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Photo on the cover of the book features Angel Riccio's Brownie Heart Cupcake, pg 2 (more on Angel below).
"There's plenty of intelligence in the world, but the courage to do things differently is in short supply."
Marilyn vos Savant
Columnist, Author and Lecturer
Great quote, isn't it!
It resonates with the book we produced because our courage was a collective one,
thus, the more people, the more courage, and ultimately a courageous project =
more effective in getting our message across.
Our message is this: the people of Haiti still need our help.
Sure, we all gave $ to a charity back in January, but now, 8 months later that $ has been spent by MSF Canada and FINCA Canada, and they need more to continue their aid work.
The Interprovincial Group printed 1000 copies of Cupcakes for Haiti, for free. Free takes a lot of courage.
Rachael Muir designed the January cupcake bake sale poster for free, then went on to tackle the design of the book, for free. She is a very busy Art Director, mother of two, wife, philanthropist and wonderful friend. Free time is scarce and takes a lot of courage.
Brian Gahan photographed the cupcakes over a period of three weekends. He is a very busy partner at an ad agency, he's a father of two, awesome husband, philanthropist and supporter of many local and international causes. Like Rachael, his free time is scarce. You may think I'm partial to his charm, but it's authentic, and I have loved him for over 12 years because of his courage.
I define community as the people who you can call on the phone, near or far, people we bump into on the street daily, or yearly, people we include in emails, people we've never met in person but chat with on twitter, the word community is endless, like a circle, to me, courage and community are inseparable. Thank you for everyone who has been a part of the Cupcakes for Haiti community, and those that are yet to join the circle.
The Cupcakes for Haiti community is growing day-by-day, here are a few links to get you acquainted with some of the courageous people that enrich our cause (see sidebar for more). Follow these people, learn about them, support them and your community will grow too.
Kari @ ActivekidsClub
Brandie @ Parent Central and The Star.
Kathleen @ good egg communications
Amanda @ FamilyNature
Amanda @ Desmond and Beatrice
ActsofSweetness @ Acts of Sweetness
Joanna @ InsideToronto
Rick Declute @ Team DeClute - RE/MAX Hallmark
Shirley @ Beaufort Decor
Angel @ Shine Blogspot
Thanks for listening. XO
AN URBAN MAMA'S TAKE ON NURTURING HER FAMILY | <urn:uuid:fb3d515b-33c6-415c-a63c-affb9893dcc9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mamasvillage.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-community.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964692 | 617 | 1.5 | 2 |
Written by David Greenwald Monday, 23 July 2012 05:59
Franky Carrillo spent two decades in prison after he was convicted of a drive-by shooting in 1992 and sentenced in 1992 to one life term and 30 years to life in prison. Critical to his conviction was the testimony of five eyewitnesses who said that they saw him pull the trigger.
Had we known then what we know now about the fallibility of eyewitness identification, particularly under poor lighting conditions, this travesty of justice may have been avoided.
Unfortunately, combining an overzealous if not outright corrupt investigator, indifferent defense and wrongful eyewitness identification, Mr. Carillo, who will speak at the Vanguard's event in Woodland, ended up serving twenty years for a crime for which he was factually innocent and not present on the scene.
Due to the vigilance of groups like the Innocence Project, the Northern California Branch that helped to free Mr. Carrillo which will be honored by the Vanguard on Thursday, not only do we have people exonerated after being wrongly convicted, but we have data to show us what has gone wrong.
Research shows that eyewitnesses may get their identifications wrong by up to 25 percent of the time. It is important to understand under what conditions that is more likely to occur.
Last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court made a ruling that was aimed at resolving what they called the "troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications."
A year later, for the first time, the New Jersey courts are having judges instruct jurors in order to improve their evaluation of eyewitness identification.
The New York Times reported this week, "A judge now must tell jurors before deliberations begin that, for example, stress levels, distance or poor lighting can undercut an eyewitness's ability to make an accurate identification."
"Factors like the time that has elapsed between the commission of a crime and a witness's identification of a suspect or the behavior of a police officer during a lineup can also influence a witness, the new instructions warn," they add.
"You should consider whether the fact that the witness and the defendant are not of the same race may have influenced the accuracy of the witness's identification," the instructions say.
"Human memory is not foolproof," the instructions say. "Research has revealed that human memory is not like a video recording that a witness need only replay to remember what happened. Memory is far more complex."
Even under the best of conditions, eyewitness identification is simply not reliable. As the instructions indicate, researchers have noted that our minds do not work like tape recorders.
Writes the Innocence Project, "The human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated."
Moreover, memory is subject to contamination that is undetectable to the eyewitness. Dr. Geoffrey Loftus, a Psychology Professor at the University of Washington, is one of the foremost authorities on memory and human perception.
In his testimony as an expert witness in a recent trial, he spoke of post-event information. This is information, as its name implies, that creates a coherent story rather than the fragmented information that is initially processed. At the time, making this more coherent does not make it more accurate.
While post-event information makes it seem more "real," the memory could actually be based on a false premise. For instance, an eyewitness may hear from someone else that the attacker wore a certain color, and subconsciously accommodate that information to his or her memory of the event.
Writes the Times, "Although it applies only in New Jersey, the ruling was widely heralded for containing the most exhaustive review of decades of scientific research on eyewitness identification."
Moreover, experts believe that the new instructions will be influential as other state courts look at revising their approach to eyewitness identification.
"These instructions are far more detailed and careful than anything that exists anywhere in the country," said Brandon L. Garrett told the Times. Professor Garrett is a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of "Convicting the Innocent," a book that includes a study of eyewitness misidentifications, which was cited by the New Jersey court in its decision.
"These instructions are far from perfect," he added, "but they are a remarkable road map for how you explain eyewitness memory to jurors."
Barry Scheck, who is the cofounder of the Innocence Project, called the changes "critically important," predicting "the new instructions would not only affect how juries are instructed, but would also influence trials themselves and the evidence-gathering that precedes them, since both sides will know that such instructions will be given."
"It changes the way evidence is presented by prosecutors and the way lawyers defend," he said, adding, "The whole system will improve."
"We expect juries are going to hear this evidence, so we want to give them the tools with which to evaluate the eyewitness testimony," New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner told the Times.
Meanwhile, we can see in the example of Franky Carrillo how this might have applied.
Years after the conviction, the victim's son admitted what investigators should have known all along - he had not seen anything.
Attorney Ellen Eggers had to lead a team of investigators out to the scene of the crime under similar lighting conditions.
Eventually she convinced the judge to go to the crime scene.
"[The reenactment] established that none of those witnesses could have seen what they claimed to have seen," she said. This meant it was not merely adult witnesses recanting years later - there was actually evidence to support that recantation.
It was the revelation that one could not make out the facial features in the lighting conditions, coupled with Mr. Carrillo's father's testimony that he was at home that night, that led even the prosecution to believe that Mr. Carrillo was not the shooter that night.
"A fundamental principal in American criminal justice is that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," writes Nancy Petro, a contributor to the Wrongful Conviction blog. "In the past two decades, DNA-proven wrongful convictions have revealed that we've routinely met the standard of 'beyond a reasonable doubt' with evidence that is quantifiably incorrect one-fourth of the time."
"A 25 percent error rate in school has historically earned the very lackluster grade of D. A 25 percent margin of error would shutter any hospital and ground any airline," she noted. "But, in the criminal justice system, most Americans, blinded by trust in the system and a popular allegiance to 'tough on crime' policies, have yet to demand best practices in securing the most accurate evidence possible from those who have witnessed a crime."
"Responsible citizens must urge our elected officials to require best practices in the criminal justice system," Ms. Petro writes. "Any case based solely upon eyewitness identification should raise red flags. It's becoming increasingly obvious that eyewitness identification alone, with its 25-percent error rate, cannot prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
If that's the case, more states should consider following the lead of New Jersey.
---David M. Greenwald reporting
"But, in the criminal justice system, most Americans, blinded by trust in the system and a popular allegiance to 'tough on crime' policies, have yet to demand best practices in securing the most accurate evidence possible from those who have witnessed a crime."
I would add one more factor to our willingness to convict based on questionable identification. That factor is fear. What I see reflected in many of the posts on the Vanguard and in the press in general is a not just fear of crime, but also of diversity and social change. I think that too often, a lack of understanding of the culture and values of those we identify as "the other" make us too willing to believe too quickly and easily in their guilt. Whether this distrust of "the other" is based on age ( as in disapproval of the actions of those rowdy students, or the comment "Don't trust anyone over 30), or race, or religion, or nation of origin, I think it presents a real threat to accuracy in our court system and to the cohesiveness of our society as a whole.
Research shows that eyewitnesses may get their identifications wrong by up to 25 percent of the time.
Even under the best of conditions, eyewitness identification is simply not reliable.
If eyewitness identification were "not reliable", it would not be permitted in the court room - much as lie detector tests are inadmissible because they have been deemed unreliable. Apparently eyewitness testimony appears to be reliable at least 75% of the time. Eyewitness testimony is imperfect to be sure, as most evidence is, and challangeable by the defense. But to make such a sweeping statement that eyewitness testimony is "not reliable" is incorrect IMO. You can certainly say eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, but that is a far cry from making a blanket statement that it is unreliable.
I have no problem with jury instructions as given in New Jersey...
As for the Carrillo case, there are not enough facts here for me to draw any conclusions, e.g. what other evidence was available at the time. I did some research - Carrillo was only 16 years old at the time of his arrest, which put him at a huge disadvantage in the criminal justice system.
To dmg: No evidence or investigative technique is perfect. All evidence is unreliable to some extent, including DNA. See below. Does that mean we shouldn't use evidence, because it is imperfect?
So where is the problem in this technique? After scientists analyze the DNA found at a crime scene, they compare it to the suspect's DNA to see if their barcodes match. The more loci where the STRs match, the more likely that the DNA comes from the same individual. Typically, to make sure that the barcodes matched, labs in the United States look at 13 loci. Labs in the United Kingdom look at 10 loci. If all 10-13 loci had the same lengths of STRs, it was said that the DNA was from the same individual. The lower the number of loci, the less confidence the DNA is a match. In other words the longer the barcode, the better the identification tool.
The problem comes from the fact that most DNA from a crime scene is not perfect. It can be degraded or mixed with DNA from other individuals. Sometimes labs can only match 9 loci to the DNA found at a crime scene.
Scientists are starting to question this assumption that 10-13 loci are enough to rule out the possibility of a random match to DNA other than the suspect. In other words, if 10-13 loci are not enough to make a definitive barcode, then a 10-13 loci DNA profile can actually match more than one individual. According New Scientist, a recent look into the possibility of random matches produced some serious results:
Or to put it another way, some evidence is reliable enough to be admitted into the court room. Lie detector tests have been deemed so unreliable, they are not admissible in court. Eyewitness testimony is reliable enough that it is permitted in court. However, the accuracy of eyewitness testimony is always subject to challenge by either side.
ERM: My understanding of Carrillo is that the DA sent their investigator to observe the crime scene and determined that the witnesses could not have seen what they claimed and so the DA did not oppose when the judge vacated the jury verdict and did not attempt to retry the case.
All that means if the eyewitness testimony was no good. We don't know what other evidence there was; how stale any remaining evidence was, etc. The prosecution obviously felt they could not successfully retry this case. I have to wonder where the defense attorney was in this case? Out to lunch?
erm: "No evidence or investigative technique is perfect."
dmg: Would you get into a car if you knew you have a 25% chance of dying?
Comparing driving a car to the courtroom is not a good analogy. I can give you a hundred reasons why (don't tempt me - I'm a lawyer, I can do it! LOL). Evidence is not taken in a vacuum, it is pieced together to make a whole. It is more accurate to think of a body of evidence as a jigsaw puzzle, with possibly hundreds of pieces of evidence that need to fit together properly. Even if one piece is missing or defective, that doesn't mean you can't get a good picture of the whole. It depends on the number of pieces that make up the whole and how many and which pieces are missing as to whether you will be able to see the "entire picture".
I think part of it is that the research on lie detector tests have been known for some time while we are just finding out the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. We allowed bullet lead analysis into the courtroom at one point, we don't any more. Science changes things.
So are you advocating not being able to use eyewitness testimony at all?
dmg: Define we? There was no evidence linking Carrillo to the crime scene other than the eyewitness testimony.
But it is not necessarily just because of the faulty eyewitness testimony that Carrillo was exonerated. See http://www.ktla.com/news/landi...3369.story
Defense investigator David Lynn testified to a confession he obtained from another man who exonerated Carrillo.
The point being that there were many reasons why this case was flawed/overturned: the defendant was 16 years old; conflicting eyewitness testimony; a later confession by someone else; ineffective defense counsel. One could argue but for ineffective defense counsel, the exonerated defendant would probably never have been found guilty, no?
erm: "So are you advocating not being able to use eyewitness testimony at all?"
dmg: No. I start with the court admonishment. What I worry about is what a 25% error rate means? Does that include a case in which I see Elaine, someone I know and recognize? If it does, that suggests that the real failure rate is higher?
What it means is that eyewitness testimony is not perfect, just as most other evidence is not perfect (not even DNA evidence). As I mentioned before, evidence has to be taken in its totality. And as I said before, a court admonishment is fine...
That would be more speculative. Clearly without the faulty witness identification, there would have been no case against him to begin with. But I do agree there are multiple factors that have to go wrong for these cases to happen.
Hardly speculative in this case. If it could be clearly shown the eyewitnesses could not have seen what they did now, it could have been shown then. Where the heck was the defense attorney? Had he noticed the same thing, this case clearly never would have gotten off the ground... | <urn:uuid:70418c09-0747-4851-8521-72e3f19e11ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://davisvanguard.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5555:new-jersey-court-develops-jury-instruction-about-reliability-of-eyewitnesses&catid=74:court-watch&Itemid=100 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970572 | 3,111 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Dr. Marianne J. Legato is an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer and specialist in women's health. She is a Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Founder and Director of the Partnership for Women’s Health at Columbia University. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato founded the Partnership for Women's Health at Columbia University in 1997. It is the first collaboration between academic medicine and the private sector focused solely on gender-specific medicine: the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and of how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato has received many awards for her leadership role in women's health.
View Dr. Legato's Books:
Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget
Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan
Eve's Rib: The New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine and How It Can Save Your Life
Dr. Legato explains if in the future we will need doctors to specialize in gender specific medicine.
February 5, 2009 - 2:52pm
Dr. Legato introduces herself and explains what gender specific medicine is and how it benefits women's health.
January 8, 2009 - 1:08pm
Listen in as Dr. Marianne J. Legato discusses her new book, "Why Men Never Remember And Women Never Forget."
As an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer and specialist in ...
January 5, 2009 - 12:25pm
Dr. Legato shares why men should take responsibility for their own health.
December 22, 2008 - 1:03pm
Dr. Legato shares how hormones affect depression in women compared to men.
December 22, 2008 - 12:55pm
Dr. Legato shares how common gender specific medicine has become.
December 22, 2008 - 12:41pm
Dr. Legato shares why women advocate for their loved ones more often than for themselves.
December 22, 2008 - 12:38pm
Dr. Legato shares heart attack signs and symptoms.
December 22, 2008 - 12:34pm
Dr. Legato shares if nicotine addictions are more profound in women.
December 22, 2008 - 12:27pm
Listen as Dr. Legato explains why women live longer than men.
December 22, 2008 - 12:24pm
Dr. Legato shares if medical professions are trained to understand and utilize gender specific medicine.
December 22, 2008 - 12:21pm
Dr. Legato shares the best way for women to advocate for their health at the doctor's office.
December 22, 2008 - 12:17pm
Dr. Legato shares what symptoms in females may indicate high cortisol hormone levels.
December 22, 2008 - 12:13pm
Dr. Legato explains how the hormones cortisol and estrogen affect a woman's ability to concentrate and retain information.
December 22, 2008 - 11:58am
Dr. Legato shares what cortisol is and how the hormone affects women after an argument.
December 22, 2008 - 11:53am
Listen as Dr. Legato explains how women and men express depression in different ways.
December 22, 2008 - 11:48am
Dr. Legato shares how women respond to stress differently than men.
December 22, 2008 - 11:44am
Listen as Dr. Legato explains what bodily functions hormones are responsible for.
December 22, 2008 - 11:37am
Dr. Legato explains if cholesterol medications affect women and men differently.
December 22, 2008 - 11:32am
Dr. Legato gives multiple reasons why men are treated more aggressively than women after a heart attack.
December 22, 2008 - 11:28am
Dr. Legato shares what women who are always chilly must be aware of.
December 22, 2008 - 11:23am
Dr. Legato shares if hormone fluctuation during a woman's menstrual cycle can compromise her immune system.
December 22, 2008 - 11:17am | <urn:uuid:623ef1be-e204-4f34-a4fd-2eb17f5499a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.empowher.com/users/dr-marianne-legato | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919894 | 848 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Although a vast majority of cars don’t sport bumper stickers, there are still a number of us who do. Some are for candidates or issues, while others tell us where the occupant has been. And then there are ones that express a joke or vulgar suggestion. The common thread is that each one tells you a little something about the owner. As for myself, with the exception of a pro-life sticker, all of mine have been for our political representatives (no great surprise there huh?) Campaigns tell us that a bumper sticker is typically as valuable as a several hundred-dollar donation to the candidate. After all, visibility and name recognition are a critically important component of victory.
Anyway, while driving to work yesterday, I traveled behind an otherwise forgettable car. Although the vehicle in front of me expressed a handful of messages, one and only one of them stuck in mind. It was a simple black and white one, which read, “America Bless God”. It is a twisting of the more traditional “God Bless America”. At first glance, I thought it a call to a renewed spirituality. So many professing Christians believe that the nation as a whole has lost its moral bearing and we are awash in moral relativism, the premise that morality is fluid and personal, rather than fixed and universal. This idea is troubling to both Christians and conservatives alike.
Upon further reflection though, I discovered a whole different shade of meaning. Think about it. America bless God? Does that statement make sense? How can America bless God? I suppose it depends on how you define “bless.” Typically when I think of blessing something or someone, it is to grant some sort of special favor or to make holy. Obviously America can do neither of these two things to God. According to my Microsoft Word dictionary the word can also mean “to declare approval and support for somebody or something” or “to express heartfelt thanks to somebody”. Regardless, the phrase “America Bless God” jogged my memory of a Bible verse. Hebrews 7:7 reads, “And without question, the person who has the power to bless is always greater than the person who is blessed.” (NLT). Applying this verse to the bumper sticker leads to some rather unsettling conclusions. If America can bless God that means that America must, by this definition, be greater (more powerful, holier, etc) than God. I doubt (or at least hope) that the owner of the car doesn’t hold America in higher regard than God. In my mind, the whole “America Bless God” rhetoric harkens back to the McCain campaign’s slogan “Country First”. Don’t misunderstand…I love this country as much as anyone else, but if you were to strip away the ideological and religious foundations you will invariably be led to blind patriotism, worship of the state, and totalitarism. Although they both sound good on the surface, their deeper meanings place America above principles, above God, über alles. Is that the kind of bumper sticker values you have plastered on your vehicle? | <urn:uuid:cf6c83bc-586f-47eb-82d6-7ced208c1ad7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://virginiaconservative.wordpress.com/2009/07/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948664 | 653 | 1.992188 | 2 |
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Art design is an important component of human civilization. With the computer aided design technology being used universally in art designs, educators are facing challenges as well as opportunities. Computer based technology has profoundly impacted art design education and has greatly stimulated designers' creative thinking. Traditional art deign education must accommodate this digitalized approach. Educators must help students to become proficient in computer skills, and most importantly to obtain extensive professional knowledge and to enhance aesthetic skills.
Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 2002. Proceedings. 2002 International Conference on (Volume:4 )
Date of Conference: 4-5 Nov. 2002 | <urn:uuid:07354863-a39c-4397-831c-72292808cddb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=1175341&contentType=Conference+Publications&sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND(p_IS_Number%3A25990) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942996 | 125 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Raising Medicare Eligibility a First Step Towards Deficit Reduction
Retirement programs must be adjusted to reflect changing demographics
December 6, 2012
The nation's fiscal problems are mainly the result of the rapid growth in spending on entitlement programs. In 1972, the federal government spent 4.4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. By 2011, spending on these three programs had jumped to 10.3 percent of GDP. The added spending on the "big three" entitlements—5.9 percent of GDP more in 2011 compared to 1972—exceeds the size of the entire budget for national defense.
Over the next 20 years, spending on the major entitlement programs (including the new spending from the 2010 healthcare law) is projected to continue to rise very rapidly, reaching 15.1 percent of GDP in 2030 under plausible assumptions used by the Congressional Budget Office. The historical rate of tax collection is 18.5 percent of GDP. Even assuming that were to rise, there's no prospect of raising taxes high enough or fast enough to cover the coming entitlement spending explosion.
So the country has little choice but to pursue, and soon, serious entitlement reform to lower future spending obligations.
The best idea is to bring the cost discipline of a functioning healthcare marketplace to Medicare. Under this model, beneficiaries would choose from among competing health plan offerings. Beneficiaries selecting less-expensive options would reduce both their own costs as well as the government's. This model has worked well to control costs in the Medicare drug benefit.
But pursuing more competition in Medicare does not preclude adopting other reforms too. Among the ideas now being discussed in budget talks between congressional leaders and the president is a rise in the Medicare eligibility age. Social Security's normal retirement age is already moving up from age 65 to 67 over about a two-decade phase-in period, but Medicare's eligibility remains at 65 (where it has been since the program was enacted in 1965).
Since 1965, life expectancy at age 65 has improved by 4.8 years for men and 4.7 years for women. Retirement programs such as Social Security and Medicare must be adjusted periodically to reflect changing demographic reality.
Raising the Medicare eligibility age would reduce spending by $124 billion over the next decade, according to CBO. More importantly, by 2035, Medicare spending would be 7 percent below what would occur otherwise. Over the long run, a 7 percent reduction in Medicare spending would be enough to eliminate about 10 to 15 percent of Medicare's long-term unfunded liabilities. That's far from the entire solution, but it's an important first step. | <urn:uuid:544eaecc-044a-43ec-a163-5fc13b6f1c41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-the-medicare-eligibility-age-be-raised/raising-medicare-eligibility-a-first-step-towards-deficit-reduction | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955718 | 536 | 2.046875 | 2 |
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I came across Textpattern only today.
A client uses it and wants a form (similar to a contact form).
Some of the form fields and one text outside the form are to be preset with contents from a database. The controlling item is a name parameter in the calling URL (or maybe the URL itself, when using rewrites).
I would be thankfull for any hint where to go from here to get the knowledge together to get that task done.
Basic questions are: – How can I get hold of the page before it is displayed to add the required text? – How to receive the sent form data? – is there a builtin mail fonction in Textarea or do I should I use the standard PHP mail library?
Unfortunately I haven’t even access to the back end yet, but that should be cleared today.
when using PHP for page generation (like getting data from a database and add it into the page), where to place the PHP? In an extra file? inline in the template? (son’t like the latter one)
Thanks for reading.
Last edited by Anutosho (2012-05-02 04:47:55)
Textpattern won’t be able to do all of this ‘out of the box’. However, one of the great things about TxP is that is can be extended through plugins, and there is a very active community of developers here who are always helpful when you’re trying to pull stuff together.
Here are a couple of plugins that might help:
I think the TxP mail handling is starting to show its age a bit, as I find I get tripped up every now and then with spam handling in Gmail etc. However, if you know some PHP that is quite easily fixed.
In terms of PHP you don’t need it all for basic stuff like displaying content from the database, building lists etc.
Finally, I would strongly recommend reading some of the core Textpattern documentation to get your head around the structure of Textpattern. A little bit of investment now will go a long way to getting up and running (eg. a “form” is not really a form, but more of a code snippet).
Thank you aslsw66.
For now we choose an external solution outside from Textpattern.
Anyway, It is a pretty interesting system and I surely will learn how to use it. | <urn:uuid:2a4df1a4-d5b5-4456-8e5e-900dd8ed41eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?pid=261004 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916615 | 514 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Karl Marx meets Adam Smith
Does the business secretary really hate business?
FORMER chief economists of giant oil companies do not normally find themselves fighting off comparisons with Karl Marx. But Vince Cable, Britain's business secretary, who once worked for Shell, found himself in this invidious position after (and indeed before) a speech he gave at the Liberal Democrat party conference on September 22nd.
Extracts from his address were released the night before it was delivered. Headlines reported that this senior member of a Conservative-led coalition government would vow to shine a “harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour”, declaring that capitalism “kills competition where it can.”
Business leaders were duly outraged. Richard Lambert of the Confederation of British Industry, an employer's body, called the extracts “emotional”, and questioned whether Mr Cable had an alternative to capitalism. Pat McFadden, Labour's business spokesman, accused him of disparaging the private sector that the economic recovery depends on. Others speculated that Mr Cable was undermining Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems' leader and deputy prime minister, or that he might be destined to quit.
Mr Cable has always had a weakness for crowd-pleasing phrases. True to form, his speech attacked the “spivs and gamblers” making “fat fees” in the City, and spoke of “good companies” being destroyed by short-term investors looking for a “speculative killing”; he denounced directors who allegedly neglect their wider duties for the sake of a cheque or two. But it was the impression that he might be launching a broad critique of capitalism itself that raised eyebrows.
Despite his own private-sector career, there are some circumstantial reasons to wonder whether Mr Cable really fits in the coalition. He began his political life in the Labour Party—though he achieved political celebrity for joking in the House of Commons about Gordon Brown's transformation as prime minister from “Stalin to Mr Bean”. He has never done much to dispel the sense that he is a reluctant member of the cabinet, implying in interviews that serving in it is more of a duty than a pleasure.
However, the latest commotion appears to have involved as much incompetence as calculation. When Mr Cable delivered the full speech, it was far from a socialist call to arms, with the most incendiary passages balanced by pro-business remarks. The charge that capitalism seeks to kill competition was revealed to be a paraphrase of Adam Smith. Moreover, Mr Cable defended the coalition's plans for aggressively reducing Britain's budget deficit. His only concrete policy announcement was that Royal Mail staff would be given 10% of its shares in any future flotation.
Lib Dem insiders noted that Mr Cable's speech—in common with all the main ones at this autumn's conference—had been “cleared with the coalition”: that is, with Number 10. The idea had been to soothe Lib Dem delegates and the broader British public, which is still aggrieved about the costly bank bail-outs. Most Tories are probably willing to put up with a bit of overheated rhetoric if it helps to keep the coalition together.
Senior Lib Dems also questioned the notion that Mr Cable might leave government: he is a gloomy cove by nature, they say, but far prefers holding office to the impotence of opposition. He has never been a perfect team player: his sudden support for a “mansion tax” on expensive properties at last year's conference alienated party colleagues.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from the furore is that the Lib Dems are still learning the ropes of government. Mr Cable's pride in being an untethered spirit has been useful at times: he was right to complain that the government's crude caps on non-European migrants are harming recruitment. But in a world of jumpy markets and 24-hour news, ill-disciplined spin should not be the government's business. | <urn:uuid:1bd406c2-34f2-47ec-8c47-2487dd99ccf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/node/17101223/email | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975127 | 815 | 1.609375 | 2 |
With its dual emphasis on precision and cost effectiveness, electronic
motion control has moved from being a bit player to a major force in industry.
Today, it is critical technology in machine tools, packaging, and robotics.
Tomorrow, say its advocates, it will be just as critical in a wide range of
other industries, particularly those that require speed and efficiency on the
To find out what the major breakthroughs are likely to be in electronic motion control as we approach a new century, Design News talked to several suppliers and users. You'll read their assessments in the next few pages, as well as one industry leader's views on tomorrow's motion-control systems.
The controller stands alone
Ease of use has become a defining characteristic of electronic motion control. Engineers at Galil Motion Control expect that to continue being the case well into the next century, with most of the growth of the technology occurring in less sophisticated markets. "When we started introducing products that plugged into a PC, we began to see ordinary electrical engineers as customers, physicists as customers, and technicians as customers," says Jacob Tal, president of the Sunnyvale, CA, company.
There exist two different philosophies concerning PC-based motion controllers. One is to rely on the PC to perform a portion of the processing. The other--the one preferred by Galil and competitor Delta Tau Data Systems (Northridge, CA)--is to make the motion controller so smart that it can stand alone. The link to the PC is for communication, not processing. "We really do this because it is easier to diagnose if something goes wrong, not because it is inherently more powerful," Tal says.
Today, Galil's new third-generation controllers take ease of use--and capability and performance--one notch higher. The product line consists of three devices, the DMC-1000, DMC-1300, and DMC-1500. Each is identical in capability, but the 1000 plugs into a PC, the 1300 targets VME-bus machines, and the 1500 is a stand-alone controller.
While the company may be touting ease-of-use, these third-generation controllers aren't slouches. All offer control of one to eight axes, including step motor, servo, or hydraulics. A 32-bit microprocessor and a custom sub-micron gate array give them four times the speed of their predecessors. Encoder feedback can be as high as 8 MHz, sample rates may be as short as 125æsec, and RS232/RS422 communication reaches 38.4K baud. And in the case of the DMC-1500, it's half the size and 40% cheaper than the previous generation DMC-700.
Modes of motion include the usual jogging, linear and circular interpolation, and contouring. It also includes electronic gearing--the ability to synthetically gear up to eight axes with variable ratios between them--and electronic camming--the synchronization of up to seven axes with a master axis to simulate the motion of a mechanical cam.
One company that agrees with Galil's vision of motion control is Glasstech (Perrysburg, OH). The firm's line of glass bending and tempering systems operate in 50 countries on six continents and are responsible for producing 80% of the 3-mm-thick glass sidelites used in all the world's automobiles. Each of four different bending and/or annealing machines depends on two 3-axis Galil controllers. They command the servo motors that power the glass-feed conveyors and run the gear trains that control a flexible bed for shaping the glass.
"We really don't do any sophisticated motion," says Dene Rinaldo, Glasstech's senior control engineer. "We chose Galil because the cards are reliable and the programming language, while sophisticated, is easy to use."
With his products spread across the globe, Rinaldo needs to be able to troubleshoot easily over the phone. He finds that Galil's line-interpretative language can be understood by most any engineer familiar with BASIC. Program printouts can be reviewed remotely on the phone, or modifications can be sent via Compuserve's e-mail. "To spend $3,000 to fly someone halfway around the world to make a one-line change in a program is not what we want to spend time doing," he says.
"Twenty years ago when you shipped a system, you shipped an engineer with it," says Tal. "Now it's more important to have comprehensive diagnostics built in than any other function."
Reliability is also important to Glasstech, and Rinaldo has been impressed with the durability of Galil controllers. "Our machines run seven days a week, three shifts a day in a very warm environment," he says. "Our customers don't need Star Wars; they need something that is easy to use and runs for years."
Programming skills? You won't need them anymore
Traditionally, installing, programming, and debugging a motion control system has been as much black magic as engineering. Designers at Berkeley Process Control say their new MachineWorks™ machine controller can eliminate the hocus-pocus and greatly speed the development of motion control systems, while also increasing reliability. "It's a breakthrough in the utility of machine control," explains Steve Kraft, product development manager, "not in raw performance, but utility."
The MachineWorks concept is basic: simplify through pre-integration. Since most machine development involves integrating hardware and software, Kraft and a team of engineers at Berkeley designed MachineWorks to eliminate these steps using something they call direct machine development.™
Direct machine development simplifies the traditional development process--plugging in cards, connecting possibly incompatible components, and especially, writing lines of code--by providing an organizing structure for machine control built into the system. Developers can enter complete machine-control sequences from a touchscreen, following menu prompts, without any conventional programming.
The development process involves a series of on-screen prompts and selections. A full machine database, Quickstart™, gives users access via the touchscreen to servo functionality, axes, I/O naming, auto-tuning, etc. All underlying issues--the black magic--of axes setup, error handling, diagnostics, and hardware configuration are anticipated.
The step-by-step process combines pre-written building blocks of optimized code into the complete debugged system. Complex operations are separated into tasks, entered via the touchscreen, and can then be executed simultaneously for true multi-tasking.
The crucial benefit is time to market. "We've done jobs that have traditionally taken six weeks, and with MachineWorks, we've done them in two or three days," says Kraft. The Apple Computer of the motion-control world, Berkeley designs all its components to work together. They are specifically machine-control components, and they integrate quickly and easily, Kraft says. And programming, the part of the job where days can slip to weeks and months, is reduced to the assembly of optimized, pre-compiled instructions via MachineWorks.
An example of MachineWorks in action appears at Meadows Manufacturing (Sunnyvale, CA). The company's problem: how to retrofit a two-year-old, four-axis product insertion machine with the least downtime and the largest increase in reliability. Engineers also wanted to convert the machine from semi-automatic to fully automatic operation.
Pedro de la Serna, project engineer at Meadows, describes the machine as an X-Y-Z table that holds a nest of pre-measured portions of a liquid product. The table repositions each portion in front of an insertion actuator that pushes the portion into individual product applicators.
The new control system consists of Berkeley Integris, which includes MachineWorks, multi-axis amplifiers, I/O system, interface, power supply, and an enclosure. As a fully integrated solution, the turn-key operation was up and running quickly--with greatly increased capability and reliability.
The largest time savings occurred in programming. With MachineWorks, the insertion machine's software was written and debugged in two days. "We took the product down to their facility on Monday and left on Wednesday with a fully functional machine--full diagnostics, everything," says Kraft. And he left the system, with complete confidence, in the hands of de la Serna, a mechanical engineer who had never seen a Berkeley Process Control product before.
Kraft stresses that his company's solution is not inflexible. With Meadows, for example, engineers defined two custom sequences using MachineWorks' Extensions option.
Only a few months into the new system, De la Serna already plans to expand the machine's capabilities. Kraft isn't surprised. "Instead of focusing on technology, performance, and numbers, we're focusing on utility," he says. "If you can't use it, it doesn't matter what the raw capability is."
Flexibility is the driver
To see where motion-control is heading, one need only look at changes in the office-automation market, says Scott Hibbard, vice president of Indramat, Wood Dale, IL. The transition from centralized mainframe computing to minicomputers to distributed, open-system PCs foreshadows developments in industrial control.
If you want to gauge the industry's progress on that path, the best place to look is the machine-tool market. "In the metal-cutting industry, multi-axis machining centers are replacing dedicated transfer lines," he explains. "But greater flexibility can't mean sacrificing production rates or machining accuracy." The technological answers to the needs of these most-demanding applications will, in Hibbard's words, "bleed down into other industries."
Indramat's latest, the DKR digital ac servo drive, highlights what's coming. Microprocessor technology makes the drive a common platform for controlling motors from fractional to 100 hp. "One drive, one software package for rotary permanent magnet, rotary induction, linear permanent magnet, and linear induction motors," recounts Hibbard. It includes electronic gearbox and cam functions, function monitoring, and real-time machine-or-drive diagnostics to simplify troubleshooting tasks and boost machine uptime.
In addition to simplifying system setup, smarter drives mean easier development work for controls manufacturers. Where different applications required different motors and thus, different drive platforms, now software developed for one application is instantly available to all. There's more functionality, and it's more widely available.
The DKR drive also includes the fiber-optic, open SERCOS communications interface. SERCOS not only reduces wiring complexity, it's a high-speed link that will enable the lowest-level distributed control that is changing the motion-control industry.
Where most people think of distributed control as PLCs or motion-control cards operating one or several motors on a machine-by-machine basis, the new model, says Hibbard, is smart drives linked by SERCOS and communicating with a much-less-harried master controller. "Any control function performed on an axis-by-axis basis is a candidate for placment in the drive itself."
There's no longer the need to control a position loop or do fast offset corrections upstream in a centralized controller, Hibbard contends. Thus, as machine controllers have less axis-control work to do, they become candidates for open architectures like PCs. "We're taking away the peculiarities of the CNC or PLC," he says.
The shift to distributed control governed by PCs will mean much less reliance on system integrators for machine programming. A user will be able to purchase packages of software and put together his or her own control system if that's their wish.
For controls makers, the shift will make success a little harder to achieve. Yet Hibbard is optimistic about the future. "There will always be advantages to choosing one piece of hardware over another," he says. "As long as your company is technology-driven, you can still stay on top of the game."
Users: Write your own interface
The advantages of higher performance that come with advances in motion-control hardware design are lost if running the new systems becomes too complicated. That's the message from Cosmo Mirra, general motion-control product manager at GE Fanuc. The opportunity exists for the "popularizaton" of high-performance electronic motion control, he says, but only for those who don't forget the users.
The core challenge facing controls makers comes from the proliferation of controller hosts available today--CNCs, PLCs, and PCs. Large industrial users of motion control, such as the auto industry, adopt the new control technologies as a requirement of staying competitive. But adding new systems alongside previous generations of controls creates problems. "They run a number of different processes and they want a common operator interface from machine to machine in order to control their training costs," explains Mirra.
Traditionally, controls manufacturers took one of two approaches to operator interfaces (OIs), continues Jeff Kao, a GE Fanuc applications engineer: Either an industry-standard look and feel as with CNC commands, or a totally open approach where users design their own screens.
For old customers like the machine-tool industry where CNC originated, a standard interface often suffices. Large industries, like automotive, usually have or can afford the programming expertise necessary to construct custom interfaces. But to expand electronic motion control into new territories, the company felt it needed a different approach to building OIs.
As part of its recently introduced PowerMotion line of high-precision, distributed-control products, GE Fanuc introduced the C Executor, a development tool that greatly simplifies creation of custom OIs.
"We compile our programs on an IBM PC using Microsoft C," explains Kao. "You load the program in, get up and running quickly, then customize the presentation of data to meet the user's needs."
For example, says Kao, a robotic painting system can be configured to go to location 1, 2, or 3 instead of the operator calling CNC coordinate codes.
One user has already seen the benefits gained from an easily customizable interface. James Rodrigues, product manager for the robotics division of Husky Injection Molding Systems, Bolton, Ontario, says PowerMotion with C-Executor could be the key to winning new customers.
Husky developed a three-axis gantry robot for materials handling to serve its molding equipment. It needed a teaching pendant to enable users to operate the system, but shied away from non-intuitive languages that customers didn't know.
"We needed to have application software that was specific to injection molding to properly market the product," explains Rodrigues. With an assist from GE Fanuc applications engineers, C Executor allowed Husky to develop a menu-driven front end that incorporates industry terminology. "We think people will like it because they can relate to it and learn it quickly." He continues, "If we had to use off-the-shelf software, customers would probably shop elsewhere."
As Mirra sums it up: "With the C-Executor, we're marrying a high-performance motion system, a descendant of complex multi-axis CNC, with an easy-to-use software tool." That's how you make motion control popular. | <urn:uuid:c9d7b955-3e58-4488-99b0-bf2e04d6c2ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=225811 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940872 | 3,168 | 2.15625 | 2 |
VALLEY VILLAGE (a/k/a SOUTHWEST JEFFERSON COUNTY)
LOUISVILLE, JEFFERSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY
BACKGROUND AND STATEMENT OF ISSUES
On August 24, 1992, ATSDR was petitioned to conduct a public health assessment for the Valley Village area of Jefferson County, Kentucky . At a public meeting in July 1992, citizens had expressed concerns about the area’s poor air quality. They wanted a health study conducted for Valley Village to determine if industrial emissions were causing high incidences of cancer . The major sources of air pollution in the area were the Louisville Gas and Electric Company’s Mill Creek Station (LG&E) and the Kosmos Cement plant (Kosmos). The purpose of this health consultation is to address public health concerns by examining current conditions and reviewing available data. ATSDR recieved no comments on this consultation during the public comment period.
In February 1993, ATSDR personnel conducted a site visit to gather additional information. During the site visit, the petitioner requested ATSDR’s assistance in evaluating air quality data and in determining if there were adverse effects on community health such as increases in cancer rates and respiratory disease. Local authorities had determined that LG&E and Kosmos were the major contributors of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate emissions . Citizens were particularly concerned about the permitted discharges from LG&E . Residential areas, small retail stores, and one elementary school are located near the two facilities .
ATSDR reviewed the available 1992 and 1993 air monitoring data from a station located at the elementary school which is also about 300 yards from the LG&E plant. This air monitoring station, known as the Watson Lane station, collects hourly readings for ambient air levels of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and particulates [4, 5]. The Watson Lane air monitoring station was put in place in 1992 as part of the State and Local Air Monitoring Station (SLAM) system. | <urn:uuid:a0f867d9-ccfb-4f6c-a12d-e614610d7e94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/pha/pha.asp?docid=787&pg=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955076 | 416 | 2.765625 | 3 |
On the latest EMS Standing Orders Podcast, the panel discussed EMS scene safety issues and whether or not EMS providers should be allowed to carry weapons. One of the panelists was Eric Dickinson, whose article Survive Your Next Shift appeared in the July, 2009 issue of JEMS. Dickinson has experience in both EMS and law enforcement. On the podcast he stated that he believed people who have permits to carry a concealed weapon should not be prohibited from carrying while at work.
I have no issue with law abiding citizens, who have permits, carrying concealed weapons. My experience with EMS people, however is that the ones who most want to carry are the last ones who should be allowed to. They are the Frustrated Law Enforcement Applicants, or FLEAs.
FLEAs very much want to be a police officer, but are repeatedly turned down. Their resumes FLEAs often include work in security, probation & parole, and corrections. Then they get into EMS because they want to help people. And to ask all the cops when their department will be hiring next.
FLEAs have infected every EMS organization I’ve been with, and were most prevalent at volunteer and lower-paying McEMS agencies. They have nick names like Tackleberry, G.I. Joe, and Hurricane. They are the 1% who make 99% of requests for police because of hostile family members.
Until a police department makes the mistake of hiring them, FLEAs enforce laws from the ambulance. Nusring home falls become crime scenes, and elderly onlookers are warned not to get too close or they will be locked up. By whom, I don’t know.
Assessments become interrogations. So what exactly were you doing when your chest pain started? Mowing the lawn? We have a witness in another room who said you were just sitting here. So which is it?
On a good day they are annoying, on a bad one they are dangerous. A real police officer, who worked part time with McEMS, explained to me how the academy is designed to weed out FLEA personalities. And these are the people who not only believe that carrying a firearm at work is necessary, but that they are the most qualified to do so.
We in EMS need to take safety seriously. We need formal training in how to manage scenes and deescalate hostile situations and get away from violence. Skip Kirkwood’s JEMS.com article about safety is a good start. In the mean time, please don’t let FLEAs near a gun at work. | <urn:uuid:08fec979-6626-44b7-95ae-6013863f8e63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://emspatientperspective.com/2011/12/19/keeping-scenes-safe-from-flea/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977482 | 527 | 1.703125 | 2 |
If one ignores the improbable voyage of Madoc (the quasi-historical Welsh prince who supposedly discovered North America circa 1170) but accepts the probability that Welshmen sailed with John CABOT from Bristol on his epic voyage of 1497, a 500-year-old Welsh connection with Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island can be accepted. Another unsubstantiated view claims that Welsh seafarer John Lloyd (John the Skilful) reached Hudson Bay as early as 1475. In 1612 Sir Thomas BUTTON, a Welsh naval officer in command of HMS Resolution, searched unsuccessfully for the NORTHWEST PASSAGE and for Henry HUDSON. A Welsh settlement was established on the southern Avalon Peninsula in 1617 by Sir William VAUGHAN, an ardent supporter of colonial expansion. Despite the failure of the venture, Vaughan wrote 2 books promoting Newfoundland, and thereby provided 2 of the earliest works about English North America. In 1759, at the siege of Québec, a Major Gwillim served under General James WOLFE. His daughter (Elizabeth SIMCOE) later married the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. Explorer David THOMPSON, although English-born, was of Welsh descent. In the early 18th century, eastern coastal waters were plagued by the puritanical Welsh pirate and slaver Bartholomew ROBERTS, and the volatile Acadian population of Nova Scotia experienced British rule under the sincere and practical Governor Richard PHILIPPS.
Migration and Settlement
Welshmen serving in the British forces in British North America during the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, the WAR OF 1812 and the REBELLIONS OF 1837 stayed on. There was a specific area of Welsh settlement along Lake Erie that absorbed the immigrants of the 18th and 19th centuries. A second wave of immigration was precipitated by the Cariboo gold rush in BC in 1862. Welsh immigration figures for the 20th century are more detailed and, just as for their ENGLISH, IRISH and SCOTS cousins, reflect the ebb and flow of economic depressions and world tensions. After David Lloyd George's visit in 1899, the Canadian West was endorsed as a good prospect for immigrants. In 1902 a third wave of immigrants - the "Patagonian Welsh," so named for their 35-year sojourn as a Welsh colony in Argentina - were relocated in Saskatchewan, and around the same time a few Welsh-American farmers settled at Wood River, Alberta. The all-time high for Welsh immigration was in 1906, when 5018 settlers arrived. Immigration increased following World War I, and again from 1926 to 1929. Immigration was also high in 1946 (1294) and after the Suez Crisis in 1957 (2629). Overall, from 1900 to 1950, more than 50 000 Welsh came to Canada.
Since 1960, Welsh immigration has been slight but steady, representing a small percentage of British immigration. In the 1961 census, 143 942 people claimed Welsh descent. In the 1971 census, this figure was reduced to 74 415 (perhaps because many of Welsh descent were recorded as being English). By 1981, only 46 620 people (0.2%) claimed Welsh descent; the Welsh were not counted separately in the 1986 census but showed 28 190 people in the 1991 census (single response). The 2006 census showed 27 115 people (single response) with an additional 413 855 people with some Welsh origin (multiple response).The largest population of Welsh is located in Ontario (182 825), followed by BC (104 275), Alberta (76 115), Manitoba (16 945), Saskatchewan (16 640), Nova Scotia (16 970), Québec (9815), New Brunswick (9970), Newfoundland (3385), PEI (2250), the Yukon (925), the Northwest Territories (735) and Nunavut (110). If at all, they have tended to consolidate in the mining areas of Ontario, BC, Alberta and the Maritimes. Their presence is evident in such place-names as Newport and Pontypool (Ontario), Cardiff (Alberta), Bangor (Saskatchewan), Lake St David (Manitoba), Cape Prince of Wales (Québec), Cardigan (PEI), Welshpool (New Brunswick) and St Brides (Newfoundland).
Religion and Language
Religion (METHODISM, Presbyterianism) and language were important to early Welsh settlers. Some communities developed around a Welsh-speaking nucleus and a Welsh-speaking preacher; however, these characteristics rarely survived the next generation. Most Welsh cultural activities are carried out at the local community level. There has never been a national society for the preservation of Welsh culture. However, they do maintain some of their cultural organizations and historic festivals. Most major Canadian cities have a St David's society - named after the patron saint of Wales - and some have Welsh choirs (for example, in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto and Edmonton). St David's Day, March 1, is celebrated by Welsh Canadians, and there are also traditional Welsh festivals of Gymanfa Ganu and the eisteddfods, which celebrate music, song and poetry.
The contribution of Wales to the development of Canada is impressive. Welsh and Welsh Canadians who have left their imprint on Canada from both past and present include missionaries Peter JONES and James EVANS; artist Robert HARRIS; scientists Stanley J. HUGHES and George L. PICKARD; philosopher George S. BRETT; writers Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS and Robertson DAVIES; administrator Leonard W. BROCKINGTON; athlete Diane JONES KONIHOWSKI; and cartoonist Yardley Jones.
Author DAVID EVANS Revised: MADELINE A. KALBACH
Association of Family History Societies of Wales, Welsh Family History: A Guide to Research (1993); Calgary Welsh Society, Welsh Heritage in Calgary, 1906-1983 (1983); C. Bennett, In Search of the Red Dragon: The Welsh in Canada (1985); P. Thomas, Strangers from a Secret Land (1986).
Links to Other Sites
Canadian Multiculturalism Day
Canadian Heritage's guide to celebrating Canadian Multiculturalism Day.
PASSAGES TO CANADA
Immigrants to Canada from around the world have encountered many hardships, opportunities, and successes as they set out to establish a better life for themselves and their families in their adopted country. Listen to some of their personal stories at the "Passages to Canada" website. From the Historica-Dominion Institute.
Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples
The website for the "Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples." Click on the links for feature articles about Canada's many multicultural communities, access to their extensive digital archives collection, learning modules, and much more. From "Multicultural Canada."
Sir Thomas Button
A brief biography of Sir Thomas Button, admiral and explorer. From the Welsh Biography Online.
Sir Wiilliam Vaughan
A biography of Sir Wiilliam Vaughan, scholar, writer, poet, and colonial promoter. From the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.
Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada
This website offers Canadian population data (2006) by ethnic origin. Also, find information for individual provinces and territories by clicking the "Select a view" window above the chart. For more information, click on the "Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada" link at the top of the page. From the website for Statistics Canada. | <urn:uuid:a53ecddf-58cb-4ac1-867c-2eb81def8eed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/welsh | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939758 | 1,533 | 3.5 | 4 |
Although they now make too much to qualify for CHIP, even with both parents working, the family can't afford to pay for private health insurance. So this means that at the time of their next CHIP renewal, their three children will lose their health coverage.
Texas advocates and legislators worked very hard this session on developing a CHIP buy-in program that would have allowed families who were just over the CHIP income limit to pay sliding scale premiums that increased with their income. This would have given parents like Jason and Misty, who have no other options for providing affordable health coverage for their children, the opportunity to purchase CHIP coverage. The CHIP buy-in proposal was extremely popular among Texans, powerful Texas Chamber of Commerce leaders, and Texas legislators and it passed in both chambers with strong bipartisan margins. But because of the lack of support from the Governor and a few other key legislative leaders, the bill was allowed to expire without receiving a final vote. Now roughly 80,000 Texas children who would have been covered with the passage of the CHIP buy-in proposal will become or remain uninsured.
Unfortunately, the James family is all too familiar with the consequences of being uninsured. Several years ago, the family experienced a lapse in coverage for similar reasons. Health coverage through Misty’s job would have cost them roughly 12 percent of their salaries, making it financially out of reach after paying child care and other basic expenses. During that period their oldest son, 11-year-old Isaiah, had a painful cavity that went untreated for nearly two years. When they were finally able to take him to a dentist, they learned that Isaiah's tooth had abscessed down to his jaw bone and required an emergency root canal. Isaiah ultimately lost his tooth and now has permanent jaw damage.
During the Texas legislative session's debate on the issue, Misty traveled to the State Capitol to testify about her family’s story and to request the option of being able to contribute to keeping her family’s CHIP coverage, instead of being forced to use the emergency room for care or to put problems like Isaiah's cavity off until they become a crisis. Misty said, "We hate to add to the rising cost of health care by taking them to the emergency room, but we just do not have anywhere else to go… I do not know if our leaders know how much it costs to raise children these days. Child care today costs more than our rent. We shop at the thrift store for clothes and do not go to the movies or have other frivolous spending. Just the basics of food, housing and child care do not leave us enough to provide health coverage for our children. I get so frustrated that I can’t take my kids to the dentist or doctor when I work hard and make a decent living."
But at the end of the day in Texas, children lost out to politics. Texas serves as a prime example of why health reform at the national level that guarantees all children affordable, high-quality and accessible care is desperately needed. We cannot be fighting these kinds of battles separately in all 50 states. And when smart policy proposals with broad support finally make it to the table, children can’t afford inaction. The time for real health care reform in our nation is right now. Congress and the President must ensure all children a national eligibility floor of 300 percent ($66,150 for a family of four) and free all children from the unjust 50-state lottery of geography. All children need comprehensive health benefits no matter where they live. Enrollment in coverage for children should be automatic and simple, so they don't experience harmful delays or denials―and it must be truly affordable. Unless these conditions are met, the promise of health reform remains unfulfilled for children.
Email your Members of Congress today to let them know that affordable, comprehensive health coverage for everyone—especially children—is important to you at: www.childrensdefense.org/healthaction.
Marian Wright Edelman, whose new book is The Sea Is So Wide And My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, is president of the Children's Defense Fund. For more information about the Children's Defense Fund, go to http://www.childrensdefense.org/. | <urn:uuid:b454265c-9e5d-4e96-a3ba-9ac175fba8a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://insightnews.com/health/4642-health-coverage-making-too-little-making-too-much | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971259 | 868 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Since the horrible tragedy that took place in Newtown, CT, our hearts have remained full of sorrow remembering those that were lost. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those whose lives were senselessly taken, as well as all those whose lives were forever changed by this unthinkable event.
There is no escape from the ceaseless news coverage of this tragedy. Our print, television, radio and internet news outlets have had countless stories retelling the details of this awful event. No matter the age, one can’t help being affected in some way by what happened. We must be especially mindful of the impact it can have on the youngest among us – our children and grandchildren. We do our best to protect them from information like this, but with the news bombardment that comes along with an event of this magnitude, unfortunate details are bound to get through.
Darcie Miller, Orange County Commissioner of Mental Health, reminds us to use caution when talking about this, and similar traumatic events, around our young people and limit their exposure to the continuous barrage from the news media. Keep in mind, as well, that your children may hear things from their peers who may be more aware of current events than your children. In those instances, you may need to manage the message to ensure that they receive correct and age appropriate information.
To help parents and guardians talk with and help children and youth cope after a traumatic event, or even a disaster, like we saw with Hurricane Sandy recently, Commissioner Miller offers these tips from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
• Give them a lot of cuddling and verbal support. Focus on them, not the trauma. Speak to them on their level in a calm voice using words they can understand. Let them know that you love them and care for them so that they have a sense of safety and security.
• Ask your children about their worries and concerns. Ask for their input on what they need to cope with the situation. Offer comfort through gentle words, a hug, or just spending time together. Initially, spend more time with the children, but then start resuming school and home routines.
• After a day or two, give children age-appropriate tasks and provide opportunities for them to feel useful.
• Support children spending time with friends or having quiet time to write or draw.
• Encourage children to participate in recreational activities and playing with others.
• Serve as a role model to your children, addressing your own trauma in a healthy way. It’s okay for them to know you’re sad or see you cry, but try to avoid intense emotions.
• Be a good listener, and allow children to ask questions.
• Be careful not to pressure children to talk about the trauma if they’re not ready.
Finally, if you, your child, or a loved one needs assistance to cope with this, another traumatic life event, or behavioral or emotional issues, don’t be afraid to seek assistance. Orange County is fortunate to have a number of outstanding mental health and wellness programs.
For more information, visit www.orangecountygov.com or call 291-2600. The 24-hour Mobile Mental Health Team is available at 888-750-2266. Help is also available through the Mental Health Association in Orange County Helpline at 1-800-832-1200.
Until next week, I wish you good health and happiness. | <urn:uuid:949717ba-a317-4a46-a42e-8f128a383930> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hvpress.net/news/126/ARTICLE/11892/2012-12-26.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957773 | 708 | 3.109375 | 3 |
The Non Verbal Interview…What it is Telling Others !
What Is Your Body Language Saying About You?
You have spent significant time preparing an impactful resume and you have gotten an interview! You dress appropriately for the interview and arrive 7-10 minutes beforehand. Thanks to your preparation, you have great answers to the commonly-asked interview questions. But you don’t get the job. What happened? Perhaps you forgot about the other 90% of the interview.
If it is true that 90% of communication is non-verbal, it makes sense that it is worth an applicant’s attention in preparing for an interview. Here are some tips on basic body language to be aware of while interviewing.
Handshake – Accept the interviewer’s greeting by standing, smiling, and shaking hands. Offer a firm handshake that displays confidence but is not overly enthusiastic. Your handshake will go a long way toward your first impression.
Posture – Sit upright and lean forward slightly. This conveys an attitude of interest and indicates that you are comfortable and confident. Tilt your head slightly to one side to show that you are paying attention. Keep your feet flat on the floor or cross your legs at your ankles. This shows that you are comfortable without being too relaxed or disinterested.
Hand Position – Rest your hands loosely on your lap or on the table. Take care not to fidget, wring your hands, or twiddle your thumbs, or cross your arms as it makes you look nervous, distracted, and distant. Avoid touching your mouth or covering any part of your face since this can be perceived as dishonesty.
Eye Contact – Maintain steady eye contact with the interviewer. Be sure to blink regularly so that you do not appear aggressive. Refrain from looking at the floor, staring blankly, or letting your eyes wander. Pay close attention the interviewer’s questions and nod occasionally. Not only will this help you appear interested, but it will ensure you hear and understand the questions being asked.
Delivery – Speak in a clearly, varying your tone and pitch; do not speak in a monotone voice. If there are multiple interviewers, speak directly to the person who asked the question. Glance briefly at each person, but return to the questioner before ending your response. Pause before answering each question to give yourself time to think as well as to ensure the interviewer has finished the question.
Last Impression – End the interview on the same note as you started, with a firm handshake and a smile.
It is always a good rule of thumb to take your cues from the interviewer, so when in doubt mimic what he or she does. This will make the interviewer feel at ease and will show an attitude of agreement on your part.
Be sure to follow Jennifer at The Executive Group via their Synergy Station Directory listing and view job opportunities represented by The Executive Group in The Synergy Station Hiring Hall. | <urn:uuid:8facf9b0-ceee-4dd2-bb02-05879b493afd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://synergystation.com/economy/jobs/the-non-verbal-interview-what-it-is-telling-others/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933319 | 602 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Channel 8 (10-1) should be relatively easy to pick up. Some UHF only antennas do fairly well in the upper VHF range.
The reason behind it..........http://www.milwaukeehdtv.org/forums/...ead.php?t=8089
MPTV Relocates Digital Channels
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Several digital channels offered by Milwaukee Public Television, including its high definition simulcast of MPTV-10, will move to new locations beginning Monday, Sept. 1, at 12:01 a.m.
Viewers who receive their digital TV signal over the air will find MPTV-HD, the high definition channel, at 10.1. It will provide a simulcast of the programs on MPTV-10, one of the two analog channels operated by Milwaukee's public television station.
A digital version of MPTV-36, the other analog channel, will be available on 36.1, but it will not be high definition. Both analog stations will continue to present their regular programming until Feb. 17. On that date, television stations are required to begin broadcasting in the digital format.
"The new MPTV digital line-up is more logical," said Tom Dvorak, MPTV's Director of Broadcasting. "When everything changes in February, it will make it easier for viewers to find their favorite programs."
MPTV offers several other digital stations, including MPTV Create, which presents cooking, gardening, travel and other lifestyle programming; V-me, a Spanish language mix of education and entertainment; and MPTV World, providing public affairs coverage and documentaries.
V-me will be 36.2, MPTV World will be 36.3, and MPTV Create will be 36.4. These channels, as well as 10.1 and 36.1, also are available on some cable systems. Viewers should consult their cable guides to find the locations.
MPTV also offers two digital music channels, MPTV Classical 36.5, MPTV Jazz 36.6 and two informational channels MPTV Weather 36.7 and MPTV Traffic 36.8.
MPTV KIDS, on digital channel 10.3 and Time Warner Cable channel 552 on Time Warner Cable, will end. The same day, the weekday schedule of children's programs on MPTV-10-HD and MPTV-10 will expand to 13 hours, from 5 a.m.-6 p.m.
MPTV KIDS began as a pre-packaged service from PBS, a 24-hours children's channel. Three years ago,
PBS stopped offering that service to stations. At that time, MPTV made the decision to continue running
the channel using a back-up feed of PBS programming and repeating it every 12 hours. PBS is now eliminating that back-up feed so they can transmit more and more programs in high definition, which requires the use of greater bandwidth. Therefore, MPTV can no longer offer a 24-hour children's channel.
MPTV has been and continues to be committed to children: the new 13-hour block of children's programming, delivered in HD for the first time, is evidence of that. To review the children's lineup from 5 a.m.-6 p.m., click on TV SCHEDULES above.
Visit MPTV.org and select TV schedules for more information. | <urn:uuid:95b95c6e-c0c9-4099-829c-df3bbfd36637> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.avsforum.com/t/463747/milwaukee-wi-hdtv/180 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933917 | 697 | 1.5 | 2 |
Last week, President Obama issued a directive which would require all health insurance plans to cover the cost of birth control.
The move is opposed by some religious groups, most prominently the Conference of Catholic Bishops. According to a new New York Times/CBS poll of 1,197 adults, the majority of Americans side with the president on this issue.
Fifty-nine percent of the poll’s respondents said that insurance plans should be made to cover birth control, even if they are being issued by religious institutions which oppose birth control measures. Thirty-four percent said such institutions shouldn’t be forced to cover birth control.
Among Catholics, the numbers are quite similar to general public, with 57 percent supporting the measure and 36 percent opposing it. However, only 43 percent of evangelical Christians support the directive, whereas 50 percent oppose it. | <urn:uuid:562fcbbc-d9a1-4444-9dc6-f335766f931e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lite987.com/news/birth-control/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972524 | 171 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The Founder’s Story
In 1991, Elspeth Pope, recently retired as a professor in library and information science, met Dr. Melissa Hardie, director of the Hypatia Trust in Cornwall, England. Melissa and her husband, Dr. Philip Budden, had created the Hypatia Trust, a library of published and personal documentation of the achievements of hundreds of creative women. Their collection of more than 15,000 items was housed in a fine building, in the garden next to their home. Their work – and Hypatia’s story planted the seed that grew into the dream that became the reality of Hypatia-in-the-Woods.
When Melissa and Phil visited Elspeth and her husband, Jim Holly, at their Hammersley Inlet home, they mutually agreed that the beautiful property and an existing small building would make a fine U.S. extension of Hypatia Trust, Cornwall.
In 1998, after Jim’s passing, Elspeth established a trust to hold her property as the home for Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She formed a board of directors to oversee its operation and guided the development of articles of incorporation and by-laws to govern the new organization. | <urn:uuid:e6a2e0f1-6b65-4d1b-bf8f-53cef84cc31b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hypatiainthewoods.org/who-we-are-2/the-founders-story/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958714 | 257 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Do you ever find yourself hunched over with your shoulders and head hanging forward? Do you notice that your upper back, neck and lower back often ache? I hear many people talk about the importance of good posture but how many of us really take the time to notice and correct it?
Our body structures work as one total unit. Just as a building is held together by framing, beams, panels and rebar, our bodies are held together with bones, connective tissue and joints. In a building, all of the materials must be sturdy enough to keep that structure from collapsing, and our bodies are no different. If one part of our structural unit is not working correctly, a chain reaction occurs. For example, if we slouch our shoulders, they will roll forward causing our upper back muscles to become over-stretched and our chest muscles, or pectorals, to become contracted. This can ,in turn, cause the head to roll forward and put pressure on our cervical (neck) muscles and adversely affect the curvature in our spine.
Before I explain a few simple exercises you can perform yourself to improve the curve in your spine, (and therefore helping to alleviate back/neck pain), here is an easy way to check how efficient your posture is:
- Stand with the back of the head touching the wall. Heels should be six inches from the baseboard. With your buttocks touching the wall, check the distance with your hand between your neck and the wall. If you’re within two inches at the neck, you are close to a good posture. If not, the neck posture is too forward and can be subject to deterioration of joints and discs.
Looking for Salt Lake City Utah Massage Therapy? Contact me at (801) 349-3934.
In an ideal posture, your head should be standing tall, your shoulders back with your chest out, and your buttocks slightly sticking out to create a small but noticeable curve in your lower back.
The image on the right displays what your posture should look like. As you can see, the body on the left, has his head hanging forward and shoulders rolling forward, with his abdominal muscles pulled forward which causes an unhealthy curve in the spine.
Re-Patterning Exercises for the Spine:
Coming up from the Top of the Head:
This is to help you become aware of the top of your head. Slightly rock your head back and then pretend as if a skyhook is attached at the top of your head to pull you skyward. As you come up from the top of your head, your neck should become longer. Just let your arms and hands hang. Try to focus on doing this every time you notice that your head is rolling forward, or when you are slouching.
Roll up/Roll Down:
Stand with your back to the wall. Step with your feet out away from the wall a half step; your back should remain against the wall. Vertebrae by vertebrae, slowly roll down, starting with the head, towards the floor with your head, neck and shoulders as relaxed as possible. As you roll down, bend your legs at the knees to help in this motion as needed. Once you have completely rolled over, roll back up one vertebra at a time all the way to the head with your feet pushing into the floor as you roll. Make sure to push into the wall as you go up. This exercise will help to create length in the spine and decompress your vertebrae.
Start by standing with your feet parallel and less that shoulder-width apart. Next, roll down as if you are going into a modified child’s pose (a standing child’s pose if you will) where you will remain with your body folded, or rolled forward as far forward as is comfortable, i.e. in a squatting position. Rest the back of your hands on the floor (palms up) at your side, with your arms totally relaxed. Once you are in the modified child’s pose with your feet as close to flat on the floor as possible, act as if a skyhook is grabbing the top of your sacrum and slowly pulling you upward. Allow your upper body to just hang and be totally relaxed as your legs extend to the point just before your knees lock, keeping them slightly bent. Keep your arms and head relaxed – hanging down as you now begin to roll your spine up, stacking one vertebra at a time on top of your sacrum. As you are rolling up, you may feel spots that don’t move as freely as others. You should stop at any of the areas that feel stuck and take a deep breath into the back focusing on the area to loosen. Repeat the breathing at each segment that is stuck. Once you have rolled all the way up, relax your neck and shoulders and slowly let your head tilt forward, allowing the weight of your head to pull the rest of your spine along as you roll over one vertebra at a time. Finally, roll down as far as is comfortable and slowly roll back up one vertebra at a time repeating the process 3 to 5 times.
Stand erect coming up form the top of your head and arms at your sides. Ball your hands up into fists with your thumbs out (as if you were hitch-hiking.) Raise your arms out to the side making sure both shoulders remain even. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and with your palms facing down toward the floor (thumbs pointed forward), rotate your arms in a 6 inch diameter circle forward, toward your extended thumb. To reverse the circles, turn your palms to face the ceiling and circle backward toward your extended thumbs.
NOTE: Start with 20 circles each direction once daily.
Some of these exercises may seem technical but once you try them 3 or 4 times you will get it and be able to do it whenever you get a spare minute during the day. Personally, I like to do these right when I wake up in the morning not only to get my spine loose and ready for the day, but it also helps me wake up and get the blood pumping through my veins.
At first, you may notice that your spine is not incredibly mobile and perhaps quite stiff. But in my experience, I have seen my clients improve mobility and decrease back pain just by doing these exercises once a day. It’s also a great way to stay aware of your body, your pain, and your posture.
If you’re looking for massage and bodywork in Salt Lake City, Utah please contact me at (801) 349-3934.
No related posts. | <urn:uuid:6953e34e-8a48-469d-9407-265d3bdf5672> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sarahmassagetherapy.com/massage/be-aware-of-your-posture-exercises-for-a-healthy-spine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95512 | 1,357 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Welcome to www.podleaders.com
Software copyright act
The Software Copyright Act was a Great Step in the Right Direction
The software copyright act, which is actually called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has given software developers a little more power when it comes to protecting their works. If you've bought software in the last few years I'm sure you've noticed some of the changes that have been made in the software buying process. If not, then you really should wake up and take note.
Some of the more noteworthy achievements of this act are the following:
1) It is now a crime to go around anti-piracy measures in software.
2) It is no longer legal to make, sale, or give away software or devices that were invented for the purpose of cracking codes enabling the illegal copying of software.
3) Limits the liability that ISPs (as far as copyright infringement violations) when information is transmitted online.
The problem isn't the people want to be bad or do something wrong. Most of us by nature want to do the right thing. The problem lies in educating people to the fact that it really is stealing when you bootleg, pirate, illegally download, or otherwise acquire copies of software that you didn't pay for. It's one of those 'white lie' types of crimes for most people and they don't really see how it will hurt anyone for them to copy a game that their brother, cousin, uncle, or friend has. Someone paid for it after all. The problem is that at $50 plus being the average price for computer games and simple software if 10 million people are doing it, the numbers are staggering and they add up quickly. The software copyright act sought to protect businesses from losing money this way.
The software copyright act was the worldwide response to a growing problem. This problem was so widespread with illegal downloading of music that lawsuits and massive commercial ad campaigns were initiated in order to curtail illegal downloading activities when it comes to music. It seems to be working to some degree. Fewer people are illegally downloading music; the downside is that these people aren't buying as much music either.
The reason is because they are no longer being exposed to the wide variety of music and artists that they were getting freely when downloading music each night at no cost. This equals lower record sales and is becoming a problem of lower movie sales and software sales as well. People aren't trying new games like they could before the software copyright act by going to LAN parties and everyone sharing a copy to play, now everyone has to own a copy before they can play.
While this may be great for the companies that make a few (a minimal few at best) extra sales on the games for the sake of a great party but for the most part, it is costing them the extra money that could be made by 10 people finding they liked the game enough to go out and buy it so they could play it whenever (and the next group of 10 they will introduce the game to) Gamers are a funny group and software copyright act or no, they are going to stick with the software and games that serve them best.
The software copyright act was created in order to protect the rights of those writing and developing computer software. We want those who fill our lives with fun games, useful tools, and great ways to connect to friends and family to continue providing these great services and to get paid for the ones they've already provided. The software copyright act is one giant step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, There Really is a Freebie Santa Claus If you are a cynic when it comes to offers of free stuff, you are not alone. Everyone has had notions like ?there is no such thing as a free lunch? and ?if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is? drilled into their heads, and for good reason ? these things often hold water. On the flip side, there ARE actually lots of places you can score some decent free stuff, if you know where to look and are willing to devote some time to hunting them down. The key to getting the best free stuff with the least amount of hassle is to stick with that healthy cynicism but to also dipping your toe in the freebie pool little by little. But why would anyone give stuff away for free? It is certainly an obvious question, but if you stop to consider it for a moment, you can see that companies actually have a lot of motivation to give away free stuff. After all, if they give you something for free, you are bound to have a little soft spot for their company, and when you are ready to part with some cash, their product may near the top of your list. Also, by giving away free things, companies can convince people to try new products. You might not want to try a new kind of shampoo if you have to pay for it, but you?d certainly be willing to give a free sample a try. You may end up loving it and switching to that shampoo for good, turning you into a paying customer. Another reason a company might give you free stuff is to complete market research. This is where getting free things can get a little complicated for some people because the products may not cost you money, but the offer may cost you a little time. A company might ask you to take a survey of your buying habits before they give you a free offer, or they may ask you to provide feedback on a regular basis as you try their product for free. Some people balk at the time commitment required here, but for other people, filling out some paperwork is a small price to pay for some free stuff. Of course, to convert you into a customer or to communicate with you about market research, a company will have to contact you, which is complicated area number two for freebie lovers. You will almost always be forced to hand over your email address in order to cash in on a free offer, and that is a recipe for opening your inbox up to a barrage of spam (many companies sell your email address to offset the costs of their free promotions, which means the number of people soliciting you can go through the roof very quickly). If you want to avoid this downside of freebie hunting, set up a special email address specifically for your freebie deals. That way all of your spam goes to this one address and your regular email you use with family and friends remains free and clear. One final note of caution about free stuff online: a lot of scammers have hit on the idea of using pretend freebie offers to solicit personal information about people or to convince people to send them money. Don?t send money, even for postage, to a company you don?t know and never, ever give out personal information online. No reputable company is going to ask for your social security number or bank account details for a freebie offer, so don?t hand them out to anyone. When in doubt, skip it and move to the next freebie. | <urn:uuid:c378d168-7342-46bd-9382-8e77bcc36738> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.podleaders.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972236 | 1,421 | 2.328125 | 2 |
Without getting into the ethics of WikiLeak’s activities, I’m disturbed that Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have all seen fit to police the organization by refusing to act as a middleman for donations. The whole affair drives home how dependent we are on a few corporations to make e-commerce function, and how little those corporations guarantee us anything in the way of rights.
In the short term, we may be stuck, but in the longer term, quantum money could help solve the problems by providing a secure currency that can be used without resort to a broker.
Physicist Steve Wiesner first proposed the concept of quantum money in 1969. He realized that since quantum states can’t be copied, their existence opens the door to unforgeable money.
Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle says you can either measure the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both to unlimited accuracy. One consequence of the Uncertainty Principle is the so-called No-Cloning Theorem: there can be no “subatomic Xerox machine” that takes an unknown particle, and spits out two particles with exactly the same position and momentum as the original one (except, say, that one particle is two inches to the left). For if such a machine existed, then we could determine both the position and momentum of the original particle—by measuring the position of one “Xerox copy” and the momentum of the other copy. But that would violate the Uncertainty Principle.
…Besides an ordinary serial number, each dollar bill would contain (say) a few hundred photons, which the central bank “polarized” in random directions when it issued the bill. (Let’s leave the engineering details to later!) The bank, in a massive database, remembers the polarization of every photon on every bill ever issued. If you ever want to verify that a bill is genuine, you just take it to the bank” | <urn:uuid:820bdb4e-3a68-4a03-8dd4-c449ec959501> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/tag/quantum-computing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930792 | 410 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Following the lead of U.S. genealogist Thomas MacEntee and in turn Australian genealogist Jill Ball, I decided to take part in this meme. It interested me more than others I had seen, because not only would I get my names “out there”, I also got the chance to do a stocktake. What an interesting exercise it was. With some names, I did not have to look up the details as I knew them so well, others I had to refer back to my tree, and for one name, I had basically nothing.
It’s easy to develop favourite families, with some just oozing information making them more compelling to research. The Harmans are an example of that. The Riddiford line was probably my least favourite and despite it being my family name, I tended to pass it by. When I did starting seriously researching them, I found loads of information. This avoidance was probably due to them being 20th century immigrants and my history interests lie in 19th century Australia. I had no choice but to delve into 18th and 19th century English history and I have really enjoyed it and learnt a lot and I continue to do so. I am glad I got over my previous mindset.
I also have more Irish links than I normally given myself credit for and I can now clearly see the branches I have been neglecting.
I have included the surnames of my great great grandparents, but I have taken the places and dates back a little further. If not, I would have had entries with just a single place in Australia with no indication of where the family originated from.
To take part, just do the following at your own blog, then post a link in the comments at Thomas’ blog post
1. List your surnames in alphabetical order as follows:
[SURNAME]: Country, (State or County, Town), date range;
2. At the end, list your Most Wanted Ancestor with details about them.
MY NAMES, PLACES AND MOST WANTED FACES:
BISHOP: England (Dorset, Weymouth) 1825-1850; Australia (South Australia, Adelaide) 1850-1854; Australia (Victoria, Byaduk)1854-1950
COMBRIDGE: England (Huntingdonshire) 1833-1855; Australia (Victoria, Geelong 1855-1935); Australia (Victoria, Grantville) 1900-1950
DIWELL: England (Sussex) 1825-1852; Australia (Victoria, Casterton) 1852-1893; Australia (Victoria, Hamilton) 1893-1940
GAMBLE: England 1808-1840; Australia (Victoria, Geelong) 1840-1850; Australia (Victoria, Colac), 1850-present
HADDEN: Scotland (East Lothian) 1823-1852; Australia (Victoria, Geelong) 1852-1865; Australia (Victoria, Cavendish) 1865-1975; Australia (Victoria, Hamilton) 1900-present
HARMAN: England (Cambridgeshire, Melbourn) 1800-1854; Australia (New South Wales) 1852-1857; Australia (Victoria, Port Fairy) 1852-1863; Australia (Victoria, Byaduk) 1863-present
HODGINS: Ireland (Fermanagh) 1816-1853; Australia (Victoria, Colac) 1853-1940
HUNT: England (Middlesex, Poplar) 1834-1854; Australia (Victoria, Geelong) 1854-1865; Australia (Victoria, Collingwood) 1867- ; Australia (Victoria, West Gippsland) 1880-1936
JELLY: Ireland (Down, Drumgooland) 1815-1845; England (Lancashire, Manchester) 1845-1854; Australia (Victoria, Casterton) 1854-1900
KIRKIN: England (London, Lambeth) 1859-1940;
MORTIMER: England (Berkshire, White Waltham) 1823-1852; Australia (Victoria, Cavendish) 1865-1930
PIDDINGTON: England (Buckinghamshire, Cuddington) 1700s-1880
RIDDIFORD: England (Gloucestershire, Thornbury) 1600s-present; England (Buckinghamshire, Cuddington) 1846-present; England (London, Lambeth) 1896-1913; Australia (Victoria, Ballarat) 1913-present
WEBB: England (Surrey, Clapham) 1845-1878; England (London, Lambeth) 1878-1900
WHITE: England (Kent, Broadstairs) 1857-1876; Australia (Victoria, Grantville) 1876-1950
MOST WANTED ANCESTOR:
When I started this I thought my most wanted ancestor would be gg grandmother Mary Jane HODGINS. She was born in Ireland around 1849, immigrated with her parents West HODGINS and Martha BRACKIN in 1853 aboard the “Marion Moore” . She married Matthew GAMBLE in 1871 at Colac. That is all I know except for the accident which saw Mary Jane loose the top of her finger, as mentioned in the post Misadventures, Deaths and Near Misses.
However, when I looked at the completed list it seemed clear it had to be Jane WYATT, another gg grandmother and second wife of Herbert John COMBRIDGE.
I had previously found a birth for a Jane Wyatt born 1882, St Arnuad but this did not really add up, mainly because my Jane Wyatt married Herbert Combridge in 1895 in Gippsland. If I searched the Australian Death Index 1787-1985, I find the death of Jane COMBRIDGE in 1909 at Grantville but with no approximate birth year or parents.
As I was writing this post, I decided to have a look around for Jane again. I checked for people researching Combridges at Ancestry.com and found a reference to Jane’s birth in 1873. I searched again with this birth date and that threw up something interesting. There is a Jane Wyatt listed on the Victorian Index to the Children’s Register of State Wards, 1850-1893. Her birth date is given as 1873, but no birth place. This could be my Jane and it could explain the lack of parent names and birth year on the Death index.
So, thanks to this exercise, I may have come a step closer to finding Jane Wyatt, but if she was a ward of the state, I may not be able to find anything else about her. So if anyone has information on Mary Jane HODGINS and her family, I would love to her from you! | <urn:uuid:5b97c94c-80cc-416a-818e-03179899eac2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mywdfamilies.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/surname-saturday-meme-names-places-and-most-wanted-faces/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=744caefc44 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925489 | 1,448 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Nowadays many people are racing to create alternative energy that carries the mission of environmentally friendly, economical, and practical.
Ever since the earthquake and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster that occurred in Japan last year technology has been developed to help if such an event were ever to occur again. One of the biggest problems to overcome in Japan was a lack of power, which has led one Japanese company to create a light that runs purely on salt water.
Green House Co Ltd released has developed LED lights to light it does not require electricity or batteries, but only requires power and salt water.
The luminous power of the light is rated at 55 lumen, but the lantern isn’t just limited to acting as a light source. On its casing you will find a USB port, allowing you to plug in and charge other devices. So if you are stuck in a power outage at night you can use the LED Lantern to light the way while it charges your smartphone.
|GH-LED10WBW from Green House Co Ltd. (Picture from: http://kuwaitblogs.tomotiki.com/)|
As reported by Ubergizmo, the lamp with the name GH-LED10WBW it will emit light when water and salt put into the lantern, and capable of burning for eight hours. To turn the light takes about 350 milliliters of water and 16 grams of salt.
This electronic device developer explained that a mixture of water and salt will work as electrolytes with magnesium (mg) rod as the negative pole and carbon rod as the positive poles.
Green House is expected to release the LED Lantern before the end of September in Japan. The one thing not yet know is the price, but due to the limited parts it uses I can’t see this being a very expensive device, but it’s certainly one lots of Japanese households will want to have ready in a cupboard just in case. *** [GEEK | PIKIRAN RAKYAT 13092012] | <urn:uuid:cc6783b2-380f-4726-a9dd-9fe082219d03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://trussty-jasmine.blogspot.com/2012/09/water-and-salt-to-led-lighting.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955949 | 409 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Peer Pressure May Help: Sylvia Rimm on Raising Kids
By Sylvia Rimm
Q. My 9-year-old had colon surgery at one week old and reconstructive surgery at 10 months. He's doing well now and is very healthy.
However, he still has bowel movements in his pants almost every day. The doctor said to give him Imodium AD every day (he's had physicals and everything is fine), but he still continues to have accidents. He refuses to use the bathroom at school and comes home smelling almost every day. I put clean underwear and pants in his backpack, but he doesn't change them. At home, he gets so involved in what he's doing that he forgets to go to the bathroom. I have to constantly remind him or ask him, and I know it must be terribly humiliating and annoying.
I've tried rewards, punishments, almost everything -- nothing works. Any suggestions?
A.When it feels as if you've tried everything, it may mean you haven't tried the one thing that could work long enough. For starters, it would be important not to ever remind your son to go to the bathroom in front of siblings or peers, because that would be terribly humiliating. You may want to replace those nagging and embarrassing reminders with a secret signal. Also, be sure he doesn't hear a lot of discussion between you and other adults about his problem, or he'll feel he won't ever be able to control it.
Your best choice for persevering is using a reward. Select something special that he'd really like to have, and then calculate a reasonable number of points for him to earn toward its purchase. For every day he manages to stay clean, award a point so he can save up for this special gift. Keep encouraging him until he finally earns his reward.
In addition, consider that peer pressure is on your side. You might like to quietly remind him that if he smells bad, friends will probably stay away because of the unpleasant odor. Furthermore, it could cause some very unpleasant teasing by kids.
If these suggestions don't work, I suggest you see a psychologist directly for more help.
REASSURANCE FROM A DAD WHO'S BEEN THERE
A. I responded to a letter from a parent whose daughter was about to have open-heart surgery. The mother was concerned about the potential negative effect on her self-esteem in our body-conscious society, because of the scar that would remain on her chest. Although I reassured her that as long as her daughter had good health, which was anticipated, there wouldn't likely be other negative effects. I've included a letter I received in response and wanted to share, since there's nothing more reassuring than a message from someone who's already experienced the problem.
"Our 20-year-old daughter had open-heart surgery when she was 9 months old. It left her in great health, but with a scar over her breastbone from her cleavage to her diaphragm. It has never caused her any problems with friends or others.
By all means, take a camera to the hospital. Your child will be asking where that scar came from, and it will help to have pictures of what she went through. Most of the other parents who saw us taking pictures of our daughter in the Children's Intensive Care Unit (CICU) thought we were crazy, but I think it helped a lot later on.
Also, be very open but unemotional in discussing the subject later with your child. If the parents assume that surgery was necessary, but don't get emotional about discussing it, it will go a long way in helping your daughter be matter-of-fact about it later."
Dr. Sylvia B. Rimm is the director of the Family Achievement Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and the author of many books on parenting.
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Categories: Children's Health
, Health & Wellness
Related Articles: Work Projects With Dad Give Confidence: Sylvia Rimm on Raising Kids
, Difficult Divorces Hurt Kids: Sylvia Rimm on Raising Kids | <urn:uuid:2e6e4a2d-3169-41e5-b9c3-e67d48b963ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.momtalk.com/2006/09/peer_pressure_may_help_sylvia.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983135 | 875 | 2.015625 | 2 |
The United States and India are congratulating Sri Lanka for carrying out a successful presidential election this week. But there are also calls from the international community for the South Asian island nation to investigate the opposition's claim of vote-rigging and other election violations.
The U.S. Embassy in Colombo issued a statement congratulating Sri Lanka for a mostly peaceful election with high voter turnout.
Sri Lanka's neighbor just across the Palk Strait, India, is pledging to deepen the relationship with Colombo during the second term of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The losing opposition coalition candidate, former General Sarath Fonseka, is demanding that the official results be annulled, claiming rampant illegal use of state resources during the campaign and a rigged vote counting.
The deputy executive director in Sri Lanka for the anti-corruption organization Transparency International is expressing concern about the use of government officials, media, and public transport on behalf of the president's re-election campaign. But Rukshana Nanayakkara tells VOA News the former army commander needs to produce something beyond speculation to support his allegations there was tampering with the vote-counting process.
"Right now, we have no evidence whatsoever to prove what he has said other than the rumors, which are spreading around the country," he said.
Thousands of domestic monitors observed balloting throughout the country Tuesday, reporting the election was considerably less violent than previous years.
There were only a handful of accredited foreign observers, with major international observer groups saying they did not have adequate notification to prepare for the Sri Lanka election.
The mission director of the Asian Network for Free Elections, Ichal Supriadi, speaking to VOA, suggests the government should agree to recount disputed ballots to settle any doubts about the president's nearly 18 percent margin of victory.
"The best we can say right now about Sri Lanka is that the election, yes, was really smooth, but needs real reform of the electoral process," said Supriadi.
A general election to elect a new parliament is expected to be held in several months.
Mr. Fonseka has spoken of continuing his quest for political office, while also noting he might have to temporarily seek exile for his personal safety. The day after the election, the former military chief accused Mr. Rajapaksa of wanting to see him assassinated.
The United States government is urging Sri Lankan authorities to ensure the safety and security of all candidates and campaign workers amid fears some are targets for arrest or retaliation.
The incumbent captured about 70 percent of the majority Sinhalese vote. The top challenger, who is also Sinhalese, enjoyed strong support among minority Tamils. Both of the candidates were touted as war heroes for last year's defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, ending a quarter century civil war. | <urn:uuid:b0c12da1-d664-40e2-863c-36aa29feed87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.voanews.com/articleprintview/111783.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969234 | 580 | 1.546875 | 2 |
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Tag Archives: linguistics
The Maldives is a small island state with the unfortunate attribute that its highest peak comes in at about 2.5 metres above sea level (a metre is like a decimal-based yard – try it, you’ll like it). This means that just a little bit of melted polar ice will suffice to turn their islands into reefs. Understandably enough, Read the rest
The NYT has a short article on fake web reviews (e.g. of a hotel) that were analyzed by a program. The general findings of the paper are that deception is signaled by:
increased use of “I” and “me” terms
superlative (but not other kinds of) adjectives
verbs and adverbs
inclusion of external information (e.g. husband, Read the rest | <urn:uuid:4b7772bf-6d11-44ea-8621-048b65481984> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://partialobjects.com/tag/linguistics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901983 | 263 | 1.882813 | 2 |
This well-known and popular pharmacist of Atchison, Kansas, was born in Weston, Missouri, July 23, 1858, a son of German parents. His father and mother, Matthias and Grace (Kurtz) Noll, were natives of Germany, the father of Horb and the mother of Herlingen, both in the province of Wurtemberg. The father, then a single man, came to America in 1848, landing at New Orleans, where he took a boat for St. Louis, but in the same year went to Weston, Missouri, where he found employment, and later engaged in wagon and carriage making for himself. Here he became acquainted with and married Grace Kurtz, the wedding taking place in 1850, and they now reside in Weston, Missouri, he being seventy-four years of age and she seventy-six. They are the parents of four children -- three daughters and one son -- all married and settled in life, viz.: Victoria, Augusta, Matthias and Mary.
The younger Matthias Noll was reared and received his early training in his native town, attending both its common and high schools. Later he took a course in the Christian Brothers College at St. Joseph, Missouri, after which he commenced his business career as a clerk. He served three and a half years as an apprentice to the drug business under Fred Scheibe, one of the most competent druggists of St. Joseph, and was one year in the employ of the Samuel Q. Smith Drug Company of that place. Then, in order to still further prepare himself for his chosen work, he went to Ann Arbor and entered the University of Michigan, where he took a course in pharmacy and graduated in 1881. Immediately after his graduation he took charge of a store in St. Joseph, but a few months later came to Atchison, Kansas, and from 1881 to 1884 clerked for Augustus Lang. On Mr. Lang's going to California in 1884, Mr. Noll became a partner in the business, under the firm name of Lang & Noll, and was thus associated one year. At the end of that time Mr. Noll purchased his partner's interest and became the sole proprietor of the establishment which he has since successfully conducted.
Mr. Noll was married, in 1885, to Miss Bertha Forbriger, a daughter of Robert Forbriger, and they have one son, Robert M.
Mr. Noll has always manifested a deep interest in everything pertaining to the welfare of his city and stands high as a public-spirited, enterprising citizen. He is a director in the Mount Vernon Cemetery Association and a stockholder also in the Oak Hill Cemetery Association. In 1884 he was the secretary of the Atchison board of education. He is a member of the Modern Woodmen, the Knights of Pythias, A. O. U. W. and the Sons of Herman. Also he is a member of numerous organizations which are connected with his profession, and in them centers his chief interest. He has been the president of the Kansas State Pharmaceutical Association, and was at one time a member of the state examining board, is the secretary of the Atchison Home Retail Druggists' Association and is a member of the American Pharmaceutical Association. In politics he is a Republican and is at present a member of the Atchison city council. In 1899 Noll postoffice was established on the Missouri Pacific Railroad six miles south of Atchison, the office being named in honor of Mr. Noll. | <urn:uuid:7ff37d2b-0c3c-4360-bd36-b3e5c625c334> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pyle/GBR/MATTHIAS_NOLL.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987838 | 732 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Kumbo Public Library & Center For Education
The Himalayan Institute Cameroon, in partnership with the Honesdale Rotary, has established the largest library in the northwest region of Cameroon, which contains over 30,000 books. The facility includes reading rooms, collaborative work spaces, a children’s corner, reference books, textbooks, computers, and other multimedia devices. The Library now also include an additional training space and detached library called the Center For Leadership and Vocational Studies.
Throughout Africa, there is a consistent lack of access to information, most vividly demonstrated in the scarcity of books. In Kumbo, despite a relatively high literacy rate, books are extremely difficult to find. Even when available, a used paperback routinely costs $15 to $20 in a country where many earn only $2 per day.
Textbooks for Students
In the national school system, textbooks can cost as much as tuition. Books on average make up 44% of annual school expenses for students in Kumbo. Rural families are routinely forced to choose between sending a child to school without books and not sending them at all. In Kumbo, more than 75% of students in a given class lack the appropriate textbook. They rely on their classmates for school assignments and struggle through examinations.
The Kumbo Public Library makes over 1,000 school textbooks available to students during its operating hours five days a week as well as a quiet and safe study environment for students of all ages. Having access to textbooks through the public library will help make going to school more affordable.
Community education programs will be hosted at the library, including adult literacy classes, children’s afterschool programs, and educational video nights where films such as Planet Earth will be projected onto the 12-foot cinema wall. Two computers are available in the library for educational use and are loaded with Wikipedia For Schools, an offline version of Wikipedia that is the size of a twenty-volume encyclopedia. So even when the computers are not connected to the internet, students can still do research and have access up-to-date information. The library has a reading room, children’s learning area, and a section devoted to textbooks.
Center For Leadership and Vocational Studies
This center allows students to have an occupation-focused school with the resources, teachers and classes needed to jump-start a career. Aside from a large vocational library and digital resources, this center offers: general education classes, management and business sessions, and skill development in leadership, farming, woodworking, electrical, plumbing, automotive.
You Can Help: Donate Books
We are still accepting book donations, especially textbooks, vocation training books and technical books. Also recent copies of periodicals such as Scientific American, Popular mechanic, Popular woodworking, The Economist, National Geographic, and Wired. Typically, we ship new books and magazines to Cameroon when we have enough inventory to fill a 20ft freight container. International shipping can be prohibitively expensive. We usually ask that our book donors pay the cost of postage to Honesdale. If you include an additional $1 per book donated, we can continue improving literacy for the Kumbo Public Library’s 20,000 annual visitors. For more information contact: firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:45372a56-0574-4f3f-b57d-d66eb202a36e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/humanitarian/africa/kumbo-public-library/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941216 | 661 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Shots - Health Blog
FDA Tells Weight-Loss Surgery Centers To Pull Misleading Ads
In an unusual move, the Food and Drug Administration has warned a marketing company and eight surgery centers in Southern California that their billboards and other advertisements touting weight-loss surgery are misleading because they don't adequately describe the risks from the procedure.
The agency's letters ask the surgery centers and the marketing firm 1-800-GET-THIN to pull the allegedly misleading advertising.
In a letter to 1-800-GET-THIN, the agency cites a billboard whose copy reads:
"LOSE WEIGHT WITH THE LAP-BAND! SAFE 1 HOUR, FDA APPROVED; 1-800-GET-THIN; 1-800-953-5000; PPO INSURANCE; FREE INSURANCE VERIFICATION"
The billboard and other ads don't tell prospective patients enough about risks and other important factors, such as the age range and body mass index required to qualify for the Lap-Band, according to the FDA.
Even some marketing materials that include a few more details, such as suggesting a physician consultation, don't go far enough in the agency's view.
The adjustable Lap-Band, made by Allergan, can help people lose weight by reducing the amount of food their stomach can hold. Side effects include nausea and vomiting, difficulty swallowing and severe heartburn. Repeat surgery is sometimes needed to correct problems with the device.
"FDA's concern is that these ads glamorize the Lap-Band without communicating any of the risks," said a statement from Steven Silverman, head of regulatory compliance at the FDA's device center. "Consumers, who may be influenced by misleading advertising, need to be fully aware of the risks of any surgical procedure."
It's far more common for the FDA to go after a manufacturer of medical devices than the providers of health care services for alleged marketing violations.
In an email to Shots, an FDA spokeswoman said the agency "is not aware of Allergan's involvement in these specific issues addressed in the warning letters." Rather, she wrote, "the issue is that the advertising by these organizations does not present appropriate risk and use information, which means that the advertising is misleading."
Allergan didn't immediately respond to Shots' request for a comment.
When I dialed 1-800-GET-THIN myself in search of a comment, an automated greeting from celebrity physician Drew Pinsky touted the FDA approval of the Lap-Band, saying it was "extremely effective."
Pinsky's message also said losing weight confers health benefits, but his message said nothing about risks from the surgical procedure or the need to avoid binge eating afterward.
In a separate call, I reached Robert Silverman, an official with 1-800-GET-THIN, who asked that I email my questions about how the company plans to respond to the FDA. I did, but didn't hear back right away.
The companies have 15 days to answer the FDA in writing.
In his letter to FDA, Dr. Jonathan Fielding wrote:
"Misleading advertisements erode the ability of the majority of the public, who are currently either overweight or obese, to fairly consider alternative weight management options, and for 'normal' weight individuals to be concerned about behavior that increases risk of weight gain."
He recommended that FDA take enforcement action. | <urn:uuid:40578909-d5ad-4f26-98ca-89a0dfe83e3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wcbe.org/post/fda-tells-weight-loss-surgery-centers-pull-misleading-ads | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94285 | 701 | 1.671875 | 2 |
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Thu June 9, 2011
Raising Lake Huron water level problematic, says study
A new study suggests raising the water level in Lake Huron could cause as many problems as it solves.
Eugene Stakhiv is U.S. Co-chair of the International Great Lakes Study.
He says people could build dams or other structures in the St. Clair River to slow the flow of water out of Lake Huron.
That would raise the level of Lake Huron and benefit marinas and wetlands around the lake.
But water levels would also rise near Chicago, which already has high lake levels.
"It’s gonna create big problems, economic damages, storm damages to the major metropolitan areas," a classic case of the economy versus the environment.
Stakhiv suspects people on both sides of the question will use the report to bolster their positions.
He says the study is only preliminary in nature and makes no recommendations. | <urn:uuid:78e13a78-eb13-4174-b0fd-260e2f2b30ef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.michiganradio.org/post/raising-lake-huron-water-level-problematic-says-study | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94278 | 206 | 2.578125 | 3 |
There are plenty of options for kitchen countertops available on the market.
Countertops refer to a decorative surface that covers kitchen cabinets, as well
as, other areas food preparation areas. Countertops can be fabricated from
a wide assortment of materials. Your choice of countertop is dependent upon the
expense of the material, its strength and sturdiness, and the difficulty with
which it can be installed and worked on.
Some familiar materials for fabricating counter tops include the following:
Ceramic tile counter tops are inexpensive, durable and easy to clean making
is a really good choice for countertops in the average home. Because ceramic
tile is installed a portion at a time, it can be handled by most capable
do-it-yourselfers. Ceramic tile counter tops are offered in wide range of
colors, textures and price points. Some of the drawbacks of ceramic tile counter
tops are that the tiles can easily crack or chip, the surface is uneven and
grout lines can become tainted. Custom designed art tiles are very expensive.
Concrete counter tops may be a good choice if you want unusual shapes, as
they're often molded right in your kitchen. The high cost may be beyond most
consumers' budget. Concrete counters tops look extraordinary and sometimes
outlandish and can be color-tinted with additives that lessen porosity. They are
abrasion and heat resistant and new treatments do away with cracking.
Engineered stone countertops are composed of quartz particles. It has a
non-porous surface that resists scratches and is available in a larger selection
of colors than granite. It's easy to maintain, and unlike natural stone does not
require yearly sealing. Brands available on the market are Silestone, DuPont
Zodiaq®, and Cambria Quartz. Engineered stone countertops are easy to care for
and resistant to acid and stains but they are an expensive decorative surface.
Granite counter tops are the material of choice when you have plenty of money
to spend. It defines sophistication and elegance in a kitchen. The
attractiveness of the stone contributes to the panache of even the most humble
kitchens but is only available in a limited range of colors. Granite counter
tops look permanent, substantial and come in beautiful natural colors. The
surface holds up to heat but granite is very expensive, requiring lots of
maintenance and intermittent sealing. It also absorbs stains and can crack.
Laminate counter tops are made of plastic-coated synthetics with a smooth
surface that's easy to clean. The pieces are cut to size and finished on the
ends. Laminate counter tops are available in lots of colors from such brands as
Formica, Nevamar, and Wilsonart. Laminate is easy to maintain; resilient
and inexpensive but it scratches and chips and is almost impracticable to
repair; it shows seams and front edge choices can be high-priced.
Marble counter tops are not often seen in whole kitchens because of it's
exceedingly high price. To get an opulent appearance, use it as an inset at a
baking center or use it on a kitchen island. Depending on its veining and color
patterns, marble countertops can also make a room appear chic. Marble requires
persistent upkeep as it easily stains unless professionally sealed. Some new
marble sealers impede staining. Marble counter tops are impermeable; heatproof
and stunning but are expensive and can scratch and stain.
Soapstone counters tops have a smooth feel and are usually dark grey in
color. It is often seen in historic homes but is also used in contemporary homes
as both sink material and countertops. Soapstone counters tops offer a deep rich
color and is to some extent stain resistant but may darken over time. It
requires regular maintenance with mineral oil.
Solid surface counter tops are just what they're called, solid. The
countertops are custom made to your specifications by companies such as Avonite,
Corian, and Swanstone. Solid surface counter tops come in a large selection of
colors and patterns; and is seamless and stain resistant. Hot pans and stains
can damage the surface but imperfections can be sanded out. It is moderately
Stainless steel counter tops are a good pick for a really modern-day and
industrial looking for your kitchen. They are heat resistant and can take hot
pans but it is noisy, may dent and you can't cut on it. Additionally, it also
easily takes on the temperature of its environment, so that kids must be kept
away from them, especially if the stainless steel countertop is part of a stove
system. Because they're constructed to your specifications, it is expensive but
you can have a seamless countertop. This durable material is easily cleaned and
Wood or butcher block countertops offer a attractive warm look and is
available in a wide range of colors and finishes. Hardwoods such as oak and
maple are frequently used as countertop woods. Wood countertops are smooth and
easy to clean but can promote bacteria, especially if it is constantly used as a
butcher block. It can be sanded and resealed to manufacturer's instructions as
required but can be damaged over time by stains and water. Wood or butcher block
is not recommended to be permanently installed on kitchen counters.
Countertops are fabricated depending on their intended use. Kitchen countertops
are usually formed with a backsplash, or a raised edge that will keep spills
from pouring into cabinets. Countertop faces can also be ornamented, from simple
and plain, to intricate, depending on the homeowner’s requirements. | <urn:uuid:1fb07961-8f4d-405e-aa61-b400b7829856> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://designbiz.com/BizLibrary/products/countertops.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944302 | 1,191 | 1.703125 | 2 |
God loves everyone and wants to forgive their sins.
When Jesus was teaching, He often spent time with people who did not know God
or do things that were good and right. He taught them what they needed
to do and change so that God would accept them. However, the Pharisees
and the teachers of the law complained, "This man welcomes sinners and eats
with them." Jesus answered their disapproval with this parable which
showed how much God cares for lost sinners, and how much He wants them to be
saved and have their sins forgiven.
The Lost Coin:
"What woman," asked Jesus, "Who has ten silver coins and if she loses one coin,
does not light a lamp and sweep the house, and seeks until she finds it?
And when she finds it, she calls all her friends and neighbours, saying,
"Come and rejoice with me, for I have found the silver coin which I had lost."
Jesus said, "In the same way, there will be joy in heaven over one sinner who
repents, more than over ninety and nine righteous persons who need no
The parable of the lost coin again shows that God loves and values every person
and wants them to be His beloved children. John 3:16 says:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son,
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."
Just a Coin?
Jesus must have had in mind a young woman who had just been married.
Her ten silver coins may have been a necklace that she wore around her neck.
These coins were very valuable to her as they would have formed part of
her trousseau. This was the money, clothes, linen, and other belongings
that a bride had collected for her marriage. No wonder she was so happy
to find that lost coin!
A Changed Life:
To "repent" means to turn away from doing sin and wrong things, and decide to
to do things that are right and good. And then to ask Jesus to forgive
you and make you clean inside. If you really mean it, Jesus will
forgive you and wash you clean inside from all your sins with His precious
And then you need to ask Jesus to come into your heart as your Lord and
Saviour, so that you will become one of God's precious children. And
you will then have everlasting life in Heaven when you die. Jesus will
change you inside so that you will want to serve and please God every day in
all you do and say.
And if you were in Heaven, you would hear all the angels rejoicing that you
now belong to God. You may not have ten silver coins, but knowing God
as your loving Heavenly Father is worth more than all the gold and silver in | <urn:uuid:e17dc3aa-4cb3-45c3-b139-aaac46d8537f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sharonministries.org.za/KidsLesson124a.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975594 | 592 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Recognizing and celebrating Xhosa traditional music in South Africa
Joseph, Dawn and Petersen, Alvin 2008, Recognizing and celebrating Xhosa traditional music in South Africa, in ANZARME 2008 : Proceedings of the XXXth Annual Conference : innovation and tradition : music education research : 3-5 October 2008, Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education, Melbourne, Vic., pp. 160-170.
(Some files may be inaccessible until you login with your Deakin Research Online credentials)
ANZARME 2008 : Proceedings of the XXXth Annual Conference : innovation and tradition : music education research : 3-5 October 2008
Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education Conference
Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education
Place of publication
The recognition and celebration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as a way forward to promote democracy and inclusivity continues to be part of South Africa's nation building process. One effective platform for this to take place is through community music making as music making in Africa is a way of life. Since democracy in 1994 many initiatives were set up to explore and foster traditional music. This paper presents a brief contextualization of IKS, identity and community music making. It reports on the a Xhosa music research project (2004-2006) as an ethnographic study which is descriptive and interpretive as a holistic cultural portrait. Participants in the project included post-graduate music students, community culture bearers and academics. Only some significant aspects of the Xhose music project at the University of Fort Hare will be reported on. We contextualize the recognition and celebration of IKS within the parameters of the music and the culture of the amaMpondo within the Xhosa people. The paper specifically focuses on the ritual life of the amaMpondo. It also describes the indigenous bow instruments of the Uhadi and Umrhubhe as unique examples of South Africa's traditional music. As this initiative proved a worthy undertaking, we challenge whether such a project could strengthen local IKS elsewhere and be a pathway for tertiary institutions to engage effectively with local community music practitioners in order to prepare students effectively as holistic music educators.
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We are particularly excited about this project as it will bring back native forest to the native peoples of Costa Rica. Already nurseries have been started with a total of 15,000 trees which will be planted onto 15 hectares in June and July. We continue to negotiate with other land holders along the Rio Sol with a goal of planting 35,000 trees on 35 hectares of land. You know if you’ve read other project reports and seen the accompanying photos how very quickly reforestation occurs in this part of the world. Within two years many of the trees are large enough for one to walk under their branches. In eight years all signs of the area once being pasture land are gone replaced by a young, thriving native forest providing food and shelter for both wildlife and the Maleku people. Your participation in this project will help us move more quickly in bringing about the restoration of both a forest and an indigenous peoples’ way of life.
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Web edition: June 5, 2012
Every electronic gadget needs a good memory. A music player saves songs, albums and playlists. A computer holds schoolwork and programs — and remembers how far a player advanced in her favorite game. Mobile phones recall names, numbers and hundreds of texts.
Now, scientists in California say they’ve come up with a way to turn a living cell into a memory device.
A. Witze. DNA used as rewritable data storage in cells. Science News Online, May 21, 2012. [Go to] | <urn:uuid:fdff197d-813a-4cea-97ec-99dce1ac64bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341296/description/FOR_KIDS_DNA_takes_notes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927187 | 114 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Today our project, Shift, on demographic change is tracking young people in search of work. There are 200,000 fewer young people on the job than there were at this time two years ago. We take a look inside youth unemployment.
There are lots of ways to measure unemployment, but one statistics stands out: There are 200,000 fewer young people … that is, those aged 15 to 24 … 200,000 fewer of them working today than there were two years ago.
With the university year wrapped up and the high school year ending and a new group of young people marching towards the job market, our project Shift on demographic change is looking to see where they fit in.
The CBC’s Neil Sandell went to something called the National Job Fair and Training Expo in Toronto where he met young people anxious to start careers. His documentary is called The Young and The Jobless. | <urn:uuid:916f31a7-00d0-4cd0-afac-1287055afa92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://huffduffer.com/tags/unemployment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967699 | 180 | 2.40625 | 2 |
By now your kitchen is clean, well-stocked and ready to be used. Today begins the second half of the Kitchen Cure when you'll start using your kitchen to cook. For the next three weeks you'll hone your skills and use your improved space to learn to cook with what you have, with what's available to you. The goal is to cook more by feel and less with recipes. This week you'll make sure you have the basics like roasting, salad dressings, and knife skills down, and you'll take on learning one new skill.
First our usual note on participation: Do your best, and pace yourself, but march forward. The Kitchen Cure never gets too hard. Many assignments can be on-going through the Cure. Document your progress with photos and discussion on the forum, this way you'll stay in touch with the community and the group will help keep you going. Losing steam? Ask for help!
Week Four Assignments
1. Polish Up Cooking Basics: Begin with these two skills - how to set up your cooking projects, and how to use your knife. These are the two things my first two weeks of culinary school covered. If you don't know these two things already, learn them this week. Mise en Place doesn't take as much practice as honing knife skills, although if you're not used to doing it, it might actually take the week of practice before you change your ways:
• Roast a Chicken or for vegetarians, roast a vegetable using the technique in our Roasted Sweet Potato Sticks recipe. • Braise Meat OR Vegetables • Make Fresh Pasta • Make Soup From Almost Anything • Make a Basic Vinaigrette • Build Flavor with These 8 Techniques
2. Learn a New Skill: Choose one from above that you do not already know, or tell us a technique you want to learn that is not already on The Kitchn, and we'll try to post it this week. Leave a comment starting with "NEW TECHNIQUE REQUEST!"
3. Buy or Cut Fresh Flowers: I'm going to start encouraging you to keep fresh flowers in your kitchen. Every week. Also, if you have a windowbox, it should be tended each week: watering and using your kitchen herbs once they're big enough. Here's some info on how to plant a windowbox.
4. Stay in touch! We have an exciting community of over 800 people currently signed up for the Kitchen Cure. Smart people. Fun people! And you can meet them all if you get active on our Cure Discussion Page. Also, don't forget to check in every day with the Kitchen Cure Page where all the Cure-related posts live in one neat little package. While assignments are posted once a week on Mondays, related posts are going up every day and there is a lot of conversation to be had in those posts comment threads as well.
Reminders about photographs:
• If you'd like your progress to be showcased, please take "before" and "after shots" and submit them directly to The Kitchn. Make sure to explain what's going on in each image.
• We also have a 2009 Kitchen Cure Flickr Group. If you post your photos to this group, please include captions so we understand what's going on in each image. | <urn:uuid:3c6b1013-35f9-4db8-be6b-deb36f9818ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thekitchn.com/kitchen-cure-week-4-cooking-ba-83671 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955062 | 677 | 2.078125 | 2 |
20.08.2007Saadat Hassan Manto's "Mottled Dawn"Stories about the Partition of India and PakistanWhile the independence of India and Pakistan had been celebrated with a national holiday, there is not one memorial in either country for the victims. Only writer and journalist Saadat Hassan Manto has set them a literary memorial in the form of short stories. By Gerhard Klas
Pakistanis are celebrating the country's 60th Independence Day on 14 August to mark its independence from the British rule in 1947 On August 15, India has celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its independence. On August 14, 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah called out independent Pakistan. Both days are still regarded as the prelude for the later wave of decolonization in Africa and Asia.
But they also launched the bloodiest massacres the subcontinent had ever seen. Muslims fled from India to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India.
At least one million people were killed, hundreds of thousands of women were raped, houses, villages, even entire city districts were burned to the ground.
While independence in the successor states is celebrated with a national holiday, there is not one memorial in India or in Pakistan for the victims, who – as usual – were predominantly the poor from the cities and the countryside, writes British author Tariq Ali in his foreword.
Only one person has set them a literary memorial in the form of short stories – writer and journalist Saadat Hassan Manto.
A scathing, desperate sense of humor
Manto, who lived in Bombay until 1948 and worked there as a successful screenplay writer for the film industry, finally had to flee to Pakistan. He had been accused of favoring Muslims.
In his volume of short stories, "Mottled Dawn," Manto not only depicts the horror, he also tries to process it, among other means, with a scathing, desperate sense of humor, which is always directed at the perpetrators and preserves the dignity of the victims. He keeps his distance, favoring neither the Muslims nor the Hindus.
In his often very brief stories, in which a situation is abruptly revealed, he makes use of concise and straightforward language.
He shoved the knife into the man's stomach. Ripping the belly cleanly, the knife moved in a straight line down the midriff, in the process slashing the cord which held the man's pyjamas. Suddenly the man with the knife cries out in horror: "Oh no, he's the wrong one!"
In his longer short stories, Manto's narrative art sweeps his readers along with the flow of events; he lets them suffer, fear, provides them with relief, and confronts them again in the end with the hopeless brutality of religious fanaticism, which repeatedly overtakes his characters.
For example, in the story "The Assignment," an old family friendship is ultimately sacrificed to the flames of hatred.
Exchanging the inmates of the "mad houses"
In many stories Manto takes a look at those who have been ostracized from society. "Toba Tek Singh" is about those who have been locked away as "mentally ill." Two, three years after the partition, the government of India and Pakistan resolved to exchange the inmates of their "mad houses" as well.
Among those released was Toba Tek Singh, a Sikh, who wanted to go to India. Arriving at the border, he climbs up a tree and yells that he does not want to go to Pakistan or India. In a world in which irrationality rules, Manto lets his "crazy" protagonists voice the only rational thoughts possible in such a brutal reality.
Manto himself finally was shattered by this reality. He drowned his pain in alcohol, and died at the age of 43 in Lahore, Pakistan.
The past continues to rot and fester
Tariq Ali, who wrote the foreword for the German edition of these short stories, was born in Lahore. When Manto died, he was eleven years old.
The bare essentials of book cover design: Suhrkamp's 2006 edition of Saadat Hassan Manto's "Schwarze Notizen". Most of the stories were first published in English in 1987 by Verso "I never met him," regrets Ali, who values Manto's literary work as well as its significance for the public: "People knew about the horrors of 1947, but few wanted to talk about it. A collective trauma apparently silences most people. Not Manto."
As an atheist Ali is adverse to every religious mania. He blames the British in particular for the fanaticism in India and Pakistan. Their head colonial officials learned as part of their education "how to divide native rulers and foment religious prejudices."
But he does not exonerate the Hindu and Muslim politicians who followed the British in this tactic – partly out of self-interest, partly out of stupidity, as Ali calls it. "Today this past continues to rot and fester, and it seems to be poisoning the future as well," fears Ali.
Recent events, unfortunately, show him to be right. Muslims from the Indian province of Gujarat, in 2002 the arena of pogroms against Muslims, now want to return to their villages. But the representatives of the resident Hindus are giving them conditions: They can return only if they renounce their faith and accept Hinduism, or withdraw their lawsuits against their persecutors.
Saadat Hassan Manto wrote his stories in Urdu, which is also a reason why they were translated so late into German. The large German publishing companies focus on the English-language literature from India and Pakistan.
Salman Rushdie: Manto's work is "world literature"
Yet Salman Rushdie identified Manto's work as world literature at the end of the 1990s. Linguists point out that the two Indian languages, Urdu and Hindi, have their roots in ancient Hindustani and only diverged with colonization in the nineteenth century.
Even today the two languages are so similar that Hindu and Urdu speakers can easily understand each other.
Manto's masterly narrated short stories draw attention to a part of the history of the subcontinent which marks the height of the estrangement between Hindus and Muslims and has not yet been processed. By so clearly depicting the horrors of religious fundamentalism in his stories, he has made an important contribution to our understanding of it.
© Qantara.de 2007
Saadat Hassan Manto. "Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition." Translated by Khalid Hassan. 216 pages. Penguin Books, India 2004.
Translated from the German by Nancy Joyce | <urn:uuid:d02ad585-5203-4601-9c0e-23c1c707e668> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.qantara.de/Stories-about-the-Partition-of-India-and-Pakistan/8882c174/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976346 | 1,376 | 2.5 | 2 |
November 19, 1901 - July 15, 1961
Nina Karlovna Bari was a woman whose contribution to mathematics was great. She lived in a period when mathematics started to become more and more popular in Russia. She gained the respect from all mathematicians of her time not only because of her work but also because of her excellent personality.
Bari was born on November 19, 1901 in Moscow, Russia. She was a woman who developed great mathematical abilities and skills while she was in high school. After high school she attended Moscow State University, and she was its first woman student. At Moscow State, she became a member of several mathematical groups. In 1918 she joined a group called "Luzitania." It was a group of students who followed Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin's mathematical ideas. Luzin was a professor at Moscow State University. ["Luzitani" came from his name] The members of that group were called "Luzitanians" and their goal was to investigate the mathematical field of function theory. Even after the group broke up, Bari decided that function theory was going to be the major subject in her research. Bari was a very good student at Moscow State. For that reason she graduated early in 1921, and she started working as a teacher at the Moscow Forestry Institute and the Communist Institute. Shortly after she began teaching, the Research Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics opened at Moscow University. She became a student at the Institute to do research on trigonometric series, while at the same time she continued to teach. She specifically focused on the analysis of various trigonometric series. She was eager to solve the problem of the uniqueness of trigonometric series. "The basic question in her thesis was: Under what conditions is a trigonometric development of a given function unique?" (Women of Mathematics, A Bibliographic Sourcebook, p.10) In 1922, she presented her principal conclusions on trigonometric series to the Moscow Mathematical Society (the first woman to do so). In 1923, she published those results. In 1926, she was given the Glavnauk Prize for her explanations to various difficult problems on trigonometric functions.
The same year she went abroad to study. She studied and worked for six months at the Sorbonne and the College De France in Paris. One year later she visited Lvov, Poland, where she attended the Polish Mathematical Congress. In 1928 she went to Bologna, Italy. There she gave speeches at the International Congress of Mathematics. Later the same year, she was awarded the Rockefeller bonus which gave her the great chance to continue her studies in Paris until 1929. By 1935 she had progressed into a very well established professor. She really enjoyed being a teacher and she participated in many mathematical seminars. One of them was the Third-All Union Congress in Moscow in 1956 where Bari gave lectures about her work on trigonometric series. She also gave many other lectures at the Moscow Polytechnic Institute, Sverdlov Communist University and the Moscow Lenin State Pedagogical Institute. In 1935, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of the Physical-Mathematical Sciences.
In 1952, Bari published a remarkable article on primitive functions and trigonometric series converging almost everywhere. "A primitive of a function f(x), defined on an interval [a,b], is any continuous function F(x) for which F(x)=f(x) almost everywhere on [a,b]." (Women of Mathematics, A Bibliographic Sourcebook, p.10) In that article Bari tried to prove that "every function that is finite and measurable almost everywhere has a primitive whose Fourier series, differentiated term by term, converges to the function almost everywhere." (Women of Mathematics, A Bibliographic Sourcebook, p.10) She also obtained significant results about properties of orthogonal and biorthogonal systems. Some of those systems were the Bessel system, Hilbert system, and Riesz-Fischer system. Bari also wrote a monograph of nine hundred pages. In this book she talked about all kinds of problems involving trigonometric series. Her monograph has become the basic reference for all mathematicians focusing on the theory of functions and the theory of series.
Bari was considered to be the principal leader of mathematics at Moscow State University. She helped many students earn their Ph.D. and improve their theses. She did everything she could to give to others the spirit of her work. Besides mathematics, Bari had other interests too. She used to hike and be a tourist and she really liked poetry and music.
Her death on July 15, 1961 was a lost to all mathematicians. She was a special person and even now is known and remembered for her marvelous work.December 1995 | <urn:uuid:e6db36b2-d136-432e-9155-bb1f24c1b1eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/bari.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984923 | 988 | 2.984375 | 3 |
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Please go to www.ahrq.gov for current information.
Figure 1. Generic analytic framework for screening topics
Numbers refer to key questions as follows: (1) Is there direct evidence that screening reduces morbidity and/or mortality? (2) What is the prevalence of disease in the target group? Can a high-risk group be reliably identified? (3) Can the screening test accurately detect the target condition? (a) What are the sensitivity and specificity of the test? (b) Is there significant variation between examiners in how the test is performed? (c) In actual screening programs, how much earlier are patients identified and treated? (4) Does treatment reduce the incidence of the intermediate outcome? (a) Does treatment work under ideal, clinical trial conditions? (b) How do the efficacy and effectiveness of treatments compare in community settings? (5) Does treatment improve health outcomes for people diagnosed clinically? (a) How similar are people diagnosed clinically to those diagnosed by screening? (b) Are there reasons to expect people diagnosed by screening to have even better health outcomes than those diagnosed clinically? (6) Is the intermediate outcome reliably associated with reduced morbidity and/or mortality? (7) Does screening result in adverse effects? (a) Is the test acceptable to patients? (b) What are the potential harms, and how often do they occur? (8) Does treatment result in adverse effects?
Return to Document | <urn:uuid:66f96a80-33d9-4639-9310-989c049bae6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archive.ahrq.gov/clinic/ajpmsuppl/harfig1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943604 | 374 | 2.734375 | 3 |
California physician Ami Bera, who has become the third Indian-American member of the US House of Representatives, has been named on three prestigious committees on foreign affairs, science, space and technology. Bera's parents migrated to the US from India in the 1950s.
Democrat Bera, 47, who represents California's 7th Congressional district in the House, follows Amritsar-born Dalip Singh Saund, who represented a California district from 1957 to 1963, and Louisiana's current governor Bobby Jindal, who was a member from his state from 2005 to 2008.
"I am honoured to have been named to the House Foreign Affairs Committee," he said in a statement after he was named to the committee following his swearing-in Thursday.
"In an increasingly complex global landscape, relationships with other nations have tangible effects here at home and we need strategic thinking to guide our foreign policy in the 21st century.
The Sacramento region, which Bera represents, he said is "uniquely situated to benefit from opening up new markets for our goods and services around the world.
"That would help create jobs here at home. Through my new role on the Science, Space and Technology, I'll also work to foster innovative industries that can bring good jobs to the 7th district," he said.
Recalling his links to India, Bera said: My parents emigrated here from India in the 1950s with very little but the dream of a better life. I grew up believing America was a land of opportunity, where if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could reach your full potential."
"Thursday, my father was among those watching as I was sworn in to the US House of Representatives," he said.
My family's story isn't unique; it's the story of the American Dream. I will work every day to ensure that we continue to invest in the next generation and keep the American Dream alive."
"I am incredibly honoured humbled that the people of Sacramento County have placed their trust in me to represent them in the US House of Representatives," he said
"Now begins the hard work of addressing the many challenges facing our region and our country. I look forward to working with my new colleagues from both parties to find common ground and to rebuild an economy that works for the middle class," he said.
Raised in La Palma, California, Bera defeated three-term Republican incumbent Dan Lungren by a narrow margin.
Arun Kumar can be contacted at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:59ab62ff-5e5c-4afd-b6cf-385786543efc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dnaindia.com/world/1785755/report-ami-bera-named-on-us-house-panel-on-foreign-affairs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984341 | 520 | 1.671875 | 2 |
By Carolina Velez
COLOMBIA: Living in Medellin, Colombia is a privilege, even though some people just don’t see it like that. But this city is so pretty, so full of colour and the city’s life sticks to its inhabitants’ memory and makes us fall in love with it over and over again.
Women in Medellin are like the flowers in a garden — always green and growing.
Some may think of us as only products of a society that seduces us to spend, but though some may see that as a bad thing, it’s not necessarily like that.
Besides being Colombia’s main fashion city, Medellin is also the city where women are recognized when it comes to contributing economically, politically and in many other ways.
We even have a talent contest where women in various fields are granted awards in recognition of their hard work such as science, technology, sports, social development, etc.
In Medellin, women work as hard as the men, some of them work even harder because they are both mother and father to their children. Yet, they still have time to shine, because here, women have time to feel.
In Medellin, women rule the society, especially at home. They are mostly middle-aged and are housewives.
The main difference for women in Medellin is that the men recognize our work and treat us like equals — sadly, that doesn’t happen in many cities around the world or even in those so-called developed cities.
Women have changed History, and will continue changing it. Medellin is proof of that happening.
Being a woman brings privileges but also responsibilities. The good part is that most of us are proud of taking the risk.
We are achieving success. As hermanas, we’re all basically the same and we have to support each other.
United we stand tall!!
Learn more about Carolina
At 17, Carolina Velez plays bass, sings, and often acts, while she finishes highschool and participates in hiperbarrio.org in Santo Domingo, Colombia.
Through her involvement with hiperbarrio.org, Carolina has learned how to create a blog and is taking her newfound talents to greater heights by now learning how to edit videos.
To read more of Carolina’s musings on life, visit her blog. | <urn:uuid:849963b6-5ab7-492a-aed0-a2e3f3077823> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://latinalista.com/2007/11/young_colombiana_proud_to_be_a_mujer_cha | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968747 | 501 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Australian Bureau of Statistics
4102.0 - Australian Social Trends, 2006
Previous ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 20/07/2006
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Australian expatriates in OECD countries
LONG-TERM AND PERMANENT DEPARTURES FROM AUSTRALIA
The number of long-term and permanent departures of Australian residents has increased considerably over the 20 years to 2005. In the 12 months to December 2005, there were 158,000 departures by Australian residents for an intended period of 12 months or more. This was more than twice the number of Australian residents who departed in 1985 (69,600). In 2005, almost two-thirds (64%) of all departures (or 101,000) were to OECD countries.
The age profile of Australian residents departing for a period of 12 months or more in 2005 differed from that of the overall Australian population. Most noticeable was the peak in the 25–29 years and the 30–34 years age-groups. One-third (34%) of all departures were of people aged in these groups yet people aged 25–34 years made up only 14% of the Australian resident population.
Overall, the numbers of males and females departing was fairly even, with 102 Australian resident males departing for every 100 females in 2005. However, the male-female pattern differed markedly by age group. At the younger adult ages (from 15–34 years) female departures outnumbered those of males with just 87 males for every 100 females (largely accounted for by the higher proportions of females in this age group going to the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand). Among departures of people aged 35 years and over, there were 124 male departures for every 100 female departures.
LONG-TERM AND PERMANENT DEPARTURES OF AUSTRALIAN RESIDENTS:
EXPATRIATE AUSTRALIANS LIVING IN OECD COUNTRIES
According to the censuses and surveys of the 29 OECD countries in the period 1999–2003, there were an estimated 346,000 Australian- born people living in other OECD countries. Of these, 84% (290,000) were aged 15 years or over. This was equivalent to almost three Australian-born people aged 15 years and over living in OECD countries for every 100 Australian-born people of the same age group living in Australia (the expatriate ratio). More than two-thirds (70%) of Australia's expatriate population were living in the top three destinations. The United Kingdom had 33% (96,900 people), followed by the United States with 22% (65,200) and New Zealand with 14% (42,000). These were followed by Greece with 7%, and Canada and Italy with 6% each.
The reasons Australians give for migrating overseas are commonly related to employment. According to a 2002 emigration survey(EndNote 1), 43% of expatriates cited 'better employment opportunities', 36% 'professional development' and 32% gave 'higher income' as a reason for emigrating. On the other hand, 'lifestyle' and 'marriage/partnership' were reasons given by 23% and 22% of expatriates respectively, while 15% gave 'education/study' as a reason.
AUSTRALIAN EXPATRIATES(a) AGED 15 YEARS AND OVER IN SELECTED OECD COUNTRIES — 1999–2003
EDUCATIONAL STATUS OF EXPATRIATES
Across all OECD countries, 44% of Australian expatriates aged 15 years and over had a high level of educational attainment. Among the top eight OECD countries of destination for Australian expatriates, there was great variability in the proportions of expatriates with a high level of education. Australian expatriates in Japan were on average the most highly educated of Australian expatriates with 84% having a high level of education. In contrast, only 13% of Australian expatriates in Italy had a high level of educational attainment. Just over half (54%) of Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom had a high level of education, while less than one-third (31%) of Australian expatriates in New Zealand did so.
COMPARISON WITH OTHER OECD COUNTRIES
EXPATRIATES(a) FROM SELECTED OECD COUNTRIES TO OTHER OECD COUNTRIES — 1999–2003
In comparison with most other OECD countries, Australia's expatriate ratio (2.8 Australian-born people aged 15 years or over per 100 Australian born people aged 15 years and over within Australia) was relatively low. Ireland had the highest ratio with 29 Irish-born people aged 15 years and over in other OECD countries for every 100 in Ireland. New Zealand had the second highest expatriate ratio with 19 per 100, while Portugal had 16 and Luxembourg and Mexico 14 each. The lowest OECD expatriate ratio was the United States of America with less than one person in other OECD countries per 100 USA-born within the USA.
The OECD country with the largest expatriate population aged 15 years and over was Mexico with 8.4 million expatriates (99% of whom were in the USA). The United Kingdom had the second largest diaspora (3.3 million) followed by Germany (3.1 million) and Italy (2.4 million).
Australian expatriates were among the most highly educated among the OECD expatriate populations, with 44% of expatriates in other OECD countries having a high level of education. Japan had the highest proportion with 50%, followed by USA (49%) and New Zealand (45%).
The transnational movement of skilled people can provide net benefits to countries. One way of evaluating the net benefit from international migration of skilled people is to look at the ratio of highly educated migrants in a country (i.e. expatriates from other countries) to the number of highly educated expatriates of that country who have left. However, this comparison does not account for whether the education was acquired in the host country.
Within the OECD countries in the 1999–2003 period, Australia had seven highly educated migrants for every one highly educated Australian who was living elsewhere in the OECD. This ratio was the highest in the OECD and while it reflects Australia's history (and official policy) of attracting skilled migrants, it should also be noted that in 2005 nearly half (47%) of overseas born Australian residents had obtained their qualifications in Australia.
The USA had the second highest ratio with six highly educated immigrants for every highly educated USA-born person living elsewhere. Most OECD countries had a ratio much closer to one, and many were less than one. For example, the United Kingdom and Italy each had 0.4 while New Zealand had 0.6 migrants with a high level of education for every one expatriate with a high level of education.
1 Hugo, G, Rudd, D and Harris, K, 2003, Australia's Diaspora: Its Size, Nature and Policy Implications, Information paper no. 80, Committee for Economic Development of Australia, Melbourne.
2 Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, 2005, They still call Australia home: Inquiry into Australian expatriates, Australian Senate, Canberra.
3 Dumont, J and Lemaitre,G 2005, Counting immigrants and expatriates in OECD countries: a new perspective, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper no. 25, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, viewed 8 May 2006, <www.oecd.org/dataoecd/
This page last updated 25 September 2007
Unless otherwise noted, content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence together with any terms, conditions and exclusions as set out in the website Copyright notice. For permission to do anything beyond the scope of this licence and copyright terms contact us. | <urn:uuid:b7092fbb-92d9-413f-8024-ae5b1e9b98bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/3CF3335EDC1A3F7FCA2571B0000EA963?opendocument | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961937 | 1,619 | 2.234375 | 2 |
We experienced unprecedented severe drought this year, particularly during May through mid-August in most places in Michigan. We can’t control Mother Nature, but we can manage drought-stressed hay fields and pastures to minimize further damage in the coming years.
Due to forage shortages, many farmers may want to harvest whatever is available in the fields to reduce buying hay externally. This may result in further damage to forage plants. Following are some fall management tips for drought-stressed hay fields:
- Allow enough time to store food reserves. Since most drought-stressed forage plants can be weak due to low root reserves, they may need some time to store their food reserves in the roots to overwinter and regrow next spring.
- Cutting time. It is believed that most hay fields may be harvested two to three times this year, depending on the region. It might be safer to harvest the last cutting of drought-stressed forages when those forage plants are in the stage of maturity such as after heading or blooming to store enough food reserves in the roots rather than in vegetative stages. If newly seeded alfalfa or grasses this spring had severe drought, it’s not recommended to mow those forage stands in the fall.
- Cutting height. Since snow cover varies region to region in Michigan (more snow cover in northern Michigan and the U.P. than lower Michigan), it’s safer to leave 4 to 6 inches of stubble. Cutting too short may make it hard to trap the snow, especially in lower Michigan, and snow cover is very important, particularly for alfalfa. If the forage plants are about 10 inches tall, it may not be cost-effective to machine harvest.
- Fertilization. Fall is a good time to soil test and fertilize with potassium (K) and phosphorus (P). This will help drought-stressed forage stands to overwinter and regrow next spring. Both P and K involve many physiological processes, in particular carbohydrate synthesis which is related to root reserves and winter survival. | <urn:uuid:a9acb6df-cf51-4041-b130-bc3fbcf051d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dairyherd.com/dairy-resources/forage/Fall-management-tips-for-drought-stressed-hay-fields-169675126.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937802 | 430 | 3.015625 | 3 |
[Shri. Indu Parekh, an Ashram boy, asked, ‘Shri Krishna got Bhishma killed by placing Shikhandi in front of him and prevented Jayandrath from seeing the sun by covering it up with the sudarshan chakra. Was his conduct on this occasions justified? And if it was not, can we enact such senses as a part of our school theatricals?’ Gandhiji replied to him on a slip of paper of the usual size for children, 4 inches board.]
It is an excellent question. The Mahabharata is poetry, not history. The poet tries to show that if man resorts to violence, untruth too is too sure to come in, and even people like Krishna cannot escape it. A wrong is a wrong, no matter who the wrongdoer is. Krishna was in fault in both the cases, and if my memory serves me right, Vyasa too take an unfavourable view of these incidents. There may be no harm in enacting these scenes if such conduct is clearly shown as unworthy of imitation (Translated from Gujarati). | <urn:uuid:46b42cc8-9ab1-433f-ac11-80d8b5d47cde> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mahatma.com/php/showNews.php?newsid=33&linkid=13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974253 | 234 | 2.46875 | 2 |
Windows 8 Survival Guide: End Users and Mobility
Noise and Light
Microsoft is a creature of habit when it comes to major software releases. Right on schedule--almost three years to the day after Windows 7 hit the streets--comes Windows 8. But the computing world has changed radically since then. The iPad has put a serious dent in PC sales, while smartphones are meeting more communication and collaboration needs.
Windows 8 is Microsoft's attempt to merge the best of PCs and tablets into a single platform, hence many of the biggest changes from Windows 7 are on the outside: a dramatically new UI; integrated touch screen support; a faster, redesigned browser; and built-in cloud storage. Most of these features are designed for consumers, not business. But in a hyperconnected, mobile world, they fit some needs of enterprise users as well.
In this report, we'll dive into Windows 8 platform updates, break down the new UI, and look at application changes and features designed to enhance mobile use, all with an eye toward what they mean to enterprises. Drawing from our latest Windows 8 survey, we'll see what IT pros think of the new features and assess their deployment plans. We'll wrap with a to-do list for organizations wondering how to approach this most dramatic change to Microsoft's desktop OS since Windows 95. (S5640912)
Survey Name InformationWeek 2012 Windows 8 Survey
Survey Date June 2012
Region North America
Number of Respondents 859 business technology professionals
Purpose To gauge adoption plans for Windows 8 at organizations with 500 or more employees | <urn:uuid:397522c4-6348-4ea3-a7e2-be1e70049d92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/7/9007/Enterprise-Software/windows-8-survival-guide-end-users-and-mobility.html?cid=SBX_ddj_well_Analytics_default_tdd_is_about_design_not_testing&itc=SBX_ddj_well_Analytics_default_tdd_is_about_design_not_testing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905648 | 319 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Concern for lone California wolf during upcoming coyote hunt
SACRAMENTO (KABC) -- California's lone wolf may be in danger. As Eyewitness News has reported, there is on gray wolf is the first to set foot in our state in more than 80 years and wildlife officials have been hoping desperately that he'll start a pack here. They're worried a coyote hunt could kill him.
The California Fish and Game Commission declined to stop a planned coyote hunt this weekend in Modoc County, where a gun club has offered a silver belt buckle to the hunter who kill the most coyotes.
"None of us, including hunters, should tolerate the gratuitous slaughter of wildlife as part of a contest to win prizes," said Camilla Fox, executive director, Project Coyote.
Wildlife supporters are worried for California's only-known gray wolf, known as "OR-7" and "Journey." The wolf has developed quite a following since a radio collar attached to him has tracked his every move.
A Twitter account stated his last known location to be Tehama County, about 90 miles from the hunt.
Critics of the hunt say the lone wolf can easily travel the distance and be mistaken for a coyote during the contest.
"There's legitimate concern that Journey could be killed by an overzealous coyote hunter," said Fox.
But owners of livestock say similar hunts have happened for years. They need the hunt to proceed because coyotes are a nuisance.
"They cause 65 percent of the predator-loss to livestock in California," said Margo Parks, a California Cattlemen's Association spokeswoman. "And it's about $4 million for cattle and about $1.3 million for sheep. So it's a serious economic loss."
The Commission couldn't really stop this hunt because it wasn't on the agenda, but the state agreed to have wardens present.
"Our department will be advising the hunt promoters and the hunters on the day of the event that the gray wolf is a state and federally protected animal, and that the shooting of a wolf would be a violation of such law," said Chuck Bonham, Calif. Fish and Wildlife director.
The hope is Journey stays alive to find a mate, especially now since it's prime wolf-mating season.
Other wolves who aren't on radio-monitors occasionally wander into California.
"He's looking for love right now. There's a short window of time. If he doesn't find his lady in the next month or so, he's going to have to wait another year to find someone who's ready for him," said Amaroq Weiss, Center for Biological Diversity.
The state is willing to talk to groups about future coyote-hunting contests, possibly opening the door to limiting or banning them.
animal news, california news, nannette miranda
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- OTRC: Johnny Depp talks split with Vanessa Paradis | <urn:uuid:8f90deff-7d3f-44a7-930a-c8bfa2d88e9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/state&id=8983501 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953345 | 762 | 1.90625 | 2 |
asked the Secretary of State for Employment how many men are registered as unemployed in the South Shields Employment Exchange area at the latest available date; how many have
MALES REGISTERED AS UNEMPLOYED IN THE AREA COVERFD BY THE SOUTH SHIELDS EMPLOYMENT EXCHANGE Total registered Temporarily stopped and casual workers Total Wholly unemployed Over 26 weeks* Over 52 weeks October, 1971 (provisional) 3,279 60 3,219 1,044 676 October, 1970 2,379 18 2,361 985 705 October, 1969 2,723 54 2,669 913 656 October, 1968 2,697 65 2,632 604 325 October, 1967 2,449 711 1,738 456 230 October, 1966 1,497 242 1,255 193 129 * Including those registered for 52 weeks and over which are shown separately.
as an absolute figure and as a percentage of school-leavers seeking employment at the end of the summer term to the nearest convenient date; how many of the school-leavers went into jobs leading to a craft or professional qualification; and in all cases what were the corresponding figures for 1969 and 1970.
§ Mr. Dudley Smith
Information is not available in the precise form requested. The following two tables give such information as is available in respect of the North Humberside Intermediate Area:
been out of work for over six months, and for over one year; and how these figures compare with those for a comparable date in each of the last five years. | <urn:uuid:b7f9dda7-fa98-4119-bd89-3feb359c6545> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1971/oct/20/south-shields | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901713 | 323 | 1.53125 | 2 |
A memorial service has been held in Solomon Islands for the 11 victims of the earthquake and tsunami, which struck the Santa Cruz Islands of Temotu two weeks ago.
The service was attended by politicians, officials, diplomats, representatives of groups involved in the relief effort and Solomon Islanders.
Hundreds gathered in the St Barnabas Cathedral for the memorial service, while thousands across the country tuned in to the live broadcast.
School children lit candles for the deceased and a provincial representative told the story of one of the victims.
"(She) saw the fierce rolling ocean approaching in the form of a destructive wave," he said.
"It looked so dangerous but (she) could not bear to see her husband killed alone so she told the eyewitnesses to run for safety, while she went back to die with her husband."
The magnitude 8.0 quake triggered a deadly tsunami and relief efforts are continuing, but locals say this week is about remembering those who are lost and their families.
© ABC 2013
16:06 EST The weather bureau has implemented a new system of forecasting the seasonal outlook called Predictive Ocean Atmosphere Model for Australia, or POAMA. | <urn:uuid:226b76a3-d293-45bf-9e0b-2ef997f1ec6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/solomons-hold-memorial-service-for-tsunami-victims/23728 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957661 | 235 | 1.679688 | 2 |
- Tribute paid to Spanish saviors.
- “The Reconciliation”: the Jewish- Catholic dialogue.
- Nicholas Winton, the British savior.
- Perlasca, the great pretender.
- “Wallenberg”, the musical.
- FIRW 2003 activities.
- Homage paid to a Polish savior on the International Women´s Day.
- Sousa Mendes postage stamp issued in Israel.
- Picture in an exhibition.
- Looking for individuals saved by the Heroes Wallenberg and Sousa Mendes
Tribute was paid to eight Spanish diplomats who saved refugees during the Holocaust, in a ceremony organized by the Spanish Embassy in Argentina and the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF). The ceremony took place in the Spanish delegation headquarters on March 30th., 2004.
The relationship between Catholics and Jews has been marked by prejudices and distrust for centuries. Argentina has become an example of fraternity between religions. Clarin, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Latin America, gave an outstanding coverage of this issue.
Very little is known about the heroic deeds of a British stockbroker savior. The story of his life in Czechoslovakia is worth reading.
He was Italian, but he pretended to be Spanish. Although he was not a diplomat he pretended to be the Spanish Ambassador. His name was Giorgio but posterity will remember him as Jorge. Get in touch with the incredible story of a novel character.
The story of Raoul Wallenberg, the hero of the Second World War, has been adapted for the stage as a musical. The First Draft Musicals is the company in charge of the enterprise. The writers of the musical are Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman.
Activities all over the world marked a year of intense work and great achievements carried out by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
The International Women´s Day was celebrated on March 8th. On that very day and celebrating her birthday, a tribute was paid to Juana Dylag, the savior of a Jewish family living in Warsaw when it was occupied by the Nazis, in the presence of the Polish Ambassador in Argentina.
A new postage stamp issued by the Wallenberg Foundation has been dedicated to the figure of the Portuguese savior Aristides de Sousa Mendes.
The stamp, issued in Israel, is added to the other issues boosted by the Foundation like the collection dedicated to the Belgian saviors, John XIII, and others.
An exhibition dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg and sponsored by the IRWF opened on March 31st., in Budapest. The exhibition was organized by the Raoul Wallenberg Association (RWA) of Hungary in the Palace of the Internal Affairs Ministry. Andras Sipos, the President of the RWA and Andras Heiszler, the President of the Jewish-Hungarian Communal Alliance, broke the tapes in the exhibition. Among the people attending the ceremony there were Bengt Ludborg and Judit Varnal Shorer, the Sweden and the Israel Ambassadors respectively. The exhibition included a portrait of Wallenberg painted by the artist Peter Malkin, the Mossad agent who captured the war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1990.
The IRWF is looking for individuals and/or family members of those saved by Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest in 1944-1945 and for those saved by Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Bordeaux or Bayonne in June 1940.
Please contact us email@example.com | <urn:uuid:c8738026-d68d-49aa-b3b3-a1cc4c8db6c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/about/newsletter/march-2004/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953182 | 729 | 2.421875 | 2 |
In midsummer, vegetable gardens hit full stride, yielding an abundance of delicious and healthy fresh produce. It’s a wonderful time in the garden. It should also be a time of diligence – giving plants all the care they need to keep them producing on into fall.
Here are some things you can do to keep your vegetable garden healthy and productive:
Water regularly. If you let vegetable plants dry out, many will stop producing, and if they don’t, the quality of the harvest will suffer: tomatoes, peppers and eggplant will get blossom-end rot; cucumbers will be bitter-tasting; ears of corn will not properly fill out; and beans will be tough and stringy. So keep the soil evenly moist, especially during hot spells. Water deeply (at least 12 to 18 inches), give the soil time to partially dry out, and water again.
Mulch. Lay down a fresh 2- to 3-inch layer of organic mulch, like compost, around the base of plants to keep the soil cool as well as to reduce evaporation and weeds.
Pull weeds. Don’t let them get the upper hand. They compete with vegetable plants for light, water and nutrients. And they usually win the competition.
Harvest often. Visit the garden at least every other day to harvest mature vegetables. Most vegetable plants, including beans, cucumbers, squash, peppers and eggplant, will stop producing if not harvested frequently. If you can’t use everything you harvest, share your bounty with neighbors.
Keep planting. In mild-winter areas, harvest can extend into winter and there still may be time to plant another crop of quick-maturing summer vegetables such as beans and squash. In many areas, August is the ideal time to plant cool-season vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, chard, peas and lettuce. Fall’s shorter days and cooler weather are perfect for ripening. For exact planting dates, check with your state cooperative extension office.
Fertilize. Keep late-ripening vegetables growing vigorously with occasional applications of nitrogen fertilizer. But don’t overdo it with plants that are already producing. Too much nitrogen will cause some vegetables, especially tomatoes, to stop producing.
Use season-extenders. In short-season areas where frosts can occur anytime, protect plants with floating row covers. Available in nurseries and garden centers, floating row covers are made of lightweight cloth, which transmits light and water, but traps warmth to hasten ripening and protect from cold.
Control insects. Keep a close eye out for insect pests. If you have a few, you can hand-pick and destroy (stomp on them or drop in a jar of soapy water) tomato hornworms, cucumber beetles and grasshoppers whenever you see them. If problems persist, consider applying a solution labeled for use on vegetables. | <urn:uuid:4a64f980-14a1-45ec-a0f8-e62e49bacfbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bayeradvanced.com/articles/summer-vegetable-care | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931148 | 600 | 3.125 | 3 |
April 12, 2007 | Over the past 20 years, bioinformatics in the workplace has evolved from a flashing green cursor connected to a server via telnet to complex applications with rich graphical user interfaces. With this evolution there has been the rise and fall of bioinformatics groups to build out and now replace existing applications and systems with configurable off-the-shelf solutions that are more easily maintainable. As discussed in Bio-IT World last year (see Web 2.0: Scientists Need to Mash It Up, Bio-IT World May 2006) there needs to be more of a bottom-up approach to knowledge sharing.
Biopharma companies have many lessons to learn from the emerging and maturing Web 2.0 technologies. Numerous Web 2.0 technologies share the basic principle of providing website visitors the ability to provide and manage the content (see Fig 1). Essentially, it is turning the relationship between a web portal and the web visitor on its head. After planting the first few seeds of content, users are encouraged to contribute material and expand the content. Over time, the site evolves where the users become the administrators, establishing a self- organizing site. This is hardly a new concept but is gaining momentum because of the usability, flexibility, and proliferation of multiple applications of this web-based technology.
A 2006 Booz Allen Hamilton study shows that the use of social networking sites, wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies is a mass phenomenon. The study found that 71% of U.S. adults surveyed (via the web) have used Web 2.0. In fact, Wikipedia and a popular Blog site, Blogger, were among the top 5 Web 2.0 tools used (see Fig 2).
How does this relate to collaborative research? Wikis, a collection of information stored in one place and shared with others, and blogs, a personal collection of thoughts, ideas, and information, are the holy grail of most research organizations . They provide an easy means of getting information to those that need it.
Wikis for Science
Last February, the NIH held its first Wiki Fair, showcasing how application of this technology is being handled within the NIH as well as in other content-rich fields. Wikis are merely collections of text instead of information linked together via relationships in a relational database. But emerging research-focused wikis such as www.wikiprofessional.info are planning several scientific wikis including WikiProteins that will launch soon. Other examples such as Fluwiki, or wiki farms (collection of wikis) such as Biowiki are actively used by global participants.
On the other hand, blogs, or more formally web logs, are more like a diary — typically with input from one or more people they have a distinctive focus and tenor. In the sciences, there are blogs that espouse personal opinions and progress on current research (see www.biowiki.org). Others aggregate and discuss interesting articles, news, and publications around a specific discipline. Scienceblogs is a wide ranging open forum that hosts 59 weblogs ranging from archaeology to neuroscience. Blogs typically allow readers to add comments at the discretion of the person “in the driver’s seat” so that the user controls content to foster scientific interactions. Positions and theories can be stated and then discussed among interested parties in an iterative manner. One of the major challenges of e-lab notebooks has been to get scientists to enter their personal diary of scientific escapades into a form that can be readily shared. Blogging offers lessons on what users really need to share in their streams of consciousness.
Some organizations stress the need for networking to help members find available expertise. Many create the physical environment where scientists can actively meet, share, and discuss, but this is difficult in larger organizations, separated across a campus or spread out globally. Social networking sites, that have been growing at an exponential rate, have the potential to compliment physical social interactions. Social networking and interaction is growing among professionals — as demonstrated by the 7.5 million members who belong to LinkedIn a business networking site or the 120+ million registered users of MySpace. Commercial systems exist (and most likely open source solutions also) so that this concept can be applied within any research organization. Simply allowing or encouraging employees to post their CV internally and requiring annual research updates would transform many organizations that repeatedly outsource, or hire individuals because they cannot keep track of their human capital!
While social networking will help foster the exchange of ideas, sharing data remains one of the biopharma industry’s greatest challenges. Data are often in multiple formats and not usually available for download or manipulation, even when results are published in reputable journals. Professional Wikis are seeking to include not just peer-reviewed articles but also the supporting data. Such sharing, especially across disciplines, can truly broaden our ability to turn data into knowledge by fostering collaboration and data repurposing at an unheard of level. Taking another Web 2.0 example, Flickr — a simple web-based image repository where images are tagged and searchable — one can see how this could be applied in research. As one researcher commented recently: “My grandma can share images on flickr, but I cannot do this in my company!”
Data and content are the staple diet of scientists, but only when combined in interesting ways can insight and knowledge be extracted. Facilitating this is a key for fostering innovation and a number of Web 2.0 tools are emerging to assist in visualizing a wide range of online data. Such “mashups” combine information from multiple sources (datasets, news feeds, etc.) and filter them to provide additional insights or knowledge. Again, this is no new concept as robots and crawlers have been typically dispatched by researchers to build collections of information. Due to the complexity of the access and filtering required, developers basically had to understand programming to be able to send the necessary queries and then parse the data. With content being ubiquitously transformed into XML, the process of combining data feeds from multiple sources is being simplified. The use of web services to generate XML data feeds is growing within organizations and, when part of a Services Oriented Architecture, has the potential of opening up information across an organization.
Where data feeds are not accessible to scientists, there are several Web 2.0 tools that can help combine and share information. Swivel, based on the pivot table commonly used in Excel spreadsheets, and Many Eyes can enable scientists to perform data exploration without customized scripting from supporting informatics scientists. Swivel users can upload a swath of data and then ‘swivel’ it or slice it in multiple dimensions and perform multiple graphic representations. This is a departure from the traditional upload, parse, and report format of most data acquisition/visualization tools, offering considerable flexiblity to the users. Many Eyes, an even more sophisticated data visualization tool allows users to upload datasets, visually explore them, share, discuss and collaborate.
Mashup.com and pipes.yahoo.com enable data feeds to be integrated with some conditional reasoning, so that all or some output of one data feed can be used to mine a second data feed, and so on. This results in a complex data query and narrowing down of a large dataset to a more focused dataset specific to the person making the query. What is needed is truly a hybrid between the open access of information through web services, visual exploration, and conditional reasoning so that triage can focus research and then be discussed and shared.
If you build it they will come! This mantra needs to be stricken from the informatics vocabulary, as empowerment of users is what is needed. If THEY build it, THEY will come. But not yet. The technologies are still maturing and despite promising examples, some have still to be applied in a hardened research environment.
Furthermore, semantic interoperability is still a developing issue that needs to be applied to this class of technologies. For example, Wikipedia is really a wiki farm working in multiple languages, with little to no sharing of information between the different language versions. Being able to freely combine information in many different ways is an exciting concept, but understanding the context of data and being able to compare and contrast it is crucial.
Furthermore, the delicate socio-dynamics that exist between persons in IT, informatics, and research must be addressed. The informatics scientists have typically been the compilers of the information, providing customized analyses, dataset extractions, and tools to enable research. As more power is put at the hands of the scientists, the role of the informatics scientists may evolve into something that looks more like library sciences. While a crucial role, it is probably not what most bioinformaticians have in mind.
The bottom line is that social networking and information sharing tools are being utilized at increasing rates to interact and share information. It is only logical that scientific communities leverage these to share ideas and exchange data. Web 2.0 is a philosophy enabled by tools rather than a technology; it is driven by changing use of the Internet. Now content creators can start to define how much they share and collaborate, rather than having organizational structures and IT infrastructure dictating the parameters for integration and sharing.
How much of an impact these tools will have on breaking down silos between disciplines, and even companies, may not have so much to do with sheer numbers of users, but rather just an evolutionary trend.
Martin Leach, Ph.D. is a principal and Michael Tedeschi an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton in New York. Email: email@example.com
Subscribe to Bio-IT World magazine. | <urn:uuid:ec721849-1bb0-421e-ab43-2897a336bb8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio-itworld.com/BioIT_Article.aspx?id=55996 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926706 | 1,978 | 2.625 | 3 |
An Activity Book for Children Who Are Going to Court in California
Here are fun activities and useful information to help children and their families who may be in court for any reason -- whether they are visitors, witnesses, or involved in a case.
Each activity in this site is marked with a bear paw symbol. For each activity, you will be given a lettered clue that will help you receive a "What's Happening in Court?" diploma.
In some activities you print a page and color or draw something. For these activities, look for the "Click here for your clue" link. For the other activities, when you click "Done!" you get the clue. There are 12 clues in all. As you receive each clue, write it in order on a piece of paper so you can get your diploma! Click here for more details.
All of the pictures of this book can be printed so that you can color them. Just click on any picture and print. | <urn:uuid:1d94bf6f-f91a-4328-95ce-04adca747b19> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.courts.ca.gov/cms/cab/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931179 | 197 | 2.515625 | 3 |
|Moving U.S. Forces: Options for Strategic Mobility||Section 9 of 12|
In response to its experience in the Persian Gulf War, the Army has designed its own set of goals for deploying forces rapidly to regional conflicts. That plan assumes that the United States will have fewer forces abroad in the future than it did during the Cold War. The Army's focus is preparing a five-division contingency corps (with one airborne, two heavy, one air assault, and one light division) that would deploy on short notice and be capable of using force immediately upon entering a region.(1)
Under the Army's plan, the contingency corps would face a tight delivery schedule: a ready brigade from a light division would arrive in the region of conflict four days after the start of deployments (C+4), with most of the rest of the division following by C+12.(2) One heavy brigade would be delivered by C+15 under the plan, with two reinforcing divisions (one armored plus either one mechanized or one air assault) arriving by C+30. The full five-division contingency corps plus a corps-support command would be in place by C+75.
That schedule serves as a rough guideline: the precise timing for deliveries would vary depending on the scenario at hand. In the case of a conflict in the Persian Gulf, for example, the Army has set an even tougher timeline--it plans to have an entire heavy division in place within the first two weeks of deployments. Given competing demands for transportation at the start of a conflict, there would not be enough planes to deliver even a heavy brigade that quickly by airlift alone. For that reason, the Army is prepositioning heavy equipment and some support units in the Gulf region.
To give a sense of the scope of the Army's mobility requirements, Table A-1 shows the average number of airlift sorties or shiploads required to transport parts of a notional contingency corps. For example, an airborne division would need 1,101 C-141 and 78 C-17 sorties--or nearly three large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off shiploads--to move its equipment and accompanying supplies.(3) (All units would require some C-17s or C-5s to move their outsize cargo, but the remaining equipment could be flown on C-141s.) Although Table A-1 shows information for a notional corps-support command, it does not reflect all the corps-level units and support units for echelons above corps that would deploy, such as air defense, artillery, and some head-quarters units and additional aviation brigades. Thus, lift requirements for an entire corps would be much larger than the sum of those units shown.
Besides planning new deployment schedules, the Army has also changed aspects of its force structure in response to the Persian Gulf War. For example, during
|Approximate Lift Requirements for Army Contingency Forces|
|Number of||Unit Weight||Airlift Sorties||Number|
|Notional Army Unit||Personnel||(Tons)||(C-141/C-17 mix) a||of LMSRs b|
|Air Assault Division||15,840||35,860||1,412/195||3.9|
|Light Infantry Division||11,036||17,092||769/41||1.8|
Budget Office based on Department of Defense, Military Traffic Management
Command, Deployment Planning Guide, 94-700-5
(Newport News, Va., September 1994).
|NOTE: Based on data
from the Army's April 1994 Tables of Organization and Equipment. Actual
deployment values will be different for specific units
and scenarios. Estimated weights include accompanying supplies, equipment, and ammunition.
|a. The number of C-141
and C-17 sorties required to move each unit's equipment based on simulations
of aircraft loading. Although the sorties shown
would move some of the unit's personnel, additional passenger sorties by Civil Reserve Air Fleet planes would be necessary.
|b. The number of large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off ships required to transport each unit, assuming minimum containerization of unit equipment.|
Operation Desert Shield, two divisions that were deployed early (the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division) each only had two active brigades; the 197th Separate Infantry Brigade and the Tiger Brigade were sent to round out those divisions. Immediately after U.S. forces returned from the Gulf, those divisions were each assigned a third active brigade. Now, all five divisions of the Army's contingency corps contain only active-duty units.
The Army has made other changes as well. Its Tables of Organization and Equipment (which describe the service's force structure) now include a corps- support group as a new unit in the contingency corps, and the Army is considering adding such a group to other corps as well. The service has installed an engineering brigade made up of three mechanized combat engineering battalions in each heavy division.(4) Formerly, each heavy division included only one engineering battalion, but extra engineering battalions were deployed for Operation Desert Storm to get troops around the extensive system of defensive barriers that Iraq had erected along the Kuwaiti border.
Even with those changes, the average number of personnel in Army combat divisions has grown only modestly in recent years (see Table A-2). Mechanized and armored divisions have grown by the largest amount--4 percent and 5 percent, respectively--since the end of the Gulf War. In the past decade, the Army has actually reduced the average number of personnel in its armored cavalry regiments.
But although the number of personnel in combat divisions has changed little, a recent study, the Total Army Analysis, suggests the service may need as many as 185,000 more support troops to accompany combat forces for two major regional conflicts. If its recommendations are carried out, the Total Army Analysis could result in higher lift requirements, including for units that would deploy early in major conflicts.
|Changes in Number of Personnel in Various Army Combat Units, 1987-1994|
|Number of Personnel||Percentage Change|
|Air Assault Division||15,795||16,170||15,840||2||(2)||0|
|Light Infantry Division||10,854||10,871||11,036||0||2||2|
|Armored Cavalry Regiment||6,167||4,663||4,627||(24)||(1)||(25)|
|SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office based on data from the Military Traffic Management Command.|
|NOTE: TOE = Tables of Organization and Equipment.|
As the Army has modernized its equipment and reorganized its forces, combat divisions have grown significantly heavier--an average of more than 4 percent heavier a year for most types of units. They also take up more floor space, but that increase (an average of more than 2 percent a year) is not as substantial as their growth in weight. Generally speaking, the additional weight increases mobility requirements for transporting units abroad--particularly those units that rely on airlift for deployment. Since the Army accounts for the majority of equipment and supplies that would be airlifted to a major regional contingency, the growing weight of its units has strong implications for overall airlift needs.
Under the Army's 1994 Tables of Organization and Equipment (the most recent version), a notional mechanized division weighs 49 percent more than it did under 1987 guidelines (see Figure A-1). The other military services have grown heavier as well, but less unclassified information is available about the effects of modernization and reorganization on the weight of Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps units.
Changes in Weight of Various Army Combat Units, 1987-1994
SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office based on data from the Military Traffic Management Command.
NOTES: The weight of each unit includes accompanying supplies, equipment, and ammunition.
TOE = Tables of Organization and Equipment;
ACR = armored cavalry regiment.
1. Maj. Gen. Fred Elam and Lt. Col. Mark Henderson, "The Army's Strategic Mobility Plan," Army Logistician (May/June 1992), pp. 2-6.
2. The military refers to the day that deployments begin as C-day, with subsequent days denoted as C+1, C+2, and so on.
3. The amount of time required to conduct airlift sorties or steam sealift ships will differ depending on the distance involved. For one point of reference, during the Persian Gulf War daily airlift sorties reached a peak of 121 on January 20, 1991. That number includes C-5, C-141, and KC-10 aircraft along with Stage II of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet.
4. Lt. Col. F. Marion Cain III, "Building Desert Storm Force Structure," Military Review (July 1993), p. 30. | <urn:uuid:adc2f4bb-ffaa-44a1-bea3-4746800b4305> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fas.org/man/congress/1997/cbo_mobility/app_a.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934781 | 1,862 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Religious intolerance is getting worse here, with state agencies, radical groups and community organizations involved in violations of freedom of faith and religion, according to a report released Tuesday.
The recent sealing of the synagogue in Surabaya, East Java, by Muslims in a protest against the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip was the latest case of religious intolerance in Indonesia.
The incident was not included in the 2008 Report on the Condition of Religious and Faith Freedom in Indonesia, which was released by the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace.
But Setara Institute chairman Hendardi said the closure of the Jewish place of worship was against the principle of religious tolerance.
“It is clearly part of religious violence and cannot be tolerated,” he told The Jakarta Post after launching the report.
The report found 265 cases of violence against religions from January-December last year, a significant increase from only 135 cases in 2007.
“The increase is spurred by the rising persecution against the Jamaah Ahmadiyah by Islamic organizations to pressure the government to issue a presidential decree banning the minority sect,” the report said.
Last year, the government issued a joint ministerial decree forbidding Ahmadiyah from spreading its religious teachings, bowing to pressure from extremist groups that had attacked its followers, their mosques and houses across the country.
Out of the 265 incidents, the institute recorded 367 violations against freedom of religion and faith.
“Of the 367 violations, the state was involved in 188 cases of violence both by ‘commission and omission’,” Hendardi said.
The report said police were involved in 121 cases of religious intolerance, regents and mayors
in 28 cases while 52 others involved courts and regional legislative councils.
“What is worrying is that more individuals and unidentified groups launched sporadic religious attacks, which reached 91 cases last year,” Hendardi said.
The report blamed the radical Islamic Defender Front (FPI) and the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) as the main actors in the religious violence.
“We record the MUI involved in 42 cases and the FPI in 27 cases including in the Monas incident last year,” he said, referring the brutal attack on activists during a pro-tolerance rally in the National Monument, Central Jakarta.
The Setara conducted investigations in North Sumatra, South Sumatra, West Sumatra, Jakarta, Banten, West Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta, South Sulawesi, South Kalimantan and West Nusa Tenggara.
West Java was the province recording the highest rate of religious violence with 73 cases, followed by West Sumatra and Jakarta provinces with 56 and 45 cases, respectively.
“Most of the cases took place in June when the government issued a joint ministerial decree to curb the activities of Ahmadiyah,” Hendardi said.
Religious Affairs Minister Maftuh Basyuni claimed a 2006 decree on religious harmony had sharply decreased religious violence in the country. “This is big achievement,” he said Tuesday as quoted by Antara.
The 2006 decree requires people to obtain government permits to build houses of worship.
Earlier, the Wahid Institute said religious violence rose to 232 cases in 2008 from 197 in the previous year. | <urn:uuid:f6aa3d11-d293-4aaa-949d-4174bd90c67a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/01/14/religious-intolerance-getting-worse-says-report.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957572 | 673 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Alex Rodriquez Ahead of His Time
Joel Sherman of the New York Post recently wrote a very good article about Alex Rodriquez and his training habits.
Sherman who is a well respected sports writer who I often read — although he rarely tells me anything I do not know about baseball is very informative about potential trades and team gossip. So I appreciate him.
In this article Sherman effectively wrote about the fact that our body parts work in sync with each other and how these interactions are now able to be quantified. He also mentioned which players are using this information to train.
In my opinion this should be nothing new in fact if I remember correctly they wrote a song about it many years ago. The hip bone is connected to the leg bone etc. and many of us sang it as children.
I have found that old habits and ideas are hard to give up especially if you have been successful in what you were doing. It is the more secure or perhaps driven person who is willing to take a look at what might make them improve their performance.
As new breakthroughs in science allow us to see and measure more we are gaining greater knowledge on exactly how the body parts are connected and how they exactly work together.
Alex Rodriquez should be given a lot of credit for searching for the latest techniques and information to help him do his job better. He also reportedly used plasma therapy as well. And as Sherman mentioned, more and more players are using science (stem cells, plasma therapy, diet, etc.) to help them have the potential to extend their careers.
Now if you buy into the mind-body connection and there is enormous research to support such—you have truly arrived. Look for more players to use what is available to improve their performance and extend their careers.
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October 11, 1986, brought the opening of a two-day summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev-a turning point in a four-decade-old Cold War with a Communist empire that threatened the liberty of the world.
Gorbachev, desperate to cut his ailing nation's military spending, offered major weapons cutbacks if the United States would do the same. Reagan was astounding and delighted. Previous Soviet leaders had answered NYET to serious proposals for nuclear arms reductions. The U.S. president responded by suggesting that both sides scrap all offensive missles within ten years. Soon both leaders were trading breakthrough proposals to dismantle nuclear stockpiles. WE HAVE NEGOTIATED THE MOST MASSIVE WEAPONS REDUCTIONS IN HISTORY, an exultant Reagan told himself.
Then Gorbacheve threw a curve: "This all depends, of course, on you giving up SDI." The demand angered Reagan. He had made it clear that the Strategic Defense Iniative-a U.S. reasearch program to develop a defensive shield against incoming missles-was not a bargaining chip. In his view, SDI would ultimately prove the best defense against foreign threats.
Reagan could have left Reykjavik hailed as a great statesman for making the deal. All he had to do was give up SDI. Instead, he ended the summit. "The price was too high but I wouldn't sell," he wrote in his diary.
Critics accused the president of being too stubborn. But others believed that standing firm would pay off. "You just won the Cold War," an administration official predicted on the plane ride home. Reagan was confident that the bankrupt Soviet empire could not stand up to the U.S. resolve. "I'm convinced he'll come around," he wrote to Gorbechev. Sure enough, the Soviets came back to the bargaining table, and the two countries soon reached historic agreements to reduce nuclear arms.
(The American Patriot's Almanac) | <urn:uuid:ff27c512-84c2-4ff0-8ce9-0ede6b83c515> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politicalchips.org/forum/topics/reagan-at-reykjavik | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978474 | 425 | 2.25 | 2 |
Oil and gas companies are probably feeling they've lost their best friend. And they're right.
Their most dependable ally used to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., but he's gone home to Texas, and it's become a much less friendly place for extractive industries. Former President George W. Bush was a huge proponent of the oil and gas industry, and during his eight years in the White House, it had a free hand to drill with the financial help and encouragement of American taxpayers. Now, not so much.
In his budget proposal, President Barack Obama rightly wants to close $31.5 billion worth of what he calls "unjustified tax loopholes" for the industry over the coming decade. That would go a long way toward putting development of clean energy sources on a level playing field with oil and gas and help the country wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, the primary cause of global warming.
But it won't be easy. Members of Congress from energy-producing states, including Utah, who have been chummy with the deep-pocketed extraction industries for many years, will fight like cats to keep Americans subsidizing oil and gas producers to the tune of billions of tax dollars every year. But forward-thinking politicians understand that we can't continue to despoil our landscapes, pollute our air and warm our climate by burning fossil fuels.
The subsidies enjoyed by oil and gas producers would be better spent on making our buildings and homes more efficient and encouraging the development of alternative energy sources. Especially in the American West, where climate change is expected to hit hardest and where solar, wind and geothermal energy abound, there must be a shift away from the status quo.
Industry proponents warn that prices of fuel and power will increase, and they are right, to a point. But there is no evidence that prices will rise as much as they predict. And the truth is that oil and gas companies have taken advantage of these huge subsidies to boost their bottom lines, not to increase production or reduce energy prices.
Obama would also charge user fees for processing drilling permits and force companies to "diligently" develop existing leases on public lands or risk losing them. There are thousands of leases on Western lands sitting idle, yet more are sold every year.
Oil and gas have been king in the West, but we no longer can afford their liabilities as we move toward clean and sustainable energy sources. | <urn:uuid:f95093de-4081-4eb4-8527-c6baac23912b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archive.sltrib.com/printfriendly.php?id=12345810&itype=ngpsid | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970741 | 503 | 2.171875 | 2 |
For decades, scientists have known that the human skeleton is a repository for lead in people who were exposed to high levels of this environmental toxin in their childhood, but thought this storage to be benign. Recently, a growing body of research is showing that the opposite is true, and that lead in bone actually sets off a bizarre chain reaction, first accelerating bone growth, and then eventually limiting it so that a high peak bone mass is not achieved. Preventing a high peak bone mass will predispose a young person to osteoporosis later in life.
Now, researchers in the Center for Musculoskeletal Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center are set to embark on the next phase of a four-year, $5 million research project funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with a clinical study aimed at better understanding the deceptive role lead initially plays in bone development, growth and loss and how this all might lead to earlier onset of osteoporosis in those exposed to high levels of lead as a child.
A metabolic bone disease that predominantly occurs in women, osteoporosis affects one in three American women over the age of 65. It is characterized by low bone mass that eventually leads to fractures, mostly of the hip and vertebrae. These fractures can be life-threatening; experts say that more women die each year from hip fracture complications than from cancer of the ovaries, cervix and uterus combined. Close t
Contact: Germaine Reinhardt
University of Rochester Medical Center | <urn:uuid:c223968f-56d9-463b-983c-290735e77b29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-3/Growing-body-of-research-links-lead-to-osteoporosis-5572-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939943 | 304 | 3.4375 | 3 |
One of the seven wonders of the modern world, the Golden Gate Bridge was the life mission of an engineer who had never designed or overseen the building of a suspension bridge. For six years Joseph Strauss, a bridge builder from Chicago, had been visiting San Francisco to supervise work on a small drawbridge, one of four hundred he had built around the world. But Strauss's ambitions far surpassed any work his firm had ever attempted.
Golden Gate Bridge documents the construction of what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world, built hundreds of feet above the dangerously churning waters of the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate.
The 1920 census delivered San Franciscans a shock: Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco as California's largest city. While Los Angeles had plenty of land, San Francisco was bottled up at the tip of a peninsula. Economic survival depended on expansion.
The idea of a bridge linking the city with its neighboring counties was appealing, but the mile-wide gap between San Francisco and Marin presented huge challenges. At the mouth of the Gate, the oncoming force of the Pacific Ocean creates turbulent waves and ripping currents. The location is plagued by gale-force winds and dense fogs.
Strauss set his sights on bridging a spot that other engineers had deemed impossible. When he delivered his plans for the bridge, resistance emerged from every quarter. Environmentalists protested that the bridge would mar the Golden Gate's pleasing vista. Shipping companies claimed the bridge would impede navigation in the bay. Ferry companies were bent on protecting their monopoly on bay-crossings. The war department feared the bridge would become a target in wartime. But no amount of opposition would deter Strauss.
In 1925, he moved to San Francisco to drum up support. He set out on a road trip, speaking at public meetings in small towns in the northern counties, proudly presenting his own bridge design. "Most people, myself included, think that it was very ugly, to the point of hideous," says structural engineer Mark Ketchum. Still, Marin County signed on, with Sonoma and Napa soon following. In all, six counties joined the Bridge District.
Strauss was not a world-class design engineer, and to retain the position of chief engineer he had to make some painful compromises. First, he was forced to hire as a consultant Leon Moisseiff, a leading theoretician of suspension bridge design and one of Strauss's key rivals. Then, when Moisseiff recommended building an elaborate suspension bridge, Strauss agreed to scrap his bridge design.
Strauss assembled a team of unknown, untested talents. Irving Morrow, an obscure San Francisco housing architect, would add the bridge's striking Art Deco styling and its signature color, International Orange. Charles Ellis, a University of Illinois civil engineering professor, is increasingly acknowledged as the bridge's true design engineer. But at the time, Ellis was barely recognized for the months of work he poured into designing a truly revolutionary structure. Eventually, relations between Ellis and Strauss would fray beyond repair.
By the time Strauss had public support and a bridge design in hand, the nation was plunged into the Great Depression. With no bank or bond house willing to buy bonds for the bridge, Strauss's project faced ruin. In desperation, he turned to A. P. Giannini, founder of a small bank that would grow into the Bank of America. The civic-minded Giannini saw the need and bought the bonds.
Work began in January 1933. Hundreds of men were hired to do the back-breaking work of removing three-and-a-quarter million cubic feet of dirt to make room for the anchorages that would hold the bridge's main cables in place. Throughout construction, the workers would be exposed to the severe weather and dangerous conditions of working high above the Golden Gate. "They were farm boys and clerks and taxicab drivers who became high steel men... teetering along on a girder up there," says historian Richard Dillon.
The 6,450-foot span would be the longest cable-spinning distance attempted to date. To spin the main suspension cables, Strauss hired Roebling & Sons, who shipped 80,000 miles of wire from New Jersey. On May 20, 1936, the last cable wire was laid, two months ahead of schedule. "The cable system is really the lifeline of a suspension bridge," says Ketchum. "That big cable, that looks so solid when we see it today, was spun in place from individual wires that are each about the size of a pencil."
Fanatical about safety, Joseph Strauss made hardhats mandatory for the bridge workers, and introduced the most elaborate and expensive safety device ever conceived for a major construction job -- a $130,000 safety net. Thanks to this innovation, nineteen men, dubbed the Halfway-to-Hell Club, would cheat death. But the net could not save everyone.
In a terrifying accident near the bridge's completion, a five-ton piece of scaffolding broke through the net and plummeted 220 feet into the icy water below. Ten men were dragged to their deaths, despite the desperate efforts of Slim Lambert, the crew's foreman, to save one of his companions. Slim's son, Skip, recalls, "It always bothered [my father] that he was regarded as a hero, because he said, 'I did nothing heroic. I wanted to save my best friend's life, and I did the best that I could.'"
On May 27, 1937, two hundred thousand people flocked to the newly completed bridge on opening day to walk, sprint, skate or cycle across. People performed tricks, airplanes buzzed overhead, and a parade was organized. A moment was set aside for the chief engineer to say a few words. "This bridge needs neither praise nor eulogy," said Strauss. "It speaks for itself."
My American Experience
From the Empire State Buiding to the carvings on Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Space Needle, the U.S. has dozens of impressive, important, and iconic structures. Which ones have you been to? Which has had the biggest impact? | <urn:uuid:bd2e474f-6d47-4383-b7f6-e3c1d151a9ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/goldengate-introduction/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972122 | 1,259 | 3.515625 | 4 |
This report was commissioned by UN-Habitat to review the laws and land tenure of a selected number of southern African countries. It involved the appointment of country specialists who researched and produced country chapters for their respective countries namely, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. A regional expert was appointed to produce a regional overview to serve as a source document for the country reports, as well as provide overall coordination of the project. The project was carried out over a period of roughly one year, which began in March 2004.
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ISBN Series Number:- Not available - ISBN:- Not available - HS Number:- Not available - Series Title:- Not available - Pages: 91 Year: 2006 Publisher: UN-HABITAT Co-Publisher :- Not available - Languages:
Themes: Housing Policy, Housing rights, Land & Tenure Countries: Branch/Office:
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When Gandhi began his 100-mile march to the sea at Jalalpur, only 74 people set out with him. But when he reached his destination and broke the salt tax law, he stood with 60,000. “With this I am shaking the foundation of the British empire,” he said.
At Occupy Providence’s Teach-In on the Occupy Movement last night, Vazira Zamindar, associate professor of history, compared Gandhi’s march to this historical moment, noting that students were the first people to join Gandhi.
“Numbers matter for non-violent civil disobedience movements to work,” she said. “As a historian, let me tell you that it’s been done before, and you can do it, too.”
The organizers sought to bring faculty into the discussion through the event, which filled Solomon 101 with students, community members and Occupy Providence protestors.
“Professor Zamindar and I received emails from two separate students talking about Occupy Providence and asking ‘Where are all the professors in all this? What do they have to say about it?’” Naoko Shibusawa, also an associate professor of history, told The Herald before the event.
“There is amazing synergy between students who reached out and faculty who came forward,” said Zamindar before the event.
Professors from departments including economics, history, sociology and political science spoke at the event, each lending their own expertise to contextualize the movement. After each set of speakers, there was a question-and-answer session.
Mark Blyth, professor of political science, asked “What do the riots in London, the uprising in the Middle East, the financial crisis in Greece and the Occupy movement have in common? They’re all the same thing.”
Blyth went on to explain, “The banks are too big to fail and they know it — and they know I’m there to bail them out.”
This system prevents the proper handling of financial downturns, he said. “It’s good to fail. That’s how we learn.”
Francoise Hamlin, professor of Africana studies and history, said her “head was spinning at the correlation between this and the civil rights movement.”
She read a passage from “Warriors Don’t Cry,” a memoir written by one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the first group of black students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
“Their Goliath was white supremacy,” she said. “We have the opportunity to take down our own.”
There were also speakers who brought a different kind of expertise. Kevin Barry GS, a former police officer, discussed police brutality. “Above anything else, the primary mission (of the police) is reaffirmation of social order through force,” he said.
Though police have a continuum dictating what level of force is appropriate, “an officer does whatever it takes to overcome resistance and uses the continuum after the fact as justification,” Barry said. He added that police officers often skip levels, escalating from “verbal commands to lethal force.”
Community members — such as a member of the Rhode Island Anti-Sexism League and representatives from Occupy Providence — spoke last at the event, which lasted over three hours. By the end of the event, the auditorium was half-full.
Other speakers at the event included Professor of Africana Studies Barrymore Bogues, Professor of Economics Ross Levine, Associate Professor of History Robert Self, Associate Professor of Africana Studies Corey Walker, Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Sociology Michael Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies Eng-Beng Lim and Professor of Sociology Patrick Heller.
“I think it’s awesome that teachers are involved, but I got the most out of the community members,” said Emily Doyle ’13. “They’re the ones who have seen what’s happening in Providence and are motivated to change it.” She said she thought it was a mistake to schedule community members to speak last.
Wendy Holmes, a retired professor from the University of Rhode Island who was in the audience, said she was “very encouraged to see young people taking the lead.”
“I’m sick of being one of the 20 white-haired people in the crowd with a sign,” she said. “My friends and I are very hopeful about this movement. We won’t camp out, but we’re willing to provide support.”
Occupy College Hill will hold a meeting today at noon on the Main Green. | <urn:uuid:9d92a7bb-1ace-4a83-aab0-d706fd364aad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.browndailyherald.com/2011/10/12/occupy-teachin-draws-full-house-in-salomon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966478 | 1,009 | 2 | 2 |
Exhibit A in the case against Walter Isaacson’s flawed Jobs biography: Malcolm Gladwell in last week’s New Yorker, arguing that Jobs was “a tweaker”:
In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling — and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”
Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts?
Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were. Gladwell, alas, takes Isaacson’s portrait of Jobs at face value:
In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh — the mouse and the icons on the screen — from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.”
If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.
Here’s an image from the January 2007 Macworld Expo keynote, where Jobs unveiled the original iPhone.
Those really were the leading smartphones of the day. Four years later and no company is making phones that look like those, save for RIM, and RIM is circling the toilet.
Here’s a video showing the Xerox Star in 1982, which Jobs and Apple, Gladwell would have you believe, “tweaked” to create the Macintosh. You can judge for yourself how much the interface resembles that of a Macintosh. Xerox certainly blazed the trail for many fundamental concepts the Mac built upon, but anyone familiar with the Mac would be utterly lost trying to use the Star without significant instruction. But the key difference between the Star and the Macintosh wasn’t design, but democratization. According to Wikipedia, a typical Star installation circa 1981 cost about $75,000 — it required a network and dedicated file server — and each additional workstation had a starting price of $16,000. The 1984 Macintosh cost $2,495 (and Jobs wanted it cheaper).
Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation to a $2500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative. The Macintosh was no “tweak”. Pixar was no “tweak”. The iPod is maybe the closest thing among Jobs’s career highlights that one could call a “tweak” of that which preceded it — but it’s hard to separate the iPod, the device, from the entire iTunes ecosystem in terms of measuring its effect on our culture and the way everyone today listens to music. Does anyone really think Apple’s entry into the music industry was a “tweak”? A “large-scale visionary” is precisely what Steve Jobs was.
The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:
This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”
How is that “the idea for the iPad”? The motivation to make the iPad, perhaps. The extra nudge to pluck the idea of “a tablet” from the idea pile and move it to the let’s get to work on it pile, more likely. But how can anyone read the above paragraph and come away with “The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft”? (And even with regard to motivation, if you really think the iPad would not exist if not for that one blowhard tablet PC engineer from Microsoft, you’re nuts.)
What if some seemingly obvious bit of conventional wisdom is not only completely wrong, but, in fact, it turns out that the opposite is true? That’s the Malcolm Gladwell formula. It does not fit here.
If anyone is the “tweaker” in the PC industry, a la Gladwell’s 18th century steam engine inventors, clearly it’s Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs. There was BASIC before Microsoft’s BASIC. Microsoft didn’t invent DOS. Windows followed the Mac. Word followed WordPerfect, Excel followed 1-2-3 (which followed VisiCalc), the Xbox followed the PlayStation.
I don’t even think it’s fair to call Gates merely a “tweaker”, though. Gates was (and remains) a large-scale visionary in his own right. He was simply never a product visionary. But the whole idea that software in general could be more valuable than hardware — or even just valuable, period? Gates. The man pioneered the concept of selling software. The idea that a software platform could be created that ran everywhere, on almost all hardware? Gates. And he built a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars from those ideas. So please don’t get me wrong and think I’m trying to belittle or diminish Bill Gates’s accomplishments. Gladwell’s entire premise here is fundamentally flawed; I’m just saying that given that faulty premise, Steve Jobs isn’t the one who fits the description.
Part of what makes Gladwell’s premise so wrong is that Jobs, clearly, was a tweaker too. Iteration — steady incremental improvements, prototype after prototype, design after design, year after year, release after release — that process is ingrained in Apple’s (and I think Pixar’s) culture. But Gladwell writes:
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.
Steve Jobs really did re-imagine the world. The thing is, he actually made it happen, too. | <urn:uuid:dafbb701-9afb-4d9b-872a-9298a38f032d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/getting_steve_jobs_wrong | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95922 | 1,855 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Now it is time to review all of the information you have learned about killer whales and report it to your teammates.
You can make your report to your team in different ways. You could write a report. You could make a presentation to your team. There may be other ways that you can think of to get your team the information they need --- use your imagination!
From your research, you should be able to report on:
- information you have gathered that you feel is important for your team to know about killer whales (Step 2 and Step 3)
- information about orcas and other whales in captivity (Step 4)
- what can be learned from orcas and other whales in captivity (Step 4)
- how you feel about keeping orcas and other whales in captivity (Step 4)
Congratulations! You are now an official ORCA SEARCHER.
Some of the Web sites you visited will provide you with updated information about killer whales. If you would like to learn more, check these sites regularly.
This resource originally created by Lucy M. Schiller | <urn:uuid:171b277f-feec-4a34-9fec-f93a3c1b3955> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ipl.org/div/orca/step5.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943065 | 220 | 1.773438 | 2 |
MARRIAGE AND GOVERNMENT-NOTHING FOR SOMETHING
Organization, rules, guidelines. Structure is necessary in our daily lives. You just can’t have a bunch of modern primates running around bumping into one another, screeching at each other over the last remaining banana. To an outsider, it might seem “unfair” that the lead ape gets the banana, but it is a way of peacefully resolving conflict. Man is a social animal and his survival depends on cooperation. Cooperation is ensured by force and by reward. The carrot and the stick. When it works, this system of ensuring the group works together to help one another works great. When the reward/coercion ratio breaks down, when there is only one or the other but not both, this is a sure sign that the basic rules governing the social group are broken. And if they are not fixed, chaos will follow.
For a long time throughout history, this basic rule has been repeatedly broken. Slavery is a good example. All punishment without reward only worked for so long. If nothing else, the resources devoted to continually suppression of dissent approached the labor gained. When done right, when slavery had a system of offering hope, it lasted for quite a time. The institution of slavery meet its end recently only because of the Industrial Revolution and using coal as a fuel source. Coal provided more energy to machines than food provided energy to human labor. People didn’t suddenly just wake up and decide to be nice to their fellow man. It was economics, pure and simple. Sure, their were plenty of decent people who advocated the end of slavery, just on moral grounds. But it wouldn’t have been allowed to happen without money being a factor.
Marriage and government are two institutions that provide a security blanket in return for sacrifice. If done right, both parties benefit and believe themselves to have gotten the better part of the bargain. By himself, a regular male would run around chasing anything in a skirt, attempting to impregnate every possible female. As a survival trait, this works out pretty good. Social structures can adapt to encompass any situation. If the male population drops, polygamy is a practical way to ensure the same amount of children are born. If too many males perish in war, the remaining females can become impregnated. If the population is even, the norm today, the return of regular sexual activity ( even during pregnancy or after menopause ) ensures the male stays in the family unit and is the provider/protector. Today, in affluent western societies, we see the complete abandonment of this marriage contract. Females have become “liberated” and want to get revenge for centuries of sexual servitude. What they fail to see is that there is no free lunch.
Every favorable social institution has a give and take. A quid pro quo. Something for something. In order to stay the length of time necessary to rear youngsters, a male must, in effect, be bribed to stay. In return the female has a stable family and is provided for. Today’s females want the benefits without the obligation. Even without children, as in old age, the arrangement ensures a division of labor beneficial to both parties. Government is the same way. In exchange for regular plunder, the dominant protection racket gives protection so normal life goes on. People know that as a fact of life, someone is always going to be pointing a gun to their head for money or goods. It is far more favorable to give a regular ten to twenty percent on a regular basis instead of 100% whenever a bandit wanders by. In exchange for not working very hard, the government protects against the other bandits taking that 100%. Every harvest, a fraction is given as a bribe for protection. If a merchant, each sale is taxed a small amount. Yes, this is immoral. There should be no cost on an individual laboring. But reality is that there will always be thieves, so better to bribe a protection racket than lose everything. The problem arises when either party gets too greedy. If the people expect too much in services for too little tax, the government goes bankrupt. If the government taxes too much without providing services, eventually it loses power when the people revolt.
Unfortunately, very few leaders ever seem to grasp this simple truth. You would think they had schools for this. In the US they usually recruit from law firms, so not one in a thousand can see any common sense. Chinese leaders are mostly trained engineers, so perhaps they have a better grasp on cause and effect. It can’t be too hard to see this. If I can figure it out on a High School education you might think those going to Ivy League schools had a clue. Perhaps it is just a side effect of “divide and conquer”. What better way to turn society against each other than to instill an entitlement thought process into everyone. Everyone is so busy being greedy, unable to see the need to contribute and only being concerned with something for nothing that this is how everyone thinks nowadays. Of course the big boys that plunder everyone stay in power longer. But in the end the social fabric is torn beyond repair.
So forget about Peak Oil or viral infections spread at the speed of jet travel. Or de-Industrialization of our economy. Or global warming. One of the basic reasons for western civilization being in the middle of a collapse is the ruination of the family unit due to women’s lib and government on the fast track to economic Depression due to a runaway welfare state. These factors, which I can’t see too many people being able to deny, are guaranteed to end our civilization as we know it. Collapse due to breech of contract.
books by bison and amazon www.bisonpress.com | <urn:uuid:37f73488-25de-4fa1-9124-1dac4bed4687> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bisonsurvivalblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/marraige-and-government.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960046 | 1,197 | 2.53125 | 3 |
- Special Sections
- Public Notices
According to a public health advisory sent out Friday, students at South Oldham Middle School may have been exposed to Bordetella pertussis — whooping cough — by a sixth-grade student at the school.
Most children are protected from severe sickness by the tetnus/diptheria/pertussis, or TDAP, shot. However, the shot does not protect them from catching them germ and spreading it to others.
Children who are behind on the TDAP series are at a higher risk for severe illness.
Whooping cough begins with symptoms similar to the common cold — sneezing, runny nose, fever and mild cough. After about 10 days, outbursts of strong coughing develop accompanied by a high-sounding "whoop" noise. Vomiting or a thick mucus may follow the cough.
Coughing symptoms can continue for four to six weeks after the infection and the person may appear well other than coughing.
Students who experience symptoms before Feb. 7 should see their doctor and take the advisory with them. Those who are coughing should not return to school unless cleared by a doctor or after completing antibotic treatment.
Contact the Oldham County Health Department for information at 222-3516, extension 135. | <urn:uuid:518ca2a2-9ba6-490c-b86e-d8b27fee657b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oldhamera.com/content/soms-students-possibly-exposed-whooping-cough?quicktabs_2=1&mini=calendar-date%2F2013-02 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952066 | 266 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Candace Y.A. Montague
D.C. HIV/AIDS Examiner
Can Talking Defeat AIDS? The International Conference on Stigma Says "Yes"
November 30, 2010
Would you rather die than know your HIV status? Some people say 'yes'. That answer is generally brought on by one word: stigma. At Howard University's Cramton Auditorium on Wednesday, AIDS experts, advocates and health educators examined stigma at the first International Conference on Stigma. The conference was sponsored by Howard University Hospital, Howard University's Health Sciences, and the Coalition to End AIDS-related Stigma. Speakers included Dr. Sohail Rana, an HIV/AIDS specialist with Department of Pediatrics, Howard University College of Medicine, U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) Gregorio Millet of the White House Office on National AIDS Policy and Miss America Caressa Cameron. The day long conference was designed to address the stigma that fuels poor responses towards AIDS.
Hold the Celebrations: Antiretroviral Drugs Not Promised to Prevent HIV
November 28, 2010
The news broke last week about the drug called Truvada, a blue pill that is a combination of two antiretroviral drugs, having shown to be effective in preventing the spread of HIV among men who have sex with men. It was presented in the New England Journal of Medicine and announced by the National Institutes of Health. The study found that if the pill is taken consistently (meaning 90% of the time) it can be up to 73% effective in the reduction in new HIV infections. This is the first medical breakthrough since the announcement of the vaginal gel Tenofovir at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna this summer. The Washington Post quoted Mitchell Warren, director of the AIDS advocacy group AVAC, as saying "This is a great day in the fight against AIDS. It's a result that requires immediate action." Before Mr. Warren runs amuck let's think about a couple of items.
Condoms Are Tolerable With the Pope but Fine With Local Clergy
November 23, 2010
Recently, HAHSTA hosted a One in the Spirit Symposium where local church leaders came together to discuss AIDS, stigma and sexuality in the church. Many of the leaders in attendance expressed sincere concern about the spread of the virus and stressed the importance of discussing it within the church. Condoms were also discussed as a means of preventing the virus. The key to getting more clergy members on board with condoms is first talking about sexuality (including homosexuality) among youth, adults, and even seniors in the church. Condom use is just one aspect of the discussion that needs to occur sooner rather than later.
Faith Leaders Become "One" Against HIV
November 15, 2010
Faith leaders around the city discuss AIDS. Photo: DC HIV/AIDS Examiner.
D.C. Women's Organization Pushes Safer Sex in the City
November 8, 2010
Move over fellas. MNF no longer stands for Monday Night Football. The Women's Collective have changed the game to Monday Night Females. Ok. That's corny. But last night's discussion on female condoms was definitely focused on women. The Women's Collective hosted a lively and interactive discussion about the FC2 female condom at the cozy Brookland Café in Northeast. The forum and demo is a part of an on-going effort to get female condoms off the shelves and into the bedrooms of DC.
President Obama Confronts AIDS Activists at Connecticut Rally
November 2, 2010
President Obama says enough to protestors. Photo: Getty Images.
The Rubber Revolution Begins in D.C.
October 27, 2010
Big Tigger, Rubber Revolution Ambassador and Acting Senior Deputy Director Nnemdi Kamanu Elias, M.D., M.P.H. Photo: DC HIV/AIDS Examiner
Local Non-Profit Fights for DASH Funding
October 24, 2010
AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth, and Families, in Northwest, is sounding the alarm about possible funding loss for The Division of Adolescent & School Health (DASH) at the CDC. DASH provides education to youth in schools concerning various health topics such as asthma, obesity, nutrition, tobacco use, safety, and HIV/STD prevention. It is the only funding stream for school-based HIV prevention. DASH is now in jeopardy of losing its funding because the Senate Appropriations Committee has inadvertently lumped DASH funding into a category focused on support for obesity-related chronic disease prevention. According to AIDS Alliance, the implication is that $40 million in CDC School Health funds used to help states and large urban school districts plan, carry out and evaluate youth HIV prevention programs will be mingled with other funding streams and quite possibly lost in the process. Not good news when fighting an epidemic that is impacting DC youth.
If You Lived Here: HIV and Housing -- The Basics
October 21, 2010
This is the second installment of the series on housing and HIV/AIDS. In this article, we will explore the basic explanation of the connection between housing, medication adherence, programs and why it should matter to you. There are so many layers and obstacles to the housing issue. This article does not cover them all but it's a start.
The Connection Between Domestic Violence and HIV
October 18, 2010
October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. Domestic Violence is a pattern of behavior used by someone to establish power and control over another person through fear and intimidation. It happens between people who are, or have been, in an intimate relationship. Domestic violence often includes the threat or actual use of violence. It happens when one person believes they are entitled to control another. In 2009, 4,796 people were served at the two Domestic Violence Intake Center locations in DC. The way it can lead to HIV infection is commonly through sexual abuse.
D.C. HIV/AIDS Examiner
Candace Y.A. Montague
Candace Y.A. Montague has been learning about HIV since 1988 (and she has the certificates from the American Red Cross to prove it). Health is a high priority to Candace because she believes that nothing can come of your life if you're not healthy enough to enjoy it. One of her two master's degrees is in Community Health Promotion and Education. Candace was inspired to act against HIV after seeing a documentary in 2008 about African-American women and HIV. She knew that writing was the best way for her to make a difference and help inform others. Candace is a native Washingtonian and covers HIV news all around D.C. She has covered fundraisers, motorcycle rides, town hall meetings, house balls, Capitol Hill press conferences, election campaigns and protests for The DC Examiner.com and emPower News Magazine.
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June 3, 2013 - Michael Douglas, HPV, and Throat Cancer: A Blog Entry by Candace Y.A. Montague
April 5, 2013 - The Sexual Health Lessons of Tyler Perry's Tempation: A Blog Entry by Candace Y.A. Montague
March 25, 2013 - Candace's AIDS News Update: A Blog Entry by Candace Y.A. Montague
March 11, 2013 - Three Condoms Rule No More: A Blog Entry by Candace Y.A. Montague
March 5, 2013 - HIV Prevention Strategies for Women Proven Ineffective: A Blog Entry by Candace Y.A. Montague
A Brief Disclaimer:
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The War in Papua: The Strategic Context
Guadalcanal August 1942 - February 1943
The American invasion of Japanese held Guadalcanal in August 1942 diverted Japanese attention from New Guinea and was of great assistance to the Australians in their defence of Port Moresby...
On 7 August 1942 the United States Navy landed a Marine Division on the islands of Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi. Guadalcanal was one of the locations the Japanese had earmarked as part of their outer ring of defences and they had begun to build an airfield there. The Americans easily overcame the small number of Japanese present and planned to make the airfield their own. The Japanese in turn made a number of attempts to recover the airfield. At the same time the Americans reinforced their Marines. The resulting series of battles, which occurred at the same time as the Kokoda campaign, exercised a strong influence on it.
Initially the Japanese believed they had a satisfactory force to take Port Moresby and that Guadalcanal might easily be recovered. Then an Australian counterattack which briefly retook Kokoda on 9 August, suggested to them that the Australians might be stronger in Papua than they had anticipated. Within days General Hyakutake, 17th Army commander in Rabaul, was informed that the Americans at Guadalcanal were also much stronger than had been believed. Now faced with two large problems which had just days before seemed to him two small problems, Hyakutake decided, his resources being insufficient for both, to put the advance on Port Moresby on hold and retake Guadalcanal. That done he planned to reinforce Papua and take Port Moresby.
The Kawaguchi detachment, originally to go to Papua, was directed to land at Guadalcanal. In the naval Battle of the Eastern Solomons, on 23 August, the landing was foiled. As a result the Japanese again drew on Papuan resources to aid Guadalcanal. Almost all Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft were withdrawn from New Guinea to support a further, successful attempt, to land the Kawaguchi detachment. Japanese airpower remained focused on Guadalcanal to the end of the year.
Hyakutake was content to meanwhile push towards Port Moresby and take up a useful position on the south side of the crest of the Owen Stanley Range that would serve as a jumping off point when the attack on Port Moresby was resumed. However in mid-September Guadalcanal again influenced events in Papua. Kawaguchi's attack on the Americans there was a complete disaster. Horii in Papua, by then on Ioribaiwa Ridge forty kilometres from Port Moresby, was consequently ordered to withdraw.
In October the Japanese again reinforced Guadalcanal but their next, and largest, attempt to destroy the American force was repulsed. The effect upon operations in Papua was that Horii was ordered to fall back yet again, from the Eora-Templeton's position to beyond Kokoda. Caught in the act of withdrawing, by an Australian attack on 28 October, his defeat at Eora was more serious than it might otherwise have been.
By November Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo had still not given up the idea of recovering Guadalcanal but realised that they must now abandon any idea of resuming an offensive towards Port Moresby. The great Australian victory at Oivi-Gorari and the Australian-American advance along the coast towards Buna confirmed what Imperial Headquarters had already decided: If there remained any chance to retake Guadalcanal then all that could be done in Papua was to hold their base on the coast between Gona and Buna. It was not until the Japanese decided in December to evacuate Guadalcanal that significant land and air reinforcements were again sent to Papua. It proved to be too little, too late.
Whether Hyakutake made the correct choice in deciding Guadalcanal was more important than Papua is open to debate. What can be said is that had he decided otherwise the Australians along the Kokoda track and at Milne Bay would have faced far larger Japanese forces with strong air support. | <urn:uuid:bdff77e5-a825-4795-8d2b-c63bc2dc2f25> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kokoda.commemoration.gov.au/war-in-papua/guadalcanal.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980042 | 851 | 3.15625 | 3 |
Equatorial Guinea? Where in the world is that? This corner of the globe lies in a very remote part of Africa which some say, upon setting foot there, feels like a moon landing. This territory was, in olden times, a poverty ridden Spanish colony in the port city of Bata.
But have no fear. The La Paz Medical Center, a state-of-the art hospital in this foreign terrain, has an authentic, kosher mezuzah on its front door, thanks to Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila of Chabad of Central Africa.
Much appreciation goes to Yardena Ovadia, an Israeli businesswoman who maintains a working relationship with the president of the city, Teodoro Obiang. Her generous support has helped to see this project through to completion. Additionally, the many Israeli staff members working on the premises say the mezuzah on the door makes them feel like they are at home! | <urn:uuid:81d4524f-4190-41c3-ba12-4d91fc593c50> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.mezuzahmaster.com/2013/02/26/where-in-the-world/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952076 | 192 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Presence of world leaders ‘paralysed’ climate summit, UN letter claims. United Nations climate chief says Danish presidency’s backing for US also derailed Copenhagen negotiations.
John Vidal | Guardian.co.uk
A leaked letter from the United Nations‘ climate chief suggests the Copenhagen climate summit failed because of the presence of 130 world leaders paralysed decision-making and the Danish presidency backed the US and other western nations over the interests of the poor.
The revelations – made as the UN climate talks resume in Bonn, Germany, tomorrow – come in Yvo de Boer’s candid letter , written to senior colleagues days after the summit broke up in acrimony in December.
More than 130 world leaders had been persuaded by Britain and other countries to go to Denmark, where they were expected to put the finishing touches to a historic global agreement to limit carbon emissions, protect forests and put in place a mechanism to transfer billions of dollars from rich to poor countries each year.
Instead, they arrived at a summit seething with mistrust and divided between rich and poor countries.
According to De Boer, who will leave the UN framework convention on climate change(Unfccc) in the next few months, the diplomatic debacle began to unfold when Denmark presented a one-sided draft agreement to a few select countries just before the start of the meeting.
The UN, aware that it was unbalanced and favoured the US and other richer countries, tried – but failed – to stop it.
“[The Danish text] destroyed two years of effort in one fell swoop,” De Boer wrote. “All our attempts to prevent the paper happening failed. The meeting at which it was presented was unannounced and the paper unbalanced.”
The paper was leaked to the Guardian, which had the effect of polarising countries’ positions further, the Danish journalist and climate change expert Per Meilstrup, whose book on the climate negotiations is published in Europe tomorrow, said.
The presence of world leaders such Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Wen Jiabao further affected the talks, De Boer wrote.
They had been expected to galvanise the summit and steamroller opposition to an agreement, but in fact proved counterproductive.
“Inviting heads of state seemed like a good idea. But it seriously backfired,” he wrote. “Their early arrival did not have the catalytic effect that was hoped for. The process became paralysed. Rumour and intrigue took over.”
Negotiators from more than 180 countries resume the talks hoping to make progress on key areas such as forests, finance and emission cuts.
But non-government groups warned that rich countries were already seeking to offer loans instead of grants to adapt to climate change.
“The $100bn a year pledged by rich nations to help fight climate change could fail the poorest people if recent moves to deliver climate cash as loans continue,” Oxfam’s senior policy advisor, Antonio Hill, said.
“At a time of economic emergency, when several poor countries are slashing critical health and education budgets to avoid a debt crisis, rich countries are considering saddling them with climate debt for a situation they did not cause.
“It’s like crashing your neighbour’s car and then offering a loan to cover the damages.”
Friends of the Earth called for Europe to show global leadership by cutting its emissions by 40% by 2020.
“This is the minimum level required if we’re to have any chance of avoiding climate catastrophe and save the lives of the millions of people who will suffer devastating effects like more frequent storms, droughts and flooding,” a spokesman said. | <urn:uuid:2e91cc08-1ccc-4a4c-8ad1-81bd6898834a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.menwithfoilhats.com/2010/05/denmark-unwittingly-puts-hitch-in-cap-and-trade-scheme/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962966 | 770 | 1.859375 | 2 |
A quasi-contribution occurs when the company purchases assets or business,
The Companies Code (NL / FR) foresees specific procedures applicable for a public limited liability company, a partnership limited by shares, a private limited liability company and a cooperative limited liability company. These procedures are not applicable in case of purchases that are executed as common business for the entity and at normal market conditions, for purchases on a stock exchange or in case of sales by the judicial authorities.
The control program, the form and content of the report and the tasks of the auditor have been specified in a standard of the IBR/IRE (NL / FR). The auditor may not express an opinion on the value of the purchased assets or their remuneration, but only on the valuation methods used by the company. Neither fcan he/she express a fairness opinion on the operation.
The board of directors has to prepare a specific report justifying the transaction to the shareholders and, if needed, explain why they deviate with the conclusions of the auditor, at their own responsibility.
The reports of the auditor and the board are presented to the general shareholders’ meeting. The transaction is effective only after approval by the shareholders. | <urn:uuid:6d1aab8f-2c60-4921-880f-0d783d7b22a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_BE/be/services/aers/audit/auditrequirementsinbelgium/specialmissionsofthestatutoryauditors/quasi-contribution/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944933 | 243 | 1.773438 | 2 |
The Fork and Spoon War
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
The Great Fork and Spoon War, known to the forks and spoons as "That time when we didnt have fun" occurred between the galactic years 2467012Fk-90043126548546Fk or 1998-2006. The war started due to a misunderstanding between the forks and spoons; the fork King "Leroy the pointy" sent a telegram to the Spoon leader "Gary the spherical" telling him to "Fork off" as a joke - unfortunately Gary didn't know this and declared war!
edit The Fork Union
In the first month of the war the spoons were claiming victory all across the kitchen, It was during this time that Leroy the pointy made an attempt to gather all the forks together to defeat the "Monstrous sphere-headed ones". And so the Fork Union was formed, lead by the Fork king. At first the forks had over 200 soldiers, while the spoons had a mere 60. After an accidental fireing on the knives (who had been nuetral in the past) the forks once again had the odds against them, when Sir Bernard Adolf Frank Leslie IV (pope and leader of the knives) pleaded to the forks for help, the forks claimed that they didnt need the help because they had the ability to "wall run like a ninja" the battle changed dramasticly soon.
edit The great wooden burning
In January 1999 the spoon's amry general Terrance Falicity gaddafi Horsepipe thought of a new mode of warfare, using FIRE BOMBS! He used his powerful connections to get help from Alan Titchmarsh and Paul O'Grady to provide the recipie for Fire, this couldnt be found so they improvised and used the recipie for death (commonly known as the Bic Mac) to start fires. After succesfuly creating the firebomb, they were fired on the wodden forks, the wooden forks had to escape the burning lands for they were the original holders of The One Ring, they traveled accross the land until they reached middle earth, and passed the ring on to the humans. They made an agreement with the humans to return home and fight the Spoon Menace . The Spoon Menace was then defeated after being Monopolized by Hasbro.
edit Intervention from the knife delegation
Despite numerous attempts by the United Nations to try and prevent warfare, president of the spoon committee Jim Davidson declared warfare on the forks after a failed heist by the forks led by Lieutenant Frank Drebin resulted in the death of over 400 spoonlets (Spoon Kiddies).Drebin launched a scud missile from Scunthorpe aimed in the direction of berlin thinking that world war 2 was still on going, but the missile hit a preschool in spooncity (located between the Island of Sodor and Prague) instantly blowing the spoons to bits. The president of the neighbouring country Sir Fat of controller was asked to prevent the outbreak of war and to send aid, but said he would rather "light a bunch of firecrackers up my anus and blow a cannon from my ass than sit back and see nothing happen." There were questions over the severity of these comments made by the controller(real name jermaine "droop-dog" Crouch) and a spokesman on behalf of him said that "The comments were aimed at the spoon nation as a whole who were a bunch of dirty mackem inbreds who pussy out of anything." These comments then led to the controller implanting a nuclear device upon Thomas the Tank Engine who consequently blew up the orphanage.
edit The Death Of the Fork King
When the wooden forks returned, the forks were in desperate need of help and the wooden ones didn't have much help because on the way back 99% of the humans had been killed Sauron but the forks were optimistic. Unfortunately Leroy had been hurt by a fire bomb and had been slightly bent. Leroy then went asplode and died. The forks could see loss on the Horizon.
edit A new hope
The Forks were loosing..... badly and were on the verge of Destruction, until a new hope came to them, the former king Leroy's only child "Terrance Stalin the sharp" returned from holiday.After months of political uprising Terrance came to the throne and after years of being in power he lead the forks to a confusing victory
edit After the war
Many years after the war, the Fork leaders decided to once again make contact with the knife menace because they heard of their recent involvment with the FIGHT TO THE DEATH between Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black The Forks supported the knives as much as possible and eventually ended the struggle by giving Rebecca Black the Fork of Power and she destroyed Justin Bieber. This was followed by years of peace and freedom between the old enemys | <urn:uuid:bb9e2afd-18a8-44a5-8ccd-413be2225360> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Fork_and_Spoon_War | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973701 | 1,005 | 1.726563 | 2 |
From Ohio History Central
Frank John Lausche was Ohio's only five-term governor.
Lausche was born on November 14, 1895, in Cleveland, Ohio. After a brief stint as a minor-league baseball player, he enlisted in the United States Army during World War I. He attained the rank of second lieutenant. With the war’s conclusion, Lausche entered the John Marshall School of Law, graduating in 1920.
For the next twelve years, Lausche practiced law in Cleveland. In 1932, he embarked upon a career in politics, becoming a municipal judge in Cleveland. He held this office from 1932 until 1937, when he became a judge with the Court of Common Pleas. In 1941, Lausche, a Democrat, won election as mayor of Cleveland, an office that he held until 1944, when he was elected Ohio’s fifty-fifth governor. Lausche received seventy-one percent of the vote in the mayor’s race in 1941.
Lausche was a member of the Democratic Party, but in his various political offices, Lausche became well known for his moderate views. He routinely crossed party lines, voting for what he thought was right and not what his party demanded of him. As governor, he became well known for his fiscal conservatism. His moderate views partly cost him reelection as Ohio’s governor in 1946, but two years later, Ohio voters reelected Lausche to the governor’s seat. Lausche served as governor from 1945 to 1947 and then from 1949 to 1957. What remains surprising about Lausche’s lengthy time in office is that the Republican Party held a dominant majority in state offices during this time. By being moderate in his views, Lausche probably remained in office much longer than he otherwise would have done so. Of Slovenian ancestry, Lausche also attracted ethnic voters, especially in Ohio’s major cities. He was the only five-term governor in Ohio’s history. While Lausche served as governor, Harry Truman, a Democrat, and Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, considered selecting Lausche as their vice-presidential running mate.
In 1956, Lausche successfully ran for one of Ohio’s two United States Senate seats. He became known as “Frank the Fence” because of his willingness to cross party lines. He won reelection in 1962, but because of his apparent lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party, Lausche failed to secure his party’s nomination in 1968. He served in the Senate from January 3, 1957 to January 3, 1969.
Following his two terms in the U.S. Senate, Lausche retired from public life. He died on April 21, 1990.
- The Governors of Ohio. Columbus: The Ohio Historical Society, 1954
- "Lausche, Frank John, (1895-1900)." Http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=L000122.
- Odenkirk, James E. Frank J. Lausche: Ohio's Great Political Maverick. Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press, 2005. | <urn:uuid:9ff66180-d187-481b-8be7-4f2e8c3ea15f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Lausche,_Frank_J.?rec=1840&nm=Frank-J-Lausche | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980041 | 664 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Meals on Wheels is in need of local volunteers to help serve hot meals to senior citizens.
Mark Kempf has made a difference for hundreds of people the last seven years.
"Every once in awhile Mark will give me a good hug," says a client of Meals on Wheels.
Kempf drives at least one route a day, serving 10-15 hot meals on each route.
"I like seeing the smile you bring people, it's like you change peoples lives and it's great to be the person that does that," says Kempf.
Kempf is a disabled veteran suffering with a brain injury, but he doesn't allow that to hold him back when it comes to serving our community.
"My heart grows everyday, I get more confidence in everything that I do from seeing the help I bring people," says Kempf.
President and CEO of Meals on Wheels here in Tyler, Mike Powell, says it's volunteers like Kempf that make the program a success.
"For many of these clients, it's the only person that they see everyday. So these clients are extremely isolated, they're all living alone and they at least get to visit with somebody for two or three minutes when the meal is delivered," says Powell.
But with the increase of gas prices Powell says it has decreased the number of volunteers.
"If an individual has the ability to give a couple hours a week, or a couple hours every other week it's a pretty simple process you just come in, and pick up their meals. We have a route written for them and they just follow directions, go out and deliver to their clients and then their finished," explained Powell.
Three thousand meals are served a day in 6 East Texas counties a day. Volunteers will serve anywhere from10 to 15 hot meals on their daily routes.
Sunday, May 19 2013 12:59 AM EDT2013-05-19 04:59:50 GMT
From the Tyler Police Department: TYLER, TX (KLTV) - On Saturday at approximately 8:50 p.m., police responded to a pedestrian accident that occurred in the 2300 block of West Erwin Street in Tyler. UponMore >>
The pedestrian was immediately transported to East Texas Medical Center with life threatening injuries.More >>
Thursday, May 16 2013 10:53 PM EDT2013-05-17 02:53:13 GMT
The Bullard Solar Car Team hopes to represent East Texas at an international competition but needs help raising funds. Their solar car is the first high school solar car in East Texas and it's finallyMore >>
The Bullard Solar Car Team hopes to represent East Texas at an international competition but needs help raising funds.More >>
Inmates at jails in Indianapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia face the nation's highest levels of sexual abuse at the hands of guards, according to a new federal report based on surveys of inmates at...More >>
Inmates at jails in Indianapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia face the nation's highest levels of sexual abuse at the hands of guards, according to a new federal report based on surveys of inmates at U.S. jails.More >> | <urn:uuid:d2ceeee2-c8c0-452e-89e2-73f80e814fd8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kltv.com/story/21195075/meals-on-wheels-looking-for-volunteers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964854 | 649 | 1.554688 | 2 |
UK car production hit a four-year high last year as car exports reached a new record, defying the deep slump in European vehicle sales, research shows.
British factories built 1.46 million cars last year, of which 1.21 million were exported, said the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Production was up 9 per cent and exports by 8 per cent, even though car sales in the EU hit a 19-year low.
About half of Britain's exports go outside Europe, where strong demand from countries such as China, Russia and America helped to offset the weakness on the Continent.
"The outlook for this year remains positive, with demand in many faster-growing global markets offsetting the continued weaknesses in European economies," the society said.
But across the channel, things aren't looking as rosy.
European car sales plunged in 2012 as the debt crisis took a heavy toll on vehicle demand.
The number of cars sold in the EU fell by 8.2 per cent to 12.05 million vehicles last year, the lowest since 1993.
Over-indebted banks refused to lend to consumers who are strapped for cash as severe austerity measures pushed joblessness to a record high of 12 per cent.
Sales in December were hit particularly hard, falling by 16.3 per cent, said the European Automotive Association.
For the year, the UK fared much better than Europe, with sales rising 5.3 per cent. By contrast, sales in Germany declined 2.9 per cent, while Spain dived 13.4 per cent, France 13.9 per cent and Italy 19.9 per cent. | <urn:uuid:aa6e72ae-13c7-4b9a-83be-a60629c934a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/motoring/news/article.cfm?c_id=9&objectid=10860667 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964646 | 333 | 1.679688 | 2 |
(This post originally appeared on the iMedia Connection blog on June 19, 2012.)
Wedding season is here, and brides and grooms everywhere are making what is hopefully the most significant and lasting commitment of their lives. But in today’s world, a lifetime of loyalty requires more than love: a lifetime of loyalty means hard work and compromise.
Just ask any marketer.
As consumers, we all have relationships with brands—and we’re more loyal to some than we are to others. We might even feel “married” to our favorites. But just as marital longevity continues to decline in the twenty-first century, brand loyalty has declined in the digital age.
Now that nearly every brand has an online presence, the game has changed, and the new rules are making it harder for companies to earn brand loyalty. Unprecedented access, digital marketing, e-commerce and rapid technological innovation are breaking up brand relationships—or even preventing them from forming in the first place.
The trouble is that the internet gives consumers access to copious information that brands can’t control. Thanks to social media and review sites, consumers often hear about brands from other consumers, as opposed to the brand itself. If shoppers deliberately search for information about a specific product or brand, they get a much broader sense of the market, options, and prices online than they would from a retail experience. One-stop shops like Amazon encourage consumers to make purchase decisions based on convenience, shifting loyalty from the brand to the distributor.
This generation may be fickle in romantic and brand relationships, but they are completely devoted to their personal devices. Forward-thinking brands are discovering that by adapting quickly to technology and the consumer habits it forms, they can rekindle cooling brand relationships—and spark new ones.
As a channel, mobile is all about intimacy; we carry our smartphones (and, to a certain extent, tablets) everywhere and feel lost without them. We interact with them in deeply physical ways: we keep them in our pockets, hear them ring, feel them vibrate, and activate them with the heat of our hands. We take care of them and they take care of us. Our relationships with these small devices are proprietary and emotional, and many of us value them over any other personal belonging that we use on a daily basis. Mobile boasts a constancy and closeness to consumers that print and TV media, store environments, and even laptops can’t rival.
Brands that truly understand their customers are crafting mobile experiences—usually either highly entertaining or very useful ones—that integrate seamlessly into customers’ connected lives. Nike is a great example of a retail brand that has translated its value proposition into a mobile presence. Nike offers apps stuffed with tools and technology designed to enhance athletic activities, such as the Nike+ GPS app, which tracks pace, distance, and progress over multiple runs, letting runners set goals and even cheering them on. In this way, Nike gains popularity and swagger among its customer base.
Other apps make “long-distance” brand relationships—the ones where you have to travel from home to a different location—much more intimate by allowing users to access their services virtually anytime. Mobile banking is the best illustration of this category, and anecdotal evidence seems to favor Schwab’s app, which lets users deposit checks just by taking a picture. Schwab customers who get used to this feature won’t be easily persuaded to bank elsewhere.
Internet brands, whose storefronts have always been virtual, court consumers by designing straightforward, easy-to-use versions of their websites for mobile. Subscribers to Zip Car or Seamless Web, for example, develop habits around these brands because of the straightforwardness and reliable function of their apps. Media brands, such as the New York Times and Pandora, also encourage subscriber monogamy with their clear and intuitive interfaces.
Perhaps the most seductive apps, though, are the ones that didn’t exist until the mobile channel existed, the ones whose product and value are intrinsic to the mobile experience. It seems like just about everyone is falling for (even obsessing over) Instagram, including Facebook. And something tells me it won’t be just a fleeting crush.
The new digital order doesn’t have to mean the end of happily-ever-after. Just as the most lasting couples learn to let their marriages grow and evolve, brands need to stay flexible and in tune with customer habits and preferences. Brands should view the internet and mobile technology not as challenges, but as opportunities—to redefine, modernize, and very likely strengthen customer relationships.
About the Author
Barbara Apple Sullivan is Managing Partner of Sullivan, a brand engagement firm she founded in 1990.
Barbara holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Follow Barbara on Twitter @bapplesullivan | <urn:uuid:d3144d48-1329-47ea-81b5-c414eaeb9cfe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sullivannyc.com/blog/turning-brand-engagement-into-brand-marriage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950059 | 1,012 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Peace of Mind
The Dilon Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI, also known as BSGI) technique can aid in diagnosis when a mammogram is inconclusive. No more “wait and see” – with MBI you and your doctor can take the next step and get the answers you need.
Did you know?
1 in 4 women have very dense breasts.
Women who have a high percentage of dense breast tissue have a higher risk of breast cancer (according to the National Cancer institute). Recent research suggests that the risk may be up to 6 fold higher.
Toss of a coin?! Up to 50% of breast cancers are missed by mammography in women with dense breasts.
Virginia has recently passed a law that requires facilities that offer mammograms to notify women if they have dense breasts. Virginia joins only two other states in the U.S. which passed similar bills. The Virginia bill goes into effect July 2012.
Ask your doctor if Dilon Molecular Breast Imaging is right for you.
For more information call the hotline 1-877-GO DILON (option 4 for patient information).
Get the latest news and read patient testimonials at http://www.facebook.com/Save.The.Ladies
Visit their website HERE | <urn:uuid:4fccab4e-2cb8-42e6-bb76-a6fc4a4a21b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eagle97.com/page.php?page_id=106 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939688 | 259 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Eye witness: Zambia
Communities across Southern Africa are looking to new ways of coping with the impacts of climate change, mainly the droughts and floods which are disrupting their farming cycles and undermining their livelihoods. They are learning how to sustainably manage the natural resources that are critical to sustain them in uncertain conditions.
At the same time, there is growing recognition that development assistance policies do not properly take into account the impacts of climate change and are therefore in danger of proving counterproductive. IUCN’s Climate Change and Development project which is underway in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia is working to address this. The project aims, in conjunction with its implementing partners, to ensure that climate change policies and activities incorporate the role of healthy ecosystems such as forests and watersheds in supporting agriculture and livelihoods, and increasing community resilience to climate stress in the long term.
Farmers who practice conventional agricultural methods on degraded soils and rely on costly fertilizers have become highly susceptible to climate change and have suffered frequent crop failure. By adopting conservation agriculture, which involves, for example, diversifying and rotating the range of crops they grow and learning new skills such as beekeeping, these farmers can increase their yields and regenerate their soils and their local environment. And, by becoming more self-sufficient, they can free themselves from government food aid.
In Zambia and Tanzania assessments have been carried out among farmers, beekeepers and fishermen on how to improve their physical and economic security. Ecosystem-based actions such as conservation agriculture, small-scale irrigation and rainwater harvesting offer significant potential as does the sustainable use of non-timber forest products such as indigenous fruits and vegetables.
Here, one farmer from the rural region of Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia describe how climate change is affecting them and how they are changing their practices to try to adapt.
“I am Peter Malata. The problems we used to have were due to late cultivation but now we are told to plant early and we have started to practice conservation farming. Burning charcoal has destroyed our local vegetation but we have now stopped this. We used to have a lot of trees in this area but people came from other places to cut them. We are thankful for the people who are teaching us about farming. If we follow their teachings we will reduce poverty in our villages.
The advantage of conservation farming is that the soil is maintained and helps to hold water. We keep the grass cover now so that in hot periods the soil is protected. Although I have a house in Lusaka, I came to live here. I want to encourage my friends who do not have homes in town to move to the villages and find a place where they can live and start farming because it is cheaper to grow your own food than to buy it.”
For more information, please visit: http://www.iucn.org/knowledge/news/ focus/2009_eba/ground/?4151/Eye-witness- Zambia
For more information, please contact firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:0c89337c-442c-45e5-a857-6b70eaf2d9fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iucn.org/news_homepage/news_by_date/2010_news/?4554/Eye-witness-Zambia&add_comment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965411 | 630 | 3.125 | 3 |
No the cows don’t need milk trucks to deliver to them but to haul away the milk they produce on a daily basis. That’s the word from the state Farm Bureau which is assessing flood damage.
If milk-hauling trucks don’t reach dairy farms in time, whole batches of milk presumably go to waste since they can only keep for so long in a non-refrigerated environment.
Here is the Farm Bureau’s update:
ALBANY — New York farmers continue to recover from the damaging flood and winds of Hurricane Irene, which has left some farms completely stranded and others with complete loss of crops, buildings and equipment.
“As the information pours in, this appears to be one of the worst weather disasters for farmers in many years,” said Dean Norton, President of New York Farm Bureau.
“We will continue to help coordinate damage assessments and make sure farmers are connected with county, state and federal agencies in positions to help,” Norton said.
In the Schoharie Valley and the Mohawk Valley, agricultural damage appears to be severe. Emergency management and state agriculture officials are working to get feed, fuel and milk trucks to dairy farms isolated by washed out roads and bridges.
Crop losses in the Schoharie and Mohawk regions, the Black Dirt region in Orange County and sporadically throughout the Hudson Valley and Catskills seem to be high based on anecdotal information.
Farmers are urged to carefully document crop losses and report those losses to USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Damage to buildings and equipment should also be documented, if possible with use of digital cameras and video.
State officials are also working to get milk trucks to dairy farms. Farms have limited storage capacity for milk. Cows need to be milked daily. Some milk dumping has occurred in some locations.
Meanwhile, fruit crops appear to be largely spared from significant damage. Isolated farms saw extensive damage, but losses were limited in most orchards.
Grape crops on Long Island were also let largely undamaged by Irene.
Crops affected consist mostly of corn for silage, onions and other vegetables. | <urn:uuid:2cce8509-8c2d-43a9-9daa-164eaa482b1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/79686/farm-bureau-fruit-crops-ok-but-cows-need-their-trucks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961972 | 449 | 2.078125 | 2 |
How Records Are Broken
Is there really an upper limit to how fast people can run?
Breaking PRs should be no less a dream for you. Think about your goal times often in planning and executing your training. Feel their force and let it pull you along. This is precisely what Mahon plans to do with Hall in their pursuit of the American and world records for the marathon. "The excitement of chasing a record will keep his motivation going for many years to come," he says.
To avoid being limited by time standards you must view each new PR as the next target. How many times have we heard runners say, "I think I can run faster," in interviews conducted immediately after they've set a new record? (That's what Haile Gebrselassie did in proclaiming his potential to run a 2:03 marathon while still sweaty from having run 2:04:26 in Berlin.) These men and women are your role models. When you set a PR, take a little time to congratulate yourself on your fine performance and then turn against it by aiming one step higher. "You can always compete against the clock," Mahon says.
You Have To Believe
Another thing you'll notice in the talk of record-setting runners is that they almost always express great confidence of success before making their record attempts. "I think one reason why records continue to be broken is because our actions always follow our beliefs," Hall says. "More and more people believe that it is possible for them to set world records, so some are bound to succeed." Hall himself is one of them. "I have always believed that God gave me the ability to run with the best runners in the world," he states. "So naturally, my actions reflect that belief when I race against them. The mind is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as runners."
According to Ross Tucker, such confidence is not manufactured but instead comes directly from specific training experiences that demonstrate the runner's readiness to achieve his or her goal time. Or, as Tirunesh Dibaba puts it, "When I attempt a world record it is not something I decide when I enter the track on the race day. I see how my shape is and confirm as much as possible beforehand how fit I am in my training and see my times, and I believe that is where my confidence comes from." Indeed, Tucker argues that developing true belief in the ability to achieve one's goal is the single most important possible outcome of any runner's training, because the brain is the ultimate regulator of running performance, and it is next to impossible to fool the brain regarding what the body can and cannot do.
Tucker is a leading proponent of the notion that the brain's main job during maximal running efforts is to prevent the runner from causing serious self-harm through overexertion by producing feelings of discomfort and by reducing electrical output to the muscles in response to feedback signals from the body. Through a mechanism called anticipatory regulation, the brain continuously calculates the fastest pace the runner can safely sustain through the end of a race based on these feedback signals, as well as physiological "set points" such as the maximum acceptable core body temperature, objective time and distance information, and past training and racing experiences. The overriding goal of training, then, is to subject yourself to workout experiences that teach the brain that the body is capable of sustaining your goal pace through the full race distance without suffering major damage.
"Any athlete going for a personal best is running at a pace that is faster than they have run before," Tucker explains. "In the absence of proper training, and teaching the brain how that feels and what can or cannot be tolerated, the runner will be forced, by the brain, to slow down in the middle of the event. But with enough training and practice, the interpretation and regulation of the signals coming into the brain will be altered to allow the athlete to reach the next level of performance."
Tucker advises runners to consciously design training plans and key workouts that serve above all to build confidence in their ability to achieve a specific race goal. Instead of simply following a training formula or strictly doing what others do, put some imagination into the types of training experiences that will do the most to make you feel ready to PR, even if they are a bit unusual. According to Tucker, this is the approach coach Franz Stampfl took with Roger Bannister before Bannister set the most famous world record in running history. "Stampfl recognized that if he wanted to run a 4-minute mile, he needed to be able to run 10 x 400m in 59 to 60 seconds," says Tucker. "So the fulcrum session in his training was that interval set, and all he did was practice it until he managed to get those times down. I'm not sure where he began--perhaps he was capable of doing 10 x 400m in 63 seconds. But over time, that came down, and because he understood the purpose of the session, he successfully translated it into the first sub-4-minute mile."
How The Best Make Us Better
Spectator sports such as football and participatory sports such as running are different. Most football fans are not football players, but nearly every running fan is a runner. Consequently, we don't just admire the world's greatest runners--we also want to learn from them. Understanding the controllable factors that enable a few great runners to break records can help you establish new personal best race times.
"The great thing about running is that anyone can get excited about improving," says Hall. "It is easy to measure and you pretty much reap in the race what you sowed in training. Running personal records is something to be proud of and to celebrate. My dad used to take me out for ice cream whenever I ran a PR in high school. He said it was important to celebrate every PR along the way. I couldn't agree more."
Matt Fitzgerald is the co-author (with Brad Hudson) of Run Faster from 5K to the Marathon (2008, Broadway Books), which was excerpted in the October issue of Running Times.
For an audio interview with American-record holder Bob Kennedy about making breakthroughs, go to runningtimes.com/nov08. | <urn:uuid:da065565-372e-4c72-948e-1a1d5be06bf4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.runnersworld.com/races/how-records-are-broken?page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977293 | 1,271 | 2.078125 | 2 |
The Environmental Interpretation Centre is located on the shores of the Faja da Caldeira de Santo Cristo on São Jorge Island on the Azores archipelago of Portugal. The islands are very remote and located smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic and not particularly well-known, but are quite beautiful. The government is trying to increase tourism and education of their parks and the Centre is one of their projects to aid that effort. The Centre will help provide information on the area, serve as an education center on the local environment, support architectural heritage and serve as a center to further study the local flora and fauna.
Design work began on the Environmental Interpretation Centre in 2007 with construction starting in 2009. The original property features a one story stone building, which was used as the foundation for the reconstruction. This building was faithfully restored using the original plans, but adding a second story and then an additional building behind it. The main building serves as the education center and the building behind is a temporary apartment for visiting researchers. Thick stone walls act as thermal mass to slow the transfer of heat and keep the interior comfortable. Deep window wells provide natural light but minimize heat gain. In the future a campsite will be created and the Interpretation Centre will serve as its headquarters.
Images ©FG+SG – Fotografia de Arquitectura | <urn:uuid:eefe73fe-69d0-4d8e-bf20-23577af05995> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inhabitat.com/stone-environmental-interpretation-centre-is-a-sensitive-reconstruction-on-sao-jorge-island/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956982 | 276 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Both of my cats love treats, and they get so excited whenever I bring out the treat bag that it’s hard to resist giving them “just one more.” However, if you’re not careful with the treats and with the mealtime portions, it’s easy to end up with a fat cat. It is estimated that over 50% of cats are overweight or obese, and a fat cat is at risk for problems such as diabetes, joint pain, cardiovascular disease and liver problems such as hepatic lipidosis. If the road to obesity is paved with good treats, at least there are some simple things you can do to help your cat stay healthy without putting away the treat jar completely. Read More
Skipper and Slouch aren’t the only adopted canines in our life.
First there was Spud. When I first met my (soon-to-be) husband, Chris, the love of his life was Spud. She was his rescue mutt and the sweetest little fuzzy baked potato I’ve ever rocked to sleep on a first date. I think I fell in love with Spud at first sight, which was quite a shock if you’ve never seen a 25 pound, furry potato with stubby legs before. Read More »
|A common presentation of many older pets is the history of weight loss. Mild weight loss may be an innocent age-related change. However, in other cases weight loss can be a sign of a more serious medical condition. Amongst the factors that help rule out the causes include intestinal parasites, metabolic diseases of the liver, kidneys or pancreas, inflammatory bowel disease, infectious disease, degenerative or autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer.|
Any pet with significant weight loss should have a proper veterinary exam and a full CBC/chemistry blood panel and urine analysis as baseline information. If further diagnostics are needed X-rays and ultrasound may be required. For pets with mild nonspecific weight loss, certainly a better diet can be tried such as Halo or Nature’s Variety, as well as adding digestive enzymes to meals including NaturVet Enzymes from 1800petmeds. If in doubt, however it is always best to have a proper and full veterinary exam.
Weight loss is one of the more common general nonspecific symptoms of disease in our dogs and cats. Weight loss may be accompanied digestive tract symptoms of diarrhea or vomiting or changes in appetite, as well as other various symptoms. Depending upon the age of the animal, there are many possible causes. Certainly dietary factors and poor or inadequate diet can play a role in many animals.
In particularly younger pets various parasites can be involved as well. Often veterinarians will start with a microscopic stool check to see if there are any parasites. Even when stools are negative, veterinarians will often worm pets with products like Panacur-C or Nemex to treat for hidden worms. Various metabolic diseases of the pancreas (including inadequate production of enzymes and diabetes), liver, kidneys and thyroid can be involved with chronic weight loss. Malabsorption from inflammatory bowel disease or cancer can also cause chronic weight loss.
If a pet is otherwise acting normal, an animal guardian can certainly try changing the diet to an all natural diet like Nature’s Variety or Halo, or can add digestive tract enzymes to the meals such as NaturVet enzymes. If a pet is chronically or severely ill with accompanying weight loss, a full veterinary workup, including blood work, X-rays, stool/urine checks and possibly X-rays and ultrasound are all possibly indicated.
|A question commonly asked particularly by dog owners is how much exercise should their dog or cat get. Of course the answer will depend upon the age, breed and health/medical history of the particular pet, but assuming one has a young healthy adult dog, most pets do not have limits on their exercise. Proper exercise can help keep the weight stable, as well as keep the heart, brain and body healthy.|
In the wild, dogs and cats can travel 20 to 30 miles a day so certainly walking or jogging a few miles with a dog in most cases is helpful to both animal guardian and pet. As with humans, before starting any exercise program, it is important for a dog to have a complete medical exam by a veterinarian, including listening to the heart and blood work if indicated, including heartworm testing. In those dogs who spend a lot of time outside exercising, it is important to make sure they are on monthly heartworm preventatives such as Heartgard or Interceptor to reduce risk of transmission of heartworms and intestinal parasites.
Kitties can also be trained to a leash and exercised as well by their owners through walks. Indoor cats should also get plenty of exercise using various toys, laser lights and the like to try and. work off extra calories from lack of exercise from being an indoor cat. 1800petmeds has some wonderful pet toys and indoor pet pens to help include more and exercise into your pet’s daily activities.
|Obesity is one of the biggest problems seen not only in humans but our canine and feline animal companions as well. The two main reasons behind this epidemic for all species involve too many calories in and not enough exercise. This is often complicated by the fact that given the carnivorous nature of both dogs and cats, being more evolved to eat meat sources of protein, most of the dry commercial diet kibbles fed by guardians around the country are loaded with processed and/or refined carbohydrates as the chief economic protein source for pet food companies.|
However as in people, it is the ingestion of too many carbohydrates that is involved with most of the weight gain. This is especially problematic in the obligatory carnivorous cats, where many guardians feed dry food only thinking it is mistakenly better for their teeth, as well as better for their feline companion’s health. The ideal diet for cats in most cases is a fresh high protein/meat based diet. Meat is rich in protein, fat and is 75% water. Dry kibbles not only put extra strain on the urinary system and kidneys of cats, but are a very big cause of weight gain, particularly in indoor only cats who get very little exercise.
With weight gain and obesity in both dogs and cats, there have been documented increased health risks known to occur, just as there are in people. Increased risk of diabetes, chronic respiratory and cardiac disorders, joint and back problems and even cancer is seen in obese patients. If one were to feed their pets the suggested serving amount placed on commercial pet food bags, than all pets would be obese, as these feeding suggestions are often way too high. Back in 2007, the FDA approved an obesity treatment drug for dogs only called Slentrol (main ingredient dirlotapide). In my opinion and experience I have not been impressed with the results in pets treated with this medication, as well as my concern for side effects involving the digestive tract and in particular the liver.
From what I understand, this was a drug that failed in human trials as an obesity treatment drug, but gained approval for use in dogs. The best suggestions I can make to either avoid and/or treat obesity in our pets is to first feed a diet as possible. The best is a proper home made diet, following recipes by experts like Richard Pitcairn and Donald Strombeck, whose books can be easily obtained and both contain balanced, easy to do, homemade recipes. If this is not possible, than moving toward at least a fresh natural diet with less carbs and higher protein levels and fat in cats and dogs would be my next suggestion. Many of the so called “reduced calorie” diets sold by many veterinarians across the country, as well as seen on supermarket shelves are loaded with lesser quality ingredients in my opinion, as well as too many processed carbohydrates for effective long term and safe weight loss.
There are some excellent natural supplements that can help with weight loss including inclusion of such products like Vetri-Lean Plus by Vetri-Science in dogs, Vetri-DMG liquid, coenzyme Q-10, as well as trace minerals like chromium. I always recommend that any guardian using such supplements work closely with a more holistic-minded veterinarian, who has more of an interest in species appropriate nutrition than typical conventional veterinarians, whose training in nutrition only includes usually a 2 hour course, as well as whose recommendations are based on what pet company sales representatives tell them, rather than what they learned in nutritional class in veterinary school. And of course giving our feline and canine companions as much exercise as possible (under veterinarian’s recommendation) is always important when implementing any weight loss program. | <urn:uuid:4d0b1e68-dc7f-49c7-af7b-a268b0e95ac8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.petmeds.com/pet-health/weight-management/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967355 | 1,790 | 2.03125 | 2 |
rahulK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
manuK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
anujK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
ankurK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
adityaK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
19 & under
poonam waliaK V Shalimar Bagh New Delhi, Delhi, India
Computers & the Internet > The Internet
Ages 15 and up
Reading Guide / Book Guide
Teacher Resources (Lesson Plans, Worksheets)
Video / Sound
As soon as we found out about the competition, we formed a team, all eager just to start the work. We emphasized a lot on planning. We worked according to the SDLC approach in which we first decided our topic. We first brainstormed for different topics, came up with 4 final subjects. From that we made a poll and asked which topic most interests the students. The result was "Ethical Hacking & Internet Security", winning with a light margin from "Robotics".
The members then discussed the various ideas about the site template, compiled them all together, making 3 rough mock-ups for the site. Finally deciding the site template from one of them, they assigned different tasks to the team members and gave deadlines in advance, we all kept communicating each and every day to trace the progress. Each new idea and articles collected by the team members were sent to the coach Mrs Poonam Walia, for final reviewing.
We sought help from friends and acquaintances having experience and/or are working in this field when we needed advice or suggestions. We had conference session every week. Many of our friends joined these sessions giving us feed-backs and more suggestions on how we must continue and what we should add.
Each tasks were given out depending on the strengths of the respective team members. Those with good experience in flash were given the animated part of the website. The one good with Photoshop and Coreldraw made the template and the logo. The website programing was given to the one familiar with Dreamweaver and Frontpage. Some were made scouts searching for different articles from various sources like books, blogs and websites such as, but not limited to Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Webopedia.
At some occasions, the tasks assigned were not completed. In such cases, all the members pitched in to help their team mates.
One of the team member came up with the idea to include sample problems for the public to try and solve. The idea was incorporated in our design, we decided to teach the basics through the sample problems, guiding on what to do and how to do. We then came up with some logical Q/A with the same concept, treating it as interactive stuff.
The team balanced the work related to the website and their studies for the school examinations. Towards the coming of the deadline, we really started giving all we had, working on the website at least 10 hours a day. Each team member made great efforts and we finally were able to complete the website and upload it before the deadline.
The team consists of 5 members and a coach. India is a diverse country with many different religion and cultures. Each member prevails from a different region of India. Being from different regions, we have many different contacts, who were able to help us throughout the project.
We were able to conduct a few surveys, and the team members, all being from different places, helped conducting them in their previous schools or regions. Due to this, we were able to get a wide range of opinions.
Two of our team members did not have a computer at their home. Normally it would greatly effect the outcome of the site, but they overcame this problem, working overtime on the website in the school, cafes etc. They did not flinch and were able to greatly contribute towards the development of the website.
One of the team member had ties with students from different countries. We could gather data from students from USA, England and Australia. These students also helped us by giving various suggestions and telling us the trends of website building popular there. Thus helping us with completion of the website.
All the members prevailing from different regions and socio-economic background worked together, used their contacts, gathered data, and all this eventually led to the successful completion of the website. | <urn:uuid:b75c4b9d-adf2-424c-b689-42a349c240c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thinkquest.org/pls/html/f?p=52300:100:1607168633547305::::P100_TEAM_ID:453593535 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968748 | 901 | 2.328125 | 2 |
ROCKHAMPTON'S Alex O'Dea argues cycling is a far cleaner sport than it was in disgraced cyclist's Lance Armstrong's prime.
Armstrong is alleged to have run the most sophisticated and professionalised performance enhancing drug (PED) program known and as more cyclists involved come forward to admit their use, negativity is building around the sport.
As a rider for the Queensland Academy of Sport, O'Dea said cycling authorities such as the US Anti Doping Agency were making a stand to give clean riders their rightful recognition as winners.
"The sport is far cleaner now than it was back then and it is more encouraged to be a clean rider, rather than to win at any cost," O'Dea said.
"There was a bad time for the sport but now there is a lot of everyday people doing charity rides and things like that so it isn't all about drugs.
"Everyone needs to stop trying to put the sport down as not only are us clean riders competing against other athletes and drugs, we now have to compete against the media and people who are just trying to put the sport into disrepute."
O'Dea argues the fact that is not only an issue in cycling, but in the sports world in general and this is reflected in recent allegations against sporting role models across the board.
"Drugs are everywhere," O'Dea said.
"Just look at how many people overall use drugs for either good (medicine) or bad.
"Everyday items literally have banned substances to the extent where I can't take certain medicines if I fall ill, because it's on the banned list."
O'Dea recognised that Armstrong's case was a lot more extreme than basic medicine bans, but said people didn't often take that into account.
"People from outside the professional sporting world don't understand these things," O'Dea said.
"Things like basic cold and flu tablets are a 'no' and one little slip up on something little and harmless can make a drug test positive.
"Most people don't know that." | <urn:uuid:f79a2cb6-955a-4d9e-94a7-f5f5fe98560b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/news/cycling-pays-price-wake-drug-abuse-revelations/1585485/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981242 | 433 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Step 8 - In this step I will show how I created a textured brush or “stamp” from a photo. I took my photo of fallen brown leaves into PS, desaturated it, and pumped up the contrast using the Levels sliders.
Remember that when making these “stamps”, the black shapes are the shape of the stamp. Because the leaves were light on a darker background, they looked white. If I selected this pattern I’ll end up the ground as texture, not the leaves. So I needed to invert this image to get the leaves as black shapes. Go to Image > Adjustments> Invert. This will give a nice dark pattern that will be the leaves. I selected the portion that I wanted and “defined brush preset“. Here you can see the “stamp” in green.
Step 9 - Adding more details!
I painted the thin webs on the separate layer. Being lazy I just duplicate the layer and added the web to other parts of the painting. I also painted glittering webs drooping from the flowers and on the lace of her green dress. I also finally rendered the foot!! It was too large and I had to resize it. Then I added more spider webs on the ground where it touched her dress to show that she dragged and stretched the webs as she walked across the forest path.
The beads were then added to the lace. I painted “water drops” to the end of the beads, making them look dewy. I also added the swirly designs to the bottom of the dress on another layer. This layer was set in mode “Overlay”, I used a small round brush 5px to add details. I also used the fallen leaves stamp on the bottom of her dress as well to give it more texture.
Now I sprinkled “glitter” to the dress and ribbon as well by simply use the small round edge brush and stippled in the sparkles. Then I painted the earrings and the ivy necklace, just having fun adding more details at this point.
Step 10 - Finally I came back to her face. I modified and added more flowers and details to her head-piece. The hardest challenge about painting the face for me is not rendering her lashes, but keeping the eyes aligned with each other and other parts of the face. The guide (which I mentioned before) was really helpful; this way I can render her soft features and detailing away while keeping the facial anatomy correct. Flipping the image horizontally also helped to spot mistakes.
For final detailing of the artwork, I painted the finger nails and the wrinkling of the knuckles to achieve a more realistic look. Finally, I added freckles by painting random brown dots on a separate layer that is set to “Overlay” at 25% opacity.
In the final image, after I’ve saved my painting as a new file (file 27 at this point), I flattened the whole image. I checked the consistency of the light source, making sure that everything was lit from left to right. For the ivy leaves on the tree, the light doesn’t spread uniformly among each leaf, but shone on the clump as a whole, with areas of lights and dark. To achieve this look I added a new overlay layer, added “light” to the ivy leaves in the middle of the tree, added some darks were the wings were casting a diffused shadow, and added light to the snails to direct the eyes to notice this detail.
For the very last step I flattened the image again, duplicate it, and set the duplicate layer on “Soft light” to sharpen the painting. But doing this would increase the saturation of my artwork, so I go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and slide the Saturation slider to -60 (negative 60) to keep my colors consistent. I flattened the image for the last time and saved file. All done!
Thank you for reading this walk-through. I hope it gave you an insight of my work process and that you found it useful. | <urn:uuid:529ed9d5-cd7c-4a15-91e4-f33320923ff8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/photoshop/leaves/greens3.php?score=1&table=greens&user=199.87.253.75 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962932 | 860 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Mt. Union Sacred Harp Singers to perform at Springs
Mt. Union Sacred Harp Singers from the Rockwood area. (Submitted photo / April 11, 2012)
The Sacred Harp is a haunting form of shape note hymn singing with deep roots in Early America that has survived over 200 years. The singing is a capella four-part harmony music and uses the sacred harp, a collection of sacred songs and anthems, published continuously since 1844. The music is written in standard musical notation, but is supplemented by four shaped note heads, originally intended to accommodate those who could not read music.
The music includes 18th century New England fuging tunes, anthems, folk and gospel hymns, camp-meeting songs from the 19th century and some modern tunes in these traditions.
Linda Marker from the Trent area leads the volunteer group who gather to sing together in the historic Mt. Union Church on the Turkeyfoot Trail, Rockwood.
Admission is free. The program is sponsored by the Springs Historical Society. | <urn:uuid:53f4d5fd-d480-4c3e-b8dc-be31d177bc8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sun-sentinel.com/topic/da-ot-mt-union-sacred-harp-singers-to-perform-at-springs-20120411,0,7101655.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949748 | 222 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Maybe my argument about radio and distances and signals was right after all !
Maybe my argument about radio and distances and signals was right after all !
He talks about the issues of detecting radio intended for internal or "local" use with current hardware, but current radio SETI efforts are focused on looking for deliberate transmissions, so it seems a rather pointless article. There are endless debates on how likely deliberate transmissions would be, all based on different assumptions. Strangely enough, people who want to find a signal tend to find ways to say it is likely, and people who don't want to find a signal tend to find ways to say it is unlikely. The debate seems rather pointless to me.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
The original essay is here.
I can find fault with only one paragraph; this oneActually our type of solar system is quite a good candidate, because of the Jupiter-sized giant removing most comets from the inner system. On the other hand, the possibility of inhabitable moons is still debatable; I think that life may evolve on moons of gas giants in the habitable zones, but only those with minimal magnetic fields- this might be a rare case. On the gripping hand an extraterrestrial civilisation might have detected the oxygen and chlorophyll in our planets atmosphere and biosphere and be deliberately targeting us periodically with a ping of data.Why would they suppose that this very ordinary star of ours, with its very ordinary solar system is any different than most, in that it harbors a supposedly intelligent civilization? Our solar system does not really stand out in any way that would presuppose they would think it a likely candidate. A far more likely candidate would be a solar system with a Jupiter-like planet orbiting about the same distance from the sun as us, a planet with a large family of moons, one or more of which is likely to be the right size to be earthlike. That lets us out. Our solar system is more unlikely than most - an earth-sized body too close to its star to be habitable (Venus), and another body at just the right distance, but too small to retain an atmosphere that is thick enough to make it hospitable or even habitable (Mars). The planet in the middle between them has a large moon, meaning it has been the object of a collision with a sizeable planet in the distant past, and that reduces the likelihood of its habitability. Likely to be a desert planet, with a thin atmosphere, bombarded by lots of meteorites, enough to make a civilization unlikely.
We don't want to miss the next ping.
I hate this when someone's saying "only planet most similiar to ours can harbor complex life", how can you know what kind of peculiarities other types of life prefer.Extremophiles on Earth never developed beyond relatively primitive organisms IMHO not because it would not be possible, but because they are not viable on a planet where most of the enviroment cannot sustain their extreme tastes.
And do you really belive that it's simple to detect life on a planet based solely on some spectroscopic observations that cannot be done if the planet is too far and the planet have to make transits?
Well, if you include the possibility of life as we don't know it, then life could probably exist anywhere there is an energy gradient. In that case all forms of SETI would be made more difficult.
But I would expect that over time, a civilisation with good instruments could begin to make informed guesses about which worlds harbour life-like processes. One indicator might be chemical imbalance; our own oxygen-rich atmosphere is unlikely, and is caused directly by biological action. Atmospheres with other unlikely components, such as chlorine or fluorine, might also be supected to have biological processes associated with them. Speculation about this sort of thing is already occuring in astrobilogical circles, I believe; it is difficult to anticipate what form 'life as we don't know it would take, but it is a lot of fun trying.
Of course, with totally alien biochemistry will be another problem: mistaking non-living weird chemistry with weird life.It is difficult, because life IS most weird chemistry in universe, showing most awesome emergent properties.
One thing that may make SETI much more difficult is that maybe everyone is listening, but no one is speaking. Is there any program at present like the 'shout' sent from the Arecibo Observitory in 1974?
That guy is right: because the odds against it are great, we have no business attempting it.
I don't think SETI will succeed, yet I'm foolish enough to believe that you have a one hundred percent chance of failing anything you don't try.
It's refreshing to see yet again that the term "zealot" isn't relegated to those of various religious faiths, and can be equally, regardless of philosophical or religious belief, or even the lack thereof.
The smallest word is one bit long. We need to demarcate times between both bits, as well as between words.
Let's say we're going to use 4 bit words. Remember, all we're trying to do at this point is get someone's attention, nothing more. Assuming a 5 second interval between bits, and a 60 second interval between words, we start with a 1 to get their attention, then follow by counting from 0 to 15:
1 0001 (attention-getter)
Thus, we have a total of 32 1's. The zero's are represented by the absence of an event at the prescribed interval.
We also have 16 60-sec intervals between bytes (subtotal of 960 sec), and 16*three 5-sec intervals (subtotal of 240 sec) between the bits which make up a byte.
Thus, the entire message could be sent using 32 events over a duration of exactly 1200 seconds, which is 20 minutes.
Now the question becomes, what might we use as an "event?"
I propose that the best source would be a series of space-based X-ray lasers pumped by a nuclear explosion. Thirty-two, to be exact, and targeting the future whereabouts (when the x-rays will reach it) of a nearby star most likely to have an Earth-like planet.
To get more bang for the buck, we could even employ separating strata, so that we can target several such systems with each blast.
Furthermore, to ensure that the full message is received, we can repeat as required, perhaps three times every twenty-four hours, then over a space of, say, ten days, repeated again a month later for three months, then beginning anew the same time next year, for three years.
Thus, the requirement for 32 weapons becomes a grand total of 2,592 weapons, AND we've communicated, in the process, the length of our hour, our day, our month (perhaps we should use a lunar month, as that's what they'll be observing), and our year (they'll be observing that, too).
Then, we sit around and wait for about 50 to 100 years. If we don't hear anything, we can assume either they're not there, they weren't paying attention, they don't care, or they're not yet at that level of technology.
If we do see massive craft dropping in for a meal, then we can assume, "oops, we goofed, and we're toast."
Or perhaps just a side dish...
On second thought, let's do the listening, not the sending.
And since this sort of pattern is NOT found in nature, we should be looking for it in the X-ray band, not the radio frequency bands.
As Mugalliens illustrated talking is expensive, so talking to distant stars is not in my budget and I hope not in the USA budget. If ET gets our message they may have no idea (or a wrong and dangerous idea) of what we ment. They might not reply. I hope we will not reply to a message, when and if, we get one. Round trip for a conversation is likely more than 8.5 years. Who wants to wait that long for a doubtful payback on a few billion dollars?
Worse ET may come here if we indicate there is a likely civilization here. Even if ET's intentions are good, the results of meeting may be bad for most humans. Listening is relatively inexpencive and much safer. Neil
This is my first post here so if I messed up please cut me a little slack. Perhaps the most detectable signals sent by Earth so far are not Mr. Ed, Lucille Ball, the Berlin Olympics, or that Arecibo radar transmission. Radio, TV, Arecibo, HAARP, even the total power generating capacity of the USA are all just small fractions of the energy released by a nuclear explosion. It's true that the nuke's energy is spread out all over the EM spectrum - but maybe that makes it even more likely to be detected.
According to Seth Shostak at SETI, with our present equipment and if everything was pointed just right we could detect an Arecibo transmission from 500 light years away (http://www.seti.org/news/features/good-timing.php). Arecibo puts out 2.5 megawatts. Compare that to a relativly small 1 megaton nuclear blast at about 4 x 10^15 watts. Or what about the USSR Tsar Bomba test at 50 megatons? That one was sure to be an attention getter! I wonder what kind of first impression that would leave with the ETs and if it would influence their attitudes. Would they be a little less inclined to be nice after all?
I can only hope that if some ETs did detect our nuclear tests that they wouldn't jump to conclusions and instead tune in and see what else was going on over here. Maybe they would pick up My Favorite Martian and conclude we were just long-lost relatives or something.
I think its foolish to think SETI can't succeed. It can but that doesn't mean it will. The program is full of assumptions. Educated assumptions but what is to say that "they" are not broadcasting on something we won't know how to detect for another 2k years? But to NOT look is insane. It would be like not looking for a new species on earth because you've never seen one before. They should be there. So look. And keep looking until you can completely confirm something.
In order to dramitically increase the amount of EM radiation received at the intended destination, you've got to channel that energy into a coherent beam which points in one direction. Even if only 1% of the nuke's energy input into an X-ray laser comes out in the beam, that beam is still pointing at perhaps 1/10,000th of the cross section area as the unfocused bomb, thereby increasing by a factor of 100 the amount of energy that will reach the intended destination.
Sorry but I haven't mastered doing quotes properly yet but I would like to thank you Grashtel and Mugaliens for taking the time to address my comments about the detectability of the nuclear tests. I agree that they probably will not be easily detectable by ET. At least I hope not.
I am still curious about the relative power levels and detectability and I would appreciate being enlightened. The Arecibo transmission was 2.5 x 10^6 watts and per the SETI web article cited (http://www.seti.org/news/features/good-timing.php) the Arecibo beam focuses on .00001 percent of the sky. If my math is correct, to maintain the same power level across 100% of the sky would require 10^7 more power or 2.5 x 10^13 total watts total. That's still less than 1/100th the total output of a 1MT nuclear explosion. In terms of sheer energy, nuclear explosions still seem to me to be the strongest "signals" we've sent out into space thus far. And those signals are not focused on a single target like Arecibo; They go everywhere. All things being equal I would think that would make nuclear blasts much more likely to be detected than the Arecibo transmission.
However, are all things really equal? How much does the EM spectrum spread affect detectability? Does it make it more or less likely? How about the transient nature of a nuclear explosion energy spike? Would ET's version of our own Compton or Swift or Chandra be able to detect one? How about if they had some much more sophisticated version that looked at the whole spectrum at once? Is there anything occuring naturally that would produce a similar low power but local spike across multiple frequencies simultaneously?
Lets use a metephor. Lets say you have an equil amount of watercolours. You can mix them with a lot of water and spread it out further, but create a weaker colour over all, or you can use a litttle water and create a stronger colour in a smaller area. The amount of pigment is the same (amount of energy being radiated), but the area it is concentrated in is much smaller.
Why disperse it all over the sky such that the received signal strength is but a very small fraction of what would be received if you focused the nuke's energy into an X-ray laser and directed it towards where your target will be when the laser beam reaches them?That's still less than 1/100th the total output of a 1MT nuclear explosion. In terms of sheer energy, nuclear explosions still seem to me to be the strongest "signals" we've sent out into space thus far. And those signals are not focused on a single target like Arecibo; They go everywhere. All things being equal I would think that would make nuclear blasts much more likely to be detected than the Arecibo transmission.
You gotta remember that we're but a stone's throw away from a star that puts out millions, if not billions or trillions, of 1 MT-worth chunks of energy every second. Trying to spot a 1 MT fusion detonation in our solar system from 50 light-years away would be like trying to spot a firefly's 1/4-second glimmer of bioluminecense during the height of a Tsar Bomba event.
The wider the spread, the less likely the detection.However, are all things really equal? How much does the EM spectrum spread affect detectability? Does it make it more or less likely?
No, as the various spikes from the sun itself occur all the time and are many orders of magnitude larger than a 1 MT detonation.How about the transient nature of a nuclear explosion energy spike? Would ET's version of our own Compton or Swift or Chandra be able to detect one?
The nuke would be lost in a much louder noise. To address this with yet another metaphor, it would be like you and your friend, both sitting front and center on the 50-yd line, but on opposite sides of the stadium, trying to out-shout 80,000 fans so crazed that the none of the linesmen nor the backs can hear him.
There's a point where this might be possible. While a nuc-det does radiate across many frequencies, it's not an even spread, and the various strengths within any given frequency vary differently over time. Thus, a very sensitive detector programmed to spot the pecuiliar signature of a nucdet may be able to pick up this anomoly.How about if they had some much more sophisticated version that looked at the whole spectrum at once? Is there anything occuring naturally that would produce a similar low power but local spike across multiple frequencies simultaneously? | <urn:uuid:43c2c47d-0e40-4644-98a2-dd956604aab8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?75134-SETI-impossible&p=1257725 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960874 | 3,275 | 2.34375 | 2 |
A report recently released by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration showed a 20.2 percent increase between 2010 and 2011 in merchandise exports for the Miami/Fort Lauderdale/Pompano Beach metropolitan statistical area (Miami MSA).
The report showed that the Miami MSA registered $43.1 billion in merchandise exports for 2011, compared to $35.9 billion for 2010, an increase of $7.3 billion.
The extraordinary growth registered by the Miami MSA allowed it to be ranked as the fifth highest metropolitan statistical area exporter compared to other regions across the country. Key merchandise export categories for the Miami metropolitan area in 2011 included computer and electronic products, transportation equipment, machinery (except electrical), chemicals, and miscellaneous manufactured commodities. Top export markets for Miami included Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland.
“This very positive report from the Department of Commerce confirms the tremendous success our international trade initiatives at Miami International Airport and Port Miami continue to have,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez.
“Increasing trade has the direct result of increasing long-term jobs in our community, which is the type of economic activity we need in order to continue to position Miami-Dade County as an attractive community for businesses to invest in.”
The ITA works with American businesses to identify export opportunities for their products and to support the President’s National Export Initiative, which aims to double U.S. exports by the end of 2014. This initiative has a specific focus on helping metropolitan areas identify regional strengths in order to increase their exports and support local jobs. In 2011, for every $1 billion in exports, an estimated 5,000 jobs are supported.
“We are proud to help Miami-Dade County continue its expansion as one of the country’s top trade hubs,” said Miami Dade Aviation director José Abreu.
“Through July of this calendar year, the value of exports at Miami International Airport (MIA) is more than $25 billion, or 60 percent of all the trade from the Miami Customs District. Cargo tonnage at MIA also continues to grow with an increase of nearly five percent this year,” he said. “South Florida’s stature as an international hub for trade and commerce will only continue to grow,” said PortMiami director Bill Johnson. “The $2 billion investment in infrastructure improvements at PortMiami supports our goal to double cargo traffic over the next decade and new initiatives, such as the recently announced PortMiami Foreign Trade Zone 281, are designed to keep us competitive in the global marketplace.” For more information on the impact of MSAs on U.S. exports, including fact sheets for the top 50 exporting MSAs in 2011, visit online at www.trade.gov/mas/ian/metroreport/index.asp.
For more information on exporting, contact the U.S. Commercial Service in Miami at 305-526-7425, in Fort Lauderdale at 1-954-356-6640, or visit www.export.gov/Florida
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(a)Identification. A patient scale is a device intended for medical purposes that is used to measure the weight of a patient who cannot stand on a scale. This generic device includes devices placed under a bed or chair to weigh both the support and the patient, devices where the patient is lifted by a sling from a bed to be weighed, and devices where the patient is placed on the scale platform to be weighed. The device may be mechanical, battery powered, or AC-powered and may include transducers, electronic signal amplification, conditioning and display equipment.
(b)Classification. Class I (general controls). The device is exempt from the premarket notification procedures in subpart E of part 807 of this chapter subject to the limitations in 880.9.
[45 FR 69682-69737, Oct. 21, 1980, as amended at 61 FR 1123, Jan. 16, 1996; 66 FR 38803, July 25, 2001] | <urn:uuid:5401176a-d162-4d2c-a849-17d738b3f956> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=880.2720 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934689 | 196 | 1.992188 | 2 |
Alberico GentiliArticle Free Pass
Alberico Gentili, (born Jan. 14, 1552, San Ginesio, Papal States [Italy]—died June 19, 1608, London, Eng.), Italian jurist considered by many to be the founder of the science of international law and said to have been the first in western Europe to separate secular law from Roman Catholic theology and canon law.
A graduate of the University of Perugia, Italy (doctor of civil law, 1572), Gentili was exiled from Italy in 1579 because of his Protestantism. From 1581 until his death he taught at the University of Oxford, becoming well known for his lectures on Roman law and for his numerous writings.
In 1588 Gentili published De jure belli commentatio prima (“First Commentary on the Law of War”), the first of a three-volume series. A complete, revised edition appeared in 1598 as De jure belli libri tres (Three Books on the Law of War). In his view, international law should comprise the actual practices of civilized nations, tempered by moral (but not specifically religious) considerations. Although he rejected the authority of the church, he used the reasoning of the canon law as well as the civil law whenever it suited his purpose. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, in writing the much better known De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace), drew extensively on Gentili’s work.
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Bernardo M. Ferdman
Alliant International University
Martin N. Davidson
University of Virginia
The events of September and October, including the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the subsequent U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, have focused us profoundly on differences. We are inundated with information about the subtleties and nuances of the Arab world and of Islam and Muslims abroad and in the United States. We are paying attention to cultural and religious differences in ways we have not previously. At the same time, we voraciously seek to understand how the hijackers emerged in the United States and blended in relatively unnoticed. Published editorials advocate stricter controls and background checks on foreign visitors to the United States. And we are once again engaged in debates about the appropriateness and utility of ethnic- or other group-based profiling. The events of the day are shifting our consciousness about difference: How different are we from one another, really? Are differences good or bad? How much difference can we embrace and still be the same society? When does a difference represent danger?
Essentially, these are all questions about limits and boundaries. In our last column, we wrote that inclusion in large part is about the container into which we all fit. Today, this perspective is being tested in dramatic and new ways in communities around the United States, in the country as a whole, and perhaps throughout the world.
Unfortunately, we are prone, especially under conditions of threat, to become simplistic and rigid in our thinking about difference. Specifically, we resort to dichotomous reasoning: If you are Arab, you may be a terrorist; if you are not Arab, there is no threat (was the bombing in Oklahoma City that long ago?). Either youre a true American and support us in this war or you are anti-American and are against us. Categorical information about group memberships is often used as a quick way to answer such questions. What we do not typically think about when engaging in this type of reaction are some of our underlying assumptions, based on answers to questions such as: What or who is us? Who defines it? What signifies whether youre in or out of the boundaries? In the current situation, for example, does putting a flag on your house or business make you one of us? (If it does, then why was the shopkeeper who happened to wear a turban murdered just a few feet from the flag he had placed on his shop window?) What do we mean by American, and who determines whether someone truly fits the category?
This either-or thinking about difference poses a serious challenge to the society and community that strives to value its diversity and be inclusive. Full inclusion requires implementing processes that involve all members of the community in setting and giving meaning to the boundary. Paradoxically, participation in this process requires an a priori commitment to the larger communityin a sense assuming a predefined boundaryyet at the same time a willingness on the part of members to relax that definition of the collectivea willingness to be wholly part of something that is yet without a clear boundary or limits. What this means is that none of us alone, and no subgroups alone, can own or set the boundary. That boundary, those limits, must be marked together; and once they are marked, we must be willing to constantly reexamine them, in light of changes in ourselves and in others.
Granted, since September 11th, we have seen our nation make its boundaries more rigid. For example, legislation allows individuals to be detained for longer periods of time without due process, and it will be more difficult for visitors to the United States to get visas. The result is that many Arabs and Americans of Arab descent have had their individual freedoms eroded. But we have also seen many people, including high officials, work to make sure members of the Arab and Islamic communities continue to be included as part of the larger U.S. community. President Bush has rarely made a statement about the attack and the U.S. response without also differentiating between those who practice the Islamic faith peacefully from the very small minority who resort to violence in its name. Many in the Arab and Islamic communities in the United States stepped up their efforts to let others know who they are and what they stand for (including all of the diversity within the Arab and Islamic communities). In San Diego, for example, the Islamic Center and a number of mosques have held open houses and lectures to which the public was invited. What is notable to us about these eventsand sets them apart from historical reactions to differences during times of war, such as the Japanese internment camps during World War IIis the collaborative way in which they have taken place. Recognizing and embracing the differences that exist among its peoplein a sense, broadening our boundarieshas strengthened unity in the United States. The paradox is that as people in the United States have in many ways closed ranks, we have also recognized and allowed for our differences more than ever before, in a sense expanding our sense of who we are and who is included in that larger community. So the closing of the ranks has actually made us bigger, and making ourselves bigger has helped us close ranks. By being willing to live with this paradox and refusing to make it an either-or, the country has become stronger. This to us is one of the lessons of inclusion: Noting and embracing differences can be a source of strength and unity, rather than division, if we do it in a way where no subgroup claims exclusive rights to defining the boundary. When we let go of our claim on the whole boundary, and therefore on being the sole arbiter of who is in and who is out, that boundary can become, paradoxically, stronger and clearer.
Our attention to differences these days can, on the one hand, lead to exclusion, to designating certain people and groups as so different that they are beyond the pale, totally unacceptable and alien. Alternatively, attending to and allowing for differences can also make us stronger by providing us more resources and perspectives. There is strength in the differences, but only if were willing both to change and be changed, particularly in terms of our hold on the boundaries. We cannot hold on to old notions of who we are and still benefit from the strengths that the differences can bring. Yet, paradoxically, to the extent that those old notions incorporate basic ideas that appeal to a broad set of people, they are more likely to be kept alive as they are changed than had we held on to them in their prior versions. It is in this way that a concept such as freedom, a basic ingredient of the fabric holding the United States together, is more likely to be magnified if we can reexamine it and implement it in ways that make sense for the time.
As we attend to differences, we typically focus on the other and rarely on ourselves. Our analysis here suggests the importance of focusing not on them, but rather on us. An exclusive focus on the other, on the outsider, rarely allows for the required type of understanding and development. For example, who is included in us? What defines the boundaries of the collective? What makes us who we are? What basic values hold us together? In the case of the United States, it may be values such as democracy, civil liberties, appreciation of dissent and difference, and the like. As the two of us have struggled to make sense of current events, and have also wondered whether sometimes some differences are just too different, we have become more aware of the importance of the processes used to define and redefine the container within which such judgments are made. Dialogue, mutual adaptation, and engagement are key practices in this regard. So, for example, in the current dilemmas over the appropriate breadth of the container we call the United States of America, we believe that the price of admission should not be a particular skin color, ancestry, or religion, but rather a willingness to engage in a two-way process of mutual adaptation. This may very well result in a container that is different than it was at other times in the past, but one that, by its ability to adapt, remains truer to its original intent.
As the United States engages in such conversations in the midst of challenging times, it is also timely for those of us in SIOP to examine and reexamine our own boundaries and the assumptions that underlie them. What defines the boundaries of our organization? How permeable are those boundaries? What benefits and costs do we accrue because of that level of permeability? To what extent do our definitions of who is in and who is out fit current times and reflect all of our members perspectives, contributions, and strengths? Are there some members with more or less voice than others in the process of defining the container we call SIOP? Is there such a thing as too different in the context of
SIOP? And how are we to determine that? Please let us know your views and reactions. Send e-mail to
email@example.com and DavidsonM@Darden.virginia.edu.
January 2002 Table
of Contents | TIP Home
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Local Experts Are Searching for a Cure To this Deadly Disease
November is American Diabetes Month. We hear that word a lot lately—diabetes—as we should. Diabetes affects 25.8 million children and adults in the United States. That’s 8.3 percent of the population, according the the American Diabetes Association.
What is diabetes? What is the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes? What are the symptoms and treatment options?
Diabetes is a disease in which the body doesn’t produce or properly use insulin. There are two main types of diabetes—Type 1 and Type 2. “Type 1 is usually diagnosed in children and young adults,” says Dr. Jin-Xiong She, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Genomic Medicine at Georgia Health Sciences University (GHSU). “This is when the pancreas is no longer able to produce insulin, which is a hormone needed to turn sugar/glucose into energy that is needed to maintain life.”
Type 1 is not very common and affects only five percent of patients diagnosed. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form, affecting 90 percent of the people with diabetes. Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or the body is not able to use the insulin it makes, according to Dr. She.
Dr. Rene Harper, associate professor of the GHSU Department of Medicine, section of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism, says the big problem with Type 2 diabetes is the resistance. “The insulin may be high, but it is not working right,” he says.
There are many symptoms of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The basic symptoms are:
1. Increased urine output.
2. Extreme thirst.
3. Extreme hunger.
People with Type 1 diabetes show these three symptoms more acutely and also may experience ailments such as stomach pain, vomiting and confusion, according to Dr. Harper.
Heather Armitage-Dunagan, RN, BSN, Certified Diabetes Educator and coordinator of Ambulatory Diabetes Education at GHSU, says that some additional signs of Type 1 diabetes are unusual weight loss and extreme fatigue.
Testing and Diagnosis
Augusta mom Mary Anne Franklin’s daughter, McNeill, was diagnosed last year with diabetes. “McNeill was diagnosed with Type 1 or juvenile diabetes at age 10½, the week she started fifth grade,” says Franklin. Franklin noticed that McNeill had a voracious appetite but was losing weight. “She was extremely thirsty and had to urinate frequently. She was lethargic,” adds Franklin. “Basically, she wasn’t acting like herself.”
It is extremely important to get tested for diabetes if you suspect you or your child has it. Type 1 diabetes usually manifests around puberty—between age 10 and 15—and 80 percent develop it before the age of 17. However, doctors are now seeing diabetes in chidren younger than this as well, says Dr. She.
Dr. Harper says it is easy to screen and that early detection helps reduce complications later. If you do test positive for diabetes at a screening, such as at a health fair, follow up with your doctor to do further testing and seek treatment.
The strongest prediction for Type 1 diabetes is family history and race. “A person with a first-degree relative (sibling or parent) has the highest risk as do Asians, followed by Hispanics, next African Americans and then Caucasians,” says Dr. Harper.
Research, Treatment and Complications
There is a plethora of diabetes research being performed today. Dr. She is involved in a clinical trial called “The Teddy Study” as GHSU. It is a 20-year research program that involves recognizing environmental determinants of diabetes in the young. There are only six clinical studies like this in the world and three of them are in the United States.
At this time, the study is monitoring approximately 9,000 children to see if they develop Type 1 diabetes. “By identifying the triggers, we think we should be able to come up with better and safer treatment strategies,” he says.
As for treatment options, insulin is always used for Type 1 diabetes. Franklin’s daughter McNeill is insulin-dependent and will be for the rest of her life. “She has to test her blood sugar roughly 10 times a day by pricking her finger,” says Franklin. “Before she eats, she has to count the amount of carbs she will be ingesting.” When first diagnosed, McNeill had to take insulin shots, but now she has an insulin pump, a small device that constantly delivers insulin into the body and gives larger doses before meals and snacks.
Treatment options for people with Type 2 diabetes include controlling their diet and exercising, says Armitage-Dunagan. Other treatments include taking oral agents (pills), insulin or a combination therapy including both pills and insulin.
There are many serious complications that go along with diabetes including vision problems, kidney issues and circulation problems that can cause damage to the feet.
Despite Franklin’s concerns about McNeill’s diagnosis, she takes an optimistic view and says she is glad McNeill has a problem that has a solution. “If she tests her blood sugar regularly, correctly counts her carb intake and takes insulin, she feels good and healthy,” she says.
If your child has diabetes, Franklin suggests getting him or her involved in activities with other diabetic children. McNeill has enjoyed going to Camp Sweet Life and Camp Kudzu where she has met friends and learned ways to better treat her diabetes.
Armitage-Dunagan says that parents of a child who is diagnosed with diabetes should educate themselves, ask questions and involve their child in the everyday treatment of the disease. “But most of all, remember your child can still do and be anything he wants to be!” she says.
Cammie Jones is an Augusta freelance writer, wife and mother of three. | <urn:uuid:c6a899b3-8004-416d-96a8-079bf23716a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.augustafamily.com/Augusta-Family-Magazine/November-2012/Decoding-Diabetes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960017 | 1,275 | 3.15625 | 3 |
Ever wonder why you yell at your kids, take away privileges and put them in time out and nothing seems to change? It’s because you are spinning the endless cycle of action and reaction instead of stopping it. You are expecting your child to make the change and be the grown-up first.
A father I am working with has established a deep cycle of resistance with his eight year old daughter, who is a very strong-willed child and says things to her father like, “You don’t love me”, “You’re mean”, and “It’s unfair”. She has a little brother who is easy and flexible and gets his parents approval because of it.
Dad complains, “She says no to everything, even something she knows is coming up and she is supposed to do. For instance, I told her when we got home it was time to go up to bed – twice. Calmly. But when we walked in the door, she went directly over to the table and started to draw. That started it.”
When this dad, like so many parents, is faced with a child who doesn’t do what she is told, what is expected of her—even the simplest no-brainers—he feels disrespected and ignored and therefore reacts accordingly. The key is in changing his perception of his daughter from, “She’s doing this on purpose to disrespect me” to something like, “She’s being resistant to what I have asked which means she’s probably feeling unheard.” But to get to this type of understanding, he must first unload his baggage and defuse his buttons.
As a child, this dad was in a divorced, highly dysfunctional family where he felt like “nothing”. Feeling disrespected was not even in his vocabulary because respect wasn’t. He was nothing. His Appreciation Button reminds him of that every time his daughter resists him. His old, yet very alive, belief that he is worth nothing gets triggered when his daughter ignores any of his requests. Logically he then feels ignored, worthless, dismissed and disrespected. Which in turn provokes him to resistance, to control, to anger, thus unintentionally sending his daughter the message that she is bad, unappreciative, a disappointment, and not good enough—his baggage comes full circle.
His daughter naturally resists what she perceives her father thinks of her, and her integrity fights back—at anytime she thinks she can take control—especially around no-brainers. To stop the cycle, this dad needs to be willing to see that his daughter is not calling him a nothing like his mother did. She just doesn’t like being told what to do—something her brother has very little difficulty with (a huge thorn in her side). But Dad thinks it’s about him and reacts. His reaction causes his daughter to feel unloved and wrong and thus she resists him. It’s in his court to stop the cycle. He must first grapple with the old messages he has about himself from long ago and understand they had nothing to do with him and all to do with his parents. Just as his daughter’s initial resistance has nothing to do with him and all to do with her temperament. To empty our baggage, we have to let go of our perceptions. | <urn:uuid:3d82120b-6531-4ad5-a591-5b69ab855f94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bonnieharris.com/wordpress/tag/appreciation-button/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990287 | 703 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Read about other civil-rights pioneers honored by the Knoxville Presidential Inauguration Celebration Committee
OAK RIDGE - Two years before Little Rock.
A year before Clinton High School was desegregated by the dozen black students now known as the Clinton 12.
The first integration of Southern schools occurred with little fanfare in September 1955 in Oak Ridge.
It's a little-known chapter in the nation's civil-rights struggle, those at the vanguard of the Atomic City's integration say.
Desegregation at Oak Ridge didn't grab attention because the former secret city was still a federal enclave instead of a self-governed municipality.
It involved about 100 black students who started attending the city's high school and Robertsville Junior High School.
The city's other junior high and eight elementary schools remained segregated 12 more years.
Oak Ridge's initial school integration didn't make national headlines in 1955 because controversy was largely absent.
There was no armed intervention, or widespread unrest or violence, no calls for state troopers or the National Guard.
A photographer from Life magazine was there, snapping photos of the first day of integration - Sept. 6, 1955.
The city's newspaper, The Oak Ridger, used the word "calmness" to describe the process.
Those who made the unprecedented journey to Oak Ridge High School from the city's segregated Scarboro community, with its small school for children in kindergarten through 12th grade, vividly recall those days.
While ultimately successful and mainly peaceful, it wasn't trouble-free, they say.
There were racial slurs, some fistfights and some stinging indignities.
There was the racial epithet painted on a school walkway, quickly removed early that first morning of integration before most students arrived.
There was the cross burned in the yard of Principal Thomas Dunigan and the threats he received.
There was the ongoing isolation felt by the few black students in the huge high school, where they'd often be the only black student in a class.
"In class, every once in a while, I'd get hit with a spitball, or a thumbtack was put in my seat," recalls Archie Lee, now 72 and a member of the class of 1957.
"That only lasted a little while," said Lee, now a longtime resident of Santa Monica, Calif.
While his grades slumped a bit "due to a little anxiety" at first, Lee said he soon rebounded. By his senior year, he was a member of the student council and the first black person named to the school's National Honor Society chapter.
Fred Guinn, 72, of Oak Ridge, a member of the class of 1956, was one of the first two black students on the school's basketball team.
He remembers how he couldn't travel to away games because segregation was still the rule at all other state high schools.
"It was a terrible thing," he said. "The coach tried to get teams to play us, but they'd say, 'Don't bring the (black) players.'"
"Even at home games, the coach had to get permission from the other teams before (the two black Oak Ridge players) could play," said Oak Ridge resident Larry Gipson.
Gipson, 68, and a member of the class of 1959, began attending Oak Ridge High School in 1955 as a 15-year-old freshman.
Only 42 black students started attending the 1,642-student Oak Ridge High School that first year.
"We had our fights and our near-fights and our 'stare-offs,'" Gipson said of those first days of integration.
Then, there was the separation of the races after class.
"Because of the isolation of the all-black community, you didn't get to interface with the white students after school," he said.
"You didn't get the chance of walking home with your white friends or going to their houses. That was kind of traumatic," Gipson said.
But overall, he said, his high school days passed peacefully.
Integration of the rest of the Oak Ridge School System would only come years after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation was unconstitutional.
It wasn't until 1967 that Scarboro School was closed and the 250 students in that school were sent to the city's eight elementary schools.
The city's other junior high school - Jefferson - only had nine black students enrolled in the 1966-67 school year. By the next year, black enrollment in the 1,000-student school had increased to 56 pupils.
The lead-up to Oak Ridge High School's integration - ordered in a January 1955 directive from the Atomic Energy Commission - was perhaps more turbulent than the event itself.
Before the historic Supreme Court ruling, Oak Ridge's advisory council in a 4-2 decision in December 1953 passed a resolution calling for the city's schools to be integrated.
That vote spurred uproar, and council Chairman Waldo Cohn became the target of segregationists.
The next month, a recall petition to oust Cohn was presented to the council, and members voted to rescind the resolution.
Cohn narrowly withstood the recall election to oust him. Sixty-two percent of the voters in a record-setting turnout favored ouster, but it required a 66 percent margin.
"He weathered the storm and led the community toward a much enlightened understanding of the need for integration and the rights of everyone, regardless of race," according to Ray Smith, who has chronicled much of the city's history.
Smith says that the uproar actually laid the groundwork for an uneventful integration. By the time the Supreme Court issued its historic ruling on segregation, "no one was willing to take a stand against the law," Smith said.
Still, there were rumblings of discontent after the Atomic Energy Commission started the move toward integration.
In the summer of 1955, a parents' group calling itself Oak Ridgers for Segregation circulated a flier calling for children to be kept home from school.
"If you are opposed to the interchanging of the races, make known your opposition," the flier stated.
But soon after school started and integration became an accepted fact, those efforts faded.
"I just want to set the record straight, that there was a school integrated in Tennessee before Clinton occurred," Lee said.
Bob Fowler, News Sentinel Anderson County editor, may be reached at 865-481-3625. | <urn:uuid:9c8c3ca3-814d-423a-9445-613a1c207a57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/feb/16/little-fanfare-for-these-pioneers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979686 | 1,335 | 3.296875 | 3 |
MIT's PS3 Class
Posted by XanTium | 24-4-2007 19:50 EST
The first-ever class on the Playstation 3's Cell Broaband Engine has just wrapped up over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During the four-week course students learned about the new microprocessor and designed and implemented projects on Playstation 3s. The student with the best project, a 3D version of Pong, presented their work at this year's Game Developers Conference.
The course, which focused mainly on parallel programming, was taught by Saman Amarasinghe, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Dr. Rodric Rabbah of IBM.
Full Story: kotaku.com and mit.edu | <urn:uuid:90645505-97c1-460d-9abc-39ebec912730> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.xbox-scene.com/lofiversion/index.php/t599834.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918032 | 154 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Scientists in Australia have predicted that one bite of a burger can cause a heart attack. Recently, another group of scientists have claimed that eggs are as dangerous as cigarettes. I believe the danger is in the scientist. They seem so bent on defaming a natural, whole food diet and that drugs can be the only health care system. It also appears that the sicker we make the country, the more profitable it becomes for the majority of big business, particularly the pharmaceutical and food industries. Foods today are prepared so they are not fit to eat. Oh, they are safe, but they provide no nutritional value and most of these foods are developed with ingredients that we have never heard of before nor can we pronounce their alien names. In most cases, the general population of America would be better off and healthier without the intervention of drugs and physicians. I absolutely agree that drugs and physicians save lives in 10% of the cases. In 90% of the cases they create the other 10% of the cases. | <urn:uuid:f3eab7e7-1807-447d-900e-01a79a6ec0f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.terrytalksnutrition.com/terrys-blog/2012/10-05/medical-scientists-have-gone-mad/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967818 | 200 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Fractionalisation is a counterintuitive phenomenon, in which an elementary particle appears to break into two independent entities. A celebrated example of this is spin-charge separation, in which an electronís magnetic (spin) and electric (charge) properties appear tobecome independent degrees of freedom.
Spin ice materials -- Dy_2 Ti_2 O_7 and Ho_2 Ti_2 O_7 -- provide a rare instance of fractionalisation in three dimensions. Their elementary excitations result from the fractionalisation of their microscopic magnetic moments; these excitations can be thought of as magnetic monopoles.
This talk presents an elementary introduction to theoretical concepts for, and experiment studies of, spin ice. It focuses on the unique signatures of the peculiar nature of its excitations. These include unusual neutron scattering structure factors [2-4], dynamical arrest and long lived non-equilibrium metastable states , as well as a response to external magnetic fields that promotes spin ice as a new type of magnetic system which has been called a magnetic plasma, a magnetic Coulomb liquid, or a magnetolyte . This talk reviews several of these striking phenomena, and discusses open questions and future perspectives. | <urn:uuid:c3bb1d0c-b14a-4228-ae78-0d5d8a2b92ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://physics.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_dept_management&act=events&Itemid=451&task=view&id=1348 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908101 | 242 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Adaptive Project Management
Originally developed by ecologists, adaptive management has become a powerful framework for project management. It is a structured and systematic process to continually improve decisions and practices by learning from the outcomes of previous decisions. Adaptive management includes a number of organizational principles, such as iterative development and avoidance of irreversible decisions. Adaptive management relies of metrics and quantitative methods to integrate actual project performance to the management of projects. | <urn:uuid:0259ef61-8429-46aa-a51d-bb97da77b857> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techrepublic.com/whitepapers/adaptive-project-management/924193?scname=project-management | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916639 | 85 | 2.8125 | 3 |
The Law of Cycles
From "Witness the Magic, Become Like a Child Again" by Renee Guenette
Breathing is something natural, and of course could not be deemed a characteristic particular to children, right? The fact is that most adults have forgotten how to breathe correctly. Yet, the flow of breath is life itself. The Universal Law of Rhythm or Cycles states that everything works in cycles, and that is how life constantly renews itself. For every high there is a low. If you think about it, the whole world breathes. The incoming tides and outgoing tides are the breath of Mother Earth, following a natural rhythmic flow that is constant. If we observe babies, babies breathe rhythmically taking reposeful respirations. They do not take shallow breaths or suck in the air, they breathe deeply from the belly, using their diaphragm. As they breathe in, they effortlessly first expand the area below the navel, then the one above the navel or diaphragm, followed by the chest area. As they breathe out they effortlessly deflate these same areas just in the reverse order. It is a natural slow process. Correct breathing produces well oxygenated blood and good circulation therefore proper functioning of the cells to excrete toxins such as carbon dioxide. It is critical to vital health and yet most of you are not doing it right. You are holding everything in, under breathing or over breathing, breathing non-rhythmically and in a shallow way, inefficiently using your lung capacity, or breathing only with the top portion of your chest area. You forgot how to breathe when, as young children, you began to do too many strenuous activities of the body and of the mind. A lot of people now have to retrain their bodies to breathe naturally.
In the animal world, except for humans, the longest living mammals are the biggest animals, the ones with the slowest heart beats and the ones that breathe the most slowly. The whales and the elephants are the mammals that have the longest life expectancy. When the metabolism is slow, less energy is spent on repairing tissues, having the kidneys, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, gall bladder, etc. do their job efficiently. I compare this to vehicles. If you drive a sports car, the amount of gas (energy) burned will be very high if the car is driven at the high speeds it is meant to be driven. Due to the constant excessive speed, the maintenance on this car will also be very high as in the wear and tear on the tires, the repairs due to collisions, the breakdown in the braking system, in effect, any of its parts will wear away rapidly because of the extreme demands exerted on them. In contrast, a vehicle that is driven slowly but on a regular basis, will use up less gas (energy) to travel the same distance as the sports car. It will need regular maintenance but by no means will it come anywhere close to what the sports car requires. The human being breathing incorrectly is like the sports car, on the road to a quick trip to the scrap yard.
If you want to breathe correctly again, it might mean that you will have to take some yoga classes or find books or teachers that will give you a series of exercises to practice your breathing. A lot of people today are very stressed and this stress is reflected in their breathing. When stressed, people might breathe up to 100 breaths in a minute as demonstrated in the case of anxiety or asthmatic attacks. In such situations, the body begins to shut down and over a repeated period of time, the body does finally completely shut down. When you experience emotions that in the past caused you to stop breathing, made you breathe in a shallow way, or hyperventilate, you breathe the same way whenever these same emotions are brought up again in the present.
It is the breath that guides the emotional body. When you are afraid, you may notice that you breathe in a shallow fashion, as in before an interview for a new job, during a meeting where things are not going your way, when you are late for an appointment, or when you have to give a speech in front of your peers. When you become aware of your breath and learn how to breathe correctly again, you will be able to consciously slow it down and find calm and peace within. One practice that you can begin to take now is at anytime during the day, stop what you are doing, and take one or two minutes to focus on your breathing, taking a few minutes just to breathe correctly. As you take in a breath, feel your belly rise, then your abdomen, and last of all your chest area. As you let out your breath, feel your chest deflate, then your abdomen, and last of all your belly. At first, this will not seem normal for you because it is not the way you have been breathing for many years now, but with practice, it will become your natural, rhythmic way of breathing once again, just like when you were a child.
The Law of Rhythm states that for every high there is a low and this is why you have to learn to control your emotions and your mental state so that you can manage your life in the extreme rhythms. You have the choice to let your emotions run your life and bounce from extreme highs and extreme lows, or choose to control the reactions to your emotions thereby living a balanced emotional life. Do not let external factors dictate the way you live your life but rather make conscious moment to moment choices to live the life that you want to live.
Try imagining what the world would be like if the tides did not occur rhythmically. People would never be sure where to sail because they would never know for certain the depth of the water covering the sandbars or reefs at any particular time, nor would they ever be sure as to where to moor their boats. A chaotic tidal system would create dangers for swimmers, boaters, and marine life, not unlike chaotic breathing which creates danger for your own life. Take the time to become conscious of your breathing again, correct it and observe how you begin to regulate your emotions with your breath. Fear will totally dissipate as you slow down your rate of breathing and breathe rhythmically once more. The flow of breath is life. When you cut it off, your life extinguishes. Do not forget to breathe.
Copyright© 2005 Renée A. Guénette All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.
DailyOM © 2004-06 DailyMedia, Inc. - All Rights Reserved | <urn:uuid:2b8e5514-dce4-4f46-ba9a-c4d9f9606cf0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/display/printerfriendlylib.cgi?articleid=787 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959122 | 1,349 | 2.328125 | 2 |
|Rep. Israel Announces Legislation to Renew Ban on Plastic Guns|
3-D Printing Technology Provides New Way to Avoid Gun Safety Measures on Books
Islip, NY— Today, Congressman Steve Israel (D-Huntington) announced legislation to renew a ban on plastic guns that is set to expire in 2013. Recent reports have pointed to the new possibility of building guns at home using a 3-D printer. Right now, plastic guns are illegal under the Undetectable Firearms Act, but this law is set to expire next year. Though right now printing all of the parts to make a gun at home isn’t feasible, publically available plans can be used to print the lower receiver of a gun. The lower receiver is the part which bears the gun’s serial number and is the most federally regulated, possibly allowing criminals to circumvent a number of gun control laws.
Rep. Israel said, “Congress passed a law banning plastic guns for two decades, when they were just a movie fantasy. With the advent of 3-D printers these guns are suddenly a real possibility, but the law Congress passed is set to expire next year. We should act now to give law enforcement authorities the power to stop the development of these weapons before they are as easy to come by as a Google search. ”
John Feinblatt, Chief Advisor to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for Policy and Strategic Planning, said, “We thank Congressman Israel for his leadership in working to keep New Yorkers safe. Gun violence is a national public safety crisis that deserves the urgent attention of our leaders in Washington, and we hope many will follow the Congressman’s example.”
3-D printers work by printing layer upon layer of a material, usually thermoplastic, on top of each other in order to form a 3-D object. While the current applications of these machines are rather limited, with technology advancing and the prices of these machines dropping, experts foresee these printers becoming common household objects. The Undetectable Firearms Act that Rep. Israel is introducing makes it illegal to manufacture, own, transport, buy, or sell any firearm that is not detectable by metal detector and/or does not present an accurate image when put through an x-ray machine. The reauthorization would extend the life of the bill for another 10 years from the date of enactment.
In New York State alone, of the 774 murders that occurred in 2011, more than 57 percent were committed with a firearm, and of the 8,496 robberies in the state in 2011, 2,516 were committed with a firearm. As a state with some of the toughest gun laws, it’s plausible to believe that, if guns were more freely available, these statistics would probably be much worse. | <urn:uuid:8597c7b3-48fe-4bad-93f5-6c5b68608a92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://israel.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1121%3Arep-israel-announces-legislation-to-renew-ban-on-plastic-guns&catid=53%3A2012-press-releases | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959999 | 567 | 1.664063 | 2 |