated colors. Since most images contain many colors, they will invariably tend to fare worse than color bars designed with perfect CMY neutrals.
Does this mean we shouldn’t use ink optimization? Not at all. Optimization/GCR of images with non-optimized color bars is an excellent way to save ink, shorten makeready and increase stability on a wide range of images. But optimization is entirely inappropriate for color bars. Optimized G7 color bars can produce “false negatives” indicating a G7 compliant job even when TVI values and corresponding image appearance are seriously shifted. Be sure that across-the-sheet plate colorbars are excluded from the optimization portion of the workflow. And if colorbars are integrated into the image, such as patches hidden into packaging end flaps, be sure that any image optimization is done off-line, prior to plating, so that color patches can be excluded. | <urn:uuid:1f6a6c31-ae83-4298-bab6-f17e57b06d2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://colorclarity.net/should-color-bars-be-optimized/ | 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 | 0.955377 | 1,159 | 1.71875 | 2 |
A sad place, a home no more
He bought the house in 1985 and has lived in it since. It became a cozy home for him and his. But now the city says it's uninhabitable and must be demolished.
By EILEEN SCHULTE
Published March 11, 2007
SAFETY HARBOR - The little white house with the metal roof was just a migrant's duplex in a Dunedin orange grove a century ago.
In 1924, it was moved to a lot filled with orange and grapefruit trees.
The couple who lived there until recently said they felt like pioneers, with just a wood-burning stove for heat. But local officials say the house is falling apart. Last month they started the process to condemn it and forced the couple to move.
Now friends in Florida's folk music community are coming together to help Phillip Terry and Terri Musgrove.
"There's a bunch of musicians that are going to play," said Jack Bellew, who is helping to stage a benefit concert March 25 at the Whistle Stop Grill and Bar.
Organizers hope to bolster Terry and Musgrove during a tough time.
Their home, however, may be beyond repair.
* * *
Over the years, Terry's house on Third Avenue N has crumbled and rusted to the point that only a faint hue of its blue trim remains.
After a cold snap in February, the city received a tip that it was uninhabitable, and that someone who lived there needed help.
A Pinellas County Sheriff's deputy, a city code enforcement officer and a worker from state Department of Children and Families made an unannounced visit.
They saw holes in the ceiling and floor, broken windows, a bathtub that drained right onto the dirt outside and a gap in a door large enough for rodents to crawl through.
They ordered Terry, a well-known Florida folk musician who goes by the stage name Vgo, and Musgrove, who said she is a descendant of Safety Harbor founder Count Odet Philippe, to move immediately.
Safety Harbor Building Official Danny Sandlin said the structure is beyond repair and probably must be torn down.
Now the couple is upset, complaining that code enforcement didn't take the time to explain the situation fully or even to discuss it with them.
But City Manager Billy Beckett said the city's primary interest was getting Terry and Musgrove some help.
"The conditions present a threat to the couple and a possible broader threat to the neighborhood," he said.
For now, the couple said they like their temporary apartment provided for the next two months by Denise Becker, a nurse who lives next door to the couple, but they want to go home.
"Vgo and Terri, they're good souls," Becker said.
* * *
Phillip Terry, 59, was born in New Rochelle, N.Y.
He said he attended Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, N.Y., with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, better known as Steely Dan.
He and his wife, Janette Terry, moved into the house at 323 Third Ave. N in 1985.
In 1993, the couple, who have several grown children, split. Janette Terry moved to New York and Terri Musgrove moved in.
Phillip Terry met Musgrove, 53, at a Civil War re-enactment event at Stone Mountain, Ga., in 1993.
She had seen him on stage playing the five-string banjo and got a friend to arrange an introduction.
Both are Civil War buffs.
"We like to live in the 19th century," he said.
And they lived like pioneers in the house on Third Avenue. Their only source of heat was a wood-burning stove. They cooked on it as well because their gas stove was not hooked up to the city's gas system. Terry couldn't afford it.
For money they worked as stage hands at the Tampa Convention Center and the Ice Palace, now called the St. Pete Times Forum.
Before that, Terry worked with the city of Clearwater's parks and recreation department as a stage manager and sound technician until a dispute over a lost piece of equipment led to his departure.
Terry and Musgrove played duets on the Florida folk festival circuit with their group Banjos Unlimited.
Then Musgrove got sick.
Terry said doctors who treated her at Mease Hospital and Tampa General Hospital were not sure what she was suffering from. At first, they thought there was a problem with her gall bladder and took it out. But during the operation, a surgeon found the organ to be just fine, Terry said.
Then they told him she had cancer, and that he should prepare for her death.
"Everybody had pretty much written me off," said Musgrove.
Ultimately, he said, she was diagnosed with an abscessed diverticula. Diverticulosis is a condition in which small, bulging pouches form in a person's digestive tract. In Musgrove's case, those sacs became inflamed and infected causing abdominal pain, fever and nausea.
She was in and out of the hospital from December 2006 to the middle of February. Terry was all-consumed with her care.
Now she is on IV antibiotics and under the care of Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. She said she's feeling better.
Terry said he has been unable to work because he can't leave Musgrove's side for long, and she needs him.
Medical bills are closing in on $100,000, but the couple can't pay them. Neither has any income. They are being supported for the next two months by Terry's grown daughter and his mother.
For a while, they said, the condition of their home has been the least of their problems.
Still, they acknowledge the place has problems.
"Stay on the plywood and watch your step," Terry tells a reporter who has come for a tour of the old house. "There are soft spots."
Terry is wearing a black shirt, black pants, a black hat and red suspenders. Books and audio tapes are stacked everywhere in the small, cluttered house.
The doors to the refrigerator are open. Inside it is dark.
He points to an odd-looking window overhead in the kitchen area.
"They didn't like my skylight," he said, meaning code enforcement. "It is a sliding shower door. I figured it was weather-proof."
An old American flag serves as a window shade in the bedroom where the couple used to sleep on a modified water bed.
If you look through the window, you can see Musgrove's 1977 van which looks like it used to be brown or gold.
Terry said he can't drive it anyway because the state took his driver's license because he owed back child support.
From the date of the March 2 letter, he has 60 days to obtain the necessary permits to commence repairs or demolish the house. The city's code enforcement officer, Bob Repp, said it could cost up to $5,000 to demolish the house. Either the city can pay for it and put a lien on the property or Terry can pay for it. But he doesn't have the money.
"They won't let me take it apart," he said. "And I put most of it together."
He can also appeal the city's decision.
Terry said he may sell the property and split the money with his estranged wife, whose name is still on the deed. The Pinellas County Property Appraiser estimates the house would sell for $161,300.
The Rev. Joan Hill, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Safety Harbor, is among those trying to help guide him through this tough time.
A benefit for Terry and Musgrove will be from noon to 6 p.m. March 25 at the Whistle Stop Grill on Main Street.
It will be hosted by the Whistle Stop Back Porch Players, all friends in the music industry who are concerned for Terry.
"We're going to pass the hat for him," said Bellew, who runs the open mike night at the Whistle Stop. Terry, he said, is well-respected in the music industry.
But Terry is depressed.
"We're gone," he said, taking down pictures from a wall in his house last week. "We're obeying the law now. People can look in on us and make judgments."
"We had lives before this," he said. "They don't exist anymore."Eileen Schulte can be reached at 727 445-4153 or email@example.com.
If you go
Help for Vgo
The Whistle Stop Grill, 915 Main St. in Safety Harbor, will host a benefit at 6 p.m. March 25 for folk musician Phillip Terry, also known as Vgo, and Terri Musgrove, who recently were forced to move from their home. | <urn:uuid:a0603d61-9e84-436e-8b0d-d91edf4decf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/11/news_pf/Northpinellas/A_sad_place__a_home_n.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983153 | 1,887 | 1.570313 | 2 |
It’s a slow news day, so I might as well join the chorus in talking about Haley Barbour’s revisionist history. He claims that Yazoo City, Mississippi, his hometown, was an island of indifference amid a sea of racial intolerance in the Deep South.
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
I like the part where Barbour says he went to see MLK speak, but he stood in the back by his pickup truck and talked about girls with his friends instead of paying attention to the speech.
But the idea that Yazoo City rejected the Klan and used their Citizens Councils as progressive civil rights organizations is a pernicious lie. They were just as bigoted as every other Citizens Council in the state. Via Atrios:
Look,” said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, “if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you—of course you don’t.”
In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.
At the WCC’s initial meeting at Indianola, Mississippi, in the summer of 1954, it was decided to isolate and silence white dissenters. The Council organizers knew that the Negroes would need white leadership and help—ministers, editors, school-board members—and it resolved to use social ostracism to deny these to them. In Holmes County, Mississippi, a mass meeting sponsored by the WCC asked Dr. David Minter and Eugene Cox and their families to leave the county.
I think Digby has this right – Barbour is doing the time-honored thing for Presidential candidates in Mississippi and invoking the Southern strategy. But it does show you just how far things have gone on the right. In 2002, the blogosphere led a movement that ended in Mississippi’s Trent Lott being demoted for comments about Strom Thurmond, which included revelations that he addressed the modern-day successor to the White Citizen’s Council. Not even a decade later, another Mississippi politician is using the White Citizen’s Council as part of a strategy to win a national election. | <urn:uuid:6eecf2ae-8607-473b-af1b-d743a6b1f5b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/12/20/haley-barbours-white-citizens-council-revisionism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979936 | 794 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Many times, admins have complained that they could not access or could not boot a virtual CDROM that was inserted or an ISO file that was mapped.
And so many times, the cause of this issue is just a simply click. To access a virtual CDROM, that CDROM must be connected. If you look at the graphic below, you can see how the device is both connected and connected at power on. Connected devices are connected after the VM boots where as connected at power on devices, are connected before the VM boots. To boot a new OS CD, that CDROM needs to be connected at power on. | <urn:uuid:fa4095c8-6b36-4fc5-a994-c20fee637f2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/faq/virtualization-product-boot-load-new-guest-os.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974617 | 126 | 2 | 2 |
Use the field below to browse the Currier & Ives Collection at Springfield Museums
Christ Stilling the Tempest
“And when he entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, “Lord, save us: we perish.” And he said unto them, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What manner of man is this, even the winds and the sea obey him.”
Matthew VIII, 23-27.
Users, log in to add this piece to your personal lightboxReturn To Search Results | <urn:uuid:50043fcb-d3e1-4284-a358-b94db6890422> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.springfieldmuseums.org/the_museums/fine_arts/collection/view/868-christ_stilling_the_tempest | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952325 | 189 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Ageless Memory : Harry Lorayne has been honing and teaching his memory systems for more than 40 years. Ageless Memory is the culmination of his life's work, specially geared to our needs as we age, and encompassing all of the many ways we can use a better memory every day. Completely practical and easy to use, Lorayne's methods can be put into practice immediately - for a better memory the very same day you open the book and start to read! It's no longer necessary to accept poor or waning memory or "senior moments" as inevitable results of growing older - Harry Lorayne proves it. With this one book, you will learn to remember anything you see, read, or hear - the very first time you see, read, or hear it - and retain it for as long as you like. You'll be able to recall names and faces, seen years later; never miss an appointment or misplace keys, glasses, or valuables; give speeches without notes; learn English and foreign words and phrases easily; excel at card and other games; memorize long lists of items, huge numbers, quotations, Bible verses, all kinds of facts and figures; and (most important) regain the confidence that comes with having a sharp, creative mind.
|Reference||Personal & Practical Guides| | <urn:uuid:647bf0b7-3e38-4bc8-8563-da293c4240a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ofertondelibros.com/Bookstore/Book/Ageless-Memory/_/R-9781579127503B | 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 | 0.955584 | 269 | 1.859375 | 2 |
East Africa is suffering its worst drought in 60 years and millions are streaming towards already crowded refugee camps. One of the largest, at Dabaab, was built in the early 90s for 90,000 refugees. Today the camp contains 400,000 people, making it the largest refugee camp in the world — and it is still growing. According to one source 1,000 new refugees are arriving in the camp per day. In response, the international community has pressured the Kenyan government to open a new refugee camp built in 2010. (Previously, the Kenyan government has blocked the camp from opening, fearing it would encourage more refugees to enter their country from Somalia.)
Even Al Shabaab, the Islamic rebel group battling for control of Somalia has acknowledged the danger of the drought and removed its ban on humanitarian organizations operating inside its territory. However, it is not that simple. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Tara Vassefi in The Atlantic argue that Al Shabaab might be able to use international aid in Somalia to further its battle against the government:
Shabaab’s propensity to extract economic gain from relief agencies also presents a challenge for U.S. policy. The U.S. has pledged $5 million to assist Somalis who have been struck by this drought. But, at the same time, U.S. policy is designed to prevent money from flowing to organizations like Shabaab, which has been named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity by the U.S. Treasury Department. Humanitarian organizations that provide money to such groups can face legal repercussions, even if it’s extracted from them unwillingly as a “tax.”
As Gartenstein-Ross and Vassefi point out, the desire of the international community to assist the millions in need in East Africa is undermined by the very real risk that the aid will help their enemies. Without the ability to guarantee that international aid will not flow into the hands of groups like Shabaab, governments might well be reluctant to provide the amount of aid necessary to assist the desperate millions living and dying in the Horn of Africa.
Photo credit: Bjørn Heidenstrøm | <urn:uuid:c0c88c48-f7af-4268-b63f-039612743f38> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.undispatch.com/will-the-international-community-have-to-funnel-their-draught-aid-through-a-terrorist-organization | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961271 | 446 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Utility rate hikes are on the way soon
City hit with higher water cost despite conservation program
City Council members were shocked to learn Tuesday that for the city government, saving water doesn't pay.
At Tuesday's City Council meeting, it was revealed that the city has to pay for not using much water in a new contract with the SFPUC. On the bright side, Shoreline Fund property taxes are $5 million higher than anticipated, leaving a balance of nearly $40 million.
"With this SFPUC agreement we basically paid $367,000 because we didn't use enough water," said council member Laura Macias at the May 1 meeting. "We spent a lot of time talking to our residents about conservation and recycled water and at the end of the day it kind of backfired."
The San Francisco Public Utilities contract was renegotiated with the city two years ago, and is a 25-year agreement, said Public Works Director Mike Fuller. He noted that he was not involved in the negotiations, but noted that those who did wanted to make sure the city had plenty of water allocated — and apparently paid a price for that guarantee.
Council members suggested that the city try and sell the water to someone else rather than pay, but Fuller said the city isn't allowed to do that in the contract.
"Couldn't we just put it in tankers and take it somewhere?" said Mayor Mike Kasperzak.
"I guess we could if we had a use for it," Fuller said.
"It just seems extraordinary to have that much water and have to pay for not using it," said council member Ronit Bryant. "I recall that there were cities who thought they were not getting enough water."
Utility rates to increase
Water, sewer and garbage rate increases are likely on the way, say city staff members, who are recommending an 8 percent increase to water rates, a 3 percent increase in garbage rates and a 5.5 percent increase in sewer rates to offset the city's increased costs for those services, which are all provided by outside agencies.
The water rate increases would pay for a rate increase of 11.4 percent from the SFPUC, from which the city receives most of its water, while the remainder comes from the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which is increasing rates by 7.9 percent for treated water and 9.3 percent for well water.
Shoreline Fund overflowing with cash
There seems to be no shortage of money in the city's unique Shoreline Fund, which appropriates property taxes in Google's neighborhood north of Highway 101.
Finance Director Patty Kong said that the fund will see $30.5 million this fiscal year while the city had budgeted revenues at only $25.5 million. Ostensibly due to Google's ongoing property buying spree, it leaves an extra $5 million for the fund which pays for maintenance and improvements to the area and Shoreline Park. The special tax district does not share the bulk of its revenue with the city's general fund, local public schools, or the county as it otherwise would.
The Shoreline Fund, which was created by special state legislation, is in its second year of a deal to share as much as $13.6 million with Mountain View's schools over three years. As part of that deal, the city must project its ongoing expenses for maintaining the Shoreline Park landfill, potential costs of sea level rise and new transportation systems in the area. City staff say those studies will finish next year.
Kong said $10 million from the fund would placed into a reserve for projects or land acquisition in the area, leaving the balance for the fund at $37.4 million.
Email Daniel DeBolt at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:aa7fc40f-5c74-4ea4-9e8e-723763bd9f3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mv-voice.com/story.php?story_id=7748 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982487 | 770 | 1.84375 | 2 |
RAPID CITY, SD -
The owners of an old sandstone one-room schoolhouse in South Dakota that is named after one of the state's most notorious criminals say the building has attracted unwanted admirers.
The school is one of the final remnants of Crook City. It's known as the Sitts Schoolhouse because escaped convict George Sitts made the building his hideout before killing two lawmen.
Sitts was the only man executed by electric chair in South Dakota.
The owners of the schoolhouse, Michael and Donna Auer, tell the Rapid City Journal (http://bit.ly/XDwGL7) they want to repair the building, but don't want government organizations involved.
The Auers are upset that a member of the Society of Black Hills Pioneers who reportedly offered to help with repairs applied for a grant from the Deadwood Historic Preservation Committee.
© 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. Material may not be redistributed. | <urn:uuid:f73ecf23-d4a8-48f2-9adc-e9394d4ed071> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/owners-of-notorious-schoolhouse-unhappy-with-help/?id=143927 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966027 | 202 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Avant-garde musician Beck Hansen recently produced a new “album,” Song Reader, that was not released in stores or via mp3 files. Instead, he released the score and asked his fans and other musicians to upload their interpretations of the score for others to hear. The tagline on the website says, “Only you can bring Beck Hansen’s Song Reader to life.”
The idea is quite intriguing for our pop music era: The composer trusts his audience to be true to the score he has provided, allowing them the liberty to interpret his notations in ways that seem interesting or apt to them. Of course, this is the way new music used to be disseminated in the days before Mr. Edison imposed the new authority of the recorded product through the phonograph. There is, as the Preacher once noted, little that is new under the sun.
The uploaded versions of the songs to-date run the gamut of quality and texture. It is an interesting experiment in artistry, to be sure, refusing to dictate every jot and tittle of the sounds and instrumentation and allowing the fans to fill in the blanks, so to speak.
I suspect that Beck intended this move to be an ironic statement about postmodern sensibilities and the vacuum of authority that is left in the wake of irony and subjectivism. Instead, however, he has produced something that is really more of a metaphor about the authority of the author. What unites the products of the project is the shared score that he has provided; if the product has no relationship to the score, it is not a part of the wiki-album.
Indeed, this is something of a metaphor for what God did for us with his revelation of himself through the Scriptures. The notes are there for us to follow but there is a wide allowance for cultural differences. Unlike Islam, for example, where only Arabic is used in the purest pursuits of the language and cultural assimilation is expected on a significantly prescribed level, Christianity has always allowed for a diversity of cultural and interpretive expressions. Sure, we have some difficult passages that we must navigate in terms of history and culture, but to be Christian is not, per se, to be Western or African or Eastern. We have the foundations and circumscriptions of Scripture, Creed, and so forth, but when we tour the world, we find these commonalities articulated in many different ways. And this seems to reflect the timeless truths that we serve a faith that has been sent forth for all peoples in all ages until he returns to gather us home. | <urn:uuid:33e4d91c-5615-460e-b013-694ac516329e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/02/04/divine-sheet-music/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967914 | 528 | 2.015625 | 2 |
How Your Nutritional Needs Change as You Age
We look at some of the most common misconceptions about the dietary needs of older people.
Do you need to change what and how you eat in your 50s, 60s, and beyond? Yes, though maybe not in ways you might think. Fallacies about nutritional needs later in life abound, and it's not always easy to separate myth from fact, especially because a lot of information is aimed at younger adults.
- You should eat less as you get older. True. "Energy requirements decrease with every decade," says Connie Bales, PhD, RD, professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and associate director of the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at Durham VA Medical Center. "We move around less, we have less muscle, and our metabolic rate goes down." But Bales says the challenge while eating less overall is to eat more nutrient-rich foods, such as low-fat milk and lean meat, which calorie for calorie, pack more of a nutritional punch.
- Nutritional needs decrease with age. False. People often think because you need fewer calories as you age, you need fewer nutrients. That's not the case. Your body requires the same amount of protein, vitamins, and minerals and, in some instances, even more nutrients. Take B-12, for example. After age 50, your body's ability to absorb the vitamin often decreases due to reduced stomach acids needed to break it down from food sources. The same holds true for vitamin D. Aging skin is less able than younger skin to convert the vitamin from sunlight, which in turn affects the body's ability to absorb calcium -- and both vitamin D and calcium are needed to prevent bone loss. That's why taking a daily vitamin/mineral supplement is a good idea; so is talking to your doctor to see if you need additional supplements beyond the multivitamin, Bales says.
- It's OK to skip meals if you're not hungry. It depends. "If it's once a week, that's fine. But if this happens regularly, I don't think it is," Bales says. While it's true that you generally eat less as you age, she says, "you don't always respond to the need for food with the normal hunger sensation," perhaps due to neurological or chemical changes in the body. Frequently skipping meals can backfire nutritionally. "It's not good to go eight hours without protein," Bales explains. "The body needs a regular supply of protein and essential nutrients to maintain metabolism, and for making bone and muscle and enzymes." Try to eat every few hours -- even if it's a light meal like a peanut butter sandwich.
- Older people need to drink less fluid. False. Though it may seem that you aren't as thirsty, that doesn't mean you need to drink less. "You don't always respond to dehydration with the normal thirst sensation," Bales says. "Our regulatory processes are just not as sharp." So you might not feel thirsty even when dehydrated. Her recommendation? Drink six glasses of water daily and other fluids as well. Perhaps the biggest myth about nutrition and aging? That older people are set in their ways, Bales says. "That really is not true. I've found that most are really motivated about their health, and many of them are quite willing to try to change." | <urn:uuid:a363a749-b2da-4883-a611-e064b7403ec3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/features/nutritional-needs-change-as-you-age | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976597 | 693 | 2.53125 | 3 |
The Pleasant Valley post office was established September 28, 1868,
On March 21, 1890, the Pleasant Valley post office reopened
According to Isaac Hiatt, author of "31 Years in Baker County," Pleasant Valley came into being as a way station on the very early Place Toll Road in 1865, a freight station on the railroad in 1884, the route of Old Oregon Trail Highway 30 and was slightly bypassed by Interstate 84.
It is the home of the multiple stone quarries that supply the building materials for Baker County's well known "Grey Stone City" of Eastern Oregon, but now Pleasant Valley is only another addition to our Ghost Towns of Baker County.
Earlier Pleasant Valley had become a city of basic population with enough
In 1874 School Superintendent W. F. Payton organized District #12 with a
The district even added some high school classes for a few years before consolidating with Baker's 5 J in 1949. Students were then bussed into Baker City schools.
The third and last schoolhouse of this area was constructed of the nearby
If you would like to to this history page,
Own a business, have a club or organization in Pleasant Valley
BAKERCOUNTY.NET is © Copyright, owned and maintained by Louise Shreffler | <urn:uuid:a054f8e0-2659-4cc4-ba12-a4e31d877626> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bakercounty.net/towns/pleasentvalley.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975082 | 259 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Manners and Customs of The Modern Egyptians, by E. Lane, is a two-volume set filled with lore about Egypt during the author’s time (1834). And although it makes for fascinating reading, the book is now largely ‘put down’ by post-colonial theorists who are troubled by the Orientalist mind-set of Lane and his colleagues.
Nevertheless, taken at descriptive value, it – as so much of the colonial literature of exploration – provides views both into lifestyles of local people and their (presumed) thoughts – as well as mindsets of the authors themselves; of colonial mentality.
The following excerpt is about some of the practices around Orthodox Easter time in Egypt (1834), and includes a recipe for kishk, which was eaten as part of the celebrations for Good Friday. Kishk is still a very popular dish, eaten year-round, and I remember the delicious kishk that was made in the Izba (small village) in Upper Egypt where I lived while doing research.
Salted fish ( فسيخ), luttice, and onion are also eaten as part of the celebration, and it is said that these practices can be traced back to ancient Egypt, though I cannot find solid information on this. Nevertheless, it is a celebration that encompasses both Muslims and Christians.
Of particular interest in the following description, is the melding of Muslim, Coptic, and non-religious activities into one ceremony – called Shamm al-Nasim (شم النسيم – literally, ‘sniffing the breeze’). Until the presidency of Nasser (mid-20th century), there was a large Jewish community in Cairo and it is possible that Passover also encompassed the Shamm al-Hasim celebration.
IT is remarkable that the Moos’lims of Egypt observe certain customs of a religious or superstitious nature at particular periods of the religious almanac of the Copts [Orthodox Christians of Egypt]; and even, according to the same system, calculate the times of certain changes of the weather.
Thus they calculate the period of the Khum’a'see’n [khamsiin], when hot southerly winds are of frequent, occurrence, to commence on the day immediately following the Coptic festival of Easter Sunday, and to terminate on the Day of Pentecost (or Whitsunday); an interval of forty-nine days.
The Wednesday next before this period is called Ar’ba’a Eiyoo’b, or Job’s Wednesday. Many persons, on this day, wash themselves with cold water, and rub themselves with the creeping’ plant called raara’a Ei-yoo’b, or ghoobey’ra (inula Arabica, and inula undulata), on account of a tradition which relates that Job did so to obtain restoration to health. This and other customs about to be mentioned were peculiar to the Copts; but are now observed by many Moos’lims in the towns, and by more in the villages.
The other customs just alluded to are that of eating eggs, dyed externally red or yellow or blue, or some other colour, on the next day (Thursday); and, on the Friday (Good Friday), a dish of khul’tah, composed of kishk*, with foo’l na’bit**, lentils, rice, onions, &c.
* Kishk is prepared from wheat, first moistened, then dried, trodden in a vessel to separate the husks, and coarsely ground with a hand-mill: the meal is mixed with milk, and about six hours afterwards is spooned out upon a little straw or bran, and then left for two or three days to dry. When required for use, it is either soaked or pounded, and put into a sieve, over a vessel; and then boiling water is poured on it: what remains in the sieve is thrown away: what parses through is generally poured into a saucepan of boiled meat or fowl, over the fire: some leaves of white bete, fried in butter, are usually added to each plate of it.
**Beans soaked in water until they begin to sprout, and then boiled.
On the Saturday, also, it is a common custom of men and women to adorn their eyes with kohhl. This day is called Sebt en-Noo’ r (Saturday of the Light); because a light, said to be miraculous, appears during the festival then celebrated in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
A custom termed Shemm en-Nesee’m* (or the Smelling of the Zephyr) is observed on the first day of the Khum’a'see’n. Early in the morning of this day, many persons, especially women, break an onion, and smell it; and in the course of the forenoon, many of the citizens of Cairo ride or walk a little way into the country, generally northwards, to take the air, or, as they term it,smell the air, which, on that day, they believe to have a wonderfully beneficial effect. The greater number dine in the country.
This year (1834), they were treated with a violent hot wind, accompanied by clouds of dust, instead of the nesee’m: but considerable numbers, notwithstanding, went out to smell it.
Source: Edward William Lane – An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Written in Egypt during the Years 1833, -34, and -35, partly from Notes made during a Former Visit to that Country in the Years 1825, -26, -27, and 28. In Two Volumes
- Happy Passover. Happy Easter. Joyeuses fêtes de Pessah et de Pâque. (gjnashen.wordpress.com)
- It’s all about passing over… (cny.org) | <urn:uuid:fef3d3ff-2fc5-45b2-9377-bf72af4f810f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dianabuja.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/easter-season-in-egypt-1834-making-kishk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951148 | 1,278 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Just listen to this mother of her concerned children who asked our legislators for the LGBT community to “not spend anymore money for kids in schools and for the LGBT people to go back into the closet where you belong…”
This is why I want to stop homophobia, people like her that have no clue what there talking about…
In our society, when a gay person is asked, “What do you think caused you to be gay?” the straight person will usually expect some kind of an answer. Research suggests that our biology causes us to be gay or straight. But people who are traditionally straight don’t seem to understand that for some reason. Instead they want to know why the question was chosen. So, by reversing this question, “What do you think caused you to be heterosexual?” this questionaire answers the question why was heterosexuality or homosexuality chosen?
(Disclaimer: these questions are being asked not to offend anyone, just for the sole purpose to have you think differently about choices that are made in today’s society and to think outside the box)
1.What do you think has caused you to be heterosexual?
2.When and how did you first decide you were a heterosexual?
3.Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of people of the same sex?
4.If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer it?
5.Isn’t it possible your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
6.Isn’t it possible that all you need is a good gay lover?
7.If heterosexuality is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients heterosexual?
8.To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did they react?
9.Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex? Why are they so promiscuous?
10.Do heterosexuals hate and/or distrust others of their own sex?
11.Is that what makes them heterosexual?
12.If you were to have children, would you want them to be heterosexual knowing the problems they’d face?
13.Your heterosexuality doesn’t offend me as long as you don’t try to force it on me. So, why do you feel compelled to seduce others into your sexual orientation?
14.The great majority of child molesters are heterosexuals. Do you really consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
15.Why do you insist on being so obvious, and making a public spectacle of your heterosexuality? Can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?
16.How can you ever hope to become a whole person if you limit yourself to a compulsive, exclusively heterosexual lifestyle, and remain unwilling to explore and develop your homosexual potential?
17.Heterosexuals are noted for assigning themselves and each other to narrowly restricted, stereotyped sex-roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role playing?
18.Even with all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
19.How could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual like you, considering the menace of overpopulation?
20.There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that could help you change if you really wanted to. Have you considered trying psychotherapy or even aversion therapy?
21.Could you really trust a heterosexual therapist/counselor to be objective and unbiased? Don’t you fear he/she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his/her own preferences?
22.How can you enjoy a full, satisfying sexual experience or deep emotional rapport with a person of the opposite sex when the differences are so vast? How can a man understand what pleases a woman, or vice-versa?
23.Is sexual orientation a choice one makes with themselves? | <urn:uuid:ccbf9d41-2e21-451a-b246-3012c3789ea2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.43things.com/people/progress/Geo58/5752507 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948792 | 838 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Who We Are
The Center for Victims of Torture works toward a future in which torture ceases to exist and its victims have hope for a new life. We are an international nonprofit dedicated to healing survivors of torture and violent conflict. We provide direct care for those who have been tortured, train partners around the world who can prevent and treat torture, and advocate for human rights and an end to torture.
Since our founding in 1985, CVT has:
- Rehabilitated over 23,000 torture and war trauma survivors through direct healing.
- Engaged in post-conflict community building after some of the world’s deadliest wars, working in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jordan and Kenya.
- Pioneered research in torture survivor rehabilitation to better understand the effects of torture and how best to heal survivors.
Download our 2012 Annual Report for the Center for Victims of Torture (pdf) for highlights of our accomplishments.
The mission of the Center for Victims of Torture is to heal the wounds of torture on individuals, their families and their communities and to end torture worldwide.
“You have a very hard job, because it is your job to put the soul back in the body.”
- Survivor of Torture
The people at CVT are committed to working toward a world without torture. If you are interested in meaningful work, being part of a team with energetic and creative colleagues, and advancing human rights globally, check our list of professional opportunities regularly for openings.
For press inquiries, contact Brad Robideau, Media Relations Manager, at brobideau [at] cvt [dot] org, +1 612-436-4886 (office) or +1 651-808-7178 (mobile). Read our CVT Experts Guide for spokespersons who can speak on a broad range of issues. | <urn:uuid:bf4a63ca-4aba-4c56-a7e4-b8ef77b1be29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cvt.org/who-we-are | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919263 | 385 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Excerpted from Hitch 22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens, to be published in June 2010 by Twelve; © 2010 by the author.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
(Just to give you an idea, Proust’s reply was “To be separated from Mama.”) I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.
Where would you like to live?
In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.
What is your idea of earthly happiness?
To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Dennis Barlow, Humbert Humbert, Horatio Hornblower, Jeeves, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, Funes the Memorious, Lucifer.
Who are your favorite characters in history?
Socrates, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky.
Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea, Becky Sharp, Candy, O, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia.
Your favorite painter?
Goya, Otto Dix.
Your favorite musician?
J. S. Bach, Bob Dylan.
The quality you most admire in a man?
Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.
The quality you most admire in a woman?
Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.
Your favorite virtue?
An appreciation for irony.
Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one?
Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
Your proudest achievement?
Since I can’t claim the children as solely “mine,” being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest.
Your favorite occupation?
Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.
Who would you have liked to be?
Prometheus, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola.
Your most marked characteristic?
What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.
What is your principal defect?
Becoming bored too easily.
What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
Loss of memory.
What would you like to be?
One who understood music and chess and mathematics, or one who had had the courage to bear arms.
What is your favorite color?
Blue. Sometimes red.
What is your favorite flower?
What is your favorite bird?
What word or expression do you most overuse?
Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was “perhaps.”
Who are your favorite poets?
Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, W. H. Auden, James Fenton, W. B. Yeats, Chidiock Tichbourne, G. K. Chesterton, Wendy Cope.
What are your favorite names?
Alexander, Sophia, Antonia, Celeste, Liam, Hannah, Elizabeth, Wolfgang.
What is it you most dislike?
Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
Which historical figures do you most despise?
Stanley Baldwin, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Which contemporary figures do you most despise?
Henry Kissinger, Osama bin Laden, Josef Ratzinger.
Which events in military history do you most admire?
Thermopylae, Lepanto, the defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, the mutinies in the German Army in 1918 and the German General Staff in 1944, the Royal Navy’s Arctic convoys.
Which natural gift would you most like to possess?
The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).
How would you like to die?
Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.
What is your motto?
“Allons travailler! ” (This more imperative version of “Get on with it!” is annexed from Emile Zola, though E. M. Forster somewhat overextended it by enjoining us to “get on with your own work, and behave as if you were immortal.”)
Answer your own Proust Questionnaire on Facebook. | <urn:uuid:fe27e75a-71c1-49f7-a29f-ed4141d403c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/06/hitchens-proust-questionnaire-201006 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914295 | 1,142 | 1.5 | 2 |
This morning was another of those daily struggles: daddy running late, little girl with absolutely no interest in rushing, or even finding her boots, and mom with no idea if they had everything they needed for the day when they ran out the door. Solving things in the morning is not an option.
But a new year is the perfect time to start some new patterns. My girl is just turning 4, and it's definitely time to start including calendars and lists into our routine. She's always asking what day it is, or what we're doing on that particular day. Here are some kid-friendly calendar ideas to help us get started.
- Perpetual Calendar DIY on Bread and Buttons
- Today Is Calendar by Alma's Designs
- Coloring Calendar by Be Happy Now
- DIY Erasable Calendar Board on Ten June blog
- Monthters Printable Calendar on Mr. Printables | <urn:uuid:79ed113f-0e12-4d48-89ef-fc5ef4f8213d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/kid-friendly-calendars-keep-everyone-in-the-loop-182235 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949501 | 184 | 1.875 | 2 |
Nato/G8 In Chicago - At A Global Crossroads: Turn Against War
On January 25, the host committee for the G8/NATO summit in Chicago in May unveiled a new slogan for the event, “The Global Crossroads.” The mood of the organizers is upbeat and positive. This is a grand opportunity to market Chicago with an eye for the tourist dollar and the city is ready, the committee assures us, to deal with any “potential problems.”
One of the potential problems that the committee is confident that it can overcome, according to a report by WLS-TV in Chicago, is “the prospect of large-scale protests stealing the stage as the world watches.” The new slogan stresses the international character of the event and the prestige and economic benefit that hosting world economic and political leaders is expected to bring to Chicago. “We're a world class city with world class potential," declares Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "If you want to be a global city, you've got to act like a global city and do what global cities do," says Lori Healey who heads the host committee and who previously led the city’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2016 Olympics.
All indications, unfortunately, are that Chicago is preparing to “act like a global city and do what global cities do” and it appears to want to follow the lead of other “global cities” in dealing with mass demonstrations threatening to “steal the stage;” think Tehran, Beijing, Cairo, Moscow and Seattle, to name a few.
One of the chilling developments the hosting committee announced was that the Illinois State Crime Commission is “urgently seeking Iraq-Afghanistan combat veterans to work security positions for the G8 summit.” The commission's chairman clarifies that is for “private security” and not to work with the Chicago police. As in other “global cities,” these veterans will be used as private mercenaries without the legal protections and benefits of public employees. The Veterans Administration reports treating about 16% of the 1.3 million of veterans of these two wars for post-traumatic stress disorder and many more do not seek help. In answer to a potentially volatile situation in the streets of Chicago, the commission is not seeking workers trained in conflict resolution, but it has an urgent need for ex-soldiers trained in the violent chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan. These veterans urgently need treatment and meaningful employment, but at the “global crossroads,” they are offered only temp jobs as rent-a-cops protecting the interests of their exploiters.
Beyond touting the overblown promise of money that the summit is expected to bring ("To penetrate international markets takes time and money," said Don Welsh, Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau) the city and its welcoming committee do not encourage education or reflection on what NATO and the G8 are and what they do. Despite its claims, NATO was never a defensive alliance. It is structured to wage “out of area” wars in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as to “contain” China. NATO’s creed is aggressive, expansionist, militarist and undemocratic. The G8 represents the economic interests of its member states. It is not a legal international entity established by treaty but acts outside the law, with NATO as its enforcer. Chicago law enforcement might better spend its resources on preparing to arrest and prosecute the war criminals, terrorists, torturers, and racketeers coming as invited constituents of G8 and NATO rather than getting ready for mass arrests of citizens coming to Chicago to exercise their right to protest these crimes.
The morning after the host committee unveiled its new slogan, some of us with the Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonviolence met to discuss our part in the response to the city of Chicago “bringing the war home” by welcoming NATO and G8.
We at Voices found ourselves in agreement with the host committee that Chicago is indeed a global crossroads. This is true not for the world’s financial elite, war profiteers, military brass and heads of state officially welcomed there in May, but for those who come to Chicago from the all over the continent and around the globe to visit or to make their lives there without the criminal intent of NATO and the G8. In May, especially, Chicago will be a global crossroads for the thousands of good people who will gather in the city to lend a hand and take to the streets for justice and peace.
Chicago in May is also a crossroads in that it is a critical place and time for us all to take stock of where we have been and where we are going. We are at a crossroads - do we continue on the road of war and economic exploitation of the planet that NATO and the G8 are committed to, or do we abandon that road and turn a corner toward economic justice and a world at peace. We are at a crossroads and our choices are stark: global domination and the economic and ecological devastation that it makes inevitable or global community.
With this in mind, Voices for Creative Nonviolence decided to call our efforts leading up to the NATO and G8 summit, “At A Global Crossroads: Turn Against War.” We are starting the ground work for a walk starting on May 1 from Madison, Wisconsin, to arrive in Chicago in time for the summit on May 19.
Brian Terrell is a former mayor of Maloy, Iowa. | <urn:uuid:0da42520-49fe-46f4-a3c5-4f179a48f33b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zcommunications.org/nato-g8-in-chicago-at-a-global-crossroads-turn-against-war-by-brian-terrell | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952874 | 1,133 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Typically when I workout I am not sore the next day. I'm sore the day after the next day. My workout buddy is always sore the very next day, and I think he usually recovers faster. I was wondering if anyone else has heard of this. Could it be a problem with nutrition, or is it genetics? Is this common? Any help is appreciated =)
You are experiencing delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). The severity of DOMS is determined by the way your lift weights and your nutrition. Experiencing DOMS days after your workout is not bad. It is a sign of muscle growth, although not the only sign.
There are two parts to a repetition - concentric and eccentric. The concentric portion occurs when you lift against gravity. For example, lifting upwards on a barbell curl is concentric. The eccentric portion occurs when the weight falls in the direction of gravity. For example, letting the barbell fall back towards your thighs. DOMS is increased by lengthening the eccentric contraction. For example, slowly lowering the barbell in a controlled manner.
Why does the eccentric contraction increase DOMS, but not the concentric contraction? From the Wikipedia article, it appears that the eccentric contraction uses a very different mechanical process and is fueled by different nutrients. I recall watching a video on Intructional Fitness saying that workouts with extremely prolonged eccentric contractions cause DOMS, not the day after the workout, but actually two days after the workout.
I'm not an expert on how nutrition affects DOMS, but I've read in numerous places that eating branch chain amino acids reduces DOMS by repairing muscle faster. BCAAs are found in most high end protein powders. | <urn:uuid:af0d523f-e319-4544-b7cc-10548a994bc8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fitness.stackexchange.com/questions/1496/am-i-getting-sore-too-late?answertab=active | 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 | 0.949529 | 348 | 2.21875 | 2 |
10 lessons about conflicts in activism
After three years sharing this workspace, I've passed through several crises within this movement, which, as with any other group, is formed by people with distortions and a wide range of understandings. Also, as with any other group, it has biases and dysfunctions. I've lived the split of the only two global movements that proposed a solid alternative to our state of things: The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement. I've seen and have participated (by action or idleness) in the desintegration of a chapter with more than 20 activist working as a true coordinated team. I've seen a lot of brilliant disenchanted or disenchanting activists leaving this space from Australia, Spain, Italy, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Argentina... Even some of my best new friends have left the room as strangers.
The first thought I have after each of these conflicts is never happy. How can both sides be very aligned with the main goal but not enaugh to share the path? How can there be space for wrong schemes and obsolete structures in a movement with such high moral values (freedom, justice, equality, nonviolence, critical thinking...)? Why is ego still present and visible in our relationships? My second sort of thoughts is: Can we learn something about it?
This text has the intention of collecting 10 lessons to learn, to put them in practice when conflicts arrive, and then to improve our labour of activism which advocates a shift to the best known socio-economic system of our age: the Resource Based Economy Model.
You might disagree with these lessons, or perhaps you have encountered some different ones. Please share your point of view. Thanks a lot.
Beware of your ego and be conscious
- We have a viable alternative to this system, but we still live inside it, in a certain scale. So, be aware that your activism can't become a burden for you or your surroundings because your health and survival are essential if you are going to give your brains and time to do no less than change the world!
- This is a volunteer movement in which each activist gives what she can and desires to, and that effort is appreciated by the group.
- Group efficiency is met after hard work and long experience. In fact, you should notice that cooperation and collaboration need a non-ego-guided learning process.
- Remember: we respect people, but not ideas nor opinions. We don't follow the authority principle. Your actions or views are not you. Simple idea but difficult to internalise.
- We want to change the world. The way of wealth distribution, the monitoring process, the production system, the social organization, the culture, religions..., this is what we advocate for a global and integral change. Complex. Difficult. We know that the shift needs a global change of perspective by spreading relevant information to reach a critical mass. That is, a well-prepared and informed minority who will get global acceptance of the new paradigm. If you haven't realized that this way might be longer than your own, work with patience. The fruit has to be planted, watered, illuminated and fed in an appropiate manner, but it will only fall when it is ripe.
- Be patient also with your fellow activists who are learning something you already know. It's just a walk; being two steps behind or ahead doesn't make you better or worse.
You've got the power!
- No matter what you believe or have been told, if you have an initiative that will bring the society closer to an RBEM or even a better proposal, you will find here the most open place to build it. The most cooperative and well-informed people. But as we say, "If you propose, you endorse." If you can't find time to work on your idea, it will also be very difficult for anyone else find it.
- This movement does not demand anything but what you are willing to give; we are thankful for it, and the sky is the limit for you.
Don't get frustrated
- Understanding a tool for socio-economic organization that would work hugely better and, nevertheless, seeing the world becoming more violent, unfair, and irrational and seeing so much unnecessary suffering emerging all around, is really very frustrating, but remember that knowing a solution is halfway to solving the problem. Such complex changes need someone who enlightens the way. Precious destinations never were easy to reach, but knowing that our proposal is viable is also inspiring and encouraging.
- The reduced oligarchy has been working through generations recording in everyone's brain a whole model that endorses their own interests and values, and has done it with magnificient success, thanks to the system design itself and the education and mass manipulation tools. Entering such a biased scene can seem frustrating also, but... Hey! there's also a place for realistic optimism here: you have suffered the same indoctrination, but you are here. And using critical thinking you have arrived at different conclusions. And you are definitely NOT ALONE.
Don't be violent or use violent communication
- This movement is like any other human group, with contradictions and biases, but we aspire to stop falling into those old mistakes. Let's be inclusive and rational. The alternative we share is not deceitful, so there's no need for aggressiveness or impetuosity to be spread around. Ideas are not imposed. They are shown and submitted for validation. In this process they are improved and our common knowledge is enriched.
- Listen. Open new ways, sow a doubt, make questions..., remember that you share a lot of goals with every human being. Imagine your future within an RBEM in your environment, and build that vision.
- Don't be violent to yourself either. We all make mistakes. If we do more and risk more we certainly will fail more. I read somewhere that 90 percent of the mistakes we commit in a lifetime are to hide former (less important) mistakes. If this is true, let's commit to learning from our mistakes instead of covering them up.
Take care of your travel companions
- We aren`t here to make new friends. Activism is not a social club, but that doesn´t imply that we must not be aware that we share efforts in making available a common goal even though we don´t necessarily share the same vision of how to reach that goal.
- There is no "us and them", or "us versus them", frontiers, geographical chapters, nor other artifitial divisions. It's just one "us". A continuous system of relations.
Don't let the trees hide the forest
- Each of the ego conflicts in the movement has resulted in a motivation decline of the group and a breach in activism capacity. Sometimes this is a price worth paying. Sometimes it's not. Consider it.
- If you have been personally compromised, take some time to breathe and get perspective. Listen to yourself and also ask around to enrich yourself with other points of view before getting burnt out and leaving the group bereft of your valuable contribution.
Be the change you want to see in the world
- Even though we are not used to functioning without leaders, gurus, hyerarchies--without competition, without profit, without dogmas, using the scientific method... if we want to show that this model works, we must force ourselves to learn how to put it into practice even though we might not be so quick or efficient in the early stages.
- The goal is very important, but if we don't act with consistency in the process of transition it is very unlikely we will build up a global socio-economic system with such characteristics, and much more improbable that we know how to sustain it long term.
Presumption of innocence
- Communication and language, very often not in one's mother tongue, creates ambiguity. Always assume the best intention and be open to interpretation unless/until proven otherwise.
- Don't try to solve conflicts by e-mail or writing posts. Missunderstandings are more frequent in not-oral communication when arguing. Text hardly express mood, tone, intention... making it more complex to really understand.
Enjoy the walk!
- This can be a space full of true freedom and collective enrichment.
- Up or downwards, with roller skates, on a kite, with the crowd, with the few, chatting on education, learning permaculture, designing a lecture, writing an essay, translating, in english, en español, auf deutsch, building a FeNi battery prototype, drawing, making pictures, composing a video, learning how to build a windmill, opening knowledge, software or hardware, moderating a meeting, developing a web site, talking to your loved ones, listening to strangers, understanding, asking... any way you adapt your work to your activism and experience, enjoy the pleasure of rolling up your sleeves to allow your work and ideas to provoke a significant change. Savor the tremendous delight of trying to stare Life in the face without losing your smile. | <urn:uuid:d361abab-a8e1-4641-ae1c-8291ef15a22a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.thezeitgeistmovement.com/blog/ardible/10-lessons-about-conflicts-activism-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948562 | 1,858 | 2 | 2 |
Chicago Times, October 17, 1881
THE LAST MAN
ONE OF THE MEN WHO ATTESTED TO THE TRUTH OF THE "BOOK OF MORMON," DAVID WHITMER ONLY IS LEFT
IN THE SUNSET OF HIS LIFE HE BASES HIS HOPES OF HEAVEN ON THE RECORDS OF THE LOST TRIBE. AND SOLEMNLY REITERATES ALL THAT HE HAS EVER SAID REGARDING THEM.
In the beautiful shire town of Richmond, Ray county, Mo., there has resided for well nigh half a century, David Whitmer, known to the world as one of the three witnesses that testified to the validity and reality of the golden plates from which it has been asserted that Joseph Smith translated the "Book of Mormon," the original manuscript of which Mr. Whitmer has in possession, which shows by finger marks and where it has been cut into "takes" -- a printer's term -- that it has passed through the hands of the type setters. As a citizen of his town he stands deservedly high, having filled the office of mayor and councilman, is a good scholar, and thoroughly posted in biblical lore. During the past two years he has been slowly declining, and is now confined to his home, carefully attended to by his wife, children and grandchildren. Born in the state of New York, from Revolutionary ancestors, he brought with him to the West his habits of thrift and hospitality. To the stranger or the unfortunate his home and purse have ever been open, and his name is a synonym of probity and integrity. Knowing that he was approaching the full term allotted for man's stay on earth and that the readers of the Times would like to hear what he had to say concerning the origin of the "Book of Mormon," I called at his residence -- a plain and unpretentious frame building -- was ushered into his chamber by his granddaughter and found the old patriot reclining on his bed. Upon being told the object of my visit he promptly responded to my questions, and after an hour's interview I gleaned the following valuable information from him -- he speaking freely and unreservedly -- in regard to the origin and rise of the Mormon Church, as well as to the authenticity of the "Book of Mormon."
from which the book was translated, supposed to be of gold, were found the latter part of the year 1827 or 1828, prior to an acquaintance on Mr. Whitmer's part with Joseph Smith, and he was loth to believe in their actuality, notwithstanding the community in which he lived (Ontario county, New York,) was alive with excitement in regard to Smith's finding a great treasure, and they informed him that they knew that Smith had the plates, as they had seen the place he had taken them from, on the Hill Cumorah, about two miles from Palmyra, New York.
It was not until June 1829, that he met the future prophet, who visited his father's house, and while there he completed the translation of the "Book of Mormon," and thus he became conversant with its history, having witnessed Smith dictate to Oliver Cowdery the translation of the characters that were inscribed on the plates, said by Mr. Anthon, an Egyptian scholar, to resemble the characters of that ancient people. Christian Whitmer, his brother, occasionally assisted Cowdery in writing, as did Mrs. Joseph Smith, who was a Miss Hale before she was married.
In regard to finding the plates, he was told by Smith, that they were in a stone casket, and the place where it was deposited, in the hill, was pointed out to him by a celestial personage, clad in a dazzling white robe and he was informed by it that it was the history of the Nephites, a nation that had passed away, whose founders belonged to the days of the tower of Babel. The plates, which Mr. Whitmer saw, were in the shape of a tablet, fastened with three rings, about one-third of which appeared to be loose, in plates, the other solid, but with perceptible marks where the plates appeared to be sealed, and the guide that pointed it out to Smith very impressively reminded him that the loose plates alone were to be used; the sealed portion was
NOT TO BE TAMPERED WITH.
After the plates had been translated, which process required about six months, the same heavenly visitant appeared and reclaimed the gold tablets of the ancient people informing Smith, that he would replace them with other records of the lost tribes that had been brought with them during their wanderings in Asia, which would be forthcoming when the world was ready to receive them. At that time Mr. Whitmer saw the tablet, gazed with awe upon the celestial messenger, heard him speak and say: "Blessed is the Lord and he that keeps his commandments;" and then, as he held the plates and turned them over with his hands, so that they could be plainly visible, a voice that seemed to fill all space, musical as the sighing of a wind through the forest, was heard saying, "What you see is true; testify to the same," and Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, standing there, felt, as the white garments of the angel faded from their vision and the heavenly voice still rang in their ears, that it was no delusion -- that it was a fact; and they so recorded it. In a day or two after the same spirit appeared to Martin Harris, while he was in company with Smith, and told him also to bear witness to its truth, which he did, as can be seen in the book. Harris described the visitant to Whitmer, who recognized it as the same as he and Cowdery had seen.
The tablets or plates were translated by Smith, who used a small oval or kidney-shaped stone, called Urim and Thummim, that seemed endowed with the marvelous power of converting the characters on the plates, when used by Smith, into English, who would then dictate to Cowdery what to write. Frequently one character would make two lines of manuscript, while others made but a word or two words. Mr. Whitmer emphatically asserts, as did Harris and Cowdery, that while Smith was dictating the translation he had
NO MANUSCRIPT, NOTES OR OTHER MEANS OF KNOWLEDGE
save the seer-stone and the characters as shown on the plates, he being present and cognizant how it was done.
In regard to the statement that Sidney Rigdon had purloined the work of one Spaulding, a Presbyterian preacher, who had written a romance entitled "The Manuscript Found," Mr. Whitmer says there is no foundation for such an assertion. The "Book of Mormon," was translated in the summer of 1829, and printed that winter in Palmyra, N. Y. and was in circulation before Sidney Rigdon knew anything concerning the Church of Christ, as it was known then. His attention was especially brought to it by the appearance at his church, near Kirtland, O., in the fall of 1830, of Parley Pratt and Oliver Cowdery, he being at [that] time a Reformed or Christian preacher, they having been sent west by the Church in New York during the summer as evangelists, and they carried the printed book, the first time he knew such a thing was in existence. Upon being appealed to by Pratt and Cowdery for the use of his church he informed them that as he was endeavoring to establish the rules and get back into the ancient usages of Christianity, and desired all the light he could get that was of benefit to his fellow-men, he would do so, and would like to hear them. Then they gave him a copy of the book that it had been asserted he was the progenitor of. The result of the meeting was that 101 persons were received into the Church at Kirtland; that Rigdon and Partridge, two influential preachers, were sent as delegates to New York to see Joseph Smith, and they were so much impressed with his history of the book and his connection therewith that they became firm believers, and started back home as evangelists, preaching the new religion. In a short time thereafter, Smith, Whitmer, and others, learning of the beautiful country in Ohio, moved west, and the church increased rapidly, and would have so continued had it not strayed from the true path, to preach only Christ and Him crucified, as it had begun. Mr. Whitmer emphatically asserts that he has heard Rigdon, in the pulpit and in private conversations, declare that the Spaulding story, that he had used a book called "The Manuscript Found" for the purpose of preparing the "Book of Mormon," was as false as were many other charges that were then being made against the infant church, and he assures me that the story is as untruthful as it is ridiculous.
In his youth Joseph Smith was quite illiterate, knew nothing of grammar composition, but obtained quite a good education after he came west; was a man of great magnetism, made friends easily, was liberal and noble in his impulses, tall, finely formed, and full of animal life, but sprung from the most humble circumstances. The first good suit of clothes he had ever worn was presented to him by Christian Whitmer, brother of David.
As evidence of their belief in the divine origin of the book, Martin Harris, one of the witnesses, mortgaged his farm for $1500 for the purpose of having it printed, and the sale of the book soon reimbursed him for the outlay. Now millions of copies are being published and sent to the furthermost ends of the earth. A few years since, I was present at an interview between Mr. Whitmer and Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith, who had been sent from Utah to Richmond to secure the original manuscript, and after a careful examination Elder Pratt pronounced it the writing of Oliver Cowdery, and informed those present that it was the original manuscript from which the "Book of Mormon" had been printed, and in a conversation with the writer he assured me the archives of the Church at Salt Lake were incomplete without it; that they would pay Father Whitmer, as he termed him, any reasonable price for it, but that Whitmer would not part with it under any circumstances, regarding it as a sacred trust. Mr. Whitmer also has a number of other records of the early church, ere it had, as he says, "broke loose from the teachings of Christ and acknowledged nothing as divine save as it was taught from the Bible and the 'Book of Mormon'"
Mr. Whitmer's beliefs have
UNDERGONE NO CHANGE
since his early manhood; he [has] refused to affiliate with any of the various branches that have sprung up through false teachings, and rests his hopes of the future "in the teachings of Christ, the apostles, and the prophets, and the morals and principles inculcated in the scriptures; that the 'Book of Mormon' is but the testimony of another nation concerning the truth and divinity of Christ and the bible, and that is his rock, his gospel, and his salvation." Seeing with him is believing. He is now as firm in the faith of the divinity of the book that he saw translated as he was when the glory of the celestial visitant almost blinded him with gleam of its glowing presence, fresh from the godhead; and the voice, majestic, ringing out from earth to the mighty dome of space, still lingers in his ears like a chime of silver bells.
Having been misrepresented by the various branches of the church, and denounced by others, ge published, with the indorsement of a number of the leading citizens of his town, so that the world might know how he viewed the conduct of the olygamists of Utah:
Unto all Nations, Kindreds, Tongues and People, unto whom these presents shall come: It having been represented by one John Murphy, of Polo, Caldwell county, Missouri, that I, in a conversation with him last summer, denied my testimony as one of the Three Witnesses of the "Book of Mormon."
To the end, therefore, that he may understand me now, if he did not then, and that the world may know the truth, I wish now, standing as it were, in the very sunset of life, and in the fear of God, once for all to make this public statement:
That I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof, which has so long since been published with that book, as one of the three witnesses. Those who know me best, well know that I have always adhered to that testimony. And that no man may be misled or doubt my present views in regard to the same, I do again affirm the truth of all my statements as then made and published.
"He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear," it was no delusion! What is written is written -- and he that readeth, let him understand.
And that no one may be deceived or misled by this statement, I wish here to state that I do not endorse polygamy or spiritual wifeism. It is a great evil, shocking to the moral sense, and the more so because practiced in the name of religion. It is of men and not of God, and is especially forbidden in the "Book of Mormon" itself.
I do not endorse the change of the name of the church, for, as the wife takes the name of the husband, so should the Church of the Lamb of God take the name of its head, even Christ. It is the Church of Christ.
As to the high priesthood, Jesus Christ himself was the last great high priest, this, too, after the order of Melchisedec, as I understand the holy scriptures.
Finally I do not endorse any of the teachings of the so-called Mormons or Latter-day Saints, which are in conflict with the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as taught in the Bible and "Book of Mormon," for the same gospel is plainly taught in both of these books as I understand the word of God.
And if any man doubt, should he not carefully and honestly read and understand the same before presuming to sit in judgment and condemning the light which shineth in darkness, and showeth the way of eternal life as pointed out by the unerring hand of God[?]
In the spirit of Christ, who hath said: "Follow thou me, for I am the life, the light and the way," I submit this statement to the world. God in whom I trust being my judge as to the sincerity of my motives and the faith and hope that is in me of eternal life.
My sincere desire is that the world may be benefited by this plain and simple statement of the truth.
And all the honor to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen!
DAVID WHITMER, Sr. Richmond, Mo., March 19th, 1881.
[Chicago, Illinois, Monday, October 17, 1881] | <urn:uuid:0923fbe6-36fe-44ff-9a54-3a2e58019096> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicago_Times,_October_17,_1881 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989294 | 3,142 | 1.695313 | 2 |
A baby girl born with much of her heart outside her body is defying the odds and recovering after lifesaving surgery at Texas Children's Hospital, where she was born five weeks ago.
Doctors at Texas Children's held a news conference Tuesday to share the story of Audrina Cardenas, whose condition was discovered during an ultrasound 16 weeks into her mother's pregnancy. The mother, from Midland, was referred to Texas Children's, where a team of doctors delivered the baby and worked together on her care after she was born.
Audrina suffered from ectopia cordis, a rare condition in which a baby's heart is located partially or totally outside the chest. Only 8 out of 1 million babies are born with the condition, and 90 percent of those babies are either stillborn or die within the first three days of life. (You can see video of the baby's heart beating above.)
"She's my little miracle baby," said Audrina's mother, Ashley, still waiting to hold the baby for the first time. "I feel blessed."
Dr. Charles Fraser, the Texas Children's surgeon-in-chief who led the six-hour open-heart procedure, said Audrina is doing very well and should develop normally. He said she will remain in intensive care at Texas Children's for some time.
Doctors gave Cardenas three options after the ultrasound showed the condition: abort the baby, bring her to term but then provide only comfort care to ease any suffering before she dies, or surgically construct a cavity in the chest to make space for the portion of the heart that was outside the body.
At that time, the doctors did not know Audrina's chances, whether she was a good candidate to survive or more likely to be stillborn or die soon after birth.
"You'll never know what it feels like to make that decision until you're faced with it," Cardenas said. She said prayer and the support of family and friends helped her decide.
Audrina still will need surgery to correct heart defects, but doctors said they hope to wait at least a couple of years to give the chest time to heal and develop. The defects, involving holes in chambers of the heart, are not uncommon in babies and are fairly easily treated. | <urn:uuid:c9cab2c8-9682-4d05-90b9-340d09d443a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Baby-born-with-heart-outside-her-body-is-4054401.php | 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 | 0.981163 | 462 | 1.875 | 2 |
Algae production on organic wastes
Algae production on organic wastes
High-Rate Algal Systems for Municipal Waste-Water Treatment
The treatment of municipal waste water in shallow (less than 50 cm deep), mechanically mixed, meandering (folded) channels was first proposed and demonstrated by Oswald and Golueke (9) in California. It was later studied by McGarry et al. (10) in Thailand, by Goldman and Ryther (11) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and by Benemann et al. (12) in California, and has been further developed by Shelef et al. (13, 14) in Israel.
Experiments at the Technion Environmental Engineering Research Center ranged from laboratory and pilot plant studies to field-scale studies in ponds of 1,000 m² each, one of which at Haifa Bay is illustrated in Figure 1.
The flow scheme of this system is shown in Figure 2, where raw municipal sewage is continuously introduced to the photosynthetic pond with an average retention time of three days, depending on climatic conditions. The effluent of this pond, which contains between 300 to 500 mg/l suspended matter, mostly algal biomass (approximately 60 per cent) and bacterial biomass (approximately 35 per cent), is treated physico-chemically, using aluminum sulphate (alum) flocculation and dissolved air flotation.
Figure. 2. Flow Scheme of the Accelerated Photosynthetic Process for Waste-Water Treatment and Algal Protein Production
The flotation unit, with a surface flow-through rate of between 4 and 6 m hr(-1), separates the algal bacterial biomass, yielding a treated effluent with average quality characteristics summarized in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 3. This effluent has a quality adequate for use as irrigation water for most agricultural crops, or for discharge into most receiving bodies of water.
Figure. 3. Enhancement of Effluent Quality in Various Treatment Steps of the Accelerated (High Rate) Algal Process
TABLE 1. Effluent Quality from Various Stages of the Accelerated Photosynthetic WasteWater Treatment Process (under Favourable Operational Conditions)
|BOD total, mg/l
|BOD dissolved, mg/l
|COD total, mg/l
|COD dissolved, mg/l
|Suspended solids, mg/l
|Ndissolved (NH3) mg/l
By additional slow sand filtration through a 30 cm-deep sand bed, followed by disinfection by chlorination, the effluent is adequate for irrigation of all agricultural crops, including/hose edible in raw form, for discharge into virtually all surface receiving bodies of water, and for ground-water recharge.
The separated algal-bacterial biomass, in the form of "froth" containing between 4 and 5.5 per cent solids, is skimmed off, thickened by inverted decantation to a slurry of between 7 and 9 per cent solids, further dewatered to a light cake of between 14 and 18 per cent solids, and then steam drum-dried to form dry flakes or powder that can be pelletized with other feed ingredients.
The biomass production, as well as other characteristics of the system, serving, for example, a city of 100,000 inhabitants living in climatic conditions simian to those near Haifa Bay, are given in Table 2.
TABLE 2. Summary of Algae Production Data Based on Technion Pilot Plant and Field-Scale Pond Operation
|Total net biomass yield (dry)
|Average daily total biomass production (dry)
|Per cent algae in biomass
|Algal biomass yield (dry)
|Average daily algal biomass production (dry)
|Pond area requirement for city of 100,000 inhabitants under
Eastern Mediterranean climatic conditions (assuming waste-
water flow of 200 litres per capita per day)
|Total yield (dry) per city
|Total protein yield (43% dry matter)
|Average daily incident irradiance (total)
|Average daily incident photosynthetically available irradiance
||202 cal/cm² day
|Photosynthetic light conversion efficiency (based on total
|Photosynthetic light conversion efficiency (based on photo-
synthetically available irradiance)
|Maximum possible light conversion efficiency (based on
photosynthetic available irradiance)
|Percentage of light conversion attained vs. potential
The effluent, containing algal-bacterial biomass suspension, can be used directly to feed fish ponds, and yields of Tilapia galilea (St. Peter's fish) of over 7 tons per hectare were achieved in field experiments by Hepher and Sandbank (15). The flotator concentrate, after further thermal dewatering, can be mixed directly with other ingredients and used for semi-wet feeding of cattle and poultry (16). Sun-drying of the dewatered material is practical, preferably when dried over beds containing ground corn, soymeal, and wheat, which are components of the animal feed ration. Because preservation of the wet biomass for more than 48 hours is problematic, wet feeding is possible only when the farm animals are in close proximity to the photo synthetic waste water treatment plant. That is why most of the nutritional and feeding tests were performed with pelletized, drum-dried algal biomass. Extensive feeding experiments with broiler chicks and laying hens (17, 18) showed conclusively that between 25 and 50 per cent of the soymeal portion in the feed rations could be replaced with dried algal biomass, with no change in growth characteristics, weight gain, egg production, or the general welfare of the animals compared to animals fed feedmeal based on soymeal as the principal source of protein. An added benefit of the carotenoid-rich algae feeding was the "healthy" colour of the egg yolk.
Large-scale feeding experiments in intensive, mechanically aerated fish ponds stocked with carp (Cyprinus carpio) and St. Peter's fish (Tilapia galilea) were performed by Hepher and Sandbank 115) using pelletized feed containing approximately 22 per cent of drum-dried algal biomass, replacing on an equal protein basis all the fish meal in the ration (usually 15 per cent of the commercial ration). Fish growth rate, weight gain, and general welfare have been found conclusively to be equal to, and in most cases significantly better than, in fish fed fishmeal-based ration, with yields of between 15 and 20 tons per hectare per year of fish.
Extensive organoleptic and toxicological tests were performed on this material by Yannai et al. (19), using alum flocculated algae. The algae, although containing aluminum and wastewater-borne heavy metals, showed no adverse effects when fed to chickens or to rats fed on the chicken's meat, and no accumulation of these metals was noticed in the animal's meat or other organs. No abnormal taste or odour was noticed in organoleptic tests of algae-fed chicken or fish.
The economics of the combined waste-water treatment, water reclamation, and protein production photosynthetic system is extremely favourable (14), based on the various benefits simultaneously gained by the system - namely: (a) waste-water treatment with lower energy requirements for mechanical aeration, (b) the value of the high quality effluent for irrigation, and (c) the value of the proteins for animal feeding.
Conservatively, subtracting the benefits of waste-water treatment and reclamation results in a net cost for dried algae of less than US$140 per ton, compared to more than US$200 per ton for soymeal and more than US$380 per ton for fishmeal.
The Growth of Algae on Animal Wastes
Animal wastes constitute an excellent medium for growing algae when diluted with water, and they provide a carbon source (through bacterial aerobic degradation that produces CO2), nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace elements to sustain rich algae production.
On small farms in developing countries, where algae separation and processing are too complicated and costly, the growth of the blue-green Spirulina algae is preferred over green algae for the following reasons: (a) mechanical separation by straining or filtration is possible; (b) protein content is high (55 - 70 per cent); and (c) protein digestibility and availability are high.
Under conditions in small rural communities in developing countries, these advantages surpass the disadvantages of Spirulina compared with green algae (Chlorophytee). The disadvantages include: reduced rate of growth, need for higher temperature, need for relatively high concentrations of bicarbonates or carbonates, and sensitivity to high irradiance levels. Growing Spirulina on animal wastes has been studied experimentally under the conditions prevailing in developing countries by Seshadri (20) in India, Soong (21) in Taiwan, and others Two sets of experiments testing Spirulina growth potential on animal wastes are described herein, one on raw (fresh) cow manure and the other on anaerobically digested cow manure.
Growth potential of Spirulina on raw cow manure
Experiments on the growth potential of Spirulina maxima under outdoor conditions in shallow (20 cm) multiple batch-type 200-litre "mini-ponds" have been performed at the Technion Institute in Haifa.
Five kg of wet, raw (fresh) dairy cow manure from Kibbutz Yagur with a total solids content of 16 per cent were added to each 200-litre mini-pond in order to reach initial solids concentration of 0.4 per cent (25 9/l) based only on the added manure and excluding the initial algae concentration of approximately 200 mg/l.
The composition of the raw manure and the concentration of its various components after the manure was added to the 200-litre mini-ponds are given in Table 3. It should be noted that the composition of the manure in Table 3 includes both the suspended and the dissolved matter of the wet manure fed into the mini-ponds.
TABLE 3. Composition of Raw Cow Manure Used for Growth of Spirulina maxima
||Raw cow manure
|Concentration at 1:40
dilution in mini-pond'
|Total volatile solids
|Total Kjeldahl nitrogen
|Total phosphate as PO4
||9 - 11**
* Components of stock algae culture are excluded.
Two weeks before the addition of the manure, the mini-ponds were inoculated with Spirulina maxima that had been isolated from domestic waste-water treatment ponds (the latter ponds were inoculated with Spirulina a few years ago). The initial medium was a synthetic one enriched with 16 g/l of sodium bicarbonate. The temperature of the mini-ponds was maintained at 30 C, and the ponds were continuously stirred by a long-winged rotor (6). The concentration of Spirulina before the addition of the manure was approximately 200 mg/l, and the chlorophyll-a concentration was approximately 3.5 mg/l. The changes in suspended solids concentration and in chlorophyll-a are given in Figure 4.
Figure. 4. Chlorophyll-a and Suspended Solids Concentrations in Batch-Type 200-litre Spirulina maxima Outdoor Mini ponds Fed with Raw Cow Manure
Following the addition of the manure, chlorophyll-a concentration was reduced by 20 per cent, and for approximately 20 days algal growth was almost negligible. It should be noted that the addition of 5 kg wet, raw manure to the 200-litre mini-ponds created highly stressed conditions as far as organic loading and turbidity were concerned, and the ponds became turbid and brown. During the initial 20 days, intensive degradation of the manureborne organic matter and solids occurred, evident in the reduction of solids concentration.
Spirulina grew rapidly between the twentieth and thirtieth days, as revealed by rises both in chlorophyll-a and suspended solids concentration. After 30 days, algal concentration stabilized and a small reduction in suspended solids was observed after 40 days; this reduction was not followed by a reduction in chlorophyll concentration, which might have been due to the continuing increase in chlorophyll-a content of the alga.
No direct measurement of Spirulina biomass production was possible because of the presence of manure-borne suspended matter and the bacterial biomass developed during the degradation of the manure. Algal growth was therefore estimated by the increase in concentration of chlorophyll-a, which is a rather poor indicator of algal biomass because the chlorophyll content varies according to growth conditions, light availability, etc. Depending on conditions, chlorophyll-a content can range between 0.5 and 2.5 per cent in blue-green algae (22), and between 1 and 2.5 per cent in Spirulina grown in outdoor mass cultures (23). The chlorophyll-a content of the Spirulina maxima prior to the addition of the cow manure was approximately 1.75 per cent, and assuming that its percentage remained the same, Spirulina concentration reached 370 mg/l at the end of the experiment.
The growth of Spirulina following the addition of cow manure was therefore quite slow, but this can be explained by the high initial dose of raw manure. During the manure degradation period, algal growth was minimal, indicating the advantage of using treated manure (composted or digested) as an algae growth medium.
Growth potential of Spirulina on digested manure
Following the experiments described above, anaerobically digested cow manure from mesophilic (35°C) and from thermophilic (55°C) mixed, semi-continuously fed digesters with a retention time of eight days was used as a medium in batch, continuously illuminated, 500 ml laboratory algae growth units. The production of biogas (approximately 65 per cent methane) during the thermophilic and mesophilic anaerobic digestion of the cow manure (24) as a function of retention time and at various concentrations of total solids is given in Figure 5.
Figure. 5. Biogas Production Rate from Thermophilic (55°C) and Mesophilic (35°C) Digestion as a Function of Retention Time and Feed Total Solids (TSo) Concentration (24)
The digested matter, with approximately 16 per cent total solids, of which approximately 30 per cent of volatile solids had been destroyed during the anaerobic digestion, was mixed with the sodium bicarbonate-enriched medium at dosages of 10 and 25 g of wet, digested manure per litre of medium. The medium was inoculated with 5 ml of Spirulina maxima concentrated suspension.
Enrichments with 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 per cent NaHCO3 in the medium were compared to growth units with no enrichment. The concentration of chlorophyll-a after ten days of algal growth, fed with 10 9/l of both mesophilically and thermophilically digested manures, is given in Figure 6.
Figure. 6. Chlorophyll-a Concentration Following Ten Days, Growth of Spirulina maxima in Batch Continuously Illuminated Laboratory Growth Units, Fed 10 Grams (Wet) per Litre of Anaerobically Digested Manure
No marked effect on Spirulina growth was observed by increasing NaHCO3 enrichment above 0.5 per cent, nor have the temperatures of the anaerobic digestion (55 C vs. 35 C) of the feed had a significant effect on Spirulina growth, as evident from the concentration of chlorophyll-a.
The effect of the dosage of digested manure is given in Figure 7, where dosages of 10 and 25 9 of wet, digested manure per litre of alga culture were compared.
Figure. 7. The Effect of Digested Manure Dosage on Chlorophyll-a Concentration in Batch Laboratory Culture of Spirulina maxima (TDM denotes thermophilically digested manure, and MDM-mesophilically digested manure.) Concentrations of digested manure are in grams (wet) per litre of growth unit.
The higher digested manure dosage, which was similar to the raw manure dosage described earlier, gave the highest increase (up to 9.3 mg/l after 12 days) in chlorophyll-a concentration. Assuming average concentrations of 1.75 per cent of chlorophyll-a in Spirulina (dry basis), an algal concentration of over 510 mg/l was achieved in 12 days. The limitations of chlorophyll-a as a reliable quantitative measurement of algal biomass production have been discussed previously.
No appreciable lag time was observed in these experiments, and no time requirement for organic matter degradation (which was particularly evident in the experiments with raw manure) was found. Obviously, the production of biogas during anaerobic digestion is an important added benefit to the production of Spirulina Combined System for Algae Production and Anaerobic Digestion.
Following the previously discussed experiments showing the potential of algal growth on anaerobically digested manure, a combined "sandwich" system was developed whereby anaerobic digestion of farm organic residues takes place at the bottom part (gas is collected by a bell-shaped dome), while the digester's supernatant directly feeds the algal pond at the upper part of the system. A small pilot plant outdoor system with a 100-litre digester and a 2.7 m² algal pond (35 cm deep) was recently set up at the Technion Institute and is now under study. Preliminary results show a production of 50 litres of biogas (STP) per day and a total biomass production (approximately 67 per cent algae) of 130 g/day (dry basis). A solar panel has recently been installed to heat the digester part of the system to approximately 37°C (mesophilic) to increase gas production rates.
A small windmill is under design to provide driving force for digester and pond mixing and for the outflow pump. | <urn:uuid:54d4662b-8fa8-4e26-856c-7e94078a2506> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzdl.org/gsdlmod?e=d-00000-00---off-0hdl--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-0l--11-en-50---20-preferences---00-0-1-00-0--4----0-0-11-10-0utfZz-8-00&cl=CL3.52&d=HASH8b116be44f080277f73e0f.17.3&gc=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92257 | 3,817 | 2.953125 | 3 |
PASS BILL TO APPLY QUOTA TO MEXICANS; Senators First Eliminate All Other Latin-American Countries From Immigration Measure. BIG INFLUX CUT FORECAST Harris Sees Drop From 58,000 to 1,900--State Department Reports Heavy Decrease.
Special to The New York Times. ();
May 14, 1930,
, Section Business & Opportunity, Page 56, Column , words
WASHINGTON, May 13.--The Senate today passed a bill that would apply the national origin immigration quota to Mexico. Oroginally the measure would have applied to all countries of the Western Hemisphere except Canada and Newfoundland and the Administration was opposed to it on the ground that it would cause unfriendly feeling in South America. | <urn:uuid:099547d2-6685-4466-906f-e6dffd3f73b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60617FD3F5C157A93C6A8178ED85F448385F9 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921851 | 150 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Editor’s Note: Reboot
As you might have noticed, the title has changed. As has the theme. This is indicative of a new focus on this page; I hope you’ll find my new content, explained below, a bit more fulfilling (and frequently-posted) than before.
“The Wire” refers to the security perimeter surrounding a military FOB, or Forward Operating Base. Military operations are conducted “outside the wire.” This is where split second decisions are made – where saving lives trumps grand strategy.
Outside the wire, idealism meets reality and succumbs to it in full. Academia has a very small role there. This blog recognizes that primary shortcoming; I have rebooted the page in an effort to show how ivory tower security theory can sometimes mesh with on the ground decision making, and also how it frequently fails. This is a place for my analysis of global security issues, and critiques of others’ analysis. While I admit that I will likely stray from those stated purposes occasionally, I plan to keep my information relevant and academically interesting for those that share my passion for international security issues. | <urn:uuid:89c4630d-ba1e-4777-bd69-6fe1e1e434a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://elperegrino.tumblr.com/post/641255142/editors-note-reboot | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953318 | 237 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Seeing Through Things!
The Glass Bottom Pan
Everyone loves springform pans for baking cheesecake and other cakes that require higher than 2-inch high sides. The main advantage of a springform is the ease in unmolding a cake thanks to the clamping mechanism that can be released to open up the sides of the pan. However, we have encountered two problems with the majority of springforms relating to removing a clean slice of cheesecake:
1. Most springform pans have lipped bottoms which makes it very difficult to slip a knife or spatula between the crust of the cakes and straight across the surface of the pans' bottoms.
2. Most springform pan bottoms have pebbled or diamond-like surfaces which cookie and graham cracker crusts will conform and adhere to during baking, preventing them from releasing when serving.
Wilton has solved both problems most elegantly and effectively with their Avanti glass bottom springform pans. The pans have their Everglide non-stick 2-3/4 inch tall metal side rings with perfectly flat 9 by 1/8-inch thick glass bottoms. These class bottoms are interchangeable with all five series of spring form pans in their line. Another advantage to the glass bottoms is that cakes can be left on them for serving which makes for a lovely presentation.
Woody and I tested the Avanti using both dental floss and a thin sharp knife to cut the cheesecake. Woody baked a marble cheesecake in a waterbath as my method treats cheesecakes as custards for the creamiest possible texture. A double layer of heavy-duty foil prevented any water from leaking into the pan. The chilled cake was then sliced and plated.
Wilton's Avanti pan worked beautifully for slicing with the dental floss and for serving clean slices. Even though it has a glass bottom, Wilton recommends the same baking times as for a pan with a metal bottom, rather than the usual lowering of the heat by 25˚F (glass transmits heat more rapidly). This is because the water bath equalizes the temperature and when baking without a water bath, it is always recommended to place all springform pans on a metal baking sheet to prevent leaking. In this case the metal baking sheet will also serve to conduct the heat in the same manner as a pan with a metal bottom.
The Avanti springform pan is dishwasher safe. It is available on the web and at several retailers. Wilton Avanti Everglide Metal-Safe Non-Stick Springform Pan with Glass Bottom | <urn:uuid:c7c4ebc8-fb25-4f3b-b56f-b0bfcfb21d0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/2010/12/seeing_through_things-print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934171 | 530 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The park has an interesting past: Named "Telegraphenberg" (Telegraph Hill), it originally was the location of a relais station of an optical telegraph system linking Berlin to the Rhine. The park was designed in the second half of the 19th century, when an Astrophysical Observatory and a Geodetic Institute were installed on the hill.
The park on Telegraph Hill, Potsdam.
It was here that in 1880, Albert Michelson made his first interference experiment to test the direction-dependence of the speed of light. He was a guest scientist at the physics institute of Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin at the time, and had to move his sensitive experimental setup to quiet Potsdam to escape the noise and vibrations of street traffic in the capital. Of course, Michelson didn't find any signs of the expected ether drift at the time, and thought of his experiment as a failure. Back to the US, he convinced his colleague Morley to collaborate on an improved experimental setup, and the rest is history.
The "Michelson Building" on Telegraph Hill, Potsdam.
The building where Michelson had installed his interferometer in the basement is now called the "Michelson Building", and accommodates the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
The most famous monument on Telegraph Hill in Potsdam is the "Einstein Tower," housing a solar telescope. Designed by expressionist architect Erich Mendelson and financed in parts by Carl Bosch (the same Bosch who built the "Villa Bosch" in Heidelberg I visited last year), it is a cute looking phallus symbol whose scientific purpose was to test the redshift of spectral lines of sunlight in the Sun's gravitational field, one of the predictions of Einstein's theory of General Relativity.
The "Einstein Tower" solar observatory on Telegraph Hill, Potsdam.
Also this experiment failed, due to the thermal broadening of spectral lines and the fluctuations of the Sun's surface which, by the Doppler shift, mask the gravitational redshift and form a source of systematic error much higher than originally expected. Evidence for the "Gravitational Displacement of Lines in the Solar Spectrum" eventually came from other observatories, and unambiguous proof of the gravitational redshift finally was provided by the experiments of Rebka and Pound in 1959, using the Mössbauer effect to detect tiny shifts in the gamma ray frequencies of iron nuclei.
Nevertheless, the Einstein Tower is the only observatory on Telegraph Hill still in use for active research: The solar telescope and spectrographs now serve to study magnetic fields in the Sun's photosphere.
The building is quite small. A person in the scene, in this photo Stefan, helps to set a scale.
Directly in front of the Einstein-Tower, I found, to my surprise, a Boltzmann brain popping out of the ground:
Wikipedia informed us later that the bronze brain with the imprint "3 SEC" was put in place by the artist Volker März in 2002. It is titled "The 3 SEC Bronze Brain – Admonition to the Now – Monument to the continuous present” and symbolizes the scientific thesis that “the experience of continuity is based on an illusion" and that "continuity arises through the networking of contents, which in each case are represented in a time window of three seconds."
I wonder what Einstein would have thought of that. | <urn:uuid:84a8b702-2f03-4a0c-8514-d2e0b4be22c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2009/10/science-park-albert-einstein-potsdam.html?showComment=1256748431625 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95195 | 722 | 3.296875 | 3 |
4 May 2011
GENEVA – Seven human rights experts dealing with the freedom of peaceful assembly and association; discrimination against women in law and practice; and the particular situation of people of African descent began work this week on the mandates handed to them by the Human Rights Council.
Freedom of peaceful assembly and association:
In September 2010, the Human Rights Council created a new post of Special Rapporteur to emphasize the importance of the freedom of peaceful assembly and of association towards the full enjoyment of all human rights. The Council recognized that these rights are essential components of democracy and called upon States to respect and fully protect the rights of all individuals to assemble peacefully and associate freely, including in the context of elections, and including persons espousing minority or dissenting views or beliefs, human rights defenders, trade unionists and others, including migrants, seeking to exercise or to promote these rights.
Among other tasks, the Special Rapporteur is called on to gather all relevant information, including national practices and experiences relating to the promotion and protection of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, to study trends, developments and challenges in relation to the exercise of these rights, and to make recommendations on ways to ensure the promotion and protection of these rights in all their manifestations.
Maina KIAI (Kenya) is the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. Mr. Kiai has been Executive Director of the International Council on Human Rights Policy; Chair of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission; Africa Director of the International Human Rights Law Group; and Africa Director of Amnesty International.
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Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice
The establishment of the Working Group by the Human Rights Council in September 2010 was a milestone on the long road towards women’s equality with men. Over the years, many constitutional and legal reforms to integrate women’s human rights fully into domestic law have occurred, but there remains insufficient progress. Discrimination against women persists in both public and private spheres in times of conflict and in peace. It transcends national, cultural and religious boundaries and is often fuelled by patriarchal stereotyping and power imbalances which are mirrored in laws, policies and practice.
The Working Group focus is to identify, promote and exchange views, in consultation with States and other actors, on good practices related to the elimination of laws that discriminate against women. The Group is also tasked with developing a dialogue with States and other actors on laws that have a discriminatory impact where women are concerned. It is also mandated to identify ways to cooperate with States to fulfil their commitments to eliminate discrimination against women in law and in practice.
Emna AOUIJ (Tunisia) was a member of CEDAW for three consecutive terms between 1990 and 2002. Ms. Aouij also served as independent expert of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in Chad from 1996 to 1997. She has been ambassador to the Netherlands and Denmark and was previously a judge.
Mercedes BARQUET (Mexico) has researched and taught extensively since 1988 on feminist theory, women’s human rights, gender and public policy, citizenship and democratic governance, institutions and gender equality. Ms. Barquet is a member of several academic committees, and has been adviser to a number of public institutions and civil society organizations in Mexico. She is currently adviser to Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission.
Kamala CHANDRAKIRANA (Indonesia) chaired the Indonesia’s National Commission on Women for six years. She was a member of the investigation team set up by the President of Indonesia on the death of a prominent human rights defender. She is also founder of several NGOs on women’s rights.
Frances RADAY (Israel/United Kingdom) is a former member of CEDAW and has taught extensively in various academic institutions in Israel and elsewhere. Ms. Raday is the author of numerous academic books and articles on human rights, labour law and feminist legal theory. She has acted as legal counsel on precedent-setting human rights cases in Israel’s Supreme Court, including women’s constitutional rights to equality in religious rituals at public sites and sex discrimination in retirement age. She is currently the Director of the Concord Research Centre for Integration of International Law, Haim Striks Law School, Colman.
Eleonora ZIELINSKA (Poland) has published extensively, including scholarly articles related to gender issues, abortion, HIV/AIDS, and medical law. She is currently professor, chief of the comparative criminal law section and director of the legal clinic at Warsaw University and a member of the European Network of Legal Experts in the field of gender equality. Ms. Zieliñska has been an active supporter of women’s rights in Poland, and has served as an expert with governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations.
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People of African Descent
Mireille FANON-MENDES-FRANCE (France) is the newest member of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. Ms. Fanon-Mendes-France has worked with UNESCO and has been an academic in continuing education at the university Rene Descartes, Paris. She was also a member of the delegation of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers at the Durban World Conference against Racism, Racial discrimination, Xenophobia and related intolerances and worked for the French National Assembly for eight years.
For more information on the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, please visit:
For further enquiries or interview requests, please write to firstname.lastname@example.org
For use of the information media; not an official record | <urn:uuid:582bd060-724d-470f-a3ce-08c4c376e2e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=10983&LangID=E | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956785 | 1,212 | 2 | 2 |
When Sherman's march through Georgia ended at the sea.
Dec 14, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 13 • By EDWARD ACHORN
General Sherman's Christmas
In Saint Luke's rendition of the Christmas story, "a multitude of the heavenly host" appears to shepherds tending their flocks, and proclaims, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."
Some interpret the multitude as a heavenly army, proclaiming peace instead of war. Peace (and thus war) has always been woven into the Christmas message. That's something Stanley Weintraub certainly understands. He has explored the juxtaposition of war and Christmas--and the holiday's particular poignancy for soldiers far from home, suffering from loneliness, cold, and fear--in a series of captivating books, rich in anecdotes and strong personalities, including Silent Night (2001), General Washington's Christmas Farewell (2003) and Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2006). This season, he offers a brisk account of William Tecumseh Sherman's relentless march across Georgia in November and December 1864, as the Union general drove his army of 62,000 to take the state's biggest port before Christmas Day.
Cut off from communication with the North, Sherman's multitudes became the "Lost Army," prompting Southern supporters to predict it would suffer obliteration as Napoleon's forces had in Russia. ("Who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?" scoffed Ulysses S. Grant.) Abraham Lincoln, fending off inquisitive reporters, characteristically compared Sherman to a mole: "We all know where he went in at," said Lincoln, "but I can't tell where he will come out at." When his head finally popped up, Sherman famously telegraphed the president: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."
This is hardly an edifying story. Its lank, red-haired, weather-beaten main character himself had few illusions about the experience of war, with its insane destruction and horrifying twists of fate. "Glory," Sherman noted, "was all moonshine; even success [at] the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families." His march was a cruel one, meant to demonstrate to the South its inability to defend itself against the Union war machine, and the futility of going on. "If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty," he wrote, "I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war."
Brushing aside the small forces sent against them, some of them pathetic collections of old men and teenagers, Sherman's army laid waste to the heart of Georgia, burning farms, stripping away crops and animals, prompting thousands of slaves to declare themselves free men and women, and unleashing a plague of "bummers"--soldiers not strictly following orders--who brutalized the populace and robbed it of anything of value.
Whether this did anything but stiffen the resolve of Southerners to fight on, and plant seeds of bitterness that bore poisonous fruit for generations to come, remains a matter of debate. It is a debate on which Weintraub does not dwell. His interest is not in developing empyreal visions of policy and strategy, but in putting the reader right on the muddy ground, slogging along with the troops in a cold rain; or waiting, terrified, with women in a plantation house as the dark cloud on the horizon becomes hundreds of men, bent on destroying all that a family had painstakingly built up, leaving acute want and fear of starvation in their wake.
Vivid scenes crowd the book. The brigade band from the 33rd Massachusetts plays the "Miserere" from Verdi's Il Trovatore as the troops leave behind the black columns of smoking Atlanta. At a crossroads village named Shady Dale, slave girls emerge to perform, repeatedly, a solemn "plantation dance" for the troops, delivering a "weird plaintive wail." Men tear up railroad tracks, then heat the rails over a blistering fire of felled telegraph poles and Southern pines, and bend them around trees to form "Sherman's bow ties." In one home, General Oliver O. Howard sits at a table as an invited guest, asking God's blessing under skies reddened by burning houses nearby. In the capitol at Milledgeville, Union soldiers gather in the vandalized House of Representatives and constituted themselves the legislature of Georgia. Listening to the fading notes of a military band by the glow of his campfire one night, Sherman turns to an officer and says: "Send an orderly to ask that band to play that tune again."
And of course, there is Christmas in surrendered Savannah. From the day of Sherman's arrival, a constant stream of former slaves--"old and young, men, women and children, black, yellow and cream-colored, uncouth and well-bred, bashful and talkative," according to one witness--passes by his headquarters, hoping to meet the man they see as their deliverer. Some manage to shake his hand. On a cold and windy Christmas Eve, presaging a rainy Christmas Day, the 33rd Massachusetts band serenades Sherman with sentimental tunes. When a clergyman asks Sherman if he may pray on Christmas Day for "certain persons," as instructed by the diocese, Sherman reportedly answers: "Yes, certainly, pray for Jeff Davis. Certainly pray for the devil, too. I don't know any two that require prayers more than they do." The general's sentimentality had its limits.
Christmas 1864 in America, the last such holiday during our nation's bloodiest war, was not particularly happy in many homes, North and South, that had suffered the loss of sons and sustenance. But General Sherman's Christmas makes it a memorable one.
Edward Achorn, deputy editorial page editor of the Providence Journal, is the author of the forthcoming Fifty-nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had (Smithsonian/HarperCollins). | <urn:uuid:755b117a-18b3-475b-8d3b-2e0b539913f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/017/295fbehd.asp?nopager=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955457 | 1,297 | 3 | 3 |
Create your own magical snowflake craft with this totally awesome science experiment! It will have the kids “oohing” and “ahhhing” as snowflakes grow before your eyes! So simple to make with just pipe cleaners and Borax. Take a look at our video to learn how to make your very own!
Create Your Own Magical Snowflake Craft
Pretty simple and totally adorable, right? My kids absolutely loved watching it change form, and become something totally unique and magical. Just like real snowflakes! Here is one of our BabbaKids in action, as well as the finished snowflake. So what are you waiting for? Grab your little ones and spend some time together making this super cute snowflake craft!! You’re going to love it! | <urn:uuid:37589a7a-3cbe-47ed-b0cf-3c882b789af4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.babbaco.com/blog/kids-diy-crafts/snowflake-craft/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941336 | 162 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Not much to say, we all know Pong: two players, each controlling a paddle, hit a ball back and forth until one of them fails to return it:
Behind the scenes
My goal with this project was to learn a bit about iPhone game development. It uses Cocos2D for iPhone, an excellent open-source framework for building 2D games on the iPhone. I will certainly be returning to it for my next games.
Anyway, check out the source code for Copong on GitHub! | <urn:uuid:f78d8d9a-3590-437e-872e-7a0979285b04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://unindented.org/projects/copong-iphone/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931733 | 104 | 1.632813 | 2 |
The New Year is here and with it a great opportunity for a fresh start. Time to take stock, evaluate and decide how to live a greener, healthier life in 2012 - and it doesn't have to be complicated. How about resolving to use both sides of every piece of paper? Walking if your destination is less than four blocks away? Starting a home garden this spring? All very do-able, with just a bit of effort. Tell us about your green New Year's resolution and you could win a Brightbin lunch box cube - to help make your lunches waste free in 2012. We love these two-layer BPA-free, lead-free and phthalate-free lunch containers with plenty of different compartments. For more about the lunch cube, click here.
THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED *** CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNER, JONNIE H.
Tell us what your green resolution is for 2012 and you could win a BPA-free Brightbin lunch cube container in our random draw.
Leave your answer in a comment below or email it to us at firstname.lastname@example.org with 'Green Resolution Giveaway' in the subject line. **Please be sure to include your name, email address and telephone number so we can contact you if you win.**
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One entry per person. The winner will be chosen in a random draw by Lavish & Lime. Extended: deadline for entries is midnight PST Friday, January 13th. The winner will be notifiedMondayday, January 16th. Open to Canadian residents only. | <urn:uuid:25878e76-57ce-4d94-8aa7-cd4b20540fbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lavishandlime.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-green-new-years-resolution.html?showComment=1326306449953 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913478 | 400 | 1.507813 | 2 |
CNO Influence Key to Advanced Nurse Education
Advancing nurses' education is a major goal for stakeholders ranging from the Institute of Health to individual hospitals. But are there certain nurses who are more likely than others to continue their education? And what are the reasons behind nurses' decisions to pursue or not pursue more advanced degrees?
A new study provides answers to some of those questions, and according to its lead author, the findings should spur chief nursing officers to take action.
"I think that most hospitals are very interested in what they can do that can either increase revenue or decrease cost. And there's some evidence that better educated nurses can do a lot for both of those," says lead author Christine T. Kovner, PhD, RN, FAAN, a professor at the College of Nursing, New York University.
She says hospitals are in a position to help nurses overcome their major barriers to education, and it's in their best interest to do so, since studies link nurse education to better outcomes.
"It's up to the chief nursing officer to make that case," she says.
- Healthcare Leaders Seek Strategic Sweet Spot
- 3 Reasons Wellness Programs Fail
- CMS Issues Health Insurance Exchange Proposed Rules
- Patients Shoulder Nearly 25% of Medical Bills
- ACOs Widespread, Yet Challenged
- MGMA: Physician Compensation Increasingly Based on Quality Measures
- Healthcare Costs 'An Abomination' Says Senate Finance Committee Chair
- Healthcare Consolidation: M&A Not the Only Way
- 6 CNO-to-CEO Strategies
- PwC: Pace of Rising Medical Costs Slowing | <urn:uuid:d42d7d3e-49b0-402a-aae3-93065ca5b972> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/page-1/NRS-287093/CNO-Influence-Key-to-Advanced-Nurse-Education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962885 | 331 | 1.914063 | 2 |
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'ECO' HOUSE VERSUS 'NORMAL'
HOUSE By Mark Fielding, 25TH May 2010
People ask me frequently: "how much extra does an 'Eco' house cost
over a 'normal' house", - my answer is always "nothing!" - which
usually surprises everyone, and it seems the general impression
out there is that an eco house does cost more - which
unfortunately is a belief that is not helping us all to improve
our new housing stock.
me qualify; if you were building any new house would you not fill
the wall and ceiling framing cavities full of insulation to
maintain good comfort? the cost is generally just 2 to 3 % of the
house cost so it makes good sense. An eco house is simply
insulated to that same level because often there is no
benefit insulating to higher levels unless heat losses can be
significantly reduced through glazing (more than just with
curtains) which is where heat loss is greatest.
further qualify; eco homes often have more glazing on their north
sides to utilise passive solar heating. Good quality Low E double
glazing is an expensive component but rather than adding extra,
the passive solar eco home is simply designed to redistribute the
total area of glazing, putting most on the north side, moderate
areas on east and west sides, and almost none on the south side.
Thus no extra cost.
wait theres more; The 'tack on' solar water heating panel is an
extra expense you say. I say no, that if you were building any new
home, why would you not include a solar panel to significantly
reduce your power bills. The extra capitol cost of the solar
system, usually less than 4% of the total house cost, stays with
the value of the home and will be realised every day in power
savings and upon resale of the home. Thus a solar water system is
not an extra on the eco home.
specify good quality curtains as part of the building performance
design, because as mentioned, the large windows of contemporary
home designs are their greatest heat loss element. Curtains
significantly reduce radiant heat loss at night, not an extra
expence on the eco design because your 'non' eco home should also
have them - if you want to feel comfortable that is... - and isn't
that the main point of a house?
home was appropriately designed from the ground up to offer
comfort levels and energy efficiency to its occupants (both
'no-brainer' common sense features) and if it were also designed
to be space efficient to save on materials and cost, (as everyone
wants to save money) and if it were to be built using safe non
toxic materials (for why would you want a poisonous house?)
materials that were simple and natural (low embodied energy to
reduce our carbon footprint) and sourced locally (as it makes good
sense keep our own people and industries in work) - would you not
have a good affordable house? why would you need to call this an
'eco' house? While others still consider these to be 'eco' houses,
I design and consider them as 'Normal'. | <urn:uuid:521da0e0-1743-4609-813c-75316c9e29a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecotect.co.nz/comments.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952937 | 807 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Balice Hertling & Lewis
The discourse of painting has become so self-reflexive as to almost seem apologetic, distrustful of the act itself. Artists use a variety of strategies to create this conceptual distance, from Michael Krebber’s depiction of Internet commentary to Emily Sundblad’s unfinished works that use the medium as performance. Charles Mayton holds painting at arm’s length, all the while contributing to the conversation. In his first solo exhibition, the artist grafted this apprehension around painting onto a surrogate – The Difficult Crossing, a 1926 painting by René Magritte – and unfolded a richly complex narrative for the inaugural exhibition of Balice Hertling & Lewis.
The conceit and title of the show are taken from the Magritte work, which depicts canvases and a stormy ocean at night, all in situ at the artist’s atelier. On the one hand, registering the anxiety of influence, and on the other, the accession of a pre-existing conversation, Mayton recreated the uncanny subject matter of the painting: the title of the art work and the exhibition was emblazoned on the gallery doormat; viewers were greeted by a rounded white coat rack adorned with paper eyes; citrus fruits were scattered across the floor, each annotated with words relating to oceans written in the script associated with Magritte’s handwriting; and the paintings were hung side by side at varying heights.
Made using brushy swathes of colour, Mayton’s paintings make reference to their source material while also illustrating the devices and tools used to render them. The Keeper of Purple Twilight (all works 2011) depicts the making of a vanishing point, the masking tape painted at diagonals, in an attempt to simulate the simulation of depth. (This shape, akin to an unfolded box, also appeared in the foreground of another, untitled painting.) Tongue in cheek, the artist created the references both conceptually and literally in an untitled painting featuring a yellow surface replete with black quotation marks in various sizes. These works, some freshly unpackaged, not yet installed, and leaning in the gallery office, collectively built a vocabulary, a visual simile, with which to construct both the Magritte scene and Mayton’s own abstracted process. The penultimate work in the exhibition, The Art of Conversation after The Battle for the Twentieth Century, combines the various approaches used by Mayton into one horizon where a white, blank void – the very shape implemented to create the illusion of three-dimensional space – interrupts a thick stormy seascape. Two quotation marks flank the top corner of the canvas and are mirrored at the bottom by keyholes, one red, one black. As the title suggests, Mayton tugs waggishly (and earnestly) at artistic practice – spinning an allegory which overtly objectifes the struggle to create work, yet deflects the more emotional and personal aspects to historical reference points and modes of production.
By pulling at the past, the artist locates the anxiety of another and displaces onto it his own. The unseen relationship of history, education, praxis, product and marketplace fold into one. Mayton used his first solo exhibition to articulate how the formal vocabulary of each canvas can inform the viewer of the distant past and the skill required to make the works. However complex and beautiful, one is left wondering where to locate the joy of painting, and what might be created should the anxiety of production be divorced from the painting itself. | <urn:uuid:87a9bf1d-6e69-4559-9f73-13579357e3bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_back/charles-mayton/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945897 | 735 | 1.78125 | 2 |
The deer-pig, the Raksasa, the only living anthracothere… welcome to the world of babirusas
Among the most unusual and exotic of big mammals that I’ve seen in captivity is the Babirusa: as discussed in a previous post (How big is a white rhino?), Marwell Zoo has a few individuals, and one of these at least is an apparently friendly individual who comes to greet you as you approach his enclosure (see photo below). What with my several recent blog posts about peccaries (go here and here), I thought I might continue the suiform theme, and in between doing other things I’ve been reading a lot about babirusas lately. What have I been doing lately you ask? That would be telling, but recent adventures have involved a buzzard skull, sika deer, those green lizards again (go here for background) and Megamuntiacus. In fact expect a lot on deer here in future. I’m pretty much giving up on dinosaurs. Anyway, back to the babirusas.
You might be surprised to learn that babirusas have been known to westerners for a comparatively long time, having been named Sus babyrussa by Linnaeus in 1758 (the generic name Babyrousa was first coined by Perry in 1811). In fact babirusas were first mentioned in the European literature as early as 1658, and there have even been claims that the Romans knew of babirusas in the 1st century AD. Linnaeus wrongly identified Borneo as the babirusa homeland, and over the following years other authors misidentified Sumatra, Amboina and elsewhere as the place where babirusas came from.
Today we know that they are endemic to Sulawesi, the adjacent Togean (or Togian) Islands, the Sula Islands (just east of central Sulawesi) and Buru (south-east of the Sula Islands, and the most westerly of the Moluccas). What might also surprise you is that the babirusas found across these islands are not all alike, and in fact the sort of babirusas we are all familiar with – those with naked skin and upper canines that curve in a circle – are by no means representative of these animals as a whole. Historically, babirusas were probably present across the whole of Sulawesi, but by the 19th century they had disappeared from the south-western peninsula. As of 1990, they were still present on Buru and two of the Sulu Islands (Mangole and Taliabu), but have become extinct on others (Macdonald 1993). Thanks to logging, habitat destruction and illegal hunting, babirusas are under pressure across their range.
Sula Island and Buru babirusas have often been regarded as introduced, and while this is likely (we know that Sulawesi people kept babirusas and traded them far and wide because of their remarkable appearance and good eating) these populations represent distinct taxa, the biogeographical origins of which remain obscure. It is also conceivable however that these colonisations occurred naturally, as babirusas are very strong swimmers and well able to make short sea journeys. On Sulawesi, babirusas have been observed swimming across the 10-km-wide Lake Poso (Melisch 1994). Adjacent photo from here.
While babirusas look pig-like and are classified as part of Suidae, they are distinctive and unusual. Combining rather slender legs with a barrel-shaped body, they can exceed 1 m in length and have a shoulder height of c. 30 cm. Some individuals weigh as much as 100 kg. Babirusas are odd in having particularly remarkable canines (more about those in a minute), but less well known is that they differ from other pigs in several details of their anatomy, and in fact resemble peccaries and other artiodactyls in a few features. The tendons of their feet and some of their throat muscles are strikingly peccary-like, and they resemble ruminants (though only superficially) in a few details of their pectoral musculature, and in having a complex, multi-chambered stomach. Furthermore, the snout of babirusas is not as specialised as that of other pigs.
In a curious parallel to this combination of anatomical features, the word babirusa combines babi, meaning pig, with rusa, meaning deer. It is supposed that Sulawesi people chose this name as the large canines of babirusas recall antlers, but it is also possible that the name reflects the amalgamation of deer-like slender legs and a multi-chambered stomach with the pig-like traits of the animal. Sulawesi people have always known of pigs other than babirusas, as Sulawesi is also home to the Sulawesi warty pig Sus celebensis*. Incidentally, you may recognise Rusa as the old generic name for the Sambar Cervus unicolor and other deer of Indonesia, the Philippines and adjacent islands. The Sunda sambar or Timor deer C. timorensis occurs on Sulawesi, but was probably introduced there from Java or Bali.
* A large extinct Pleistocene suid, Celebochoerus heekereni, was also endemic to Sulawesi, but so far as we know was not related to either babirusas or Sus celebensis.
In view of the divergent anatomy of babirusas, most artiodactyl specialists agree that they represent an ancient lineage, Babyrousinae, which branched off from the rest of Suidae early in its evolution (Thenius 1970). This is supported by chromosome data, as several autosomes present in babirusas have no equivalent in other suids. Unfortunately babirusa fossils only go back as far as the Pleistocene, but in theory we should expect to find babyrousines going back to the Oligocene. Is it possible that babirusas aren’t part of Suidae? Such a view was favoured by Deninger (1909) who argued that babirusas descended from anthracotheres like Merycopotamus. Anthracotheres, a widespread extinct group that appeared in the Eocene and survived into the Pleistocene in eastern Asia, are probably ancestral to hippos (and thus perhaps not close to suids at all), and while Deninger’s idea has been mostly dismissed it was viewed favourably by Groves (1981). He thought it at least possible that babirusas might really be extant anthracotheres, which is a pretty radical thought. For the record, no, this has not been accepted and babirusas are universally regarded as suids.
Despite the ancient divergence of babyrousines from other suids, a male babirusa recently hybridised with a female domestic pig at Copenhagen Zoo (this was announced in the news last week). Of the five resulting piglets, one has died but the others are apparently ok. While the successful mating has surprised some biologists, we should remember that successful hybridisation can occur between species that are only distantly related, so it actually doesn’t mean much.
Like many (but not all) pigs, babirusas are omnivorous, and are said to eat invertebrates whenever they find them. They have also been reported to eat fish on occasion, to catch small mammals, and even to catch and eat the juveniles of other babirusas (Leus & Morgan 1995). They eat all kinds of plant material, including fruits, leaves, flowers, berries, nuts, bark and tubers, and they not only browse and dig to obtain such items, they are also surprisingly good at standing bipedally (without support) to feed on leaves. This again is a curious parallel with deer, in particular Sambar.
So what’s with the bizarre curving tusks? Present only in males (females lack canines entirely), they grow continuously throughout life, and their growth, anatomy and function are all odd. The lower canine is normal in position and anatomy, it’s just that it becomes particularly long during growth, overlapping the outside edge of the snout as it grows. The upper canine is another story. Initially growing downwards – like any normal mammalian upper canine – it is then rotated as the alveolus itself turns to force the tooth upwards, and it eventually emerges from the dorsal surface of the snout. The most anterior part of the spiral parallels the long lower canines. As mentioned earlier, we are mostly familiar with those babirusas where the upper canines curl in a circle as they grow, forming a spiral over the animal’s forehead. As we’ll see in the next post, spiralling upper canines of this sort are not present in all kinds of babirusas.
Regardless, in those babirusas with spiralling tusks, some authors say that, if the animal lives long enough, the tusks grow fatally into the face (Irven 1996). However, in the old male skulls that I’ve seen (see accompanying images: the woodcut is from Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1869 The Malay Archipelago), the tips of the upper canines begin the anterodorsal part of their curvature a short distance dorsal to the upper surface of the skull, so if they were to continue to grow they would harmlessly curl upwards. Furthermore, so far as I can tell from the literature, no-one has ever found a babirusa skull in which the upper canines have bored into the bone.
A Balinese demon with curling tusks that emerge from its cheeks – the Raksasa – might have been inspired by stories or sightings of babirusas (Groves 1980).
Famously, people on Celebes once supposed that babirusas hung from trees with their tusks, and stay there in wait for passing females. This seems to be the one ‘fact’ about babirusas that everyone knows, as it’s mentioned in just about every article, paper and book that discusses them. It’s often stated that the tusks might be used in display or fighting, but there is also the old idea that the tusks allow males to push their way through dense stands of ratten cane, thereby allowing tusk-less females and juveniles to follow in single file behind. Well, maybe the tusks can be used in this way, but they can’t of course have evolved for this purpose given that the intermediate stages leading up to this ‘end’ condition wouldn’t have been at all useful. More on tusks in the next post.
Perhaps surprisingly in view of their sensitivity to cold, babirusas have fared quite well in zoological collections, having first been kept in Europe at ‘la Ménagerie du Roi’ in Paris during the 1840s, and having bred at London Zoological Garden as early as 1884. In 1995, 29 zoos worldwide held babirusas. Several individuals have survived in captivity for more than 20 years, with the record holder being an animal kept at Chicago which, on its death in 1920, was 21 years and 4 months old. Paul Irven (1996) wrote that captive babirusas are ‘sensitive and responsive … with an endearing character’. They are also said to exhibit excitement and enthusiasm on greeting familiar people, engaging in tail wagging, head shaking and jumping and running about. This friendly disposition makes them quite different from many other non-domesticated suids.
And that’s that for now: more on babirusas in the next post. Coming soon: Up-close and personal with Red deer, Why Draco volans is boring, Temnospondyls for beginners, Kinglets and the passerine supertree, Fake Chinese turtles, Steep Holm and the biggest slow-worm ever, Naish’s guide to Rhinogradentia, Really flying lemurs, The habits of storks, The probing guild, Recently extinct island-dwelling crocodilians and Our lost tree frogs. And for the latest news on Tetrapod Zoology do go here.
Refs - -
Deninger, K. 1909. Über Babirusa. Ber. Naturf. Ges. Freiburg 17, 179-200.
Groves, C. P. 1980. Notes on the systematics of Babyrousa (Artiodactyla, Suidae). Zoologische Mededelingen 55, 29-46.
- . 1981. Ancestors for the Pigs: Taxonomy and Phylogeny of the Genus Sus. Technical Bulletin 3, Department of Prehistory, Research School Pacific Studies, Australian National University.
Irven, P. 1996. The Babirusa. Mainly About Animals 29, 5-7.
Leus, K. & Morgan, C. A. 1995. Analyses of diets fed to babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa) in captivity with respect to their nutritional requirements. Ibex J.M.E. 3, 41-44.
Macdonald, A. A. 1993. The babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa). In Oliver, W. L. R. (ed) Pigs, Peccaries and Hippos Status Survey and Action Plan. IUCN/SSC Pigs and Peccaries Specialist Group & IUCN/SSC Hippos Specialist Group (Gland, Switzerland), pp. 161-171.
Melisch, R. 1994. Observation of swimming babirusa in Lake Poso, central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Malayan Nature Journal 47, 431-432.
Thenius, E. 1970. Zur Evolution und Verbreitungsgeschicht der Suidae (Artiodactyla, Mammalia). Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde 35, 321-342. | <urn:uuid:cd136d14-0753-4f56-9175-a5b327de30ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/08/deer-pig-raksasa-only-living.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952129 | 2,948 | 2.46875 | 2 |
I love ostriches and luckily, when you're on safari, you won't have much difficulty seeing them. Wild ostriches live throughout Africa, mostly in the drier areas and at low elevations. There are 4 living sub-species and they all inhabit different parts of the continent.
The ostrich is the world's largest bird and it won't surprise you that it can't fly. But boy, can it run. It's large powerful legs can propel this huge beast to speeds of up to 45 miles (70km) an hour. Those powerful legs can also kick like a mule and kill a man, so it's best not to corner an ostrich. Just in case you do anger it, keep in mind that ostriches can only kick forward, not backwards.
The fact that the ostrich can run like the wind has made ostrich racing a popular sport, especially in South Africa. Riding an ostrich is on my list of top 50 things to do before I die. If I can't make it to Oudtshoorn, in the Karoo (the ostrich capital of the world), I could try my luck in Phoenix, Arizona at the Ostrich Festival that's held every March.
It's my unscientific opinion that the ostrich must be one of the most versatile animals in the world. Ostrich farms are very popular, you can find them as far afield as Texas, Israel and Namibia. Ostriches are farmed for their eggs among other things. One egg can easily make an omelet for a dozen hungry men. Their shells have been used to make ornaments and necklaces for thousands of years by many African tribes. The shells are also handy for storing water.
Ostrich skin makes great leather. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but any self respecting Latino man in Texas when I lived there a decade ago could be seen sporting a nice pair of ostrich cowboy boots. Ostrich leather is very strong, and easily recognized by the little black dots from where the feathers were plucked.
I apologize to vegetarians, but ostrich meat is really delicious. It's leaner than steak, but just as satisfying and has the same lovely dark red coloring. It can be tough, so it should not be overcooked. The South African Ostrich Business Chamber has plenty of recipes on their website.
Ostrich feathers were heavily favored by hat-loving Victorian ladies and this fad almost led to the birds extinction. But once it was discovered that ostriches could be successfully farmed, the pressure was off. These days ostrich feathers are still in demand for costumes, feather boas, center pieces and feather dusters.
More About Ostriches: | <urn:uuid:28f78371-e399-4835-8bad-cb244d3d5f7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://goafrica.about.com/b/2012/04/23/the-versatile-ostrich.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965032 | 573 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Ipswich, Suffolk (PRWEB UK) 12 October 2012
Last week the Association of British Insurers (ABI) called for an overhaul in the way that young people learn to drive in an attempt to reduce the high number of accidents and casualties amongst the UK’s under 25 year old drivers. Recommendations included the adoption of a minimum one year period of tuition, restrictions on driving at night for newer drivers, a lower alcohol limit for young drivers and the lowering the age at which young people can start to learn.
The ABI report highlighted the high incidence of accidents and casualties amongst young drivers: one in three road deaths are people under 25; and an 18 year old driver is three times more likely than a 48 year old to be involved in a crash. It argues that steps taken to radically improve road safety amongst Britain’s younger drivers would not just lead to fewer road deaths and serious injuries but would also start to impact on the cost of young drivers car insurance.
That younger drivers pay more for their insurance is indisputable. A newly qualified 17 year old driver can expect to pay some 70% to 80% more for their insurance policy than a 35 year old with the same car, occupation and postcode who has just passed their test. This is a reflection of the increased risk that insurers face from the younger driver. Tiger.co.uk, a leading independent car insurance comparison site, has produced an analysis of young drivers to examine the insurance costs facing young motorists and to look in particular at the effect that making an insurance claim during the early driving years may have on costs.
Tiger.co.uk’s research shows that a typical male driver passing their test at 17 and keeping a clean licence and without making any insurance claims could pay around £9,500 in car insurance premiums over a five year period. A woman with the same driving profile would pay substantially less – about £4,700 in total.
However, when a 17 year old has an accident and a claim during their first year on the road, this has a knock-on effect on premiums over the five-year period. Total premiums paid rise by over £1,100 (12%) for a young male driver and by over £850 (18%) for a young female.
Commenting on this analysis, Tiger.co.uk’s Commercial Director, Andrew Goulborn, said: “We support the ABI’s report and recommendations that are aimed at improving driver safety amongst the UK’s younger motorists. Whilst reduced road deaths and casualties are of course the most important effect of this, we also wanted to highlight the financial effect that an insurance claim in the first year of driving could have. Essentially, in the example we’ve used here, a young driver can save about £1,000 in increased premiums by driving safely and avoiding accidents and claims. It’s worth considering also the additional cost that younger newly qualified drivers pay compared with older drivers who have just passed their tests. In the longer term, safer driving by younger motorists could help to reduce the massive premiums that 17 and 18 year olds currently face when buying car insurance”.
Tiger.co.uk is a trading name of Call Connection Ltd. Tiger.co.uk is a UK based, independent motor insurance comparison site, offering insurance quotes from over 150 insurance brands. Call Connection Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (number | <urn:uuid:2941f2c5-bd39-47cf-aca8-3862ecb8cba5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb10008176.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965481 | 703 | 1.960938 | 2 |
St. Erasmus, also known as Elmo, was the bishop of Formiae, Campagna, Italy. During persecution of the Christians under Emperor Diocletian he fled to Mount Lebanon and lived there for some time, being fed by a raven. His whereabouts were discovered and he was thrown into prison, from which an angel rescued him. Eventually he suffered a martyr's death. He is the member of the so called Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of 14 saints, whose collective cult grew up in the first quarter of the 15th century.
See: Grünewald The Meeting of St. Erasmus and St. Maurice.
Nicolas Poussin. The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus.
Lives of the Saints: From Mary and Francis of Assisi to John XXIII and Mother Teresa by Richard McBrien (Author). Harper SanFrancisco, 2001. | <urn:uuid:3f8c24bc-e819-4c3c-be32-7d832098252d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abcgallery.com/saints/erasmus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974216 | 187 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Many people consider the quiet nature of electric vehicles is a boon, but there are others who are concerned that these silent cars could lead to an increase in pedestrian accidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is in the latter group, and the NHTSA has announced a proposal to include warning sounds on EVs going 18 mph or less.
If you’ve been following the EV saga here in America, you probably knew that this was an inevitability. Groups that represent blind Americans, the elderly, and traffic safety advocates have all been pushing for such legislation ever since hybrids like the Toyota Prius hit the streets. But with electric cars becoming increasingly commonplace, the NHTSA has decided that now is time to take action.
Some cars, like 2012 and up Toyota Prius hybrids, already have sound emitters, though drivers can turn them on and off at will. Ford has even asked fans what they think its Focus Electric vehicle should sound like.
The NHTSA proposal allows some flexibility in terms of what sound is used, and the system is expected to add just $30 per vehicle. The NHTSA estimates this will help prevent around 2,800 injuries, and 35 deaths, each year. The system will turn on and off automatically, and frankly, we’re interested to see what sorts of sounds automakers come up with. If supercar sounds aren’t an option though, and we’ll be disappointed. | <urn:uuid:372d24fc-9135-4194-9d2d-431f50cb7826> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gas2.org/2013/01/09/nhtsa-to-mandate-ev-soundtrack-for-pedestrians/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964102 | 291 | 2.71875 | 3 |