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Health care the top priority for voters, poll reveals
Published Thursday, June 2, 2011 6:50PM EDT
Canadian voters want Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new majority government to place the priority on health care, a new poll reveals. But voters also want to see the deficit eliminated, taxes cut and jobs created.
Those are the findings of a new poll from Nanos Research and the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP).
The telephone survey asked more than 1,200 Canadians to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how highly they viewed nine possible priorities for this government. Here are the average scores each priority earned:
- Working with the provinces on health care - 4.32
- Creating jobs through training - 4.01
- Eliminating the deficit - 3.98
- Cutting taxes - 3.69
- Investing in research and development - 3.63
- Getting tough on crime - 3.58
- Focusing on new trade opportunities around the world - 3.48
- Strengthening Canada's armed forces - 3.05
- Reforming the Senate of Canada - 2.99
Almost 60 per cent of respondents gave a "5" rating to "working with the provinces on health care," meaning they wanted health care given high priority.
Committed federal Conservative supporters were most likely to score health care high on the priority scale – about as high as they scored eliminating the deficit.
In all, 44 per cent of respondents gave "eliminating the deficit" a score of 5, suggesting that many Canadians are also concerned about the country's books.
Getting tough on crime was a middle-of-the-road priority for Canadians – only 35 per cent scored it a 5 -- while Senate reform and strengthening Canada's Armed Forces were lower priorities, the poll found.
Pollster Nik Nanos says the research suggests a number of things. First, many Canadians may see Senate reform as a diversion from more important issues such as health care, the deficit, jobs and taxes.
Likewise, Canadians are not as concerned with strengthening Canada's Armed Forces if it interferes with plans to eliminate the deficit, but on the other hand, they may regard it more warmly if it means more job creation.
The debate about how to fund the military could become a political hot potato, Nanos suggested.
"One possible political flashpoint in the next parliament could revolve around defence spending. New Democrats are more likely to believe that strengthening Canada's Armed Forces is not a priority compared to both Conservatives and Liberals," he observed.
Priorities related to money issues appear to be important Canadians, the poll found.
"As we enter a period of multiple provincial elections where health care will be among the top provincial election issues, one can expect that Canadians may also examine Harper's strategy on managing the health care issue beyond the election commitment," Nanos said.
The Nanos/IRPP poll was conducted between May 24 and 29. The random telephone survey of 1,205 Canadians 18 years of age and older was accurate plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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Local parents want school officials to move quickly on 15 recommendations to improve special education in the Chilliwack school district.
The recommendations were made by consultant David Carter, who started reviewing the district's special education services in August. He presented his 36-page report at a packed school board meeting Tuesday.
Parents there said the report addresses many of the problems they have voiced for a year, but some were frustrated it's taken the district so long to bring the report to the board.
The document is dated Dec. 6, but the district delayed bringing it to the board until Tuesday because Carter was unavailable for the presentation.
"There's been an awful lot of time that has passed since this process first got started," said parent Don Davis. "I don't know that you heard anything more from Dr. Carter tonight than you would have gleaned from your opportunity to have read the report. Sure it was nice to hear from him, but my concern is, what's the timeline for all of these steps to begin?"
Superintendent Evelyn Novak defended the district's decision, saying the board needed Carter on hand to present the information and answer questions.
"We acknowledge that parents may feel that it took a long time, but we did it as quickly as we could," she told the Times. "I wouldn't be able to do [the report] justice and answer the questions that the board might have. I don't think there were any surprises in the conversation, but it's important to us that the board receive that before we publicly proceed with any of the recommendations or suggestions."
Along with receiving the report, trustees approved another motion by trustee Heather Maahs directing staff to come back to the board before the end of May with an action plan for Carter's recommendations.
"We really need to get moving on these recommendations and do the very best that we can do for now, even with the resources that we have because sometimes it's not necessarily about money," Maahs said. "Sometimes it's about doing the best with what we have and then if we get more money, great, we're further ahead for it."
Trustee Doug McKay commented that-even before the end of May-staff should find ways to work Carter's recommendations into planning for next year's budget.
"Clearly dollars and cents are attached to almost all of the recommendations," McKay said.
Like many districts around the province, Carter said Chilliwack spends more money on special education than it gets (42 per cent more), and that frustration among parents and staff is "primarily attributable to what happens when very complex children are included in modern classrooms and resources are very very tight."
While his 15 recommendations suggest ways to improve local special education services, Carter said one "massive strength" of special education services in Chilliwack is the people.
"I have been impressed, and on a couple of occasions, I really can tell you (you can check with my wife) I was moved by what I saw people doing, making do with what they have to do the best they can for kids," he told trustees.
Calls for a review of Chilliwack school district special education services were sparked a year ago by School District No. 33 education assistant Kathi Friesen, who stood up at a board meeting and told trustees the district needed more accountability in its education of students with autism.
Her comments unleashed emotional public complaints from parents of students with autism.
Friesen and a number of those parents were on hand Tuesday.
"I'm thrilled with Dr. Carter's report," Friesen said. "I really like all of his recommendations. As you know, us EAs have had a lot of frustrations, and I can see that you've taken some of our concerns seriously."
Autism is a frequent focus in Carter's report.
He called it a "flashpoint" among parents in the district.
"If there were people unhappy, it was more often around autism than in any other category," he said.
He said the incidence of autism is "shooting right up" and recommends more resources and training for staff.
? For Carter's complete report, see the Feb. 26 school board agenda at www. sd33.bc.ca.
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Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words.
These once-isolated people, a tiny group, have no system of numbers; their sentences cannot accommodate subordinate clauses or other forms of recursion (embedding phrases), and they are not impressed by the Gospel of St Mark in Pirahã, not least because it is a story composed by someone they do not know, about someone they have never heard of, in a time and place that has no meaning for them. The Pirahã people tend to confine their discourse to things they know about, and their verb forms can be suffixed to distinguish between hearsay, inference and observation. They have no perfect tense.
On the other hand, they can also sing, hum, yell and whistle information to one another. So they have four additional speech forms as well as a very precise vocabulary for their environment and everything in it that matters to them. If there is some deep structure that underpins all 7,000 human languages – a universal grammar or language acquisition device or language instinct, already hard-wired in the human brain at birth – Pirahã seems to be an exception.
For Daniel Everett – linguist, anthropologist and once an evangelist missionary in the Amazon – the case settles an old argument about the nature of language. The exceptional language of the Pirahã people seems to be a unique cultural tool – like their knowledge of plant toxins, and their ability to fish with a bow and arrow – adapted for their exceptional circumstances. It is just another finely honed instrument from the human cognitive toolbox: we have large brains, we are social animals, we co-operate, we have a lucky arrangement of lungs, larynx, pharynx, palate, tongue, teeth and lips. We can speak, and so language has evolved, just as our brains and bipedal locomotion have evolved.
Language, in the Everett formula, is the sum of cognition plus culture plus communication. There is no need for a language instinct to set a three-year-old suddenly talking nineteen to the dozen. The infant's ambient culture compels the order of subject, verb and object, the potency of individual words and phrases (such as "nineteen to the dozen"), and the precise choice of phonemes.
This claim has reportedly annoyed the hell out of other linguists, among them Noam Chomsky, one of the high priesthood of the discipline, and the founder of the belief in what, for shorthand, is called a universal grammar. It also presents a challenge to the arguments of the psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, a 1994 bestseller. The notion of language as an innate human talent received a colossal fillip that year with the identification of one British family, some of whose members, through three generations, were perfectly ordinary, while others had a very precise and puzzling problem with the rules of language. This was interpreted as evidence for a "grammar gene".
This, to be fair, was before the genome of even the simplest bacterial organism had been sequenced, during an era in which researchers were betting that humans inherited more than 100,000 genes, perhaps even a million. Among these might be a gene for schizophrenia, a gene for intelligence, for being good at the 100m sprint and for learning to manipulate sentences.
The picture has changed since the human genome project ended in 2003. The awesome bundle of human complexity turned out to be delivered by about 23,000 genes; many more than a fruit fly, certainly, but many fewer than the maize plant. Whatever it is that lets us relish the preposterous loquacity of Mr Micawber, condemn the hubris of footballers and compile scenarios for a Greek debt default, all on a brief bus ride, it won't be a simple genetic turn of the screw in a larger than usual primate brain.
This, however, is not an argument in which the rest of us stand much chance of judging which side is right. Everett is the western maestro of Pirahã: what we know about the language is what he tells us, and what he tells us is so strange that some linguists have even asked if he might not be the victim of some sustained Borgesian prank (it wouldn't be the first time that an isolated community with an advanced sense of humour had deadpanned a visiting anthropologist).
But beyond that lies another difficulty: arguments about what the shape and capacity of a language tells us are quite difficult to follow. Is recursion really the thing, as Chomsky claims, that makes the difference between the pragmatic social communication of great apes and the infinitely resourceful language of humans? Is Pirahã really such an exception? Does the number of pronouns in a language really correlate inversely with a culture's technological advance? Do words for colour really provide an index of the way a language has advanced?
There is another reason for confusion. Everett – once a kid in a Texas rock band, before he became a trainee missionary – is the kind of scholar often described as "flamboyant". He has not, however, written a flamboyant book. During the heaviest going, he wades into academic discourse rather as an Amazon traveller might wade through a lagoon in the rainy season, stirring up more mud than clarity. "More ordered thoughts and communication would have been facilitated in a beneficent cycle of evolutionary improvement," he says, in a passage I don't suppose he could translate into Pirahã.
It seems churlish to complain that a book about language is a bit prolix, but fewer words might have forced more pointed argument. That said, most of it is revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language. It is a finite resource with seemingly infinite possibilities. It constrains thought, but it also delivers vision far beyond its apparent evolutionary purpose.
Persevere through the thickets of disciplinary defensiveness and the components of language become clearer: a theory of mind, intentionality, contingent judgment, a lot of cultural expectation and some biology that makes possible not just the usual vowels and consonants but also words made up of clicks, glottal stops, plosives and the voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (rare, even in the Amazon). As a bonus, you will also learn why you shouldn't talk with your mouth full.
• Tim Radford's The Address Book will be published by Fourth Estate in April.
Making sites popular is about more than Twitter and Facebook. Burgess Powers makes social: personal
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Welcome to “Robot Boot Camp.” In this two-part article series, I’ll explain what you can do with a basic mobile machine, a few sensors, and behavioral programming techniques. Behavioral programming provides distinct advantages over other programming techniques. It is independent of any environmental model, and it is more robust in the face of sensor error, and the behaviors can be stacked and run concurrently.
My objectives for my recent robot design were fairly modest. I wanted to build a robot that could cruise on its own, avoid obstacles, escape from inadvertent collisions, and track a light source. I knew that if I could meet such objective other more complex behaviors would be possible (e.g., self-docking on low power). There certainly many commercial robots on the market that could have met my requirements. But I decided that my best bet would be to roll my own. I wanted to keep things simple, and I wanted to fully understand the sensors and controls for behavioral autonomous operation. The TOMBOT is the fruit of that labor (see Photo 1a). A colleague came up with the name TOMBOT in honor of its inventor, and the name kind of stuck.
In this series of articles, I’ll present lessons learned and describe the hardware/software design process. The series will detail TOMBOT-style robot hardware and assembly, as well as behavior programming techniques using C code. By the end of the series, I’ll have covered a complete behavior programming library and API, which will be available for experimentation.
The TOMBOT robot is certainly minimal, no frills: two continuous-rotation, variable-speed control servos; two IR (850 nm) analog distance measurement sensors (4- to 30-cm range); two CdS photoconductive cells with good lux response in visible spectrum; and, finally, a front bumper (switch-activated) for collision detection. The platform is simple: servos and sensors on the left and right side of two level platforms. The bottom platform houses bumper, batteries, and servos. The top platform houses sensors and microcontroller electronics. The back part of the bottom platform uses a central skid for balance between the two servos (see Photo 1).
Given my background as a Microchip Developer and Academic Partner, I used a Microchip Technology PIC32 microcontroller, a PICkit 3 programmer/debugger, and a free Microchip IDE and 32-bit complier for TOMBOT. (Refer to the TOMBOT components list at the end of this article.)
It was a real thrill to design and build a minimal capability robot that can—with stacking programming behaviors—emulate some “intelligence.” TOMBOT is still a work in progress, but I recently had the privilege of demoing it to a first grade class in El Segundo, CA, as part of a Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) initiative. The results were very rewarding, but more on that later.
A control system for a completely autonomous mobile robot must perform many complex information-processing tasks in real time, even for simple applications. The traditional method to building control systems for such robots is to separate the problem into a series of sequential functional components. An alternative approach is to use behavioral programming. The technique was introduced by Rodney Brooks out of the MIT Robotics Lab, and it has been very successful in the implementation of a lot of commercial robots, such as the popular Roomba vacuuming. It was even adopted for space applications like NASA’s Mars Rover and military seekers.
Programming a robot according to behavior-based principles makes the program inherently parallel, enabling the robot to attend simultaneously to all hazards it may encounter as well as any serendipitous opportunities that may arise. Each behavior functions independently through sensor registration, perception, and action. In the end, all behavior requests are prioritized and arbitrated before action is taken. By stacking the appropriate behaviors, using arbitrated software techniques, the robot appears to show (broadly speaking) “increasing intelligence.” The TOMBOT modestly achieves this objective using selective compile configurations to emulate a series of robot behaviors (i.e., Cruise, Home, Escape, Avoid, and Low Power). Figure 1 is a simple model illustration of a behavior program.
Joseph Jones’s Robot Programming: A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics (TAB Electronics, 2003) is a great reference book that helped guide me in this effort. It turns out that Jones was part of the design team for the Roomba product.
Debugging a mobile platform that is executing a series of concurrent behaviors can be daunting task. So, to make things easier, I implemented a complete remote control using a wireless link between the robot and a PC. With this link, I can enable or disable autonomous behavior, retrieve the robot sensor status and mode of operations, and curtail and avoid potential robot hazard. In addition to this, I implemented some additional operator feedback using a small graphics display, LEDs, and a simple sound buzzer. Note the TOMBOT’s power-up display in Photo 1b. We take Robot Boot Camp very seriously.
As you can see in the robot’s block diagram (see Figure 2), the TOMBOT is very much a minimalist system with just enough components to demonstrate autonomous behaviors: Cruise, Escape, Avoid, and Home. All these behaviors require the use of left and right servos for autonomous maneuverability.
The Cruise behavior just keeps the robot in motion in lieu of any stimulus. The Escape behavior uses the bumper to sense a collision and then 180° spin with reverse. The Avoid behavior makes use of continuous forward-looking IR sensors to veer left or right upon approaching a close obstacle. The Home behavior utilizes the front optical photocells to provide robot self-guidance to a strong light highly directional source. It all should add up to some very distinct “intelligent” operation. Figure 3 depicts the basic sensor and electronic layout.
The TOMBOT uses the low-cost robot platform (ArBot Chassis) and wheel set (X-Wheel assembly) from Budget Robotics (see Figure 4).
A picture is worth a thousand words. Photo 2 shows two views of the TOMBOT prototype.
Photo 2a shows dual Sharp IR sensors. Just below them is the photocell assembly. It is a custom board with dual CdS GL5528 photoconductive cells and 2.2-kΩ current-limiting resistors. Below this is a bumper assembly consisting of two SPDT Snap-action switches with lever (All Electronics Corp. CAT# SMS-196, left and right) fixed to a custom pre-fab plastic front bumper. Also shown is the solderless breakout board and left servo. Photo 2b shows the rechargeable battery pack that resides on the lower base platform and associated power switch. The electronics stack is visible. Here the XBee/Buzzer and graphics card modules residing on the 32-bit Experimenter. The Experimenter is plugged into a custom carrier board that allows for an interconnection to the solderless breakout to the rest of the system. Finally, note that the right servo is highlighted. The total TOMBOT package is not ideal; but remember, I’m talking about a prototype, and this particular configuration has held up nicely in several field demos.
I used Parallax (Futaba) continuous-rotation servos. They use a three-wire connector (+5 V, GND, and Control).
Figure 5 depicts a second-generation bumper assembly. The same snap-action switches with extended levers are bent and fashioned to interconnect a bumper assembly as shown.
A 32-bit Micro Experimenter is used as the CPU. This board is based the high-end Microchip Technology PIC32MX695F512H 64-pin TQFP with 128-KB RAM, 512-KB flash memory, and an 80-MHz clock. I did not want to skimp on this component during the prototype phase. In addition the 32-bit Experimenter supports a 102 × 64 monographic card with green/red backlight controls and LEDs. Since a full graphics library was already bundled with this Experimenter graphics card, it also represented good risk reduction during prototyping phase. Details for both cards are available on the Kiba website.
The Experimenter supports six basic board-level connections to outside world using JP1, JP2, JP3, JP4, BOT, and TOP headers. A custom carrier board interfaces to the Experimenter via these connections and provides power and signal connection to the sensors and servos. The custom carrier accepts battery voltage and regulates it to +5 VDC. This +5 V is then further regulated by the Experimenter to its native +3.3-VDC operation. The solderless breadboard supports a resistor network to sense a +9-V battery voltage for a +3.3-V PIC processor. The breadboard also contains an LM324 quad op-amp to provide a buffer between +3.3-V logic of the processor and the required +5-V operation of the servo. Figure 6 is a detailed schematic diagram of the electronics.
A custom card for the XBee radio carrier and buzzer was built that plugs into the Experimenter’s TOP and BOT connections. Photo 3 shows the modules and the carrier board. The robot uses a rechargeable 1,600-mAH battery system (typical of mid-range wireless toys) that provides hours of uninterrupted operation.
PIC32 On-Chip Peripherals
The major PIC32 peripheral connection for the Experimenter to rest of the system is shown. The TOMBOT uses PWM for servo, UART for XBee, SPI and digital for LCD, analog input channels for all the sensors, and digital for the buzzer and bumper detect. The key peripheral connection for the Experimenter to rest of the system is shown in Figure 7.
The PIC32 pinouts and their associated Experimenter connections are detailed in Figure 8.
The TOMBOT Motion Basics and the PIC32 Output Compare Peripheral
Let’s review the basics for TOMBOT motor control. The servos use the Parallax (Futaba) Continuous Rotation Servos. With two-wheel control, the robot motion is controlled as per Table 1.
The servos are controlled by using a 20-ms (500-Hz) pulse PWM pattern where the PWM pulse can from 1.0 ms to 2.0 ms. The effects on the servos for the different PWM are shown in Figure 9.
The PIC32 microcontroller (used in the Experimenter) has five Output Compare modules (OCX, where X =1 , 2, 3, 4, 5). We use two of these peripherals, specifically OC3, OC4 to generate the PWM to control the servo speed and direction. The OCX module can use either 16 Timer2 (TMR2) or 16 Timer3 (TMR3) or combined as 32-bit Timer23 as a time base and for period (PR) setting for the output pulse waveform. In our case, we are using Timer23 as a PR set to 20 ms (500 Hz). The OCXRS and OCXR registers are loaded with a 16-bit value to control width of the pulse generated during the output period. This value is compared against the Timer during each period cycle. The OCX output starts high and then when a match occurs OCX logic will generate a low on output. This will be repeated on a cycle-by-cycle basis (see Figure 10).
Next Comes Software
We set the research goals and objectives for our autonomous robot. We covered the hardware associated with this robot and in the next installment we will describe the software and operation.
Tom Kibalo holds a BSEE from City College of New York and an MSEE from the University of Maryland. He as 39 years of engineering experience with a number of companies in the Washington, DC area. Tom is an adjunct EE facility member for local community college, and he is president of Kibacorp, a Microchip Design Partner.
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Translations into other languages are available for subscribers only.
In the usual wine-growing plant or a plant for the rearing of grafted rootstocks similar to a nursery. Frequently, a finishing operation is connected. An important basis for breeding or "enrollment" are mild to moderate, to Humus rich soils that allow rapid rooting. Requirement is especially an adequate supply of Potassium (Potassium salts) and Magnesium . The plant has little frost, warm and sheltered, and free of virus transmitting Nematodes Be (nematodes). Only by vegetative propagation ensures that the newly formed vines exactly the same genes and thus have properties such as the Ursprungsrebe. A Generative propagation of planting and breeding of grape seeds is therefore not in question. Basis for future vine are two components, namely the scion (top part) and the base and rootstock (bottom). Both are mounted on separate areas and only after finishing , advancing and subsequent enrollment in a reproductive capable cuttings .
The scions are long officially recognized by several years in a vineyard and watched it on their viticultural characteristics tested positive clones obtained (clonal selection). The best act of which have special requirements for admission as a so-called basic seed (nurseries). Of these, about 80 centimeters long rods separated one year. The cut is made in late December to mid January, to prevent damage by frost buds. The rods must be at least seven, with long internodes with some such as in the Blaufränkisch (Lviv), Trollinger or Dornfelder five graftable Eye exhibit. Mutterrebe can be obtained from a 50 scions. They are hermetically packaged for further use in cold rooms with 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in plastic sheeting to 100 or 200 mounted to the reserve substances as primarily Carbohydrates preserve the wood. For finishing the rods are then cut into small pieces, each with one eye. Remain above the eye must be a stub with at least 1.5 centimeters in length, under the eye with a pin remains at least 5 centimeters in length.
The different base and rootstock varieties are as targeted with certain characteristics and certain soil type bred by crosses, which, due to the essential phylloxera ever American vines are involved. In a nursery, not only the desired variety that is possibly also the desired clone type, but also for the vineyard optimally suitable underlay ordered, with which it has been refined (eg Riesling clone 64-183 G - FA Geisenheim with the base 5BB). The documents are a one-year wood, which is produced in so-called vines. As they warm to grow, require little frost-sensitive sites, they are mostly produced in northern Italy or southern France. They are either brought up without support on the ground or by Greiner-decker shear helical pile education, so that 8-10 rods arise, each several meters in length. The harvest takes place in January and February, while the rods are cut off just above the head. The length must be divisible by 40, but must be at least 120 centimeters. The cut on the final length of 30 centimeters is then just before the finish. The lower section is about 1.5 to 2 centimeters below a node (node). At this interface form it turned out the roots. All eyes are cut out, what is called the iris. From a vine can reach 60 to 80 documents can be harvested.
Immediately after finishing done to protect them from drying out a waxing of the cuttings, including the finishing point with liquid, hot wax finish. This also contains substances for inhibition of Botrytis and promotion of callus formation. Thereafter, each 500 to 600 vines in Vortreibkisten packed in plastic that are filled with wet peat until before the graft. It is with sand or Perlite filled. Then, in bright, heated rooms, mostly glass houses, the advancing (pre) of vines in the boxes, causing the formation of Callus (Scar tissue) promoted the eye to shoot and placed first root tips are formed. The date depends on the subsequent enrollment in the northern hemisphere, this is mostly in the last ten days of April. The duration is between two and three weeks. This requires a uniform temperature, high Humidity and good ventilation. The young shoots should be as short as possible while developing. They are regularly sprayed with protected against Botrytis. This is followed by hardening, where the vines are slowly within one week of normal temperature conditions adapted.
The enrollment begins after the late frost around mid-May. The former practice of "grave process" was from the late 1970s, replaced by the so-called "film process". By means of a laying machine is raised by a slightly curved embankment, over which a plastic film is pulled. This approximately 75 centimeters wide, black-colored soil, and thus a higher heat effecting film of polyethylene is, the edges covered with earth, so the wind does not attack surface is offered. After the sheets are rolled over with thorns, with a bespickten wheel, so that every 6 to 8 inches, holes punched into it. Through these holes the cuttings are placed about 10 inches deep in the earth. Unlike the earlier grave process takes place during film process an unsolicited uprooting from the scion. After the greening measures are nursing as loosening the soil, cut foliage and preventive treatment with Fungicides against false and Wettable sulfur against real Mildew required. During the official visit in the summer, the vines are reviewed as a prerequisite for the recognition of varietal purity.
After the Leaf fall November is the Ausschulung the vines. Before the shoots are cut about 15 inches and dug the vines, the roots are cut up to 25 centimeters. Now all the vines especially regarding optimum adhesion of scion and support by manual compression and rotation sample be tested. It may not come to spring the Kallusringes or a cleft in the graft union. To marketing and it has been planted in the spring, the vines are stored in refrigerated rooms. According to one in 1992 adopted EU Directive is mandatory for all within the EU put on the market vines a "plant passport", are in the country among other producers, growers, botanical name, precious and base of rice varieties. As an alternative to nursery vines will also be so-called generated. Instead of the enrollment in the open air is the air conditioning process with the potted vines. See also Breeding .
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What's the best way to get rid of ammonia in new tank?
I thought my tank was cycled cos I got readings 0 for nitrites and ammonia but just over a week after getting first fish the ammonia went up to 0.25 and fish weren't moving much.
I was advised to do a 50% water change and told that the chances are my tank wasn't cycled. After water change I treated the water with cycle and the fish have been swimming around and looking quite happy since but my ammonia readings are still 0.25 even though the cycle bottle says it gets rid of ammonia and I can only use that every 7 days.
Should I do water changes until ammonia reads 0? Will this prevent the build up of good bacteria? I think I may have over fed the fish and there's a lot of food on the bottom of tank but I was told not to clean the gravel cos it's a new tank but I'm thinking it might help if old food makes ammonia levels rise.
Please can anyone advise me what to do cos I don't want the fish to get sick.
do a water change and just hoova above the gravel to get
rid of the food.
you may have made a spike due to the amount of fish you added,
may have been to many for ther filter to cope with.
keep checking the water and let us know how you get on.
but don't panic. :)
Patience and water changes.
Water changes if levels are at or above .25, otherwise it takes longer to fully cycle. It's possible the Cycle stuff is giving you a false reading so you may wish to avoid it to know what your parameters are doing.
Flashygrrl is right. A lot of those treatments will "detoxify" the ammonia so it doesn't hurt the fish, but the water tests will still get readings of ammonia.
Hi fish seem ok, they tend to be inactive for about a day after I do a water change 20% I'm testing every other day to check ammonia levels the test water is ever so slightly green not even reading 0.25 now so that's good I'm hoping. I'm thinking that I should I revert to weekly water changes to give the tank a chance to build up it's bacteria, cos the fish don't seem to like it when the water's changed and it seems to be causing them stress. I'm not sure what's the best thing to do now?
Are you treating the tap water to remove chlorine and other things? Is the water you are adding the same temperature as the tank water? You need to use an accurate thermometer to test this, NOT just your hand.
Yeah I'm using a water conditioner and a thermometer, I'm boiling a kettle and adding hot water to get the right temperture water b4 adding it to the tank, and I thought maybe cos I'm not letting the water reach room temp. slowly maybe the water conditioner I'm putting in doesn't have time to work b4 I add water to tank, this is the only thing I can think I'm doing wrong. The water conditioner doesn't say it gets rid of ammonia, but I've been told the ammonia levels that I've got shouldn't be having 2 adverse effect on fish. Thanks for taking time to help :)
why don't you test your water right before adding it to the tank so we know for sure?
Water changes and patience are the best thing for cycling a tank once it's been started. Sounds to me like it may have been cycled and then you added more fish? If you got a 0 reading on nitrites and ammonia without any fish it's because there was no ammonia to get the cycle started, unless you did a fishless cycle by adding ammonia.
Read up on cycling here. It is the easiest way to understand it.
Some people do not like this product or have not had good luck with it, but I HIGHLY recommend Biospira. I can't say enough about it. It's a natural product, and will give your cycling a huge jump start by adding nitrifying bacteria to rid the tank of ammonia overnight. I have used it to cycle every one of my tanks. It does not cycle the tank completely, but gets rid of ammonia. It must be purchased at a reputable LFS with a high turnover, and it must be refrigerated to ensure freshness. I've never had a fatality during cycling with with thanks to this product.
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Victoria Station in Salem, MA, where the Slam Poetry evening of the Festival took place.
We could not resist the Saturday morning panel entitled “Amy Lowell and Robert Frost Started It,” and so we went.
“It” turned out to be the New England Poetry Club—formerly the Harvard Poetry Society.
The first panelist to speak was a lady director of that venerable club, who read “Patterns” by Amy Lowell, the poet’s most anthologized piece, with its anti-war ending. It’s a rather long poem, was not read particularly well, and most of us know this poem, anyway. But it was read. It is a good poem, and we enjoyed it. The lady director also felt compelled to read Pound’s awful “Metro” poem—which works neither as haiku, nor as whatever lame substitute it’s attempting to be. Accepting Pound’s wretched poem as some kind of significant marker begins the slippery slope in western poetry to inferiority masked as progress. Every time someone praises that piece, a skylark dies, another Keats is killed, a star somewhere goes out.
The New England Poetry Club lady dispersed a few facts: the president of Harvard was Amy Lowell’s brother, and thus the Harvard Poetry Society was born—as an Imagist club, since Imagism appealed to Amy Lowell, (as did Orientalism to all the idle rich in those days.) Lowell’s quarrel with Pound was skipped over, as was the contemporary haiku/orientalism rage which fed Imagism.
Fred Marchant, the second speaker, picked up on the anti-war theme and treated us to Conrad Aiken’s “Trenches: 1915,” an uncollected poem—too long—detailing the lengthy horrors of trench warfare. Aiken’s father shot his mother and then shot himself when Aiken was a boy, right outside the poor lad’s bedroom, and this tragedy was used as a centerpiece in Marchant’s presentation of Aiken’s poem—which, it turned out, was imagined, because Aiken never fought in WW I. Marchant rambled on about how Aiken knew T.S. Eliot; the Selective Service Act of 1917; yellow journalism—his presentation never came into focus. Aiken, with Frost and Lowell, had been a co-founder of the Club.
Next up on the panel was the jolly, side-burned, X. J. Kennedy, who is best known for light verse, and he was a breath of fresh air, dispensing with all attempts to present The New England Poetry Club in some solemn anti-war light. F.D. Reeve, (the father of the superman actor) who was Robert Frost’s translator on the latter’s trip to Moscow, was unfortunately unable to attend “They Started It” and Kennedy began by bemoaning this fact. Then he joked that on the 100th anniversary of both the Titanic sinking and Fenway Park, that the Red Sox (who had been losing) and the Titanic were “both at the bottom.” Kennedy reached for another anniversary: he had the New England Poetry Club officially at 97 years, but he figured it was about 100 years ago that the Club’s genesis began.
Kennedy’s focus was on Frost, who was “not a joiner,” but managed to be elected Vice-president of the Club in 1917 and President in 1919, without attending a meeting. Frost, Kennedy, said, was “anti-clique,” and had little patience for Pound and his cliques; Frost preferred to “get outside the clique and appeal to the ordinary reader.” A concept rather foreign to the pretentiousness of obscurantist modernist poetry. Pound’s so-called Imagism was just an obvious rip-off of another culture’s then popular-in-the-west-movement: haiku and orientalism, generally. Frost didn’t have to be part of some manufactured movement to make a name for himself.
X.J. Kennedy, just by his voice and demeanor, was clearly the literary lion in the room; one could tell he was no lackey imposter, no myopic scholar, that poetry burned in his soul—if by nothing else, one could tell by the perfect timing he used in his jokey anecdotes: apparently at a Frost reading, an angry woman, wanting Frost to be a true legislator of humanity, asked Frost whether he really cared about rhyme and spondees and trochees and the various techniques of verse. Frost looked at the woman for a moment and then said, gruffly: “I revel in it!”
X. J. Kennedy was his own thesis—whatever he uttered was interesting, whether it was exclaiming about a great rhyme in a poem (“suffice” at the end of Frost’s “Fire and Ice”), listing the “witty poets of New England: Dickinson, Updike, John Holmes…” or quoting the poet and Harvard fundraiser, David McCord, “By and by,/God caught his eye” (“The Waiter”). Kennedy joked that “The Waiter” was considered at times to be by ‘anonymous,’ the greatest tribute to a living poet.
When X.J. Kennedy tells anecdotes of some poet ‘not selling,’ it’s funny, not a tragedy. The true spirit of poetry lights up this gentleman.
The irony of this presentation, finally, as it relates to the New England Poetry Club, was the simple attempt to play the anti-war card by the first two presenters: the original Harvard Poetry Society sprang from Imagism; Pound and T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford’s Imagism clique in England was anything but anti-war. Of course, these matters were well beyond the scope of the one-hour panel. Modernism is not examined anymore—it’s become a white-washed backdrop. We were just hoping for a little more insight from one of the few panels at the Poetry Festival which advertised some intellectual weight—and not just mindless cheerleading.
That night, at a local restaurant and bar, we caught the Slam Poetry presentation, and aside from the fact that poor acoustics made it impossible to hear some poets, we came away with the following observations;
1. As our 10 year old daughter remarked, “It sounds like comedy, not poetry.”
2. Slam poetry means every type of expression of bad taste and imaginative vulgarity is permissable: every metaphoric combination of nature, society, nerdiness, sex, and bodily function oozes forth from the egotistical show-off at the microphone, every rant and gripe, every filthy, adolescent boast, pours forth.
3. The occasional example of wit and elegance is drowned out by the general tastelessness of the Slam. The soul of poetry hasn’t got a chance.
As if American culture were not vulgar enough.
The irony here is that poetry, divine poetry, exists to elevate the soul above vulgarity and bad taste; Slam Poetry is not only not poetry, it’s anti-poetry. Slam Poetry hurts poetry; Slam Poetry is poetry whored out.
The Sunday afternoon Headline Reading featured Frank Bidart reading his long poem, “Ellen West,” which just happened to be his 2012 Scarriet March Madness Tournament entry. “Ellen West” is based on a case study of a woman with an eating disorder who kills herself. Bidart belongs to the academic scene, not the Slam, but it seems Slam taste rules academia more than many would like to admit. What happens to the practice of an art when the line between vulgar interest and art no longer exists?
Also on Sunday, in the atrium of the Peabody Essex museum, we caught a presentation called ”Bad Poetry Contest,” which was bad for many reasons, the chief being that so much bad poetry is called good these days that no one knows what “bad poetry” is anymore. The author who hosted this travesty spent a great deal of time reading from his own published book—of his own bad poetry; a bad poet to begin with, he is marketing his own rejects—which seems to us very telling.
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Last month, we looked at XMLC, a new system for displaying dynamic web content that comes with the Enhydra application server. This month, we will look at how to write servlets and basic applications using the tools that come with Enhydra. While Enhydra's web applications are not as standardized as servlets with Jakarta-Tomcat, they do offer a fair amount of power and the possibility of creating Enterprise JavaBeans with a fully open-source infrastructure.
Enhydra is an open-source application server written in Java, aiming for full compliance with Sun's J2EE specifications. Lutris, the company that spearheads Enhydra development, has made the application server available under a BSD-like license. The current stable version of Enhydra is 3.x and includes support for a large number of standards, including servlets and JSPs. Enhydra Enterprise, which is slated for release during the summer of 2001, will have additional J2EE features, including support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB).
Enhydra itself is available as a fully open-source product, meaning that you can download it from the Web and install it. But for those clients who might be suspicious of open-source software, who want to use a packaged product that has gone through quality assurance or who want to get support from Lutris, commercial versions of Enhydra are available. I suspect that most people reading this column will not need support from Lutris, but it is good to know that they are ready and willing to help others use the product.
Lutris is aiming Enhydra not just at the J2EE market but also at the market for wireless internet applications. I personally have yet to see a compelling use of cellular internet technologies—the WAP functionality on my mobile phone could charitably be called pathetic—but Lutris is positioning Enhydra as a player in what will inevitably become a hot market.
While Enhydra has yet to develop the mindshare or community of Zope and the ArsDigita Community System, they have managed to score a fair number of impressive commercial triumphs. In particular, Hewlett-Packard recently announced that they would work with Lutris to market and use Enhydra in a number of applications. If nothing else, this proves that open-source application servers do have an important place in the world of web application development and that they can provide a compelling case even to companies that could otherwise afford to pay much more.
Now that we've reviewed a bit of the background, let's try to create some basic web applications using Enhydra. The first task, of course, is to download and install the product. I decided to download the beta of Enhydra Enterprise, in no small part because I wanted to play with the EJB features. As of the beta release, Enhydra Enterprise requires JDK 1.3, a pleasant contrast to previous releases that required JDK 1.2 even after 1.3 had been released for quite a while.
I downloaded and unpacked the Enhydra tar file, which created a large number of files and directories under the enhydra4.0 directory. As you might guess, the doc directory contains documentation, the lib directory contains .jar files that Enhydra needs and the conf directory contains global Enhydra configuration files. There is also a bin directory, in which nearly all files are shell scripts (with Windows .bat equivalents) that execute the various Java programs that make up Enhydra.
To ensure that the Enhydra shell scripts and Java programs are aware of the directory in which you installed Enhydra, run the configure shell script in the root directory of the Enhydra distribution (to which I will refer as $ENHYDRA). configure takes a single mandatory argument, the root directory of your JDK installation. configure modifies a number of Makefiles and other configuration files but does not force a recompilation of any code. After running configure (which does not produce any visible output), run the bash shell script (setup.bash) in $ENHYDRA, which adds the JDK executable directory to your PATH.
Enhydra consists of a number of different interrelated software packages. The application server itself, known as the multiserver, can work directly opposite HTTP clients or with a front-end web server such as Apache acting as a proxy. You can reduce the number of services that the multiserver starts up or change the order in which they are started by changing the loadOrder property in $ENHYDRA/conf/bootstrap.conf.
To start the multiserver, simply run $ENHYDRA/bin/multiserver. It should start up right away, launching services one at a time until you finally see the message, “Bootstrapper initialized normally”. At this point, you can test the multiserver by pointing your web browser at port 8001, which should bring up a control panel for viewing the current state of your multiserver.
My initial attempts to launch the multiserver failed, with the program complaining that it was unable to find enhydra.jar in my CLASSPATH. Particularly confusing here was the fact that I couldn't find any such file as enhydra.jar in the entire Enhydra distribution.
The solution turned out to be simple, if not obvious: Enhydra knows what CLASSPATH is necessary in order to run each of its programs but will ignore those settings if you have already set your CLASSPATH. So before running the multiserver, make sure to unset CLASSPATH, removing this environment variable. Once you have done this, the multiserver should come up as expected.
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Free Webinar: Hadoop
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Realizing the promise of Apache® Hadoop® requires the effective deployment of compute, memory, storage and networking to achieve optimal results. With its flexibility and multitude of options, it is easy to over or under provision the server infrastructure, resulting in poor performance and high TCO. Join us for an in depth, technical discussion with industry experts from leading Hadoop and server companies who will provide insights into the key considerations for designing and deploying an optimal Hadoop cluster.
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The farm is run by the commercial farming business Brooklyn Grange and is located atop a building on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.
The group says the idea is to inspire New Yorkers to create their own rooftop gardens by informing them of all the perks.
Local officials praised Brooklyn Grange’s initiative.
"It makes sense on every level,” said Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer. “It's locally produced, locally farmed, that will be sold locally."
Farmers cultivate a wide variety of vegetables ranging from salad greens, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, squash and kale.
The farm sells its produce to city restaurants, at two markets at the building on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and at Roberto's in Bushwick on Sunday afternoons. It also plans to sell at Vesta in Astoria on Saturdays.
For more information, go to BrooklynGrangeFarm.com.
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Mario Livio is a scientist and self-proclaimed "art fanatic" who owns many hundreds of art books. Recently, he combined his passions for science and art in two popular books, The Accelerating Universe, which appeared in 2000, and The Golden Ratio, reviewed in this issue of Plus. The former book discusses "beauty" as an essential ingredient in fundamental theories of the universe. The latter discusses the amazing appearances of the peculiar number 1.618... in nature, the arts, and psychology. Here he gives us a taster.
The origins of the divine proportion
In the Elements, the most influential mathematics textbook ever written, Euclid of Alexandria (ca. 300 BC) defines a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its "extreme and mean ratio." Euclid's definition reads:
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).
C divides the line segment AB according to the Golden Ratio
Who could have guessed that this innocent-looking line division would have implications for numerous natural phenomena ranging from the leaf and seed arrangements of plants to the structure of the crystals of some aluminium alloys, and from the arts to the stock market?
In fact, with the increasing realization of the astonishing properties of this number over the centuries since Euclid's definition, the number was given the honorifics "Divine Proportion" and "Golden Ratio."
Here I shall concentrate only on one of the surprising (claimed) attributes of the Golden Ratio - its presumed association with aesthetics, since it provides a wonderful example of an attempt to mingle mathematics with the arts.
The golden ratio in the arts
Many books claim that if you draw a rectangle around the face of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the ratio of the height to width of that rectangle is equal to the Golden Ratio. No documentation exists to indicate that Leonardo consciously used the Golden Ratio in the Mona Lisa's composition, nor to where precisely the rectangle should be drawn. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge the fact that Leonardo was a close personal friend of Luca Pacioli, who published a three-volume treatise on the Golden Ratio in 1509 (entitled Divina Proportione).
Sacrament of the Last Supper, by Salvador Dali
Another painter, about whom there is very little doubt that he actually did deliberately include the Golden Ratio in his art, is the surrealist Salvador Dali. The ratio of the dimensions of Dali's painting Sacrament of the Last Supper is equal to the Golden Ratio. Dali also incorporated in the painting a huge dodecahedron (a twelve-faced Platonic solid in which each side is a pentagon) engulfing the supper table. The dodecahedron, which according to Plato is the solid "which the god used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven," is intimately related to the Golden Ratio - both the surface area and the volume of a dodecahedron of unit edge length are simple functions of the Golden Ratio.
These two examples are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the appearances of the Golden Ratio in the arts. The famous Swiss-French architect and painter Le Corbusier, for example, designed an entire proportional system called the "Modulor," that was based on the Golden Ratio. The Modulor was supposed to provide a standardized system that would automatically confer harmonious proportions to everything, from door handles to high-rise buildings. But why would all of these artists (there are many more than mentioned above) even consider incorporating the Golden Ratio in their works? The attempts to answer this question have led to a long series of psychological experiments, designed to investigate a potential relationship between the human perception of "beauty" and mathematics.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
The pioneering (rather crude) experiments in this field were conducted by the German physicist and psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 1860s. Fechner's experiment was simple: ten rectangles varying in their length-to-width ratios were placed in front of a subject, who was asked to select the most pleasing one. The results showed that 76% of all choices centered on the three rectangles having ratios of 1.75, 1.62, and 1.50, with a peak at the "Golden Rectangle" (with ratio 1.62). Fechner went further and measured the dimensions of thousands of rectangular-shaped objects (windows, picture frames in the museums, books in the library), and claimed (in his book Vorschule der Aesthetik) to have found the average ratio to be close to the Golden Ratio.
Many psychologists have repeated similar experiments since then, and obtained rather conflicting results. Michael Godkewitsch of the University of Toronto, for example, pointed out that average group preferences often do not reflect the most preferred choice. For example, the brand of tea that everybody ranks second-best may on the average be rated best, but nobody will ever buy it. Godkewitsch therefore noted that first choices provide a more meaningful measure of preference than averages. Godkewitsch concluded from a study conducted in 1974 that the preference for the Golden Rectangle reported in the earlier experiments was an artifact of the rectangle's position in the range of rectangles presented to the subjects. He noted: "The basic question whether there is or is not, in the Western world, a reliable verbally expressed aesthetic preference for a particular ratio between length and width of rectangular shapes can probably be answered negatively."
Other experiments, however, gave different results. In particular, British psychologist Chris McManus concluded in 1980 that: "There is moderately good evidence for the phenomenon which Fechner championed." Nevertheless, McManus acknowledged that "whether the Golden Section [another name for the Golden Ratio] per se is important, as opposed to similar ratios (e.g. 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.75), is very unclear."
The entire topic received a new twist with a flurry of psychological attempts to determine the origin of facial attractiveness. For example, psychologist Judith Langlois of the University of Texas at Austin and her collaborators tested the idea that a facial configuration that is close to the population average is fundamental to attractiveness. Langlois digitized the faces of male and female students and mathematically averaged them, creating two-, four-, eight-, sixteen-, and thirty-two-face composites. College students were then asked to rate the individual and composite faces for attractiveness. Langlois found that the 16- and 32-averaged faces were rated significantly higher than individual faces. Langlois explained her findings as being broadly based on natural selection (physical characteristics close to the mean having been selected during the course of evolution), and on "prototype theory" (prototypes being preferred over non-prototypes).
Science writer Eric Haseltine claimed (in an article in Discover magazine in September 2002) to have found that the distance from the chin to the eyebrows in Langlois's 32-composite faces divides the face in a Golden Ratio. A similar claim was made in 1994 by orthodontist Mark Lowey, then at University College Hospital in London. Lowey made detailed measurements of fashion models' faces. He asserted that the reason we classify certain people as beautiful is because they come closer to Golden Ratio proportions in the face than the rest of the population.
Many disagree with both Langlois's and Lowey's conclusions. Psychologist David Perret of the University of St. Andrews, for example, published in 1994 the results of a study that showed that individual attractive faces were preferred to the composites. Furthermore, when computers were used to exaggerate the shape differences away from the average, those too were preferred. Perret claimed to have found that his beautiful faces did have something in common: higher cheek bones, a thinner jaw, and larger eyes relative to the size of the face.
An even larger departure from the "averageness" hypothesis was found in a study by Alfred Linney from the Maxillo Facial Unit at University College Hospital. Using lasers to make precise measurements of the faces of top models, Linney and his colleagues found that the facial features of the models were just as varied as those in the rest of the population.
I will certainly not attempt to make the ultimate sense of sex appeal in an article on the Golden Ratio. I would like to point out, however, that the human face provides us with hundreds of lengths to choose from. If you have the patience to juggle and manipulate the numbers in various ways, you are bound to come up with some ratios that are equal to the Golden Ratio.
Furthermore, I should note that the literature is bursting with false claims and misconceptions about the appearance of the Golden Ratio in the arts (e.g. in the works of Giotto, Seurat, Mondrian). The history of art has nevertheless shown that artists who have produced works of truly lasting value are precisely those who have departed from any formal canon for aesthetics. In spite of the Golden Ratio's truly amazing mathematical properties, and its propensity to pop up where least expected in natural phenomena, I believe that we should abandon its application as some sort of universal standard for "beauty," either in the human face or in the arts.
About the author
Dr. Mario Livio is the Head of the Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the institute which conducts the scientific program of the Hubble Space Telescope. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Tel Aviv University in Israel, was a professor in the Physics Dept. of the Technion-Israel Institute of technology from 1981 till 1991, and joined STScI in 1991. Dr Livio has published over 300 scientific papers and received numerous awards for research and for excellence in teaching.
His interests span a broad range of topics in astrophysics, from cosmology to the emergence of intelligent life. Dr. Livio has done much fundamental work on the topic of accretion of mass onto black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs, as well as on the formation of black holes and the possibility to extract energy from them. During the past two years Dr. Livio's research focused on supernova explosions and their use in cosmology to determine the rate of expansion of the universe. In particular, he has shown that in spite of some uncertainties that still exist in theoretical models for supernovae, it is very likely that the recent findings that the expansion of our universe is accelerating are correct.
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9.12.2010: Dubstep rebellion - the British banlieue comes to Millbank
1930: They marched to parliament square, got stopped, surged through police lines and trampled onto the grass that had been so painstakingly regrown after the eviction of the peace camp. And then they danced.
The man in charge of the sound system was from an eco-farm, he told me, and had been trying to play "politically right on reggae"; however a crowd in which the oldest person was maybe seventeen took over the crucial jack plug, inserted it into aBlackberry, (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumped out the dubstep.
Young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of a bench they had set on fire.
Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken.
While a good half of the march was undergraduates from the most militant college occupations - UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex - the really stunning phenomenon, politically, was the presence of youth: bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.
Having been very close to the front line of the fighting, on the protesters side, I would say that at its height - again - it broke the media stereotype of being organised by "political groups": there was an anarchist black bloc contingent, there were the socialist left groups - but above all, again, I would say the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines were done by small groups of young men who dressed a lot more like the older brothers of the dubsteppers.
The fighting itself is still going on - I am seeing people break the windows of HM Revenue and Customs live on TV. At one point after 2pm there were just two lines of riot cops between the students and parliament and it was at this point, with nowhere to go, that people began to push forward and attack the police.
Despite that, those involved were a minority and it was fairly "ritual" involving placard sticks and the remains of the metal fence around Parliament Square, until people realised there was nowhere to break through *to* and changed direction.
I saw them swarm up Victoria Street, at first pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through various attempts by riot police to form a cordon. But then in successive charges, both the mounted and the foot police charged back.
I saw heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flashbangs. At one point the horses were unable to contain this and a policeman fell off his horse, being carried away on a stretcher by colleagues. Later the police - who were themselves trapped between two lines of protesters, lost control of their own rear and only contained the breakthrough by batoning people to the floor, including women. By the side of a pub in a nearby street there was a line if injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews.
By this point many of the seasoned occupiers had moved out of Parliament Square and some were returning to their occupations to discuss where the campaign goes next.
I have seen a lot of public disorder in this part of London over the past 30 years. As a riot it was sporadic; one notable feature is that, while many protesters fight wearing masks, many do not: there is an air of "don't care" - especially among the school students.
Politically, there is an almost total disconnect with the established parties: they had not bothered to send their representatives there - there were a few NUS national officials but no kind of Labour student presence that I could see.
When there are speeches, the university students often defer to the working class young people from sixth forms, who they see as being the main victims of the reform. With the Coalition's majority reduced by 3/4, as I reflected earlier, it is unprecedented to see a government teeter before a movement in whom the iconic voices are sixteen and seventeen year old women, and whose anthems are mainly dubstep.
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July 24, 2009
Critical Civil Rights Bill Introduced In House Of Representatives And Senate
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON – House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution Chairman Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced bills in both chambers of Congress today that will restore voting rights to millions of American citizens with past felony convictions. An estimated 5.3 million citizens cannot vote as a result of felony convictions, and nearly 4 million of those individuals are living and working in their communities. The Democracy Restoration Act of 2009 is a welcome measure that will establish a uniform standard restoring voting rights in federal elections to millions of Americans who are not incarcerated, but continue to be denied their ability to fully participate in civic life.
States have vastly different approaches to permitting citizens with past criminal convictions to vote. For example, some states permanently disfranchise some, but not all, citizens with felony convictions, while others allow voting after a sentence is completed or after release from prison. Two states, Virginia and Kentucky, permanently disfranchise citizens with felony convictions unless the state approves individual rights restoration; two states, Maine and Vermont, allow all persons with felony convictions to vote, even while incarcerated; all other states fall somewhere in between. Unfortunately, there has been widespread confusion about the proper administration of state laws that has contributed to the disfranchisement of even eligible citizens.
The following can be attributed to Deborah J. Vagins, ACLU Legislative Counsel:
“The Democracy Restoration Act is necessary to restore the voting rights of millions of American citizens who have had their right to vote revoked because of a past felony conviction. These citizens work, pay taxes, live in our communities and bring up families, yet they are without a voice.
“Worse still, felony disfranchisement laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era and were intended to bar minorities from voting. To this day, they continue to have a disproportionate impact on minority communities. Moreover, revoking the right to vote for millions of citizens is not only undemocratic, it is counterproductive to the rehabilitation and reintegration into society of those released from prison.”
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Intel is officially launching on Monday its next-generation chip technology, codenamed Ivy Bridge. The new chips will be available for regular laptops and desktops immediately, although versions for the thinner Ultrabook designs will take a few more weeks.
For Intel, Ivy Bridge represents more than just the regular generational shrinking of transistors to increase chip performance. Besides taking the company's chip design to the 22-nanometer level (the distance between individual transistors), the new processors are the first to use a technology called Tri-Gate.
Tri-Gate changes the game somewhat for chip design. While the silicon in computer chips has thus far been designed to be flat, Tri-Gate is the first design to use depth, which is why the design is often referred to as "3D." The design lets the transistor run at lower voltages, which both saves power and improves performance. The video below explains further.
Although Intel has been talking about the tech for about a year, those improvements are finally about to be realized in machines people can actually buy. The initial release of the new designs will revamp Intel's Core i5 and i7 processors, the BBC reports, and it includes 13 separate quad-core processors.
"This is Intel's fastest ramp ever," Intel PC business chief Kirk Skaugen told the BBC. "This is the world's first 22 nanometre product and we'll be delivering about 20% more processor performance using 20% less average power."
Skaugen says Intel's various partners have more than 300 mobile products and 270 desktop designs in the works for Ivy Bridge.
Besides simple raw processing power, the Ivy Bridge chips also have the benefit of an integrated GPU (graphics processing unit). That makes Ivy Bridge machines ideally suited to take on pro-video tasks like editing the new ultra-high-resolution 4K format. For everyday consumers, tasks like compressing videos for email should happen much faster.
Are you planning to buy an Ivy Bridge machine this year? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Community Advisory Groups and Technical Assistance Grants
These are two ways the community can get involved.
Community Advisory Group (CAG)A CAG is a public forum in which all affected and interested residents can have a voice and actively participate in the process. A CAG provides a setting in which community members can get up-to-date information about status of cleanup activities as well as discuss their views and concerns about cleanup progress with EPA, state regulatory agencies and other involved parties.
For more information: If a group of residents is interested in forming a CAG they can contact the Community Involvement Coordinator for the site. They can also visit EPA's CAG Web page.
Technical Assistance Grant (TAG)
Can your community group use money? The TAG program can provide up to $50,000 to eligible community groups to fund activities that will help community members better participate in decisionmaking about the site.
The money can be used to hire technical advisors to help your group intepret and comment on technical documents and for other eligible administrative and educational activities at sites that are proposed or final on EPA's National Priorities List.
Only one TAG may be awarded per site at a time.
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Art and Photo Journals
and Galleries Directory
Dedicated to the Preservation and Restoration of the Whole of Creation
Humans - Animals - Environment
"And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day" (Genesis 1:31)
(Spring Beauty - 14) In this greatly enlarged photo of the center of a spring beauty flower, we did our best to focus upon the anthers at the tip of the stamens, in order to view the pink colored pollen grains. Usually, pollen grains are yellow.
Previous | Spring Beauty or Springbeauties (Claytonia virginica) | Next
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Scores*: 91 percent proficient in math; 85 percent in reading.
The 411: Meredith parents raise lots of money to support the school’s copious visual and performing arts programming, including elaborate winter and spring shows. Reading and writing are huge—all grades use the Reading Workshop approach, where students choose their own books to read and write about, then conference with teachers about them. Ninety-nine percent of eighth-graders advance to Philadelphia’s magnet high schools.
Getting in: Live in the catchment. (Very few kindergarten seats are open to transfers; click here for a map of school boundaries.) Spots open up in fifth grade, when fourth-graders leave for Masterman or GAMP.
Scores**: Average SAT verbal 638, math 652, writing 639 (Class of 2011). Math proficiency*** 100 percent; reading, 98 percent.
The 411: Math-oriented kids study AP Calculus their junior year, then cross the street senior year to take discrete math at Philadelphia Community College. The school’s chess team is nationally ranked, and last year’s senior class boasted 10 National Merit semi-finalists. With more than 40 percent of kids qualifying for reduced or free lunches and 44 percent white students, Masterman is a model of socioeconomic and racial diversity. A strong feeder school to Penn.
Getting in: Most successful applicants have all A’s, and need a minimum of the 88th percentile on the PSSA in reading and math, plus good behavior and attendance. Generally, students enter in fifth or sixth grades; the school seeks out applicants from underrepresented zip codes.
Scores: 71 percent proficient in math; 68 percent in reading.
The 411: The school’s active Home and School Association (HSA) finally has an energetic partner in principal Dan Lazar. The HSA giveth what budget cuts taketh away: In the past few years, this committee of parents has funded books for the library and raised a stunning $750,000 for the Greening Greenfield project (the schoolyard doubles as an outdoor classroom) and $45,000 (plus a matching grant) for auditorium renovations. To replace the slashed art program, accomplished parent/artists are volunteering to supplement the curriculum.
Getting in: Live in the catchment, or apply through the voluntary transfer program. The number of catchment kids is increasing every year, but much of the kindergarten class still comes from outside the catchment. Spots open up in fifth grade, when fourth-graders leave for Masterman or GAMP.
PENN ALEXANDER SCHOOL
Scores: 85 percent proficient in math; 83 percent in reading.
The 411: Family involvement is so valued here that Penn Alexander invites parents to interview candidates for its open teacher slots. Last year, those parents were camping out on one of the coldest nights of the year to sign their kids up for kindergarten. This year, a new enrollment cap will likely have ’em out even earlier. Penn’s partnership with the school translates to a contribution of $1,330 per child per year, used to maintain programs and keep class sizes down to 23 students max.
Getting in: Live in the catchment, and line up early. The 50 kindergarten seats go on a first-come, first-served basis, and grades one through three are at capacity. Spots open up in fifth grade, when fourth-graders leave for Masterman or GAMP.
INDEPENDENCE CHARTER SCHOOL
Scores: 81 percent proficient in math; 74 percent in reading.
The 411: Kids from kindergarten on can apply for the Spanish Immersion Program, where 90 percent of daily interactions are in Spanish. In middle school, everyone takes Arabic. The school’s in-depth cross-learning style, focused on creating global citizens, has fifth-graders studying civil rights in South Africa in social studies and reading Journey to Jo’burg in English class.
Getting in: Admission is by lottery; 2011′s had 350 applicants for 33 open kindergarten seats (and 950 applicants total for K-8). Parents should send an application by February 25th. But take note: Early apps don’t get a leg up.
SCIENCE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY (SLA)
Scores: Average SAT verbal 503, math 493, writing 487 (Class of 2011). Math proficiency 64 percent; reading, 84 percent.
The 411: Every student gets a laptop, to better participate in SLA’s project-based curriculum; ninth- and 10th-graders do mini-courses at the Franklin Institute; and every 10th- and 11th-grader does an Individualized Leaning Project or an internship custom-designed at one of 90 science institutions around the city. SLA has had a Gates Millennium Scholar every year.
Getting in: Everyone who applies interviews. (This year there were 1,000 applicants for 125 ninth-grade seats.) Applicants must answer this question: “Why will SLA be a better school because you’re here?”
MAST (MATHEMATICS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY) COMMUNITY CHARTER SCHOOL
Scores: Average SAT verbal 481, math 483, writing 463. Math proficiency 87 percent; reading, 84 percent.
The 411: A focus on technology translates into more than 1,200 computers in the school, a brand-new 27,000-square-foot information resource center with an HD video studio, and an elementary-school library equipped to project ebooks onto the floor for storytime. First-graders put together PowerPoint presentations, and the high-school engineering class planned the “Fitness Center of the Future” using Google SketchUp and an Auto CAD program called Inventor.
Getting in: By lottery. For 2011, there were 572 applicants for 78 kindergarten seats and 205 for 30 open fifth-grade seats. Don’t land a spot? Try the George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, a magnet high school where students earn college credits for engineering courses.
GIRARD ACADEMIC MUSIC PROGRAM (GAMP)
Scores: Average SAT verbal 469, math 470, writing 473. Math proficiency 94 percent; reading, 97 percent.
The 411: Students take three music-theory classes per week, and choir is a requirement. (Mayor Nutter told the Daily News that GAMP’s choir almost made him cry.) Angelo Milicia, the beloved principal of 16 years, retired in June to save the jobs of two music teachers; assistant principal Jack Carr, a GAMP founder, has taken over.
Getting in: Most students enter in fifth grade. Applicants must have an overall average of B or better on their most recent final report card, 75th percentile or higher in PSSA reading and math, excellent attendance and punctuality, and a demonstrated interest in music. Don’t land a spot? Check out the Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School (grades K-8), where everyone plays the violin through fifth grade and selects an instrumental major in sixth.
Scores: Average SAT verbal 540, math 569, writing 532. Math proficiency 98 percent; reading, 98 percent.
The 411: Central is one of five Philly schools to offer the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, a separate integrated-learning track with college-level courses that encourage international-mindedness. The school’s diversity prompts comparisons to Benetton ads.
Getting in: Central only wants A’s and B’s (at most, they’ll spot you one C) on a student’s seventh-grade report card, and reading and math PSSA scores at or above 88 percent. Don’t land a spot? Check out the Academy at Palumbo, which some consider a mini-Central; its principal was formerly a vice principal at Central. Or try Bodine High School for International Affairs, which was a 2009 National Blue Ribbon School.
PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE CREATIVE AND PERFORMING ARTS
Scores: Average SAT verbal 507, math 460, writing 501. Math proficiency 62 percent; reading, 84 percent.
The 411: Philadelphia’s answer to Fame puts on some seven productions a year, including a spring musical involving more than 200 students. There’s also a concert band, a jazz band, choirs, and plenty of dance performances. And the state-of-the-art neo-Gothic behemoth on Broad Street has a visual-arts gallery and holds an annual Writers’ Cafe. CAPA kids are also academic achievers—their 2009 SAT verbal scores were behind only Masterman and Central. The student body is about half the size of Masterman’s and less than a third that of Central’s.
Getting in: Students need all A’s and B’s, with the possible exception of one C, on the most recent final report card; scores in the 80th percentile or higher in PSSA reading; no negative discipline reports; excellent attendance and punctuality; and a successful audition in their chosen art field. Don’t land a spot? Check out the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush (grades 9-12), which integrates the arts into all of its programs.
Scores: 90 percent proficient in math; 74 percent in reading—though it should be noted that English isn’t the first language for many students, 60 percent of whom come from Chinatown.
The 411: Mandarin Chinese for all grades fell victim to budget cuts for the 2011-’12 school year, but the parents’ association is already working to reinstate the popular program. Principal Carol Domb is skilled at forging partnerships: The Federal Reserve Bank supplies financial literacy classes for first- and second-graders; ACE insurance group funds Arden for All, a theater program for third-through-fifth-graders. Eighty percent of 2011’s eighth-graders are going on to magnet high schools.
Getting in: Live in the catchment. (Only one kindergarten seat went to a transfer this year.) Spots open up in fifth grade, when fourth-graders leave for Masterman or GAMP.
GREEN WOODS CHARTER SCHOOL
Scores: 77 percent proficient in math; 80 percent in reading.
The 411: Educators from New York to Utah have reached out to Green Woods to learn about its EIC (Environment as an Integrating Context) model. The focus on environmental stewardship has kindergartners going on mile-long hikes and fourth-graders following the Delaware River to its estuary to study its ecosystem. Says CEO Jean Wallace, “It’s not for a kid who insists on wearing her red patent-leather shoes.”
Getting in: By lottery. The 2011 lottery had 160 applicants for 11 open kindergarten seats. (The rest of the seats went to siblings.) Don’t land a spot? Try Wissahickon Charter, another in-demand school with an environmental focus; it has Haverford alums as co-CEOs.
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- Population: 28 million (UN, 2005)
- Capital: Lima
- Area: 1.28 million sq km (496,225 sq miles)
- Major languages: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara
- Major religion: Christianity
- Life expectancy: 67 years (men), 72 years (women) (UN)
- Monetary unit: 1 nuevo sol = 100 centimos
Backpacking in Peru
Welcome to Peru – top South American destination for more than one reason. The arcane Nazca Lines have stirred up curiosity and story up in the Andes, but it’s Peru’s historical, natural, and social intricacies and varieties that snag a traveller right from under his or her nose and captivate them for good. No words uttered could describe the unflinching beauty of the Peruvians from the likes of beauty queens, actors, and everyday people you’ll meet on the streets. Beauty could also be seen in its past undertakings, especially pertaining to the origin of its name, which reveals alot as is. “Peru” is derived from Birú, a 16th century ruler from the Bay of San Miguel in Panama.
Peru’s illustriousness based on pre-Columbian cultures and colonial architecture makes the solid landmass seem all to familiar. However, Peru’s wealth is on the mysterious. So much more ancient sites, traditions, and experiences to discover. It is a fun and enigmatic country with a hook for people of all religions (Christians and indigenous), pastimes, and budgets. Like Peruvian saints, Saint Martin de Porres and Saint Rose of Lima, unravel and ravish Peru with a humble resources but without restraint in its dime-a-dozen, natural offerings.
The Republic of Peru (10 00 S, 76 00 W) is a 1,285,216 km2 nation in western South America facing the South Pacific Ocean. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, east by Brazil, west by the Pacific Ocean, and south by Chile. Peru is characterized by a diversity in landforms: coastal plain on the west, high and mountainous Andes in the center, and low jungles on the Amazon Basin. The highest point is the Nevado Huascaran, 6,768 m above sea level. Peru shares control with Bolivia over Lago Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake.
Peru, unlike other equatorial countries, is not exclusively tropical in terms of climate. Peru as three climatic zones: arid coastal desert (west); tropical Amazon jungle (east); and temperate Andean highlands (central). There are two main seasons: wet and dry. On an average of seven years, the El Niño phenomenon, named so – Little Boy after Christ Child – because of its occurence on Christmas thereabouts, is felt in Peru through a manifestation of extreme weather of either heavy rains or drought. Peak tourist season is June to August when the Andean highlands are dry and cool – the ultimate time to trek on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.
Multiethnic Peru has surprisingly maintained a predominantly Amerindian demographic (mostly Quechua and Aymara) that constitutes about 45% of its estimated population. At a number of 29,549,517 (July 2012 est.), Peru is the fourth most populous South American country. Amerindians have long inhabited Peru for a few millennia, until the 16th century – the period of Spanish conquest – which led to a decrease of 5-9 million down to 600,000 people.
The Spanish conquest led to a interracial mixing that resulted to its mestizo demographic of almost 37% of all Peruvians. Chinese and Black communities came to Peru due to the slave trade. There still remains 15 uncontacted indigenous tribes in Peru. Other ethnicities like Europeans and Japanese immigrated to Peru also.
SPANISH is the official language of Peru. As the primary language in Peru, Spanish also is the first language of about 84% of the population aged five and up. Indigenous language remains rich and diverse, that of the 104 listed Peruvian languages (12 extinct languages), more or less 100 are Amerindian languages, including QUECHUA, AYMARA, ASHANINKA, and plenty others. Immigrant languages include CHINESE, while ENGLISH is spoken mostly in touristy places and big cities, otherwise English is uncommon at all.
Spanish occupation instilled stern Christian faith in the Peruvians, and thus, 90% or so adheres to either Roman Catholicism, Evangelical, and other denominations. On the other hand, around 3% confessed to be non-religious.
Just a few countries in the world offer the kind of variety of life Peru does. Peru is but that must-see, must-do sort of place, such as its breathtaking World Heritage Site, the Inca city of Machu Picchu, aloft a mountain peak, northwest of Cusco. No more true has the adage the “it’s the journey, not the destination” been more fitting.
The trek itself on the Inca Trail is one of the most famous mountain treks. But to spare quarrel, the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu are equally awe-inspiring, as is another famous site. Flying over the ancient Nazca Lines is in many people’s Bucket List and other extreme rosters including “Places To See Before You Die” and the sorts.
Lima’s colonial heritage featuring Moorish latticed wooden balconies in a rusting orange hue, loud and energetic main square - Plaza de Armas, and cathedrals and Government Palace filled with details and texture, is a past many would delight looking back to.
Further back in time are ancient marvels like the ruins of Chan Chan of the Chimus nearTrujillo, Kuelap of the Chachapoyas in north Peru, or around Lake Titicaca where ancient civilizations flourished. Be warned of the long bus rides to reach sites like these.
On the other hand, glam and modern Miraflores in Lima is to look forward to. Peru is a developing country – a land abounding of rags to riches stories, and as such, tourism is one of its major industries and source of economy.
Truth be told, Peru has more unimaginable diversity, color, and surprises than a bag of jellybeans, that none can simply Peru as “ruins, rivers, and mountains”. For the “now” backpackers is Máncora in northern Peru and Huanchaco – a surfer and backpacker destination of choice for both party and waves.
Speaking of yummy jellybeans, In shopping precinct Larcomar, Peruvian cuisine, a standard offering as much as the next Peruvian turquoise accessory, fills the air with spices and flavorful aromas. What a uniquely diverse gift Peruvian cuisine is to the world! Peru’s geographic and climatic diversity results to its high biodiversity of plant and animal species.
Ingredient-wise, we’re looking at a country with produce made available year-round through this diversity. So, it’s kinda nice to think a visitor can eat Mazamorra Morada (cooked purple maize and and sweet potato starch jelly).
Rice and meat are Peruvian staples but it depends on where in Peru you are. Potatoes are integral to Peruvian gastronomy, particularly in the sierra, and present in many dishes like Causa relleña (potato cakes with chicken), Pollo a la Brasa (chargrilled chicken) as a side, and many more.
In fact, there are about 2,000 kinds of potatoes here. And mixed with another the hot-and-spicy component of Peruvian cuisine, and you have Papas a la Huancaína, that is boiled sliced potatoes, hard-boiled egg/olives, on lettuce with spicy cheese sauce.
Tamales and ceviche are common noshes, however Salchipapas (sausage and chips) are savory, rich, hearty, and very Peruvian. What Peruvian cuisine is is a smash up of diverse cuisines that developed into a special and ever evolving “platos criollos” or creole dishes, and Lima is an example.
There’s Spanish, Amerindian, African, Asian, Italian, and other European influences. Still expect some cuy (guinea pig) and dishes made from internal organs or spare parts like the anticucho - a spicy, marinated beef heart kabab, and cau-cau, a dish of cow stomach and potatoes in yellow sauce. Don’t forget to make room for sweet and indulgent alfajores and suspiro a la limeña - some of the best desserts in Peru and the world!
Backpacking Addictz is a website set up by backpackers for the use of backpackers. On this site you will find a lot of very valuable backpacking information surrounding different destinations, countries and experiences from people’s different backpacking adventures throughout the world.
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Massive Storm Headed to Bucks and Montgomery
The National Weather Service has issued both a Flash Flood Watch and a Wind Advisory with thunderstorms expected to hit early Thursday morning.
The National Weather Service has issued a special weather statement for Bucks and Montgomery Counties as “prolonged and heavy downpours” as well as thunderstorms are in the forecast through Thursday morning.
The wind advisory and flash flood watch started Wednesday afternoon and lasts until Thursday morning.
The weather service says:
“A slow-moving and potent cold front will tap the Gulf of Mexico and it is forecast to generate rainfall amounts of between 1 and 2½ inches. Locally higher amounts are possible in prolonged and heavy downpours. Moreover, thunderstorms may develop.
Prolonged and heavy downpours would cause flash flooding in some locations. Road flooding is likely. Since the ground is frozen just below the surface and plants are taking in very little water, heavy rainfall will not be absorbed.”
It is expected to be an unseasonably warm day on Thursday, too, into the mid- to high-40s. But it will feel like winter again by Friday and for the weekend when temperatures will once again drop to the freezing mark.
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Moderator: Tibetan Buddhism moderators
waimengwan wrote:Renunciation, how I understand this is we need renunciation then the actions that we do will result in true merit. Without renunciation all actions we do can be either karma or a combination of karma and merits. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Then as a lay person what kind of renunciation can we achieve without becoming a monastic?
dharmagoat wrote:Andrew108 wrote:But what is it exactly?
I have never been too sure about this.
waimengwan wrote:Merit is accrued due to someone engaging in actions with a bodhicitta intention/ non selfish motivation,
Andrew108 wrote:Buddhism presents a very different version of reality than the one we are used to. Merit is the sense of inspiration we take in this unconventional view. It follows that the amount of inspiration we have is an indication of our potential. So merit is both inspiration and potential. The greatest way of gaining merit is to wish more than anything to come into contact with genuine dharma.
Andrew108 wrote:Merit making centred around an egotistical desire to improve ones circumstances or to inflated oneself is worthless.
JKhedrup wrote:With words I am always interested in how the Tibetan gives it, because there can sometimes be several different English translations for the same word. In Tibetan nges par 'byung ba is the word that is often translated into English as renunication. In fact if you break down the world nges par is "definitely" and byung ba is emerge, hence another translation is definite emergence.
To me this carries a connotation of definitely wanting to emerge from, to get out of, that which binds us, and to eventually leave samsara behind.
Andrew108 wrote:In the end renunciation consists of not adding to experiences.
Andrew108 wrote:Conventionally yogis like Milarepa led miserable lives. By modern standards they would be seen as loosers in life and lacking merit.
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Interest in Pope Benedict XVI's last days as leader of the Catholic Church has heightened before his departure, offering a business opportunity in papal-related memorabilia.
But Daniel Wade, editor of Paul Fraser Collectibles in Bristol in the United Kingdom, said only the rarest items will have investment-grade lasting value, despite the fact that Benedict, 85, is the first pope to leave his post in 600 years.
"The most personal items are going to have a decent chance of appreciation in the future," Wade said.
In Photos: Pope Benedict XVI's Resignation
One such item may be Pope Benedict XVI's former 1999 Volkswagen Golf, which is presently being auctioned on eBay for charity. The seller is online casino GoldenPalace.com, which is donating 100 percent of the final sale price to Habitat for Humanity Great Britain. The minimum bid is £3,900 GBP, or about $5,913.
Wade, who is not Catholic, said Paul Fraser Collectibles has had a number of inquiries about one item it is selling related to Pope Benedict -- small pieces of red carpet he walked on when he visited Westminster Cathedral in September 2010, the first official state visit to Britain by a pontiff since the 16th century, when King Henry VIII broke from Rome. The carpet is listed for £49.95 GBP, or about $76.
"If you're Catholic you can enjoy having a piece of carpet that's been walked on by the pope," Wade said.
That Pope Benedict has chosen to resign from his post hasn't cost him any fans, at least according to Ingrid Ardales, who runs Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Bookstore, which sells mostly devotional prayer books in New York's Bronx.
"There's still a lot of support for the pope," Ardales said. "If he made this decision, it may seem like his decision, but it really is guided by God. The church is in God's hands. Even though it may seem like a big disaster, we know God is in control."
The same will be true for the next elected pope, Ardales said.
"There is a ton of support and prayers. We know whoever is elected was chosen to lead the church. This is obviously history in the making," she said.
Still, Ardales said one of her most popular items is the newest edition of the "Catechism of the Catholic Church," an instructional book that was published in 2003 under Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict's predecessor.
"I have to replenish the 'Catechism,'" she said. "It is a hot item."
Also, she said John Paul's autobiography "flew off the shelf."
Wade wonders if sales in general aren't as brisk for Pope Benedict because he may not be as popular as John Paul.
"John Paul was such a popular pope. He was so charismatic. People are still mourning his loss," Wade said.
Billy McMillan in Scotland has seen a slight uptick in interest in mugs he sells on eBay that feature Benedict, related to the papal visit in 2010.
He said he sold close to 50 Benedict mugs at £5.49 or about $8.32 in the past two weeks, most of which were shipped to Canada, the U.S., Australia and Central Europe.
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Boy. Girl. Negro. Colored. Nigg**. Black. African American. We were called all the aforementioned and have answered to most. Some were meant to degrade, dehumanize, marginalize, ostracize. Others were an attempt to reclaim our power, pride, integrity and heritage. Still a few were born out of a sense of confusion and identity crises.
But bottom-line we are Americans, governed under the same Constitution and laws of the land as every other American. Entitled to the same fair and equal treatment. However, lingering bias, prejudice, bigotry, racism lurk in the shadows and are so deep-rooted, they sometimes blend in, camouflaged as justified actions within the arm of the law. But we know injustice when we see it, smell it, taste it, feel it.
An unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain, 28 year old George Zimmerman. All the dead child reportedly had in his pockets were some skittle and a little can of juice as he was gunned down on February 26 just outside the gated community where he lived with his family in Sanford, Florida. Gunned down because he was “Suspicious While Black?”
Folks in the Black communities across America understand what this means, just as they know what WWB and DWB means. Walking while Black and driving while Black are monikers used by melanin-rich folks to describe the profiling, harassment or even worse, that we are subjected to simply because of pre-conceived judgments, blatant bias and sometimes covert racism.
Yes, racism, it still lives here and contrary to some naiveté across the land, a melanin-rich President did not eradicate it all. Intolerance, ignorance and prejudice cannot be legislated away and those with hearts of hate rarely change because of the law. They might just burrow covertly but the insidiousness of racism or bias will raise its ugly head at the slightest opportunity. Hate and fear can be an explosive combination.
Is this what happened here, as someone’s child lays dead? I am the mother of child the same age as Trayvon so I can only imagine the pain consuming his mom, the rest of his family and friends at this time. To add a piercing sword to the already violent emotional wound, the police haven’t arrested Zimmerman.
Why was Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch—not even a cop—authorized to shoot? Why did he find the teen “suspicious?” Does one’s attire, like a hoody, make the teen threatening when he lived in the same gated community? Was it his skin tone or a combination of both?
Zimmerman was, according to several reports, an over-zealous community watch captain, who called police over 46 times in the last 14 month to reports “suspicious people” in the neighborhood. On the night he killed Trayvon, the Miami Herald reports that he called 911 again to complain about a suspicious person he was going to follow. Despite the dispatcher telling him not to do so, he did and moments later the teen lay dead. So what really happened?
Apparently the local police have no desire to find out, for Zimmerman is walking around a free man--their excuse for not taking him into custody--"no evidence that suggest it wasn't self-defense." But this is not a simple case of he said/he said—a child's life was abruptly cut short. How can law enforcement just take the shooter’s word? Who is speaking for Trayvon?
Zimmerman claims the teen attacked him first and scared for his life, he defended himself by fatally shooting him in the chest with his Kel Tel 9mm. Now 7 witnesses say not so-- for they claim to have heard cries for help that night, then seconds after hearing the boom of a gun. One witness 31 year old Mary Cutcher, allegedly said that the cries sounded like a child’s. Click on the link at the end of this article to listen to the 911 tapes and judge for yourselves.
When the gun went off, the cries stopped immediately. She and friends ran outside to find Trayvon lying on the ground with Zimmerman holding him down on the ground. Moreover, Trayvon had no weapon on him. Yes, he was a tall teen, standing at a reported 6 feet 3 inches, but he was only 140 pounds, a lightweight for a male of that height.
The witnesses say they heard no grunts, scuffles or sounds of fighting like Zimmerman claimed happened. Now the 911 tapes have been released and the panicked cries of the witnesses calling for help as well as what appears to be Tayvon’s screaming for someone to help him, can be heard in the background.
It's only March, and the killing of our young men seem to be in full season. In New York, 18 year old Ramarley Graham was shot to death in the bathroom of his apartment by a police officer, while his baby brother and grandma looked on in horror. In New Jersey, 19 year old Malik Williams was shot and killed cowering in a garage, again by police.
Which leads into a bigger, even more sinister scenario, one that we rarely talk about amongst ourselves or hear broadcasted on the evening news. Black genocide, 'States-side.' We hear about Africa's atrocities, horrors in the Middle East, Asia's conflict but not much on Inner City 'Black on Black' crime. Our youths slaughter each other daily and it's like backgound noise in our daily symphony. We are over in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting unending wars yet the war that needs to be fought and won in our own backyards are consciously ignored. Does the minimized value of a Black life play into this glaring gloss-over as well?
A wise man once said, "if the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed.The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
Is this the same society that sent NFL starto jail for cruelty to dogs?
Listen to the 911 tapes here:
Check out my article on the other side of the crime:
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REASON- User- Thread
Posted 11 April 2004 - 05:14 PM
I would like to start a thread for Reason users, where we can share tips and other things.
I'm using the program a lot, but I think, that there are many more hidden, or unknown tricks for best results.
My first question is: How to use the compressor as a hard- limiter. I want to insert the compressor between the mixer and the output- interface, to reduce signals over 0 dB.
I have tried a lot, but still without effect.
Is there anybody, who knows, how to do it?
On demand i`ll put some important links posted in this topic regarding to reason here: If you have more useful links please add em to this topic so i can add em later in this post...
Other Replies To This Topic
Posted 12 April 2004 - 03:37 PM
Simply insert a compressor and move it close to the mixer. Hit the TAB key to flip to the back panels. Take the master out of the mixing board and tie it to the LR in of the compressor. Tie the LR out of the compressor to the audio output interface.
Unfortunately this method gives you no control over the wet/dry signal ratio. Your best bet would be to create yet another mixing board and tie the input from your other mixing board to a channel on the new mixing board, then insert the compressor as on an FX channel, then you can modify the wet/dry signal ratio by adjusting the FX level.
I would use a method similar to this to master my drum tracks better, as well as isolating frequency bands.
But if you are just running your output really hot (at 0dB), then you should really be turning things down and pumping up the volume outside of Reason. Running the output hot on Reason can produce some really crappy sounding music.
Posted 12 April 2004 - 06:27 PM
and as for what todd said about wet/ dry signals... you don't need to separate the wet/ dry signals with this kind of processing... a compressor is a series processor, meant to affect the entire signal... you don't want to have wet/ dry controll over it.... it's meant to controll dynamic range of a signal, it doesn't really alter the tonal quality very much.. it just controlls amplitude...
it's much more involved than i'v stated here, but i'm too lazy to go into a huge explanation right now...
Posted 15 April 2004 - 12:00 PM
Or well something like this: Output Interface - Comp - Filter - EQ - Main mixer - 2 Mixers (One With Regate effect, check Kurt Kurasaki's a.k.a. Peff site for this nice effect) and the other mixer where I do the normal stuff. When adding more synths or whatever than the "other mixer" can handle (cuz of the available channels) I connect a new mixer to my Main mixer. :)/> Pretty complicated but quite simple... ummmm :D/>
btw xtra edit: sometimes I don't use the main comp, eq or filter... or even the regate for that matter... but it's nice to have them ready for use if needed.
Posted 19 April 2004 - 06:26 AM
i love the way these two progams work together.. so f***ing powerful
Posted 19 April 2004 - 03:00 PM
1st. - how to simulate a record slowing down, or tempo change in a allowed amount of time. (say i want the tempo to change from 140 to 125 within 4 bars ) i've heard there is a way to do this inside of reason but i may be wrong
and 2nd. - how to get those intense treble filters. not filtering it into the bass and 'hiding' it so to say, but raising everything to the treble side of the spectrum. i'll try and get a audio clip when i get to a better computer.
so i've just read about how to do my second question in 2.5 with a vocador or something, but how about 2.0?
Posted 20 April 2004 - 03:20 PM
If you want to change the tempo without the pitch being altered you should consider using Acid Pro. I use Reason and Cubase till I’m (partially) done with (most of) my track. I export each track as an audiofile to Acid so I can change some last stuff b4 my track is done. Sometimes my track is as good as done before exporting the whole shit to acid, but I’m kinda used to doing this and even then I always find/think off things I can adjust/change/add in Acid. Pretty usefull application and easy to use.
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See everything, hear everything
Watch 60 films, 170 excerpts and over 80 archival artefacts selected by NFB specialists as part of this unique project.
Several Canadians of Italian descent discuss their trouble integrating into Canada and Québec. One of them, Marco Micone, is a separatist playwright and journalist who does not feel accepted as a Québécois. He says that multiculturalism is considered in Québec to be a federal strategy for diminishing the singular importance of francophone Québécois culture. He says the term "Interculturalisme" is preferred by Québec francophones.
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An addition that would almost double the center's size is an explicit endorsement of its long-term economic prospects.
The Lee County Board of Supervisors and the private-sector Community Development Foundation announced jointly on Tuesday that they will seek $2.7 million from the federal Economic Development Administration for half the cost of a planned $5.4 million expansion.
The IDEAs center campus occupies the corner of Main and Elizabeth streets.
CDF and the county's governing board have had a productive business relationship that has successfully built industrial parks, the IDEAs center's first phase, and many other jobs-producing projects.
The public-private partnership not only combines resources at the beginning of the project, it provides valuable linkage to continuing government promotion of private-sector jobs, which some clients of the IDEAs center may seek as they grow and move into permanent locations.
The center, which has been cited for its innovation and technology, is more than a space; it is a state-of-the-art business environment.
The Renasant Center emphasizes entrepreneurial businesses, a sector that has been the backbone of the Northeast Mississippi economy for decades. Its seeks to:
- Create jobs and wealth;
- Nurture an entrepreneurial climate;
- Spread the use of technology;
- Diversify the local and regional economy;
- Create and retain businesses;
- Encourage women or minority entrepreneurship;
- Identify spin-in or spin-out business possibilities; and,
- Contribute to community revitalization.
The IDEAs center, like more than 20 percent of similar programs nationwide, has direct ties to government (the Lee County board), and it is a creation of an economic development organization (CDF).
In the process of building and development, a consortium of much broader partners develops, including, for the Renasant center, TVA, existing private businesses, and the state. All the backers add strength because their goal is success in the use of their investment.
The IDEAs center's highest-profile client was Toyota, which is neither entrepreneurial nor start-up, but its leasing of space was an endorsement of the facility. The Toyota work force has moved to the assembly plant site at Blue Springs, where planning continues for production of some kind of Toyota vehicle.
An expanded IDEAs center will become an even stronger magnet for developing prosperity.
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- Policy Resources
- News & Analysis
- Your State
Matt Singer on February 8, 2006 - 6:03pm
President Bush's Mythical Budget Leaves the States Holding the Bag FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 02/08/2006 The Bush Administration's budget proposal is chock full of bad ideas, wildly irresponsible, and opposed by members of both parties. It's also got more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese. The fifty states are being left to fill in the holes. The Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN), a national organization representing state legislators fighting for working families, offers the following round-up of what they're saying and what you need to know:
- Fiction. The President Prioritizes National Security in This Budget. President Bush claims that in writing the budget "his priorities were 'protecting our citizens and our homeland'" [New York Times, 2/7/06].
- Fact. Funding for First Responders is Cut. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME): "But the President's homeland security budget is not all good news. It cuts grants to states and local governments, to police, firefighters, and other first responders. These are grants that help train and equip our first responders, including providing them with interoperable telecommunications equipment, which we have seen time and again--including in our Hurricane Katrina investigation-- is essential to respond effectively to catastrophes" [Sen. Collins, 2/6/2006] Fact. The Budget Ignores the Pentagon's Recommendations. The President's budget spends huge sums on costly weapons system better suited for fighting the Cold War while ignoring the needs of the War on Terror according to the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review. [Knight Ridder Newspapers, 2/6/2006]
- Fiction. President Bush Has Stepped Up Border Protection.
- Fact. Bush is Refusing to Work With Border States on Immigration. Under Bush's proposal, no money would be given to states to reimburse costs of holding illegal immigrants, a job that should be the responsibility of the federal government [LA Times, 2/7/06]
- Fiction. The President is Prioritizing Math and Science Education. In the State of the Union, President Bush announced the "American Competitiveness Initiative -- to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science" [President George Bush, 2006].
- Fact. The President is Actually Cutting Education Funding. Despite marginal increases in one area, the President cuts education funding overall. The President's proposed cuts include literacy and student loan programs. Additionally, the newest budget would increase the margin by which the federal government is failing to fully fund No Child Left Behind [Stateline.org, 2/7/2006]. The President has pledged to prepare more students for college but deny those very students the means to attend.
- Fiction. The President Supports Vocational Education. "I propose increasing our support for America's fine community colleges, so they can -- I do so, so they can train workers for industries that are creating the most new jobs" [President Bush's 2004 State of the Union].
- Fact. The President's Budget Proposes Cuts to Vocational Schools. Bush's proposed budget would cut "state grants for vocational education" [Stateline.org, 2/7/06].
- Fiction. President Bush is Committed to Weaning the United States Off Its Oil Addiction. "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology" [The President's 2006 State of the Union].
- Fact. The President's Budget Cuts Funding to States to Improve Energy Efficiency. President Bush's budget cuts state grants to improve energy efficiency of low-income households by almost one-third [Stateline.org, 2/7/06]. Fact. The President is Actually Cutting Some Renewable Energy Research. Hydropower and geothermal energy lose $24 million in funding while other renewables programs gain only roughly $130 million in new funding [Stateline.org, 2/7/06]. The net effect of efficiency and research cuts and the research increases is a virtual freeze in the energy innovation budget. Fact. President Bush's Top Energy Advisors Already Promised He Was Lying About Alternative Energy. "One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally" [Knight Ridder Newspapers, 2/1/06]
- Fiction. This Budget is Fiscally Responsible. The Bush Administration is cutting billions in popular domestic programs and using those cuts to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility.
- Fact. Bush's Tax Cut Explodes the Deficit. President Bush is calling for making permanent the tax cuts passed previously by Congress. Of course, these tax cuts only got passed in the first place by playing number games that included their eventual phasing out [Hacker and Pierson, 2005]. Why? Because they aren't affordable. While President Bush's budget calls for cutting expenditures by $187 billion over five years, it calls for $285 billion in tax cuts during the same period. Even worse, in the next five year period, an additional $1.4 trillion in tax revenue is lost [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2/6/2006]. Fact. The Budget Cuts are Smoke and Mirrors. Many of the President's proposed cuts have already been rejected once by the Congress and will likely be rejected again since members of the President's party are also speaking out against them [Stateline.org, 2/7/2006; New York Times, 2/7/2006; Los Angeles Times, 2/7/2006; Senator Norm Coleman, 2/6/2006]. Additionally, Goldman Sachs is saying the numbers are simply unrealistic [Washington Post, 2/7/2006] Fact. The President Still Isn't Coming to Grips With the Full Cost of War. The President's budget numbers significantly lowball the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [Washington Post, 2/7/2006]
- Fiction. The Federal Government Took Care of States in the Past. Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, claims that the federal government can no longer help states the way it did earlier in the Bush Administration [Stateline.org, 2/7/06].
- Fact. The Federal Government's Assistance to States has Declined for Years. This budget continues a six-year trend of declining budget support for states according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. [Stateline.org, 2/7/06]. Fact. The Federal Government Will Be Unable to Assist States in the Future if Bush's Budget is Adopted. Unlike the federal government, states cannot have budget deficits. When the next downswing in state budgets occurs, the federal government will be too debt-ridden from Bush's budget proposals to assist, leaving only deeper cuts as the only option.
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US 4369148 A
An supplantary reservoir supplants the original integral reservoir of an evaporative cooler eliminating the necessity for accumulating water in said original integral reservoir. The water circulating pump and float controlled valve of the original, conventional cooler may be transferred physically and functionally to the supplantary reservoir. Communication of water from the conventional cooler to and from the supplantary reservoir is by means of the drain opening in the base of the original integral reservoir. The supplantary reservoir is readily accessible providing easy maintenance thereof and inexpensive replacement if necessary.
1. In an evaporative cooler having means for passing air past and through evaporative cooling pads which pads are maintained saturated with water drawn by water circulating means from a reservoir forming part of the base of said cooler said water being maintained within said reservoir by a float controlled valve coupling a source of water to said reservoir said reservoir being further provided with means for draining water from the base of said reservoir when desired to do so, the improvement comprising:
a supplantary water retention vessel external to said evaporative cooler supplanting said reservoir and coupled thereto by said means for draining water from the base of said reservoir to preclude the accumulation and storage of water within said reservoir.
2. The improvement of claim 1 further comprising means for coupling said supplantary water retention vessel to a source of water.
3. The improvement of claim 2 wherein said means for coupling said supplantary water retention vessel to a source of water comprises a float controlled valve.
4. The improvement of claim 3 wherein said float controlled valve comprises that float controlled valve originally used to maintain water within said reservoir.
5. The improvement of claim 4 further comprising water circulating means for drawing water from said supplantary water retention vessel and coupling same to said evaporative cooling pads to maintain said pads saturated with water.
6. The improvement of claim 5 wherein said water circulating means comprises that water circulating means originally used to draw water from said reservoir to saturate said pads.
7. The improvement of claim 1 further comprising means for supporting said supplantary water retention vessel external to said cooler.
8. The improvement of claim 7 wherein said evaporative cooler further comprises means for mounting said cooler above a stable base and said means for supporting said supplantary water retention vessel external to said cooler comprises vessel support means coupled to said cooler mounting means.
9. The improvement of claim 8 wherein said means for mounting said cooler above a stable base comprises means for mounting said cooler above a sloping roof and said vessel support means comprises a support shelf coupled interior of said means for mounting said cooler above a sloping roof.
10. The improvement of claim 9 further comprising exterior access means to said vessel when said vessel is supported on said shelf interior of said means for mounting said cooler above a sloping roof.
A conventional evaporative cooler 10 is illustrated in a partial sectional perspective view in FIG. 1. The conventional cooler 10 comprises a fan housing 11 which houses a fan employed to draw air through evaporative cooling pads 12. Evaporative cooling pads 12 are maintained saturated with water drawn from a reservoir 13 which is integral with the base of cooler 10. The water level within reservoir 13 is maintained by float control valve 14 which couples the reservoir to a source of water, not shown. A water circulating pump 15 draws water from reservoir 13 and passes it through hose 16 to the top of evaporative cooler pads 12 in conventional manner well known to those skilled in the art.
As is typical, an overflow pipe 17 fitted to a threaded drain 171 in the base of reservoir 13 is provided to draw off excess water from reservoir 13 should float controlled valve 14 malfunction.
In the embodiment of FIG. 1, cooler 10 is shown mounted to support 19 which provides a horizontal mounting platform 191 for supporting cooler 10 above the stable base provided by sloping roof 18. While those skilled in the art will be familiar with mounting bases configured such as that of base 19 illustrated in FIG. 1, base 19 is here modified by providing an opening 20 in vertical face 192 of base 19. Opening 20 provides access to a horizontal shelf 21 coupled interior of base 19.
Shelf 21 provides support for an auxiliary water retention vessel 22 which, in accordance with the teachings herein, will supplant reservoir 13 of conventional cooler 10. Further modification in support base 19 is made by the provision of access openings 141 and 173 whose purpose will be disclosed in the discussion which follows.
In practicing the invention, it is desired to supplant the reservoir 13 of conventional cooler 10 with an auxiliary reservoir provided by water retention vessel 22. In this manner water will no longer accumulate within reservoir 13. Salt deposit buildups within reservoir 13 will thus be minimized. Water retention vessel 22 in an inexpensive, easily replaced auxiliary reservoir which is employed as follows.
Water circulating pump is removed from conventional cooler 10 and emplaced within the auxiliary reservoir 22. Hose 16, utilized for circulating water to the top of evaporative cooler pads 12 for purposes of saturating said pads is fed through drain hole 171 after overflow pipe 17 is removed.
In a similar fashion float controlled valve 14 is removed from cooler 10 and installed in auxiliary reservoir 22 as illustrated in FIG. 1. Drain hole 172 is provided to draw off water from auxiliary reservoir 22 should float control valve 14 malfunction. In practice, drain opening 172 would be provided with a hose coupling to permit the overflow water to be directed outward from vessel 22 to a proper drain site. Access openings 141 and 173 in the side wall of base mount 19 provide access to float control valve 14 and overflow opening 172 respectively.
When auxiliary water retention vessel 22 is placed on support shelf 21 with water circulating pump 15 and float control valve 14 emplaced as indicated in FIG. 1, water will be circulated upwards through hose 16 which, as already noted, passes through drain 171 in the base of reservoir 13 and conveys circulating water to the top of evaporative cooling pads 12 to maintain them in a saturated condition. Water returning to the base of pads 12 flows across the base of reservoir 13 and enters drain hole 171 from whence it passes into auxiliary water retention vessel 22.
Water circulating pump 15 maintains the water in auxiliary reservoir 22 in circulation while float control valve 14 maintains the water level within auxiliary reservoir 22.
To remove auxiliary reservoir from support base 19, the couplings between the water source and float control valve 14 are disconnected and, similarly, the hose connections between the drainage hose, not shown, and overflow drain 172 are uncoupled. Auxiliary reservoir 22 may then be readily drawn from the interior of base 19 where it had been supported upon shelf 21. A first partial withdrawing of auxiliary reservoir 22 will permit circulating pump 15 to be lifted from the auxiliary reservoir. Auxiliary reservoir 22 may then be removed for cleaning or total replacement if necessary. Cleaning of the auxiliary reservoir 22 is accomplished in an easier manner than would be required if necessary to gain access to reservoir 13 of cooler 10. Should auxiliary reservoir 22 suffer damaging effects from corrosion it may readily and inexpensively be replaced.
While auxiliary reservoir 22 is in position beneath cooler 10 and supported on shelf 21 within base 19, access to the auxiliary reservoir 22 is denied by cover plate 23 which is fastened to face 192 of mounting base 19 in any convenient, well known manner.
Frequently an enclosed base 24 of FIG. 2 will be provided for supporting cooler 10 above a horizontal stable base such as a flat roof or a concrete pad at ground level. Again such mounting bases as that of 24 are well known to those skilled in the art and they provide a horizontal platform 191 for the support of cooler 10. In practicing the invention, base 24 would be modified in a similar fashion as was base 19. A horizontal shelf 21 is provided interior to base 24. Access to shelf 21 is provided through opening 20 with such access being denied when desired by the emplacement of cover plate 23 over opening 20. Auxiliary reservoir 22 is mounted to shelf 21 of base 24 in the manner already described with respect to base 19.
Occasionally, instead of a mounting base 24, four legs 25 are provided at each corner of cooler 10. Each of legs 25 provide a horizontal support surface 191 to support cooler 10. For use of the invention, an enclosure 27 is emplaced within the confines of legs 25 so as to be located exterior to and beneath cooler 10. An opening 26 aligns with drain 171 in the base of reservoir 13 of cooler 10 and permits the flow of water through drain 171 to pass into auxiliary reservoir 22 which will be supported within enclosure 27. As already set forth in the other embodiments access to the auxiliary reservoir 22 within enclosure 27 will be through access opening 20. Again such access will be denied by emplacement of cover plate 23 over access opening 20. As would be expected, hose 16 is passed through opening 26 and thence through drain 171 in passing from circulating pump 15 to cooler 10 when the auxiliary reservoir is emplaced within enclosure 27 of FIG. 3.
What has been disclosed is a supplantary reservoir for use with a conventional evaporative cooler. The supplantary reservoir supplants the reservoir which is integral with the conventional cooler and provides a readily accessible, easily maintained, and inexpensively replaced water retention vessel which supplants the reservoir within the conventional cooler and eliminates the necessity for the accumulation of water within said conventional, integral reservoir. The supplantary reservoir is coupled to the conventional cooler by means of the drain in the base of the reservoir of the cooler. The original circulating pump and float control valve of the conventional cooler may be removed therefrom and employed within the supplantary reservoir. The hose used for saturating the evaporative cooling pads is passed from the circulating pump within the supplantary reservoir through the drain in the base of the original integral reservoir of cooler 10.
While those skilled in the art will conceive of other embodiments of the invention drawn from the teachings herein it is intended that all such embodiments so drawn shall fall within the ambit of protection of the appended claims.
FIG. 1 is an exploded perspective view of the invention in an embodiment associated with a conventional evaporative cooler which is mounted on a sloping roof.
FIG. 2 is a perspective view of the mounting base employed with a conventional evaporative cooler showing the modifications to be made to that base to permit it to support the auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel of the invention.
FIG. 3 illustrates four legs used to support a conventional evaporative cooler above a stable base and indicates the means whereby an auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel may be supported beneath, and exterior to, a conventional evaporative cooler.
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to improvements in the field of evaporative coolers.
The invention particularly relates to the field of reduction of hard water deposits and their corrosive effects in the reservoir of a conventional evaporative cooler.
The invention specifically relates to the use of an auxiliary reservoir to supplant the existing reservoir of a conventional evaporative cooler.
2. Prior Art
Evaporative coolers are an important means of cooling residences and other buildings in the arid southwestern portion of the country. This region, extending from the deserts of California to those of Texas, is a region of high temperature and low relative humidity. It is the low relative humidity which makes it feasible to cool buildings by the use of evaporative coolers. Air is forced past and through a water saturated pad. In its passage it causes the evaporation of water from this pad which reduces the temperature of the air. This cooled, moisture laden air is then passed to the interior of the building to both cool the building and raise the relative humidity therein.
In maintaining the evaporative cooling pads saturated with water, the usual procedure is to provide a water reservoir in the base of the cooler and to pump water from the reservoir to the top of the evaporative pads. The water is distributed to the top of the pad and is dispersed downward therethrough under the influence of gravity. Excess water exiting from the base of the pad returns to the reservoir.
Because water is constantly being evaporated as air is forced past and through the evaporative cooler pads, a replenishment water supply is required. This is generally achieved by connecting a float control valve to a water supply. The float control valve monitors the level of water within the reservoir. When the water level is lowered due to the evaporative action of the cooler, the float valve is operative to permit water from the water supply to enter into the reservoir thereby replenishing the water and once more raising the float valve to the level at which the valve inhibits entry of additional water.
With the constant evaporation required for proper cooling effect, the water reservoir soon becomes saturated with salts dissolved within the incoming water. These residues soon appear and form a slime at the base of the reservoir. The reservoir and other parts of the cooler require regular cleaning if the implacable progress which this slime makes in advancing up the walls and to the outside of the cooler surfaces is to be prevented. Those skilled in the prior art have attempted to ease the burden on the person performing the maintenance on the evaporative coolers. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,290,020 issued to Findley Dec. 6, 1966, luggage-type latches are employed to permit the ready disassembly of the evaporative cooler enclosure to permit ready access to the interior of the cooler and the reservoir therein. This somewhat relieves the burden of cleaning and painting this interior.
Mackay et al, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,234,526 issued Nov. 18, 1980 also employs a quick-release latching mechanism in an evaporative cooler having a one-piece, frameless shell secured to a bottom pan and a top cover. The top cover was readily opened to permit easy access to the components of the evaporative cooler housed within the frame.
While inventions such as these noted above permit a ready access into the evaporative cooler enclosure, the task still remains of removing the water salts from the base of the reservoir. Lack of care on at least an annual basis can result in the corrosive failure of the reservoir in four to five cooling seasons.
It is an objective of the present invention to reduce the buildup of corrosive salts within the reservoir of a conventional evaporative cooler device.
It is a further object of the invention to simply and readily modify existing conventional coolers such that the base of these conventional coolers no longer serve as a reservoir of water to be used for circulating to the evaporative cooling pads.
It is a specific objective of the invention to provide a readily removable, easily replaceable auxiliary reservoir which supplants the original reservoir provided with the conventional evaporative cooler device.
The invention is an improvement to a conventional evaporative cooler. The conventional evaporative cooler provides means for passing air past and through evaporative cooling pads which pads are maintained saturated with water drawn by water circulating means from a reservoir which forms part of the base of said cooler. The water within the reservoir is maintained by a float controlled valve which couples a source of water to the reservoir. Means are also provided to the reservoir for draining water therefrom when it is desired to do so. The improvement of the invention comprises an auxiliary water retention vessel external to the evaporative cooler supplanting the reservoir and coupled thereto by the means for draining water from said reservoir.
The improvement further comprises means for supporting the auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel external to said cooler.
As is usual, the conventional evaporative cooler further comprises means for mounting the cooler above a stable base. In the improvement of the invention the means for supporting the auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel external to the cooler comprises vessel support means which are coupled to said cooler mounting means. Frequently the cooler mounting means for the conventional evaporative cooler is configured to mount the cooler above the sloping roof of a residence or other building. In such instance the vessel support means comprises a support shelf which is coupled interior to the means for mounting the cooler above the sloping shelf. So too, where means are provided for mounting the cooler above a level surface, similar means are provided for supporting the vessel therein.
With the improvement of the auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel, means for coupling said vessel to a source of water are also provided. In the embodiment disclosed this coupling means comprises a float controlled valve. Ideally, that float control valve comprises the same float control valve originally used to maintain water within the reservoir of the conventional evaporative cooler.
Water circulating means for drawing water from the auxiliary supplantary water retention vessel and coupling that water to the evaporative cooling pads to maintain the pads saturated with water are also provided. In the embodiment preferred this water circulating means comprises the same water circulating means originally used to draw water from the reservoir of the original conventional evaporative cooler to saturate the evaporative pads therein.
Citas de patentes
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Chemical Composition: Na8
Specific Gravity: 2.4-2.9
Refractive index: ~1.50
Double Refraction: none
Lapis-lazuli, also called lapis or lazurite, is not your normal type of gemstone. It is not pure like a diamond, ruby or sapphire. Lapis-lazuli is a compound consisting of various minerals, such as augite, calcite, diopside, mica, haüynite, hornblende and pyrite, just to name a few. The stone's coloration varies from dark blue to a lighter shade of blue. Because of the shuffle of ingredients found within Lapis-lazuli sometimes green coloration comes out and very rarely will a lapis-lazuli stone be completely green. Because of the pyrite, fool's gold, lapis-lazuli looks like the night sky, with the specks of gold relating to the stars. The color of the stone is very opaque, only really thin cut sections of the stone are translucent. Because of this opaqueness, lapis-lazuli is cut differently than other stones. Diamonds are cut with many facets because of their brilliance. This allows the light to be caught and bounce around inside the stone before exiting. This doesn't happen with lapis-lazuli. It is rare for a lapis-lazuli to be cut with facets as they won't be seen very well, and won't create a brilliant effect like with the diamond. Instead, Lapis-lazuli are cut on either curves or planes, meaning beads or flat and round, like a good skipping stone. However, lapis-lazuli can be used for carving, as a lapis-lazuli buddha statuette has been found in Afghanistan.
Lapis-lazuli is a rare stone, with only three main veins around the world. One of the oldest is found near the source of the Amu-Darja river in the Badakshan region of Afghanistan. The mining process in that vein is very similar to how it was thousands of years ago. Another strong vein is found on the western end of Lake Baikal in Siberia. It is also found in three nearby rivers, the Talaya, Malaya Bistraya and Sludianka. However, these deposits in Russia are considered to be of lower quality to those in Afghanistan. The Siberian lapis-lazuli tends to have less flakes of pyrite, and also a red/violet core. The last major vein, considered to be of even lower quality than the vein near Lake Baikal is the one found in the Chilean Andes Mountains. The vein is located near the sources of the Cazadores and Vias rivers, two small tributaries of the Rio Grande. Here the stone appears in beds of white and grey limestone. The lapis-lazuli found in Chile usually has a greener tint than other sources, and the stones are often marred by the strong presence of calcite, creating white patches in the stone. The Chilean lapis-lazuli also has a lighter color than its asiatic brethren. Lapis-lazuli has also been found at Mount Summa, the crater of mount Vesuvius, as well as the island of Burma.
Lapis-lazuli has had many uses over the years. A powder was made from grinding up chunks of lapis-lazuli and worked into a paint to create the color ultramarine. Nowadays, ultramarine is easily created artificially, at a much cheaper cost. Both the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and the Castle of Tsarkoe-Selo contain rooms which use lapis-lazuli as a trim. This was pure luxury and a sign of the tsar's wealth, akin to having a golden toilet seat. Lapis-lazuli was also used in jewelry as brooches, rings and amulets.
However, it might have been the ancient Egyptians who had the most interesting uses for the gemstone. Papyrus 3027, an ancient text, from the 15th century and currently residing in the Berlin Museum, spoke of a necklace made of lapis-lazuli, malachite, and jasper beads. The necklace was worn by a sick child and a chant was sung, warding off the disease. In a text from a century before, the Ebers Papyrus, a cure for cataracts is discussed. Ground lapis-lazuli is added to a mixture of milk, verdigras salve, tabasheer, stibium and "Alligator-earth", which was translated as the slime of the Nile. How this odd concoction adds to one's health, let alone cures cataracts, is beyond me. According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapter 26 of the book was supposed to be read or inscribed onto a figure of lapis-lazuli.
The largest "find" of lapis-lazuli belongs to Senor Emilio Montes. Montes discovered a block, 24x14x9 inches in measurement and weighing 312 pounds inside an Incan tomb. The block is complete, save for chipping occuring in one of the corners. Lapis-lazuli was believed to have helped the dead reach their final destination, heaven. This was due to the celestial nature of the chiny pyrite on the dark blue background. The block resides in the Field Museum of Natural history in Chicago.
I use Lapis-lazuli instead of lapis lazuli because all the sources below used that spelling save the most recent one.
I have no idea about this whole Armenian Stone thing. According to Webby, "Armenian stone. (a) The commercial name of lapis lazuli.", however none of my sources use the phrase Amenian Stone. A google search produced several sites such as www.cst.cmich.edu/users/dietr1rv/lapis.htm and www.thaigem.com/dis_lapis.php. Neither of these sites say anything about the stone coming from Armenia, just that it's called the Armenian Stone. I guess it's just another name for the stone, even though there's no lapis-lazuli located in Armenia, hopefully, this is clearer now. Thanks to RoguePoet and panamaus for their help with this.
Precious Stones, by Dr. Max Bauer. Charles E. Tuttle Company: Rutland Vermont and Tokyo, Japan, 1969
Gemstones of the World, by Walter Schumann. Sterling Publishing Co., New York, 1979
Simon and Schuster's guide to Rocks and Minerals, Simon and Schuster Inc. New York, 1978
The Magic of Jewels and Charms, Dr. George Frederick Kunz. J.B. Lippincott company, Philadelphia and London, 1915
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UNECE Regional Sustainable Development Meeting Focuses on Sustainable Transport, Consumption and Production
11 December 2009: The "Weekly" bulletin of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) for 14-18 December 2009 reports on the UNECE fourth Regional Implementation Meeting on Sustainable Development, held on 1-2 December 2009, in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting addressed sustainable transport, production and consumption, among other issues.
Taking into account the contribution of unsustainable transport, production and consumption to climate change, the meeting agreed on the need to: avoid transport where possible; shift to cleaner transport modes; and provide a balanced mix of instruments and incentives for sustainable production and consumption. Key sectors for sustainable consumption and production were identified, namely housing and construction, waste management, cities and tourism. The meeting's key messages and policy recommendations will be submitted to the 18th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD 18), scheduled to take place from 3-14 May 2010, in New York, US.[UNECE "Weekly"][Meeting Website]
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Brookwood is a town in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, United States. As of the 2000 census, the population of the town is 1,483. It is part of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama Metropolitan Statistical Area.
As of the census of 2000, there were 1,483 people, 553 households, and 430 families residing in the town. Thepopulation density was 182.3 people per square mile (70.4/km2). There were 613 housing units at an average density of 75.4 per square mile (29.1/km2). The racial makeup of the town was 97.91% White, 0.54% Black or African American, 0.07% Native American, 0.13% Asian, 0.20% from other races, and 1.15% from two or more races. 0.34% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 553 households out of which 42.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 63.3% weremarried couples living together, 9.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 22.2% were non-families. 19.2% of all households were made up of individuals and 6.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.68 and the average family size was 3.07.
In the town the population was spread out with 28.9% under the age of 18, 8.7% from 18 to 24, 33.1% from 25 to 44, 21.8% from 45 to 64, and 7.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females there were 99.1 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 96.5 males.
The median income for a household in the town was $40,104, and the median income for a family was $46,071. Males had a median income of $38,929 versus $23,571 for females. The per capita income for the town was $18,670. About 6.2% of families and 8.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 10.1% of those under age 18 and 5.4% of those age 65 or over.
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Universities Help with Census
Because the U.S. Census Bureau tracks students where they attend college, regardless of permanent address, local census workers are relying heavily on university housing staffs and campus directory information to ensure an accurate 2010 count.
NMU will begin the process on April 1 by providing a census worker with the names and addresses of students living in the residence halls. Universities can release such directory information without consent unless a student has opted out of its disclosure. The worker will return later and provide housing staff with personally addressed envelopes containing the one-page census form to be completed by each student.
“We will piggyback the distribution of the census surveys with our mandatory house meetings that were previously scheduled for the first week of April to cover end-of-the-year checkout procedures,” said Jeff Korpi (Housing and Residence Life). “Our staff will hand out the envelopes, emphasize the importance of filling them out and encourage them to complete them at the meeting so they can return it to the staff and not have to worry about remembering to do it later.”
Each resident adviser will follow up with students who miss the meetings to distribute remaining envelopes. NMU will collect all of the surveys and turn them over to the census worker. After determining which students are unaccounted for, NMU will either make another effort to contact them or provide the minimum information requested on the census survey, as permitted by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The survey period runs from April 1 through May 14, but NMU will complete its obligations before the end of the semester.
Traditional door-to-door survey methods will be used for off-campus students. Arrangements for counting students in the campus apartments are still being finalized.
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Forest Conversion Programme
Africa/Madagascar > West Africa > Ghana
Africa/Madagascar > West Africa > Nigeria
Asia/Pacific > Pacific Ocean > Papua New Guinea
Asia/Pacific > Southeast Asia > Indonesia
Asia/Pacific > Southeast Asia > Malaysia
Latin America/Caribbean > South America > Argentina
Latin America/Caribbean > South America > Brazil
Latin America/Caribbean > South America > Colombia
Latin America/Caribbean > South America > Ecuador
Latin America/Caribbean > South America > Paraguay
The Forest Conversion Initiative (FCI) was conceived in 2001 with the goal of reducing conversion of high conservation value forests (HCVFs) and other non-forest areas to palm oil plantations and soy fields in key ecoregions. In order to achieve this objective the FCI employed a number of instruments to engage with relevant stakeholders along the supply chain. The approach which has been most effective so far and which integrates various instruments such as better management practices (BMPs), participatory land-use planning or investment screens have been the initiation of 2 multi-stakeholder roundtables, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Roundtable for Responsible Soy (RTRS). The rationale behind the roundtables is that development of criteria, their implementation and the mainstream procurement of responsibly/sustainably produced raw materials will transform the markets and thus reduce the pressure on areas with high conservation values.
The Forest Conversion Programme (FCP) builds on the Forest Conversion Initiative. It will have the same goal, namely to ensure that HCVFs and habitats of key species in focal ecoregions are no longer threatened by the expansion of palm oil and soy.
The FCP’s vision is that RSPO and RTRS will transform the production of palm oil and soy by engaging companies that produce, trade or use products containing palm oil and soy, and the banks and other institutions that finance those companies. Concurrently policy dialogues in producing countries will lead to the adoption of a participatory landscape-level land use planning methodology modelled after the high conservation value area (HCVA) concept.
The FCP encompasses the major regions where palm oil and soy are produced and consumed. The project aims to generate a growing demand for sustainably produced commodities in Europe, China and India, that will motivate producers to adopt environmentally and socially responsible practices, including the protection of areas with high conservation value. This strategy will be reinforced by local support in key producing areas aimed at testing and implementing appropriate better management practices and participatory land use planning (HCV methodology).
Over the last 2 decades of the 20th century, deforestation in tropical forests was 10-16 million ha per annum, and this rate is showing no signs of slowing down. The causes are complex and often interrelated. Among them is the role of plantation agriculture. In the next 25 years, 250-300 million ha of tropical forest are likely to be converted into agricultural land where high conservation value forests (HCVFs) and valuable forest landscapes will be lost or degraded. Particularly in danger are tropical lowland rainforest, representing the world's biologically most diverse terrestrial ecosystem.
In recent years, some of the fastest expanding crops have been palm oil and soy. Palm oil and soy constitute the largest raw material base for the rapidly expanding edible oil market; palm oil is the fastest growing crop in the tropics in terms of production. This growing demand globally for palm oil and soy and the subsequent expansion of these crops is a key driving force behind forest and habitat loss, with impacts on freshwater resources and pesticide use.
More than 80% of the global palm oil production occurs in Malaysia and Indonesia. The remainder is produced in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Latin America (Columbia, Ecuador, Brazil) and in Africa (Ghana, Nigeria), where the palm oil originates. Palm oil is predominately used as a vegetable oil, whereas palm kernel oil is used as an ingredient in cosmetics, soaps and food. Projections of global demand for palm oil in 2003 assumed a doubling by 2020, but the suitability of palm oil for biodiesel is expected to increase demand even further, threatening conversion of the remaining tropical lowland forests on the Sumatra, Borneo and New Guinea islands but also in Latin America. The priority market locations are Europe, India and China.
Soy originates from China, but the United States were the major exporter until recently, being surpassed by Latin America. Due to a globally rising demand for animal feed, soy expansion is booming in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay at the expense of tropical forests and savannahs, like the Cerrado. Major importing countries of Latin American soy meal are Europe and China. Since soy oil can also be converted to biodiesel, global demand may increase beyond original projections depending upon crude oil prices (soy oil is more expensive than palm oil).
Overall goals for palm oil by June 2010:
- 30% of global palm oil production is from RSPO-certified sustainable sources.
- 55% of global production is represented in RSPO membership (2006 baseline 40%).
- The percentage of total palm oil used from RSPO-certified sustainable sources is 40% in Europe, and 15% in China and India.
- Conversion of HCVF due to palm oil in Indonesia, Malaysia and Columbia is halved relative to 2005.
Overall goals for soy by June 2010:
- RTRS has developed and pilot-tested criteria.
- Membership of RTRS involves 20% of production in Latin America and 10% elsewhere.
- Major European buyers, Cargill, Bunge and/or Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) are members of the RTRS, as are the 3 largest buyers from China.
- First producers are RTRS-certified.
- In Europe 1 million tons of soymeal are from sustainable sources (basel criteria or RTRS).
- A requirement for participatory land use planning for new developments is in the included principles and criteria of the RTRS.
- Pilot HCVF projects have been completed in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.
As originally conceived the Forest Conversion Initiative attempted to halt or slow conversion of HCV areas by developing BMPs, by engaging with market actors along the supply chain, by influencing economic trade and policy, by shaping the investment screens of financial institutions as well as raising consumer awareness. The experience of the FCI shows that roundtable processes designed to involve all relevant stakeholders along the supply chain have been most effective. Secondly, piloting the HCV methodology with companies or provincial/regional governments has been key for the diffusion and acceptance of the methodology. The remaining approaches have been less successful or effective under specific conditions, such as the social pact in Paraguay, a policy intervention which has reduced deforestation by 90%. As a result of these experiences the FCP focuses on 2 approaches, namely roundtables and HCV pilots.
Multi-stakeholder roundtable processes are the primary delivery mechanisms of companies involved in the palm oil and soy supply chains, as well as the financial institutions that fund investments for the sector. The role of WWF is twofold, namely as a stakeholder within the roundtable processes we need to insure that robust and time-bound delivery mechanisms are put in place and enforced and, secondly, to insure that major private-sector players join and stay actively involved in roundtables.
Both palm oil and soy roundtables have the ambition to develop widely accepted criteria to mitigate adverse ecological and social effects. Subsequently, these criteria are to be implemented by producers and buyers, in order to eventually reform respective supply chains. As the initiator of both roundtables, WWF should stay involved in the governance bodies, as well as ensuring that its corporate members implement and procure sustainable palm oil and soy. This should include liaising with other NGOs to ensure that roundtables, respectively corporate members do deliver and stay actively involved (good cop vs bad cop-roles).
Ensuring that areas of HCV are not converted to palm oil plantations or soy fields is the key objective of the FCP. Therefore it is of utmost importance that the HCV methodology is applied in pilots and subsequently mainstreamed. WWF’s role is to engage with industry to show that the HCV methodology is a workable land-use planning concept and to act as a stakeholder in public consultations. Secondarily, efforts should be undertaken to reach out to regional planning agencies to get landscape-level HCVs implemented as methodology of choice. In Indonesia a number of pilot HCVs have been carried out both at the landscape and concession level and a process is underway to revise the Indonesia HCVF toolkit. There has also been some uptake at the provincial level (Riau). Objectives for the duration of the agreement for Indonesia should be to support companies to apply the HCVF concept, participate in the Indonesia HCVF toolkit revision process to ensure the toolkit is strengthened and gains the support of more stakeholders, and to lobby at the provincial and district level for adoption of the HCV methodology as a key element in land-use planning processes. Likewise, ongoing pilots in Latin America (Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay) should be mainstreamed during the next 3 years.
In other countries (Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil), where the HCV -concept is unknown or untested, pilot projects should be initiated both at the landscape and concession levels. While WWF can provide some seed money, contributions in kind (expertise, staff time) should be favoured in order to avoid a dependency upon WWF. Once successful pilots have been conducted, WWF’s efforts should focus on mainstreaming the methodology and successively taking over the role of a critical but constructive stakeholder.
With the formation of the HCV Resource Network, established with funding from various forest companies and the World Bank-WWF Alliance, the intention is to build up the HCV Resource Network so that it can supply the support on the HCV concept. In this way resource commitments by WWF can be successively reduced. A key strategy will therefore be to get companies from the palm oil and soy supply chains involved in the HCV Resource Network, including the governance structure and future funding.
Business and industry engagement in major markets will aim at encouraging companies to join the roundtables and to source sustainable/responsible palm oil and soy. This should include conventional users, as well as the rapidly growing biofuel sector. In the long-term WWF will pursue a watchdog role or develop expanded partnerships with selected corporate actors.
For palm oil, a critical mass of companies have already been recruited to RSPO (160 companies are members of RSPO, representing 45% of global production and including over 70 downstream users). The emphasis of WWF's work in the European market will shift to encouraging or pressuring the member companies to set and pursue ambitious targets for procurement of sustainable palm oil. In China and India, where less progress has been made, WWF will focus on recruiting pioneering companies to join RSPO and offer intensive support to selected companies to help them develop and implement responsible purchasing policies and practices.
For soy, the membership of RTRS is still small and should ideally increase to roughly 25 European and North American companies. Concurrently, efforts need to be stepped up to recruit members from China and India to both roundtables. This should happen a) via specific support from business and industry staff in these countries who are familiar with the business culture of these countries, as well as b) increasing the capacity and resources within WWF China and WWF India. It is envisioned that by 2010 more than 10 Indian and/or Chinese companies are members of either roundtable and, in combination, switch 15% of these countries’ palm oil and soy procurement to sustainable sources.
Market-based activities in the main producing countries (palm oil: Malaysia, Indonesia; soy: Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay) should continue to focus on constructive engagement with producers and the initiation of pilots relating to sustainable production and/or HCV-based land use planning.
In addition, WWF will engage with the banking sector to encourage lending and investment screening compatible with RSPO criteria to minimize risk to banks associated with poor social and environmental practices of their clients or assets within the palm oil sector. WWF will publish a “handbook” on investment screening in the palm oil sector, and seek endorsement of the practices described in the handbook from leading international banks. WWF will offer training in the use of the handbook to local banks in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia with the aim of encouraging investment screening practices amongst local banks. A longer term goal will be to encourage the central banking authorities in these countries to incorporate responsible screening practices in their banking regulations. If this approach is successful, WWF may seek to replicate it in the soy sector.
The role of communications activities within the FCP is twofold, namely to raise consumer and business awareness about the impacts of palm oil and soy production and to generate pressure for companies to develop and implement procurement policies for sustainable palm oil and soy.
In emerging markets like India and China, public awareness of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and responsible procurement policies is still growing. Here basic business and consumer information campaigns related to the ecological footprints of palm oil and soy, as well as the solutions recommended by WWF will be launched. These may also help in raising the profile of WWF in respective countries.
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The discussion involving Judith Curry and The Hockey Stick Illusion has continued at Collide-a-Scape, with posts on the views of Judith Curry (Curry did admit to getting one of her ten points wrong, but not the other nine) and those of Gavin Schmidt.
Steve McIntyre’s comments in the second thread provides another case where readers can judge the reliability of his claims without having to delve into the mathematics. He wrote:
The non-Stickness of Mann-style reconstructions without bristlecones+Gaspe or with reduced bristlecone+Gaspe weight – a point conceded by Wahl and Ammann – was inconsistent with MBH98 claims that their results were “robust” to the presence/absence of dendroclimatic indicators. MBH98 stated that “the long-term trend in NH is relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators in the network”,
But if you look at the paper you’ll see what they actually said:
“But certain sub-components of the proxy dataset (for example, the dendroclimatic indicators) appear to be especially important in resolving the large-scale temperature patterns, with notable decreases in the scores reported for the proxy data set if all dendroclimatic indicators are withheld from the multiproxy network. On the other hand, the long-term trend in NH is relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators in the network,suggesting that potential tree growth trend biases are not influential in the multiproxy climate reconstructions.”
So in fact they said that dendro was “particularly important” for large-scale temperature patterns. What they said was “robust” was just the “long-term trend”.
It gets worse. McIntyre continued:
a point made even more forcefully in a note to Mann et al 2000, which stated:”Whether we use all data, exclude tree rings, or base a reconstruction only on tree rings, has no significant effect on the form of the reconstruction for the period in question.
What do you think “the period in question” refers to? McIntyre has artfully removed that sentence from its context to make it look like Mann is making a claim about the period from 1400 to the present. But look at the sentence in context.
NH temperature reconstructions based on all records, and on subsets excluding or comprising exclusively of, tree-ring data.
Note that the NH reconstruction based on the sparse “non-dendro” multiproxy network (19 non-dendro indicators available back to 1760) is remarkably similar to that based on the full (more than 100 indicators) multiproxy network of MBH98. Because the sampling of the “no-dendro” dataset is much sparser, we expect that it will be more influenced by regional variations, and less representative of the true NH mean temperature. Accordingly, it calibrates significantly less (47% vs. 74%) of the instrumental NH variance, and the variability and uncertainty in the reconstruction is larger. Nonetheless, the overall variation–and the long term trends in particularly–are remarkably similar. Also shown is the reconstruction based ONLY on dendroclimatic indicators (ie, no coral, ice core, or historical or instrumental indicators). Again, the primary features of the reconstruction are very similar. Whether we use all data, exclude tree rings, or base a reconstruction only on tree rings, has no significant effect on the form of the reconstruction for the period in question.
The “period in question” is from 1760 to the present, not 1400 to the present as McIntyre pretends.
You don’t have to take my word for any of this — check it out for yourself and ask yourself if you can trust the claims McIntyre makes about things that aren’t so easy to check.
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If we've heard it once, we've heard it a thousand times . . .
* Letters to Congress don't work
* Pressure on Congress doesn't work
* The only way to change things is to throw out the bums and elect the right people to replace them
Well, if that's true then we must have just elected a new Congress, because a lot has changed since Election Day 2008.
Way back then the new unified Democratic government was supposed to gobble up a big chunk of the roughly one-half of our health care system that still operates under a partially free market. But look what's happened instead . . .
The President has offered to drop the so-called "public option" that would have signaled the eventual end of private health insurance. He doesn't have the votes in his own party to pass it.
Clearly, this retreat had to be the result of an election, right, because public pressure doesn't work. Letters to Congress don't work. The only thing that works is electing new people. So did you just elect a new President and Congress?
Oops! Nope. It didn't happen. There were no new elections, no bums thrown out, and no "right" people elected to replace them. Instead . . .
We've just had a lot of letters to Congress and other forms of public pressure. And the result has been a steady stream of changes in the correct direction. In addition to the slow death of the socialized health insurance scheme we've also seen . . .
President Obama moderate his fraudulent use of the claim that 47 to 50 million Americans can't afford health insurance. In his speech Wednesday night he removed the portion of that number who are illegal immigrants, and he's started using the number 30-million instead.
Did this happen because we elected a new President who just happens to have the same name? No, it happened because of public pressure.
Pressure works. Elections don't. Now we need a lot more of what works, and a lot less worrying about which set of bums we should elect to replace the current set of bums. Specifically . . .
We need to tell the politicians that the 30-million number is also inflated, because many of the people in that group can afford health insurance, they just don't want to pay for it. And frankly, we don't blame them given that the prices are inflated by government mandates. Health insurance in many places is simply a bad deal. So . . .
We also need to tell the politicians that almost everyone could afford health insurance if only the federal government would allow individuals and employers to buy health insurance across state lines, thereby avoiding state mandates that make insurance too expensive.
Finally, we need to tell the politicians that government insurance co-ops will eventually lead to the same result as the so-called "public option." No government insurance co-ops!
Hey, you're winning! But to win a complete victory, and not just a few partial retreats, you need to keep doing what works. You need to keep applying PRESSURE. Do you want to win? If so . . .
Please use DownsizeDC.org's Educate the Powerful Systemsm to send another letter to Congress opposing the Big Government health care bill.
Use your personal comments to tell your elected Representatives that . . .
* Government insurance co-ops are as bad as the so-called "public option"
* The "30-million uninsured" number the President is now using is still inflated and misleading
* You want Congress to make it possible for individuals and employers to buy health insurance regulated by the state of their choice.
By the way, please notice that the Republicans have adopted this last item as their main proposal. They had little to say about it before, but they're promoting it now because of . . . PRESSURE! It works. USE IT!
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC Army. If you are attending a Tea Party this weekend, we have important information for you below my signature. To see how much your Army is growing please check out the Keeping Score report that follows.
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An uninvited visitor has been lurking in the hallways of the Chillicothe R-2 school system: the flu.
Monday was the hardest hit day this week for R-2, leaving Dewey Elementary with 17 percent of its student body out sick, Field with eight percent out sick, Central with 12 percent out sick, and the Middle School with about 6 percent out sick.
Most of the buildings are taking extra steps to ensure that they are as "germ-free" as possible during this time of year, having extra hand sanitizer available, as well as taking extra hand washing time and having a box of tissues perched on several surfaces.
Steve Haley, principal at CMS, whose attendance has been hovering around 90 percent this week, stated that they are "doing what they can" against the germs, and that they have been sterilizing doorknobs, lockers, tables — just about all surfaces.
Field Elementary, which had the best attendance rates this week, had several teachers out due to illness on Tuesday; three total in the building of 12 classroom teachers.
Classes had yet to return back to normal attendance numbers even this morning (Thursday), as Dewey was still reporting that 13 percent of the student body was out sick.
Dewey Elementary, by far, has had the most absences this week, with attendance under 90 percent every day so far. Two days, Monday and Wednesday, were even below 85 percent. Dewey sent out a message via TextCaster earlier this week, stating: "The flu bug is strong at Dewey. Make sure students are 24 hours fever free before returning to school."
Central sent out an email that was similar to Dewey's message, reminding parents that, per the student handbook, students must be free of temperature for 24 hours without fever-reducing medications before returning to the classroom. Students will be sent back home if it hasn't been a true 24 hours.
"We have to enforce this policy to keep students healthy," the message read.
The high school reported normal absentee numbers for the week.
As for the flu vaccine, one may be hard-pressed to find any available. The Livingston County Health Center ran out of adult vaccine early this flu season, after administering 1,160 doses. It doesn't look good for them to be receiving any more either, for adults. Sherry Weldon, administrator and nurse at the Livingston County Health Center, stated that the center was "strapped." The Health Center has administered over 300 more doses of the vaccine to adults this year than last.
"What we understand is that the numbers aren't excessive," said Weldon, "They are just early."
Even the two pharmacies that the Health Center recommends are also out of the vaccine, as are their suppliers.
The good news? The Health Center is still offering vaccines for children, as an immunization clinic was held today. The next immunization clinic for children will be Thursday, Feb. 14, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Health Center.
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The Whole Earth Catalog, once cited by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as “Google in paperback form,” was a revolutionary predecessor of the Web search engine. The publication, in its heyday during the ’60s and ’70s, was known for propagating various ideologies and viewpoints, from environmental issues to counterculture.
On Wednesday, October 25 from 5:30-7 pm, Whole Earth, which was published biannually and then less frequently from 1968 to 1998, will be the subject of the final Action Speaks! discussion series of 2006. The series, presented by AS220 and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, takes place at AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence. (The Phoenix is a cosponsor.)
In advance of the discussion, Art Kleiner, a former Whole Earth editor, who will be joined by Simon Sadler, professor of architectural and urban history at the University of California-Davis, and Diana Leafe Christian, editor of Communities magazine, took part in an e-mail interview.
Why was Whole Earth a revolutionary publication?
Before the Internet, there was a quality of formalism that hobbled human endeavor. The Whole Earth Catalog, and its progeny, broke through that. It was a venue for expression of peoples’ actual experience — their thinking, tool-using, interaction, daily life. It elevated all of that into a roundtable of ideas, perceptions, and judgments — and in that way it anticipated what has since become the writing of the Internet.
How did Whole Earth address the topics of networks, self-help, and social promise?
[Whole Earth] started as a networking vehicle, connecting thousands of people who had gone to live in communes in the late 1960s. The original base was the “Whole Earth Truck Store” — literally a truck, packed with goods that [founder] Stewart [Brand] drove from commune to commune. It soon became clear that the information of the catalog was more important than the goods; people could get their own goods, but they needed reliable information on what to get.
Whole Earth [was] also an early user of computer networks — first the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES), and then the WELL, which Stewart started with Larry Brilliant [now the head of the Google Foundation].
Self-help was built into the Whole Earth credo . . . Stewart wrote: “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” This was not just self-help, but mutual help, and it was in many respects his most revolutionary act: A statement of fierce meta-pragmatism, which took seriously not just human potential, but human capacity.
Do you see technology as being more beneficial or detrimental?
I think “technology” as a social force is the wrong unit of aggregation. I think there are vast systems of which technology is a part. I think they’re beneficial to the extent that their predispositions are well understood and designed for.
The Internet in some ways heralded the end of Whole Earth. With Wikipedia around, Whole Earth doesn’t really need to exist. And yet the voice of Whole Earth is very different from the voice of Wikipedia. Even Wikipedia has an editor; and the coherent voice of an editorial sensibility is extremely important. Harold Ross’s name, to my knowledge, never appeared on a New Yorker article — but his voice was the core of the magazine. And Stewart’s voice was the core of Whole Earth. Technology will never replace that.
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Treasures of pain
Pain into profit.
I've been reading what I think is the seventh book of Glen Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company - a truly bizarre, sometimes unintelligibly complex fantasy series, because I've been weirdly captivated by the genre since devouring the Game of Thrones books ...
Anyway, that was a needlessly complex and irrelevant explanation of the fact that, while reading, I came across a sentence in which Cook described the price a group of soldiers would pay for some betrayal - saying it would cost them "treasures of pain".
I like that phrase. It reminded me of something the comedian Steve Martin once said in an interview - and I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the quote online - in which he described one of the benefits of being an actor and writer as that "we turn our pain into profit".
My work, both in fiction and on this blog, has given me ample opportunity to tap into the sadness, confusion, loneliness, jealousy, anger and hurt that we all experience from time to time - and to make a living out of it.
I'm not kicking it in a $6.65 million mansion like Martin but I do pay the rent via the written word, largely on my own terms, which is more than most writers can boast (and for which I am humbly grateful).
My father was a writer and journalist too, mainly for newspapers, but he did pen a lot of great short fiction for various magazines and wrote an unpublished novel about apartheid entitled An Ancient Wrong, which I have sitting on my bookshelf.
My mum - who divorced my dad when I was aged two - once said of my father that he "only wrote well when he was unhappy" and that he seemed to give it up altogether when he married his third wife because he was "content".
Ain't that a depressing thought?
Personally, I do my best work when I'm happy. The bulk of both my novels were written while dreamily in love with two different women - but both are works about unhappy men.
Anyway, I started thinking about how other people might spend their "treasures of pain" if they didn't happen to be a writer, actor, artist - and it struck me that there is always value in true suffering.
I think one of the mixed messages of culture is the constant assumption pain is a bad thing, that we should numb it either through medication, party drugs or distractions, rather than "walking through the fire".
I know plenty of people who'll do anything to avoid pain in their lives and, you know what? It messes them up.
The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once wrote that "neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering", a sentiment I'm sure Steve Martin would agree with.
In his movie Shopgirl, adapted from his novella of the same name, Martin puts it simply: "It's pain that changes our lives."
I reckon we all have treasures of pain; hopefully you'll spend yours wisely.
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Date of this Version
One of the results of the clash between immigration policies and economic incentives is unauthorized immigration. There is no accurate data on unauthorized immigration, but estimates permit some empirical work. The motives for immigrants to enter the destination country without formal authorization are the same as those that lead immigrants to seek legal entry, and the static labor market model of immigration can be used to explain the flows of unauthorized immigrants. There are additional factors to consider, however. Unauthorized immigrants do not normally enjoy the same civil rights as legal immigrants, so the potential rewards from immigrating are unlikely to be the same for legal and unauthorized immigrants. There are other interesting questions, such as why so many destination countries implicitly accept substantial numbers of unauthorized immigrants, even though their formal laws and regulations call for their strict punishment and expulsion. Unfortunately, we have few answers.
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Your palms sweat as you board the plane. Searching for your seat twists your stomach into a giant knot of dread. And then you have an entire flight to endure. The degree of fear of flying covers a wide spectrum: some travelers are mildly uneasy during plane trips, whereas others are grounded by their desperate refusal to fly, despite profound professional and personal cost. Fortunately, there are ways to cope.
Take for instance Nigel S., a 29-year-old vice president of a San Francisco public relations firm. He was once a tranquil flyer. But when he reached his early twenties, a few "incredibly turbulent" flights and one troubled landing propelled him into a tailspin of terror.
"My fear never kept me from flying," Nigel says, "but from the moment I bought my tickets I'd lie awake at night dreading the plane trip as if it were my own execution." Since Nigel logs in 35,000-50,000 miles of airtime a year, those anxious sleepless hours added up.
Refusing to let panic control his life, Nigel enrolled in a course at Boston's Institute for Psychology of Air Travel. One evening a week for ten weeks, he practiced breathing exercises and acupressure techniques. A commercial pilot explained turbulence, flight sounds, and passenger sensations, such as a dropping feeling as the plane levels in the air. Group members supported each other through sharing and mutual encouragement.
Was the course worth it? Nigel says it is one of the best things he has ever done for himself. "I'll always have some fear, but I've learned how to deal with it. It's really made a difference in my personal and professional life." He mentions his honeymoon, which concluded with a 14-hour flight home from Greece. "I was stressed but I could cope."
And those sleepless nights? "No longer a problem," he says.
News of airplane accidents, some resulting in deaths, may turn even previously calm passengers timid. "Frequent flyers who could tolerate air travel in the past may now experience thoughts and fears about crashing…that they are unable to control, resulting in cancelled reservations and heightened anxiety for those who are forced to fly," says Los Angeles-based trauma psychologist Robert R. Butterworth, PhD.
Other scenarios might nudge a relaxed traveler into fearfulness. Like Nigel, a once-confident flyer may encounter an upsetting in-flight experience, such as prolonged turbulence or mechanical problems. Or boarding the plane may be just one stress too many for someone already overloaded with everyday tension, resulting in an anxiety episode. Worry over a repeat panic attack during future flights could trigger an ever-worsening spiral of fear. No matter what causes the problem, experts agree that insight alone is not treatment. Anxious flyers must take action to deal with their feelings.
For uneasy flyers, there are some simple methods that may soothe anxiety:
- Eat a nutritious meal before boarding to keep blood sugar levels even.
- Get to the airport early, since rushing can contribute to nervousness.
- If possible, meet your flight crew.
- Watch the safety demonstration and study the emergency instruction in your seat pocket.
- Pack a light snack. Seattle-based flying phobia therapist Robin Fay-McNair, MS, recommends "foods that make you feel like you're taking care of yourself."
- Confide in a friendly seatmate. "Strangers are amazingly compassionate," Nigel says. "They'll go out of their way to distract you or put you at ease."
- Drink enough water to prevent dehydration.
- Avoid caffeine, diet pills, and over-the-counter cold/allergy medicines containing decongestants. All are stimulants and may contribute to a pounding heart, shortness of breath, and nervousness.
- Avoid alcohol and sedatives since they may contribute to feelings of loss of control. Effects are difficult to predict during flight because of changes in altitude pressure.
- Stay busy. Listen to soothing music, watch the in-flight movie, read a great book, or work. If safety conditions allow, stand up and stretch frequently.
- Practice deep breathing exercises and relaxation techniques.
But what if you cannot even force yourself near an airport? What if the quality of your life is suffering because you absolutely cannot fly?
If it is time for professional assistance, there are various resources available:
- Clinics offer expert instruction combined with group support.
- An airline-run self-help group may include an airport setting, pilot-led discussions, and even a group "graduation" flight.
- Personal therapists offer privacy and individualization.
- Virtual-reality therapy clinics allow clients to experience a computer-generated flight via a head-mounted display, while the therapist teaches coping techniques.
The National Institute of Mental Health suggests consulting your primary care doctor. Your doctor can rule out other medical conditions and refer you to a mental health professional.
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diphtheria was a widespread and greatly feared disease. In the
1920s, the United States experienced 100,000-200,000 cases of diphtheria
per year. About 15,000 people died from the disease a year.
spread when germs pass from an infected person to the nose or
throat of others. It is a very serious disease which may block
the airway, making it impossible to breathe. It may also cause
heart problems. Five to ten people out of 100 who contract diphtheria
die. But thanks to immunizations, diphtheria is rare today in
the United States.
vaccine is given to young children in the DTaP (diphtheria,
tetanus, and acellular Pertussis) or DT (diphtheria and tetanus)
vaccine series. Diphtheria vaccine is given to older children
and adults in the TD (Tetanus, diphtheria) or TDaP (Tetanus, Diphtheria, acellar Pertussis) vaccine.
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71 sponsors [v]
Fair Tax Act of 2011 - Repeals the income tax, employment tax, and estate and gift tax. Redesignates the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as the Internal Revenue Code of 2011. Imposes a national sales tax on the use or consumption in the United States of taxable property or services. Sets the sales tax rate at 23% in 2013, with adjustments to the rate in subsequent years. Allows exemptions from the tax for property or services purchased for business, export, or investment purposes, and for state government functions. Sets forth rules relating to: (1) the collection and remittance of the sales tax, and (2) credits and refunds. Allows a monthly sales tax rebate for families meeting certain size and income requirements. Grants states the primary authority for the collection of sales tax revenues and the remittance of such revenues to the Treasury. Sets forth administrative provisions relating to: (1) the filing of monthly reports and payments of tax, (2) accounting methods, (3) registration of sellers of goods and services responsible for reporting sales, (4) penalties for noncompliance, and (5) collections, appeals, and taxpayer rights. Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to allocate sales tax revenues among: (1) the general revenue, (2) the old-age and survivors insurance trust fund, (3) the disability insurance trust fund, (4) the hospital insurance trust fund, and (5) the federal supplementary medical insurance trust fund. Prohibits the funding of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after FY2015. Establishes in the Department of the Treasury: (1) an Excise Tax Bureau to administer excise taxes not administered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and (2) a Sales Tax Bureau to administer the national sales tax. Terminates the sales tax imposed by this Act if the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (authorizing an income tax) is not repealed within seven years after the enactment of this Act.
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Recieve functional benefits with interesterified shortenings, oils
How does enzyme interesterified oil function differently in bakery foods than partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? ADM has found that in many baking applications, enzyme interesterification products perform as well if not better than partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Enzyme interesterification does need some application work for extruded products.
What are the functional differences between palm oil and interesterified soybean oil? Enzyme interesterified products are similar to palm oil in functionality in some instances. Both products do not exhibit the plasticity commonly associated with partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
What is the nutritional profile of enzymatically interesterified soybean oil? How is this different from palm oil? This depends on the level of saturates needed for a particular application. Soy-based enzyme interesterified products are stearic rich and also are a source of polyunsaturated fatty acids. In most cases, saturate levels for enzyme interesterified soybean oils are lower than their palm counterparts.
What will a label look like with interesterified soybean oil? What are the differences? The FDA has indicated that food manufacturers may declare the interesterified oil in the ingredient statement as “interesterified soybean oil.” Alternative descriptors may be added such as “high in stearic acid” or “stearate-rich.”
What are some future issues with fats/oils from a consumer and/or FDA standpoint? Nutrition will continue to be the emphasis with more of a focus toward childhood consumption of fats and oils. ADM believes that omega-3s and omega-6s will be the next area of prominence in fats and oils along with the nutritional quality (or fatty acid profile) of saturates.
For more information, contact Mike Rath at ADM at 217-424-5200 or visit www.admworld.com
Why all the buzz about trans-fatty acids? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as countless public interest groups, have named trans-fatty acids public enemy No. 1 in the fight to improve the health of Americans.
Why? Trans-fatty acids raise LDL (bad) cholesterol, and many nutritionists believe this type of fat is more dangerous than saturated fat.
What are trans fats? Trans fats are formed when liquid vegetable oil is made solid through hydrogenation. The hydrogenation process rearranges the hydrogen atoms so they appear on opposite sides of a chain of carbon atoms at the carbon-carbon double bond.
Why are these oils hydrogenated? Partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils provides high-volume bakeries with a solid shortening that can be modified for specific applications. The partial hydrogenation process allows bakers to use tailored shortenings with specific melting profiles. Other than the negative health aspects, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are a near-perfect ingredient because they can be tailored for specific applications.
What applications use partially hydrogenated vegetable oils? Unfortunately, the baking industry is one of the main users of these unhealthful oils. Trans-fats are found in a wide range of bakery foods, from cookies and crackers to cakes and pies.
When will new FDA labeling regulations be enacted? On Jan. 1, food manufacturers will have to label the trans-fat content of their products. Many bakeries already have made the labeling change.
Do trans fats have to be removed from bakery foods? No. Bakers can continue to produce bakery foods with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. However, once the new year comes, these harmful fats must be labeled.
Do consumers care about trans fats and will they even notice the label change?
Although it is impossible to gauge true consumer reaction until the labeling change occurs, there is a good chance that consumers are going to read labels and limit their trans-fat intake. The publicity surrounding trans fats is at an all-time high. Rarely does a week go by without a major news story about these harmful fats. Most recently, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene made headlines when it asked restaurateurs and food suppliers to voluntarily eliminate partially hydrogenated vegetable oils from their food supplies.
Are there alternatives to partially hydrogenated vegetable oils? Yes. However, most of the alternatives either lack the plasticity and functionality of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils or increase the saturated fat content of bakery foods.
Replacing trans-fat filled shortenings and oils in bakery food formulas is not an easy task. In many applications, replacements cost millions of dollars and months of research and development. Simply put, drop-in solutions do not exist at this time. However, many solutions do exist and are being used by high-volume bakeries throughout the country.
What solutions are available? Many bakers use palm oil to eliminate trans-fatty acids in bakery food formulas. However, these oils increase the saturated fatty acid content of bakery foods, forcing bakers to decide which is the lesser of two evils: trans fats or saturated fats. Many bakers are living with increased levels of saturated fat to eliminate trans fats.
However, the battle against saturated fats is heating up. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) recently sent a letter to Michael Leavitt, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ secretary, expressing concern that palm oil usage was increasing because of new trans fat labeling regulations. The nonprofit organization urged Leavitt to ask manufacturers to reformulate without partially hydrogenated vegetable oils or palm oils.
Besides palm oils, what other solutions exist? Many trans-fat free shortenings are available, including various oil blends, such as palm oil and canola oil, and interesterified shortenings and oils. Oil blends allow suppliers to take plastic fats and blend them with oils to create a product with plasticity and a lower saturated fat content. However, the functionality and melting profiles of these oils prohibits their uses in certain applications. What are interesterified shortenings and oils? To create interesterified shortenings, soybean salad oil is blended with fully hydrogenated oil and then modified through enzymatic interesterification. This process allows bakers to tailor the melting profiles of shortenings for specific applications.
What other issues need to be considered before reformulating with trans-fat free shortenings and oils? Ensure that your shortening supplier is able to meet your supply needs. Many of these oils are relatively new to the market, which may create shortages.
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VENICE.- For half a century, the well-known Montenegrin-born artist Dado (b. Cetinje, 1933) has been creating a world of delicate horror and intricate fantasy in every medium from painting and fresco to drawing, engraving and book illustration.
In 1989, the mill at Hérouval in Normandy, France that has long been Dados adoptive home burnt down. Among the many things consumed by the fire was a series of sculptures that Dado had begun to work on. These sculptures marked both a new departure for the artist and a summum of what he had created before. Where he had relied until then on his prodigious graphic ability and unerring eye for acidic colour to create a world of sinuously suggestive horror (unequalled since Bosch), here he was confronted by new demands on his extraordinary plastic inventiveness.
Burrowing into the smoking ruins of his studio, Dado dragged out and salvaged the elements destined to constitute a new race of sculptures. He has since baptized them the Zorzi Elegies in honour of the splendid Renaissance palazzo where his works are exhibited during the Venice Biennale. Cast in bronze, the sculptures juxtapose the most unlikely and arresting elements: a saints head with a tree trunk and a half-melted saucepan, for instance, or a homunculus in a bucket welded to an ancient washing machine drenched in bright colour.
Around the elegant Palazzo Zorzi courtyard, where a score of these eloquent artefacts subtly blending the sacred and the profane are displayed, stand several vast banners based on photographs recording the fire on which the artist has superimposed images that came to him as, after a misdiagnosed illness, he hung between life and death recently in a six-day coma.
Each of the sculptures exhibited has been dedicated to a number of people, poets, painters and friends all now dead, that have been of central importance to Dado and his career as an artist. Grouped together with a number of Dados paintings on wood lent by the National Museum of Montenegro, the ensemble makes an unusually powerful impact, setting up a direct and eloquent dialogue with the dead that brings sharply into question our own identities and bearings in existence.
The commissioner for the exhibition is Michael Peppiatt, formerly editor of Art International and best known for his books and exhibitions on Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and other major 20th-century artists.
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Title IX--General Provisions
General Provisions (IX)
This section includes general provisions that affect all programs under the No Child Left Behind Act.
WHAT'S NEW--The No Child Left Behind Act
Increases Accountability for Student Performance
- Allows development of content standards. State education agencies (SEAs) may use Title I administrative funds to develop challenging academic content standards and academic assessments. This may include, for example, developing additional academic content standards for science or for grades not yet included in state standards for math and reading.
- Prohibits federally sponsored national testing except international comparisons and other assessments explicitly provided by law, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Reduces Bureacracy and Increases Flexibility
- Provides authority to consolidate administrative funds. SEAs and school districts may consolidate administrative funds to eliminate duplication in conducting administrative functions to enhance the effectiveness and coordination of programs.
- Provides authority to submit a consolidated application. SEAs may apply for programmatic funds through a consolidated application process, rather than applying for funds on a program by program basis.
- Streamlines reporting for participation in U.S. Department of Education programs into a single annual consolidated report to reduce costly duplication and burden, and encourage effective program implementation.
- Continues the U.S. Department of Education's authority to grant waivers from many statutory or regulatory requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act. However, there are certain limitations and exceptions to this waiver authority set forth in the statute.
- Requires options to attend safe public schools. SEAs must establish and implement a policy to allow students attending persistently dangerous public schools or who become victims of violent crimes while at school to attend safe public schools within the district (see discussion, "Unsafe School Choice Option, Title IX, Part E, Subpart 2, Section 9532" in this guide).
Other Major New Requirements
- Prohibits teacher testing. Program funds cannot be used for mandatory teacher or paraprofessional national testing.
How It Works
This legislation adds general provisions that affect most programs under ESEA. Key provisions include:
- SEAs and districts may consolidate administrative funds to enhance the effectiveness and coordination of programs.
- SEAs are to use Title I administrative funds to develop challenging academic content standards and academic assessments.
- Rather than submitting many individual applications,SEAs and districts may continue to use consolidated plans, in consultation with the governor, to cover plans that the U.S. Department of Education requires.
- SEA reporting is streamlined into a single annual consolidated report.
- The U.S. Department of Education has continued authority to grant waivers from burdensome regulation.
- Private school students continue to receive services from NCLB programs, including Reading First, Even Start, Safe and Drug Free Schools, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, Math-Science Partnerships, migrant, professional development, technology and bilingual special services.
- Districts are required to provide services to private school students in a timely manner and to consult private school officials in planning such services.
- U.S. Department of Education officials are prohibited from requiring, recommending, or certifying curriculum, programs or standards.
- Program funds cannot be used for mandatory teacher or paraprofessional national testing or certification.
- Federally sponsored national testing is prohibited, except international comparisons and other assessments explicitly provided by law.
- Funds cannot be used for condom or other contraceptive distribution, obscene materials, promotion of sexual activities, or for sex education in schools that is not age- appropriate and does not emphasize abstinence.
- Establishing a national database of personally identifiable information is prohibited.
- Federal control of home schooling is prohibited. Home schools are not subject to NCLB or NCLB assessments.
- NCLB funds are denied to any school district that has a policy that prevents, or otherwise denies participation in, constitutionally protected prayer in public elementary and secondary schools.
- Districts receiving NCLB funds are required to provide Armed Forces recruiters the same access to high school students as college and job recruiters.
- Any local district that discriminates against or denies equal access to patriotic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America, is denied funds.
- SEAs must establish and implement a policy to allow students attending persistently dangerous public schools or who become victims of violent crimes while at school to be allowed to attend safe public schools within the district (see discussion,"Unsafe School Choice Option, Title IX, Part E, Subpart 2, Section 9532" in this guide).
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If we needed any more proof that childhood obesity is a plague that will haunt this country for years to come, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine offers more ammunition for quick and dramatic action to address this tide of adiposity.
If you don’t have time to read it, here it is in a nutshell: a study of 276,835 Danish children ages 7 to 13 years old found that those who were overweight had a higher risk of developing coronary heart disease in adulthood than those who were a normal weight, with the association being stronger in boys than in girls.
The conclusion? That not only can the roots of coronary heart disease start as early as 7 years old, but that even small increases in a child’s BMI can elevate the risk.
In the study, the authors noted that an overweight 13 year-old boy has a greater than 33 percent risk of developing coronary heart disease in adulthood than a boy of normal size. Another study in the same issue, this one on overweight teens, projected that the increasing prevalence of obesity would result in rates of coronary heart disease increasing 5 to 16 percent by 2035, creating 100,000 more cases of a disease which is already the No. 1 killer of men and women in the United States.
The CDC estimates that more than 9 million children in this country are overweight — triple the number from 30 years ago.
Studies have shown that overweight children are already at an elevated risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension — now we can add another disease to that lethal list.
— Paula Hunt
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Photo by Jan Chipchase
At the Pop!Tech conference last fall, I gave a talk that focused on the social tension that occurs with the introduction of new technologies, including turn-of-the-second-to-last-century portable cameras, and could have applied equally to the Walkman (remember them?) and mobile phones. My talk touched on technology use and whether "adoption" is pro-active, passive or even conscious. I also discussed the consequences of near-time facial recognition; how DNA testing reveals parental discrepancy and will for many change the notion of "family," how public displays are increasingly monitoring the world around us, and what all this means for designers who are creating products, services and systems in which consumption, use and adoption is sometimes conscious, sometimes not. A central tenet of the talk was that as more of what we design is jacked into our social network, the option of whether to use or opt-into a technology or service becomes one of opting into or out of society. (Download my entire Pop!Tech presentation here [PDF, 12MB].)
The talk prompted questions related to the design imperialism discussion that has preoccupied some in the design community, and a rally against globalization (for a related interview, click here). In previous instances when I've been asked questions along these lines, the motivation for asking was driven by an anger against the all-trampling BigCorps and me as an agent of the BigCorp, a fear/recognition of not being in sufficient control, and on occasion also guilt (where the person asking the question has trouble balancing their own consumption habits with the injustice of other people not having the same economic opportunities).
Whereas the design imperialism debate honed in on local interventions, this essay will focus on my experiences working with multi-national corporations and organisations. I'm not suggesting that the lessons outlined here are the same as for more local initiatives, nor am I making a judgment on the pros or cons of local or global design solutions—that would need to be visited on a case by case basis. And yes, I recognize that the international aid / donor community has for many years overlooked locally sustainable solutions often at the detriment of communities that they were there to serve—this imbalance has been a personal driver to understand for myself for much of my career. I do assume that the benefits of globalization in the short term (~20 years) outweighs the costs and the opportunity costs.
In this second installation of my "Imperialist Tendencies" essay, I'd like to present a backgrounder on the role of design research / ethnography that was referred to in the talk and some of the nuances of the approach that I think make the process one that is rewarding for the individuals concerned, their communities, our teams that conduct the research and employer, and ultimately the client.
Research for Design
The basic premise of design research is that spending time in the contexts where people do the things that they do can inform and inspire the design process with a nuanced understanding of what drives people's behavior—which can then be used as a foundation for understanding and exploring the opportunities for new products and services.
More often than not the process leads to innovating on what already exists. The practice is mostly associated with up-front research at the beginning of the design process, but in my experience it is valuable to think of it as a state of mind that can infuse, inform and inspire across and often beyond the project. Often researchers get ahead of themselves and talk about the opportunities they perceived after uncovering unmet needs. The fact is in many cases needs are being met, just not particularly well. The process assumes, of course, that the project is aligned to the client's organisation and goals, and that the team knows how to apply the right mix of methods, understands how to make sense of what they are collecting and can articulate the opportunities that comes from this. Some people and/or agencies are good at parts of the process, far fewer can carry off the whole. Just as there are many different ways to design, there are many ways to run design research. For my clients, design research is particularly effective when it explores the collision of people, technology, culture, and business models to inform what, when and how to make something and understand how best to get there.
Corporate research studies are often about a 2-month sprint: a week or two to ramp up; a week each in two or three research locations; two weeks of pure synthesis; and two weeks to write and deliver a report. Most projects have some form of hand-over workshop with the client, and for a larger consultancy like frog, this is usually the bridge to a design phase—where the ideas/concepts are further explored and evaluated, before being refined with increasing levels of fidelity. A research + design project can run for 6+ months, but I'll focus on the research phase here since it is most relevant. The client often wants the research yesterday and it is common for the team to be working 24/7 with only a couple of days break over the course of the research—stepping back only after its all done and dusted.
Common criticisms of this format of corporate research include: the time on the ground is so limited that the breadth and quality of the data is likely to be suspect; that the incoming team is insensitive to how things are done locally; that the broad range of locations and limited total time span doesn't allow for building meaning relationships with local partners; that the team suffers burn-out; that engagements with participants and local partners is at best superficial and at worst disrespectful; and that the opportunity areas/concepts/ideas that come out of this process bear little or no acknowledgement to local needs.
All are valid concerns.
All can be mitigated.
Mitigation is not always the smartest move.
Many design research projects also include an element of what practitioners would broadly describe as participatory design—where participants are either brought in for some or all of the ideation, evaluation or design process. Using participatory design to create products to sell in the global marketplace is very different from designing with and for a specific community—something that I appreciate is important for some of you reading this—a good example of the latter is the approach espoused by fellow Pop!Tech speaker Milenko Matanovic's work at the Pomegranate Center. Participatory design for corporate clients can lead to a moral and legal conundrum—ensuring that participants are adequately rewarded for their intellectual contribution while balancing the needs of the client to legally be able to use the outcomes of the sessions. For this reason, the participatory design sessions that I run are guided by the following principles:
- Be up-front about how participant's contributions will be used
- Be pro-active about the issue of the ownership of an idea and devote as much time as is needed to discuss the issue—even if it eats into other planned activities. There's nothing like a researcher trying to "stick to the schedule" to give a participant the sense they are being hoodwinked.
- Advise participants not to share anything that they don't want the team and/or the client to have the legal right to commercially exploit. The name of the client is often not revealed or is revealed under a Non-Disclosure Agreement so trust can be an issue. It is common to reveal an abstraction of the client e.g. "a top tier consumer goods company"
- Reward the session participants with equitable compensation
- Ensure that every member of the team understands these principles and how they play out in practice
Defining "equitable compensation" can sometimes be tricky for the simplest of design research activities (e.g. a home interview), but is especially problematic when researching highly financially constrained communities where the gulf between the wealth/power of the participants and the researchers can be considerable. The decision about whether to join the study can come down to being one of whether there will be food on the table at the end of the day.
Equitable compensation is even more significant in participatory design—where the line between a participant's "bright idea" contribution and a product/service on the market appears to the layman to be short—they assume it won't take long before their idea will make the company billions. While it is not that common an occurrence, it is within this context that the ownership of ideas comes up, and from my experience this is more of a hot potato issue in some countries, e.g. India, than others. Anyone who has tried to drive a concept, idea through an organisation will know how far removed from reality a rapid from-idea-to-market is. Each idea is reinforced, challenged and shaped with input from many different sources, including the team's gestalt knowledge. Plus it takes a significant investment of tens if not hundreds or thousands of people to turn an idea into a product or service that people are willing and able to buy.
At some point the equitable compensation issue can create a relationship that is closer to "subcontractor-subcontractee" than "interviewer-interviewee" or "co-participants" with everything that that entails. As full-time employees of a consultancy and before that a BigCorp, my colleagues and I are also bound by these contracts—when we are paid to apply our knowledge to a particular issue, our output belongs to our employer. Changing the relationship to be more transactional is not inherently a bad thing—except when the team doesn't recognize the impact of that change. In communities and households with very low levels of income, the opportunity to earn additional income is valued, as is having a customer base that for the time that they are on the ground, includes the research team.
There are other ways to structure participatory design sessions so that the outcomes are co-owned by the attendee stakeholders. These same BigCorps do invest in events where the attendees retain ownership of their ideas—for example, discussion might come under the Chatham House Rule, but these are normally not suited to achieving a focused design. These events are also often run under the auspices of the marketing department, which tells you something about their perceived value, and skills required internally.
As a side-note there are interesting issues related to international IP law, and what is considered equitable compensation for employees who create IP that leads their employer to make billions (or trillions if we're talking Japanese Yen). The inventor of the Blue LED or anyone whose patents make it into the global standards specifications are prime examples, although most patents are likely to sit on the shelf until the patent attorneys go to war.
The challenge for researchers in setting up a more transactional relationship with a participant is that setting the wrong level of compensation sets the wrong tone and can bias the responses. In my experience, too many researchers over-compensate—preferring to spend too much money rather than figure out what the "right" amount is. Throwing money at a problem, any problem leads to bigger headaches later on, and overpaying in communities where finances are tight creates significant distortions that can be difficult to recover from.
This article first appeared here.
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Neatly combining the topics of a number of my previous posts, namely the surveillance society, computer games, and Foucault, a new Internet ‘game’ is about to be launched that enables members of the public to win cash prizes by spotting criminals in ‘real-life’ video surveillance footage.
Although the United Kingdom has one of the highest proportion of video surveillance cameras in the world, the sheer amount of footage generated currently means that any criminals filmed are unlikely to be observed by any human camera operator, thereby escaping detection.
As described in Foucault’s book ‘Discipline and Punish’, this new scheme mirrors the design of Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, a proposed prison in which inmates are potentially under constant observation, yet are unaware whether they are actually being observed at any particular moment. Consequently, those under surveillance must behave as if their every action is observed, thereby subjecting themselves to discipline instead of having it forced upon them, and so becoming the instruments of their own control.
The widespread connectivity provided by the Internet similarly enables numerous members of the public to co-operate in tackling somewhat more altruistic large-scale projects, exemplified by the collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Likewise, the open-source software movement is able to work together to develop free alternatives to commercial products, despite being geographically distributed. These include operating systems, office productivity suites, web-browsers, and for those of you currently involved in academic writing, reference managers.
This use of human ‘distributed processing’ mirrors the design of super-computers, in which a large number of relatively low-powered processors concurrently tackle small sub-parts of a much larger and more complex task. Once again, the Internet can be key in facilitating the necessary interconnections, as illustrated by the SETI@home project, where members of the public donate the spare computing power of their home PC to help the search for extra-terrestrial life.
Story from the Daily Mail
Sunar, D. (2009). Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality
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“Just as occurred in Switzerland, it is now clear that the U.S. government is increasing its focus on Americans who are failing to report Israeli assets,” said Charles M. Ruchelman, an attorney at the law firm Caplin & Drysdale.
While a spokesperson for the IRS would not confirm that it had a particular focus on Israeli accounts, Ruchelman cited a recent California case as evidence of the purported crackdown.
On Feb. 14, an American citizen pled guilty to crimes involving failure to report the existence of two bank accounts in Israel to the IRS, according to court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. The stipulated facts in the plea agreement indicate that the defendant, who was born in Israel, accessed his money through “back-to-back” loans, a set of transactions suggested by the Israeli bankers that allows holders of Israeli accounts to access their funds in the United States.
The defendant, Zvi Sperling, had more than $4 million in accounts in Israel that he had not reported to the IRS.
Sperling agreed to pay a significant financial penalty as well as to cooperate with government authorities in exchange for the government’s promise to not prosecute other members of his family.
“A lot of Jewish people have accounts in Israel, and they may be for completely innocuous reasons,” said Ruchelman, who advises many clients with foreign accounts. “They may have a house there, or relatives there. But they need to be aware of the tax implications.”
While lots of people have foreign accounts, Ruchelman said, there is a “disproportionate number of American Jews with accounts in Israel.”
Tax implications are triggered when the assets in those accounts exceed $10,000, requiring the filing of a Foreign Bank and Financial Account Report (FBAR), according to Ruchelman.
“A lot of people are unaware of the requirement,” he said. “Even a lot of accountants don’t know about it.”
While the federal government has been prosecuting people with foreign accounts in Switzerland, India and Hong Kong for several years, the government’s attention has now turned to Israel because of the large number of Americans with accounts there, Ruchelman said.
Recent reports by Reuters indicate that Bank Leumi, the largest commercial bank in the Jewish state, has been urging its American clients to disclose information about their accounts to government authorities.
“Israeli banks are going to cooperate [with U.S. authorities] because they want to maintain a good relationship with the United States,” Ruchelman said.
If one has a foreign account over $10,000 that has not been previously disclosed, one can avoid prosecution by entering into an IRS program to voluntarily disclose that account now, and pay a penalty. Instructions and forms for entering into that program can be found at http://www.irs.gov/uac/2012-Offshore-Voluntary-Disclosure-Program.
Because each case is unique, Ruchelman advises people with foreign accounts to seek the advice of an attorney or accountant knowledgeable in the field to ensure that all rights and obligations are considered, and to determine the correct course of action.
“The Jewish community should be aware of this,” he said, “and not stick their heads in the sand. They do have options, but they should move quickly.”
(Toby Tabachnick can be reached at email@example.com.)
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« more RISD stories
RISD, Asia and Creativity
The contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang, a RISD parent, recently spoke on campus, and toured RISD's studios.
Inspired by the
recent recognition of RISD’s 2012 honorary degree recipients – Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize-winning
Chinese architect, and Studio Ghibli, the internationally acclaimed Japanese animation house – along
with a visit from President Xu Jiang
of China Academy of Art (CAA), President John
Maeda shared some thoughts about his own experiences as an artist and
designer of Asian descent.
What comes to mind
when you think of Asia and creativity?
I grew up in what was formerly called “Chinatown” in
Seattle (later renamed the “International District”) because people resettling
from all over Asia set up shop there. When you are surrounded by something as a
child, it never registers as anything out of the ordinary – it’s just your
reality. So I never really noticed “Asian culture” until there was a major
exhibition touring the country after President Nixon’s momentous trip to China in
1972. It showed the Four Great Inventions
of China’s past: gunpowder, the printing press, papermaking and the compass. It
was remarkable to me to see how many seminal inventions are credited to the
Chinese, especially when the dominant political rhetoric at the time dismissed
Asia for its non-innovative, “copy-cat” culture. The facts and the stereotype
seemed at odds.
On a personal level, I felt how, because I was Asian-American,
the assumption by the mass media – and even by my teachers – was that I was
most suited to non-creative subjects. My parents reinforced this as well. Though
supportive, they bragged that I was good at math, but didn’t pay attention to the
fact that I was also good at art. Looking back, I realize that I was forced to
overcome these stereotypes in order to pursue a creative life.
As an artist and
designer, what is your relationship to Asia?
Maeda at Samsung
After fulfilling my parents’ dreams and earning both bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, I went
on to study art and design in Japan at a Bauhaus-influenced school outside of
Tokyo – the University of Tsukuba. Though located in Asia, its European methods
made it a truly cross-cultural experience. The contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang, a RISD parent, recently spoke on campus, and when he was touring our
studios, he shared with me that he’s also a Tsukuba alum, though he left the
year before I arrived.
In Japan I worked as a graphic designer for print and digital
media in the era when the computer had recently emerged as a design tool and
the Internet was just beginning to take off. My mentor there was the great
master designer Ikko Tanaka, who operates
fluidly across cultures, and across commercial and non-commercial work. So I
was able to take what I had learned about computing in the US and situate it
within traditional notions of art and design in Japanese contemporary culture.
Why was it significant
that RISD honored Wang Shu and Studio Ghibli this year?
To me the honorary degrees awarded at Commencement this
year – selected by a faculty committee headed by Interim Associate Provost Patricia Phillips – made a statement
about Asia as a global center of creativity. For millennia cultures throughout
this continent have seen art and design as “need to have” not just “nice to
have” components of human existence. And now the entire world is waking up to
the need to incorporate art and design back into our education system and our
lives – a notion that we have been reinforcing here at RISD through our many STEM to STEAM initiatives.
RISD itself is an international hub of creativity, with
students from more than 52 countries represented on campus and alumni spread
out in 86 countries around the world. In recent years we have seen a flourishing
new alumni club in Hong Kong and continued activity in Korea and Japan. Alumni around the world – including Tokyo-based apparel designer Tae Ashida 87 AP and Martin Lo BID 84 in Hong Kong – continue to show us just where
and how art and design are making a huge impact, and every time I travel, I am
proud to help share this good news.
What do you think the
US can learn from creativity in Asia?
In the fall of 2010, I spoke at an event at the Japan Society in New York along with Naoto Fukasawa
and Kenya Hara, at which
we introduced the Japanese retailer MUJI to the US. To me MUJI represents the
unique wonder of Japanese design – the combination of simplicity, sophistication
and functionality. MUJI
doesn’t design for a quick “wow” reaction, but for a “delayed-wow” instead.
After owning a MUJI-designed object for a while you think, “Wow!” because it has become so
indispensible to your life.
Japanese design has always been about the pursuit of
perfection and celebrating the sacred in the everyday. During his visit to
campus, Mr. Suzuki of Studio Ghibli explained that it’s their everyday
surroundings that influence the Ghibli animators the most. At our Commencement,
when CAA President Xu Jiang accepted RISD’s Presidential Honor for
Distinguished Leadership and Vision in the Arts, he quoted DreamWorks’
venerable Kung Fu Panda to make the
same point: “The past is history, the future is a mystery, and today is
a gift. That is why we call it the present.”
I also think a lot about Japanese pop culture – from the
self-sacrificing spirit of Tora-san to the “existential warrior” ethos of
Gundam – and how that forms the rich cultural context in which Japanese design
exists. Historically, the Japanese had always been about winning the battle,
performing super-human feats, dying for the cause. After World War II, though,
Japan had to rewrite this national narrative to dampen the glory of war and
transition to a culture of peace and prosperity. Yet it still held on to this
notion of going to the edge – of extreme dedication and perfection. I think that
is the foundation beneath the beauty of modern Japanese design.
tags: Apparel Design
Studio Ghibli Comes to RISD
RISD Partners with Creative
Global Luminaries Honored at Commencement 2012
Cai Guo Qiang Visits RISD
Building Bridges for International Innovation
RISD/Hong Kong alumni club
, Industrial Design
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CLARKSBURG, W.Va. -- West Virginia's state parks are still feeling the effects from the June derecho and superstorm Sandy.
Parks Chief Ken Caplinger told The Exponent Telegram that the two storms did at least $2 million worth of damage to the parks system.
Caplinger said revenues are down $1.2 million because of the damage and the lingering effect of people traveling less.
Downed trees from the storms continue to shut off some areas to visitors.
The boardwalk to Blackwater Falls, in Davis, remains closed, as does six miles of walking trails and a day-use area at Cathedral State Park, in Preston County. Power has yet to return at Holly River State Park, the second-largest state park.
Caplinger said it will take several years to clean up from the storms.
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
This morning, I went to the Science Museum to talk to Ada Lovelace herself about Charles Babbage, his computing machines, and her vision and brilliance.
Ada was a most fascinating lady, and I hope that because of today, more people will know not just about her, but about all the other amazing women in technology.
I’d like to thank Steph Troeth and Steph Booth for helping me with Ada Lovelace Day. Both of them helped me to figure out what shape the campaign was going to take and were then invaluable in kick-starting it. Without their help and encouragement I’m not sure that Ada Lovelace Day would have happened at all. Thanks also go to Vicky Riddell at the BBC for deciding to run with the story on the BBC News Channel and doing such an amazing job of getting so many smart techie women on the news.
And secondly, my wonderful husband Kevin who has provided me with endless support and help over the last three months, who shot the video above, and who came with me to BBC Television Centre this evening and helped me calm my nerves before my interviews.
Thanks are also due to everyone who has taken part. Ada Lovelace Day was a community effort, with everyone playing an important role in making it the success it is.
But it’s not over yet! We have another 15 hours before the day that is Ada Lovelace Day is finally over as midnight arrives in the Baker Islands, and we have a lot more blog posts still to be added to our Collection.
Even then, it’s not over. We have our first event booked at NESTA for 10th June - on which more to come - and I have a few other ideas up my sleeve too. So don’t go away - keep FindingAda.com in your RSS reader, or follow us on Twitter, and keep up-to-date with our news.
Technorati Tags: ald09post
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Judge Decries Warrantless Surveillance
Posted Jun 25, 2007 11:17 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
The judge who once approved terrorism wiretaps has criticized President Bush’s decision to allow surveillance in some cases without court approval.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said in a speech to the American Library Association that warrantless surveillance erodes civil liberties, the Associated Press reports.
"We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," he said.
For seven years, Lamberth led the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which secretly reviews wiretap applications in terrorism and espionage cases.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush allowed the executive branch to wiretap calls between people in United States and overseas terrorism suspects without the FISA court’s approval. In the face of criticism, Bush later changed the policy to require review.
Lamberth apparently saw no need for the order, since the court reacted quickly after the Sept. 11 attacks. While trying to drive out of Washington, D.C., on the day of the attacks, he approved five warrants on his cell phone. He also waived requirements for written submissions and agreed to wiretaps on weekends and in the middle of the night, he said.
Judges are better suited to make the wiretap decision, Lamberth said. “What we have found in the history of our country is that you can't trust the executive."
A White House spokesman told Associated Press that the terrorism surveillance program is “specifically designed to be effective without infringing Americans' civil liberties."
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Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica
Print version ISSN 0102-7972
LUCIO, Patrícia Silva; PINHEIRO, Ângela Maria Vieira and NASCIMENTO, Elizabeth do. The influence of social, individual and linguistic factors on children's performance in tasks of reading single words aloud. Psicol. Reflex. Crit. [online]. 2010, vol.23, n.3, pp. 496-505. ISSN 0102-7972. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-79722010000300010.
This study evaluates social, individual and linguistic factors in the performance of a single- word reading aloud task. A group of 1st to 4th grade school children from Belo Horizonte-MG (N = 333) read aloud 323 single words presented in a computer screen. Measures of reaction time (RT) and error scores were collected. The Generalized Estimating Equations method exhibited the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme regularity effect in reading and also showed an impact on the number of categories of regularity in this effect. No social factor was important to explain the results, but their mothers' education was correlated to the error scores (in opposite direction). There was no gender effect. Other factors rather than the traditional ones were also relevant, such as the age of reading acquisition and the verbal comprehension. The work brings important theoretical issues to cognitive reading assessment in Brazil.
Keywords : Reading; Regularity effect; Categories of regularity; Social factors.
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What's a greeter ?
The idea behind "Greeters" is for French and international visitors to have the chance to meet local residents who can show and tell them all about their very own Versailles, their favorite places, way of life, and city they love and are proud of.
Each Greeter will give you a one-of-a-kind tour where you can learn about Versailles' typical and atypical places, hidden treasures, attractions, people's daily lives and Versailles' major events.
They are not, of course, substitutes for professional guides and do not charge any fees or tips for their services.
Whether you're visiting as a family, with friends or alone, Greeters will be there to greet you and open the gates of Versailles to you.
The Greeters program is a service provided by volunteers at no charge. It is coordinated by The Office de Tourisme de Versailles and is part of its welcome and visitor information services.
All outings are carried out as a part of the Greeters Charter, which we invite you to read.
Our Versailles team
"Joseph will lead you through the charming streets of Versailles to his favorite spots, and on culinary outings."
"Sébastien, who loves literature, tea and old stones, will share his favorite locations with you. Come along on his peregrinations..."
Portrait of Guillemette by her daughter
"Guillemette, who loves her city, will share her favorite locations in the Saint Louis district, such as the cathedral, the Carrés, and their picturesque shops..."
"Jean-Luc, fond of history, good cuisine and urban studies, will make you discover, in English or Chinese, the fascinating city of Versailles."
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| 0.949653
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Conjuring the Fifty Spirits of Marduk, defeater of the Ancient Ones
A conjuring circle of evocation is drawn with red chalk. The Priest must have the Spirits seal engraved in ancient parchment, or sealed in clay. The sign is centered in a conjuring circle of evocation before performing the chant of the Ritual. Incents must be lit to keep away the Idimmu, dreaded demonlike being attracted to occult operations, so that they may not try to feel off the power that is expended. The priest should summon their Watcher so that It may guard his body and property
“Spirits of Marduk, Remember!
NAME, TITLE, Remember!
In the name of the Covenant sworn between Thee and Race of Men,
I call to Thee! By the word of thy calling! WORD! WORD! WORD!”
As the Priest begins their chant, the Seal will either glow green (if on a parchment) or fill as though with liquid (if a clay tablet). The Seal will be engraved onto the item or person in a magic light, unseen by unmagic means.
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| 0.928496
| 236
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| 2
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Max and Trude Schönthal Heller discuss growing up in Vienna, Austria, in the 1920s and ’30s, and the hardships and losses their families experienced as a result of the Anschluss, the German invasion of Austria in 1938. They describe how they and their family members escaped Austria and made their separate ways to the United States. Max, by chance, had met Mary Mills of Greenville, South Carolina, while she was visiting Vienna in 1937. He appealed to her for help in leaving Austria. Mary contacted Shep Saltzman, a Jewish man who owned a shirt factory in Greenville, and he sponsored Max’s immigration and gave him a job. Max and Trude, who met at a summer resort in Austria in 1937, married in the United States in 1942, and Trude joined Max in Greenville, where they raised their three children. Max served on Greenville’s city council from 1969-1971, and then was elected mayor for two terms, during which he spearheaded a major revitalization of the city’s downtown.
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| 0.981825
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Simply begin typing or use the editing tools above to add to this article.
Once you are finished and click submit, your modifications will be sent to our editors for review.
...possibly the most specialized mongoose. The narrow feet have four toes instead of five and possess extremely long, tough nails on the forefeet. The animal also has smaller ears and thinner hair. The yellow mongoose (Cynictis penicillata), sometimes called the red meerkat, sometimes shares warrens with meerkats and is intermediate in form between meerkats and other mongooses. It...
What made you want to look up "yellow mongoose"? Please share what surprised you most...
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| 0.902614
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Two CU-Boulder environmental researchers -- Kevin J. Krizek and Maxwell Boykoff -- have been named Leopold Leadership Fellows for 2013 in recognition of their outstanding leadership abilities and desire to communicate scientific issues beyond academic audiences.
A grant awarded to the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2, will allow students to conduct research related to the conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. C2B2 is a joint renewable energy center of CU-Boulder, Colorado State University, Colorado School of Mines, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and industry.
Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., CU-Boulder professor of environmental studies, says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it and the magical thinking that the agreement represents.
In his book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world's economy is powered.
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| 0.931375
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Internet Ready Hardware
"This email request comes from a student of Graham Harwood from Goldsmith University London this is a letter I received earlier today not just to me but all of us really. Jean Demars is a trusted and valued student of Grahams if you can help him in anyway with this project or projects it will be much appreciated by all"
The simple answer "Because I can" is probably premature at this stage. The main reasons I want to do it are principle and security.
As Paul points out in his page on encrytping e-mail [[How to Encrypt emails in Debian Etch 64 bit, PCLinucOS and Ubuntu Hardy Heron.]] plain e-mail is inherently insecure. It is sent in plain text through servers you do not control including your ISP's. However even if you encrypt your e-mails, as Paul suggests, an attacker who can monitor your internet connection can learn a great deal about you by studying who you send e-mails to and who you receive e-mails from. In security jargon this is called "Traffic Analysis".
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http://www.soslug.org/topic/soslug/projects/personal
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| 0.958972
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Conclusion Of Principles Of Interior Decoration
( Originally Published 1922 )
THE field mapped out for exploration in this volume has been covered, and the work is at an end. It is a work confessedly imperfect, and—though it aims at a certain completeness in scope and method—confessedly fragmentary. But at any rate one who has followed it to the end will have gained a clear perception of the fact that the creation of a beautiful and comfortable home environment is not a matter of magic or happy accident, but rather of rational and essentially simple processes; and it is hoped that he will have gained some knowledge of how to develop the ability to take due account of individual needs and tastes, and to proceed logically and assuredly and with the minimum of costly experiment and .disappointment to express these needs and tastes artistically in the decoration of houses. In the degree that he acquires this power he becomes a decorator ; without it he remains, at most, a copyist. A man's house can be a real home only in so far as it fits his needs and expresses his ideals and aspirations. "That best becomes any one," as Cicero observed, "which is most his own."
Beauty and comfort in the homes we live in—this is the ideal of interior decoration, the goal of all planning and contrivance and house-furnishing effort, the highest aim of all study of the art. To point out and emphasize the mutual interrelation and inter-dependence of these two qualities, and to set forth the principles underlying the creative processes through which they may be achieved, has been the primary aim of the study just completed. Necessarily this study has been highly analytical. We have been obliged to pick out and to consider separately elements which are actually seen only as they are combined with other elements to form wholes, and esthetic factors and forces of which we normally perceive only the resultants. This process is difficult, and at the best unsatisfactory. The art is like a two-ply web, wherein general esthetic principles are the warp threads that run from one end of the fabric to the other, giving it strength and continuity, and individual needs are the weft threads that shoot across and back, in and out, binding the warp together and giving pattern and meaning to the whole. In the process of raveling out a thread or two at a time for separate study, much of the significance of the whole mesh is lost.
Nevertheless, an analytical study is the only one that can equip the decorator to solve his own problems. The method of description and illustration is easy, and valuable suggestively. But of necessity description deals, as we have repeatedly noted, with solutions of other people's problems, not with one's own. This is not enough. The decorator must be able to use form and color, as the writer uses words, in the expression of any ideas. He must be able to adapt a decorative treatment to any given conditions ; and the ability to do this can never be acquired through the study of examples alone, but only through a mastery of the fundamental principles of his art.
If it be objected to the general method of this study that it is too positive, too much given to formulas, and too much inclined to ignore the personal quality of decorative art and the mysterious and intangible elements of beauty, the answer is that the method was chosen deliberately. The mysterious, the personal, the intangible and vague have been too much exploited in the literature of interior decoration. What the beginner in the art needs is a starting place on the ground, not up in the air.
We must live in houses, and we must furnish them, in person or by proxy, before we can live in them. We may do this perfectly, or fairly well, or ill. With most of us it is not a question of perfection, but of relatively well or ill; not a question of the highest beauty, but of some beauty or none at all. And the difference between relatively well and ill, and between some beauty and ugliness, is a matter of communicable and easily acquired knowledge. To master the grammar of decoration and the fundamental principles of composition ; to ground the mind in the elementary facts of proportion, balance, light and shade and color practice as they are here set forth, to learn enough of ornament and of design to recognize excellence and detect the lack of it--these things are easy. Yet they are enough to insure the power to create some measure of beauty in the home, and in the aggregate to go far toward setting up standards of artistic judgment and toward cultivating the faculty of taste upon which excellence in decoration so largely depends.
In many of the arts experiment is easy and inexpensive. The painter can correct his drawing or his coloring with no loss save that of his time. The writer can blot and rewrite his line. But the decorator must pay dearly for his mistakes. The selective processes of his art demand the use of costly materials, which cannot be changed at will. Thus ugly and unfitting decoration is too often permitted to remain, long after its ugliness and unfitness is clearly perceived and deeply deplored, simply because the cost of alterations is prohibitive.
The time to acquire wisdom is before one has need to use it; and in decoration, as in most of the arts of life, the beginning of wisdom is compact and workable knowledge, logically organized, and consisting in clearly established principles and definable general ideas. At the outset of this study taste was defined, somewhat ponderously, in the language of the dictionary. Essentially, taste is simply an unerring sense of fitness. A faculty developed by long processes of observation, analysis and comparison, it is after all chiefly a matter of knowledge. Hence success in the complex but fascinating and most useful art of furnishing houses is also chiefly a matter of knowledge. To repeat an earlier observation, vague ideals and hazy enthusiasms for beauty and comfort will get us nowhere in the art. We must not only feel, but know.
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Have You Heard About... Beastly
… the Beauty who fell in love with a Beast? Some form of “Beauty and the Beast” is found in cultures throughout the world, and you can find many wonderful versions from picture books to movies. Over the next week, we will feature three great novels based on this classic tale, all filled with roses and romance.
Alex Flinn’s Beastly is the most modern of the three adaptations. It features a handsome, spoiled, self-centered high school student who is turned into a beast for his cruel, thoughtless treatment of a witch (and everyone else). Because he did one kind thing the day she cursed him, the witch gives him two years to learn how to love a woman and to earn her love in return. If he can’t, he will stay a beast forever. This version focuses more on the “beast” than the “beauty,” showing how he changes from being one of the pretty people and leading a charmed life to being rejected by his father and having to hide from his former friends.
Reviewed by Fran (staff)
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The University of California will ban smoking and chewing tobacco on all 10 campuses within two years, President Mark Yudof told campus chancellors this week.
Nearly 600 other campuses nationwide have banned smoking, and many California universities either limit smokers to isolated parts of campus or keep them from lighting up at all.
The UC ban was a long time coming, said Colleen Stevens, chief of the tobacco-control branch of the California Department of Public Health.
"People have been actively working on this for 10 years," she said. "The UC system has been very vocal about protecting people from secondhand smoke."
The university likely would have banned smoking earlier, but smokers vehemently argued against it, said Trish Ratto, a health educator and manager of UC Berkeley's Health Matters Wellness Program.
The university will implement the ban in stages to help smokers quit gradually rather go cold turkey.
By 2014, however, nobody -- students, professors, custodians or conference attendees -- will be allowed to smoke or chew tobacco on campus.
"We want to give them time," Ratto said. "There's a lot of work ahead to make it happen."
California's smoking rate -- just less than 12 percent of the adult population smokes -- is lower than every state's but Utah's. About 8 percent of UC students and 10 percent of employees smoke, both far lower than national averages.
The upcoming ban also will prohibit
It remains to be seen how campuses will handle illicit puffers and chewers. A bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in the fall gave colleges and universities the right to fine smokers, but UC appears inclined toward a more forgiving strategy.
"The organizations that seem to be the most successful are the ones that, instead of handing them a ticket, hand them a card with information on it," said Grace Crickette, chief risk officer for the UC system.
Each campus will be able to handle smokers in its own way, but the educational approach "would be the hope," she said.
Matt Krupnick covers higher education for the Bay Area News Group. Contact him at 510-208-6488. Follow him at Twitter.com/MattKrupnick.
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It is important to develop an efficient right hand thumb technique with the ability to use not only free stroke, but rest stroke as well. A versatile thumb technique is important for dynamic and color flexibility, bringing out bass lines, and muting. The following video discusses the mechanics of the thumb stroke as well as how the stroke can change in different musical situations (ie. single line vs. multi-voice textures/chords). Pay attention to the angle of the thumb to the bass strings, if it is not a large enough angle (roughly 35 degrees) it will be difficult to do a rest stroke with the thumb. If your hand and thumb are positioned correctly, you thumb will slice through the string easily. Your thumb tip joint will be extended while playing a rest stroke and in many instances free stroke as well. The thumb tip joint will flex through the string sometimes while playing chords, multi-part textures, and free stroke, but never for rest stroke. The usage of the tip joint will largely depend on the musical context along with your personal tastes in tone and anatomy of your thumb (ie. length and shape of the thumb).
Practice the basic rest and free strokes with the thumb on the open bass strings while planting i, m, and a on strings 3, 2, and 1 respectively. Planting your fingers on the trebles will ensure you must move from the wrist joint of the thumb and not your entire hand which is a common mistake. Extraneous movement in free stroke thumb is another common error. Allow the straight, efficient movement of the rest stroke thumb train the free stroke thumb to make a straight movement downward toward the index finger. When playing free stroke thumb, it is fine if your thumb touches your index finger during the flexion of the stroke.
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PORTLAND, Ore. - Accidents involving cyclists and motorists in Portland do not often turn deadly, but when a truck driver accidentally ran over 19-year-old student Tracey Sparling this week, it renewed the debate over how the two groups can share the roads more safely.
Friday night's memorial ride for Tracey Sparling brought hundreds of cyclists to Burnside Avenue in downtown.
"It affected a whole bunch of people. It could have been anyone," said participant and friend Betsy Marineaeu.
On Saturday afternoon, pedestrians continued to stop and look at the flowers and candles placed on and around a ghost bicycle, painted white and mounted against a pole on the corner of 14th and Burnside.
Some say the accident is a reminder that bike lanes are not always visible to drivers.
Ben Johnson took his three kids to the scene to teach them a lesson about defensive riding.
"The drivers and the riders need to watch out for one another," Johnson said.
In life, Sparling inspired others.
In death, her story re-ignites a community discussion.
"We're on the verge of being forced to make big changes," said Jonathan Maus, the man behind BikePortland.org.
He says the number of cyclists using the roads continues to grow - and so does the need for education about bike safety.
"A big issue is visibility and blind spots," he said, adding that more signs would help.
Other ideas include creating more bike boxes at intersections.
Bike boxes are clearly defined spaces for cyclists that exist in front of stopped vehicles at traffic signals rather than on the side of vehicles. An example can be seen here or by visiting the corner of 39th and Clinton in southeast Portland.
Located throughout Europe, the idea is to have cyclists congregate in front of drivers and to eliminate any blind spots.
Lt. Mark Kruger of the Portland Police Bureau's traffic division disagrees, saying big boxes may not be the most feasible idea because they take up so much space and would require a massive amount of work.
Kruger told KATU News he recommends following California's lead by allowing drivers to turn into a bike lane within 200 feet of an intersection. That could lower the chance of a driver hitting a cyclist while making a right turn. Kruger said such a rule could have saved Sparling's life.
So far, none of these ideas have gained enough traction among cyclists and non-cyclists.
Tracey Sparling's death may be a rare occurrence but some hope her story can lead to bold action.
"We've done a lot already," said Maus. "But some will have to balance their perspectives with others and improve the safety."
Maus suggested other options could include painting more bike lanes a different color or physically separating bike and car lanes with some kind of buffer.
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http://www.katu.com/news/local/10526777.html?tab=video&c=y
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Many students find division difficult. They feel overwhelmed with division homework, tests and projects. And it is not always easy to find division tutor who is both good and affordable. Now finding division help
is easy. For your division homework, division tests, division projects, and division tutoring needs, TuLyn is a one-stop solution. You can master hundreds of math topics by using TuLyn.
At TuLyn, we have over 2000 math video tutorial clips including division videos
, division practice word problems
, division questions and answers
, and division worksheets
Our division videos
replace text-based tutorials and give you better step-by-step explanations of division. Watch each video repeatedly until you understand how to approach division problems and how to solve them.
- Hundreds of video tutorials on division make it easy for you to better understand the concept.
How to do better on division: TuLyn makes division easy.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.tulyn.com/2nd-grade-math/division/worksheets
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en
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The Problem with Cooperation
Paul B. Stephan III
University of Virginia School of Law
September, 30 2008
The case for international cooperation in competition policy is weaker than commonly thought. First, the lion's share of international transactions (the only kind for which international cooperation is relevant) involves industries for which there is no clear consensus about optimal industry structure. Second, there are strong theoretical reasons why states would exploit all forms of regulation, including competition regulation, to benefit incumbent producers to the cost of consumers. Third, the historical record demonstrates that states have invoked competition policy exactly in this manner. Fourth, arguments that competition regulators can gain solidarity and increased leverage against their domestic adversaries through strengthened international cooperation do not withstand scrutiny.
working papers series
Date posted: October 2, 2008
© 2013 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1276032
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Charles Francis ADAMS
ADAMS, Charles Francis, (son of John Quincy Adams and grandson of John Adams), a Representative from Massachusetts; born in Boston, Mass., August 18, 1807; spent several years with his parents in St. Petersburg, Russia; attended the Boston Latin School, and was graduated from Harvard University in 1825; studied law; was admitted to the bar on January 6, 1829, and commenced practice in Boston; member of the Massachusetts house of representatives 1841-1843; member of the Massachusetts state senate 1844-1845; founded the newspaper Boston Whig in 1846; unsuccessful candidate of the Free-Soil Party for Vice President of the United States in 1848; elected as a Republican to the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses and served from March 4, 1859, to May 1, 1861, when he resigned to accept a diplomatic position; chairman, Committee on Manufactures (Thirty-sixth Congress); appointed by President Lincoln as Minister to England and served from March 20, 1861, to May 13, 1868; declined the presidency of Harvard University but became one of its overseers in 1869; died in Boston, Mass., November 21, 1886; interment in Mount Wollaston Cemetery, Quincy, Norfolk County, Mass.
BibliographyAdams, Charles Francis. Diary of Charles Francis Adams. 1964. Reprint, edited by Aïda DiPace Donald and David Donald. 8 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986; Duberman, Martin B. Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886. 1960. Reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.infoplease.com/biography/us/congress/adams-charles-francis.html
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At a time of upheaval in the Middle East, Iran's ambitions as a regional power and its ongoing nuclear program constitute major challenges to its neighbors and the global community. "Crisis Guide: Iran," the Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) latest multimedia feature in its Emmy award-winning series, uses interactive timelines, bubble maps, graphs, and images to trace Iran's history, examine its oil-driven economy, and survey its nuclear program.
Its seven chapters include video interviews with more than twenty-five leading analysts, journalists, and Iranians such as Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. In its concluding chapter, top experts offer policy choices for managing the risks posed by the Iranian regime:
– Journalist Robin Wright, and scholar Reza Aslan, on the future of the U.S.- Iran diplomatic relationship;
– Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg and former U.S. intelligence analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht on the use of covert action to deter Iran's nuclear program;
– Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution and Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council on ways international actors can support domestic opposition to the regime;
– Former U.S. diplomat James Dobbins and Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran on public diplomacy's role in encouraging Iranian citizens to promote change from within.
"Conveying the full scale of the crisis around Iran is complicated and with this guide we are providing a range of interactive tools to give audiences clear reference points," says CFR.org Editor Robert McMahon. "The expert videos provide the crucial narrative."
Co-produced with MediaStorm, previous features include: "Crisis Guide: Pakistan," "Crisis Guide: The Global Economy," "Crisis Guide: Climate Change," "Crisis Guide: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," "Crisis Guide: The Korean Peninsula,”" and "Crisis Guide: Darfur."
"Crisis Guide: Iran" is available at: www.cfr.org/iranguide
This publication was made possible by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.
The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
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Feasibility study for an OTEC plant on Guam
The Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation has received a $50.000 grant, which will be used to conduct a feasibility study on the economic and technical aspects of running an OTEC plant on Guam. This grant has been given by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development and is in line with the Guam Bill 166, which states that each utility that sells electricity for consumption on Guam must increase its share of renewable energy of its sales, which has to be 25% in 2035.
About the grant, Guam Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo had this to say:
“The Federal grant received today is a step toward promoting renewable energy on Guam. It is important that Guam continue to invest in sustainable energy technologies in our community. The feasibility study that is awarded in this grant will explore Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) as a renewable energy alternative for Guam. OTEC has great potential for our island and it is important that it is explored as an economic alternative to fossil fuels.”
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This is a list of questions to ask yourself when developing, reviewing, or even playing games. It is supposed to be a useful guide to diagnose what is good in your game, and what is bad. This process highlights the strengths/flaws of the game you are developing/reviewing/playing, so that you can better understand what might make this game better, or more interesting.
It is divided into 5 categories: Presentation, Visuals, Music/SFX/Dialogue, Gameplay, and Value/Appeal. Presentation
refers to the overall impression you get about the quality of the game when you play it. It's usually based on a first impression, or a general feeling of polish or completeness, and is primarily based on the skill/experience level of the developer. Visuals
refers to the graphical component of the game, which is everything that is detected by the eye, concerning beauty and stuff. Music/SFX/Dialogue
is a weird combination of everything that hits the ears, and the written dialogue in the game. I did this because RPG Maker games rarely, if ever, have voice-overs, but instead they have dialog boxes, which count just as much. Gameplay
refers to the game as you play it, and its systematic mechanics that you experience. It usually involves the combat mechanics, the database, and the skill system. Value/Appeal
refers to the emotional quality of the game, its replayability, and the affect your choices have on the game. It also factors the interesting nature of the decisions you make in the game. OK, so here we go!PRESENTATION
- Is the interface intuitive?
- Does the game have good polish?
- Is the game simple, or complex?
- Is there a reward system? Does it bring quality?
- Is the story stellar/excellent? Does the player want to see everything in it?
- Is the pacing smart?
- Is the dialogue clever?
- Are the upgrades (if any) engaging?
- Is it easy to find what to do next?
- Does the game have style?
- Are the controls tight? Do they make sense?
- Does the game draw you into its world?
- Is there humour? Is it actually funny?
- Does the game have personality?
- Are load times long?
- Does anything in the game feel "tacked on"?
- Does the game lack a good story?
- Is it pretty to look at?
- Do the backgrounds fit the game?
- Is the framerate smooth? Is there lag?
- What is the mapping quality like? Are the environments visually impressive?
- Is the visual style appealing?
- Is there lighting? Does the game pay attention to small details?
- Is the art highly detailed or awesome?
- Does the graphics create a cool world?
- Does it run smoothly?
- Are the areas bland/dull?
- Are the backgrounds repetitive?
- Are the character graphics bland/uninteresting?
- Does the environment feel boxy/squarish?
- Is there a visually attractive variety of graphics?
- Are the graphics dull?
- Do you remember the unique style of the graphics when you turn the game off?
- Is the music the pinnacle of all video game music?
- Are the SFX nailing the appropriate sounds?
- Is there voiceover? Is it convincing?
- Does the sound support the game's atmosphere?
- Does the dialogue create genuine/believable characters?
- Are there small-detail sounds, such as footsteps, or background sounds, that make it convincing?
- Is the soundtrack captivating?
- Is the music consistent? Does it drop out now and then?
- Is the soundtrack forgettable?
- Is the music satisfactory?
- Are the SFX limited in quantity? Is there enough of a variety of sounds?
- Is it new?
- Are there big, incredible battles/puzzles/challenges awaiting?
- Does the gameplay feel varied?
- Is it fun?
- Is it challenging?
- Is it hopelessly addicting?
- Is it accessible to newcomers?
- Is there enough nuance and progressive depth to keep the player engaged for long periods of time?
- Are there relationships? Can you decide what to do with them?
- Are there moral dilemmas you get caught up in?
- Are encounters intelligently designed? Is each fight exciting?
- Is the level design exciting?
- Are the combat mechanics enjoyable/varied?
- Is there a good balance between different styles of gameplay?
- Is the learning curve well-aligned?
- Does it start simple, and get more complex as you go on?
- Does the combat stay interesting/challenging/surprising throughout?
- Are the controls simple or effective? Are they inviting to newcomers?
- Does the system have depth and precision demanding attention from experts of the genre?
- Is it simple, yet compelling?
- Is gameplay involving the player, or is it just an interactive novel?
- Are there control problems/quirks?
- Is combat repetitive?
- Is it just the same thing over and over again, and not interesting?
- Is it challenging enough?
- Does it take too long to get to the fun? And when you have fun, does it end quickly?
- Are the controls clumsy?
- Is the story worth replaying, to see the story in a different light?
- Are there multiple story threads that make it engaging to play again?
- Does the player make interesting decisions that affect the game? Do they really affect the game?
- Are there collectables to collect? Are there enough collectables?
- Is there another mode? Is it well-crafted?
- Are there a variety of strategies you can use in the game?
- Is there any reason to stop playing? Do you see any reason to replay the game?
- Does the game end too quickly? Would you have wanted more?
- Is it all playable in one short sitting, or many more? Does it have replay value?
Yeah, that's about it. I hope that if you ask yourselves these questions, when developing or reviewing or playing games, that you will realize the strengths/flaws of that game, and alter your mindset to accomodate for these strengths/flaws. The game you are developing may be lacking in the gameplay department. Reviewing a game, you may decide that it doesn't have good presentation or polish. When you next a play a game, you may decide that the graphical style is one you particularly like, and it will open your mind to the artistic possibilities. If this tutorial achieves anything like that, then my mission is complete.
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| 0.929418
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|
NEW YORK // About ten years ago in Baghdad, as American bombs thudded into the city around him for a second consecutive week, Omar Al Mashhadani began to dream.
"The first dream was about meat," Omar said, explaining that during the embargo imposed by the United Nations from 1990, most Iraqis could afford the luxury only once or twice a month. "Lamb, chicken, fish - I thought the Americans would bring all of this!"
The second dream was that the United States would help rebuild Iraq into something better, as it had done for Japan and Germany after the Second World War. During the looting that gripped the city after its capture by the invading forces, Omar would yell at people hauling loot down Palestine Street, "Hey, you don't need to take that table, America will make Baghdad into Dubai!"
The smile quickly faded from Omar's face as he spoke about the past, sitting with his wife, Shafaq, and young son, Adam, in their new home, a cramped studio apartment in a rough section of the South Bronx. After the hopeful uncertainty of 2004, "the dreams", he said, "became nightmares".
And so, after eight years of death, displacement and living under threat as a journalist with the American-funded Radio Sawa, Omar and his family became some of the 82,000 Iraqi refugees who have been allowed to settle in the US since 2008.
But for many of them, the bitter reality of life as a refugee in the US has been difficult to reconcile with the American dream, as they struggle to reassemble lives shattered by the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
But of leaving Iraq, there was no question, at least not for Omar, who is now 28.
"It was not possible for me to live like a human in that country," he said. His brother, who worked for an American contracting firm, was murdered by Shiite militiamen in 2006. His family found the body days later, bloated from lying in the summer heat.
Omar began spending most nights at his office in Iraq because traversing the new sectarian geography of the city at odd hours was too dangerous. He was there when his mother called him a month after his brother's murder, crying, saying that the same militia had kicked down the front door of the house and demanded that the family leave the now Shiite-dominated neighbourhood.
In 2008 the US Congress passed the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, which allowed for thousands of Iraqis who faced threats to their lives and who had worked with the American military and civilian administration, or with American companies, to be resettled as refugees in the US. Omar applied for refugee status soon after.
The process took four years, and in that time Omar survived an Al Qaeda suicide bombing at his office as well as a car bomb during the 2010 general elections. He married, had a son and had given up hope of ever leaving Iraq.
Then, late last July, Omar received a phone call from an aid agency worker saying that in two weeks he and his young family would be on an aircraft bound for Amman. There they would transit to another plane bound for New York, where he would begin his new life.
He and his wife had not expected so tiny a flat in what turned out to be a chancy neighbourhood. It did not help that within the first week in their new home, there was a fatal shoot-out on their street. "If I have to die, I would rather do it in Iraq," Omar said.
They have become used to the neighbourhood, and with the help of a refugee resettlement agency, Omar was able to quickly find a minimum-wage job inspecting fabric at a store in Manhattan. He was also given a small boost of US$400 (Dh1,470) a month for his first three months from the federal Refugee Assistance Programme. Since then he has also qualified for state welfare benefits that include food stamps and basic medical insurance.
But Omar is unable to save any money at the end of each month, and has not managed to move his family into a more comfortable one-bedroom apartment. He would also like to enrol in a journalism graduate programme and restart his career, but he does not know how he would be able to afford the cost.
While the administration of Barack Obama has streamlined the process for eligible Iraqi refugees to come to the US, with 18,000 expected to come this year compared with about 12,000 last year, once they arrive they receive scant help with restarting their lives.
A study by the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law school reported that many Iraqi refugees continue to live in or near poverty long after the resettlement assistance expires, and that US anti-poverty programmes are not sufficient for meeting the unique needs of Iraqi refugees.
"[They] do not break down barriers to sustainable employment, employment services are not properly funded, English-language training is insufficient … professional recertification is not viable … and [medical] options are insufficient to address the serious mental-health issues that affect many Iraqi refugees," the report stated.
Joshua Tyack, who runs the employment programme at the federally funded Iraqi Mutual Aid Society in Chicago, the country's only organisation dedicated solely to assisting Iraqi refugees, said that the Iraqis are generally trained professionals. Their degrees are not recognised, however, so they are forced to take menial jobs.
"They go from being in the elite to all of a sudden being in a job taking orders from someone who has not gone to high school, and it can lead to frustration that they are not being allowed to contribute to their full potential in their new home," Mr Tyack said.
Without better jobs, the Iraqis generally have to rely on state and city welfare services whose budgets have been cut during the recession. "Social services that people used to have access to are no longer there, especially mental-health clinics," he added.
The automatic, across-the-board federal budget cuts now occurring also threaten the initial resettlement help refugees receive, with the Office of Refugee Resettlement warning recently that it faces a $90 million shortfall this fiscal year.
Both Republican and Democratic politicians in Washington once championed the cause of Iraqi refugees, who were seen as having risked their lives on behalf of the US. But as Washington reckons with huge cuts, and with memories of the Iraq war losing political significance, their interest in the issue has faded.
"I can't get a meeting with lawmakers if I say I want to talk about Iraqi refugees," said an employee of a New York-based non-profit who works on resettlement. "They've turned the page. It's off their radar completely."
While Omar remains optimistic about his future in the US, other Iraqi refugees who have been here much longer say the frustration and disappointment is not easily overcome.
"Do I feel like my life has begun here, even now after two years? No," said Muhammad, who preferred to use a pseudonym.
He was resettled in New York after spending four years as a refugee in Damascus. "I want to live, I want to save some money, get married, plan for the future, have some health insurance."
But even after working for two years at a restaurant and being promoted to assistant manager, he has yet to save money, which makes it difficult to start a family.
"When you accept me as a refugee, you should treat me like a refugee," he said. "I have lost ten years of my life, I did not plan for my life to go like this, it wasn't by choice. It was all because of the war."
Zainab, who asked to use a pseudonym, is an Iraqi refugee who lived in New York for six years before moving to Germany because she was unhappy with life in the US. Her two sons, who had experienced wartime Iraq, had a very difficult time adjusting and received little help, she said.
"When I brought my children to the US, they were sent to a regular public school and were expected to do as well as the other kids academically, culturally and socially. It was a harsh, harsh reality," she said.
Back in his apartment in the Bronx, Omar holds his son as his wife cooks chicken, ful and rice at the stove a few feet from their bed.
"At night I dream of going home without a green card, and after dreaming I want to cry because I cannot go back, it is not safe," he said.
He recently realised just how unsafe Baghdad still is after posting an offhand comment on his Facebook page comparing the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, with Saddam Hussein.
"I got two threats," Omar said. "One person said, 'If you come back to Iraq I will cut out your tongue'. The other said, 'Maliki is really bad because he let you live'."
He now stays off Facebook out of fear that he may endanger his family in Iraq.
Omar acknowledges that nothing about his new life in the US is guaranteed. But with a wife and two-year-old son, he cannot afford to look back or worry about the obstacles that may come.
"I left many things in my country, but I came here for my son and I hope he will have the opportunity to be a great person," Omar said.
"When he grows up he will say, 'I'm American', he will never say, 'I'm Iraqi'. Iraq will just be stories for him."
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/american-realities-for-iraqi-refugees-restarting-life-in-new-york
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Automake also includes simple support for testing your program.
The most simple form of this is the `TESTS' variable. This
variable holds a list of tests which are run when the user runs
Automake also supports the notion of an xfail, which is a test which is expected to fail. Sometimes this is useful when you want to track a known failure, but you aren't prepared to fix it right away. Tests which are expected to fail should be listed in both `TESTS' and `XFAIL_TESTS'.
The special prefix `check' can be used with primaries to indicate
that the objects should only be built at
Automake also supports the use of DejaGNU, the GNU test framework. DejaGNU support can be enabled using the `dejagnu' option:
The resulting `Makefile.in' will include code to invoke the
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.makelinux.net/books/autobook-1.5/autobook_42
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Motorcycling For Dummies
If you’re ready to hit the open road on a motorcycle, make sure you wear a properly fitted helmet and jacket and give your bike a thorough pre-ride inspection for maximum safety. Before you decide to buy a used motorcycle, ask some key questions to get reliable information and ride home with the right bike for you.
How to Get the Right Fit for a Motorcycle Helmet
A motorcycle helmet is a sign of a true motorcyclist. Even if you don’t want to wear one, you need one. It’s the single most important piece of safety equipment you can have. A helmet has to fit well to offer the most protection and comfort, so use these tips to get a great fit:
Is the helmet the right size? Measure your head in centimeters at about eyebrow level and find a helmet in that size. Strap the helmet on, and then shake your head left and right and up and down. Push back on the chin bar on a full-face helmet to be sure it won’t slide too much. Try to roll the helmet off your head forward. If you can, it’s too loose.
Also be conscious of pressure points that could become painful while wearing the helmet — especially in the forehead. If possible, wear the helmet in the store for at least 10 to 15 minutes to see if pressure points develop.
Is it comfortable to wear? Try on a lot of different helmets, because each one will have a different feel.
Is the eye positioning good? Ideally, your eyes should be centered in a full-face helmet’s eyeport.
Does the helmet have a federal Department of Transportation (DOT) sticker that shows it passed stringent testing? If it doesn’t, it’s an illegal helmet and can’t be worn while riding on the street in states that require riders to wear DOT-approved helmets.
What to Look For in a Protective Motorcycle Jacket
A motorcycling jacket is an important piece of safety equipment for a rider or a motorcycle passenger. To provide the best protection when riding, a jacket should be properly fitted. When you’re looking for a good motorcycle jacket, answer these questions:
Does it protect from abrasions? A tag on the jacket should say that it’s abrasion resistant.
Is it snug but not too tight? If it’s too tight it will be uncomfortable, and you won’t wear it. It shouldn’t bind at the shoulders when your arms are stretched out reaching for the handlebars.
If leather, is it competition-grade (1.1mm to 1.3mm thick) leather? If a tag on the jacket doesn’t give the thickness, just feel various jackets and hold them. Competition-grade leather jackets feel heavy, and the leather feels thick compared to lesser-quality jackets. Avoid thin leather jackets made for fashion and looks rather than protection.
Does it zip at the wrists for a snug fit? Zippers keep the sleeve in place and allow gloves to fit over the sleeve easily. If gloves are worn under the sleeve, the zipper keeps air from blowing up the sleeve as you ride.
Does it have built-in padding or armor for protection in the elbows and shoulders, at a minimum? Padding or hard-armor protection in the back is also useful.
Does it have as many pockets as you want? Some riders like two outside pockets, some like two outside pockets and an inside pocket, and some riders like five pockets. Decide how much stuff you might carry.
Performing a Motorcycle Pre-Ride Safety Check
To ensure a safe ride, you should examine your motorcycle every time you decide to hit the road. Doing an inspection only takes a few minutes and can point out little problems that can turn into some major ones through neglect.
Get into the routine of looking for the following things during a bike inspection:
Do the lights and turn signals operate properly?
Are the tires properly inflated and the tread good?
Are the wheel rims damaged? Are spokes loose or bent? If either is the case, don’t ride.
Do the throttle and clutch cables operate smoothly?
Does the bike have plenty of gas and the right amount of oil?
Are the sidestand and centerstand firmly held in place and operating smoothly?
Are the mirrors adjusted properly?
Is your license plate held securely in place?
Inspect a Used Motorcycle before You Buy
When you’re looking for a used motorcycle, do some research and have a few bikes in mind that you’re interested in buying. So you don’t get stuck with a lemon, go through this short checklist and ask the owner questions when checking out the bike:
Does the bike have a title? Also make sure the Vehicle Identification Number on the bike matches the VIN on the title. On most bikes, the engine and frame numbers should match. If they don’t, have the owner explain why not. It could be that the original motor blew up and the motor was changed. (Or all the parts are stolen except the frame!)
Elevate the bike with a centerstand if the bike has one and check a few parts. For instance, tug on the front forks, and try moving the wheels from side to side. This allows you to check for bearings that are worn out. Do the same for the rear wheel to see if there’s any play in the swingarm or wheel, which also would indicate worn-out bearings.
Ask how often maintenance work was done and when. To verify, ask to see service records.
Check the brake fluid, air filter, and oil to see if they’re clean. If not, the bike hasn’t been routinely maintained.
Look for oil leaks. If the head gasket is leaking, it could be an expensive fix.
Make sure the lights, turn signals, and horn work. If they don’t, there could be a short in the system that could be time consuming to trace and fix.
Check the throttle and clutch cables for binding. Binding can be dangerous but is usually fixable by rerouting the cables or replacing them.
If the bike has been repainted, ask whether it was in a crash. Look for gouges, dents, or cracks in the frame and swingarm. A bent frame will cause handling problems. A cracked frame could break.
Ask if the bike was raced. A race bike can suffer abuse. If raced, ask when the motor was last rebuilt and what was done to it.
Start the bike. Watch for smoke from the exhaust and listen for unusual sounds from the motor.
When you find something wrong with the bike, you should be able to offer less than the asking price. And don’t pay a lot of money for a bike that has been raced unless you want to race, and it has top-shelf parts.
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http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/motorcycling-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.navId-323839.html
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Presidential approval has been given to produce commemorative silver dollars in 2015 to mark the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the March of Dimes Foundation.
President Barack Obama signed H.R. 3187, the March of Dimes Commemorative Coin Act of 2012, on Dec. 18.
A maximum of 500,000 of the coins will be struck for a one-year period beginning Jan. 1, 2015.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was afflicted with polio, authorized the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes, on Jan. 3, 1938, at a time when polio was on the rise nationwide.
The law requires the designs to be “emblematic of the mission and programs of the March of Dimes, and its distinguished record of generating Americans’ support to protect our children’s health.”
The law specifies the design contain “motifs that represent the past, present, and future of the March of Dimes and its role as champion for all babies, such designs to be consistent with the traditions and heritage of the March of Dimes.”
The final designs will be selected by the Treasury secretary after consultation with the March of Dimes and the Commission of Fine Arts, and after the designs are reviewed by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee.
A surcharge of $10 per coin will be added to the price of each coin. Once all federal requirements are satisfied, surcharges will go to the March of Dimes to “help finance research, education, and services aimed at improving the health of women, infants, and children.”
The legislation was introduced on Oct. 13, 2011, by Rep. Robert J. Dold, R-Ill. After approval in the House of Representatives on Aug. 1, 2012, the bill was sent to the Senate, which approved it on Dec. 10. ■
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<urn:uuid:80f15dcd-896f-4abe-b238-2f7479646070>
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http://www.coinworld.com/Articles/ViewArticle/march-of-dimes-silver-dollars-set-for-2015
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Address: off St Helena Street, Isisford 4731 QLD
Isisford Cemetery occupies a site of about 2 hectares 2km south of the town. According to information posted at the site, the cemetery was gazetted in 1895 but inscriptions extant date from as early as 1881. A shelter erected inside the cemetery displays a list of burials recorded in the Isisford Cemetery register between 1894 and 2007.
Peter and Karen Patterson-Kane surveyed the cemetery in September 2010 and made digital images and notes of all visible inscriptions. They describe the grounds as very tidy, well fenced and well maintained by Longreach Regional Council. Although several are broken, the monuments are generally in good condition as are the many attractive wrought-iron grave surrounds. Isisford Cemetery impresses as one that has benefited from lots of 'TLC' in recent years.
Peter and Karen compiled the list of all inscriptions for this cemetery. The Queensland indices of births, deaths and marriages and the Australian War Memorial online military rolls were consulted for additional information.
The unmarked burials recorded on the cemetery memorial have been included and efforts have been made to identify them. As is to be expected in the transcribing of old handwritten records, many differences between the data displayed, the inscriptions on the graves that are marked and the BDM indices were noted. These related mainly to variations in and the spelling of names and dates of death. Obvious transcription errors have been corrected but many remain unresolved. It appears that only about 30 per cent of the known burials are marked in any way.
How to find it
From Isisford, head south on St Helena Street for 1km to the cemetery lane, almost straight ahead, from where it is 900m to the cemetery entrance. Lat -24.27571, Long 144.432481
Isisford Cemetery is administered by Longreach Regional Council. For further information, contact Council at PO Box 472, Longreach QLD 4730; phone 07 4658 4111; email: email@example.com
The number of inscriptions for this cemetery is 496
The listing was last updated on 2010-12-01
The listing was complete as at 2010-09-21
Search for a specific family name in all cemeteries.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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An example of a “free” paper in a prominent medical journal reporting a study funded by industry.
Let’s examine what is behind this beneficence.
REACH is an an acronym for REduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health. The term “atherothrombosis” was concocted by “industry” to market Plavix and has now infiltrated into the literature. This is a classic example of marketers inventing a disease for which their drug is the cure. The first and most lucrative was the invention of the disease,”dyslipidemia”, to market statins.
The web site, http://www.atherothrombosis.org, is funded by sanofi-aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb who sell Plavix. Dr. Bhatt, an author of REACH, is prominent on the site. Here is a quote from the site by a Dr. Cannon:
Atherothrombosis vs atherosclerosis: Different diseases?
The patients were divided into those who had had a prior event versus those who had not. Interestingly, the patients who’d had a prior event each had about a 20% reduction in death, MI, stroke over the subsequent 2 ½ years in this otherwise pretty stable outpatient population. On the other hand, there was no benefit whatsoever in those who had coronary disease without a prior MI, or cerebrovasculardisease without prior stroke. So, in thinking about this, the question comes up: ‘Does this mean that the patients with a prior event are different?’ They’ve had a thrombotic event as part of their course of vascular disease. The question popped into my head: ‘Would this mean, potentially, that atherothrombosis might be a different disease than atherosclerosis?’
If we circle back to thinking clinically, there are a lot of patients we see who are 80 years old who finally come in with evidence of angina and have diffuse atherosclerotic disease, but who have never had an MI or stroke; then there are other patients who come in at age 40 with a large anterior MI and just one atherosclerotic lesion on their cath. Those would seem to be two extremes: the atherosclerotic patient (the 80-year-old with diffuse disease) and the atherothrombotic patient (the person who comes in with an acute event). And, the difference in the benefit of dual antiplatelet therapy for the atherothrombotic patient makes perfect sense: you’re treating a thrombotic disease with an antithrombotic agent. This may give us insight into subcategorizing a little bit the disease process itself and targeting long-term therapies.
Readers should be made aware of the disclosure of Dr. McDermott, the editorialist:
Financial Disclosures: Dr McDermott reports that she has received honoraria from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Sanofi-Aventis, NicOx, and Otsuka Pharmaceutical, has served as a consultant for Hutchinson Technology, and is currently receiving support from research grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Why couldn’t JAMA find an editorialist with no connection to “industry”, particularly the company funding the study which was editorialized?
If you wonder why this is a “free” publication just look at the disclosures and funding:
Financial Disclosures: Dr Bhatt reports that he has received honoraria for consulting on scientific advisory boards from AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Centocor, Eisai, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Millennium, Otsuka, Paringenix, PDL, Sanofi-Aventis, Schering Plough, The Medicines Company; honoraria for lectures from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Sanofi-Aventis, and The Medicines Company; and provided expert testimony regarding clopidogrel (the compensation was donated to a nonprofit organization). Dr Röther reports that he has received honoraria from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis. Dr Steg reports that he has received honoraria from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis and has received research grants from Sanofi-Aventis. Dr Steg reports having served as a member of the speakers’ bureau for Boehringer Ingelheim, Servier, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Nycomed and also on a consultant ad board for AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sharp & Dohme, Sanofi-Aventis, Servier, and Takeda. Dr Ohman reports that he has received research grants from Berlex, Sanofi-Aventis, Schering-Plough, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Millennium. Dr Ohman reports that he has stock ownership in Medtronic, Savacor, and Response Biomedical and is a consultant for Invoise, Response Biomedical, Savacor, and Liposcience. Dr Hirsch reports that he has received research grants from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis; honoraria from Sanofi-Aventis; and speaker’s bureau fees for Sanofi-Aventis. Dr Wilson reports that he has received a grant from Sanofi-Aventis. None of the other authors reported disclosures.
Funding/Support: The REACH Registry is sponsored by Sanofi-Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the Waksman Foundation (Tokyo, Japan), who assisted with the design and conduct of the study and data collection.
Call me paranoid but I have a suspicion that the conclusion of the next paper from REACH will be that “dual anti-platelet” therapy (read ASA and Plavix) is underused. Thus the “reduction” in REACH.
But the sponsors may have shot themselves in their feet. The REACH data shows that in Japan the use of statins is about two-thirds and hypertensives one-half of the world average but Japanese all-cause mortality is 40% less than the world average. Also the Japanese used about the same “dual anti-platelet therapy” as the world average. So, total mortality has no relation to drug use of all types. This glaring paradox is nowhere mentioned in the paper or the editorial and I doubt most readers will look at the data themselves.
In the final analysis, what is the point in studying atherosclerosis in a population in which 80% are overweight or obese, 44% are diabetic, 82% are hypertensive and 16% are smoking? The causes of their atherosclerosis are obvious, food and/or tobacco addictions as we have known for many years.
If sanofi-aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb really want to reduce “atherothrombosis” and improve health they should fund programs for fighting these addictions instead of doing more surveys to try to justify more drug sales. From their own data it is clear that drugs do not increase life expectancy.
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http://medicalmyths.wordpress.com/tag/tobacco/
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|
en
| 0.948184
| 1,555
| 2.21875
| 2
|
Reporting Stray Animals
The stray pet running through your neighborhood may just have escaped out of the yard or perhaps was abandoned several weeks ago. Whether a pet has been lost for one day or three weeks makes no difference. Stray pets suffer. They are scared and confused by their strange surroundings. They are hungry and constantly looking for food. They run the risk of being hit by a cars, taunted or hurt by cruel people, or may come into contact with vicious or rabid animals. They may not be vaccinated against rabies either. And if they have the disease, they could bite another neighborhood animal or unsuspecting child and pass it along.
Remember the description and location of the stray animal you see and call your local animal control immediately. You’ll be ending the pet’s suffering, perhaps reuniting him/her with the owner, and insuring your community’s safety too.
You can also report a stray pet by visiting Pets911.com, a website that helps reunite lost pets with their owners.
These tips on reporting strays come from the American Humane Association.
Note: All content provided on HealthyPet.com, is meant for educational purposes only on health care and medical issues that may affect pets and should never be used to replace professional veterinary care from a licensed veterinarian. This site and its services do not constitute the practice of any veterinary medical health care advice, diagnosis or treatment.
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<urn:uuid:4c05e616-6422-4a85-8402-175f637d1280>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.healthypet.com/PetCare/DogCareArticle.aspx?title=Reporting_Stray_Animals
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|
en
| 0.973464
| 289
| 2.5625
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Due to its geographic location, the Philippines is one of the world’s most disaster prone countries, particularly vulnerable to tropical cyclones and floods, earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions. These disasters can easily wipe-out years of hard-won development gains in the country. The U.S. Government through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is a committed supporter and partner of the Government of the Philippines in alleviating the suffering of people that have been affected by disasters; and in promoting approaches that reduce people’s vulnerability to hazardous events. The USAID humanitarian assistance approach focuses on providing rapid and appropriate emergency response to requests for assistance, as well as fostering self-sufficiency through disaster risk reduction (DRR).
USAID has been providing humanitarian assistance to the Philippines in response to natural and man-made disasters. The U.S. Government, through USAID has provided a total of PhP 2,117,350,000 (US$51.6 million) over the past five years to aid with the disaster response in the Philippines. The U.S. Government is helping the Philippines cope with the effects of calamities by improving mechanisms to effectively adapt and respond to natural disasters. This includes responses to Tropical Storm Ketsana (Ondoy) in 2009, Typhoon Megi (Juan) in 2010, Tropical Storm Washi (Sendong) in 2011, and Typhoon Bopha (Pablo) in 2012.
On December 4, 2012, Typhoon Bopha made landfall in the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, bringing heavy rains and sustained winds of up to 175 kilometers per hour, as well as flooding and landslides, to areas along its path. The storm moved west-northwestward across the Philippines, primarily affecting Compostela Valley, Davao Oriental, and Negros Oriental provinces. The U.S. Government has provided a total of PhP 508,400,000 (US$12.4 million) to support the emergency assistance to individuals affected by Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines. This funding is helping address the humanitarian needs of typhoon-affected populations in Compostela Valley, Davao Oriental, and Negros Oriental provinces, and includes support for emergency shelter, logistics, and water, sanitation, and hygiene activities, as well as the provision of emergency relief commodities and rice.
USAID also implements a DRR program aimed at enhancing the capacity of the national and local government units in reducing disaster risks by managing the causal factors of disasters, as well as reducing exposures to hazards, lessening the vulnerability of people and property, and improving the level of preparedness for future adverse events. In partnership with the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), USAID is providing assistance to increase the capacity of regional and provincial level DRR councils to adopt the Incident Command System as the structured disaster response approach. USAID provides local government units technical assistance to enable them to increase their capacity to prepare for and reduce the adverse impacts of disasters. USAID also works with the Department of Education and various schools in mainstreaming DRR into secondary education curriculum through teacher training and adoption of DRR teaching activities. In Fiscal Year 2012, USAID provided over PhP 168 million (US$4.9 million) for disaster risk reduction activities in the Philippines.
Last updated: May 10, 2013
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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en
| 0.945071
| 685
| 3.203125
| 3
|
In many church settings, Bible stories are taught as just that—stories, nice accounts that, although they may have a moral message, have no real bearing on the world around us. The Bible, the history book of the universe, has become disconnected from the real world. Although recognizing it as important for Christian living, we do not give the Bible its rightful place as the authority on all matters it touches on—history, geology, astronomy, etc. Read more about this important section of our website. The resources listed here will help you to connect the Bible to the real world with your students in a variety of situations: VBS, Sunday school, small groups, homeschool, and Christian school.
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http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/curricula
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| 0.968337
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The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world— albeit with perhaps with a kinder-gentler face. While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated.
The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush administrations all put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton’s model of supporting the US military industrial complex was hold steady defense spending and to increase foreign weapons sales from 16% of global orders to over 60% by end of his administration.
The neo-conservatives, who dominated the most recent Bush administration, amplified this trend for increased military spending. The neo-cons laid out their agenda for military global dominance in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report Rebuilding America's Defenses. The report called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, to perform global constabulary roles, and to control space and cyberspace. The report claimed that in order to maintain a Pax Americana, potential rivals — such as China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — needed to be held in check. Their military global dominance agenda required forward deployment of US forces worldwide and increasing defense/war spending well into the 21st century. The result was a doubling of the US military budget to over $700 billion in the last eight years. The US now spends as much on war/defense as the rest of the world combined making American taxpayers the highest war tax providers in the world.
Barack Obama’s election brought a moment of hope for many. However, the Obama administration is not calling for deceased military spending, or a reversal of US military global dominance. Instead, Obama retained Robert Gates, thus making Obama the first president from an opposing party, in US history, to keep in place the outgoing administrations’ Secretary of Defense/War. Additionally, Obama is calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and only minimal long-range reductions in Iraq.
The US military industrial complex is deeply embedded inside the Washington beltway. According to the most recent reports from OpenSecrets.org, 151 members of Congress in 2006 had up to $195.5 million invested in defense companies.
Major defense contractors were seriously involved in the 2008 elections. Lockheed Martin gave $2,612,219 in total political campaign donations with 49% to Democrats ($1,285,493) and 51% to Republicans ($1,325,159). Boeing gave $2,225,947 in 2008 with 58% to Democrats and General Dynamics provided $1,682,595 to both parties. Northrop Grumman spent over $20 million in 2008 hiring lobbyists to consult to Congress, and Raytheon spent $6 million on lobbyists in the same period. Nancy Pelosi received more money from registered lobbyists than any other House candidate in the recent election cycle.
The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to close this year, and while official unemployment is at 7 percent in the US, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers, it is closer to 14 percent. The military-industrial-political elite are worried about the potential of increasing global insecurity. The answer inside the Obama Administration is to continue high defense/war spending to insure military control of both domestic and foreign instabilities.
The military, industrial, congressional, and administrative elite profit from defense spending, both financially and ideologically. Insider profit taking from pentagon spending is widespread in Washington. But perhaps more important is the belief that this global military machine is seen as necessary for the protection of US corporate interests and the American upper classes in a increasingly destabilized world. Given that belief, the Obama administration is unlikely to change the established defense spending policies of the previous US administrations.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored a media research organization. His 2006 study on the Global Dominance Group in the US is available on line at: http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/the-global-dominance-group/
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It could be a yeast infection
That something else could very well be a fungus whose technical name is Candida, and which causes what is often called a "yeast" infection. Such infections are most common in teenage girls and women aged 16 to 35, although they can occur in girls as young as 10 or 11 and in older women (and less often, in men and boys as well). You do not have to be sexually active to get a yeast infection.
The Food and Drug Administration now allows medicines that used to be prescription-only to be sold without a prescription to treat vaginal yeast infections that keep coming back. But before you run out and buy one, if you've never been treated for a yeast infection you should see a doctor. Your doctor may advise you to use one of the over-the-counter products or may prescribe a drug called Diflucan (fluconazole). FDA recently approved the drug, a tablet taken by mouth, for clearing up yeast infections with just one dose.
Symptoms of a yeast infection
Though itchiness is a main symptom of yeast infections, if you've never had one before, it's hard to be sure just what's causing your discomfort. After a doctor makes a diagnosis of vaginal yeast infection, if you should have one again, you can more easily recognize the symptoms that make it different from similar problems. If you have any doubts, though, you should contact your doctor.
In addition to intense itching, another symptom of a vaginal yeast infection is a white curdy or thick discharge that is mostly odorless. Although some women have discharges midway between their menstrual periods, these are usually not yeast infections, especially if there's no itching.
Other symptoms of a vaginal yeast infection include:
- rash on outer lips of the vagina
- burning, especially during urination.
It's important to remember that not all girls and women experience all these symptoms, and if intense itching is not present, it's probably something else.
Why do yeast infections occur?
Candida is a fungus often present in the human body. It only causes problems when there's too much of it. Then infections can occur not only in the vagina but in other parts of the body as well -- and in both sexes. Though there are four different types of Candida that can cause these infections, nearly 80 percent are caused by a variety called Candida albicans.
Keep reading for ways to prevent and treat a yeast infection
Causes and cures of a yeast infection
Your very personal health at 20, 30 and 40
New research on cranberry juice benefits
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Mark Newbold's Animated Necker Cube
Gamelan Staff Pick (Educational), October 1996
JARS TOP 5%, September 1996
Net-mom Approved, June 1998
More Java applets here.
If your browser supports Java,
you should see an animated image above (generated by a Java applet
embedded on the page).
Otherwise, you should see a static image.
The Necker Cube is named after the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker, who in the mid-1800's
saw cubic shapes spontaneously reverse in perspective.
The human mind perceives the 2-dimensional shadow of a cube as a 3-dimensional object, but
the 2-D image doesn't distinguish the front and back faces. You can perceive either face as
being in front.
The Animated Necker Cube applet forces you to periodically switch your perception
of the cube. It does this by moving images horizontally and vertically
through the cube in a mutually inconsistent way.
The flying dog is Jack.
The jumping person is me.
The images were scanned from photographs.
Image manipulation was done using Adobe Photoshop LE.
You can put this applet on your own web page and have your own images
moving through the cube. Click here for instructions.
These people have done it (web pages listed in chronological order):
Notes on the Java Applet
The applet begins by displaying moving rectangular beams.
A separate thread loads images from my web server while previously-loaded images are being viewed.
The images are "transparent GIF's".
The black "Necker Cube" is always the same (though I draw its edges
in a different order depending on which perspective I am showing).
Some Related Links:
<Dogfeathers Home Page>
<Mark's Home Page>
<Mark's Java Stuff>
This page URL:
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(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved. Contact us for information about using this image.
The state Convention voted to ratify the new Federal Constitution by a vote of 187 to 168. Most of the counties in the eastern part of the state were in favor of ratification by a large majority, while the counties of Worcester, Hampshire and Berkshire were very much against it. The counties of York, Cumberland and Lincoln which are listed here are now part of Maine, which separated from Massachusetts in 1820.
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Editor: Michael R. Burch
A Review by Laurel Johnson
Reviewing a website is a first for me. I discovered The HyperTexts while reviewing books published by Joe Ruggier, editor of Multicultural Books of British Columbia, a Burch colleague. The books were of such excellent overall quality, I wanted to know more about Burch and The HyperTexts. Visiting The HyperTexts turned out to be an exhilarating and enlightening adventure. The site is easy to navigate and positively loaded with memorable poetry and essays. It's a website devoted to capturing the potential beauty and intensity of the English language. I found gems written by past poetic masters and new, compelling offerings from contemporary poets.
To ease navigation for readers, Burch has divided his website into varying topics of interest:
"Esoterica" features poems by icons of the ages who are not necessarily known for their poetry: Einstein, Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Hemingway, and Elie Wiesel, for example.
"Essays and Assays" features essays, interviews, and reviews, with a focus on writers / poets who produce exemplary work.
"Rock Jukebox" features lyrics by songwriters like Simon, Dylan, Springsteen, Lennon, and McCartney. Burch believes that today, as in our ancient past, some of the most passionate poetry took musical form.
"The Masters" is devoted to poems by the great classical masters of poetry and contemporary icons.
"Featured Works" presents in detail examples of poetry Burch admires along with commentaries. I found this topic to be an excellent learning experience for poets and poetry lovers.
"Mysterious Ways" features poetry, art, and literature that deals with things mysterious, such as God, eternity, death, and afterlife.
"Grace Notes" examines the philosophy of grace and all its meanings. Grace is a word and a concept that has remained unspoiled from ancient times to the present day. All forms of grace, eternal and kindly, is what you'll find here.
"Thanksgiving" is a verbally stunning and beautiful testament from Burch. From the survival of Iraqi War buddies to thoughts of his mother, this topic is poignant and uplifting.
"A Dram of Epigrams" features short poems, one-liners, witticisms and zingers from the famous, near famous, and infamous.
"Wit and Fluff" is an entertaining amalgam of humorous and thought-provoking quotes.
In addition to the diverse topics mentioned, readers are provided links to other websites and a helpful search option. The featured contemporary writers are listed alphabetically to the far left of the home page and each one is worth exploring.
Michael Burch is a man who puts his money and energy where his heart is. The HyperTexts reflects his philosophy and social conscience in a myriad of ways. This website is an esoteric celebration of old and new, classic and modern. By avoiding arbitrary labels and limits, Burch provides the highest form of excellence available to readers. He searches out and introduces sights and sounds he believes will excite and charm. And, thanks to the sponsorship of Alpha Omega Consulting Group, Inc., he does it without popups or other forms of advertisement.
If you enjoy poetry in any form, or prefer to be enlightened and educated in unusual ways, this well-crafted website is sure to be a favorite.
Review by Laurel Johnson
Midwest Book Review
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The title of this post comes from an advocacy piece written by ELCA Missionary Stephen Deal entitled “Sin borda…no hay comida”. The phrase has become the rallying cry of communities who live along a 10 kilometer stretch of the Paz River in the southwest corner of El Salvador. These communities, including many Lutherans, have been affected by annual flooding, like that of last October where 10 days of torential rains led to heavy throughout Central America and especially along the Paz River.
Much of this flooding occurs due to the lack of a system of retaining dikes at key points along the Paz River – which serves as the border between El Salvador and Guatemala. The consequences are predictable and often tragic: destruction of crops, homes, roads, bridges, farm animals and even the loss of human life. To help lift up this issue the communties formed the Inter-Community Association for the Development of Southern Ahuachapan (ADICO) which has been adovacting Salvadorian authorities for these dikes since the massive flooding of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Yet for the most part these pleas have fallen on deaf ears and efforts have fallen off.
After last years major flooding event the communities decided to redouble efforts with ADICO and have been blessed with positive results. The authorities were beginning to listen and actions were starting to take shape, like a dredging project to help mitigate some flooding. A great victory and step forward this action offers a short-term fix to a longer-term problem.
“We are tired of being treated as victims; tired of being the recipients of charity . . . we want to be listened to.” – Inter-Community Association for the Development of Southern Ahuachapan (ADICO) representative in El Salvador
The communities are continuing to advocate for a dike system or another alternative to bring a permanent, sustainable solution to the problem of flooding. The ELCA is helping in this important work of disaster risk reduction and preparedness, through generous gifts to our Disaster Response fund and continued relationships of support with our local companions as they work to fulfill the quote above, to move from victims and recipients to empowered citizens engaged in their own solutions.
I think Stephen sums it up best in the closing words of his article: “Thanks be to God for the dedication of ADICO and Lutheran church leaders as they work to bring a measure of peace and stability to the lives and livelihoods of everyone living in this part of El Salvador. Thanks be to God also for the opportunities we have to accompany them through our prayers, visits & offerings!”
Read Stephen’s Update No Borda…No Hay Comida
Gifts to ELCA Disaster Response allow the church to respond locally and globally in times of need. Donate now.
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Indigenous Law Program Curriculum
Advanced Topics in Indian Law 635A (2 credits)
(Formerly DCL 563) Provides an opportunity for in-depth discussion and examination of current legal issues of federal and tribal law in Indian country including tribal gaming and economic development, tribal policy and governance, treaty rights, international indigenous peoples, and other contemporary topics.
Federal Law and Indian Tribes 635B (3 credits)
(Formerly DCL 486) An examination of the law and policy of the United States regarding Indian tribes and their citizen members. Study the relationships between the federal, state, and tribal governments; and examine the source and scope of federal, state and tribal authority in Indian Country
Indigenous Law and Policy Center 630F (3 credits)
(Formerly DCL 625) This experiential learning course addresses the issues involved in creating and operating tribal judiciaries, and the federal, state, and tribal tax laws that affect tribal governance. Students learn about the appellate process in tribal court systems, including preparation of bench memoranda for pending cases in tribal appellate courts. Students also have the opportunity to assist in developing tribal court structures and improving tribal court administration. In addition, students assist in drafting tribal tax codes, creating administrative tax tribunals, and handling tax controversies for qualifying clients. Other projects may include legislative and policy work for tribal governments, including drafting and revising tribal laws and providing legal assistance regarding land tenure systems.
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RALEIGH — Computer games are a billion dollar industry, but it could be a lot bigger with the help of a new Web site developed by a Triangle family.
The Boinodiris women are serious about gaming, and their new Web site,WomenGamers.com, will be launched Wednesday.
The eCommerce Almanac reports that 43 percent of PC gamers are women. The WomenGamers.com Web site hopes to bring them together.
N.C. Statesenior Ismini Boinodiris plays games. She has worked in the industry and now is helping her mother and sister launch WomenGamers.com.
"I hope that the gaming industry takes a look and finds out that ... there is a huge female market already out there, and it's only growing," she said.
The site is not an online gaming site. It will offer articles, game reviews and suggestions for choosing games for your family.
"We are bringing in educators, psychologists, people in the community to give their input to this site about what is going on in the gaming industry," says entrepreneur Phaedra Boinodiris.
Boinodiris describes WomenGamers.com as "female friendly," but not just for women. As more women play computer games, the male-dominated industry may change.
"Its games are mainly marketed toward men," Boinodiris said. "The women that are portrayed in the games, if at all, are often portrayed misogynistically."
Boinodiris hopes more women will write and produce games, and so does her sister-in-law, a psychologist who contributes to the site.
"It's market driven, it's money driven so in some way that's the ideal and that's our hope," says Kathryn Wright, a clinical psychologist.
Boinodiris says the site has already received messages of good luck from gamers around the world.
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Workforce & TrainingGreen County offers a broad spectrum of skilled workers whose work ethic is grounded in the agricultural heritage of the county. Drawing upon its own workforce and those of surrounding counties, employers report a readily available supply of quality labor.
According to the most recent annual workforce profile, the Green County Labor Force is projected to grow 9.3% between 2010 and 2030, while the workforce age population is projected to grow 21.1% during the same period. In order to retain a greater percentage of the workforce age population, several workforce related initiatives have been started, including Future Forward! Green County and the Young Professionals of Green County.
Within the Green County region, we have a variety of labor training resources and education partners to support the workforce retention, development, and recruitment needs of area businesses. GCDC can assist you connect to the resources needed to accommodate your workforce training and recruitment issues.
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If you are planning an acquisition or budgeting for your existing portfolio, you have asked yourself the question, “how much should I set for reserves?”
Recently, my friend John and I were chatting about how smart money follows a basic premise when making an acquisition decision. John is a building engineer and his job is to analyze the segmented components of office buildings so that investment firms can understand what the useful life of each piece of the building may be.
John explained that on one building, his company learned that the window systems installed on the high-rise had 5 years remaining and that the report they produced noted the system’s end-of -life and provided the client with an analysis of costs to replace the windows. The client used this key report to set their reserves target over the 5 year period and plan adequately for the window system replacement.
One mistake we see many investors make is not adequately understanding the useful life of the building systems owned or being acquired. When adequate reserves have not been set to meet the replacement and repair of the property, the owner scrambles to draw on credit lines, refinance the property, spend tenant security deposits, raise money through a capital call, or even resort to not repairing the problem. Such behaviors can also raise the bank’s attention to maintenance of the property and pose some problems for the owner when he is asked about necessary repairs.
If you are budgeting your reserves and are wondering how much to include, consider hiring a building engineer to analyze your property. You might be delighted to know that planning for reserves is much easier when you have an idea of what to expect versus wondering what might go wrong in a few years or putting some money aside because that is what your colleague or banker told you to be the correct amount.
And if you are buying a building and have already planned for your engineering study, here is a tip:
Remember that reserves are savings. They are not expenses because they are not recurring annual costs to operate the property. What do you think the IRS would say if when you filed your return, you deducted reserves as an expense?
Reserves are designed to be spent as capital expenditures over a 5, 10, 15, or 20 year period. That means when you calculate your net operating income, reserves should be placed below the line, not above it. Most appraisers and banks will disagree because they like to account for reserves above the net operating income line partially because it ensures that sufficient cash flow is in place for replacements, but also because the added reserve line item reduces the net operating income and subsequently decreases the loan amount offered to the borrower.
When it comes time to sell the property, you either liquidate the reserves as part of your reversion, or leave the fund in place for the next owner.
About the Author: Jeremy Cyrier, CCIM is the President of MANSARD, a market research driven commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firm, and member of the CCIM Institute faculty. You may reach Jeremy at Jeremy@Mansardcre.com.
Get a free copy of The Essential 7 Step Guide to Filling Commercial Vacancies.
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What Is a Neuroma?
A neuroma is a thickening or overgrowth of nerve tissue. The most common neuroma in the foot is a Morton's neuroma, which occurs between the third and fourth toes. It is sometimes referred to as an intermetatarsal neuroma. "Intermetatarsal" describes its location in the ball of the foot between the metatarsal bones. Neuromas may also occur in other locations in the foot.
The thickening, or enlargement, of the nerve that defines a neuroma is the result of compression and irritation of the nerve. This compression creates enlargement of the nerve, eventually leading to permanent nerve damage.
Anything that causes compression or irritation of the nerve can lead to the development of a neuroma. One of the most common offenders is wearing shoes that have a tapered toe box, or high-heeled shoes that cause the toes to be forced into the toe box.
People with certain foot deformities - bunions, hammertoes, flatfeet, or more flexible feet - are at higher risk for developing a neuroma. Other potential causes are activities that involve repetitive irritation to the ball of the foot, such as running or court sports. An injury or other type of trauma to the area may also lead to a neuroma.
If you have a Morton's neuroma, you may have one or more of these symptoms:
- Tingling, burning, or numbness, at the ball of the foot
- A feeling that something is inside the ball of the foot
- A feeling that there's something in the shoe or a sock is bunched up
The progression of a Morton's neuroma often follows this pattern:
- The symptoms begin gradually. At first they occur only occasionally, when wearing narrow-toed shoes or performing certain aggravating activities.
- The symptoms may go away temporarily by removing the shoe, massaging the foot, or by avoiding aggravating shoes or activities.
- Over time the symptoms progressively worsen and may persist for several days or weeks.
- The symptoms become more intense as the neuroma enlarges and the temporary changes in the nerve become permanent.
To arrive at a diagnosis, the foot and ankle surgeon will obtain a thorough history of your symptoms and examine your foot. During the physical examination, the doctor attempts to reproduce your symptoms by manipulating your foot. Other tests or imaging studies may be performed.
The best time to see your foot and ankle surgeon is early in the development of symptoms. Early diagnosis of a Morton's neuroma greatly lessens the need for more invasive treatments and may avoid surgery.
In developing a treatment plan, your foot and ankle surgeon will first determine how long you've had the neuroma and evaluate its stage of development. Treatment approaches vary according to the severity of the problem.
For mild to moderate neuromas, treatment options may include:
- Padding - Padding techniques provide support for the metatarsal arch, thereby lessening the pressure on the nerve and decreasing the compression when walking.
- Orthotic devices - Custom orthotic devices provided by your foot and ankle surgeon provide the support needed to reduce pressure and compression on the nerve.
- Activity modifications - Activities that put repetitive pressure on the neuroma should be avoided until the condition improves.
- Shoe modifications - Wear shoes with a wide toe box and avoid narrow-toed shoes or shoes with high heels.
- Medications - Oral nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, may be recommended to reduce pain and inflammation.
- Injection therapy - Treatment may include injections of cortisone, local anesthetics or other agents.
When Is Surgery Needed?
Surgery may be considered in patients who have not responded adequately to non-surgical treatments. Surgery consists of removing the enlarged portion of the nerve. Your foot and ankle surgeon will determine the approach that is best for your condition.
Regardless of whether you've undergone surgical or nonsurgical treatment, your surgeon will recommend long-term measures to help keep your symptoms from returning. These may include appropriate footwear, custom orthotics, and modification of activities to reduce the repetitive pressure on the foot.
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May 14, 2010
Mother’s Day Cards
Buying Mother’s Day cards was hard for me this year. It was the first time I wasn’t purchasing a Card for my mother – who died last year, just a few days after Mother’s Day. Also the store’s selection didn’t include all the types of cards I needed – such as step-mother. The card aisle didn’t seem to know that families could be complex.
In reviewing the cards, I noticed that the cards describing the “perfect” moms who are the “best in the world” were rather sappy and over the top. Hallmark didn’t seem to know that mothers (like all people) might have some faults too. (I know I do!)
This week’s Torah portion sheds some light on the complexity of parenthood. The parasha begins with a genealogy, saying: “These are the generations of Aaron and Moses in the day that the Lord spoke with Moses in Mount Sinai.” Then the text proceeds to list Aaron’s sons. The rabbis rightly wondered: Why was Moses listed as a father of Aaron’s children?
Rashi, the pre-eminent eleventh century commentator answered that the sons were called Moses’ descendents “because he taught them Torah.” He explained: “This teaches that anyone whoever teaches his friend’s child Torah is accredited as the bearer of the child.” Therefore, Rashi understood that the essence of parenthood was not biology – but rather the imparting of wisdom from one generation to the next.
Like all biblical characters, Moses and Aaron had both incredible strengths and weaknesses. Moses was surely the greatest leader of the Jewish people, who received the Torah and led the people through forty tough years in the desert. The Torah also describes Moses as something of a workaholic, who repeatedly put his communal leadership above his family. (Exodus recounts that Moses’ father-in-law Jethro once advised Moses who was previously working from “morning to night” and encouraged him to set up a system of judges to help him.)
Aaron was a great peace-maker and caring priest for the people. He was devoted to family, but he too had his faults. He was overly permissive, particularly when he allowed the people to build the golden calf.
In the Torah, there are no saints – just real characters with great achievements and shortfalls too. Unlike the Hallmark cards, the fathers and mothers in the Torah are far from perfect, but they seem more real. They can teach us more about life, precisely because they are flawed human beings. We learn both from their achievements and their mistakes.
Unlike the card aisle, the Torah understands that our parents may or may not be our biological mother or father. Yet through our parents’ successes and even failings, they teach us how to live. Like the biblical matriarchs and patriarchs, our parents give us the sacred legacy of their life’s story. Write that in a Hallmark card.
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New textual analysis tools are providing interesting insights into classic works of literature. Last month, for example, we looked at a visualization based on character frequency in Jane Austen novels.
A blog post announcing the visualization outlines the ebbs and flows that were uncovered:
Things start off well with creation, turn negative with Job and the patriarchs, improve again with Moses, dip with the period of the judges, recover with David, and have a mixed record (especially negative when Samaria is around) during the monarchy. The exilic period isn’t as negative as you might expect, nor the return period as positive. In the New Testament, things start off fine with Jesus, then quickly turn negative as opposition to his message grows. The story of the early church, especially in the epistles, is largely positive.
This Bible visualization from OpenBible.info includes both the Old and New Testaments. Black indicates a positive sentiment, red negative. (Click to enlarge.)
A second visualization breaks down the sentiment by specific book, making it easier to see those that contain overwhelmingly positive sentiment (Psalms, for example), those that contain negative sentiment (Job), and those that go from bad to worse (Jonah).
Found a great visualization? Tell us about it
This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We’re always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there’s a visualization you think we should know about.
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Believe it or not, the popular MP3 audio compression format is now celebrating its 10th birthday. After all this time, it is still the undisputed king of digital music format, even with the advent of rival formats such as WMA, Ogg Vorbis and Real Audio, among others.
This Data Compression News Blog article has a well-written coverage of this event. Here’s some excerpts from the article:
In 1992 MP3 was in fact so far ahead of its times, that the industry considered the technology far too complex for practical application. It turned out, however, that its development was the bottom line advancement in audio coding – no other coding method so far could uncrown MP3 as the standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.
More discussion of this event on Slashdot.
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Three authors from the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science authored an analysis in the BMJ, “Stop the silent misdiagnosis: patients’ preferences matter.”
I’ll only provide the bookends of what they wrote.
In recent decades, rapid advances in the biosciences have delivered an explosion of treatment options. This is good news for patients, but it makes medical decision making more complicated. Most critically, an accurate medical diagnosis is no longer sufficient to identify the proper treatment. Just as important is an accurate preference diagnosis. Every option for treatment (a term that we use broadly here, to include procedures, tests, and even watchful waiting) has a unique profile of risks, benefits, and side effects. Doctors, generalists as well as specialists, cannot recommend the right treatment without understanding how the patient values the trade-offs. Regrettably, patients’ preferences are often misdiagnosed. We outline a method for making better preference diagnoses.
Better diagnosis of patients’ preferences would repair a fundamental flaw in market based health systems around the world, including the UK’s managed internal market and the wide open US market. For either market to work effectively, there must be an accurate signal of demand. But every preference diagnosis error is also an error in the demand signal. These errors subsequently lead to inaccurate assessments of wants and needs. Decisions on investment or disinvestment cannot be solely based on historical demand, because these figures are distorted by widespread preference misdiagnoses and do not reflect the demands of well informed patients.
Evidence from trials shows that engaged patients consume less healthcare. More work is needed to understand the magnitude of this potential benefit, but it is tantalising to consider that budget challenged health systems around the world could simultaneously give patients what they want and cut costs.
I believe that the full article is freely accessible to anyone online, so please read the full analysis yourselves.
Disclosure, Dr. Al Mulley, one of the authors, and director of the aforementioned Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, was a co-founder of the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation, which has been the sole financial supporter of this website project.
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Gulf War, 1991
In 1991, the United States became the worlds only superpower and began redefining its global role.
When Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990, President George H. W. Bush, with support from the United Nations, assembled a coalition of international allies. More than thirty countries, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, provided troops, in-kind support, and help to pay the $61 billion cost of the war.
Americas military leaders were determined that Iraq would not be another Vietnam. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Colin Powell ensured that the coalition used what he called overwhelming force. He also granted the coalitions commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, wide latitude to direct operations from the field. In 1991, the American-led forces went to war to liberate oil-rich Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Military leaders amassed troops and material, constructed bases, and targeted Iraqi military command centers and critical infrastructures. After massive air assaults, ground troops joined the attack. By January 17, 1991, in little more than 100 hours, the combined air-ground campaign freed Kuwait, expelling Saddam Husseins armies. An American decision to let Hussein stay in power in Iraq quickly became controversial.
A half-million American men and women were deployed in the Gulf War; 148 died in combat. The speedy victory boosted public opinion of U.S. military prowess and public appreciation for the nation's all-volunteer armed forces. Troops returned home to flag-waving crowds and an outpouring of goodwill.
September 11, 2001
Stunning attacks in the United States by al Qaeda, an international Islamist terrorist group, killed nearly 3,000 people and launched an American-led war on terrorism.
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked and crashed a passenger jet into the north tower of New York Citys World Trade Center. Fire and rescue crews rushed to the scene. As live television coverage began, Americans watched in horror as a second plane slammed into the south tower at 9:03 a.m. Thirty-five minutes later, a third airliner dove into the Pentagon right outside the capital. A fourth jet, bound for Washington, D.C., crashed in Pennsylvania, its hijackers thwarted by passengers. The nation reeled, but resolved to fight back. For more information visit http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11.
War in Afghanistan, 2001
The United States invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the ruling Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic militia, that was harboring al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
The United States launched its war against terrorism in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, using diplomacy, intelligence gathering and analysis, law enforcement, monetary curbs, and military force. Several hundred Central Intelligence Agency and Special Forces operatives, armed with bundles of cash, recruited anti-Taliban forces and joined them in ground fighting. In October 2001, allied forces unleashed a torrent of precision-guided bombs and sea-launched cruise missiles against targets in Afghanistan, directing air support with lasers and Global Positioning System devices.
Remote-controlled, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were widely used in Afghanistan. They carried cameras and sensors that provided real-time intelligence to field commanders around the globe. Armed with Hellfire-C laser-guided missiles, the drones attacked mobile targets. The United States military forces experimented for the first time with various remote-controlled robots for ground reconnaissance. PackBots carried cameras that enabled ground troops to explore compounds and caves from a safe distance
Relying on this precision weaponry and several hundred ground troops, the United States toppled the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. While Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds were quickly destroyed, Osama bin Laden and other highly sought leaders escaped.
As the United States launched its attacks in Afghanistan, it began a massive humanitarian relief operation. Millions of rations and explanatory fliers were air-dropped. Tons of supplies, from building materials to radios, were distributed on the ground. Troops were deployed to help Afghans build and rebuild schools and housing.
War in Iraq, 2003
In 2003, Americas role as sole superpower was once again testedin Iraq, the heart of the Middle East. Called Operation Iraqi Freedom an invasion was launched in March 2003. The United States, Great Britain, and other coalition forces attacked and overthrew Saddam Husseins brutal regime in Iraq.
In the war against the Iraqi regime, U.S. and coalition forces simultaneously employed air strikes of unprecedented precision and ground attacks that were fewer, faster, and more flexible than those of the 1991 Gulf War. Troops deployed through Kuwait raced 300 miles to Baghdad, while Special Forces operatives were inserted deep into northern and western Iraq. When Turkey refused to allow a major coalition offensive to cross its border, small numbers of U.S. Special Operations Forces were inserted into northern Iraq, where they mobilized peshmerga, local Kurdish militia units. A long-oppressed ethnic minority, Kurds were willing allies in the fight against Hussein.
The Defense Department controlled media coverage of the war. In response to criticism that journalists had been excluded from on-the-scene coverage of the Gulf War, U.S. military officials embedded selected journalists with fighting units. These embedded journalists broadcast live reports to a global audience.
Major combat operations took less than two months, but coalition units remained entangled in a controversial effort to establish an Iraqi democracy. U.S. forces suffered 139 combat-related deaths before major combat operations in Iraq ended on 1 May 2003. As American and Iraqi authorities struggled to establish an interim government, U.S. and coalition forces faced civil unrest and an anti-occupation insurgency. Hundreds more U.S. troops were killed and wounded.
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SELEX Galileo this week marks 60 years involvement in airborne fire control radar with a unique celebration event in London and the publication of a fully illustrated book.
Paying tribute to its rich UK-Italian heritage in air-to-air and air-to-surface radar technology, the company exhibited 17 radar sets - ranging from the AI.23 system equipping the RAF's Lightning fighter to its latest solid-state active electronic scanning array (AESA) products - at a reception to launch 'Looking Forward: 60 Years of Fire Control Radar'.
It was in 1952 that Ferranti - one of the corporate antecedents to what is today SELEX Galileo - began initial engineering studies and technology development work at its site in Crewe Toll, Edinburgh, for the airborne intercept radar that would eventually equip the RAF's Lightning interceptor.
Entering RAF service in 1960, the AI.23 was the world's first high-power fighter radar to employ the monopulse technique. Its development was a huge engineering challenge, made doubly difficult by the absence of any established component supply base. Virtually everything from the smallest piece parts upwards had to be designed and built from scratch. Engineers pioneered the use of numerically-controlled milling techniques to machine the precisely matched waveguide system from a solid block of aluminium.
AI.23 laid the foundations for a high technology business that came to excel in the realm of fire control radar. Products such as Blue Parrot, Blue Fox and Blue Vixen went on to become part of the lexicon of British post-war military aviation.
In Italy, the story unfolded in the 1960s when FIAR - another of SELEX Galileo's forebears - undertook the license build of the North American Autonetics NASARR radar to equip the Italian Air Force's F-104G Starfighter interceptor. The company later produced the much evolved R-21G/M1 Setter radar, a solid-state evolution of NASARR conferring the updated F-104 ASA with a true look-down/shoot-down capability.
Later, FIAR had the vision to invest in the development of a family of lightweight pulse- multi-mode fire control radars, identifying the growing worldwide demand for fighter avionics upgrades. This gave rise to the best-selling GRIFO family, still a leader in its market with more than 450 systems sold and in operations on many different platforms.
Building on this heritage of success, SELEX Galileo has gone on to develop the modular Vixen family of affordable, high performance multi-mode AESA radars. It is also part of the multinational Euro radar consortium developing the next-generation CAPTOR-E radar for the Eurofighter Typhoon.
"I am honoured to be here today representing years of outstanding individual, industrial and technological excellence," said Fabrizio Giulianini, CEO of SELEX Galileo. "For many years armed forces around the world have relied on our radar to support airborne missions and come home safe. The United Kingdom and Italy have looked at SELEX Galileo, and all its previous incarnations, as the trusted partner to deliver the capability edge to counter enemies and threats."
"Building on a continuous evolution of technology and techniques, SELEX Galileo today stands as the cornerstone of Europe's sovereign capability in airborne fire control radars," says Alastair Morrison, SVP Radar and Advanced Targeting. "The company has brought together the complementary experience, knowledge and lines of business from Italy and the UK to create a world-class airborne radar capability uniquely positioned to meet the needs of a diverse and demanding global customer base."
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Maria Stern takes flour, oil, water and salt and regularly makes pounds of macaroni noodles. She estimates it costs her about 15 cents, and she can stretch a pound of noodles for seven meals. “I’m from the old school,” said Stern, 83. “I know how to cook very economically. I cook differently than the younger generation. They don’t know how to use these things.”
But even with her frugal culinary sense, Stern doesn’t usually have the means to fill her pantry or refrigerator on her own. She spent more than 30 years working as a nurse in Florida, but now she has only a limited checking account and no savings. Sociologists describe her situation as living with food insecurity.
According to a 2009 Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia study, there are approximately 11,300 Jewish people living in southeastern Pennsylvania who are at risk of hunger. That amounts to more than 6 percent of Jewish households.
Some people have not recovered from the economic recession. Some of them lack health insurance. Some have skills for a 1980s workplace, not the one that exists today. Others have received notice that their social safety net programs have been cut. And still others don’t have family members who can help cushion the fall.
Organizations like the Jewish Relief Agency, the Mitzvah Food Project, the Klein JCC’s programs in Center City and the Northeast and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Philadelphia, all of which get funding from the Federation as well as public and private funding, offer a mix of prepared food, grocery staples and social dining events to help their clients avoid skipping meals. People who work for the nonprofits say the demand goes up every year.
On Friday mornings, Stern attends the Klein Center City Senior Program’s lunch and discussion event. There are usually about 70 Jewish adults inside the Jewish Community Services Building, many of them on fixed incomes. They eat a kosher meal and enjoy entertainment or a guest speaker. For Stern, it is her only social event of the week, she said.
She has lived alone in Center City since 1998. That is how she faced many of the struggles in her life — alone. Born in Italy, her mother brought her to the United States when she was an infant and left her at a convent in New York.
She was in training to become a nun when the convent let her out for a year. She met a Hungarian Jew. Instead of returning to the monastic life, she taught him English and converted to Judaism.
Then after having five children, two of whom died, they divorced. Stern said she hasn’t spoken to one of her sons in over 50 years; he hasn’t forgiven her for splitting from his father.
Asked about her plans for Thanksgiving, she shrugs and says she doesn’t have any. She appears sincere when she says that she’s fine. She is steady on her feet and clearheaded when she speaks. But her financial situation is tenuous.
Each month, she receives a $1,000 social security check. Most of that goes to rent and prescriptions. She used to receive $80 each month in food vouchers through the governmental Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A year ago, she received notice that she only qualified for $60.
Once a week, a volunteer with the Mitzvah Food Project delivers a week’s worth of meals to her apartment at 19th Street and JFK Boulevard. She receives a package of staples every other month from JRA. “The money doesn’t last till the end of the month, so that helps a lot.”
• • •
Bruce Springsteen played two shows in September in Philly, and for the first time since 1978, Lenny Vinokur wasn’t there. Vinokur recognizes that may seem trivial to other people who aren’t so devoted to The Boss, but to him it felt “like a pain in your heart.”
He is borrowing money from his brother, an Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, to pay rent for his apartment at 19th and Lombard streets. He receives help from Jewish and public food assistance organizations.
Once every few months, he said he will treat himself to some Chinese take-out. Concert tickets, though, are an impossibility these days. “It’s a hard way to live,” Vinokur said.
Vinokur, 53, has been unemployed since early 2009. He attended college in his teens and 20s, but never finished.
He ran the copy center at the University of Pennsylvania for 17 years and lost his job when Xerox offered the school a cheaper alternative. He worked at Ikon, a Xerox rival, for 14 years and again became expendable when Ricoh, a Japanese office company, purchased the company for $1.6 billion.
Now, Vinokur spends most of his time inside his apartment trying to ignore a tingling sensation in his right arm.
He had double-knee replacement surgery a few years before losing his job. Then he developed carpal tunnel in his wrists, the result of compensating for his weak legs by lifting his large frame with his arms. He had surgery on his left wrist while still at Ikon, but the right wrist wasn’t as bad and so he decided to wait. Without health insurance, surgery is no longer feasible, he said.
Vinokur connected with a lawyer a few months ago, who is helping him apply for long-term disability benefits. The process could take a few more months.
For now, he relies on his brother, organizations like the Mitzvah Food Project and $16 a month from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The office is a bus ride away from his apartment, though, and by the time he pays for the tickets, it almost isn’t worth it, he said.
Vinokur said he has become increasingly insular. He is anxious about going outside during the day.
“You can go to the park but, if it’s in the day time, you are aware of two things,” he said. “You feel like you should be at a job, and you’re not on vacation, so you think, ‘What am I doing?’ You are also always aware that you have no money.”
• • •
Susan, a 54-year old woman who lives in Elkins Park, loved her job at a local restaurant. Her boss told her he thought she was going to be there for life.
But her body didn’t cooperate, she said. Susan, who asked that her last name not be used, said her condition causes her to be in constant pain and working is not currently a possibility.
“My family doctor said you are a car wreck, and we have to treat you like a car wreck and put you back together,” Susan said. She now depends in part on the Jewish Relief Agency for food and other help.
During Superstorm Sandy, her furnace stopped working, which made her house very cold. JRA added her problem to a running list that volunteers can pick from on a website, Jraid.org. The site connects volunteers with clients.
A volunteer has made two trips to Susan’s home to work on the furnace. Last Friday he made a third trip with a needed part and fixed the machine.
Susan receives health insurance and financial assistance through the state. But the JRA is what she said fills “her hope pot.” “It’s the food itself, but it’s also the knowing that JRA cares enough that they are watching out for you,” she said.
Susan has received Thanksgiving baskets in past years but has not heard about any this year. She understands nonprofit organizations’ limitations, but is disappointed she likely won’t be able to make her turkey. Her secret is stuffing the inside of the bird with an orange and pricking its peel. “I miss making my wicked bird.”
To Find Help
Jewish Relief Agency
Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia Mitzvah Food Project
Email: firstname.lastname@example.org
Klein JCC Adult Services Lunch Program
Jewish Family and Children’s Service
Email: email@example.com
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Guide to Galicia
Gorgeous Galicia in the far North West corner of Spain is one of the country's greenest, loveliest and most unusual regions.
It boasts one of the longest and most unspoilt coastlines of any Spanish region, offering some of the finest seafood in Europe. It is also home to what is probably the world's best known walk – the hallowed Santiago Way.
This is a relatively little known corner of the Iberian Peninsula which attracts history and culture buffs, bird watchers, water sports enthusiasts and Spanish holidaymakers keen to escape the crowds and blistering summer heat of the Southern and Eastern costas. Walkers and cyclists from all over the world make for the Galician capital, Santiago de Compostela, their destination when they embark on the famous 'Camino de Santiago' (Santiago Way) which has been trodden by pilgrims for more than 1,000 years.
The age-old pilgrimage is comprised of various routes, all leading to the shrine of St James the Apostle at the magnificent Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela – a city which was declared a World Heritage Site in 1993.
The city is teeming with places of historic interest including the world's oldest hotel – the Hostal Tres Reyes Catolicos which was originally a pilgrims' hospital and is now one of the most exclusive hotels in the Government owned chain of Spanish Paradors.
Low key tourism has started to develop here in recent years but despite Galicia's wealth of glorious beaches, the holiday hordes have largely been kept at bay because the sea's too cold and the weather's too unpredictable. There are no major theme parks and mega tourist centres such as Benidorm and Torremolinos along the Galician coastline.
Exploring Galicia's 200 kilometre coastline is an absolute delight if you're not in any particular hurry and you're the sort of person who abhors the over development of the cluttered holiday costas. There are magnificent long, sandy stretches which are never over-crowded (even in high season), Norwegian-style fjords and sheltered inlets with shallow lagoons for safe and relatively warm bathing.
The coastline is peppered with pretty fishing ports and superb fish restaurants offering the sumptuous fresh seafood for which the region is so famous. Local delicacies include the rather gruesome-looking 'goose barnacles' known as percebes of which Hollywood actor/director Woody Allen is said to have remarked: “How can anything so ugly be so delicious?.” Many a foreign visitor bold enough to try one has concluded that the taste of these particular barnacles is quite as gruesome as their appearance!
First time visitors to the region are often perplexed by thousands of odd looking buildings on stilts, topped with crosses, which are a distinctive feature of the Galician countryside. At first glance they appear to be some kind of religious shrine but in fact they are the traditional way of storing grain. Known as 'horreos' these grain stores are no longer used for their original purpose but are proudly preserved as an essential element of Galician heritage. You can buy miniature ceramic versions as souvenirs and full size new horreos are still built today (as decorative features rather than for any practical purpose).
Galego - the language of Galicia
The people of Galicia are proud to speak their own language which is more akin to Portuguese than it is to the main language of Castilian (Castellano). And they safeguard their ancient culture and heritage which binds them more closely in many ways to their fellow Celtic 'nations' such as Ireland or Cornwall than to neighbouring Spanish regions. Galicia is a land of rolling mists, green hills and an abiding belief in witchcraft and Celtic folklore – all a far cry from the sunny Spain known to millions of foreign package holidaymakers.
Places of interest in Galicia
Santiago de Compostela
The capital of Galicia and final destination of the famous pilgrimage way is certainly among Spain's most beautiful cities.
This city, of high economical importance, is located at a peninsula. Major attractions include the Romanesque churches, the synagogue and the old quarter which offers an interesting contrast between almost fragile buildings and massive stone palaces.
Galicia's most populated city with the most important port. The historic quarter is very charming and well preserved.
The old quarter of Lugo, to the South East of La Coruña, is completely encircled by defence walls built by the Romans 1,700 years ago and are still perfectly preserved
This province is said to be one of the most beautiful of Spain, thanks to the marvelous landscapes of Rias Baixas. The city itself offers an outstanding monumental center.
Other historic towns in the region include La Coruña (A Coruña in the Galician language of Galego), where you'll find the world's oldest working lighthouse – the Tower of Hercules which overlooks the meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and Cantabrian Sea. This was the departure point for the ill-fated Spanish Armada which set sail for England in 1588 and was repulsed by Sir Francis Drake's navy.
And in the town of Ourense you can visit the Roman spa baths, where the water is a constant 70 degrees centigrade all year round or the beautiful Romanesque cathedral.
Places to see
Dates and Events
Provinces of Galicia
The history of the city began to be important in Roman times, when the...
Lugo has been a provincial capital since Roman times and lies between A...
Stretching out on the banks of the River Mino is the city of Ourense, the...
Pontevedra means 'old bridge' and the town is situated at the top...
Noia is typical of the many small towns located around the bays or '...
Stay informed on our latest property in Spain news
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While some doctors and researchers seem keen to downplay the potential hazards of statins, their use is linked with a range of unwanted effects including muscle weakness, muscle pain, liver damage and kidney damage. These are all well-recognised side-effects from this form of medication. However, there is also some thought that statins can affect brain function too, and in particular may impact on memory and basic brain function. If this is the case, then one might expect statins to be particularly problematic in individuals who have compromised brain functioning to begin with, such as those with Alzheimer’s disease.
A group of US-based researchers decided to test this idea in a group of elderly individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (the most common form of dementia) . All of the individuals in this study were taking statins at the start of the study. The research involved taking these individuals off statins for 6 weeks, and then putting individuals back on their statin medication for another 6 weeks. During the study, individuals had their mental functioning assessed including with a tool known as the ‘mini mental state examination’ (MMSE). This test is designed to assess brain functions such as memory, the production and understanding of language, problem-solving and decision-making – what researchers and doctors often refer to as ‘cognition’.
Read the full article and comment here: http://www.thecholesteroltruth.com/how-statins-affect-brain-function/
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If you know or suspect you are pregnant, see your health professional as soon as possible. Whether you plan to continue a pregnancy or have an abortion, it's important that your health professional asks about your medical history. The medical history includes:
Your health professional will also discuss future birth control methods that can be started right after the abortion procedure.
Last Revised: September 22, 2010
Author: Healthwise Staff
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2012 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
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Michael Tschakovsky, an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, enjoys a post-exercise massage as much as anyone. But unlike those of us who happily drowse through the massage therapist’s assurance that the pummeling and kneading is speeding blood flow to our muscles and draining them of built-up lactic acid, Mr. Tschakovsky took notes. His academic specialty is the study of blood flow to muscles, particularly in diseases like diabetes, and he decided to put the therapists’ words to the test.
Recruiting 12 healthy young men, he and his colleagues had them exercise their forearm muscle to exhaustion. The men accomplished this by squeezing a specialized handgrip at 40 percent of maximum force for two minutes, nonstop. “If that doesn’t sound hard, try it,” Mr. Tschakovsky says. By the end of the two minutes, the men’s arms shook with fatigue. Their hearts beat faster, and lactic acid, measured by a catheter inserted directly into the deep vein that drains the muscle, enveloped the straining forearm muscle.
Lactic acid is widely believed by many of us outside academia to cause muscle fatigue and soreness after exercise. Physiologists are more skeptical. Recent studies have found few negative effects from lactic acid and, in fact, have shown that it provides fuel for tired muscles. But the studies are not definitive, so “it’s still theoretically possible” that lactic acid has some impact on fatigue, Mr. Tschakovsky says, especially in events that involve repeated short bouts of intense exercise. More to the point, “most people think that one of the main benefits of massage is that it removes lactic acid,” he says, whether such dispersal is important or not. “We wanted to see if massage fulfills” that promise.
So after the volunteers had exhausted their arms and pumped them full of lactic acid, they either lay quietly for 10 minutes (passive recovery), intermittently squeezed a handgrip at about10 percent of their maximum strength for the same 10 minutes (active recovery) or had their arm massaged by a certified sports-massage therapist for 10 undoubtedly pleasurable minutes. Throughout, blood flow to the forearm muscle of the volunteers was measured by ultrasound, while their lactic acid concentrations were monitored via blood samples.
The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, are a blow, at least to those of us who justify our massages as medicinal. It turned out that massage did not increase blood flow to the tired muscle; it reduced it. Every stroke, whether long and slow or deep and kneading, cut off blood flow to the forearm muscle. Although the flow returned to normal between strokes, the net effect was to lessen the amount of blood that reached the muscle, particularly compared with the amount that flowed to the forearm muscle during 10 minutes of passive recovery. Meanwhile, active recovery reduced blood flow as well, since muscular contractions, however slight, compress blood vessels in the muscle briefly. But the overall reduction of blood flow was significantly less during active recovery than during the massage session.
As a “direct result” of the lessened blood flow to their muscles, Mr. Tschakovsky says, the volunteers being massaged wound up with far less lactic acid removal than the groups who recovered passively or actively. Massage “actually impairs removal of lactic acid from exercised muscle,” Mr. Tschakovsky and his colleagues wrote in their published study.
Although the findings may seem counterintuitive (and, frankly, depressing), they actually are in agreement with a growing body of science about sports massage. Multiple other recent studies have found that massage tends to impede rather than improve blood flow to tired muscles. Mr. Tschakovsky’s experiment, however, directly correlates that impact with lactic-acid removal in the affected muscle.
Do his and the other scientists’ results mean that massage is worthless after exercise? “Not at all,” Mr. Tschakovsky says. “This experiment had a specific aim, to see whether massage improved blood flow and lactic-acid removal in an exercised muscle. It did not. That does not mean massage doesn’t have other beneficial effects. We just don’t necessarily know what they are yet.”
M. K. Brennan, a licensed massage and bodywork therapist registered nurse and former president of the American Massage Therapy Association, is more blunt. “Too many knowledgeable, experienced athletes rely on massage for there not to be a significant benefit,” she says. The psychological effects, for instance, may be extensive and pervasive, she says. A number of recent experiments have found that sports massage may reduce post-exercise blood concentrations of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. In a particularly apropos study from 2000 of boxers, inter-bout massages left the athletes feeling significantly more recovered. The athletes didn’t subsequently punch any harder in their second bouts after a massage than after passive rest, but they felt less tired.
“The main takeaway” of Mr. Tschakovsky’s study, Ms. Brennan says, “is that far more research about exercise and sports massage is needed.”
Mr. Tschakovsky agrees. “Our study does not mean people should skip massages,” he says. “I’m not going to. And my wife, who runs marathons, looked at our results, laughed and said, ‘That’s very nice, Mike, but I’m getting a massage anyway.’ ”
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