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Rural Idaho Community Launches Campaign Against Economic Malaise
Twin Falls, ID (Vocus) January 7, 2009
As the global economy swings wildly and federal bailouts seek their mark, some communities are propounding their own solution: Buy local.
One community in Idaho has turned this message into an aggressive campaign, with radio, newspaper and TV ads urging residents to not only buy local, but to keep investing in infrastructure and training, and to “keep swinging.”
“The news is all about the economic downturn – we want people to focus on the inevitable up-turn,” said Jan Rogers, who heads SIEDO , an economic development organization in the Twin Falls region of Idaho. “By keeping our eye on the end game, we will be better positioned for that up-turn.”
Twin Falls, a city with a population of about 40,000, grew rapidly over the past decade as a variety of businesses expanded and moved in to take advantage of affordable land and a strong workforce. With agriculture and food processing industries serving as its stable economic backbone, the community has weathered the downturn much better than many areas of the country.
Rogers says that ‘buy local’ campaigns don’t go far enough. That is why her organization – the Southern Idaho Economic Development Organization – teamed up with the College of Southern Idaho to urge community leaders to invest now, both in site development and workforce training.
“Buy local” campaigns are springing up everywhere, with smaller communities more likely to succeed by supporting “mom and pop” stores and locally owned dealerships owned by people they know. Boise, Idaho – the state’s capitol – also launched a “buy local” initiative, with newspaper ads running through the summer. Eagle , Idaho – a tiny suburb of Boise – started a smaller campaign that consists of banners and sandwich board signs encouraging residents to spend their dollars close to home.
Twin Falls’ campaign is called “Preparing for the swing,” and shows a child swinging high in the air. “To keep the swing moving, you had to lean back, pump your feet and hold on for dear life,” the ad copy goes. “During an economic downturn, you have to lean back a little farther, pump a little harder and hold on a little tighter. It’s the only way you can ride it back to the top.”
The campaign will run on local TV, radio and newspaper as a positive reinforcement to help its communities understand that a local plan is in place to help stabilize the economy and offer alternative and additional training for future business expansion and recruitment.
“When this recession ends, we’re going to see a significant increase in businesses coming here looking for a business-friendly environment and strong workforce,” said Rogers. “It’s not going to be a trickle…it’s going to be a fire hydrant. And we’ll be ready.”
To see images, audio and the TV campaign, go to http://www.southernidaho.org/pressreleases/pr123008/
The Southern Idaho Economic Development Organization (SIEDO) is a joint venture of public and private sectors formed to help diversify and strengthen the local economy by retaining and attracting business to the south central Idaho region. For more on SIEDO, go to http://www.southernidaho.org.
About College of Southern Idaho
The College of Southern Idaho (CSI), a comprehensive community college, provides quality educational, social, cultural, economic, and workforce development opportunities that meet the diverse needs of the communities it serves. CSI prepares students to lead enriched, productive, and responsible lives in a global society. For more on CSI, go to http://www.csi.edu.
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, Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.
Vocus, PRWeb, and Publicity Wire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vocus, Inc. or Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC. | <urn:uuid:1547ec56-1524-43c9-9fd5-4dfbecba5e3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boiserealestatenews.com/2011/rural-idaho-community-launches-campaign-against-economic-malaise/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94239 | 849 | 1.625 | 2 |
The newest edition of Healthy People, officially released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on December 2nd, sets “ambitious, yet achievable” national public health priorities for the next decade. Healthy People establishes national benchmarks and identifies relevant data sources, allowing health professionals and the government to monitor progress over time. One [...]
Tag Archives: HHS
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released The National Plan to Improve Health Literacy – with support from Sebelius and others who see the relationship between improving health literacy and increasing access to cost-effective, high-quality health care. The action plan contains seven goals, each with specific strategies for different sectors of [...]
The Quick Guide to Healthy Living, part of healthfinder.gov, captured the 2010 ClearMark Award for the best plain language public sector Web site. | <urn:uuid:e4529b94-da64-42da-993e-83b861c84f3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.communicatehealth.com/tag/hhs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916279 | 180 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Accent on Worship
“Rise Up, and Follow”
“They set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.” Matthew 2:9-10
My grandma used to have a Christmas album, an LP (what we used to have before CDs, for you younger folk) by the Harry Simeone Chorale. Harry Simeone is most famous for “The Little Drummer Boy,” and that was a song on this album. But the one I loved to hear all the time was an arrangement of the spiritual “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.” I’ve never heard a better one – it was simple, with a deep bass singing the opening call. Beautiful arrangement.
And what was so compelling for me was the invitation – “There’s a star in the east on Christmas morn; rise up, shepherd, and follow! It will lead to the place where the Savior’s born; rise up, shepherd, and follow!” “Rise up, shepherd, and follow!” This simple spiritual gives the angel’s invitation as if to all of us – go, get up, see what God has done! Now, to be fair, the spiritual conflates two of the stories of Jesus’ birth. There’s no Biblical record that the shepherds saw the star in the East; it was the wise men, the Magi, who followed the star. But the point is the same. (And the shepherds did get up at the angel’s invitation and go to Bethlehem themselves.) As we enter the season of Epiphany this Friday, Jan. 6, the season begun by a celebration of the star-followers who found the infant Jesus, we hear the same invitation both shepherds and Magi heard: rise up, follow!
As it turns out, Epiphany, the season of light, is also a season of invitations to follow. We hear stories in our Sunday worship of Jesus calling disciples at the beginning of his ministry. We celebrate God’s light in the world, and are invited to follow the light, not the darkness. God is saying to us, follow my light, come see what I’ve done for the world in my Son, and then go and tell others. The spiritual says, “leave your ewes and leave your lambs,” and the first disciples were called to leave parts of their lives as well. And so are we. We’re called to follow our Lord’s light, and leave behind the things that would hold us back. This is a hard thing, but it’s a call that points to the light we desperately need in the darkness of our world.
So rise up, look to the East, and find the star God has placed before us, the light of Christ in the world. And then follow! It will lead to light in darkness, life in the midst of death, and joy in the depths of our world. May we, like Magi and shepherds, find our Lord and then tell the world.
Our Saviour’s Needs
Our Saviour's Lutheran Church on Chicago Avenue (up the street toward downtown from Mount Olive) serves the homeless by providing emergency shelter, transitional housing, and a permanent supportive housing program, serving over 650 people annually. They are asking us to partner with them in this ministry. We hope that Mount Olive members will, with their usual generosity, provide some of the needs of the people Our Saviour's serves. Some of these needs are:
General needs: laundry and dish soap, underwear, linens and pillows, hygiene items, cleaning supplies, microwaves, vacuums, fans, and kitchen items. Some gently used items are also welcome, contact Our Saviour's for details.
Financial donations are needed to help provide staffing, warm and comfortable facilities, and year-round service to those experiencing homelessness.
Gift cards: These give residents the dignity of choosing their own purchases. Most needed are Target, grocery stores and Metro Transit.
Day Planners are crucial to the residents' ability to keep their commitments and gain independence.
For details, contact Colleen O'Connor Toberman at 612-872-4193 X25 or email@example.com Please bring your donations to Mount Olive and place them in the designated receptacle. Gift cards should be taken to the office for security. Your participation in and support for this ministry is sure to be greatly appreciated.
Book Discussion Group
For it's meeting on January 21 (postponed one week this month due to the annual Conference on Liturgy), the Book Discussion Group we will read William Faulkner's A Light in August. And for the February 11 meeting the selection will be Native Son, by Richard Wright.
Tenth Annual Conference on Liturgy
January 13-14, 2012
The conference begins Friday evening, January 13, at 7:30 p.m. with a hymn festival, “Liturgy Shapes.” Leadership will be provided by Mount Olive Cantor David Cherwien, The National Lutheran Choir, and author and poet, Susan Palo Cherwien.
On Saturday, hear keynote speaker Gordon Lathrop discuss how liturgy shapes our believing and how liturgy shapes our sending. Participants will be invited to choose from four workshops which will explore this topic further. Senator John Marty will lead a workshop on the ways in which liturgy influences our public lives. Susan Palo Cherwien will offer a session on worship and language. Joseph Crippen, pastor of Mount Olive, will offer a presentation on children and the liturgy. The fourth session is continued conversation with Gordon Lathrop.
The day will open with Morning Prayer at 9:00 a.m. and close with Evening Prayer at 4:00 p.m. Gordon Lathrop will be the guest preacher on Sunday, January 15.
Cost for Mount Olive members is $35/person.
Adult Forum Topics for January
Jan. 8 Dwight Penas will lead a presentation on the Baptism of JesusJan. 15 Art Halbardier will lead a presentation on Development of the Nicene CreedJan. 22 & 29: Susan Cherwien will offer a 2-part series on Hymns and Worship.
A Familiar Story
One cool, quiet night, many, many years ago, in Bethlehem, a baby boy was born in a stable, kept warm by animals living there.
The mother, Mary, held the baby in her loving arms, as Joseph proudly gazed at his beautiful son.
Mary had a dream previously and God told her, “His name will be called Jesus. He is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” A
ngels appeared in the sky to shepherds in the fields tending their flocks, saying, “Do not be afraid. Go and see the miraculous baby born in a stable, The large star you see in the sky will guide you.”
The huge chorus of angels went away singing, “He will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God and Prince of Peace.”
The large star the angels sang of was so brilliant in the sky that many countries away, wisemen were curious about this new star. They mounted their camels and followed where the huge star led them.
Their journey was long, eventually bringing them to the manger in Bethlehem, where they saw Mary, Joseph, and the new baby, Jesus.
They bowed down to worship this Holy Child and offered their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
On that quiet night many years ago, the stage was set for the coming of God’s Son, who will love us, save us from our sins and teach us about God’s grace and kindness, forgiveness and love for us all.
And now, all these years later, each Christmas we follow the star, shepherds, and wisemen to the manger where the Christ Child is waiting for us.
At God’s beckoning, we follow him, bask in his love, and know that we are truly God’s children.
Blessed Christmas to all, as we renew our relationship with God and his only Son, Jesus Christ, our beloved Savior. Share joy, laughter, smiles and love to all you meet. Best wishes and blessings for your 2012.
- Pariann Schenk, Mount Olive member | <urn:uuid:975e09bd-a841-40d1-87f7-edc7fe50b6b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.mountolivechurch.org/2012/01/olive-branch-1312.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953885 | 1,811 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Complex adaptive systems and virtual team collaboration
Leading complexity thinkers apply biological principles to enterprises: The Biology of Business is a set of essays by ten researchers and practitioners in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).
Virtually Networked Business Teams
We have argued that the new emerging form for teams in enterprises is the "virtually networked business team" - a complex cocktail of team members from different organisations, departments, professions, locations, using different technology platforms and engaging with varying levels of team involvement.
We have proposed that these kinds of teams could be more effective if they designed their operations around the principles which underpin nature's most successful teams. rather than the traditional command and control structures.
We coined the term "bioteams" - business teams based on sound biological principles which have made it through millions of years of evolution's "survival of the fittest" - the ultimate seal of quality!
The Books Core Message in a Nutshell
The Biology of Business is a set of essays by ten researchers and practitioners in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). As is often the case with a collection of papers the coverage is very rich but at the cost of making it challenging for the reader to locate the core message.
CAS also has its own specialised vocabulary of terms such as Fitness Landscape, Requisite Variety, and Edge of Chaos, which though initially off-putting are worth exploring as they do actually define some important ideas.
For me the best part of the book was the section written by Philip Anderson of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In a chapter entitled "Seven Levers for Guiding the Evolving Enterprise" Philip shows very clearly how enterprises can adopt an evolutionary and self-organising approach. This is illustrated using a case study from Capital One Bank who became one of America's fast-growth success stories in the 90's using such an approach.
Anderson shares some valuable insights which we can adapt to help us with bioteaming:
- how to define the bioteams boundary and space of operation through Tagging
- how to develop the bioteams network of strong and weak relationships through Social Network Analysis
- how the bioteam can engage in experimentation and rapid learning through the practice of variation, selection and retention
So What problem is CAS attempting to solve?
Anderson argues that all organisations left to their own devices will start to breakdown. There are two solutions:
The Command and Control Solution - which involves trying to manage and control the organisation better and the Self-Organising Solution - which tries to create the necessary conditions for order to emerge from chaos. The book advocates the latter on the basis that:
"In natural systems order emerges as long as a system has an inflow of energy, enough parts, enough interconnections, and positive feedback loops....Such systems tend to evolve to a state between inertia and chaos called "self-organisation" or "the edge of chaos".
The three key elements needed for evolutionary systems
Philip goes on to suggest that all evolutionary systems depend on just three elements: variation, selection and retention.
Take the example of the giraffe:
- Variation - first some giraffes, through random mutation are born with longer necks than usual
- Selection - secondly these giraffes can access some food sources the other ones cannot and therefore are likelier to breed more successfully
- Retention - thirdly the longer necked giraffes pass on their genes to their descendents who also have longer necks
Over many generations the population of giraffes increasingly becomes longer-necked because they breed more successfully than the shorter necked ones
Anderson goes on to suggest that the most powerful way to consider an organisation from the evolutionary viewpoint is as a network of social relationships and suggests four rules for "Social Network Analysis":
- Evolution proceeds more rapidly when networks are partitioned - small groups with strong ties linked to other groups via weak ties
- Chaos may signal that a network is too richly interconnected - too much connectivity is just as bad as too little!
- A slow rate of evolutionary improvement may reflect too much interdependence - too many strong ties slow the whole system down
- It is more important to identify the worst performing element in a network than the best one - contrasting fundamentally with the current approach which focuses on identifying best practices and standardising them across the organisation
Organisational Evolution in practice - Capital One Bank
Capital One's approach to organising is highly biological, for example:
- Rapid Evolution - it conducts some 15000 new product introduction (credit card) "experiments" per annum. Each of these is low cost to run and only 1% of them are taken forward based on the early pilot market feedback. Anderson refers to the importance of having "Evolving Vicarious Systems". In other words having some way to make a rapid prediction of the likely value the market will place on the prospective new product before costly roll-out - a kind of "market proxy"
- Autonomy - it is everyone's job, not just the organisational leaders, to manage "organisational white space" and operate outside the traditional boundaries whenever the need arises
- Swarming (i.e. Rapid Deployment) - once Capital One identify a product as a potential winner they deploy exceptionally quickly and with force to attempt to dominate and cherry pick the niche before the competition can catch up
- Leadership - the job of the leaders at Capital One is not to control but to define what is important. CAS calls this "Tagging" which is about how we creatively use terminology and language to define what is important and encourage radically new ways of thinking which break with tradition ("legacy tags"). Management are also responsible for recruiting the best people into the network, keeping the network on its "sweet spot" (the balance point between chaos and over-organisation) and providing coaching to staff
So can we apply this to bioteams?
CAS has not yet become as mainstream as it should have. I personally believe some of its difficulty stems ironically from its difficult terminology - ie how it tags itself! Nevertheless the principles of Complex Adaptive Systems are hugely valuable at both the organisational level and the bioteam level.
In our manifesto we identified 12 traits of successful bioteams - for example, here are three very practical ways the Biology of Business can help:
- Tagging can help us define the bioteam's boundary and its space of operation (Trait 1)
- The four rules of Social Network Analysis can help develop the bioteams network of strong and weak relationships (Trait 9)
- The three elements of evolutionary systems i.e. variation, selection and retention coupled with the idea of a "vicarious selection system" can help a bioteam engage in highly effective experimentation and rapid learning (Trait 10)
The Biology of Business - Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise, edited by John Henry Clippinger III, Jossey-Bass, 1999, pp 113-152 | <urn:uuid:9d7b0836-7f21-40fb-864d-b5d10e0dad1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bioteams.com/2005/07/16/complex_adaptive_systems.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940185 | 1,438 | 1.890625 | 2 |
BROADVIEW HEIGHTS - Starting with the first quarterly sewer bill of 2013, residents will notice a new fee from the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
To help property owners better understand the fee and why the sewer district is now handling stormwater management, the district hosted a public meeting Jan. 28 at Broadview Heights City Hall.
Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, manager of watershed programs for NEORSD, told the audience that the district sees stormwater management as a regional issue because the runoff does not adhere to municipal boundaries. Runoff contributes to regional stream flooding, erosion, and water-quality issues.
It is responsible for wastewater treatment plants, interceptor sewer operations and maintenance, fixing combined sewer overflow control and other issues related to regional storm water management.
- Tier 1: includes properties with less than 2,000 square feet of impervious space. Owners of such properties will pay $3.03 per property, per month.
- Tier 2: includes properties with 2,000-3,999 square feet of impervious surface and requires owners to pay $5.05 per property, per month. Wells said this accounts for most property owners in Broadview Heights. She said that these property owners can expect to pay approximately $60 per year in NEORSD fees.
- Tier 3: includes any property with more than 4,000 square feet of impervious space and requires a fee of $9.09 per property, per month.
Wells also included information about how property owners can lower their payments by getting credits for managing their stormwater runoff.
"I want to make it clear that anyone can apply for any credit, except the education credit, which is obviously limited to schools," she said.
These credits include a stormwater quantity credit for a 75 percent reduction in fees if a property has means of addressing volume or peak flow of stormwater runoff. Businesses are more apt to successfully apply for this credit.
There is an individual residential property credit worth a 25 percent discount. Anyone can qualify if they have things such as a rain garden, pervious pavement or rain barrels.
In order to apply for the credits, property owners must contact their local watershed team leader. In Broadview Heights, for example, owners would contact Rachel Webb at 216-881-6600 ext. 6645.
Residents can also go online to neorsd.org and use the "Fee Finder" function to type in their address and find out what their fee will be.
To qualify for some credits, NEORSD may require property owners to make certain changes to their property or incorporate elements that aid in stormwater management.
Follow this reporter on Twitter @rrozboril | <urn:uuid:96652ca7-56a1-4a54-9f7e-4c0c8d30342d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cleveland.com/brecksville/index.ssf/2013/01/neorsd_representatives_address.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934521 | 555 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Did you know that Christianity existed between the end of the New Testament and Martin Luther posting the 95 Theses? Sometimes Lutherans seem to ignore the 1,500 years between Christ and Luther. In that time much corruption entered the Church as the Antichrist (the Pope) gained power and influence and came to dominate the Christian Church. But during that time faithful men still proclaimed the truth. As Jesus said, “The gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Hear from two of these faithful men: Justin Martyr (100-165), one of the first Christian apologists (defenders) and Athanasius (296-373), who battled to defend the Biblical truths about Jesus being true God and the triune nature of God.
Justin: “And the Word, being His Son, came to us, having put on flesh, revealing both Himself and the Father, giving to us in Himself resurrection from the dead, and eternal life afterwards. And this is Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. He, therefore, is Himself both the faith and the proof of Himself and of all things. Wherefore those who follow Him, and know Him, having faith in Him as their proof, shall rest in Him. But since the adversary does not cease to resist many, and uses many and divers arts to ensnare them, that he may seduce the faithful from their faith, and that he may prevent the faithless from believing, it seems to me necessary that we also, being armed with the invulnerable doctrines of the faith, do battle against him in behalf of the weak” (On the Resurrection, chapter 1).
Athanasius: “But just as this consequence must needs hold, so, too, on the other side the just claims of God lie against it: that God should appear true to the law He had laid down concerning death. For it were monstrous for God, the Father of truth, to appear a liar for our profit and preservation. So here, once more, what possible course was God to take? To demand repentance of men for their transgression? For this one might pronounce worthy of God; as though, just as from transgression men have become set towards corruption, so from repentance they may once more be set in the way of incorruption. But repentance would, firstly, fail to guard the just claim of God. For He would still be none the more true, if men did not remain in the grasp of death; nor, secondly, does repentance call men back from what is their nature – it merely stays them from acts of sin. Now, if there were merely a misdemeanor in question, and not a consequent corruption, repentance were well enough. But if, when transgression had once gained a start, men became involved in that corruption which was their nature, and were deprived of the grace which they had, being in the image of God, what further step was needed? or what was required for such grace and such recall, but the Word of God, which had also at the beginning made everything out of nought? For His it was once more both to bring the corruptible to incorruption, and to maintain intact the just claim of the Father upon all. For being Word of the Father, and above all, He alone of natural fitness was both able to recreate everything, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be ambassador for all with the Father” (On the Incarnation, chapter 7).
Remember that these men, like Luther, were not inspired by the Holy Spirit. They could and did err. Some of the corruptions of Church came from the writings of the men we call Church Fathers. So, we read with a careful eye, yet we also give thanks where they give witness and testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ. | <urn:uuid:7de8c27e-4ef9-40b4-9698-f51215a6710a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://saintmarkluth.com/2012/06/06/the-church-existed-between-the-years-33-and-1517/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979856 | 778 | 2.8125 | 3 |
By ROB GILLIES
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Among the graves of Fairview Lawn Cemetery, there is one that was a magnet for bouquets and weeping girls in the 1990s. The name on the tombstone: J. Dawson.
Jack Dawson, you will recall, is the name of the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1997 film "Titanic." And this cemetery is the final resting place of more victims of the Titanic than any other.
Now, with the movie's re-release in 3D and the upcoming 100th anniversary of the disaster, keepers of the cemetery expect more flowers, love notes and more weeping — though James Cameron, the film's director, has said there's no connection between his Jack Dawson and the J. Dawson buried here.
This is a place that has a deep connection to the tragedy. Halifax is 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) west of the spot where the ocean liner hit an iceberg; the ships bringing bodies back to land arrived starting late in April. Families came to claim the remains of their loved ones, and funerals and memorial services followed. Altogether, 150 of the Titanic's dead are buried in three cemeteries.
Gerry Lunn, curator of Halifax's Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, said this city was in mourning for months after the disaster, with much of its downtown draped in black bunting. "This was not just a one-night story," he said. "It may have been for the ship and the victims, but for Halifax this story went on for months and months and hasn't ended to this day."
On April 15, the anniversary of the sinking, a candlelight procession will be followed by an interfaith memorial service at Fairview Lawn; flares will be set off at the time the ship began sinking; and the Nova Scotia provincial government will tweet the Titanic's final emergency messages.
The Five Fishermen Restaurant and Grill — housed in the building where a funeral home handled the bodies of wealthier victims such as millionaire John Jacob Astor — is offering an April menu inspired by the Titanic's first-class fare.
And the maritime museum is mounting an exhibit of pictures and stories of the 150 Titanic victims buried in Halifax graveyards — 19 in the Catholic Mount Olivet Cemetery, 10 in the Jewish Baron de Hirsch Cemetery, and 121 in non-denominational Fairview Lawn.
Among items on display in the museum's permanent collection is a Titanic deck chair given to the minister who performed services on one of the ships that recovered bodies. The most touching artifact is a pair of shoes, donated to the museum by a descendant of a Halifax police officer. They belonged to the nameless child who came to symbolize the many children who died aboard the Titanic.
In 2002, Canadian researchers identified him as a 13-month-old Finnish boy, Eino Viljami Panula. But in 2007, DNA testing determined that he was in fact a 19-month-old English boy, Sidney Leslie Goodwin, who died with his entire family, including five siblings, as they were sailing to a new life in America.
The child's headstone remains among the nameless ones at Fairview Lawn, each inscribed: "Died April 15, 1912." The bodies were numbered as they were picked up; the numbers appear on the headstones of the known and unknown victims.
That the J. Dawson buried here is not the character in the movie did not stop the flow of mourners, said cemetery tour guide Blair Beed, a Halifax historian and grandson of an undertaker's assistant at the funeral home.
"After the movie I saw fathers with their daughters standing here crying. For two or three years that lasted. Instead of spring break fathers would bring their daughters here to see J. Dawson," he said.
The real J. Dawson, or Joseph Dawson, shoveled coal in the bowels of the ship and didn't win his Titanic ticket gambling as DiCaprio's character did.
"It wasn't until after the movie came out that we found out that there was a J. Dawson gravestone," said the film's producer, Jon Landau, in an interview.
Whoever J. Dawson was, "He received more notoriety decades after his death than he ever would have had in life," said Lunn, curator of maritime museum, which saw its attendance more than double, to 250,000, in the year after the film opened.
The headstones are assembled in the shape of a ship. Among them is that of John Law Hume, violinist in the band that played on as the Titanic sank. Somebody recently left a little replica of a violin by his gravestone.
Beed said it's not just teenage girls who choke up in the cemetery.
"All of a sudden seeing the names on the stones, they are emotional, men and women. It's like 'I've heard this story all my life and here are the remains and here are the names.' It's 121 in this cemetery and it's four rows. And all of sudden the story is real," Beed said. | <urn:uuid:e349ac5e-2b82-4309-9cfa-00a705c0f92d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ncnewsonline.com/cnhi_special_projects/x2108293550/Visitors-drawn-to-town-where-Titanics-dead-are-buried/print | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976255 | 1,051 | 1.953125 | 2 |
God created this world as a place of maximum challenge, and therefore, man must be inherently imperfect and die. The sin of Adam revealed this imperfection because of which man must make the transition of death. Accordingly, God told Adam, "But from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, do not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you will definitely die" (Genesis 2:17). Since we are all descendants of Adam, all must share this fate.
Therefore, death is the destiny of every person, and none can escape it. We are thus taught, "[Just as] no person can control the wind or stop it from blowing, neither is there any control over the day of death" (Ecclesiastes 8:8). No matter what a person may attain in life, he cannot conquer death. It is thus written, "The triumph of the wicked is short-lived, and the rejoicing of the hypocrite is but for a moment. Though he be elevated to the heavens in his eminence, and his head reach the clouds, he shall perish forever like his own dung. Those who see him shall ask, "Where has he gone?'" (Job 20:5-7). Even the perfectly righteous must die, since no distinctions can be made in this world which might tend to destroy or diminish man's choice between good and evil.
Because of man's inherent imperfection, death is for his own good, since it reminds him that he is below God and that he must repent each day. Since man must constantly be in a state of repentance, no one is allowed to know the time of his death. Regarding this it is written, "for no man knows his time. Like fish caught in a net of evil, and birds caught in a trap, so are men trapped when a time of evil suddenly descends upon them" (Ecclesiastes 9:12). However, God makes man forget his death, so that he may also flourish in this world.
When a person becomes sick and bedridden, he is judged whether he is worthy of recuperating, and therefore whether he is worthy of experiencing a special degree of providence. We are thus taught that God pays special attention to the sick, as the Psalmist said, "God strengthens the sick man on his bed" (Psalms 41:4). Therefore, although a sick person must seek out the best possible medical treatment, he should still pray to God for divine aid.
Power over life, children and economic prosperity remain in God's hands alone.
Life, children and economic prosperity, form the basis of God's control of the historical process. Power over these things therefore remains in His hands alone. God makes His long-term plans for humanity on the assumption that man will do good. As such, any sin affecting life, children or property, causes God to revise His plans. It is for this reason that God strongly forbade such sins in the Ten Commandments, "Do not commit murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not testify as a false witness against your neighbor" (Exodus 20:13). These sins are even worse than idolatry, since idol worship only affects God's honor, while these pervert His very control of history.
Murder and Theft
Murder is one of the very worst of sins, since its effects can be felt for all future generations. Since the offspring of a single person can comprise a significant portion of humanity after a sufficient number of generations, we are taught that one who kills a single human being is like one who destroys an entire world. Since, unlike animals, man enjoys individual providence, every murder forces God to set up new chains of events to assure the birth of those persons upon whom history depends.
Similarly, sexual crimes upset God's plans of matching individuals to produce special traits in their children.
Robbery also upsets God's plans for the world, causing redistribution of property contrary to His will. Since this crime also causes much suffering, it is the one sin for which the judgment of a city or nation may be sealed. The punishment for corruption is most severe, since only a major catastrophe can set things right, and accordingly the prophet said, "The people of the land have oppressed and robbed one another… I have therefore poured out My indignation upon them" (Ezekiel 22:29-31).
Similarly, the miscarriage of justice is a sin that can upset God's plans, and therefore cause general disaster. Like robbery, it can seal the doom of a country. All judges are therefore warned that their decisions not only involve other human beings, but have an effect on God's own plans, as it is written, "Consider what you do, for you judge not [only] for man, but for God who is with you in judgment" (2-Chronicles 19:6).
Chain of Events
One of the important tasks of Divine Providence is maintaining a certain number of righteous individuals in each generation. By their merit and example, these individuals offer spiritual support to all humanity. In order to assure that individuals will be born with both the heredity and environment, as well as the spiritual traits needed to be great spiritual leaders, God sets up chains of events, sometimes dating all the way back to Adam. Providence also arranges that before one saint dies, another is born.
Although man has free will, certain individuals are predisposed by birth to be good. Accordingly, God told His prophet, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I sanctified you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5). Similarly, when God needs avengers, He causes individuals predisposed toward evil to be born. Regarding these, the Psalmist said, "The wicked are estranged from conception; speakers of falsehood err from birth" (Psalms 58:4).
Although many acts of providence are miraculous, their super-mundane nature is kept hidden from man. It is for this reason that God only bestows His blessing upon that which is hidden from the eye, and never upon that which can be measured.
God has a special love for messengers of good, and therefore protects them with a special degree of providence, except where danger is imminent. Similarly, God pays particular attention to a person who is being pursued.
Although each individual enjoys particular providence, that extended to groups, institutions and governments is much more exacting. Accordingly, we are taught that the chains of events leading to changes in government are so precisely ordained by providence, that the time of succession is determined to a hairsbreadth.
Although war sometimes fulfills God's purpose, He constantly strives for peace in the world. The ultimate blessing which God wishes to bestow is that of peace, as the Psalmist said, "God will give strength to His people; God will bless His people with peace" (Psalms 29:11). | <urn:uuid:2c2c9e48-3975-4b73-be34-0cc08d5ebffb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aish.com/jl/p/ph/48939737.html?s=mbaw | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961451 | 1,442 | 2.4375 | 2 |
A recent Department of Justice decision essentially put it up to the states to decide whether they'd like to legalize online gambling. But here's the issue: Online gaming--and pretty much all of the Internet, for that matter--doesn't operate at the state level. It works on a global (or at the very least country-wide) level. There are numerous legalities and regulations to be considered now that online gambling will be handled by the states. Age and location verification alone are gargantuan hurdles.
Gambling tax expert Rob Bossart made this example, according to VentureBeat: "If a consumer uses an online gambling app on a mobile phone while in Arizona, would the consumer be breaking a law? Or would they have to pay taxes to the state of California?"
While game makers and casino operators already have their ducks in a row for the social-gambling-meets-social-gaming collision, we're a ways away from this being a nationwide reality. Regardless, gambling execs are determined. "We have all missed the opportunity to build tournament-style gambling games (for no real-money betting) on Facebook," online gambling firm PKR CEO Malcolm Graham said. "But in the next 12 months to 18 months, our gambling industry will move onto Facebook."
Are you excited for or dreading the onset of gambling on Facebook? What will this do the social games world? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment. | <urn:uuid:8e33ac50-66ac-4a8e-9f01-c8780939274c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.games.com/2012/04/26/online-gambling-facebook-2014/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937106 | 293 | 1.585938 | 2 |
- Mixed Race
- About Us
Innovation in Storytelling
The New Voters team spent time exploring nonlinear storytelling by blending video, audio, images and text in new ways. Here are a few examples of the experiments:
Video Tag Player
The News21 team at Maryland developed this media player as a way to present many videos and allow viewers to use "tags" or keywords to sort them and decide what to watch. The player shows tags on the right; the tags grow larger if multiple interview subjects raised those topics. Video clips appear in a grid on the left based on which tags are clicked. The player was conceived in a brainstorming session by all the News21 fellows and was built in Flash by News21 consultant Kristen Novak.
Blending Linear and Nonlinear
Jose Castillo, a visiting News21 fellow from the University of Texas, developed this mixed-media player to showcase linear video at the top, while displaying related items such as maps, photos and text in nonlinear fashion at the bottom. Two stories in The New Voters package, about Latinos in Fresno and Allensworth in California, showcase this innovative player. | <urn:uuid:38ea99d3-be16-4ec9-91a4-64f5a28be88e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thenewvoters.com/innovations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92746 | 232 | 2.859375 | 3 |
An explanation of the military alphabet in a Golf Oscar Oscar Delta, Bravo Oscar Oscar Kilo
Alpha Bravo Charlie: The Military Alphabet. By Chris L. Demarest. Margaret K. McElderry, 32 pp., $16.95. Ages 4 and up.
By Janice Harayda
The buzz this week might be about Lone Survivor (Little, Brown, $24.99), Marcus Luttrell’s book for adults about the dangerous work of Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. But you can also find good children’s books about servicemen and -women, including picture books that honor both veterans of past wars and those who are serving in Iraq.
One of the best is Chris Demarest’s Alpha Bravo Charlie. This vibrant picture book introduces children to the International Communications Alphabet (ICA) used in the U.S. military and in civil aviation worldwide. It also gives an excellent overview of the many kinds of jobs performed by U.S. servicemen and -women.
Each page or spread in Alpha Bravo Charlie shows a letter of the English alphabet and its military counterpart and signal flag. Then a picture and line of text illustrate the use of the letter. The page for M (MIKE in the ICA) shows a man and woman in scrubs dashing toward an arriving helicopter emblazoned with a Red Cross: “Medical personnel work to save lives at mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) units.”
Alpha Bravo Charlie is intended for children old enough to enjoy words or phrases like “flak jacket” (F or FOXTROT) and “Nuclear Class submarine” (N or NOVEMBER). But it could also make a great baby gift for the child or grandchild of a proud U.S. veteran. It depicts the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and even those of us who soldier at computers. The page for J (JULIET) reads: “Journalists travel in jeeps to report news from the front lines.”
Best line or picture: The page for W (WHISKEY), which shows ugly but ferocious-looking U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolts (“Warthogs”). You’ll understand how those planes got their nickname after seeing this one.
Worst line or picture: A line in an author’s note at the end, which explains how the military and later the airline industry adopted the ICA. “When service people transfer information verbally, confusion between certain letters, such as the similar-sounding B and D, could bring disastrous results.” Good information. But “orally” would have been better than “verbally,” which means “with words” and can apply to spoken or written words.
Recommendation? This is the rare alphabet book that could appeal to children who have long since learned their ABC’s.
Published: June 2005 www.simonsayskids.com
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
A new review of a book or books for teenagers appears every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews. The site does not accept advertising or free books from publishers, and all reviews offer an independent evaluation by an award-winning critic. Please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed to avoid missing these reviews and, if you work for a school or library, consider adding the site to your Ready Reference links. | <urn:uuid:ce005df1-80ce-438d-a799-2c3b67346565> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/a-childrens-book-that-honors-the-men-and-women-of-the-us-military/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=1c9f85538d | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921943 | 725 | 2.75 | 3 |
Victims’ vulnerabilities that abusers exploit
We talk a lot on this blog about the many strengths of victims of abuse, and how victims creatively resist abuse. One of the ways we can increase our strengths and be even better at resisting abuse is to be aware of our vulnerabilities. As we work to overcome our vulnerabilities, we make it more difficult for abusers to exploit us. George Simon Junior in his book In Sheep’s Clothing (pages 140-41) lists the vulnerabilities that abusers commonly exploit in their victims: naivete, over-conscientiousness, low self-confidence, over-intellectualization and emotional dependency.
It strikes me that these are the very vulnerabilities that conservative Christianity can inadvertently (?) impart to many of its followers and perhaps most particularly to females.
Naivete. Cotton-wooled in conservative church-going culture, many Christians are naive. They aren’t street wise, they’re unable to recognize and deal with evil people because they’ve been taught to think the best of everybody and to treat everyone as if they are honorable and can be reasoned with. And they’re unlikely to look for wolves in sheep’s clothing in their own little stream of Christianity because the wolves are ‘out there’ in other denominations and other churches, they’re not in our church!
Over-conscientiousness. Christians are taught to be conscientious – to watch their thoughts, feelings and actions so as to avoid sin; to confess and repent when they have sinned; and to put others before themselves. All well and good, but this teaching is often insufficiently balanced by instruction about how to guard against predators and evil-doers, and how not to throw one’s pearls before swine. We are trained to believe that if we continually run on the mouse wheel of do-gooder-ism, everything will come out alright in the end.
Low self-confidence. The legalistic and Pharisaic forms of church culture can make low self-esteem worse by teaching distorted wooden doctrines to regenerate believers: “You are nothing but a depraved sinner; you have no rights; all you deserve is hell,” or, “All sins are equally sinful; therefore your sins are just as bad as the sins of a really malicious, depraved person.”
Over-intellectualization. Simon explains that victims may try too hard to understand the reasons for the abuser’s behaviour in the delusion that uncovering and understanding the manipulator’s behaviour will be sufficient to make things different. The pop-psychology version of this is to try to explain the abuse as the result of things like a rotten childhood, unemployment, mental illness or other health problems. But Christians can add to a bunch of super-spiritual intellectualisations like ‘an attack of the devil’ or ‘lack of bible reading and prayer’ or ‘poor church attendance’ or ‘not being accountable to other men in the church’ (as if the other men would be likely to know how to see through an abuser’s deceits).
Emotional dependency. The false and sub-biblical doctrine in many church cultures breeds emotional dependency. When we are scared into obedience by Pharisaic doctrine, when non-conformity to church culture is equated with disobeying God, it can be a form of traumatic bonding. Two powers wall us in: the abuser and the church. We often find it hard to emotionally depend on God (a healthy form of emotional dependence) when our concept of God is conflated with our experience of Pharisees.
* * *
However this isn’t just a church-bashing post. The vulnerabilities that Simon lists are by no means exclusive to conservative Christian culture. I had a good middle class secular upbringing and got into the drug scene in my late teens, but believe it or not I was still very naive even while living the drug addict lifestyle. I could lie and take advantage of others when I wanted to, but I nevertheless had a naivete about the way the world worked that took years to shed. My naivete led to many embarrassments; I think some people must have thought I was weird or crazy or both, because I had so little understanding.
I can also put my hand up for the other types of vulnerability. I showed over-conscientiousness in both my marriages and had low self-confidence from my teens right up to my mid-forties. In thinking of multiple excuses for my abuser’s behaviour, I certainly over-intellectualised. And in my first marriage I was emotionally dependent because I worried that ending the marriage would mean my reversion to bulimia, the addiction that had dogged me ever since I was eleven. | <urn:uuid:60f9a240-8cd4-42a4-8657-ba58cb164db9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cryingoutforjustice.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/victims-vulnerabilities-that-abusers-exploit/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963516 | 990 | 1.773438 | 2 |
From the Editors
Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hilal Elver (HE): My experience in Turkey in relation to the headscarf is the main reason for writing the book. Turkey is very much a divided society: ninety-nine percent of the population is Muslim and it is a significantly religious society, yet it has also developed a secular legal order and ...Keep Reading »
Hilal Elver is a Research Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she has been Distinguished Visiting Professor since 2002, and is co-director of the Project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy housed at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at UCSB. Previously she was the UNEP Chair on Environmental Diplomacy at the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies in Malta; she has also taught at the University of Ankara, Faculty of Law. Her publications focus on international environmental law and human rights, specifically in relation to women's rights; among her publications are the books Peaceful Uses of International Rivers: Case of Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and The Headscarf Controversy, Secularism and Freedom of Religion. | <urn:uuid:2461cda9-fec0-4402-ad21-daa62c47cd8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/77390 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940572 | 276 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Lectio Divina: Luke 12:32
Do not store up treasures on earth,
For it is your Father’s good pleasure
To give you the kingdom.
Jesus modeled kenosis as the path of transformation—in Greek, “letting go” or "emptying oneself"
"There is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing. You let it go. Divine love is infinite and immediate and will always come to us if we don't cling. Often our own small acts of heroism and sacrifice seem pointless—except that what the Trinity assures us is that no act of kenosis is ever isolated, no matter how meaningless it looks, no matter how disconnected, no matter how unproductive in terms of [apparent] reward and gain. It connects us instantly with the whole of God, allowing divine love to become manifest in some new and profound dimension."
--Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus
Love is recklessness, not reason
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
Hard-surfaced and straight forward.
Having died to self-interest,
She risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows. | <urn:uuid:002d271c-5888-46d0-aeed-cafe71e22fe2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.monasteriesoftheheart.org/transformation-through-kenosis | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91288 | 287 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Most vaccines contain parts of a germ or toxin that have been made so weak that they can no longer cause illness, but will stimulate one’s immune system to make antibodies against that disease. Therefore, in the future, when they are exposed to that particular germ, the antibodies should prevent one from getting sick.
Since vaccines were first developed in the late 1700s, millions of lives have been saved. Smallpox, which wiped out entire civilizations, has actually been totally eliminated from the face of the Earth because of the smallpox vaccine. I watched friends come down with polio in the 1950s and become permanently paralyzed. This was a fearful disease until the polio vaccine banished it from the U.S.
We have effectively controlled outbreaks of common diseases such as measles, mumps, diphtheria and chicken pox. Before the chicken pox vaccine became available, more than 11,000 Americans were hospitalized and more than 100 died each year from the disease. It is estimated that measles, one of the most contagious diseases in the world, could cause almost 3 million deaths worldwide if vaccinations were stopped.
Commonly asked questionsAre vaccines safe? I believe they are. Thousands of people take part in clinical trials before a vaccine is approved. Millions of people are vaccinated every year. Some people may get local reactions of pain, swelling and redness at the vaccination site, but this lasts only a few days.
Can vaccines cause autism? I know this is an extremely controversial issue, but I can find no scientific proof in the peer-reviewed literature to directly link vaccines and autism. Common pediatric vaccines, with the exception of some flu shots, no longer contain mercury or thimerosal, chemicals often implicated with vaccine side effects.
Are infants getting too many shots at once? In general, infants tolerate these vaccines very well. Every day, infants come into contact with millions of particles such as bacteria, viruses and pollen that impact their immune systems. Delaying shots can leave a child unprotected against certain diseases, many of which can have dangerous complications such as seizures, brain damage, blindness and even death.
If everyone gets vaccinated, will my child still need them? It is true that an unimmunized child has less of a chance of catching a disease if everyone else is immunized, but if a larger number of children are not immunized, then there will be a greater chance of highly contagious diseases spreading through the population.
How long does immunity last after getting a vaccine? Many vaccines, such as measles and hepatitis B, lend lifetime immunity. Others, such as tetanus, last for many years but require booster shots.
The bottom line is that vaccinations have saved millions of lives, significantly lessened — and in cases eliminated — certain killer diseases, and have played a significant role in the increased lifespan of humans over the past several generations.
There are many well-intentioned individuals and groups who advocate against vaccinations. I hear what they are saying, but scientific evidence and multiple studies have demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of vaccinations.
• Terry Hollenbeck, M.D., is an urgent care physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Santa Cruz in Scotts Valley. A doctor with 36 years' experience, he invites you to view all of his previous articles at his web site valleydoctor.wordpress.com. Information in this column is not intended to replace advice from your own health care professional. For any medical concern, consult your own doctor. | <urn:uuid:1b6218c9-6ccf-4e8f-a92f-0742d056e19c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pressbanner.com/view/full_story/6400102/article-Your-Health--The-truth-about-vaccines?instance=home_community | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966531 | 698 | 3.484375 | 3 |
AFSC staff make visits to refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Almost 12 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in the Horn of Africa region.
Children at Dadaab refugee camp.
Photo: Christine Mbito
Providing Resources to Those Most Vulnerable
Earthquakes and tornados, famine and floods are just some of natural disasters that afflict humankind. Recovery from such events can be long, harrowing, and costly. Shifting the funds allocated to wars, defense, and armaments to recovery from natural disasters could ensure a return to normal life for survivors. Here are recent examples of AFSC’s response to natural disasters.
Support AFSC’s work providing humanitarian service and building peace in Somalia and the surrounding region. The Horn of Africa has the most severe food crisis in the world today. The combination of drought, conflict, and skyrocketing food prices has created the most acute humanitarian crisis for Somalis in the past decade.
Afmadow district in Lower Shabelle region and especially Doble town housed most of the children and women internally displaced persons (IDPs) stranded on Somalia side or seeking entry into Kenya as refugees. AFSC responded to the plight of IDPs and host communities through a local partner. The main objective of the project was to improve living conditions through the provision of essential drug- kits and sanitary pads to IDPs and host communities for three months.
AFSC is a Quaker organization devoted to service, development, and peace programs throughout the world. Our work is based on the belief in the worth of every person, and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice. Learn more
Where we work
AFSC has office around the world. To see a complete list see the Where We Work page. | <urn:uuid:ed1fc5b7-192e-4df8-8f64-c27cd0c85f77> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afsc.org/category/topic/humanitarian-response | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932398 | 367 | 2.21875 | 2 |
As I was looking through a booklet about saving seeds, I found that there were some great tips and they did a great job with descriptive terminology so we can all understand what it is the authors are exactly trying to get across to us.
This is a good reminder for experienced gardeners, and for those who consider themselves less experienced or for those who are new to gardening, this information will help.
Open pollinated varieties (seeds) will produce plants that resemble the parent plant. The parent plants are genetically about the same. A hybrid variety is a plant that has been crossed in a controlled manner and produces a plant that is different then the parent plant. You will have very few plants that are the same as the first year that you grew the seeds. This is something to watch out for when you let, for example, pumpkins mix with your squash in your garden. The outcome is any plants that grow from seeds that fell into the soil in the garden will provide some strange looking and not so tasty squash the next year. I speak from experience.
An annual crop (seeds or plants) requires only one year or season to complete its lifecycle. A biennial crop (seeds or plants) will take two seasons to produce seed and complete its lifecycle. The first year we generally see a plant that we would eat such as cabbage. There are a set of rules that a biennial plant must meet in order to set flowers and make seeds. The plant must go through a cold cycle, a plant must be well sized in the fall (not too big or too small) and the plant must survive the winter. In our climate, this will be quite difficult. We normally would have to dig up the plant and place it in storage as a root. Then comes the tricky part, the storage temperature has to be between 35-38 degrees F with a relative humidity 90-95 percent. It is further suggested that the roots stored in the containers be covered with clean wood shavings such as cedar. Cedar has a high rate of anti-microbial factors than most other types of wood. If you happen to have a good root cellar (and not many of us now days has this), using moist, clean sand will also work and then storing your crop in the root cellar works wonders. The root is taken up from the storage area and then planted the next spring when it will grow, flower and produce seeds. In some cases we also call this "bolting." You may see this rather quickly in plants such as broccoli which are not a biennial plant.
As a side note to digging and saving root crops, at this point in our end of the growing season, it is time to start digging and storing potatoes. It is best to gently clean off as much soil from the potatoes as possible and then let them sit in a protected area for a few day to a week (without letting them freeze) to toughen the skins and slow down the growth of the potatoes. This one seemingly small part of digging potatoes will help to slow them down from growing again. Potatoes that you purchase in the store have been treated with a chemical to keep the potatoes from growing again. This is also why using store bought potatoes will not work all that well for planting in the garden. I rotate my potatoes from every two years of which whatever is growing come spring, goes into the garden the following year. The second year, I throw out any potatoes that are growing and purchase new potato seeds. This will help you to maintain disease control and some moderate amount of pest control in your potato crop from year to year plus save just a little bit more money.
Next time, we will talk about seed storage and how you can safely put away any extra seed that you have from this year so you can use it again next year.
For more information on gardening, you can reach me at Stephanie@starpoint.net | <urn:uuid:16a15cac-ab0b-4d77-a146-c6a706bc440f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marshallindependent.com/page/content.detail/id/530627/Plants-and-seeds.html?nav=5073 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972067 | 793 | 3.5 | 4 |
Title: Lilmod Ulelamed
Author: Rabbi Mordechai Katz
In my weekly Jewish Press column, “Dear Dr. Yael,” I occasionally recommend books that will enhance shalom bayis, parenting skills and the quality of the Shabbos table. Lilmod Ulelamed, eloquently written by Rabbi Mordechai Katz, is a newly revised and expanded version of the original that was published by Feldheim Publishers in 1978. It is a book that can truly improve your Shabbos table.
Reading it over Shabbos, I realized its true value as a perfect parshah companion. Lilmod Ulelamed, a synopsis of the weekly parshah and based on traditional sources, contains commentary and insights from the Talmud and sages, past and present. Along with midrash, the book includes inspiring parables, anecdotes and sayings. It is detailed and offers an easy-to- follow topic outline for each parshah. Readers will come away with a fundamentally richer and fuller understanding of the parshah, having become energized by insightful life lessons that will mechazek them on a regular basis.
This book, also published by Feldheim, will add spice and excitement to your Shabbos table. You are also likely to benefit from the wisdom gained and improve the quality of a future speech that you deliver at a simcha or other appropriate occasion.
The week of Parshas Vayishlach was the Shabbos Sheva Berachos of my niece and new nephew. My sister-in-law, always game for a challenge, made an amazing Shabbos Sheva Berachos in her and her family’s beautiful home. As it was necessary to come up with an appropriate d’var Torah, I glanced at the “Commentaries, Insights and Anecdotes” section of Lilmod Ulelamed. And sure enough, a piece on the “Mitzvah of Escorting” emerged.
Based on Bereishis 32:25-33, this segment in Lilmod Ulelamed brings out the following: We learn from the Torah the importance of accompanying others. The night before Yaakov’s confrontation with Eisav, Yaakov was left alone when he returned to retrieve some objects that he had left behind. He was attacked by Eisav’s sar (heavenly guardian) and in the ensuing struggle, was injured in the thigh. Because of this, Hashem imposed a prohibition upon the descendents of Yaakov against eating the sciatic nerve (gid hanasheh) of the thigh.
If Yaakov was only injured and not killed, why was this prohibition against eating the gid hansheh given to his children? The reason the order was given was to teach them the valuable lesson of accompanying another individual.
Yaakov’s sons had behaved inconsiderately when allowing their father to return by himself. They should have remained with him. Therefore, this prohibition was also extended to them and their descendants (Da’as Zekeinim, Bereishis 32:33).
The Chazon Ish demonstrated the importance of escorting others. He was returning home late from a wedding one night and saw a young boy walking apprehensively in the street. The Chazon Ish understood that the young lad was afraid to walk by himself so late at night. He accompanied the boy home, even though it was quite a distance from his own house (Pe’er Hador, volume 4, page 48).
In this vein, we escort the chassan and kallah on the day of their wedding. This tradition of having a shomer with them on their wedding day continues to this day. The idea behind it is to protect them from any harm.
This d’var Torah was appropriately connected to the need for a chassan and kallah to protect each other for the rest of their life together.
Lilmod Ulelamed saved the day (and Shabbos) for us. It provided us with a fitting d’var Torah in the well-deserved glowing words spoken about the chassan and kallah and their parents.
Lilmod Ulelamed will undoubtedly inform and inspire a whole new generation of readers. The reader will have the opportunity to explore the Torah text with this insightful companion and experience the impact of every parshah’s eternal wisdom.
Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, in his haskamah of this book, says: “Lilmod Ulelamed, by Rabbi Mordechai Katz, is an anthology of parables, homilies and practical insights on the parshas hashavua. They reflect authentic Torah perspectives on life. The parshiyos have been summarized in an easy-to-read format. They present timeless messages that are a welcome addition to the family Shabbos table or to anyone learning the parshas hashavua.
“This monumental work, which was first published over 30 years ago, is being re-introduced in clear and simple language that benefits both the beginner and those who are well-versed in the Torah. Each parshah contains practical lessons that can be immediately applied to our lives. Lilmod Ulelamed offers hundreds of anecdotes and stories that make for lively and enriching reading.”
With similar complimentary sentiments offered by Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, Rabbi Yitzchok Scheiner, Rabbi Joseph Elias and the Naroler Rebbe, Rabbi Berish Shapiro (and an endorsement of the original Lilmod Ulelamed sefer by Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l), I highly recommend this incredible book.
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If you have my 2012 CowParade Austin calendar, you probably flipped it over to November and said to yourself “Hey, what’s up with this cow? It’s different than the others!”.
This cow, named Texas Moosicians, was created by Mitch Brookman. Mitch evidently is a very talented artist who specializes in mosaics.
The CowParade Austin website, which is still semi-functional, lists Mitch’s website as http://www.mitchbrookmanmosaics.com, which does not seem to be valid at this time.
Doing a little searching using Bing and Google, I was able to find an interesting news post from The Oasis Restaurant out at Lake Travis, where they were having a contest to name Mitch’s cow (this was in July 2011).
I could also locate this web page, which appears to be on Facebook, but you do not have to be logged in to Facebook to see the photos there.
If you open another web browser window and login to Facebook, you can then come back to this web browser window and view Mitch Brookman’s Facebook page by clicking on this link.
And here is his Texas Moosician’s Facebook page:
It was late on the Saturday morning of September 3, 2011, when Dad and I arrived at the location where Texas Moosicians was on public display. It was at West Willie Nelson Blvd (2nd Street) and Lavaca – which was at the base of the stairs leading up to the Moody Theater at the Austin City Limits Studio.
This was the 19th of 24 cows that we photographed that morning – by far the most we visited in any one day. We arrived at exactly 11:00 AM. The sun was high in the sky, and it was a very hard light. I photographed the plaque first, and then started from the left front side of the cow.
The Texas musicians shown on the left side of the cow, from front to back, are Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, and Janis Joplin.
Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock, TX in 1936 and died young in an airplane crash in 1959. From Wikipedia: Holly was among the first group of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2004 Rolling Stone (magazine) ranked Holly #13 among “The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time”.
Lyle Lovett was born in north Harris County (the county that Houston is in) in 1957. His musical career took off while he was attending Texas A&M University. I have been to two Lyle Lovett (and his Large Band) concerts, and really had a great time!
Reminder: You can always view any photo at a larger size by just clicking on it. You will then need to use your browser’s “Back Button” to return to my story.
The Willie Nelson statue now sits in almost the exact same location that Texas Moosicians was on display at. Willie Nelson still lives just west of Austin. Barb and I took Dad and Rita to see a Willie Nelson concert at Riverbend Church for his Father’s Day present last summer.
Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, TX, but her musical career took off while she was attending The University of Texas at Austin. Janis could really let loose, and was a superstar in the late 60′s – she even performed at the legendary Woodstock music festival in 1969, as one of the main attractions. She came on stage late on a Saturday evening, and performed in front of a half a million people until well into Sunday morning.
Although seeing this cow was very exciting, photographing it was very challenging. The hard, harsh sunlight was directly above. The background was very busy, and even though you still see some parked cars behind the cow, I did my best to wait until there were not also pedestrians and other vehicle traffic on the street. Note also the steel railing of the fence behind the cow…
That railing meant that any photograph of the other side of the cow was going to include the railing, or using some difficult to achieve photographic technique. I wasn’t going to leave without at least trying to get a photo of the other side of this very interesting cow!
To get this photo, I closed the 3 legs of my Gitzo tripod, so that they came together, and raised the center column all the way – which essentially turned it into as tall of a monopod that it could be. I put my Canon 5D Mark II into live-view mode, zoomed my 24 – 105mm f/4 lens to as wide of a field of view that it could go (24mm), and shielded the rear LCD of the camera from the direct sunlight, and stood on my tippy-toes to see the composition on the rear LCD. I used a fairly small aperture, which combined with the 24mm focal length gave me a fairly deep depth-of-field.
The musicians that Mitch Brookman put onto this side of his Texas Moosicians cow are (from read to front): Selena, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Roy Orbison, and Billy Gibbons.
Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was born in Lake Jackson, Texas, in 1971. According to Wikipedia, Selena was named the “top Latin artist of the ’90s” and “Best selling Latin artist of the decade” by Billboard for her fourteen top-ten singles in the Top Latin Songs chart, including seven number-one hits. In 1995, when Selena confronted the president of her fan club for embezzling money, the accused woman shot and killed Selena as the singer tried to flee.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was born in Dallas, Texas in October 1954. Stevie moved to Austin when he was 17 years old. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I saw Stevie Ray Vaughan play 3 or 4 times live – and it was up close and personal. He was the lead guitarist in a band called Paul Ray and the Cobras that played weekly out at the Soap Creek Saloon that used to be out west on Bee Caves Road in the mid-to-late 70′s. That joint could hold maybe 150 people, and we would sit at a table 20 feet from the band and drink beer by the pitcher…. A few people would dance, but almost everyone would just enjoy the music and stare at the band.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was a huge influence on my music listening. I still have several vinyl LPs, and a handful of CDs of his.
Stevie died in a helicopter crash along with 3 members of Eric Clapton’s band when leaving an outdoor concert in Wisconsin in August 1990.
Roy Orbison was born in Vernon, Texas in 1936. Wikipedia reports: Roy’s greatest success came with Monument Records between 1960 and 1964, when 22 of his songs placed on the Billboard Top Forty. … In 1988, he joined the supergroup Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. Roy dies of a heart attack in December of that year, at the zenith of his resurgence.
I really liked the Traveling Wilburys, but the song that I still get chills when I hear it, is a song called Crying that Roy Orbison did as a duet with K. D. Lang in 1987. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it #69 on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. I don’t know about such rankings, but it is a beautifully powerful song.
William Frederick “Billy” Gibbons was born in the Tanglewood subdivision of Houston, Texas in December 1949. Billy is best known as the guitarist of the Texas blues-rock band ZZ Top.
The only time that I ever saw ZZ Top perform live was during their Worldwide Texas Tour at the 1974 Labor Day show at Texas Memorial Stadium here in Austin. The concert was the last to be held at the stadium for two decades, as the artificial turf was damaged by rowdy fans. Also performing at that show was Santana, Joe Cocker, and Bad Company. Jay Boy Adams and Jimmy Page also showed up to play. An aerial photograph of the crowd in the stadium was later used as the record sleeve for ZZ Top’s 1975 album Fandango!. If you ever see it, I’m sitting with my buddies on about the 35 yard line, southwest of mid-field, and yes, we were roasting in the mid-day Summer sun.
When I look at the metadata embedded into the 5 photos that I took of Mitch Brookman’s cow named Texas Moosicians, I find that I was only there for 6 short minutes photographing it. It is simply amazing how such a work of art can bring back so many wonderful memories from decades ago.
The photos that I show here are not full of highly saturated colors, like most of the other cows that I was drawn to, but the colorful musicians shown on the sides of Texas Moosicians made this an easy choice to include it in my 2012 CowParade Austin calendar. | <urn:uuid:3baf7169-c587-407f-bd2b-39c55409fcd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greggmack.com/category/photography/cowparade-austin/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979994 | 1,932 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Windows 7 Anti-Virus 2012 is a another new rogue anti-virus program that uses fake alerts and system scans with dishonest results to make you think that your PC has an army of virus infections.
Windows 7 Anti-Virus 2012, like other rogue security programs, has two sides – a visible side where it pretends to be an anti-virus and security product, and a hidden side where it attacks your PC hiding it’s malicious nature. Win 7 Anti-Virus 2012 is in the same subcategory as many other rogue security programs; some other examples of threats that are nearly identical to Win 7 Anti-Virus 2012 are Vista Total Security 2012, XP Total Security 2012, XP Internet Security 2012 and Vista Anti-Spyware 2012.
Windows 7 Anti-Virus 2012 will modify your Windows Registry to enable automatic startup every time you start your PC. Removing this rouge program is difficult. Call your local Ace Computer Guy to help restore your PC.
In the last week I have had 3 service calls from people whose computer has become infected with this malware. System Fix is a fake computer analysis program from the FakeHDD family of malware. This rogue program displays false alerts that are designed to make you think that your computer has hard disk problems causing corrupt and missing data. It displays these alerts in order to scam you into purchasing the program to fix these issues. In reality, there is nothing wrong with your computer or data. System Fix is installed through hacked sites, infected email attachments, or through fake online scanner pages.
Once installed, System Fix will display false error messages and security warnings. When you click on of these alerts, System Fix will automatically start to scan your computer and find additional errors that it states it cannot fix until you purchase and install an bogus upgrade that can fix the problem. Do not give these scam artists a penny of your money. Give me or your local computer guy a call to remove this malware.
I wrote about Security Center in detail not so long ago and want to dispel all doubts you may have about the legitimacy of Security Center.
This is a bogus anti-malware application designed to scare you by displaying a great deal of security alerts and lists of “infected files” and then convince you it can be truly helpful when it comes to removing the virus. But as charitable as it may appear at first, in the end, it is going to ask for some money in order to provide you and your computer with perpetual serenity.
How can you tell if it’s visiting you? Actually, it is quite easy. Once you start observing exceptionally sluggish performance, occasional system crashes, or annoying pop-ups and commercial ads start taking over your screen, you may be sure you are currently hosting Security Center. It may also start changing your background or it could also block normal system files from running.
It will most probably try to control some of you system files which could damage data stored on your PC. The Security Center virus is also able to send your passwords from the Internet browser (Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Outlook etc. ) to third parties.
To put it in a nutshell, Security Center is a malicious application and you shouldn’t consider even for a moment the possibility of paying to get the extended version. So the best thing to do after you notice its presence in your machine is to remove it as quickly as possible.
Windows Risks Prevention is fake anti-spyware program that will take control over your computer and turn it into a real mess.
This malicious software will aim in every possible way to convince you that it is genuine and is the best possible security application. From frightening windows, warning you that your PC is under threat of severe malware attacks, to fake full scan system notices that provide you with misleading information.
Once Windows Risks Prevention has distracted you with numerous fake messages, alarming you of virus infection, its only aim is to convince you to purchase the full version of the product.
To be even more convincing that you need this software (even though you do not need it at all, but on the contrary – you have to get rid of it immediately in order to save your PC), the installation of this program can result in slowing down the computer operations and internet connection, as well as annoying pop-ups. Not only that, but Windows Risks Prevention can cause blocking executable files from running, installing itself or connecting to the Internet without permission and even system crashes.
Unfortunately, according to the results, provided by the analyzing tool VirusTotal, Windows Risks Prevention is detected only 17 from 42 times by some anti-spyware programs.
Given that this rogue anti-malware application has already been discussed before, I am going to be as concise as possible. Windows Custom Settings is a fake anti-virus program with the only purpose of its existence is to scare you by displaying nonexistent security threats and convince you pay for the imaginary services it offers.
How do you know you’ve been attacked by it? Well, if you start noticing annoying pop-ups, occasional system crashes, slow system performance, unexpected loading of web pages or blocking exe files from running, then you may infected.
Here’s a word of advice – don’t take seriously any of the alerts or scan results it shows you because none of them are true. And what you should do is stay away from this application, and in case this advice comes a bit too late, then get rid of this bogus anti-virus program as soon as possible.
While surfing the Internet, concentrating on the latest news or laughing at some funny video, people even do not notice how they become victims of the attacks of cyber criminals. Unfortunately, there it is – an unexpected message from the latest rogueware program, known as Windows Custom Settings pops-up on your screen, warning that your computer is under threat of unauthorized access.
Despite the frightening messages that an Unknown Trojan has been detected on your system, these warnings are fake and the truth is: Windows Custom Settings is nothing but a part of the Fake Microsoft Essentials infection that aims to penetrate into your computer and prompts you to purchase the full software.
For that reason, you have to be aware and keep in mind that any scan processes or frightening messages, initiated by this malicious program, are just another attempt of hackers to attack your PC and take advantage of your personal information. This program will not detect real threats, neither will it protect the system from future infections.
And here is the ugly truth – the only intention of Windows Custom Settings is to get over your computer system and, thus, mislead you into buying the full program. Do not believe IN any of the tricky messages and pop-ups because you will just be trapped into wasting your money.
My advice is when you notice such messages on your computer, stay calm and remove this rogue anti-spyware application. Please use only trustful software programs to ensure the continual safety of your computer.
View the original article here | <urn:uuid:88cd1ad0-56a0-4fcf-902b-594cf712c304> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.acecomputerguy.net/category/malware-and-spyware/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936112 | 1,436 | 1.632813 | 2 |
‘RETRO TECH: Artists’ Books & Bindings by Karen Hanmer’ Showcases Best Work by Chicago Artist at FAU’s Wimberly Library
BOCA RATON, FL (February 7, 2008) – The Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University Libraries is sponsoring an exhibition, “RETRO TECH: Artists’ Books & Bindings by Karen Hanmer,” from Tuesday, February 5, through Monday, April 28, at the S.E. Wimberly Library, 777 Glades Road, on the Boca Raton campus.
Hanmer, a Chicago book and installation artist, showcases her best work in RETRO TECH. Her exhibition includes artists' books, design bindings and even an installation featuring over-sized computer punch cards.
John Cutrone, programs coordinator for the Jaffe center and the exhibition’s curator, describes Hanmer as one of the up and coming “rock stars” in book arts. “Karen Hanmer is that rare artist who thoroughly understands the vast potential of the book as an art form. Her books consistently unify structure and content in a way that makes her work unforgettable. At the same time, you can tell that she's having a heck of a lot of fun, too,” said Cutrone.
The Jaffe center, which established FAU as a major national contributor to book arts education when it opened in March 2007, houses more than 8,000 artists’ books. The collection, which includes some of Hanmer’s works, consists primarily of visual books created more for their artistic merit than for their informational content.
Hanmer’s books are intimate and playful. They fragment and layer text and image to mirror the experience of personal and cultural memory. Her themes intertwine memory, history, and the history of science with the archaic act of making a book and the non-archaic act of using the computer as a tool in the process.
Hanmer’s books also are meant to be handled. The intimate scale and the gestures of exploration required to travel through each piece evoke the experience of looking through an album, a diary or the belongings of a loved one. Her books, however, often take the form of games or puzzles, and each book's structure almost always relates directly to its content. There is a great sense of humor at work here also.
Hanmer exhibits widely and her work is included in collections ranging from Tate Britain and the Library of Congress to Yale University and Graceland. She has a degree in economics from Northwestern University and has studied at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and with several notable bookbinders. Hanmer also serves on the editorial board of The Bonefolder, a peer-reviewed online book arts journal, and is exhibitions chair for the Guild of Book Workers.
During Hanmer’s visit to FAU, she will present a gallery talk on Friday, February 22, at 4 p.m. inside of the Jaffe center. The event is free and open to the public. The artist will also teach a two-day book arts workshop, “Flag Books: Interplay of Image and Text,” at the Jaffe center studios on Saturday and Sunday, February 23-24, for all levels. Enrollment is limited.
The cost of tuition and materials for the two-day workshop is $195 for the public and $135 for FAU students. One work study scholarship covers tuition to an enrolled FAU student. The student would pay $35 for materials. Registration information and the scholarship application are posted at http://www.jaffecollection.org.
RETRO-TECH can be viewed in the galleries of the Jaffe center, third floor east of the library. The portion of the exhibition in the lobby of the Jaffe center may be viewed during regular library hours, which may be found at www.library.fau.edu/geninfo/hours.htm?boca or by calling 561-297-3770. The portion of the exhibition inside the Jaffe center may be viewed Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A catalog of her work is available at www.karenhanmer.com.
For more information on the exhibition and its related events, contact John Cutrone, programs coordinator for the Jaffe center, at 561-297-0455 or firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:92a5b6c8-b3dd-4bed-a6ee-6df9c11c5fd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fau.edu/mediarelations/Releases0208/020807.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95801 | 933 | 1.820313 | 2 |
The work ethic consists of choosing productive work over unproductive activities, in order to improve the condition of oneself, one's family, and society at large.
- The more hours Americans work, the happier they report themselves to be. Only 11 percent of Americans say they wish they could spend a lot less time on their jobs.
Four definitions of work
But, in the fallen world, and from a naively secular perspective, work appears to be an ambiguous blend of joyous productivity and more-or-less unpleasant-but-necessary toil.
So, while work may be defined simply as productive activity, such a definition falls short of an enlightened, humane perspective. This naively secular view of work results, over time, in an increasingly disparate socio-politico-economic system by the error of what may be called the "Divine Right of the Work Ethic", the "rat race ethic", or the "dog-eat-dog ethic". This is the view of work in which the individual has the unqualified right to all the "proceeds of his efforts" in a secular free-for-all of economic (if not socio-economic) 'contract': "to the winner of any manner of competition---and, to the holder of any manner of advantage---rightly goes the spoil".
This secular view of work is the second definition of work, and those who, like Ayn Rand, hold to it have either no care or no comprehension of its long-term consequences. It is against those consequences that God commanded capital punishment within His own nation for those who willfully violate the Sabbath by so much as toiling and trading for personal gain on the Sabbath.
This "Divine Right" view of the work ethic is in error because it makes kings of those who merely are so driven to excel in worldly terms as to hold all individuals to account who fail to compete as capably, or at least as selfishly, as they do, and therefore are "unworthy" of consideration beyond what they have "earned". This is most notably the view of India, which has functioned as an epitome of castes since ancient times. It also is notably the view of Ayn Rand and her disciples.
The third definition of work is that which distinguishes between every important factor of the nature of production, beginning with the kind of production intended for the original, unfallen world. This third view of work holds that human individuals, as such, are inherently valuable above all other creatures, and thus who, regardless of their level of ability or inability to produce, are not to be denied, for someone else’s selfish worldly glory, the joy of living in God’s creation as human beings and as rightly differentiated human individuals.
This third definition of work allows slavery in terms only of economic justice. This implies that this view of work so opposes the debasement of those human individuals who find themselves owned by another (justly or not) as to command that the owner forfeit his ownership for that debasement. This third definition of work implies also a support of reparations for unjustified slavery.
The fourth "definition" of work is that which is "constructed" in opposition to all three other definitions, for the sake of saving humankind from the selfishness of "unenlightened" (real and imagined) individuals, if not also from the "superstition" (real and imagined) of the masses. This fourth view of work was most notably held by Karl Marx and the official leaders of the USSR; and, since it consists in normalizing the glory of humankind at the expense of both conforming and "non-conforming" individuals of the human kind, it immediately is bankrupt and parasitical, if not also legalistic.
This fourth view of work, however, is not equivalent to a voluntary communal work ethic, because a volunatary communal ethic may exemplify either an ambiguous or a more-or-less informed view of work. | <urn:uuid:2c39e76c-2ce6-43ca-a536-b36830359918> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://conservapedia.com/Work_ethic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959173 | 818 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Jun 15, 2012 / 7:00 am
Growing Up… in Atlantic Canada, I have firsthand experience in what is called ‘Living History’, being surrounded by three hundred year plus settlements, and more importantly, musical traditions.
Stories in song were part of my daily diet, whether it be songs of the Acadian Expulsion, what is now called Folk music from the exploits of the explorers set to open up the country or music from the legends of the area. Here, in the interior of British Columbia, a similar track through history complete with the music of the times is ever present.
A modern day group from the south Okanagan is keeping a portion of the area’s history alive, with lively music in the traditional sense, as well with brand new original interpretations of the great railway history of the region!
Celebrating fifteen years together, these travelling minstrels bring alive the legendary Kettle Valley Railway, a rich heritage that they set in song!
The Kettle Valley Brakemen are living historical minstrels, bringing us the stories of danger, frustration and accomplishment of the culture that grew out of the region’s rails. Combining traditional music with original creations built upon the historical facts of the Kettle Valley Railway, their concert performances are lively lessons in history and folklore.
The group preserve a part of the BC Interior’s lifestyle, and present it in a musical fashion that is emotive in its performance. Like Atlantic Canada, those that experience the Kettle Valley Brakeman are much richer, and most likely bring back memories of Family stories about the Canadian Railway, which we know was responsible in opening up this part of Canada.
The Kettle Valley Brakeman are well sought after. In celebrating their fifteen years together, the group are booked solidly throughout the summer! Appearances range from Port Moody on the coast to Revelstoke and Golden, and they’ll appear in Penticton for the PeachFest celebrations!
A vastly talented group of musicians, The Kettle Valley Brakeman are a ‘must see’ ensemble! They bring back a period of our history in song and music, a fantastic way of learning about our Heritage! I’ll be bringing you more news on this group, complete with an interview and exploring their original musical creations! Until then, look at this great video on your Kettle Valley Brakeman!!
Another local Talent, Rann Berry will present a show-stopper in August! “Rann Berry And The One Hit Wonders” will also be presenting history in music, contemporary music that has become a big portion of our life’s soundtrack! Relive such timeless creations as “Judy In Disguise”, “Hooked On A Feeling”, “Indiana Wants Me” and of course many more. It will be a complete concert performance, a seven piece band that will have you rocking and reeling and reliving some precious memories from the 1960’s and 70’s!!
‘Rann Berry and the One Hit Wonders’ will perform on August 10th at the Kelowna Community Theatre; tickets are available now, so don’t hold back, go ahead and get them now! Tickets available through: Select Your Tickets (selectyourtickets.com) at The Prospera Place Box Office or phone 250-762-5050. Rann Berry & The One Hit Wonders; surely a night to remember, August 10th at The Kelowna Community Theatre…
Under The Lights
Upcoming Club/Concert Highlights:
Doc Willoughby’s Downtown Pub: Paul Filek June 15th
Dave’s Sports Bar: June 15th: Whiskey Dick with Kat & The Valentines June 16th: Xul-- Album Release Party June 22nd & 23rd: Younguns
Pheasant & Quail Pub: Blue City Trio: June 15th & 16th Murphy’s Lagh (Irish Music at its best) June 22nd & 23rd Rann Berry June 29th and 30th
97 Street Pub: Bucknife: June 15th & 16th Cod Gone Wild: June 22nd & 23rd
The Blue Gator: Crosstown Bus: June 15th & 16th Sonny Rhodes: June 22nd & 23rd
Lake City Bowl: Anvil August 4th
VooDoo’s: (Penticton) Sunday Blues Jam—every Sunday!!
Salmon Arm: Shaw Centre: Nazareth July 7th
Merritt: Harlequinn July 12th
Kamloops Convention Centre: Sweet June 15th Nazareth July 9th
Funtastic (Vernon): Kenny Shields & Streetheart plus The Headpins June 29th Lou Gramm (Foreigner) June 30th
Kenny Shields & Streetheart: July 14th Dancin’ Barefoot Music Festival in Peachland
Sturgis North 2012-Vernon: July 18th to 22nd Rick Derringer Jerry Doucette Blue Oyster Cult Foghat Nick Gilder & Sweeney Todd The Guess Who Stampeders Brian Howe Snake Oil Sinners Jasmine Cain
‘Notes & News’: Great White: Ex-XYZ vocalist has replaced Jack Russell in Great White and has left his mark on the group’s new album “Elation”. The group continues to move forward and sounds a lot tougher these days…here, check them out for yourselves!:
……if you have a musical story or news and would like me to write something… drop me a line at: email@example.com and let’s celebrate Kelowna’s rich and varied music community together!!.....
Read more Under the Lights articles
- The Wonderful World Of Music Apr 13
- Spring Renewal Apr 8
- A New S.U.N. Is Rising Mar 29
- A Swedish Invasion? Mar 22
- Blues Rules Mar 15
- Swedish Hardcore Mar 8
- Reloaded/Revitalised Mar 1
- Second coming, of sorts Feb 22
- Survivors Feb 15
- A Master's Work Is Never Done Feb 8
- A humble 'hands on' approach Feb 1
- Spring! Nothing But Fields Of Green Jan 25
(Click for RSS instructions.) | <urn:uuid:319ecfa7-e063-4b3b-b8f5-809e02a0b9e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.castanet.net/edition/news-story-76557-1022-.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910855 | 1,325 | 1.867188 | 2 |
A new poll from Transportation for America reveals that Americans, from cities to rural areas, are ahead of elected officials when it comes to envisioning a transportation system that meets our current and future needs.
Contrary to what the highway lobby would have us believe, a solid 20% majority of Americans (59-38%) believe that the solution to our current traffic congestion troubles is providing more transportation choices, including public transportation, bicycling and walking. Even in rural areas, dedicating federal dollars to public transportation polls at 79%.
T4America went further, examining what positive outcomes people would like to see. Those that polled the highest:
“Low-wage workers, seniors and the disabled will have an easier time getting where they need to go”
“Residents will have more transportation choices”
Regardless of the type of community in which people live, there is general agreement that our transportation system should serve the needs of all ages, abilities and income levels. This equity argument, along with accountability to maintain existing facilities, also scored highest on the most compelling arguments that were tested – with bike and pedestrian facilities for health and Safe Routes to School close behind: | <urn:uuid:8e966564-0342-46c4-afdf-28c2d85a3ccb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.cascade.org/2010/04/poll-americans-want-choice-and-equity-in-transportation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960329 | 237 | 2.21875 | 2 |
On this date, the chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was born in Dole in the Jura region of France.
From the time of the ancient Romans, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some life forms arose spontaneously from nonliving matter. Such “spontaneous generation” appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Likewise, the spontaneous generation hypothesis was proposed by scientists to explain the origin of the “animalcules” observed by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in his magnifying lenses and had received wide acceptance all over Europe. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it was consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.
It wasn’t until Louis Pasteur that this fallacy was finally disproved. In 1859, the French Academy of Science offered the Alhumbert Prize of 2500 francs to whoever could shed “new light on the question of so-called spontaneous generation”. Young Pasteur’s award winning experiment was a clever variation of earlier experiments performed by John Needham (1713-1781) and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). Pasteur filled a long necked flask with meat broth. He then heated the glass neck and bent it into an “S” shape. Air could reach the broth, but gravity acted to trap airborne microorganisms in the curve of the neck. He then boiled the broth. After a time, no microorganisms had formed in the broth. When the flask was tipped so that the broth reached the microorganisms trapped in the neck, the broth quickly became cloudy with microscopic life.
Thus, Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation. Furthermore, Pasteur proved that some microorganisms are airborne. “There is no known circumstance in which it can be confirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves,” he concluded in 1864. His experiment also supported germ theory. Germ theory states that specific microscopic organisms are the cause of specific diseases. While Pasteur was not the first to propose germ theory (Girolamo Fracastoro, Agostino Bassi, Friedrich Henle and others had suggested it earlier), he developed it and conducted other experiments that clearly indicated its correctness, thereby managing to convince most of Europe it was true.
Despite what creationists and proponents of “intelligent design” may insist, Pasteur’s research on spontaneous generation did not demonstrate the impossibility of life arising in simple form from nonliving matter under conditions vastly different from those today and by means of a long and propitious series of chemical steps/selections. In particular, he did not show that life cannot arise once, and then evolve. Neither Pasteur, nor any other post-Darwin researcher in this field, denied the age of Earth or the fact of evolution. What Louis Pasteur and the others who denied spontaneous generation did demonstrate is that life does not currently spontaneously (i.e., within a matter of weeks) arise in complex form from nonlife in nature.
One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, this is enough for me: you belong to me and I shall help you.
– quoted in Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science (1950) by René Jules Dubos, p. 85 | <urn:uuid:54c8c772-c12d-4b6b-a744-93dc4f9f637c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://diogenesii.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/december-27-1822-a/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957962 | 773 | 4.09375 | 4 |
CNSC and AECL Announce Findings from Independent “Lessons Learned” Review of NRU Reactor Events
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 28, 2008
Ottawa - The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) today announce that Talisman International, LLC has concluded its “lessons learned” report related to the circumstances that led up to the extended outage of AECL's National Research Universal (NRU) reactor in Chalk River, Ontario in November and December 2007.
The independent review consisted of document reviews and interviews, and was focused on renewal of the NRU licence in 2005 and 2006 and the extended outage in late 2007. As part of its mandate, Talisman was asked to identify the underlying causes of the extended outage and to make recommendations for improvements in both organizations that would prevent a repeat occurrence or similar situation.
The report outlines 15 specific recommendations, which CNSC and AECL have fully accepted. The report also includes responses by both organizations to these recommendations and outlines the actions that will be taken to address each recommendation.
CNSC and AECL have examined the lessons learned report carefully, and recognize the need to clarify licence requirements and improve the implementation, tracking and completion of licensing commitments. Both organizations have already taken action to improve communications at all levels, including a process to allow for senior management oversight and resolution when warranted.
Commenting on the review, CNSC President Michael Binder stated, “To address the review team’s findings and recommendations, CNSC has put a corrective action plan in place with aggressive timelines. We are working to ensure a constructive relationship with AECL and to ensure that the NRU licence conditions and outstanding commitments are clearly defined and understood.”
“We accept the lessons learned report and are committed to taking the actions required to ensure our operational processes and communications practices are adjusted in accordance with the recommendations,” said AECL’s President and CEO Hugh MacDiarmid. “I will be personally overseeing the implementation of these improvements to ensure they are in place as quickly as possible and we are confident that the actions we are taking to address the recommendations will prevent any similar situations in the future.”
English or French versions of the lessons learned report can be viewed and downloaded from both CNSC and AECL websites.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) is an independent quasi-judicial agency that reports to Parliament through the Minister of Natural Resources. The CNSC regulates the use of nuclear energy and materials to protect health, safety, security and the environment, and to respect Canada's international commitments on the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited is a full service nuclear technology company providing services to nuclear utilities around the world. Established in 1952, AECL is the designer and builder of CANDU technology including the CANDU 6, one of the world's top-performing reactors. AECL's 4,800 employees deliver cutting edge nuclear services, R&D support, design, and engineering, construction management, specialized technology, refurbishment, waste management and decommissioning in support of CANDU reactor products. More information on AECL and CANDU technology can be found at www.aecl.ca.
About Talisman International
Talisman International is an international consulting firm based in Washington D.C. whose personnel have conducted evaluations of the operational and regulatory performance of nuclear facilities since the mid-1980s.
For additional information, please contact:
CNSC Media Relations
Manager, External Communications | <urn:uuid:258252a6-8e8f-4584-a60f-37917746027b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/mediacentre/releases/news_release.cfm?news_release_id=412 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936566 | 743 | 1.640625 | 2 |
There are currently no matches for "Intermediate Stretching Buttocks Exercises with Plyometric Box".
Intermediate Stretching Buttocks Exercises with Plyometric Box
Gluteal Muscles (Glutes) are one of the strongest muscles in the body and are the connecting point between your legs and back muscles. Glutes are used in a variety of actions from moving the leg to extending and rotating the hip, as well as extending and rotating the trunk of the body.
Strong glutes will also define and shape your buttocks.
Plyometric Boxes increase athletic ability concerning quick movements and explosiveness. They come in a variety of different heights (12"-48") and are usually made of metal or wood.
Jumping is an explosive movement that engages a lot of fast twitch muscle fibres and burns a ton of calories. Plyometric boxes are a great addition to any fitness program and a necessary tool for athletes looking for more power output in quick movements and jumping ability.
No Exercises were found under this search filter.
Please change your "Find Exercises" options >> | <urn:uuid:8a2a170e-45eb-4001-92dd-777bef9da445> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trainwithmeonline.com/Exercises/Stretching/Intermediate/Buttocks/Plyometric-Box | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941705 | 227 | 1.554688 | 2 |
and some really good Antwerp architecture.
Walking the tucked-away backstreets and thoroughfares of Antwerp, full of shops from designer to whimsical to antique, from chocolates to art, you can't help but notice that above the delightful places to spend and spend some more, there are elevated niches on many of the corners. In these niches the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus reside, ever serene, watching over those passing by.
There is something very nice in this.
As I understand it, for centuries in Belgium it was tradition for the priests and local people to process through the streets, carrying the bits and bodies of saints in reliquaries behind richly dressed statues of the Mother and Son like the one below.
In nearby Mechelen, since 1272, probably the largest and certainly oldest procession is held every year to thank the Virgin for freeing the city from plague. 739 years and counting. That's gratitude.
The churches we visited in Antwerp (and many had doors open to welcome us) are packed with religious treasures, ornate and elaborate, and very somber. This is a staggering contrast to the simple, clean and bright look and feel of everyday Antwerp.
Sometimes my largely dormant Cultural Anthropology education raises its nosy little head and asks things like "what does this contrast tell us about the citizens of Antwerp?"
(Usually all it wants to do it try out the new foods. Maybe I should have been a Nutritional Anthropologist like that fabulous lady on Alton Brown.)
Much richness is expressed but also a seeming lack of joy. Faith appears to be a lot of work. I mean, look at the carving that went into crafting the dark wood pulpit (above on the right, a closer view below).
and the altar, grand but also imposing.
Even with all that white and the spacious ceiling and flowers and candles you would never have raised your voice above a whisper, never felt it would be springtime there among the incense. The graves beneath our feet might have contributed to the somber impression, the weightiness of religion.
Back outside, the blue skies and bride-to-be party leaping for a photographer
brightened us right back up and I felt Antwerp-y again. Beer, anyone? Chocolate? To be fair, perhaps it wasn't the churches so much as a funny pre-hangover-esque pang of anticipation, that we knew we were only on our very last day of what had been not just a three week vacation for us, but also at the end of two years abroad in a very different and exciting sort of life.
Now it was time to pack up our bags one last time and to say good-bye.
Or as the Dutch would say, Doei. | <urn:uuid:12927e12-2289-431b-a355-ab8619aaa06f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sandinmylatte.blogspot.com/2011/03/feel-like-im-walking-world-walking.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971916 | 582 | 1.578125 | 2 |
(Margaret McDermott Bridge/IH-30/IH-35)
The Horseshoe Project is managed by the Texas Department of Transportation TxDOT) and it will upgrade bridges that cross the Trinity River at IH-30 and I-35E as well as update the route geometry for connecting roadways where they all converge near downtown Dallas' Central Business District. This project meets the NCTCOG 2035 Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) http://www.nctcog.org/trans/mtp/
The Margaret McDermott Bridge is named after the philanthropist and wife of the founder of Texas Instruments. She was the first person to make a personal contribution that ensured Dallas' ability to secure Santiago Calatrava as the designer to meld architectural beauty with functionality for bridges over the Trinity River. The City of Dallas has worked with TxDOT, legislatures, the region to make this funding a priority.
For the IH-30 Bridge, the City of Dallas is working with TxDOT and Santiago Calatrava to design a signature addition that will result in the Margaret McDermott Bridge featuring pedestrian and bicycle access in and around downtown, the floodway and Oak Cliff.
|Financing for the Horseshoe Project|
|Design, Construction, Management & Testing||$56 million|
|Right of Way (R.O.W) & Utilities||$62 million| | <urn:uuid:ae00cf5d-bedb-4a68-818f-8d13ac099667> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://trinityrivercorridor.org/transportation/transportation-improvement-margaret-mcdermott-bridge.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915141 | 297 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Built 1997. Project Description: A half city block plaza that is part of the Westside MAX's (Metropolitan Area Express) ambitious public art program to merge artistic vision with public transportation. The plaza's artwork is intended to recall and promote Portland's long established tradition of free speech. The design team set out to transform the first new MAX station into a civic heart--a plaza the size of half a city block that would bring together Southwest and Northwest Portland, two historically different neighborhoods, while replicating the feeling of a traditional town square. Discussions of town criers, hand bills, public discourse and spontaneous gatherings, led the team to uncover highlights of Portland's own illustrious history of communication and free speech - a tradition they hoped to encourage for the future. The designers hoped to create a station that would encourage that tradition to continue. The communications building, a backdrop for the plaza, is clad in stainless steel and etched with writing that highlights colorful episodes and characters in Portland's history of public discourse. The bronze soapbox, tree stump, and the pedestal in the center each act as a stage for spontaneous speechmaking. The throne-like seats along both sides of the substation serve as seats for an audience. Project History: In 1992, the Portland Tri-Met light rail system gained approval to expand eighteen miles to Portland's West side. The West side MAX (Metropolitan Area Express) public art program is one of the country's most ambitious efforts to integrate the vision of artists with public transit. Over twenty artists contributed significantly to the design of what has become the largest public works project in Oregon's history. The art program was a voluntary effort of Tri-Met (Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon), the Portland area transit agency which built Westside MAX with a combination of federal and local funds. Tri-Met did not fall under any jurisdiction's percent for art mandates. Media: Bronze Speaker Podiums. Size: 2 ft. podiums in 1/2 city block plaza. | <urn:uuid:c186861d-2198-4dbc-870a-3f71bc218cd6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/transport/id/3180/rec/1422 | 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 | 0.931761 | 403 | 2.0625 | 2 |
COLUMBIA — The fact that a majority of Hickman High School students fall short of the voting age didn’t stop them from making their voices heard Tuesday morning.
More than half of Hickman’s 2,200 students cast ballots supporting their favorite presidential candidates in the school’s mock primary election. The majority named Barack Obama and John McCain as their respective Democratic and Republican choices.
Rachel Zemke, a 17-year-old senior and the student government policy chair at Hickman, said while she wasn’t surprised that Obama won, his 80.4 percent victory over Hillary Clinton did come as a shock.
“I was a little surprised by the margin, but I think that a lot of kids really like the idea of Obama becoming president because they think that he represents change,” she said. The margin of votes for each winning candidate, however, was not as important to these young voters as the number 18 — the voting age that excluded most of them from Missouri’s actual primary.
Celinda Marshall, a 17-year-old senior, was disappointed to miss the opportunity to vote in Tuesday’s primary election. Her birthday falls in early March.
“I think the voting age should be 17 because you start getting charged as an adult at 17 and should be able to vote and help make decisions” she said. “I’d say I’m slightly more informed than the general public.”
Marshall is a senior in Hickman’s Our Law in Society class, where students investigate political issues pertinent to them.
“I tend to think that we have some kids who may be more politically informed now than they’ll ever be in their whole lives because they’re sort of forced to participate in the dialogue about it,” Jami Thornsberry, who teaches the Our Law in Society class, said.
This “forced exposure,” as Thornsberry describes it, gets students comparing online candidate calculators, engaging in regular political discussions and making campaign posters in class — exposing students to several hot-button issues.
“An issue that’s really divisive, I have found with my classes, is immigration. They’re really torn on that. That’s a more polarizing issue than even the war in Iraq,” Thornsberry said.
Caitlin Chester, 17, a senior in Thornsberry’s class, said she hasn’t let her aversion to the nasty side of politics stop her from developing and defining what she believes.
“I definitely think we should get out of Iraq; I think abortion should be a woman’s choice; and, I guess I’m kind of a hippie, so I want someone who would to try to help the environment,” said Chester, who was backing Clinton.
Cooper Livingston, 18, a senior and Hickman’s student body president, helped organize Tuesday’s mock election but remained undecided on the eve of Super Tuesday, his first real election.
“I like McCain on the Republican side, and I like Obama on the Democratic side, but my vote depends on which one of them is going to need more support here in the Missouri primary,” he said Monday. “I’m going to watch the polls before I make my decision.”
Livingston, who eventually chose Obama, wished his underage friends could have participated in Tuesday’s primary rather than just the school’s mock election.
“People who are going to be 18 in time for the actual election should be able to vote in the primary,” Livingston said.
Larry Schuster said he hoped his 18-year-old son would make an informed decision for his first vote.
“I want (my sons) to make decisions based on what people say and how they conduct themselves rather than all the sound bytes,” he said.
For Turner Schuster, Larry’s son and a senior at Hickman, this meant voting on the issues.
“Some people are going to vote for Obama because they want to see a black man in office or for Hillary because they want to finally see a woman as president, but really, I just look at the issue,” he said Monday. “Race or gender isn’t going to have any bearing on how they do things.”
Isiah Bishop, a Hickman senior, said race was an important factor in his vote.
“The fact that there’s a black guy in the race is a big deal for me,” said Bishop, who is black. “It’s important to see that my people have it together.”
Whatever their reasons for getting involved and excited about politics, Thornsberry said she is glad to see her students passionate about their role in shaping democracy at every level, even if some are still too young to vote in an actual election.
“We get the government we deserve, and if we don’t participate and things don’t go our way, then we deserve that,” she said. | <urn:uuid:4cf3329b-71c0-429b-afc8-16a203b2ef96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/100570/hickman-high-school-students-vote-in-mock-election/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973337 | 1,088 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Iran Announced this week they are now a nuclear nation, about an hour or two ago there was a 6.4 Quake in Iran. at a depth of 10KM or 6.2 Miles very shallow, could it possibly be a Nuke test? The U.S. Geological Survey measured the first quake at 6.4 magnitude and said it struck 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the city of Tabriz at a depth of 9.9 km (6.2 miles). A second quake measuring 6.3 struck 49 km (30 miles) northeast of Tabriz 11 minutes later at a similar depth.
A few years ago North Korea tested a Nuke, and the result showed up as a 4.7 Quake on the Richter scale with a depth of 10km as well, is this all just a coincidence or is a test causing these quakes?
In 1978 a Sweedish seismic laborotary at Uppasala recorded a Soviet Nuclear test of ten megatons at Semipalitsk, USSR just 36 hours before the earthquake. British and German geophysics believed that the 1978 earthquake in Tabas, Iran, which killed more than 25,000 people, was likely to be triggered by an underground nuclear explosion triggered by the USSR.
Iran is straddled by several major fault lines and has suffered several devastating earthquakes in recent the past, it is possible to be naturally caused or from nuclear testing.
The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted the head of the government’s emergency centre, Gholamreza Masoumi, as announcing the casualty figures. Iranian media said the quakes have confirmed to have killed between 90 and 180 people and injuring over 1400, Iranian officials fear the death toll could rise. Reports say phone lines to many villages have been cut off, making rescue efforts harder.
A local official in the area told ISNA that six villages had been completely destroyed and 60 villages had been 50 to 70 percent destroyed. | <urn:uuid:42feac7a-edb6-493f-872f-aa7e205857e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://conservativepapers.com/news/2012/08/11/iran-earthquakes-leave-scores-dead-natural-or-a-nuke-test/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966779 | 402 | 2.34375 | 2 |
An organism's adaptation to new environments involves many genes, Canadian researchers say, a finding that may settle a long-standing evolutionary argument.
An organism's adaptation to new environments involves many genes, Canadian researchers say, a finding that may settle a long-standing evolutionary argument. A current debate in the field of evolutionary biology is whether adaptation to new environments is the result of changes in many genes, each having a relatively small effect, or large changes in just a few genes.
Canadian researchers, along with evolutionary geneticists in Switzerland, studied how threespine stickleback fish adapted differently to lake and stream environments in British Columbia, using high-resolution genomic methods to test for genetic differences at thousands of positions scattered across the fishes' genome, McGill University in Montreal reported Tuesday.
"I suspect that as more and more studies use [high-resolution] methods, the tide of opinion will swerve strongly to the view that adaptation is a complex process that involves many genes spread across diverse places in the genome," McGill researcher Andrew Hendry said. | <urn:uuid:b84ddadb-0bc9-4e4c-9017-a4369d6459b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/upi-genomes-involvement-adaptation-seen-215964 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948846 | 210 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Getting a little bored with the project. Only had enough ambition to photograph a fence today :-)
From Wiki -
The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. | <urn:uuid:e5d554f4-e35a-4469-b0b0-965782d282d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://365project.org/shutterbug0810/365/2010-05-25 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974906 | 93 | 2.0625 | 2 |
David Urbach (a ‘liker’ over at Rosemary Sutcliff’s Facebook page - do join him and click the like button there!) alerted me to a 10/10 review by someone he considers “perceptive”, of Rosemary Sutcliff‘s classic of historical fiction and children’s literature, The Eagle of the Ninth. It makes interesting reading, and I am intrigued to learn of the reaction of others who know Rosemary’s work well.
Rosemary Sutcliff’s most famous book ought to be looked at in two different ways, and judged on two levels. Firstly, any reader venturing into historical fiction will be instantly drawn to it as a deserving classic. Every word of praise afforded Eagle of the Ninth is surely deserved, and every criticism should be scrutinised heavily. This book is not only a simple story; it is a revelation. It is a sudden meeting between the children’s and young adults’ fiction of the ’80s and ’90s, when children’s literature began to be taken seriously; and literature from the early twentieth century and the nineteenth century, when writers felt able to wax philosophic and lyrical, and were not so concerned with spending a hundred pages on diligently establishing a scene and building meticulously to a grand climax or a cheap twist. | <urn:uuid:ad1d7a1b-f489-4551-8af5-8faf25a68b07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rosemarysutcliff.com/2012/02/13/the-eagle-of-the-ninth-rosemary-sutcliff-library-of-libation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958157 | 281 | 1.75 | 2 |
- Add The Trial to Queue
Add The Trial to top of Queue
Much of Orson Welles' latter-day reputation as an "unfathomable" genius rests upon his seeming unwillingness to tell a story in clear, precise fashion. Sometimes, as in such films as Touch of Evil, Welles' spotty storytelling skills can be forgiven in the light of the excellent visuals. In other cases, as in his 1962 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, Welles'style comes across as empty virtuosity, precious and petulant when it should be profound. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K, a man condemned for an unnamed crime in an unnamed country. Seeking justice, Joseph K is sucked into a labyrinth of bureaucracy (Welles once described the character as being a "little bureaucrat" himself, who deserves to be punished. This is never clearly expressed in the finished film). Along the way, he becomes involved with three women -- Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli -- who in their own individual ways are functions of the System that persecutes him.
While Welles considered The Trial one of his finest films, this enthusiasm is not universally shared; even his most fervent admirers have been known to emerge from a screening of the film with quizzical, disappointed expressions on their faces. On the plus side, Welles and his cinematographer Edmond Richard perform miracles in transforming an abandoned French railway station into the headquarters of a totalitarian, red tape-ridden society. It's also fun to hear Welles' voice emanating from several of the supporting characters (his post-dubbing budget was nil). All in all, however, The Trial never truly works; it is unfair, however, to lay the blame for this entirely on Welles, inasmuch as the 1948 and 1994 attempts to cinematize the original Kafka novel likewise came a cropper. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, (more) | <urn:uuid:14e133c1-b15f-4618-9268-55e159f19f76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blockbuster.com/browse/catalog/personDetails/52363 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960472 | 407 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Editor's note: Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and of the new book "Governing America."
(CNN) -- The critics are raving about Steven Spielberg's new film "Lincoln." A.O. Scott of the New York Times called it "among the finest films ever made about American politics." Viewers get a taste of the legislative process up close by watching how President Abraham Lincoln rounded up the necessary votes in get the 13th Amendment resolution through the House. Viewers see a master at work -- a president who knew how to break through the various divisions in Congress and outflank his opponents.
Movies such as Spielberg's often result in inflated expectations about what a president could achieve in the current political environment. The reality is that even the best presidents would have trouble rounding up votes in the contemporary Congress.
As the nation continues to be obsessed with a sex scandal involving top military officials and as the lame-duck Congress figures out what to do about the fiscal cliff, Washington would do well to think seriously about how government reform might improve the basic machinery of the federal government so that elected officials are better able to handle the big issues of the day such as unemployment, immigration, climate change and more.
Reform must start with reining in the power of money and organized interest groups. Campaign finance reform, once a promise of President Barack Obama in 2008, has taken a back seat even though the president made some progress on reforming lobbying early in his term.
Unless Congress does more to prevent the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street and limit the power of private money in campaigns, it will be difficult to change the status quo. With more than $6 billion spent on the recent election, elected officials will have to maneuver around donors who were essential to both sides of the campaign and who will be expecting access when the new year begins.
Then there is the filibuster, which currently requires a supermajority on most pieces of legislation given that the congressional minority has been willing to use this mechanism with ruthless abandon. Since 2007, according to the Senate Historical Office, there were more than 360 Republican filibusters. When Congress reconvenes in early 2013, it will have one shot to change the rules so that the threshold for passing a filibuster is lowered. In January 2009, lawmakers let the opportunity slip away. The chronic use of the filibuster threat has been one of the central culprits behind dysfunction as the congressional minority has immense power to block progress.
But it's not just Congress that has to step up its act. The White House, for example, needs to curtail one of the legacies of Lincoln that has often caused friction with Congress and circumvented the kind of the checks and balances we depend on: executive power.
Throughout the 20th century, and especially in recent decades, presidents routinely employ executive power, such as signing statements, to circumvent the will of Congress. Obama, who started his term critical of how President George W. Bush had employed this authority, has started to replicate his predecessor.
The president used executive power to conduct national security operations as well as to strengthen environmental regulations. "I refuse to take 'no' for an answer," Obama said, "When Congress refuses to act and -- as a result -- hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them." The problem with executive power is that it results in policies that can easily be overturned and which rarely have bipartisan support. It also sets a precedent for the president to erode legislative power.
Recently, in a wonderful play at my children's school, the students put on a show about how a bill becomes a law. The play begins with protest that unfolds when a group of parents want to impose a candy tax on their children after they collect their Halloween treats. The president, moved by the protesters, sends this proposal to Congress. After a committee drafts the legislation, the House of Representatives passes the measure, as does the Senate. But soon after, the Supreme Court declares the bill to be unconstitutional.
As my wife and I watched two of our children star in the play, we could not help but think about what the teachers decided to leave out of the script. What parts of our political process are sanitized when we translate them into a production for children? There was no talk of lobbyists, filibusters and executive power.
As the new Congress gets ready to reconvene in January, this is the time to consider reform. If we want to reach the high moments captured in Spielberg's film about Lincoln, we need to make sure our political process, albeit difficult, works. Otherwise dysfunction will rule.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Julian Zelizer. | <urn:uuid:061b545a-c23f-4ab9-a730-95c5ac5da6e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/19/opinion/zelizer-congress-reform/index.html?hpt=op_mid | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968324 | 996 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Highest-capacity hard drive on the market.
- Cons Slow for a 3.5-inch drive. Will not work in Windows XP systems. May require an adapter card. Cannot be used as a boot drive on most PCs.
Western Digital obliterates all heretofore known storage boundaries with its 3TB Caviar Green, the largest on the planet. But this internal hard drive's platters are piled with caveats.
What are technological limitations when you have history to make? That must have been Western Digital's controlling thought process when conceiving its latest Caviar Green drive. This 3-Gbps SATA model, priced at $239 (list), has a full 3 terabytes (TB) of storage space, which makes it the largest-capacity 3.5-inch internal hard drive you can buy. The bad news is that almost no one will be able to use this kind of high-capacity drive without making some adjustments to their system. Windows XP users won't be able to use it at all, and those who do get it working will find it's not exactly a speed demon. But if all you need is basic storageand a lot of itthe 3TB Caviar Green delivers.
A Word on Block Sizes
To be fair, the drive's compatibility problems are due to its capacity rather than any technical failings on WD's part. Back when hard drive capacity was measured in mere megabytes, a block size of 512 bytes made sense as a way of maximizing available space. But as drives got bigger and performance started straining, roundabout the late 1990s, the 512-byte block size became more restrictive. So the industry decided to up the standard block size to 4,096 bytes (or 4KB), which would reduce errors and make higher-capacity drives possible.
Unfortunately, this plan didn't go mainstream until after Windows XP didso the world's most popular operating system for nearly a decade didn't support 4KB blocks. A workaround for this issue could help that OS, and ease the transition for everyone to the larger block sizes: Hard drives would report their blocks as only being 512 bytes in size, so any OS that didn't understand the larger sizes could just "see" each 4KB block as eight 512-byte blocks. Due to MBR partitioning structure, XP would need to "align" its sectors for 4KB drives to work, but that was hardly an insurmountable obstacle.
Even 4KB sectors, however, couldn't guarantee drives of infinite capacity. Because of the limitations of the BIOS and 32-bit MBR partitioning in computing's earliest years, systems that used these technologies had a hard ceiling of 232 logical blocks. Having each of those 512 bytes in size meant drives could store up to 2,199,023,255,552 bytes, or 2.19TB. For drives to go even higher than that, new solutions were needed. The MBR's replacements are GUID partition tables (GPT), which offer 64-bit block addressing, and thus (with 4KB blocks) a maximum storage size of 9.4 zettabytes (or 9.4 trillion gigabytes). BIOS, however, can't read GPTsonly what's supplanting it, the Unifed Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), can.
Because XP has no support whatsoever for GPTs and UEFI, you cannot use any drive with a capacity over 2.19TB on a system that runs it. Even if you have a supported OS (Windows Vista, Windows 7, and many flavors of Linux) that recognizes GPTs, you won't be able to boot to a drive that size unless you also have a motherboard running UEFI instead of BIOSsomething very few do. All current Intel boards support UEFI, but almost no other major manufacturer has yet followed suit.
Finally, your system's SATA controller must also be able to recognize 4KB blocks. This wrinkle, at least, was easily solved. WD is including with all its above-2.19TB drives a PCI Express (PCIe) x1 Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which lets your OS use a known driver to communicate with the drive. Just install the card in any free PCIe expansion slot, plug your drive into one of the card's two SATA jacks, and you're good to go. (The HBA comes with both full- and half-height brackets, so it will work in any sort of case.)
If you don't have a UEFI motherboard (and you probably don't), are you okay with buying a 3TB drive just for storage? There's no reason you shouldn't be: A small, fast hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD) to boot to, paired with a larger and slower drive for storage, is still a killer combo. And so, if that's all you need, this Caviar Green essentially works.
Just know that you may not like the speed decrease that comes with it. Because these drives are intended to be eco-friendly and use less power, they run cooler and slower. WD wouldn't even tell us the drive's rotational speedwhich suggests it's probably well below the 7,200 rpm threshold for standard desktop drives. Its results in our performance tests bear this out. Compared to a 7,200-rpm 2TB Caviar Black, it finished considerably slower in every benchmark we ran: 130.1 MBps versus 147.3 MBps linear read speeds in AIDA64; 128.4 MBps versus 152.1 MBps sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark 3.0, and 126 MBps versus 149.8 MBps in sequential writes; and a score of 4,077 versus 6,131 in the PCMark Vantage HDD Test. HDTune reported an average transfer rate of 109.5 MBps for the Caviar Green, and 117.2 MBps for the 2TB Caviar Black. AIDA64 reported an average read access time of 14.48 ms for the Caviar Green; for the Caviar black, it was 11.41 ms.
Perhaps the 3TB Caviar Green drive's performance remedies the booting issue: With speeds like these, you're not going to want to use it as a primary drive anyway. We feel obliged to point that if you don't mind sacrificing some eco cred by opting for a second drive, your same $240 will buy two 7,200-rpm 1.5TB WD drives you'll be able to boot to with no problems. Until 4KB blocks and UEFI become standard (the former becomes the industry rule rather than the exception in 2011; the latter remains much harder to pin down), that might be the more convenient way to go. But as a one-drive way to get tons of storage in one package, the 3TB is pretty good in spite of the speed and configuration difficulties you may face while using it. | <urn:uuid:f452e705-6ddc-41ae-8743-dac26d4cf206> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372807,00.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95456 | 1,413 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The National Science Foundation’s Implementation of Section 7009 of the America COMPETES Act requires that institutions in receipt of NSF funds provide appropriate training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research for undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who are supported by NSF to conduct research. This policy was published in the Federal Register Vol. 74, No. 160, Thursday, August 20, 2009. Further notification may be found in Chapter II of the NSF Grant Proposal Guide.
SIUE is committed to excellence in Responsible Conduct in Research (RCR) education for all undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. SIUE seeks to encourage a culture of responsible conduct in research across campus, and therefore supports several programs designed to promote education and training in the responsible conduct in research, including:
As of July 1, 2010, all undergraduate and graduate students paid by internal or external research grants (not including URCA Associates or Assistants) will complete the following core curriculum:
Students may choose one of the three relevant courses to meet the training requirement. RCR certification is good for three years. The courses offered include: Humanities Responsible Conduct of Research Course 1, Basic Course; Physical Science Responsible Conduct of Research Course 1, Basic Course; and Social Behavioral Responsible Conduct of Research Course 1, Basic Course.
2. Email a list of names of these students to Linda Skelton at firstname.lastname@example.org. A database of names and completed training certificates will be kept in the Office of Research and Projects.
* Individual department courses can be certified to replace the above CITI certification and training. Requests for course RCR certification should be directed to the Associate Dean for Research in the Graduate School.
Faculty leading internally or externally sponsored research projects are encouraged to utilize the online and other materials and resources provided in the Graduate School Guidelines for RCR Mentoring on NSF Award.
Documentation and Recordkeeping:The Graduate School will retain all documentation related to the Core Curriculum.
Approved by Provost, August 12, 2010. | <urn:uuid:1757f260-37fa-4662-8bd2-2575081abb7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.siue.edu/orp/humansubjectsprotection/rcr_home.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930704 | 431 | 1.578125 | 2 |
The Path to Organic Roses
by Jack Shoultz
Originally published in California Coastal Rose Society Newsletter
by Jack Shoultz
Roses are very easy to grow. This statement along with a realistic approach to expectations in your rose garden will bring about the best of all worlds in having beautiful roses with minimal care. For several years now, I have continuously amended my soil with homemade compost, worm castings and lots and lots of mulch. By doing this and occasionally throwing down some good organic fertilizers my roses need very little care other then deadheading, removing blind shoots, cleaning out the center of the bush and just enjoying the beauty.
It is realistic to expect as much using organic methods as any other. The advances which we are enjoying in products being introduced with natural ingredients can only substantiate the arguments that there are really no excuses not to incorporate and move toward using organic methods. The theory behind most organic products and the people producing them is that if you have a soil rich with activity then whenever the plant needs nutrients, they are available. This can be greatly improved by the addition of humic acid or humus and mychorrizae. Read the label on all the bags, boxes and containers of products you use and if you can understand what the ingredients are, then you can decide if this will give your roses what they need.
I virtually only spray with teas - compost and worm castings - and have had great results in preventing fungal diseases. I water blast for pests and only recently used Spinosad when necessary. Spinosad is a very effective control for chewing insects such as rose slugs. I have found it also works for thrips. As far as the teas, I have made my own and used products such as Worm Magic and find that they are effective and not influenced by weather conditions such as heat.
I am continually reading and trying to find out the latest test results using organic methods and the release of new and improved products. Increasingly, the movement toward all organic gardening is fast becoming the norm instead of a fad. It is not something that has to be undertaken with fear or dread anymore. This column will bring you ideas and products that will hopefully make it an easy process for you. My introduction into organic care was full of pitfalls and trial and error. What I would like to do is make the idea of moving from chemical to organic methods a reasonable and workable transformation.
The best way to do this is to address questions that you have on what you would like to know to help move in the organic direction. Direct questions on products, methods or indirect inquiries on anything you would like to know more about within the scope of organic rose growing will help bring answers to your concerns. If you have a question, please contact us. | <urn:uuid:78b33248-f73a-44cf-9511-c6bcf838df8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.organicrosecare.org/articles/general_path_I.php | 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 | 0.966155 | 566 | 1.984375 | 2 |
What does justice look like? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself over the past few days, in the wake of the startling news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Responses have been flooding the internet as various people weigh in, many of them admitting a certain amount of relief and gladness, still others refusing to rejoice in the death of another human being, even an enemy. There’s been gloating and congratulations, praise for the Troops and grudging admiration offered to Obama even by his staunchest opponents and detractors. (And there’s been snark, too, as faux-news outlets announce that the 2012 presidential election has been canceled in light of overwhelming bipartisan support, while some ask if the moral of bin Laden’s death is that “we only like a black guy when he kills a brown guy”.)
Has justice been done? I’m not sure. When I turn a reflective eye on my own reactions, I have to admit that I feel very little more than mild surprise. I don’t feel relieved or happy about the news, but nor do I feel particularly sorrowful. I might even describe my reaction as curiosity, albeit a wincing, hesitant kind, that leaves me wondering, “What next?” After a decade of using bin Laden and the threat he represented as the raison d’être for so much of U.S. war-mongering and justifications for our violent, heavy-handed foreign policy — after three on-going wars, thousands dead, millions of civilians turned overnight into refugees — I wonder if the death of a single man can do much of anything to restore balance and see justice done. It seems to me strange to believe that the death of one person could somehow satisfy the demands of justice, if the thousands dead in Iraq and Afghanistan could not. And if those deaths were not for the sake of justice, then what is it we’ve been doing? What have we done?
The news leaves me only with more questions. What will the ramifications be for our involvement in the Middle East? Will we finally end these idiotic wars, or will they continue to drag on indefinitely? Would it have been better to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to trial, or would such a trial have been merely a mockery of justice, a foregone conclusion? Is it really a blow to bin Laden’s “street cred” and claim to martyrdom that he was found living in a mansion in Pakistan, or was it only ever Americans who needed to believe he was living desperate and isolated in a desert cave somewhere? Will this become just one more excuse to continue the U.S. policy of torture and human rights violations in the name of national security? And who will be the next boogie man, the next evil-doer public enemy?
Because there will be one. The United States has a history of forming ill-advised and unethical alliances that come back to haunt us — Russia against Hitler, Saddam Hussein against Iran, bin Laden (CIA trained, let’s not forget) against Russia… Even now, we’re sending military aid and support to rebels in Libya we know next to nothing about, while continuing to prop up dictators in strategic locations all over the world. Celebrating bin Laden’s death seems like little more than rejoicing that we’ve managed to sever one of our own gangrene limbs before the infection could spread.
But even that rejoicing may be too hasty. Sitting in a coffee shop this morning, I listen to local red-blooded Americans talking amiably about how they shouldn’t have let the women and children out alive — they should have just bombed the whole place, taking out everyone in the compound along with bin Laden. After all, these patriots reason, they were there, they were involved, they were witnesses and accomplices. Surely, guilt by association should apply, and they deserve to die. They joke about it like it were a football game. But it’s that same logic that al-Qaida and others use to justify killing American civilians — no one is innocent when they benefit from a corrupt, tyrannical system, no one can escape righteous justice when it comes, there is no such thing as an “innocent” bystander, you’re either with us or against us.
This is not justice. It’s barely even revenge, so much as it is reveling in the easy violence of the victorious and powerful. How could there possibly be justice for such death? How can we imagine we can weigh deaths against one another and come out even?
What does justice look like? Perhaps to some justice is the opposite of mercy, but that seems to me to be too entrenched in black-and-white dualism. Justice is not defined solely by retribution and punishment, but by restored relationship and mutual healing. If it is to have a purpose beyond emotional indulgence of the powerful taking revenge on the weak who have wronged them, the purpose of retribution must be restorative at its core. Justice is done when those who have suffered have the chance to heal, and those who have done violence or harm have the chance to atone — to be “at one” with their victims in experiencing the full nature of their violation and the devastation it has caused.
There is no justice in death. Justice rests not in our ability to make others suffer as we have, but in our capacity to grieve and to heal from the violence of the past. Justice rests not in the destruction of those who have wronged or threatened us, but in the reconciliation that will prevent them from doing it again, not through force of arms but through understanding and mutual respect.
Has justice been done, now that bin Laden is dead? The threat of extremism still looms large, with plenty of others poised and ready to take his place. Do we really expect that we can make ourselves safe and build our peace on the graves of our enemies? Do we really think we can keep up these wars forever, stamping out terrorists one by one, without ever redressing the underlying imbalances and abuses that define our relationship with the rest of the world? The death of a single man pales in comparison to the on-going work that real and lasting justice demands. | <urn:uuid:80ba335e-11f8-4f2d-b450-b0a09a1c163c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://politics.pagannewswirecollective.com/tag/obama/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965321 | 1,310 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Parking - Disabled People
EUROPEAN BLUE BADGE SCHEME - DISABLED PARKING CONCESSION
The Blue Badge Scheme provides a national arrangement across the UK and a partnership arrangment in other European Union member states.
The scheme is designed to help severely disabled people live independent lives by knowing that when they reach their destination, either as a passenger or driver, that they will be able to park near to the venue and therefore have easier access to the services they want to use.
The Blue Badge parking concessions only allow badge holders to park on-street. They do not apply to off-street car parks, such as supermarket car parks or on privately owned roads. However there may be special concessions for badge holders in these areas and you should check for signs.
Following a comprehensive review of the blue badge scheme in Scotland (and at UK level) the Scottish Government announced a series of reforms of the scheme. The leaflet "WLC Changes to the Blue Badge Scheme" is available to download at the bottom of this page and sets out in more detail the changes that West Lothian Council are introducing from 1st January 2012.
The actual badge has been re-designed making it more secure and harder to tamper with. Badge holders photographs are now digitally printed on the back of the new badge, which is securely printed by the National supplier.
Please note that West Lothian Council will no longer issue a badge from any of our locations. Also, existing old style blue badges will remain valid until the expiry date on the card.
BLUE BADGES WILL REMAIN FREE FOR WEST LOTHIAN RESIDENTS.
The responsibility for administering the scheme remains with local authorities. West Lothian Council will process applications, determine eligibility, arrange mobility assessments (where applicable) and order badges from the supplier at national level.
BLUE BADGE ELIGIBILITY
The eligibility criteria is set by legislation laid before the Scottish Parliament. This criteria is split into two parts - "without further assessment" (automatic) and "subject to further assessment" (discretionary).
In Scotland, you are automatically entitled to a bue badge if you are over two years old and:
- you are registerd blind; or
- you receive the higher rate of the mobility component of the Disability Living Allowance (DLA); or
- you receive a War Pensioners' mobility supplement; or
- you have received an award under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS) within tariffs 1-8.
If you do not meet any of the above automatic criteria then you may qualify for a blue badge if you are over two years old and:
- have a permanent and substantial disability which means you are unable to walk or virtually unable to walk; or
- have a temporary, but substantial, disability which means you are unable to walk or virtually unable to walk which is likely to last for a period of at least 12 months but less than 3 years; or
- drive a motor vehicle regularly, have a severe disability in both arms and are unable to operate, or have considerable difficulty in operating, parking meters.
If you are applying under one of the above criteria then West Lothian Council may request that you attend an independent mobility assessment as a means of checking your eligibility.
There are special rules for children under the age of three years. A parent or guardian may apply for a badge for their child, if the child:
- has a medical condition requiring the transportation of bulky medical equipment at all times; or
- they must always be kept near a motor vehicle on account of a medical condition so that they can, if necessary, be treated for that condition in the vehicle or taken quickly in the vehicle to a place where they can be so treated.
If you are unsure whether these questions apply to your child then please read the guidance notes accompanying the relevent application form - see How to Apply.
HOW TO APPLY FOR A BLUE BADGE
If you think that you qualify for a Blue Badge then you must complete the relevant application form. If you are applying under the "automatic" criteria then download and complete the form called WLC BB Application - Automatic. If you do not qualify automatically then download and complete the form WLC BB Application - Discretionary. These forms are available from our download section at the bottom of this page.
Please note that unfortunately we are unable to process applications at Pumpherston and Blackridge Libraries.
All applications must be accompanied with the appropriate evidence:
- Proof of identity e.g. passport, driving licence etc; and
- Proof of address e.g. council tax bill, bank statement; and
- Proof of entitlement e.g. award letter dated in last 12 months; or
- Supporting evidence e.g. hospital report - discretionary applications only
Please note that West Lothian Council will not issue a blue badge on the basis of a letter from your GP however you may still submit this as evidence in support of your application.
All applications will be initally checked and recorded by our CIS and library staff. Our Blue Badge Administration team will process the applications and upload all required data to the national database. The badge will then be ordered if applicable. Badges will be sent direct to our customers within 5 working days of the order being placed with the national supplier.
Organisations who wish to apply for a blue badge should complete the new application form available from our download section. Completed forms along with any other documents should be posted to the address shown on the form.
If you are attending one of our locations in person then there is no need to provide a photograph for your blue badge. We have installed webcams in our CIS and Libraries which will allow the staff there to take a digital photo of you for use on the newly designed badge.
If someone is applying on your behalf or you are applying by post then you must include a passport style photograph with your application. We will scan this and return it to you.
A Blue Badge normally lasts for 3 years. At the end of the period stated on your existing badge you will need to re-apply and supply up to date evidence of your entitlement and address. The same application form should be used when re-applying.
We encourage customers who are applying under the "automatic" eligibility criteria (listed above) to re-apply at least 2-3 weeks before your existing badge expires to allow for the additional time involved in the process.
If you do not qualify under the "automatic" eligibility criteria and are re-applying using the "discrectionary" application form then we strongly encourage you to submit this application at least 6 weeks before the expiry date on your existing badge. You may be required to attend a mobility assessment to establish your continuing eligibility for a badge.
If you lose your old style badge or it is stolen, defaced, faded, etc then you do not need to complete a form. Simply visit one of our locations and our staff there will process your request as well as take a digital photograph of you for the new style badge. If you are unable to attend in person then you may be required to send an up to date passport syle photograph of yourself before we can place the order for your badge.
Anyone who receives a new style badge after 1st January 2012 will receive a parking clock as part of the pack that is sent to you. Legislation in England and Wales requires badge holders to display this due to time limitations that are in place.
YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS
West Lothian Council may share the information you have provided on the application form with other government organisations for the prevention and detection of fraud (further information can be found under National Fraud Initiative on our website:
Further information can be obtained by telephoning our Customer Contact Centre on 01506 775000, by emailing email@example.com or by visiting any of our Council Information Service (new window) offices or local Library (new window).
- Can I get a Blue Badge? (PDF, 76kb)
- Rights & Responsibilities of a Blue Badge Holder (PDF, 152kb)
- WLC Blue Badge Application - Automatic (Word, 300 kb)
- WLC Blue Badge Application - Discretionary (Word, 380 kb)
- WLC Blue Badge Application - Organisation (Word, 204 kb)
- WLC Changes to Blue Badge Scheme (PDF, 866kb) | <urn:uuid:ab9d4cdc-3f92-4e6f-8040-d8ac8d627262> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wlothian.org.uk/1523/1265/1271/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928439 | 1,744 | 1.648438 | 2 |
In an effort to rescue planetary science projects amid budget cuts, scientists in Florida are holding bake sales and car washes to sway legislators to protect NASA's budget.
The 2013 budget proposal submitted by the Obama administration earlier this year would cut funding for NASA's planetary science projects by about $300 million. While Congress is still deliberating over the federal budget, groups of scientists are planning a series of demonstrations — in the form of bake sales, car washes and other events — for Saturday (June 9) to plead their case.
Though planet-studying spacecraft usually cost millions, or even billions, of dollars, every penny helps. That's the reasoning behind the Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale to be held by University of Central Florida students and professors who hope to sway lawmakers into providing more money for studying the solar system. It is one of nearly 20 planned demonstrations for Saturday at sites across the country, organizers said.
"We're not asking for more of the pie, we're asking for less of a bite out of the pie," Laura Seward, a graduate student at the university who organized the event, said in a statement. "A strong robotic planetary exploration program is essential for a strong human planetary exploration program."
Like many federal agencies, NASA is strapped for funding under the current fiscal conditions. Just today (June 7) the space agency announced the cancelation of a new X-ray space telescope mission, the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer, because it is over-budget. | <urn:uuid:6d0933e7-5d22-4eba-950a-7af51de65405> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0608/Florida-scientists-reduced-to-holding-bake-sale-to-fund-NASA | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939912 | 304 | 2.15625 | 2 |
A couple of weeks ago, I was inside the “big black box” also known as the British Columbia Ministry of Education. If you know that I am a teacher from Surrey, B.C. you might jump to the conclusion that I was there picketing, slashing tires or doing the ol’ “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” switcheroo. Well, none of that is actually the case. My adventure was a little more bland, but I still felt cool like Harriet the Spy.
Students and education are number one for me, so if I thought I could make a larger impact from with in the Big House (you know, Trojan Horse-style), then I felt it was my duty to explore that possibility.
I, like so many teachers, have no idea what really happens behind the very secure wall of the M.O.E. (It was near impossible to get back inside to retrieve my forgotten umbrella–several people including security had to be called). For some, the Ministry is like Bin Laden’s cave circa 2002 or neo-libralist puppeteering convention.
I’ve got to say, it was a fascinating experience to see first hand the environment, the people that work there, the tone, the types of conversations had in the hallways. Of course, I got the tourist-eye view of things, but I felt what I saw changed a bit of how I view the Ministry. There are some fabulous, caring individuals who work there, but the Ministry is not the sum of its parts. The thing that troubled me most was that as it is now, from what I gathered through informal conversation, not enough of the decision-makers are very closely or personally linked with real classroom life in a very recent, real way. (Time to do a new episode of Undercover Boss maybe!?)
As you know, these are very tense times between the government and our teachers’ union, the BCTF. There are some critical issues that the government must address to improve education for our students and teachers. I know this. I feel this. I want to do my part. And I wanted to gather as much information as I could.
I met with several key figures in curriculum and assessment who I felt were very candid with me about their own perspectives and the direction of the ministry as they see it.
I will be writing more reflections about “the inside” in the coming weeks–I am still trying to make sense of it all. But let me start with one point: as a part of my interview, I was given a computer with no internet connection, a quiet room, and one hour to write my response to the question:
How can we personalize learning for all students
while maintaining equity and fairness within the education system?
Great that they chose this question, right? (Or does this question need more unpacking?)
Understand that I was a little nervous to begin my writing–perhaps somewhat like a fish out of water flopping around at the Cat Show. Well, not that bad. But I was still processing for myself other questions like, “Do I want this job?” “Are these people sincere in working towards real change?” “Am I a traitor?” ”Am I in line to become the next straw man?” “Is this the opportunity of a lifetime to offer what I have to make a real difference for students?”
So, basically for the first 20 minutes, my mind was just blank. Then the next 10 minutes, I was frantic. I only actually wrote for the last 30 minutes.
Imagine: a genie pops out of a bottle and you have one wish…we always say we would ask for more wishes, but you have to take that off the table this time (Keep in mind I KNOW the gov’t isn’t going to listen to my voice if I just type in 100pt bold font “For Pete’s sake reduce class sizes, support students, and pay teachers properly.”). I kind of felt like I was a student writing a grade 12 English examination. I had to keep in mind my audience, while at the same time being true to my beliefs and style…but I also wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be writing from my own true perspective or from my imagined voice as a possible future Ministry of Education employee or a George Orwell 1984 character.
So what did I actually write? Well, I was just emailed my copy of the writing sample. I post below what I wrote, word for word, errors and all, not edited. Here is my answer as I wrote it on Feb. 24th, 2012:
As custodians, advocates and representatives of public education in B.C., it is our mandate, duty, and deep honour to serve this province, ensuring that all students, parents, and teachers and educational leaders in British Columbia have equitable access to the benefits of personalizing learning. It is a matter of social justice that the transformation occurs as a result of collaboration with the polyphony of voices in B.C. and that the benefits of personalized learning are fairly distributed to all geographical locations, to every school, to every grade level, and to students of every ability, cultural and socio-economic background, gender, and sexual-orientation.
Taking a broad perspective, we can identify key areas on which to focus in this task of ensuring a fair and equitable transformation:
(1.) Relationship Building: Building positive relationships through open communications with all of the various stakeholders ; especially reaching out to under-identified groups.
(2.) Thorough Research: Gathering input from available current data and supporting new research initiatives in areas impacted by personalized learning.
(3.) Meaningful, Productive Collaboration: Providing opportunity for authentic exchange and consideration of ideas from the broadest spectrum of voices.
(4.) Strategic and Balanced Distribution of Resources: Determining where there are existing gaps and working to correct these.
(5.) New Research & Development: Exploring new technologies and methods that can make the most of existing resources and support personalized learning initiatives for all.
SEEING THE PERSONAL FACE OF PERSONALIZING LEARNING:
As we move towards personalizing learning, we are mindful that imbalances in each of these abovementioned areas have a very personal, individual face. When a high school library in Prince Rupert does not have funds to pay for subscriptions to valuable online learning programs that West Vancouver students have been using for over a decade, inequality exists. When a South Surrey elementary school has mobile icarts, smartboards, and ipads for every class because these were paid for with PAC funds, while an East Vancouver elementary school has fewer than fifteen operable computers, inequality exists. When some parents are able to attend PAC meetings and parent-teacher interview scheduled midday, while other working parents cannot, inequality exists. These are the stories we need to hear, reflect on and respond to with supportive and measureable plans of action.
PROVIDING MULTIPLE PLATFORMS:
Driven by a desire to co-create change that is meaningful and impactful for all, we can harness new technologies to offer a variety of platforms from which people will be able to share their personal stories. This has already begun through the BCEDPLAN forums and beyond.
EXPLORING THE RESEARCH:
We partner with all stakeholders to code the data that emerges and then present and reflect on findings. It is an iterative process we engage in as we move towards identifying the scope and causes of current challenges to providing fair and equitable access to personalized learning opportunities. We must consult the wealth of knowledge offered by research occurring in our universities, and colleges, through the BCTF, teacher-initiated projects, student and parent contributions and beyond.
In this era of transformation in education in B.C., matters of equity and fairness must be forefront. Personalized learning comes at a time when we need to put social justice issues at the top of the list. We need to re-imagine and redefine to ensure a first-class education system, our greatest public good and one that is accessible to all.
Okay, so…? Not terrible. Not very groundbreaking. Mostly rhetoric. Looking back, I wish I had taken a harder line, been even more direct, had more examples. You know what irks me the most is that I played it safe and started to sound like a politician myself here. Sure, there are reasonable important ideas here that could be developed, but it’s not an actionable plan which is what we need right now. (But, hey, I only had 60 minutes and was nervous as a nacho on Superbowl Sunday!). But really, I could have done better if I was prepared…I believe I will get prepared by dialoguing more with like minds.
So the take away lesson from for us all is BE READY! Be ready for the genie! Be ready for the microphone because it may pop in front of you at any time! Be ready! I have more thinking to do on how I will refine my answer to these and other critical questions.
I would love to hear from you, what would YOU say we can do “to personalize learning while maintaining equity and fairness within the education system?”
Oh, wait, I just picked up on something I never saw before: why did they frame the question to say “maintain” as if fairness and equity were the present state of affairs?! Hmmmm… | <urn:uuid:1077f78b-e151-4645-ba46-c137bcf6f6da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://personalizinglearning.com/2012/03/13/challenge-your-government-gives-you-one-hour-to-answer-the-question-of-how-to-make-education-more-equitable-what-do-you-say/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967432 | 1,990 | 1.703125 | 2 |
WASHINGTON — As Hurricane Irene threatened the Outer Banks and most of the Eastern Seaboard, President Barack Obama warned Friday of a historic storm with the potential to flood neighborhoods, down trees, erode beaches and knock out power to tens of millions of people unused to violent tropical weather.
Irene, the closest brush with a major hurricane for many Northeasterners in more than a decade, is likely to be an "extremely dangerous and costly storm," Obama warned, before leaving his vacation on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts a day early to return to Washington. He and his top emergency managers urged people to follow evacuation orders.
"Don't wait. Don't delay," said Obama, who spoke Friday with mayors and governors along the East Coast. "We all hope for the best, but we have to be prepared for the worst. All of us have to take this storm seriously."
New York took the unprecedented step of issuing a mandatory evacuation for some 270,000 residents of lower-lying areas of the city: Battery Park City, Coney Island and the Rockaways. The city also announced that it would end mass transit service at noon Saturday.
Irene was forecast to be just off New York City by early Sunday, possibly still at Category 1 hurricane strength with 85 mph winds.
"You only have to look at the weather maps to understand how big this storm is and how unique it is, and it's heading basically for us," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday afternoon.
Beach communities from North Carolina to Delaware ordered mandatory evacuations, and New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia declared states of emergency in advance of the storm. Some people in Hoboken and Jersey City, N.J., across the river from Manhattan, were asked to evacuate voluntarily. Jersey City's police chief even warned that he might ban driving on Sunday.
Among the government's chief fears: the potential for widespread power outages in a region that's home to more than 65 million people from North Carolina to Maine.
"Those in the path of the storm should make sure that you are also taking necessary and common-sense precautions, such as having an emergency plan, such as having some emergency supplies, some food, some water, a flashlight with batteries, in case we lose power," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned. "We do anticipate a significant amount of power outage with this particular storm."
Pepco, the Washington-area electric utility, offered an ominous automated recording in a call to all residential and small commercial customers Friday morning: "Due to the magnitude of the storm, the company expects the restoration effort to extend over multiple days. Just as Pepco is preparing for Hurricane Irene, we strongly urge you to prepare now for the very real possibility of power outages this weekend."
The company's reliability came into question from customers, regulators and lawmakers after extended outages last year during the major snowstorms in the region.
An investigation by The Washington Post late last year found that the company ranked near the bottom nationally among electricity companies not only in maintaining power but also in returning service to customers
Smaller communities in the path of the storm worried that the potential damage to New York City and Washington would overshadow them. Ray Sturza, the mayor of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., warned that if residents decided not to evacuate the Outer Banks community, they'd be on their own after the storm.
"The path of the storm is going into such major urban populated areas that they're going to be the priority for power restoration. So if you decide to stay this time, you've got to be prepared to be self-sufficient for a longer period of time than you normally would expect to be."
Sturza urged those remaining on the Outer Banks to be prepared enough to be self-sufficient for three to five days, a call echoed by other government officials from the president to Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"Here's what you need to be prepared for: power outages that could be days or longer," he said. "And the further away you are from the urban areas, the likelihood that could be, you know, up to a week or more power outages. You're just not going to be able to get everything back on quickly."
Many people who remained at Carolina Beach, N.C., which was under a voluntary evacuation order, said they were largely unconcerned.
"This is nothing," said Todd Lengyeltoti, who came out to the shore to see the surf Friday. He paused before adding, "We hope."
Lengyeltoti, an artist, moved to North Carolina six months ago from Miami Beach, where he went through hurricanes in 2004 and 2008. His house is about three blocks from the beach, on a small rise, and Lengyeltoti said he thought it would be OK despite the storm surge.
"Living in Miami, you were used to this sort of thing," Lengyeltoti said.
But New Yorkers, less accustomed to the threat, wondered how to handle the storm, including what to do about their window air-conditioning units. Leave them be, Bloomberg advised.
In Bethany Beach, Del., local officials called property owners Friday afternoon to say there was a mandatory evacuation for anyone within three-quarters of a mile of a "major waterway."
Law enforcement officials were going door to door to enforce the evacuation, which takes effect at 9 a.m. Saturday. Businesses within the evacuation zone were ordered to close over the weekend. "They will be allowed to reopen once Irene has cleared our area," the call said.
Economists said the sputtering economy probably wouldn't be pushed into recession, as long as the effects of Irene weren't too bad.
"Even if it causes $10 billion in insured damages, that's a shock we can live with," Wells Fargo Securities senior economist Mark Vitner said in a phone interview Friday.
However, the fragile economy can't handle many big surprises, he said: "If it causes $50 billion and shuts down the East Coast and sends the cost of oil soaring, that may be too much of a shock."
Since economic growth has slowed to less than 2 percent, "we just don't have that much margin for error," Vitner said. "Any unforeseen shock, that might be enough to push us into recession.
"Absent that, we see the economy continuing to grow."
There's often a temporary economic disruption during a storm, but they often result in a mini-building boom, said Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of IHS Global Insight. That could be good for the economy, he said.
"There's a hit, but then it bounces back," he said. "This could up being a nice little boost for the construction industry, which has been on the ropes since the housing crisis."
(Ely Portillo of The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, Curtis Morgan of The Miami Herald, Alan Wolf of The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer and Tish Wells and David Lightman contributed to this report.)
ON THE WEB
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY | <urn:uuid:9789c324-29e7-4507-9fa9-fe2a1c7f794c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/26/122161/irene-churns-toward-northeast.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970222 | 1,489 | 2 | 2 |
Home-Grown Education Foundations Can Help With School Finances
By Charles K. Trainor
Earlier this year, Minnesota’s Albert Lea School District was confronted with the possible elimination of its athletic department, two elementary school principals, and a high school administrator if its operating tax levy could not be renewed. California’s Carlsbad Unified School District has contemplated the dismissal of 16 classified employees along with reductions in work hours or workdays for another 30 employees. Reductions also were proposed for staff training, maintenance contracts, and supplies and materials.
Around the country, school districts often struggle to meet the educational needs of their children while finding the necessary funds to do so. Budget shortfalls occur for many reasons. Deficits can result from situations such as the removal of a large parcel of land from the tax rolls, cuts in state aid, or reduced school tax revenues related to declines in local economic activity. School districts are expected to do more with less.
The No Child Left Behind Act is just one example of the ever-increasing demands placed on districts to cut costs and improve academic outcomes. In addition to federal mandates, districts are often subjected to requirements issued by the state legislature or department of education. While every board desires to enhance student performance, difficulties arise when insufficient funding is allocated to accomplish goals defined by others.
In most cases, severe financial penalties are associated with noncompliance with federal and state mandates. These penalties may be political, financial, or both. For example, districts may be placed on lists distributed to the media or they may face reductions in state aid or funding allocations.
Public school districts have few financial alternatives if legislators or district voters do not provide the funding required to achieve mandated results. One possible strategy, of course, is to raise taxes. However, this usually is not a popular solution.
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Click here to log-in or become a subscriber to ASBJ.com. | <urn:uuid:3fbc7470-ae1f-40dc-8b9d-1106e4b8ffcb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asbj.com/TopicsArchive/SchoolSpending/School-Spending-Archive-2007/HomeGrownEducationFoundationsCanHelpWithSchoolFinances.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958688 | 398 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Congress, Some States Consider Creating Tax on Miles DrivenBy (Display Name not set) March 29, 2011
U.S. Congress and at least three states are proposing the idea of taxing motorists on miles travelled in addition to taxing them on the fuel they use to better make up a shortfall in federal highway funding in a move that would capture revenue from alternative-fueled and electric-drive vehicles while removing some of the incentive for buying fuel-efficient cars.
The Congressional Budget Office last week released a 38-page report examining the idea of using a so-called vehicle miles travelled (VMT) tax to better align taxes with highway costs incurred by U.S. drivers. Oregon, Texas and Washington state are also considering VMTs, with Oregon proposing a VMT on drivers of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles that would start in 2014.
VMTs are being considered by both the federal and state governments as a way their proponents say will help close the gap between highway costs and funds.
As overall fuel economy has improved -- the 2010 model-year light-duty vehicle fleetwide fuel economy of 22.5 miles per gallon marks a 17 percent jump from six years earlier, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- gas taxes cover a decreasing share of funding need to maintain federally-funded highways.
Drivers typically pay about 2 cents a mile in state and federal fuel taxes, compared to costs of almost 15 cents a mile in the form of congestion, accidents and air pollution, according to the Congressional Budget Office report.
"Most of the costs of using a highway are tied more closely to the number of miles traveled than to the amount of fuel consumed," the report said. "Therefore, charging highway users for the full costs of their use, or in proportion to the full costs, could not be accomplished solely through fuel taxes. Accomplishing those goals would require a combination of fuel taxes and per-mile charges."
The current gas tax, which averages about 20 cents a gallon nationwide, raised about $24 billion for the highway trust fund last year, while the federal government accounts for about a quarter of the approximately $150 billion spent to build, repair and maintain U.S. highways. Almost half of the vehicle miles travelled in the U.S. are on interstates despite the fact that interstates make up just 7 percent of U.S. highway-lane miles.
How the VMTs would be enacted is still a point of discussion, with systems based on GPS readings and a self-reporting process being proposed. Still, VMTs are likely to further spur debates over how the federal government should or shouldn't incentivize drivers for buying more fuel-efficient cars or electric-drive vehicles.
Last December, Presiden Obama signed an $858 billion tax package that in part extended tax credits for biofuels but also allowed for a number of tax credits for hybrid-electric vehicles, compressed-natural-gas vehicles and diesel vehicles to expire.
That means that while buyers of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars and trucks in 2011 get a $7,500 credit on battery-electric and plug-in-hybrid vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt, as well as write down some of the cost of purchasing and installing charging stations for the vehicles, incentives on about 20 hybrid, CNG and diesel vehicles also expired.
That VMTs are being considered for Oregon is also topical given the state's aggressive role in promoting electric-drive vehicle adoption. Last September, San Francisco-based electric transportation product developer ECOtality said it would install more than 1,100 of its Blink electric-vehicle charging stations in and around Portland, Salem, Eugene and Corvalis, making Oregon a major cog in the company's $230-million plan with the federal government to install more than 15,000 states across six states over the next three years.
Oregon also passed a $1,500 tax credit for electric-vehicle buyers in 2009, while Governor Ted Kulongoski said the state would install a string of fast chargers beside U.S. Interstate 5 along the approximately 200 miles between Eugene and the California border.
Still, VMTs are among a growing list of initiatives aimed at putting a greater premium on road usage and not just fuel consumption. A recent study by the nonprofit Energy Security Leadership Council concluded that the U.S. needed to follow the lead of cities such as Singapore, London and Stockholm by enacting so-called "cordon pricing" policies, also called congestion pricing, that charge drivers to enter the busiest parts of metropolitan areas while being more aggressive in putting toll roads into use. | <urn:uuid:1b708c55-122e-42f2-8442-8c0530e2fc93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edmunds.com/autoobserver-archive/2011/03/congress-some-states-consider-creating-tax-on-miles-driven.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955562 | 956 | 2.25 | 2 |
Jewish Community Voice: JDC provides local student with hands-on Israel experience
For Jews living anywhere but Israel, we can only imagine what it is like to be whisked away to a dreary bomb shelter when sirens signal that incoming enemy rockets are hitting our town. Many of these shelters, often occupied for several days, are a far cry from the comforts of home. For Cherry Hill native Kate Herron, helping to make a bomb shelter a more pleasant place was truly an invigorating experience. Herron recently participated in a 10-day, groundbreaking mission to Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an overseas partner of the Jewish Federation that is supported each year through the Federation Annual Campaign. | <urn:uuid:fdf06fcd-6c6c-4b98-a7dd-2977c9731e32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdc.org/news/in-the-news/index.jsp?s=gfp-news&page=13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943599 | 148 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Boston is truly a city of medical and scientific superlatives: the first public smallpox inoculations (1721), America’s first Board of Health (1799), and the first organ transplant (1954). Today this legacy lives on in the groundbreaking work being done in places such as the Massachusetts General Hospital, and across the river in Cambridge, where a number of major pharmaceutical companies are gathered in Kendall Square.
Today, the curious visitor doesn’t have to look far to find out about the city’s fascinating past (and present) endeavors in the fields of scientific and medical innovation, and here are a few places that are worth a visit.
Located on the fifth floor of the Countway Library on Harvard University’s Longwood medical campus, the Warren Anatomical Museum is truly one of the lesser-known gems in the city.
The Museum was started courtesy of a gift by Professor John Collins Warren, who donated his personal teaching and research collection from his many years as a professor of medicine at Harvard. For much of the twentieth century it resided in nearby Gordon Hall, and it finally found a new home here at the Countway in 2000.
Visitors will need to show a photo ID at the library entrance, and they can proceed straight away to the fifth floor via elevator. The Museum consists of a number of display cases, containing everything from gall bladder stones to a number of delicate wax preparations of preserved body parts. The signature item here is the tamping iron that made its way through the head of Phineas Gage on September 13, 1848. It is, of course, a most celebrated case in the annals of medical history, as Gage survived (amazingly), though, many contemporaries noted that he was markedly different after the accident, and some called him “impatient and obstinate.” The exhibits are well worth a visit, and they are open to the general public, free of charge, Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm.
Today, most people can safely assume that some form of anesthesia will be used in many surgical procedures with relatively little risk. Of course, this was not always the case, and before the use of anesthesia, most surgeries were rather quick (and possibly brutal) affairs. This all changed on October 16, 1846, when William T.G. Morton performed the first public surgery using ether in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital. Today, visitors can climb the stairs within the Hospital’s Bulfinch Building to wander around this most wonderful amphitheater. Here they can look at a large oil canvas depicting the famous first surgery, along with a most wonderful Egyptian mummy and a clutch of medical instruments. The room is open from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, free of charge. And what did Dr. Morton say to the audience when he was finished with the surgery that fateful day? “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”
Located on the corner of North Grove and Cambridge Streets, the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation is the proverbial new kid on the block, as it is Boston’s newest museum. Opened to the general public in April 2012, the Museum is named after Dr. Paul S. Russell, a distinguished surgeon who practiced his trade nearby at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The museum contains apothecary kits from the late 19th century, an ether mask, early operating chairs, and hundreds of other items on its two floors. As the museum is part of MGH, it makes sense that the museum also offers a range of video installations that tell visitors about the various accolades and accomplishments that took place just a few hundred feet away. Interested visitors will want to note that the Museum is open Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm.
Max Grinnell is a writer based in Cambridge, MA, who writes about cities, public art, geography, travel, and anything else that strikes his fancy. He’s the author of several books, and his next book, “Secret Chicago,” will be published in fall 2012. His writings can be found online at www.theurbanologist.com and he tweets over @theurbanologist. | <urn:uuid:3cc2141f-97f8-4275-8064-21323d66d5f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.massvacation.com/blog/2012/04/bostons-scientific-medical-innovation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96453 | 873 | 2.875 | 3 |
With so many new plants appearing in the garden in the warm-up to winter, it's sometimes hard to remember what's what, especially if you're doing a no-dig, companion-planted, square-metre, crop-rotated, organic garden. Trying to pick the carrots from the celery or the onions from the leeks or the cabbage from the broccoli is disorienting.
When you buy plants by the punnet you usually get a small plastic label. Mine will inevitably get lost somewhere between the store and the garden. We usually buy or save seed so can't take advantage of the garden centre labels anyway. If you're the alpha gardener at your place then you'll probably know precisely where everything is, but what if you want something watered or harvested? Because you're the only one who knows where things are it's usually easier to just do it yourself otherwise you send out for a pumpkin and they come back with a rock melon.
The labels - or signs as I'm proposing here - tell everybody where everything is. As I write this my wife has asked me to water the green crop and carrots she'd sowed yesterday. Because we had a big-as "Green Crop" sign it wasn't hard to spot where she meant. The traditional plant label has the name of the plant, date of planting and how many seeds were sown and although I had this process drilled into me I am still a little resistant to the idea of it - in other words, slack. The information on the label, should you choose to use one, can be important, especially for all you journal keepers out there. Knowing how long ago you planted your seed helps you keep track of progress. You can compare one propagation with another; evaluate different planting mixes, techniques and propagation positions. To me this all sounds like tantric gardening so I usually don't bother, but I do love to decorate the garden. Introducing veggie paintings certainly brightens up those empty autumn beds as well as making the garden a lot easier to navigate and understand ... for everybody.
Using plywood or any flat timber, draw a vegetable silhouette and cut out with a jig saw.
File any rough edges.
If you're worried about weathering, paint with white acrylic paint to seal.
Paint the basic colour and details. I've used artist acrylics but just use whatever you've got. I used hardwood veneer for some of our labels and rubbed the paint into the grain with a rag, which gave a really nice finish.
Glue or screw a stake on to the back of the label. | <urn:uuid:7a5ca2dc-8172-40f0-846f-5f65909b0dca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/news/print.cfm?objectid=10713346&pnum=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947093 | 537 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Last month historic Redcliffe Plantation on Beech Island received the 2012 S.C. Heritage Tree Award. This recognition honors the property’s stunning quarter mile allee of Magnolia trees estimated to be a century and a half old.
Redcliffe was the home of James Henry Hammond, a U.S. Congressman (1835-1836), governor of S.C. (1842-1844) and U.S. senator (1857-1860). In 1973 Redcliffe Plantation was donated to the S.C. State Park Service. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Heritage Tree Award identifies, celebrates and recognizes S.C. trees that are remarkable because of their age, their association with an historic structure or district, their association with an important historic event or person or their overall significance to the community.
Trees may be nominated as individuals or as a group. They must be located either on public property or on private property that is easily accessible free of charge. Previous award winners include the White Oak (Irmo), the Deerhead Oak (McClellanville), the Wade Hampton Oak (Conway), the Boundary Street oak allee (Aiken), The Horseshoe (USC), the Angel Oak (Charleston), the Centennial Bur Oak (Clemson), the Southern Magnolia (Winthrop University) and the Trinity Live Oaks (Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Columbia). Winners receive a bronze plaque to be displayed near the trees.
The Heritage Tree Award is a project of Trees S.C., formerly the S.C. Urban and Community Forestry Council. Founded in 1991 as a non-profit organization, Trees S.C. fosters the stewardship of S.C.’s urban and community trees and forests through education, advocacy and networking. Bartlett Tree Experts sponsors the award.
Trees S.C.’s award program also recognizes individuals, including both professionals and volunteers, as well as organizations who have made an outstanding contribution to urban or community forestry.
To learn more, visit www.treessc.org and www.southcarolinaparks.com/redcliffe.
— Joanna Angle is a Master Tree Farmer and 2012 South Carolina Tree Farmer of the Year. Her Cedarleaf Farm in Chester County is a Certified Stewardship Forest and part of the American Tree Farm System. | <urn:uuid:1a5f8275-4cb2-4f0b-8dde-7688313000a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecherawchronicle.com/view/full_story/21622530/article-TREE-TALK--Redcliffe-Plantation-earns-S-C--Heritage-Tree-Award?instance=popular | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933391 | 494 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Clothing and merchandise inspired by the wonderful places,people,
creatures and cultures of this place we call Earth.
Tons of national and state flags, coat of arms,
state seals and symbols.
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System, in both diameter and mass. It is also referred to as the Earth, Planet Earth, and the World, and in some contexts, Gaia and Terra.
Home to millions of species, including humans, Earth is the only place in the universe where life is known to exist. | <urn:uuid:c4c1848a-31b0-40a1-bc19-8f606557c637> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://skreened.com/planetearth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938452 | 121 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Allium giganteum (Giant Onion):
The smaller white plant to the left is a Fritillaria, but I am not sure what species.
Cimicifuga racemosa, or Black Snakeroot:
Though the above is a pretty diminutive plant, it has an interesting story. Another common name for this is Bugbane or Bugwort because the plant has natural insect-repellent tendencies. This is actually more true for species of Cimicifuga in other regions. Cimex is Latin for bug (bed bugs are Cimex lectularius) thus the origin for Cimi-. -fuga derives from the Latin fugare, which means repel. Racemosa refers to the flower structure. Flowers that bloom along a single stalk are called racemes.
Iris germanica, or Bearded Iris:
Iris or irid refers to a multiple of colors or a rainbow. Presumably the Latin appellation is due to the variety of Iris colors available.
The word bearded refers to the small hairy strip on the Iris's fall. The fall is the morphological term for the lower three petals. The actual petals are only the upper three. The beard on these falls is essentially a landing strip for pollinators, leading them to the inside of the flower.
Epimedium x rubrum, or Red Barrenwort:
Epi means on or above. Medium, is middle. I'm not aware of the meaning for this Latin name. However, in common names, -wort almost always is a clue to some medicinal or folk use of the plant. While one's first assumption is that the plant is then to be ingested by those who can't conceive is accurate, the historical reason people attributed to such barrenness was a low libido. This was used to cure impotence. The first viagra. It was also used for rheumatism and a potpourri of other ailments. None of those benefits have been scientifically proven.
Aquilegia x hybrida, or Columbine:
Didn't we all learn the word aquiline during SATs or PSATs (or was that just my school?)? It means curving like an Eagle's beak or Eagle-like. Aquilegia thus refers to the long arcing curve of the petals. The common name, Columbine, means dove-like. Aquilegia is a sentimental favorite of mine. It's available in blues, pinks, and a native species has smaller flowers in a deep, salmony orange. Even the hybrids re-seed pretty well and can spread well in the right conditions. Its distinctive foliage is referenced in the name for Meadow Rue, Thalictrum aquilegifolium, which has leaves much like the Columbine. | <urn:uuid:86a8d24b-3a1e-4d55-b8c9-a5cb78b9dd62> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newyorkplantsandotherstuff.blogspot.com/2008/05/spring-perennials-tompkins-square-park.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946962 | 589 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Select a category and shop online for Yardenit specialties, Holy Land souvenirs, Christian and Jewish gifts, inspirational jewelry, food items eaten during biblical times, music, books, clothing, cosmetics and toys.
"In the Footsteps of Jesus" guides you through the life, teachings, sojournings, and miracles of Jesus, . "In the Footsteps of Jesus" turns the printed text into a living one so that you can not only now imagine it, but actually experience it. . . Director: R. Dorot Running Time: 1 hour
In The Footsteps Of Jesus DVD
In the Footsteps of Jesus chronicles the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, Nazareth the birth of Jesus, His baptism in the Jordan River and his miracles in the Galilee Plus his last journey to Jeruslaem Narrated in 12 languages including English. | <urn:uuid:49d60ecf-d1b1-404c-90f3-1e63e5d4a4de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yardenit.com/?section=275&product=240&lineItem=928 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904857 | 178 | 1.671875 | 2 |
|1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,|
|21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37,|
|38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54,|
|55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71,|
|72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88,|
In today's lesson I want to teach about extracting honey. Before I do, let me tell you what's been going on. We've been very busy keeping up with building hives, working our own bees, raising queens, selling packages and enjoying beekeeping. We're busy taking phone calls and answering emails too! Our customers are reporting back that they are very happy and excited to have become beekeepers! Packages are arriving in great condition and customers are relying on lesson seven to give them the confidence they need to install their packages. This is always great to hear. In case you will still be installing your package of bees. Click on the link at the top of the page to view our videos of us making up packages. As you can see I did not wear protective gear, but you should! I was fortunate and did not get stung while giving this demonstration. We always advise beekeepers to wear protective gear even when installing packages.
We sell package bees right from our apiary. The bees are packaged in Florida and driven up to Illinois within 24 hours or less!
Below is a video of us getting bees off the truck that arrived in Illinois from Florida. The bees were off loaded from the truck, seen at the end of the video and placed on this trailer that we used to carry them to our farm.
One of our customers has even started his own blog. Charles Holmes got some hives from us and some packaged bees and set them all up Friday. Check out his blog: http://tuffstreetapiary.blogspot.com/NOW FOR TODAY'S LESSON...
Let's face it. Most of us keep bees in order to gather the honey! It's a blast. Very few things excite me as much as seeing honey flow out of my extractor. It has such a wonderful smell and color. All the hard work, stings and expenses all seem worth it when the honey starts flowing.
I realize that some keep bees for reasons other than the honey. But for those of us who must harvest honey, I want to share the details of how to do it. I'll give a quick outline, then I'll elaborate on each topic in more detail.
1). Make sure it is capped (ripe). 2). Harvest for individual types of honey. 3). How to rob honey from your hive and live to tell about it. 4). What to do with combs full of honey. 5). Various harvesting methods. 6). How much should honey be filtered? 7). Should honey be heated? 8). A clean honey room and processing procedure. 9). Getting rid of air bubbles. 10). Bottling honey.
MAKE SURE IT IS CAPPED (RIPE) Honey bees ripen nectar by removing the moisture and when the moisture level is to their satisfaction, they seal it off with wax, like putting a lid on a jar. This prevents the honey from drawing any additional moisture.
You must be patient and wait for the bees to cap the honey comb before you remove it. If you remove the super of honey prior to it being sealed your moisture level in the honey will be too high and could cause the honey to ferment which will cause your customers to complain and want their money back. So do not remove the honey combs until all frames are completely capped.
Here's a picture of one of my sons using a hot knife to cut off the cappings. We sell these for around $100. Notice what the sealed area looks like. The capped area is white because the newly made wax is a bright color at first. As it ages through the years it becomes darker.
You can click on all photos for a full size image.If you pull out the frames prior to the caps being completely sealed, you can leave the frames in a room with a dehumidifier for a day or two and it will draw out moisture. HARVEST FOR DIFFERENT TYPES OF HONEY Honey from specific flowers does have a different taste. I would not begin to describe the difference but believe me it is different. Here's how to harvest specific honey. Essentially you must remove your honey supers after that particular flower stops giving nectar, and place new supers on before the bees change to a different source. This way, the honey will not be mixed from different sources. Of course, some mixing may happen, but you'll get more of the type that had the largest nectar flow.
HOW DO YOU ROB HONEY FROM THE HIVE AND LIVE TO TELL ABOUT IT? Bees aren't going to freely hand over their honey to you. You have to figure out some way to remove the stored honey from the hive by first removing the bees from the honey supers.
What works best is to remove the bees from the honey super so that you can carry the entire super full of frames of honey to your honey room. There are several common practices: Leaf blower or an official bee blower, a fume product such as Fischer's Bee Quick, a bee escape or a feather. Though there are many other methods, these are the common practices.
A blower works well and many beekeepers do use leaf blowers to blow the bees out from between the frames of a super. I've found that bees are agitated by the engine on a leaf blower. They feel the vibration of the engine and it bothers them. So I do not use the blower method. Others use a fume product which is a chemical that the bees do not like. To use it, you pour some of the liquid fume on a fume board and place it on top of the super you want to remove. The bees run out of the super to get away from the bad smell and the super is empty within 5 minutes of bees. Many love this easy method. I'm skeptical of the product being absorbed into the wax or honey and having an overall effect on the hive. However, many people use this with no signs of ill effect.
Another method has been common for many, many years. It is a method that I started out using. Simply pick up each full frame of honey and either shake or brush the bees off. This works pretty good, however, bees do not like to be brushed off and I always get stung alot whenever I use a brush. Old time beekeepers used a large feather and many still do. They brush off the bees with a feather.
Finally, many people use a bee escape. The bee escape is a plastic device invented by Mr. Porter in 1891 and commonly referred to as the porter escape. It fits into the oval shaped hole in the inner cover, and then the inner cover is placed below the super you want to empty. As the bees depart the super through the escape, they can get out, but they cannot get back in. This works real well for me most of the time but not always. We do sell a lot of these.
What I have found works great for me is a modification of the leaf blower. I blow my bees gently out of the super with compressed air.
We are able to drive our truck near the hives, and in the back of the truck are two important items. A generator and a 15 gallon air compressor. The air compressor is powered by the gas generator. We then stand a honey super on edge and with the air compressor we gently spray off all the bees toward the front of their hive. They simply fly back into their hive. Since we have a long air hose, the noise of the generator and air compressor are kept a considerable distance away. The bees just think it's a windy day. Then, we place the bee free honey supers in the truck and drive them back to our honey room.
HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU FILTER YOUR HONEY? Once in the honey room, the individual frames are loaded into our automatic cowen uncapper which uncaps the sealed combs. But, most beekeepers with smaller operations use what is called a hot knife. We sell these and they work great at slicing off the caps on each cell so that the honey can be extracted. Some people who do not wish to pay $100 for the knife simply scratch open the comb with a kitchen fork.
Once the comb is uncapped, now the honey must be extracted. In the simplest way, a frame can be left upside down to drip out over night. It would need to be a warm room, atleast 80 degrees. Then the comb would have to be reversed and the same done to the other side. If you cannot afford to purchase an extractor, this may be your best option. You can squeeze or crush out the honey from the comb, but this destroys precious drawn comb that you could reuse and it mixes in too much wax with the honey.
Once uncapped, we then, placed the frames into our 33 frame extractor which spins at a high rate of speed, slinging the honey out of the comb. You can purchase a very simple plastic extractor for just over $100 but a more common extractor is a stainless steel hand crank 2 frame extractor for just over $300. This is our best seller. If you can afford a little more, then a 4 frame extractor does 4 frames at a time. It runs just under $400.
Once the honey is slung out it collects in the bottom of your extractor which has a value on the bottom. At this point, you can bottle it, although you'll have pieces of wax, bee legs and wings and other things that came off your frames. So most beekeepers filter their honey.
We are against heating honey. Honey does not need to be heated or pasteurized. It is a pure and natural product and the only food that never spoils. Heating honey destroys precious elements within honey. It does not need refrigerated and can be kept at room temperature forever without spoiling.
We filter our honey through micron filters, usually a 600 or 400 micron filter. We sell a lot of these filters that fit down over a 5 gallon bucket. These filters are $10 and can be washed and reused over and over again. The honey flows very fast through these filters and important elements of the honey are allowed to stay within the honey but foreign particles are filtered out.
We like our honey to be free of air bubbles. So we allow our honey to sit after it has been filtered. It sits for at least one week. Then we bottle it. We have a 500 gallon settling tank which allows all air bubbles to float up to the top. Then we drain from the pure honey at the bottom of the tank. You can do the same in a 5 gallon bucket with a valve on the bottom which we sell too.
Most honey will become hard, known as crystallizing. This is normal and does not mean the honey is bad. It means it simply crystallized. This can be remedied simply by leaving a jar in warm water for a while.
A CLEAN HONEY ROOM Keep a clean honey room. One drop of honey on the floor soon gets tracked all over the place. It is a messy job, but fortunately honey cleans up very nicely with water. So, after you are finished harvesting your honey, clean all your equipment up.
When processing honey, since it is a natural product and all you are doing is bottling it, there are very little guidelines. If you giving away your honey or selling it, here are some common practices you should follow.
Wear a hairnet, clean clothes and keep your hands clean and properly wash all equipment including bottles. If you are selling honey, your processing room should not be in your house. The room should be kept very clean, lights covered and walls and floors washable.
If you are just keeping the honey for yourself, you should still practice cleanliness and you can use your own kitchen.
BOTTLING HONEY Bottles are expensive. We use a combination of glass and plastic bottles. Many of our customers enjoy the small well known teddy bear bottles. Bottles must be cleaned well and dry, free of any foreign objects and dust. Most of our bottles come with lids that have the safety seal within the lid. So once we secure the lid, the safety seal is activated and the customer is the only one who breaks that seal.
A common bottle for us to sell is the quart jar. Most of our customers buy the one quart size and the traditional canning jar with canning lid is very cost effective. Some customers return their jar when finished.
There you go! I hope this lesson has been helpful and I hope within the next few weeks, you'll be harvesting the spring honey crop!
We'd like to thank all of our fantastic customers for how nice and encouraging you have been to the Burns family here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms! We love receiving your photos and video of your hive operation. And why not consider starting your own blog too! It's really simply and free at http://www.blogspot.com/
For all your honey harvesting needs, such as filters, extractors, buckets, and supers give us a call. 217-427-2678!!
Sheri and I are busy building a store on our farm now, where we will also hold our fall and spring beekeeping classes. We are building a very large observation hive as well for study and demonstration.
See you next time and remember to BEE-have yourself! David & Sheri Burns Long Lane Honey Bee Farms 217-427-2678 EMAIL US AT: firstname.lastname@example.org Visit our website at: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/
We are a family business manufacturing our own hives and selling every thing you need to keep bees. | <urn:uuid:e1820083-1a90-4d96-951b-4c4262f48029> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.honeybeesonline.com/blesson33.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951496 | 3,016 | 1.648438 | 2 |
February 14, 2012- Moody’s, the credit rating agency, has warned the UK that it may cut its rating therefore increasing its cost of borrowing funds. Moody’s statement came following concerns of the possible impact the crisis in the eurozone will have on growth prospects in the UK.
The agency placed a “negative outlook” on the UK meaning there is about a 30% change the country could lose it’s credit rating of AAA with the next 18 months. Austria and France were also warned. Moody’s has already lowered the ratings of Portugal, Spain and Italy
Chancellor George Osborne was quick to point out that the comments by the U.S. credit agency were not criticizing the economic policy of his government. He said, “It has given us a reality check that Britain has to take care of its debts.”
He added, “This is another organization warning us that we cannot borrow or spend too much or we will lose our AAA rating.”
“The country could put in place a number of austerity measures and still lose it top credit rating if the economy were to continue to be stagnant,” he concluded
Sovereign debt classifications, like personal credit ratings indicate how risky it might be to lend money to a particular country. A high rating from the main agencies such as Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s will help keep borrowing costs for a country much lower. | <urn:uuid:2bd2b319-a914-4479-a6b7-c54223b92015> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zolmax.com/united-kingdom-has-negative-outlook-say-moodys/874/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976145 | 301 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Partnership for Rural King County (PRKC) and Stewardship in Action (SiA) are approaching completion of the Patterson/Raging Focused Stewardship project. Below is a “clickable/zoomable” map that lists the status of each land parcel, as of August 27, 2011. A lot of farms and forests have benefited from planting, restoration and other productive land practices AND hundreds of landowners have had the opportunity to get expert advice from local resource professionals!
Partnership for Rural King County (PRKC at prkc.org), working with EPA and King County, is wrapping-up a two year effort to reach rural landowners who are interested in pursuing stewardship projects on their lands. The project has provided technical assistance to help complete stewardship plans as well as provided cost sharing for completing stewardship projects. Below are three maps that highlight the project area and some of the accomplishments. The first map below shows the project area within the Patterson Creek and the Raging River basins: The next map indicates the specific areas (green icons) where forest stewardship plans and projects were accomplished: The last map shows the areas (yellow icons) where farm plans and projects have been completed:
Partnership for Rural King County (PRKC) is completing a joint venture with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and King County to connect rural landowners in two rural watersheds (map below) with stewardship advice and funding sources to complete needed stewardship projects on their land. Over one thousand landowners in the two basins have been contacted, resulting in hundreds of farm and forest owners being connected with the stewardship assistance that they have requested. All in all, a winner for rural landowners in King County. You can find out more at prkc.org.
Over the Summer and Fall of 2010, Cascadia assisted in the preparation of a Forest Stewardship Plan for Ueland Tree Farm in Kitsap County near Bremerton, Washington. Cascadia provided spatial data analysis, mapping and editing services for this project. The plan was ultimately certified by the Forest Stewardship Council which defines the gold standard in forest stewardship. Ueland Tree Farm is commended for their long term vision for forest sustainability. | <urn:uuid:83f6c4d0-1c74-4881-b267-2315c5859b11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cascadiapacificgroup.com/?tag=stewardship | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952846 | 458 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Sure to be one of the most talked-about documentaries at this year’s
Sundance Film Festival, Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove is part heist movie, part
environmental exposé. The cove in question is a secluded and naturally
fortified lagoon in the small Japanese town of Taiji, where every year for
six months thousands of dolphins are brutally slaughtered. The film is in
part about the efforts of a group of activists to infiltrate the cove and to
actually film what goes on there. Leading the charge is Richard O’Barry, a
longtime activist who was responsible for training the dolphins on the
sixties TV show Flipper. Indeed, The Cove is also the story of O’Barry’s
journey, documenting how he came to be a self-described “abolitionist” for
dolphins. He spoke to Vulture about his new film, watching TV with Flipper,
and the increasingly elaborate disguises he has to wear when he goes to
You know, when I was a kid, I always wanted to live in the Flipper
I used to live in that house! It was right in the Miami Seaquarium
there. I have such wonderful halcyon memories of those days. There wasn’t
even a fence around the Seaquarium. It was like magic. Until the wheels fell
You had captured the dolphins on Flipper, right?
I captured the five dolphins that collectively played the part of Flipper. I
trained all of them, from the very beginning of the first show to the last
show. I lived with all five of them in the Seaquarium. And on Friday nights,
at 7:30, I would take the TV set, with a long extension cord, out to the end
of the dock, so Flipper could watch Flipper on television. And that’s when I
knew they were self-aware. I could tell when the dolphins recognized
themselves and each other. Cathy, for example, would recognize the shots she
was in, Suzy would recognize her shots, and so on. Dolphins are hard to
read, because you have to look at body language. Almost all other animals
you can read by looking at their faces. But dolphins have this built-in
“smile” that makes it look like they’re always happy.
your ideas about captivity turn around?
Cathy died in my arms,
of suicide. It was just before Earth Day, 1970. The next day, I found myself
in a Bimini jail, trying to free a dolphin for the first time. I completely
How do you know it was suicide?
to understand, dolphins are not automatic air breathers like we are. Every
breath for them is a conscious effort. She looked me right in the eye, took
a breath, held it — and she didn’t take another one. She just sank to the
bottom of the water. That had a profound effect on me.
footage of the dolphin slaughter you filmed in The Cove is pretty
staggering. Has anyone else seen it yet?
The world will see it
Sunday, at Sundance. Even the Japanese don’t know about this. I went onto
the street in Tokyo, and I showed the footage to a hundred people walking
down the sidewalk, and none of them knew this was happening. That’s the only
hope, to expose this to the world. It won’t be easy. The film will probably
be banned in Japan. I’m hoping Jim Clark, who is our partner on this, can
figure out a way to get it seen there. If he can invent Netscape, he can
figure that out, as well. In the meantime, we also have our website,
people can learn more about this issue.
But killing dolphins
is actually legal in Japan.
Yes, but let’s not forget that the
place in question here is a national park. They’re killing the wildlife in a
national park. They don’t have jurisdiction there. They’re just a bunch of
thugs. As for the broader issue of legality: One percent of the Japanese
population eats whale meat, and a very small percentage of that one percent
eats dolphin or even knows that people eat dolphin. That’s one of the
reasons I’m opposed to a boycott of Japan. In the seventies and eighties,
there was a big effort to stop whaling by taking out full-page ads in
newspapers that said, “Save the Whales. Boycott Japan.” Japanese people are
not guilty of this. They don’t know it’s happening. Japanese papers and
networks do not cover this story.
So if nobody is eating
dolphin meat, why is this slaughter happening?
I think it’s
really about over-fishing. It’s a worldwide problem. Basically, they’re
killing the competition, because each of those dolphins eats 25 to 30 pounds
of fish. As for the dolphin meat, nobody really knows where it goes. They
kill 23,000 dolphins a year: I have no idea where that meat goes. You can’t
really even buy it in Taiji. I’m thinking it might be exported to places
that have a protein shortage. We had this meat tested, and the mercury
levels on it is through the roof. It’s contaminated.
you been back to Taiji since you shot this footage?
I go five or
six times a year, during the killing season, which is six months. I’m
constantly there. I’ll go anytime anybody will go with me — CNN, BBC, you
name it. It’s gotten so dangerous now that I have to wear disguises when I
first get there. The last time, I was wearing a long black wig, sunglasses,
my Michael Jackson mask over my mouth, a dress, and lipstick. I had to dress
as a woman because they’re looking for a man.
What will they
do if they catch you?
The biggest danger is not so much the
fishermen, although they are angry and some of the younger ones have said
they would kill us if they could get away with it. But it’s really the
yakuza, who are very connected to the whaling and fishing industries. In
Japan, that’s how problems like me are solved, how people who cause trouble
are often dealt with. Especially in a lot of these small towns, you don’t
call the police, you call the yakuza.
What about people who
say that, while the footage in The Cove is quite grisly, a regular
slaughterhouse would also look pretty horrific to people if they could see
They’re absolutely correct. The one difference is that the
dolphins are terrorized for days, as the fishermen intrude on their
migration patterns and then chase them into the lagoon with loud noises. But
yes, the slaughterhouse is an absolute horror show. It’s a separate issue,
and some of us are working on that as well. But that doesn’t justify what
they’re doing to the dolphins.
Wow, that's great, the USA has a new sacred cow that the people of the
world must be made to worship. It must be wonderful to know which animals
are sacred; then you can point out the evildoers who want to eat them
instead of worship them.
lanny on 01/16/2009 at
well lanny--the dolphin is a warm blooded--intelligent(you could look it
up) mammal---with a brain a third larger than ours-that communicate with
intricate vocalises-like we humans--sacred?--not-!-wonderful and very
humanistic--yes!--and deserving of more than slaughter--just like us--ya
think??--do the research and save the smarmy for politicians and others that
need it--peace-! vince martin
vince37 on 01/17/2009 at
Also, it's important to point out that dolphins, are basically feared by
all sea life, including great whites and other predators. I usually applaud
japan with it's technology smarties and it's anal like atmosphere and
manners, but their refusal to leave dolphins and whales alone to live
completely baffles/ires me in sort of the same way as deviant priests do.
on 01/17/2009 at 3:03pm
The slaughter in Taiji cannot be compared to an abattoir or
slaughterhouse, it is better compared to running a herd of bison or horses
over a cliff – except that the terrifying fatal plunge lasts for days and
ends with the blade of a knife or the point of a spear. If you're a lucky
dolphin you get to see your offspring hauled off to an aquarium for a life
of servitude before they slit your throat.
Although some people, like
the proprietors of the Dolphin Research Center, hate O'Barry and badmouth
him in their public programs, I admire him and wish I could do more to help
him. I interviewed him in the 1970's, when he was still Ric O'Feldman, and
he told me he trained the dolphins for Flipper by telepathy. "There wasn't
time to do it any other way," he said. "It takes you as long to train a
dolphin as it takes to get across the idea of what you want it to do. As
soon as the dolphin understands, it will do it."
As for me, if
anybody who reads this is interested in publishing "Wet Goddess," my novel
about my 1970's love affair with a dolphin, you can read a chapter on
Angelfire under my name, below. I think if I could get it published in
Japan, where people aren't so hung up about zoophilia as they are in this
country, it could have a profound effect and make some lucky publisher a
hell of a lot of money too. – Malcolm J. Brenner, Punta Gorda, FL
01/18/2009 at 12:37pm
The slaughter in Taiji is brutal and cruel. Imagine your nearest and
dearest being hounded for days with loud noises that are totally
disorientating and distressing. Then you are trapped in a cove and all
around you your friends and family are being hacked to death and you are
swimming in their blood.
Then because you look young and fit you are
chosen by one of the many aquarium officials who are in the water watching
the masacre, but their job is not to save the dolphins but to select them
for sale to aquariums in Japan or for export. The rest of your life is then
stuck in a tank being forced to perform for stupied human beings. The
aquariums tell the families about the wonderful conservation work that they
fund, what a pack of lies!!!!
01/19/2009 at 4:57am
The Japanese should be deeply ashamed by the continued dolphin killings.
A tiny market for the meat, the risk of mercury poisoning (the meat from
these near-shore dolphins has been tested over and over and literally has
hundreds of times the already questionable "accepted" mercury level of 0.4-1
ppm (varies by country; max. levels lower for pregnant women). With the
majority of whale species populations on the decline, and with many
near-shore species threatened by toxins in the water and the ocean
food-chain, this continued killing of dolphins by a small number of Japanese
fishermen is short-sighted and absolutely without honor.
paul08 on 01/26/2009 at
WRITE TO THE JAPAN EMBASSY!
Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki
Washington D.C 2008-2869
nkat on 01/29/2009 at
The issues related to Taiji are disturbing and highly emotional, no
argument there. But let’s not forget that hunting and killing dolphins takes
place all over the world, Japan is not unique in that aspect. North American
tribes hunt marine mammals, most islands in the Caribbean hunt dolphins and
nearly 300,000 dolphins are killed every year in by-catch fisheries
worldwide. The people of Taiji will not stop what they have done for
hundreds of years because of a bad image in US media. In fact, Japanese are
notorious for thumbing their noses at American values.
O'barry gets out of this is notoriety ...otherwise how would he raise
donations? What’s amazing is with the Internet at our fingertips, no one
does any real research on the people we shamelessly seek to worship. Richard
O’barry’s real name is Richard Feldman, then Richard O’feldman and finally
Richard O’barry. He never captured any of the Flipper dolphins, never worked
with them and never had one die in his arms. Richard Feldman was a
maintenance worker on the set at Miami Seaquarium and left as a disgruntled
employee. He was then hired as a trainer at the killer whale stadium and
fired after only one year. The man running all of this was Arthur Hertz, the
now owner of Miami Seaquarium.
In Monroe county and Grassy Key, the
history of Flipper is well known. Look it up. No where will you find the
name Richard O’barry. The man has made a living on a compelling, but
completely fabricated story. Taiji drives won’t stop because a fraudulent
extremist says so…they’ll stop when younger generations of Taiji fisherman
learn the value of dolphins and resource management. You don’t change
someone’s mind by painting them as the devil on the world stage. Richard
O’barry sells dirty laundry for donation. If that’s what you want to buy,
then do it with eyes wide open.
umashank on 06/15/2009
Ric Feldman/O'Feldman/O'Barry was convicted of violating the U.S. Animal
Welfare Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1996, causing the willful
and deliberate suffering and death of dolphins in the Florida Keys. This
legal case is well known, but strangely wasn't mentioned in this one-sided
fabrication of a story. Your "animal rights" advocate caused just as much
suffering to dolphins as the fisherman in Taiji do. So let's kick him off
his high horse and label him for what he is...an attention seeking extremist
who needs attention, even if it costs dolphins their lives. Get real people.
By tursiopst on
06/16/2009 at 10:39am
UMASHANK: I am really interested in what you are saying about O'Barry's
fabricated life. Who do you claim was the dolphin trainer on Flipper? I
attempted to find the information myself but couldn't. All I'm seeing is Ric
O'Barry. He is credited for the series in the IMDb but as as an actor
("Veterinarian") and "technical advisor"... however, the IMDb Glossary
states that this term means "A person with expertise in a particular field
who provides advice for the production" so this could refer to an Animal
Traininer. There is no other "Animal Trainer/Handler/Wrangler/Owner"
credited. Could you please post links to your sources as I would love to
look into this further! I too value the truth. :-)
LANNY: So what you
are trying to say is "How dare they try to save wild dolphins and keep
humans from getting poisoned??"... Really? Try reading the article next
time. The dolphin slaughter is thought to be more about fishing than selling
the meat. And although the meat is most likely being sold to make more money
this is a problem too it contains TOXIC LEVELS of mercury. In other words:
it's poisoning people. And it's NOT America's fight, it's the fight of
O'Barry and his team.
TURSIOPST: Before you post next time, do your
homework!! What you are referring to was when O'Barry was convicted of
releasing TWO captive bred dolphins who were not yet ready to live in the
wild. Consequently, the dolphins obtained severe injuries. Was a stupid
thing that he did? You bet. Does a stupid mistake he made *19 years ago*
somehow disqualify him from fighting to end the annual torture & slaughter
of *thousands of dolphins annually*?? Of course not. By the way, regarding
your comment: "Your "animal rights" advocate caused just as much suffering
to dolphins as the fisherman in Taiji do." ... all I can say is, do the
~ Lana K. | <urn:uuid:bea06cf3-c1ec-4190-baa0-95c2904a240f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Saints/Media/TheCove-Interview.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95796 | 3,670 | 1.804688 | 2 |
In extending its holidays and New Year's celebrations, Disneyland Resort will celebrate Three Kings Day Jan. 6-8, 2012. Three Kings Day activities will take place at Zocalo Park in Disneyland Park.
The Disneyland celebration of Three Kings Day is one of many in area.
Three Kings Day, or Dia de los Reyes Magos, observes what is widely known as Epiphany. Dia de los Reyes Magos is a holiday tradition celebrated in many Latin American countries, focused on part of the Christmas story as related in the Bible's gospel of Matthew. It marks the day the three kings – also referred to as the Magi or wise men – followed the star of Bethlehem to present their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus.
Disneyland's three-day event takes place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and will include special décor, food and entertainment at Frontierland's Zocalo Park, Spanish for "Town Square."
Among the activities and entertainment for Disneyland's Three Kings Day:
Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse will appear in Fiesta costumes and other characters will join them: The Three Caballeros: Donald Duck, Jose Carioca and Panchito.
Entertainment highlights include folklorico dance along with musical performances by the Grammy-winning Mariachi Divas.
Bilingual activity hosts will join children in face-painting, coloring, crown decorating and other activities.
Special food carts will appear in Zocalo Park for the occasion, serving Three Kings Day treats. The seasonal menu at Rancho del Zocalo restaurant includes tamales and Mexican hot chocolate. [Disneyland has not indicated whether they will offer rosca de reyes, the special cake associated with the holiday.]
Three Kings Day at Disneyland is free with park admission.
Kungaloosh! Put on your set of ears and join me in stalking the Mouse. | <urn:uuid:52589c5a-5346-49cd-adca-db6aabc0254a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dldhistory.com/2k11article.asp?Page=5&Filter=Current&Ident=2448 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901648 | 396 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Conditions of Use
1. The growing part of the mitosis is the longest period of all. During the cell cycle the DNA duplicates and divided, and the proteins are being produced. The cells will also be growing in size.This is the first step which is called the interphase.
2. During the interphase the cells are starting to divide which then splits into to 2 sister cells during this stage the proteins are being made.
3. To produce the 2 sister cells the DNA instructions in the cell MUST be duplicated. This situation occured in the synthesis phrase. The chromosome splits into two identical chromosomes.The cells mother give the daughter cells all they need to survive.
The cells are able to split into 2 cells and are the same exact cells due to the chromosome makes the EXACT duplicates of themself.
Interphase: the longest and the busiest period of the stage. The DNA duplicates and the cells are dividing.
Prophase: In this stage the nucleolus starts to fades. The nucleolus then strats to meet together into chromosomes.
Prometaphase: This stage is where the nucleolus envelopes break down. This stage is where the proteins are being mixed together and where the 2 sister cells are at.
Metaphase: Tension applied by the spindle fibers aligns all chromosomes in one plane at the center of the cell.
Anaphase: The spindles fibers are shorten and the 2 daughter cells are being torn apart. they then later travel towards the cell pole.
Telophase: The daughter cells arrive at the cell pole and the spindle fibers that pulled the sister cells apart dissappeared.
Cytokinesis: The spindle fibers begin to break down. Contactile ring cleaves the cell into 2 daughter cells. Then the new cytoskeleton are being reorgonize bu the microtubules and then they are later return to the interphase stage of the the Cell Cycle.
Article posted January 25, 2012 at 02:27 PM •
comment • Reads 884
see all articles | <urn:uuid:d3de9c73-b1b7-48b2-acef-566d4dc9111d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=271339&user_id=271339&blog_id=1415412&position2=14 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931074 | 432 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Austin Young is used to dealing with unwanted furry animals.
“I just hope that everybody keeps after them,” Young said. “It’s more of a problem than most people realize.”
It’s a problem that resurfaced recently in Jacksonville. In 2008, the city council established an official policy about the city’s right to trap feral hogs. At the time, the animals popped up around Woodhaven Circle, and the policy allowed the city to trap them with homeowner permission.
Jacksonville is now seeing hogs in the Nichols Green Park area, north of Trinity Mother Frances-Jacksonville.
In the past month or so, people called the city about hog sightings in the area, prompting the city to put out traps, City Manager Mo Raissi said. He estimated that city staff on Monday trapped two large hogs and likely four or five smaller hogs.
“We caught a bunch of them (in the past, and) we felt like we got a bunch of them out,” Raissi said. “Now it looks like they’re coming back again.”
Jacksonville Public Works Director Will Cole said the wooded area is conducive to a feral hog habitat, and as long as they stay in the woods, people don’t notice them. However, when they start venturing into areas the city maintains, it becomes a problem, he said.
Cole said there’s a technique to baiting and placing the traps, and some workers have different ideas. Corn is mostly used, and as of Tuesday, the city planned to keep two traps out.
“Sometimes, placement of traps is not conducive to catching,” Cole said. “We’ll move periodically until they move back into the woods.”
Raissi urged residents to be cautious and call the city if they have concerns.
The situation in Jacksonville is indicative of a statewide issue. There are about 2 million feral hogs in Texas, according to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.
The feral hog population is always on the rise, and the animals can only stay in one area for a certain amount of time, said Mike Hanson, with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
“Wild hogs historically — even if they seem to have everything they need in a place — they will leave,” he said. “They’re becoming smarter and smarter and more wise to our ways.
People used to have more success in trapping.”
Hanson said the animals’ movements are greatly driven by food — they love acorns — and can wind up in places where they historically weren’t.
He said they’ll generally try to get away from people, but if cornered, can become aggressive.
“People need to be aware they are out there. They do pose a threat. They’re going to try to get away from you in most instances,” Hanson said.
He said people could see hogs during the day, depending on availability of food, but they primarily run around at night.
There is no hunting season for hogs. However, Hanson said if people hunt them at night, they are asked to call and let the local game warden know.
In fact, Cherokee County Game Warden Eric Collins said about every landowner he’s talked with this year is having problems with hogs rooting up their land.
He said wetter conditions, more habitats for hogs and few predators that keep the population in check could all be contributing factors.
“These hogs, being that (their) population has boomed, moved into more (populated) areas. Hogs can do damage when moving around trying to feed,” Collins said.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Biologist Daniel Price said trapping is likely the best way to deal with the hogs on big property.
Jacksonville residents with hog issues can call Public Works at 903-589-3510. | <urn:uuid:97f1b2da-0e4d-4a41-a650-f40af002c621> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tylerpaper.com/article/20130210/NEWS01/130209753/0/SPORTS0575 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955931 | 839 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Equating the racism of the oppressor to the racism of the oppressed? Blacks suffer a double oppression in the U.S., and are in no position to use racism to oppress whites economically or politically. The converse, of course, has been true ever since whites enslaved blacks. Anything appearing as racism from black individuals is typically a reaction to suffering a lifetime of real racism and oppression here in the cradle of racism.
Ameerica is not the fucking "cradle of racism", doucebag. The fucking European CREATED racism, or at least were the first to act upon it in a major way.
Yes, I'm a "doucebag" [sic] for pointing out something widely known. White supremacists here can save their comments for someone who cares to hear their racists drivel. Here are a few places to start for the under-educated: | <urn:uuid:9f77f75c-7887-420c-8c55-cc32564b2de9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939648 | 178 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Neutron and X-Ray Scattering - Courses
Scattering to Study Soft Matter
- Adrian Rennie is giving a course on Study of Soft Matter with Scattering. It starts on 1 April 2008 and will give 7.5 ECTS points. This course consists of lectures, self-study and discussion. It is intended for graduate students and covers small-angle scattering (X-rays and neutrons), light scattering and applications of diffraction to soft matter.
The following material is available for download by students:
Article on SANS data reduction
Other web resources and references are provided in the lectures.
Polarised Neutron Scattering
Andrew Wildes held a course on polarised neutron scattering between October 2007 and March 2008 (credit 4.5 ECTS).
Last updated 2010-07-02 13:32.
Editor: Karl-Einar Ericsson | <urn:uuid:f65b674e-f212-417c-b125-b818c3b314c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.physics.uu.se/node/1355 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90605 | 185 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Captain Pete Bethune Boards Shonan Maru 2 to Arrest Japanese Skipper
credit JoAnne McArthur /
At 0629 Hours (Perth Time), New Zealand Captain Pete Bethune of the recently sunk Sea Shepherd vessel Ady Gil breached the Japanese government security ship Shonan Maru 2 and successfully boarded the vessel under cover of darkness.
His mission is to attempt a citizen’s arrest of the skipper of the Shonan Maru 2 for the destruction of the Ady Gil and attempted murder of the six Ady Gil crewmembers.
At 0600 Hours, Captain Bethune (of New Zealand) left the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin on a Jet Ski driven Larry Routledge (of Great Britain).
The Jet Ski lay in wait for the Shonan Maru 2 to approach. With the Japanese vessel making 14 knots through the water, Routledge maneuvered the Jet Ski into position under the anti-boarding spikes along the port side of the Shonan Maru 2.
Captain Bethune made the jump and climbed onboard the whaling ship without being noticed. Captain Bethune is presently onboard the Shonan Maru 2 awaiting sunrise to make his presence known.
Captain Bethune also has a bill for $3 million dollars to present to the Master of the Shonan Maru 2. The bill is for the cost of replacing the Ady Gil.
Captain Bethune will be demanding that the Shonan Maru 2 Captain surrender himself to Sea Shepherd or take his ship to the nearest Australian or New Zealand port to turn himself in to legal authorities.
Captain Bethune will make it clear that he does not wish to return to a Sea Shepherd ship without the Captain of the Shonan Maru 2.
Sea Shepherd anticipates that the Japanese will hold Captain Bethune as prisoner onboard the Shonan Maru 2.
“This was an impossible mission,” said Captain Paul Watson. “Captain Bethune boarded a Japanese whaling fleet security ship at high speed in total darkness, breached the spikes and anti-boarding nets and is presently onboard and the Japanese crew are still not aware that he is there. He is there to demand justice for the sinking of his ship.” | <urn:uuid:bc983b00-a396-4cb3-9138-508dadb97cf0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/2010/02/15/captain-pete-bethune-boards-shonan-maru-2-to-arrest-japanese-skipper-238 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947336 | 458 | 1.875 | 2 |
Often thought of as a “woman’s problem” binge eating is almost as prevalent in men as women—and puts both sexes at equal risk for obesity, depression, problems at work, and other impairments. Despite this, the disorder is often overlooked in men, a new study reports. An estimated 8 million Americans struggle with binge eating, characterized by frequent episodes of gorging on large amounts of food, often in secret, accompanied by feelings of disgust, embarrassment, guilt, and a sense of being out of control.
While up to 90 percent of patients with anorexia or bulimia are women, binge eating is one of the few eating disorders that strikes men at nearly as much as it does women. About 11 percent of women and nearly 8 percent of men struggle with binge eating, according to a study of more than 46,000 adults ages 18 to 65, published in The International Journal of Eating Disorders. Overall, about 8 million Americans struggle with binge eating, putting their health in danger.
Binge eating disorder is defined as episodes of eating large amounts (15,000 calories) of foods within two hours, occurring two or more times a week, accompanied by a sense of being powerless to resist gorging. For example, Ron Saxen—the 49-year-old author of “The Good Eater,” a memoir about his battle with bingeing—frequently ate 10,000 to 15,000 calories of Big Macs, French Fries, chocolate milkshakes, ice cream, and M&Ms, often within a 90-minute time frame, according to the New York Times.
Because men don’t think of themselves as being at risk for binge eating, it can take an extreme feeding frenzy before they’re willing to admit that they have a problem. For years, Andrew Walen, 39, had frequent bouts of gorging on 4,500 calorie’s worth of food at a single sitting, and often ordered takeout food for four when he was eating alone. But he remained in denial that his eating was out of control until the day when he downed 70 chicken wings in an hour.
“Ultimately, it was about numbing out and self-loathing,” Walen, now 39 and a therapist in Columbia, Maryland told the New York Times. “There was this voice in my head that said, ‘You’re no good, worthless,’ and I turned to food.”
Researchers report that binge eating causes just as much harm to men as women—or may even be more dangerous for men, because men are far less likely to seek help, often because they’re ashamed of having “a woman’s disease.” Doctors rarely screen male patients for this disorder, even though it can lead to dangerous or life-threatening health problems.
Because binge eaters don’t purge, 70 percent of them are overweight or obese, increasing the risk for such dangerous conditions as the following:
Binge eating also takes a devastating psychological toll, frequently causing intense shame, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety, and depression.
Yet this devastating disorder doesn’t even have its own listing in the DSM, the diagnostic guide for mental health professionals. Often men can’t find treatment facilities targeted at men, and almost all literature on the disease focuses on its effects on women. Or, like Saxen, they may be in denial, because eating large amounts of food is more culturally acceptable in men than in women.
While most binge eaters are overweight, others are not. However, there are many warning signs of the disorder. Along with frequent feeding frenzies, typical symptoms include:
Researchers aren’t sure what causes binge eating, but it’s strongly linked to depression. About half of people with the disorder are either currently depressed or have a history of mood disorders. Scientists suspect that genes may be involved, since bingeing often occurs in several members of the same family. Researchers are also studying the possible role of brain chemicals.
Although binge eating is challenging to treat (due to a relapse rate of up to 50 percent among people with the disorder) psychotherapy can often be helpful. Among the more effective forms of treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, in which people identify the triggers and patterns that lead them to shovel down too much food, then work on finding healthier ways to address these issues.
For example, binge eaters often tend to restrict their eating during the day, only to lose control at night; so one treatment goal is to learn to consume three square meals per day, plus healthy snacks. However, for men, the biggest challenge of all can simply be getting them to step forward and admit they have a problem.
Get the information you need to improve your health and wellness on Healthline.com.
5 Psoriasis Triggers to Avoid. Watch out for these five common triggers to lessen chances of a flare-up.
Avoid a Migraine Before it Happens. Certain triggers cause migraines, such as food, hormonal shifts and even bright sunlight.
Foods to Avoid with Arthritis. Many health professionals recommend avoiding trigger foods to ease your arthritis pain.
Symptoms & Stages of Lung Cancer. Learn the warning signs of lung cancer and what you can do lower your risk of getting it.
Bipolar Disorder & Sexual Health. Our sexuality expert offers tips about what you can do to maintain a healthy sex life. | <urn:uuid:ecd27447-752f-497b-bf86-67fd3bb5dbdc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/binge-eating-equally-common-men-women | 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 | 0.970794 | 1,128 | 2.296875 | 2 |
06-14-2006, 04:54 PM
ok, So this is my first tryout with dx. All i want to do is adjust the gamma of an image in a picture box. Obviously I probably need to adjust it as its coming in but does anyone know how to explain the simplest/proper way to adjust gamma of an image? I tried looking through the help and such but everything is being dropped for something newer and it warns not to use it. So obviously there must be a new and improved way, I'm just missing it :D I'm using Visual Stuido 2005 and have downloaded the dx9 SDK. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help or link to simplified help for me. | <urn:uuid:41979058-fe67-4306-b90e-6cbb285b62bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-264587.html | 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 | 0.973216 | 145 | 1.9375 | 2 |
The Kuranakh gold deposits found in 1959-1962 are mainly in Lower Cambrian bituminous limestones and dolomites in the Aldan anticline of southern Yakutia. There is considerable similarity between the primary gold occurrences and those disseminated deposits of north-central Nevada (Carlin, Cortez, etc.). The primary occurrences in the Kuranakh district are mainly potash feldspar (adularia) and quartz metasomatites with about 6 ppm gold occurring as irregular replacements of the limestones and dolomites in places in stratiform bodies up to 3 km in length, 300 to 500 m in breadth and 5 to 10 m in thickness. The gold in the adularia zones is very finely divided (2-5 µ) and mainly in pyrite. Thin kersantite dykes and sills of late Mesozoic age are also accompanied by adularization along their contacts both in the Cambrian strata and in Lower Jurassic sandstones, and these igneous rocks have a comparable tenor of gold within the ore zones. Oxidation of the primary gold-bearing zones and karstification of the Lower Cambrian limestones, in post-
In Luzon, Philippines, eluvial placers are common and were extensively mined in the past. In the Paracale-Mambulao district where the primary auriferous material is mainly veins and stock-works of quartz and pyritic quartz veins in granite intruding serpentinites. The auriferous eluvial material consisted mainly of weathered debris and disintegrated bedrock carrying free gold.
Certain eluvial auriferous deposits take the form of talus accumulations. A typical example of this type of placer occurs near the Belaya Gora deposit in the Lower Amur region of Russia. The bedrock deposit occurs near the summit of Belaya Gora in a strongly fractured, kaolinized and silicified Oligocene volcanic rock. The gold is mainly free and accompanied by about 0.5 % combined pyrite, arsenopyrite, sphalerite and argentiferous sulphosalts. The talus placer associated with the primary deposit lies below the deposit on a gentle slope and averages some 5 m. in thickness. In composition the talus material is largely variegated clay and sandy clay and oxidized rubble with a heavy mineral suite composed mainly of limonite, magnetite, ilmenite, chromite, epidote and small amounts of zircon, sulphides, manganese oxides and other minerals. The gold is disseminated through the talus material and also forms short streaks and enriched lenses. The gold in the talus is not much different from that in the bedrock. The gold grains range in size from 0.05 to 1.5 mm. Some adsorbed and very finely divided gold also occurs in concretions of kaolinite and quartz. Downhill from the talus placer there is a colluvial and alluvial placer system associated with springs and the river fed by the springs.
Maps of alluvial gold deposits in: California, Western Canada, Eastern Canada, Russia, World
Maps of primary gold deposits in: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic Rocks
Rafal Swiecki, geological engineer email contact
This document is in the public domain. | <urn:uuid:f897a238-6f2b-4b55-aa4f-c109f3892050> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rafals.com/alluvial/deposits6.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917291 | 704 | 2.765625 | 3 |
What’s the cheapest way to heat your home: oil, natural gas, electricity, propane? Home heating costs vary by region and even by house. Here's what the average Northeast homeowner can expect to pay to heat his or her home with various fuels this winter, as forecast by the Energy Information Administration (EIA):
Oil prices have risen so high that oil heat, once competitive with other major home-heating fuels, has become the most expensive to use. Prices are tied to world events, so they can change quickly. But the trend of the past decade is clear: Heating oil prices have more than doubled from $10.31 per million British thermal units to more than $25 per million Btus.
Nationally, only about 6 percent of homeowners use oil as their primary home heating source. Most of them are located in the Northeast.
This comparison uses the EIA’s Northeast prices, because it’s the one region that uses all four fuels in quantity and because it reflects the full costs of heating in a northern climate.
1 of 4 | <urn:uuid:bc1c2de9-2b50-435b-b456-1114f783c952> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/Environment/2012/1207/Cheapest-way-to-heat-your-home-Four-fuels-compared/Heating-oil-2-526 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967752 | 223 | 2.265625 | 2 |
When Congress and President Bush rushed to pass their popgun economic "stimulus" package, they increased the current year's deficit by more than 150 percent and charged another $152 billion to future generations.
The federal debt is more than $5 trillion — $48,359 per household. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We owe another $5 trillion to federal employees and veterans for health care and retirement benefits.
However, the cost of retirement and health care programs for the general public really shafts our children and grandchildren. The unfunded cost of providing Social Security and Medicare benefits to everyone alive today is more than $45 trillion. That's not the total cost; it's the cost that cannot be covered by existing revenues.
The board of trustees of these two programs says the promises we've made to ourselves "are not sustainable under current financing arrangements." Social Security's existing surpluses will "turn into rapidly growing deficits as the baby boom generation retires."
"Medicare's financial status is even worse," the trustees warn. That should make any clear-thinking American recognize the sheer foolishness of creating a new health care entitlement for everyone.
Too many Americans, whipped into a frenzy by groups like AARP, prefer to sentence our children or grandchildren to stratospheric tax rates than to consider simply slowing the growth of future benefits. Without changes, government will grow from an historic cost of about 18 percent of GDP to 30 percent in just 22 years. In some 40 years, spending will consume 50 percent of GDP — more even than during World War II.
Our decisions today determine if we will saddle our children and grandchildren with an unrestrained government that drains the economy and makes the dollar virtually worthless.
If we hope to secure the blessings of liberty for our posterity, we must force our leaders to confront the future responsibly and aggressively. Most of us did not endure the Great Depression nor any of our country's most demanding tests. However, we face a moment of truth that is just as crucial to our nation's future.
It would be tragic if we who have been asked to do so little fail even this test.
Fox News' Roger Ailes: Administration's Excuses Won't Work, Americans Died For Press Freedom | Katie Pavlich | <urn:uuid:51570f55-3b22-4284-bba2-00f2f5f2247b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://townhall.com/columnists/markhillman/2008/03/17/the_cult_of_instant_gratification/page/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950668 | 461 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The Righteous Among Nations
The Wall of the Righteous Among Nations
Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. "I could have done more," she said. "This regret will follow me to my death."
She has been honored by international Jewish organizations--in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.
Irena Sendler was awarded Poland's highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003.
This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants.
She passed away on May 12, 2008, at the age of 98. | <urn:uuid:10fc56b6-562a-4d08-80b9-5b68b7c0132a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voicesinwartime.org/content/righteous-among-nations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970793 | 190 | 2.296875 | 2 |
[Windows] Focus completely on your work with WriteMonkey, a clutter-free and portable writing applicationFebruary 13, 2013 7 Email article | Print article
I would like to say that when I sit down to write something, I get into the “Zone”. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. I can become very easily distracted. So I went looking for a writing application that could help me stay on track. What I came across was word processing program WriteMonkey. In short, this is writing program with a stripped down interface. Although it may not have all of the bells and whistles of OpenOffice of Microsoft Office, it was surprisingly robust for a small, portable writing application.
WHAT IS IT AND WHAT DOES IT DO
WriteMonkey is a portable writing application that takes up your whole computer screen when it is open. All of your toolbars are hidden, allowing you to completely focus on your writing. When you need something, all of your toolbars and options can be easily accessed through right-click or hotkeys.
- Stripped down writing application that allows you to focus completely on your writing
- Completely portable
- Very fast and stable (never crashed)
- Full-screen even hides your task bar (full-screen can be toggled on and off)
- “Info bar” located at the bottom of the document (can also be docked at the top) is customizable. Can be changed to display word count, time, file name and live notices
- Offers statistics such as word count, number of characters, paragraphs, sentences and word frequencies
- Offers a visual progress bar for writers who need their articles to be a certain length
- Time your writing to see how long it takes to complete your work
- Offers many standard word processing features: word look up, spell check and “type replacements” (define a short trigger that will automatically be replaced with the correct corresponding text)
- Turn on typing sounds that sound like a real typewriter
- Offers typewriting scrolling so the words you are typing always appear fixed at a pre-defined vertical position
- Can set the number of seconds between auto saves
- Offers multi-monitor support
- Can be integrated with Firefox
- Offers quick links to Thesaurus (eng), Google Images, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, Answers.com, Reference.com, English Dictionary, Poetry.com, IMDb, Big Huge Thesaurus and Wordnik
- It will take time to adjust to the look and feel of this program
- Lacks that polished feel of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
- Requires .NET Framework 4.0
If you could not tell by the “pros” list, I love this program. It has a ton of features all packed into a small portable program. Although WriteMonkey lacks a few features and the polished feel that you get with Microsoft Office, it more than makes up for it.
The thing that I love most about WriteMonkey, and the main reason to use it, is how it helps you focus more on your writing. The program cuts out all of the distractions that come with using other word processing programs. All of your toolbars at the top have been removed, and when the program is in full screen, even your task bar is hidden. When it is in full screen mode, you can’t simply hit “minimize” to close the window. You actually have to toggle the full-screen off and on. This may be annoying at first, but it does a wonderful job at keeping you on track.
Although your toolbars are hidden, they can easily be accessed by right-clicking anywhere on the document. Here you will find your standard options: cut, paste, spell check, undo, save, open, etc. You can also use the “lookup” feature. This is a handy feature that allows you to select a word and then get information about that word from different sites like Google Images, Thesaurus, Answers.com, Wikipedia and more.
The program is very customizable as well. For example, you can choose to display a progress bar and Info bar. The progress bar is great for writers who have to make their articles a certain length. You can set a certain word count, and it will show your progress as you work towards it. The info bar can be used to display a number of things which you choose. This does include your word count, current time and the name of the file you are working on. It can also be moved to the top or bottom of your document.
Overall the program has too many features to cover, but let’s see if we can’t cover a few more that stood out to me. WriteMonkey can be integrated with Firefox and does offer multi-monitor support. You can choose how often the program auto saves your work, right down to the second. It even offers you a ton of helpful statistics: your word, sentence, character and paragraph counts, as well as statistics on word frequency. Heck, you can even give the program the old “typewriter” feel by turning on typing sounds and typewriter scroll, which keeps the text you are writing centered vertically and scrolls the rest of the text.
CONCLUSION AND DOWNLOAD LINK
WriteMonkey is a program that is designed to cater to “hardcore” writes. It lacks some of the user friendly options of Microsoft Word (like its polish), but that is perfect for people who just want to focus on their writing. If you are looking for a good portable writing application, or a program that can help you stay focused, I suggest you give WriteMonkey a try.
Version reviewed: 2.4.0
Supported OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8
Requires .NET Framework 4.0
Download size: 6.56 MB
VirusTotal malware scan results: 0/44
Is it portable? Yes | <urn:uuid:b03f9e71-b4d1-41d6-aac5-7f3f846f9254> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dottech.org/97004/windows-review-writemonkey/comment-page-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941331 | 1,242 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The Art of Living Dangerously
July 2006 issue features an interview of Karen Marcelo by Annalee Newitz. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125601.700.html
Interview: The art of living dangerously
* 15 July 2006
* Annalee Newitz
* Magazine issue 2560
What happens when technology is unleashed as art? Who controls rampaging robots built from scrap? High-tech artist and icon Karen Marcelo explains
In San Francisco's underground high-tech arts scene, Karen Marcelo is an icon. A computer programmer by day, she's also a member of performance art group Survival Research Labs. SRL artists build robots with equipment they find in junkyards and military-industrial waste bins, setting them loose in a kind of anarchic frenzy with no practical purpose. This is technology for art's sake.
Marcelo often plays the role of the hacker behind the art - coding software that allows people to control gun-shooting robots from remote locations over the web or developing user interfaces for remote-controlled sculptures. Her motivation is to create art that is interactive, involving the audience in the experience of controlling huge machines that often appear uncontrollable. In 2002, she began a semi-regular public event in San Francisco called Dorkbot, where tech art innovators meet to show and discuss new works. In the last four years, Dorkbot has become ... | <urn:uuid:896bec74-7353-4cfb-99e6-4d80096b72ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://karenmarcelo.org/crewblog/2006/07/art-of-living-dangerously.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928508 | 294 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Born: c. 1390
Died: c. 1360 B.C.E.
Egypt Egyptian queen
Nefertiti was an Egyptian queen and wife of King Akhenaten who remains a mystery to scholars today. A bust (sculpture of a person's head and shoulders) of her discovered in 1913 is one of the most widely recognized symbols of ancient Egypt.
Few facts known
Nefertiti was born around 1390 B.C.E. Some believe she was of Egyptian blood, while others believe she was a foreign princess. Her name, which means "the beautiful one is come," is of Egyptian origin, and evidence indicates that she had an Egyptian wet-nurse or governess of noble rank, which has led to the belief that she was born within the circle of the Egyptian royal court. She may have been a niece or daughter of Ay, who was a keeper of records under King Amenhotep III.
When Nefertiti was fifteen years old, she married Amenhotep IV, who was a year older and became king upon his father's death. They had six daughters and, according to some, one son. During the first five years of Amenhotep's reign, Nefertiti enjoyed a high profile. Evidence of her political importance is seen in the large number of carved scenes in which she is shown accompanying him during ceremonial acts. She is shown taking part in the daily worship and making offerings
In the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten. He went against the beliefs of previous kings by announcing that the sun god Aten was the greatest of all Egyptian gods and the only one who should be worshipped, rather than Amen-Ra, who had long been considered supreme. Nefertiti shared his belief. Largely because of opposition over this issue, Akhenaten built a new capital called Akhetaten and moved the royal family there.
After the fourteenth year of Akhenaten's rule, there are no more pictures of Nefertiti; she simply disappears from view. Some believe she was the power behind the throne and thus responsible for the changes during the rule of Akhenaten until being dismissed from her position and banished to the North Palace at Amarna. This would mean there was a conflict within the royal family, with Nefertiti favoring the continued worship of Aten while Akhenaten and his son-in-law Tutankhamen (c. 1370–c. 1352 B.C.E. ) supported a return to the worship of Amen-Ra. Most scholars, however, now suppose that Nefertiti's disappearance may simply be due to the fact that she died, and one of the king's other wives took her place at his side. A more dramatic, if less accepted, theory holds that she assumed a new, masculine identity toward the end of Akhenaten's rule—that Nefertiti and the young Smenkhkare, who ruled briefly either with or after Akhenaten and is believed by some to have been his son, were in fact the same person.
For More Information
Freed, Rita E., Yvonne J. Markowitz, and Sue H. D'Auria, eds. Pharaohs of the Sun. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
Tyldesley, Joyce A. Nefertiti: Egypt's Sun Queen. New York: Viking, 1998. | <urn:uuid:5d3454ad-00be-4656-ad77-9bbab8b35ae2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.notablebiographies.com/Mo-Ni/Nefertiti.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983652 | 713 | 3.59375 | 4 |
You live on the 6th floor of an apartment building. This week, the elevator has been broken. You're telling a friend about it:
I've had to walk up and down six flights of stairs all week.
Use this for something that you had to do in the past, and you still have to do it. In other words, use this to talk about an obligation that started in the past and has continued until the present. For example, if you lost your job and haven't found a new one yet, you can say:
I've had to cut back on my expenses and rely on my friends and family for help.
When complaining about stairs, people often use the phrase "walk up and down".
"Stairs" can't easily be counted, but here are ways that you can specifically count them:
- One whole set of stairs in a building is called a "staircase". Most buildings only have one staircase, but some large buildings might have 2 or 3 separate staircases.
- One "flight of stairs" connects two floors. For example, between the ground floor and the 2nd floor is one flight of stairs; between the 2nd and 3rd floor is another flight, and so on. There can be several flights of stairs in one staircase.
- Sometimes there will be a "landing" halfway up a flight of stairs. This is a wider area where the stairs turn around and go in another direction.
- A staircase or a flight of stairs is made up of lots of "steps". You usually walk up one step at a time.
(Print this lesson) | <urn:uuid:a0094e80-8ae3-416d-a192-ce89e48a462b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phrasemix.com/examples/ive-had-to-walk-up-and-down-six-flights-of-stairs-all-week | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978021 | 333 | 3.71875 | 4 |
Military reform was central to German political debate before 1848. Princely standing armies were criticized as instruments of monarchical authority, used for arbitrary repression and isolated from society. While some liberals would replace them with popular militias, all agreed to reduce their costs, require officers to take constitutional oaths and open their ranks to all men of ability, and subject armies to parliamentary control. Reformers also wanted to guarantee the civil rights of soldiers, decrease the length of military service, reform military judicial systems and create a more effective national military organization.
In the March days several states instituted many of the desired liberal reforms; only the creation of a national army was beyond their reach. Many recognized the right of soldiers to participate in public assemblies, to join clubs freely and to exercise free speech. They abolished corporal punishment. Wurtemberg ordered that all soldiers be addressed as equals by officers. New liberal ministries required officers to swear constitutional oaths and gave parliaments a greater say in military affairs. In Prussia, however, much of the liberal program remained promises. Radicals and liberals struggled among themselves while the military establishment regrouped and launched a propaganda campaign to discredit the revolution. In other states, most notably in south Germany, the officer corps more easily accepted the changes.
Wurtemberg began plans to end substitution, a practice whereby men of wealth could escape military service by hiring a replacement. Saxony abolished exemptions from service and substitutions, following a similar move by Electoral Hesse. Baden introduced the same changes and also doubled the size of its army in the autumn of 1848, in accordance with a national assembly law. Wurtemberg raised its draft quota as well.
When the national assembly opened in May 1848 the left spoke for a military system similar to that of Switzerland or the United States, but the majority rejected a complete revamping along the lines of popular militias. Instead it formed a military reform committee, which was increasingly dominated by right liberals and conservatives. Though it never reported back on a proposal for military organization, the assembly took a few interim measures and also debated the federal constitution which contained several articles relating to military matters.
In June the assembly granted the provisional government direction over all German armed forces, though key monarchies refused to recognize its authority. Though wary of infringing on middle class privileges, in its 1849 constitution the assembly asserted the military service obligation of all German men and abolished substitution. Frankfurt's military and political weakness became clear when it had to call upon Prussia to wage war against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein and then accept the Malm armistice. The triumph of reaction in Austria and Prussia later that fall made further plans for military reform moot.
Though the failure to place the German military system on a national basis, responsible to an elected parliament, forms only one segment in the larger revolutionary movement, it indicates the dilemmas, complexities and contradictions of German society at mid-century as it succumbed to the Prussian military state.
Loyd E. Lee
Jörg Callie. Militär in der Krise. Die bayerische Armee in der Revolution 1848/49. (Boppard, 1976).
Andreas Hohlfeld. Das Frankfurter Parlament und sein Kampf um das deutsche Heer. (Berlin, 1932).
Fred H. Stenkamp, "The Prussian Army and the Revolution of 1848" (Dissertation, Michigan State, 1972).
jgc revised this file (http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~chastain/ip/military.htm) on October 26, 2004.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to email@example.com
© 1999, 2004 James Chastain. | <urn:uuid:b5f73dfe-8802-4c39-9948-243a834ec67d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/ip/military.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942479 | 782 | 3.953125 | 4 |
Teeth whitening is a dental cosmetic procedure gaining popularity, according to Dr. Deepika Verma. Yet the appearance of a white smile is no substitute for lifelong dental health aided by professionals.
Increasingly, adults are turning to teeth whitening as a method of reducing stains on teeth and obtaining a brighter smile. This cosmetic dentistry procedure aims to whiten teeth, reduce visible staining and give the appearance of a healthy smile. As one of the most common avenues of cosmetic dentistry, the process of whitening teeth is frequently requested by patients and consequently offered by dental professionals.
As individuals scramble to achieve the illusion of a healthy mouth, dental authority Dr. Deepika Verma cautions that there is no substitute for practicing consistent, professionally supervised dental care to promote a bright, healthy smile.
Cosmetic teeth whitening relies on active chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, to produce a whiter smile. For some patients, the process of chemical whitening can produce persistent tooth sensitivity or incomplete stain removal. Frequent bleaching wears away at the natural enamel of teeth, making it more likely that stains will last in the future. Some bleaching processes can produce heightened sensitivity by widening pores on the surface of teeth.
Using toothpaste with active whitening ingredients is a more cost-effective way to promote a white smile. However, consumer vigilance is required, and the choices can be overwhelming: some toothpastes contain abrasive whitening ingredients that can cause damage to teeth.
As Dr. Deepika Verma asserts, maintaining a healthy smile starts with diligent and well-informed dental hygiene. Twice-yearly dental cleanings allow professional hygienists to remove plaque that builds up on the surface of teeth. Far from being simply an issue of vanity, regular cleanings at a responsible dental care center will prevent plaque accumulation that can lead to gum disease or other damaging conditions.
Education provided by a dental office can be essential to lifelong dental health and hygiene. As in the case of whitening toothpastes, many products and services offer fast results but fail to appropriately address issues of safety and proper dental care. It is necessary to consult with a trusted dental professional in order to determine the correct course to take when it comes to choices in the field of dental health.
Whether or not whitening is a priority, Dr. Verma recommends using fluoride toothpaste approved by the American Dental Association. As she notes, dental products fortified with fluoride contribute to strong, efficient teeth.
Aside from professional cleanings and expert-reviewed product choices, a consistent and mindful daily routine will contribute to healthier, stronger teeth. Brushing twice a day is essential, diminishing bacteria that accumulate overnight and during meals. It is essential to choose a dental professional who is trustworthy and experienced. Overbrushing or incorrect brushing can be damaging, so consulting with an expert is the best method of establishing a healthy dental routine.
While professional whitening can be an option for some, for others, following a professionally supervised course of dental maintenance significantly contributes to healthy teeth, regular maintenance and a luminous smile.
Dr. Deepika Verma is an experienced dental professional who serves as the director of the Community Health Centers of Southern Iowa. Dr. Verma utilizes industry innovation, years of experience, and personal relationships with her patients to promote lifelong dental health. | <urn:uuid:803d6eaa-7360-4bf2-bf00-dc98ac2e54d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indyposted.com/193107/dr-deepika-verma-advises-on-teeth-whitening-and-health/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917517 | 677 | 2.609375 | 3 |
(sighs) All right. You know I have more respect for your art than I do for my own fears.
Thank you! Thank you!
Just promise you won’t betray me.
A lot of people I know are trying to get their first jobs out of college. Many of them are bitter that they did not prepare with vocational training instead. Too many intangibles are invited when the qualifications one has do not just dictate the next step. Boundaries are seductive. Sheila Heti’s book How Should a Person Be? assumes there are boundaries to be longed for by the narrator, Sheila.
If a person should be a particular way, it is for others. The central conflict therein is the disintegration of a friendship. Sheila audiotaped her best friend, Margaux, in order to learn how a person should be, and by doing so, Sheila sabotaged Margaux’s (a painter’s) relationship with her own art and started to assume some of Margaux’s qualities. A person should be able to circumvent this. A person should be able to be the subject of art without reducing that art to shit. A person should be able to be a friend without driving that friend to manic emails. Sheila embarks on this quest to determine how a person should be after the end of her marriage, in which she realizes she has aspired all her life to show the men who want to teach her something that they’ve taught her something, and she touts them like a relic, these lessons she’s learned, until her life is shit and she can’t make art.
As one who spends most of my energy allocated to worrying worrying about art, this book provoked the unpleasant urge to counter every statement with thoughts of psychotic policymakers, disenfranchised voters, and the kind of actions that turn lives to shit. Any time I catch myself feeling art has been trivialized – especially in my own head, over which I have all the control I do not have over the state – I am alert. Of the many factors that contributed to my wanting to read this book, the real one is all about one of my most significant relationships with someone who refuses to read anything but self-help books.
As long as this person and I have been acquainted, I have given her shit for relying so much on self-help literature. As one who is forever unable to make them herself, she is a great seeker of boundaries and people and things that will tell her what to do and how to be. As this is someone I have known for a long time, my total fed-up-ed-ness with this behavior is episodic, and I was cycling back towards repulsion for the whole thing when I read this book and this conversation surfaced about attitudes in book reviews:the case for divorcing the author and the work in order to conflate admiration or disappointment with a person when it should be the work being judged. Amid this conversation here is a work about an author working whose own shortcomings as a person prevent her from making art – or at least, as she judges it, good art.
I reiterate my first statement: a lot of people I know are trying to get their first jobs out of college. I am very young. I went to college and I studied writing there with a man who warned me and five others as often as he saw us how dangerous it would be to fuck up art, how we must be vigilant to call out anyone who fucked it up, how we had to be impenetrable in our belief and understanding about what did not fuck up art but would advance it, and be ready to meet head-on anyone accusing us of fucking up art and hand them their ass. In school I learned the discipline to develop a style I could defend and how to wield compassion and love for art that is barbed and built to undo what are wastes of time, what takes advantage of the idea that just because it was difficult to produce, it is art.
If you are one who considers how a person should be in relation to those around you, negative criticism is a batbomb – you’ve gone about everything all wrong. Ideally – this is not how it is by any means – if negative criticism is provoked, it stands as a generative response, moving the conversation forward that the art being criticized failed to do by the force of its own artfulness. As easily as a book could make one think could there ever be love a book could make one think why the fuck do we keep writing fucking books about love.
I read How Should a Person Be? because it invites a batbomb. If you care how a person should be because that person stands the chance of being used to make art, and artists must be vigilant of art that could turn to shit – that could be borne in a person being how one should not be. So if the main character, Sheila, is concerned with how she should be because she knows she and by virtue what she is involved in the deepest – her friendship with Margaux – is the subject of her art, she is concerned with her performance in the book itself, and if How Should a Person Be? is shit, if it is the winner of the Ugliest Painting Competition. Is someone worrying how one should behave a sturdy or shit-prone subject for art? Do those worries pose a bigger threat to art than a critical audience who just cannot section work versus writer right, who cannot establish boundaries?
Boundaries are seductive. But in art, “there is no place it does not see you.“
If Sheila Heti longed to be for others a particular way, as a writer she might make things easier for critics, but How Should a Person Be? which is subtitled “a novel from life,” demonstrates that a book that seems transcribed from true events is not reducible, dismissable as uncrafted and, as they have been, evidence of the female author’s inability to do a thing but parrot their depths in the context of therapy in an attempt to assert the personhood assumed automatically by men, the foundation upon which they can lay art. How Should a Person Be? has a fit in that space and cries in that space.
I almost can’t blame it for posing itself as a question, although I want to blame it for how aware I am of my roll in judging the book. That question exposes my particular biases as a critic and a lover of art and how I care profoundly for how people should be while I detest the articulation of the concern. If you must ask, you only want to be for others. If you make art and you ask How Should a Person Be?, you only want to make art for others, for people like me. Is that shit?
How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti is available from Henry Holt and Company | <urn:uuid:a7ad31ce-8671-463e-80f9-bee4c0008232> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://anobiumlit.com/2012/09/13/seductive-boundaries/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972944 | 1,420 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Yesterday I posted about a Minnesota appellate court’s mind-boggling ruling that driving was not required to be arrested and convicted of drunk driving. For those who think this was an isolated moment of judicial insanity, consider the latest wisdom from the appellate bench:
State’s Highest Court Rules In Drunken Driving Case
Hartford, CT. Mar 24 – Drunken people don’t actually have to drive their cars to be charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the state Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The court’s 5-0 ruling came in the case of Michael Cyr, who was arrested in Manchester in February 2005 in a parking lot near a bar. He had started his car remotely and then sat in the driver’s seat intoxicated, but never put the key into the ignition and didn’t drive anywhere.
Justices ordered the state Appellate Court, which had thrown out Cyr’s conviction, to reinstate it and send the case back to Superior Court in Manchester for sentencing.
Cyr, 50, of Andover, faces a year in prison followed by three years of probation.
In its written decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court used the following tortured reasoning to sustain the conviction:
In starting the engine of his vehicle remotely then getting behind the steering wheel, the defendant clearly took the first act in a sequence of steps necessary to set in motion the motive power of a vehicle that has been equipped with a remote starter. The fact that the defendant next needed to insert his key to continue the process of setting in process that motive power is of no greater import in determining whether there has been operation than the fact that a person without a remote starter , after inserting the ignition key, wll need to turn that key to start the motor.
As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is”, said Alice,”whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
(Thanks to George Stein and Lewis Carroll.) | <urn:uuid:955ac580-2d04-4f31-b9f6-c347c02c068a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.duiblog.com/2009/03/27/another-drunk-driving-conviction-with-no-driving/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960881 | 496 | 1.609375 | 2 |
It’s midterm time now and the honeymoon period for the relationship between roommate pairs is over…. LIfe gets more serious now and the little differences between roommates become harder to ignore……. If your relationship hasn’t already caused you and your roommate to have a serious talk about any issues, you should probably sit down and reassess how things are going for each of you. One theory about the stages of group development categorizes the stages each has to go through before they can become a high performing team as: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing…… Forming was when you met up and moved in together, Storming is next – and it’s where the group learns to address and work through conflicts. If the conflicts in a group (you and your roommate are a group of 2) aren’t addressed, then you will stay in this stage.
It’s hard to confront things that may seem silly, but when you live in such close quarters, the little things add up and can become a big deal. If you have a list in your head of all the things your roommate has “done” to you, or a list of their ideosycracies that annoy you, it’s time for a talk – You can also be sure that your roommate has the same “lists” for what they would like to change about you.
Most people are reasonable. If you don’t give them the chance to change by even letting them know that you are upset, then the issue is yours. Moving on to become a team that can develop a healthy level of mutual respect is far better than living with daily issues that distract and upset you.
Please do yourself a favor and have a discussion. Don’t whip out your list and attack, demanding that everything be perfect for you. Ask your roommate how things could be improved when you are both at home – review or create a real rooommate agreement, now that it’s not just an exercise… Get advice from your RA on how to ask questions and on how to create a welcoming environment that will encourage some open and honest sharing.
Take responsibility for making it a healthy and productive relationship. | <urn:uuid:18e44f2e-08ce-439a-8579-3b275ed05fad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uvahousing.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/roommate-relationships/ | 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 | 0.964157 | 459 | 1.515625 | 2 |
What is a wood floor, then? Wood floors are very popular calls in recent years, our country has only one product, land, a new type of environment wood-plastic composites materials, products, humidity, water, high levels of environmental protection and other characteristics of products based on the point of the market. Wood floor after entering the domestic consumer market is extraordinary, with increasing consumer awareness of environmental protection, the parquet market in the future, mainstream products in the market definition of hardwood timber flooring, by reason, a combination of wood and plastic, to keep the feel of wood floors relations , but also has good moisture-resistant acid water resistant, and alkali, anti-fungal, anti-static, anti-moth and other other features, a series of parquet wood-plastic soil is the first collaboration of its kind, the use of plastic waste sawdust, straw and waste produced another set of wood-plastic compound material renewal, development and other floor coverings in the building materials industry in the fields.
Wood in developing new environmentally friendly high waterproof plastic composites moistureWood published only in recent years, new building materials that are environmentally friendly as well as in other countries in its infancy. Timber products in plastic raw material waste and wood waste, straw and other agricultural, forestry, plant fibers are used to represent the substrate does not contain hazardous materials. Then again, the use of recyclable packaging, which is called the true meaning of environmental protection, energy conservation, recycling, to focus the use of innovative products that people use to increase the level of environmental resources for waste recycling and comprehensive utilization of resources as the core of model of the economic cycle has become a global economic trends. Major effort to develop technology for recycling of resources, economic development and protecting the environment, long-distance implications.
Incoming search terms:
- hardwood flooring designs
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- prefinished wood flooring waterproof | <urn:uuid:cdd7a0cf-f005-40c0-b427-aee61b672466> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emmanuelsfoundation.org/category/waterproof/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937849 | 399 | 2.640625 | 3 |
For a large part of the American art public, the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) stands alone and unrivaled as the classic American representative of the
Realist style. With subjects ranging from water sports and baseball to affectionate scenes of domestic life and portraits that are penetrating character studies of his Philadelphia contemporaries, Eakins created a corpus of American types and pastimes that, for sheer quality, gravity and intelligence, no subsequent champion of the Realist style has been able to match.
That his career was also marked by scandal, rejection and outright character assassination only adds to the luster of a fame that has elevated Eakins to the status of a national icon. We like our artist-heroes to be fiercely independent and disruptive, and Eakins leaves little to be desired in this respect, too. He made it a habit to offend established taste, not only in painting but in the realm
of public morals as well, and this has also
endeared him to posterity. Not that offending established taste was a difficult thing to accomplish in the Philadelphia of his day, which was nothing if not staid in its standards of respectability. Eakins even dressed for the role, affecting the kind of shabby attire that polite society looked upon as impermissibly “bohemian,” especially for a teacher at the remorselessly respectable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Thus, while Winslow Homer was undoubtedly more beloved, and both William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent were far too eager to please to be cast in a heroic role, Eakins remains a singular figure in the American art of his time-and indeed, in ours as well. Which is one reason why the comprehensive retrospective that has now been organized at the Philadelphia Museum of Art- Thomas Eakins: American Realist -is bound to be a huge success. Another reason, of course, is that Eakins brought a powerful, if narrow, talent to an oeuvre that is wonderfully accessible to every level of public perception. This is pictorial Realism unburdened by the modern appetite for ambiguity, irony or obscurity. It is an art in which easily recognized sentiments and actions are clearly expressed in a manly, robust style that commands attention without challenging the boundaries of the mainstream imagination.
That the aesthetic elements in Eakins’ art were deeply conservative, with affinities closer to academic tradition than to avant-garde innovation, has seldom been held against him. In fact, it is seldom even acknowledged. Owing to his reputation as a rebel and martyr at the Pennsylvania Academy, Eakins has been transformed in our literature into a kind of honorary modernist révolté , yet this is a classification that is denied in every square inch of painted canvas Eakins ever put his hand to. In every respect but one-his unremitting and incorruptible candor in registering the impact of his personal response to the American life of his time-Eakins remained a votary of academic tradition.
Yet this radical candor-which was abetted in Eakins’ case by his keen interest in scientific standards of objectivity, and which was itself a spur to clarity of expression-was sufficiently rare and sufficiently affecting to set him apart from his contemporaries. Yet it was a candor expressed in an academic mode. No one understood the academic roots of Eakins’ art better than his widow, Susan Eakins, who was herself a gifted painter, very much influenced by her husband’s pictorial practice. Thus, when Lloyd Goodrich’s pioneering study of the artist, Thomas Eakins, His Life and Work , was published in 1933, she was appalled to find that Goodrich had “disregarded Eakins’ roots in the French academic tradition,” as Carol Troyen writes in the catalog accompanying the current retrospective.
Susan Eakins understood that, far from being a painter “little influenced by others,” as Goodrich had insisted, Eakins had been deeply influenced by his period of study
in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, a retardataire Academician whose work, as Goodrich surely understood, commanded nothing but contempt in advanced art circles in the 1930′s. Susan Eakins thought otherwise, of course, observing that “when a man cannot understand the greatness of Gérome I cannot think he understands Eakins.” To what extent Susan Eakins came to understand that her husband had been a far greater painter than Gérome-and greater by virtue of his radical candor in rendering the look and feel of contemporary life-must remain a matter of speculation.
In the current exhibition, we are given a glimpse of the kind of academic painter Eakins might have remained absent that candor in an ambitious painting of a conventional religious subject, The Crucifixion (1880), which-in my view, anyway-is the least persuasive of all of the artist’s major canvases. Compare it to the intensity of concentrated attention in The Gross Clinic (1875) or the pathos of The Concert Singer (1890-92) or the controlled passion of the rowing pictures, and you see the difference between an artist attempting to conform to convention and an artist inspired by the depth and complexity of his own response to life.
In no other Eakins exhibition that I’ve seen have we been given such a detailed account of the intellectual and aesthetic labor that Eakins invested in perfecting his Realist masterpieces. In addition to the expected drawings and oil sketches in the Philadelphia retrospective, we are also given a plethora of his sculptural studies and the photographs that were used in the preparation of his major paintings. Indeed, there may be a few too many photographs in the current show for most viewers, for they are not all invariably interesting, and the sculpture, too, is mainly of interest as preparatory studies for the paintings. The sculpture, certainly, can leave no one in doubt about Eakins’ academic loyalties.
It is in the paintings-and in the paintings alone-that Eakins’ genius was fully developed. And it is in the paintings, too, that he remains an isolated figure in the history of American art. No painter before Eakins was as audacious as he was in his account of American experience, and none that came after was in a position to resist with impunity the innovations of the modern movement. In his lifetime, Eakins paid a high price for his singularity of purpose-the singularity of a radical conservative-yet it’s hard to believe that he could have achieved what he did without the social resistance he met with at almost every stage of his career. It is in this respect that he can be said to resemble one of his idols, Walt Whitman, who was the subject of one of his finest portraits.
Thomas Eakins: American Realist remains on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Jan. 6, and tickets are required to see it. The show will then travel to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from Feb. 5 to May 12. It comes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York next summer, from June 18 to Sept. 15.
Follow Hilton Kramer via RSS. | <urn:uuid:d7e29a75-4077-43f3-8a07-2db1303c37fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://observer.com/2001/10/realist-thomas-eakins-back-still-beloved/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97935 | 1,524 | 2.28125 | 2 |
2004 BMW MOA National Rally ÔÇô Spokane, WA
Chapter Five ÔÇô Go West, Young Man (and Woman)
(see previous posts/pages for Chapters One, Two, Three and Four)
All through the NW MT-Northern ID-NE WA area you will see reference to Mullan Rd and Mullan Trail. While the folks in the East were fighting each other, during 1859-1862 Captain John Mullan of the US Army was establishing a route between Fort Benton, MT and Walla Walla, WA. The goal was to connect the Missouri River and the Columbia River for a supply route. It was marked with ÔÇ£MRÔÇØ for Military Road but this designation is now more commonly described as Mullan Road.
This road was 25 feet wide, ran over 624 miles and hand dug. It was used for over thirty years; then it became part of the motorway designated The Yellowstone Trail (1912-1930s). This was somewhat of a marketing ploy to encourage tourism via a transcontinental highway stretching from MA to WA or ÔÇ£Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound.ÔÇØ This was a private endeavor, similar to the Lincoln Highway project which was started a year after this one and ran parallel but through Midwest states. In the 1930s, as the national highway efforts consolidated all the various routes, this route became Hwy 10. In the 1980s this became part of the Interstate system, now known as I-90.
You can walk on or drive stretches of the Mullan Road, see the old Yellowstone Trail signs and some of the original bridgework still intact across local streams as you leave Montana from Missoula (the frontage road on the north side of I-90) and all the way through the panhandle of Idaho. Stop and visit the historic tree nursery Savenac, I-90 exit 16, Haugen, MT; the road(s) cut through the front yard of the compound. The Mullan Tree monument is off of I-90, exit 28 in Idaho. The crew rested a day because it was July 4, 1861 and blazed a tree with the date. This resulted in the names you see today: Fourth of July Summit, Fourth of July Canyon, Independence Pass, etc. Some of the road can be seen here, too, along the interpretive trail.
Coming from the East: Stop for gas in St. Regis, MT, then take the local road called CamelÔÇÖs Hump, about 15 miles to the other end, where it connects with I-90 again at Harrison. Right now this whole stretch of I-90 is one way each direction and 45 mph due to bridge work so this is actually a faster way to get through the area, although this section of I-90 has incredible sweepers and is normally a sport-bike heaven.
If you have an extra hour or two, instead of CamelÔÇÖs Hump, for a different route, leave St Regis and I-90 behind and take Hwy 135, which follows the Clark Fork River. It is joined by the Flathead River at Hwy 200. Take Hwy 200 to Thompson Falls (or if you are coming across the State on Hwy 200, take note). Just past town, take the bridge to the left, across the river. This road will take you over Thompson Pass and into Idaho.
If you are riding GS and have an extra hour or two, take CamelÔÇÖs Hump to the Harrison end but donÔÇÖt get back on I-90. Instead turn up the forest road to the North (your right), go past the campground, up over Knox Pass towards Thompson Falls. When you come to the bottom you will feel like you just drove out of someoneÔÇÖs backyard, which you have. You will hit the pavement at the same road as the previous paragraph, but you are already across the river from Thompson Falls. Go left on the main road and you can rejoin your pavement-bound buddies (if you separated at St Regis at the same time, you should all join up again here with about the same time traveled) and you can all go over Thompson Pass together.
The road over Thompson Pass was first paved only a few years ago and many maps do not show it as paved or even show the route. When you hit the Y near Prichard you can quickly drop down to Wallace, ID and regain I-90 via a route that is steep, twisty and big time fun, or take the right hand route and meander along the Coeur DÔÇÖAlene River road back to I-90 near Cataldo ID. If you had friends who left St Regis via I-90, they will have had time to eat in Wallace ID while waiting for you to come in the back way.
spokane rally '04
I've been watching the forum and am somewhat saddened at what's been said by some of my neighbors, so I want to set the record straight with my perceptions and experiences.
I'm a Spokane resident, but wasn't raised here. I moved from the Seattle area 5 years ago, due to a mandatory transfer of my wife's job. The move was made willingly, but with some apprehension. All those misgivings were unfounded.
Spokane is a biker's paradise. Any kind of scenery and any kind of road (or off-road) you desire, it may be reached within 20 minutes from city center, except mountains, which will take you an hour or so.
Some have complained about bad roads. NOT SO! Spokane County's roads are great, well maintained, and pretty well marked. The city itself has had some unfortunate fiscal issues in the past several years, so there are potholes and patches. They aren't a problem except in winter, and even then, not too bad.
Someone also mentioned the Rally venue, the Spokane Interstate Fairgrounds. I have no idea what the "might as well have it in the middle of the stockyards" comment was all about, since there are no stockyards any more, although there are several clean and well-kept animal barns on the fairgrounds campus. Someone mentioned showers. For one, if you look at one of the pictures someone posted, you'll see what looks like a baseball stadium. It looks like one because it IS one. Complete with home team and visitor locker rooms and, therefore, showers. The Fairgrounds has also recently seen a transformation process undertaken in order to make it into a venue that can handle multiple simultaneous major events. In order to make that happen, more shower facilities were constructed. I'm not positive, but I believe several full-hookup RV sites were added. Beyond that, there is a full service truck stop less than half a mile away. The nearby community college's facilities will also probably be made available. Whether you want mom-n-pop motels, chain, budget, or classic landmark hotels, B-n-Bs, primitive or full hookup camping, it is all close by, within 10 miles, most within 5. I plan on making my floor available to my many on-line friends whom I've never met in person (also, I've got central AC in case the weather is TOO hot). Beyond creature comforts, the fairgrounds are comparable to the nicest agriculture-oriented facilities out there. Lots of room to spread out and I can personally guarantee that there will be no floods.
So much for the venue complaints.
"Montana" has already sung some of the praises for the area; I'll add more. In 3 hours, you can be across the Idaho-Canada border and into the East Kootenays of British Columbia. Lots of incredible roads and scenery (one GS road that runs higher into the mountains and comes down into the Yaak Valley in Montana, I believe), wildlife, hiking, fishing, breweries, wineries, pubs, and incredible deals on shopping, lodging and food (I have a cabin up there and I love the place). I know of at least one hotel that will put you into a homey riverside room for about $35 US a night and you'll get in on an impromptu potluck BBQ (bring chips or something from a nearby store) if you arrive early enough. A great way to spend the last night before the rally or the night you leave the rally.
But back to Spokane: you can find whatever makes you comfy. There are microbrew pubs, wine bars, jazz clubs, golf courses, live theater (Best in Nation winners 1999 and 2003), you name it. There is a favorite hangout for local riders, a gas station / convenience store called the Rocket Market, where the eurobike crowd shows up first Tuesday of every month at 7pm. On Tuesdays and one other night every week, there is live entertainment. In the parking lot. The Market started out as a yuppie grocery store and just sort of acquired a mind of its own. On the live music nights, it gathers quite a crowd. They've got about 60 varieties of brew, the obligatory espresso menu, plus a hell of a deli / dessert counter. The music is always good, as is the mood of the crowd, a great place in which to watch the sun go dim.
I could go on extolling this area's virtues, and probably will do so at a later date. But if you're straddling the fence on whether to come, make the leap. You'll have a great time. The Rally has the unqualified support of local government and business. Taken as a whole, the whole area, including the venue, is maybe the best that the Rally has seen in a decade, and anybody who misses this one will definitely regret it.
Yeah,I would take some of that AC floor space;and I have friends coming from Michigan with some of their children and a spouse or maybe 2.Kay??:D
Has anyone noticed that the site appears to be a couple of blocks from the interstate? That combined with the picture of the site someone posted awhile back makes this site look pretty dreadful.
Sorry. Just an observtion. I'm sure it will still be a blast to go though. Hoping to make it my first trip to the West Coast. I'm sure there will be many things to distract from an ugly rally site. :beer
Wonderfull, if Charleston was not bad enough, we have a rally between to rail road tracks in spokane
Re: 2004 Rally
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Unregistered [/i]
Wonderfull, if Charleston was not bad enough, we have a rally between to rail road tracks in spokane [/QUOTE]
Check the poll:
Spokane Sounds like Fun
Was there a couple of years ago for a meeting in Post Falls, ID. Flew into Spokane and drove over to Post Falls. Also got to go to Sand Gap, ID. Neat town.
Looking forward to the trip and seeing the sites and visiting the Micro's and sampling the local flavors:bliss
Just got back from riding some of the incredible roads described by Montana. Glacier Park, Flathead Lake, Thompson Falls, St Regis, Northern Idaho and the Locksa River. Getting here and day rides wil be over half the fun. Who takes their bike to a rally to park it?
"Who brings their bike to a rally to park it"
I do,unless I have to have a short ride for pie,poutine,laundry or shower.I do my riding to get there and back.The rest of the time I want to see and be seen,hang with my pals,make new ones,snort beer out of my nose with laughing,buy something absolutely essential(just like golf,when my game falls apart I accessorize);I bought a diode board from the dealer in Portland Oregon a few years ago when the turn signal flasher quit en route to Redmond a few years ago and guess what?My on board board fried before I got back to Vancouver!!
I have been to Spokane and found it a great city.I dont know the venue,but I am darn well prepared to like it a lot!!:clap
I'm rather pleased to hear that the rally site for next year is Spokane. That means that I should be able make it down there for most of the weekend (I all ready checked my shift calendar). I have never been out to one of the BMWOA rallies before because I have not been able to put together the time needed to ride to the chosen locations. This one will be close enough to make it an easy days ride, two if I make it interesting. Hope to see you all there. | <urn:uuid:da8a54c6-1d74-46d5-a089-29f1c1ac784e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bmwmoa.org/forum/printthread.php?t=699&pp=15&page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96327 | 2,670 | 1.820313 | 2 |
by Mike Butcher Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012
Science and academia have to date been a little slower to react to the vast changes going on in the business world as we move to the cloud, big data and third-party app ecosystems. Most academic online networks remain locked up by academic publishers with expensive licensing agreements for universities. But that’s starting to change. The science publishing division of corporate giant Elsevier has created its own (closed) platform for apps to be built upon looking at the meta data around scientific journals. That data can range from how many times an academic paper is read, who reads it, and even to how influential each paper is considered to be in scientific circles.
On the other side is the three-year old upstart Mendeley. And the difference between the way it and Elsevier approaches the academic world is thrown into sharp relief today with the news that Mendeley’s third-party app eco-system is fast approaching three times the size of Elseviers’. This amounts to the difference between an open and closed approach to apps.
Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month. While Elsevier now has around 100 third-party apps using its platform, it’s clear Mendeley is winning in the apps stakes.
The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery.
Mendeley’s API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.
Mendeley’s tools now touch about 1.9 million researchers, pooling 65 million documents and claims to cover 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. By contrast commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents, respectively.
However, each year universities have to pay licenses running to tens of thousands of dollars to access those databases. Mendeley’s database is free under a Creative Commons license.
It’s also the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data.
In theory you could even now produce a “Klout for academics” based on Mendeley’s data.
Another, Hojoki, pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. And OpenSNP makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.
Meanwhile, Elsevier has been trying to build a similar thing to Mendeley but their philosophy is the exact opposite. The API is not an open access one, but paid-for and closed, open only to paying university customers. They have put a lot of marketing behind it, holding ‘hack days’ etc. Their third party apps have now reached around the 100 mark – although they do allow for easier monetisation while Mendeley’s are free.
But Mendeley’s focus on open apps has won plaudits from the likes of Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels (also a former research scientist) who calls the growth of Mendeley’s app ecosystem “stunning and transformational for science”. Perhaps it helps that it’s largely run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
Mendeley is also monetising while trying not to limit its growth. It does not get a cut of revenues from apps built on its platform as its model is on freemium use of its data dashboard. That said, Dr. Victor Henning, CEO & Co-Founder of Mendeley say’s it now pulling in “tens of thousands of dollars” per month in revenue and has “plenty of runway” for the next couple of years.
It’s thus done some initial sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions. The first customers of Mendeley’s data dashboard include the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Nevada, Reno, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council Japan.
To date it’s raised over $2 million from Angels Stefan Glaenzer, Alex Zubillaga and Ambient Sound Investments, who have also invested in a follow on round.
That was an interesting move as it pits it against Academia, also a social network for scientists.
Perhaps it’s fair comment that Henning says Mendeley’s realtime API approach is better than the famous quote about science progressing “funeral by funeral”. | <urn:uuid:95a0d098-d921-458b-92d8-204696f5e1ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://passioncapital.com/news/techcrunch-mendeley%E2%80%99s-open-api-approach-is-on-course-to-disrupt-academic-publishing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933818 | 1,080 | 1.992188 | 2 |
July 28 – National Hamburger Day
Posted on July 28, 2012
National Hamburger Day
Five Food Finds about Hamburgers
- The oldest fast food restaurant in the world is the White Castle franchise, which opened in 1921.
- The people of America eat more burgers out at restaurants or on the go than they do at home.
- The largest hamburger ever created was over 8,000 pounds and was cooked for a burger festival in Wisconsin.
- However, the hamburger in its current form, with ground beef and a bun, is a decidedly American creation.
- Hamburgers are made of beef, not ham, and there is much debate over whether they actually originated in Hamburg.
Today’s Food History
on this day in…
1586 The potato was introduced to England. It is claimed that Sir Thomas Harriot introduced potatoes to England on this day. (Some sources give December 3 as the date).
1852 Andrew Jackson Downing died. An American horticulturist, he was the author of ‘The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America’ (1845) and editor of the ‘Horticulturist’ periodical.
1866 The metric system was authorized to standardize weights and measures in the U.S. (Authorized, yes, but we still don’t use it very much).
1900 One of the many claims to the origin of the hamburger, is that Louis Lassing (or Lassen) first served hamburgers on a bun in his diner in New Haven, Connecticut.
1907 Earl S. Tupper was Born. The inventor of Tupperware. (Tupperware makes the containers used to conduct mold and bacterial experiments in the back of refrigerator shelves).
1977 At 11:02 p.m. the first oil from Prudhoe Bay arrived at Valdez in the trans-Alaskan pipeline. It took 38 days to travel the 800 miles.
1989 The largest halibut (Atlantic) caught with rod and reel weighed over 255 pounds. It was caught in Gloucester, Massachusetts by Sonny Manley | <urn:uuid:cc6b99aa-41e9-4ff0-8b65-8cc156c3b531> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://foodimentary.com/2012/07/28/july-28-national-hamburger-day/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958743 | 439 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Digital Equalization and Mixing Circuit Design
Digital filtering is one of the most important technology in the field of digital audio. Digital filter circuits have so far been applied to digital audio equipments for real-time digital signal processing. We think, however, no specific theory of systematic designing has been developed yet in this area. Authors have some experience in developing digital audio equalizer circuits by digital filter technology, which makes it possible to realize the desired frequency response, and also have developed, for application of these circuits, the digital audio mixer having three position equalizer on each channel. Then followed the development of 8-channel input, 2-channel output digital audio mixers as well as the designing theory and its applications, of which descriptions are given in this paper.
Click to purchase paper or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the E-Library then switch to the institutional version. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!
This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers. | <urn:uuid:c8d4fabf-c4f2-4cc2-8a51-f04740f1e08f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=11945 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946927 | 231 | 2.8125 | 3 |
I drove to Berlin to search the files of the Allied Documentation
Center at Clay Allee.
While leafing through a mountain of documents, I discovered that Lina
Heydrich was still alive, had remarried with a Finn named Manninen and was living on the island of Fehmarn.
Using part of my vacation, I traveled to Luebeck and took a ferry to Fehmarn where I found Lina Heydrich Manninen, now an old woman in whom I was able to see trsces of the great Nordic beauty so much admired by Hitler and other leading Nazis.
During the two hours I spent talking with her she insisted almost vehemently that her late husband, although a fervent Nazi was not an anti-Semite and even boasted privately of having had a Jewish
grandmother named Sarah.
She recounted an anecdote of a conversation she and Heydrich had
had after he returned from the infamous Wansee conference. She told me that he felt privately, that the "Final Solution" of the Jewish 'problem' decide on at Wansee was a terrible mistake and would
damage the German soul for centuries.
She recalled him saying, "if only Jews could be made to think and act like good Nazis, their lives could be saved and they might even be useful for the Third Reich.'
I left Burg on Fehmarn with the feeling that I had been bamboozled. What she told me sounded more like her attempt to reinvent her late husband to make him more acceptable to the New Germany. I was not taken in and decided not to write the story.
Furthermore, at the time I could not imagine any Jew thinking and acting like a Nazi. I knew the theme of the great American novel, MOBY DICK by Herman Mellville, that we often become like the thing we hate, but I believed that the post-Holocaust Jews had learned the painful lesson, that we as a people and as individuals must never do to another people what had been done to us.
That I believed until I saw what was being done to the Palestinian
people in Israel and read an open letter by an Israeli writer, Ehud Ben-Ezer, whose fiction I had admired many years ago. But before I comment on this letter, I must return to my title for this piece.
Baruch Goldstein is an infamous murderer, a man who wilfully massacred defenseless Palestinians as they prostrated themselves iat early morning prayer in a mosque in Hebron.
Wearing the olive green uniform of an Israeli army major, Goldstein, an American immigrant settler, a KACH adherent and follower of
the Jewish Fascist Rabbi Kahane (who espoused the doctrine of genocide for all Arabs) from nearby Kiryat Arba, entered the packed Ibrahim Mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs, a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims, and killed nearly 30 Muslims and wounding 170 more before taking his own life.
What makes it all even more horrible is that this Jewish Dr. Mengele, was also a physician, a man sworn by his Hippocratic oath to save lives instead of taking them.
Was Heydrich right then?
Had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict finally produced a Jew capable of thinking and acting lijke a Nazi?
His grave in Kyriat Arba has become a shrine and place of pilgrimage for Jewish terrorists. With all this, I still believed that there were sane people in Israel and that it was only a vociferous group of politicians like Sharon and other militarists that still preserved their dream of a 'greater Israel' who were willing to advocate the destruction of Palestinians, even to the point of mass genocide, in order to prevent a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
And then I read the letter of Ben Ezer, a former adversary of Sharon.
In it I was shocked to find such hackneyed cliche phrases as: "Israel the bulwark of democracy, of humanism, and western culture" in conflict with "the majority of an Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian
world, that have produced nothing except oil and hate", "What is now taking place is the war of the children of light against the children of darkness"
(This last sounds like a Hollywood advertisement for
the Tolkien trilogy, THE LORD OF THE RINGS).
"One cannot make deals with the powers of darkness."
How sad that a writer who was once able think clearly and logically has now become so depraved that he cynically employs apocalyptic rhetoric to justify state terrorism by Israel and the
indiscriminate murder of small children and mothers.
Is this typical of what has happened to the majority of Israelis who. according to Ben Ezer, feel as he does?
I managed to escape the holocaust although most of my loved ones went up in the smoke of German ovens.
It took me a long time to get over my hatred but I came to realize that if I did not heal my soul of hatred it would destory me just as hatred of Moby Dick destroyed Cpatain Ahab, Hitler's hatred
of the Jews destroyed him and nearly destroyed all of Germany, and Israeli hatred of the Palestinians is well on the way to destroying Israel, if not militarily, than morally and spirtually from the internal contradictions of its actions.
The great Viennese psychoanalyst, Viktor Frankl, a Jew has formulated
the problem I am adumbrating in his essay. He spent many years in a Nazi prison camp.
You might say that while he was there he discovered 'Why the Caged Bird Sings'. That is, He ran smack dab into 'enlightenment'.
When he came out he wrote a little book about it called: Man's Search for Meaning.
In it he describes what happens when you take an accomplished, rich, educated human and remove all the trappings, further reducing him down to naked skin and bones.
He discovered that when man loses everything he THINKS he is, Man has the potential to find himself staring straight into the Face of God.
At the end of his book, he writes about what the experience was doing to those who had not reached that Mighty Doorway OUT.
He said they had a strong desire to make the world pay for what was done to them.
He could not really blame them, but he understood the potential to use the energy destructively.
He was most concerned about what it might do to the world. I think we are seeing that very outcome in Israeli society.
Some commentators have spoken about a Masada Complex and that is certainly one way of interpreting the Goldstein statement I cited above.
But there is something even stronger that has been referred to as the Samson syndrome: the aggresive posture of the only former democracy of the Middle East that has become a runaway terrorist state with weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a military cabal,which is ready to use the ultimate weapon that will insure not only the death of its misperceived enemies as well as its own. | <urn:uuid:cf8bf7f3-3212-47b1-b8f1-7edb51f7cf22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=120&contentid=1294&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978399 | 1,450 | 1.820313 | 2 |
A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants.
The food supplied to the Israelites in their journey through the wilderness of Arabia; hence, divinely supplied food.
A name given to lichens of the genus Lecanora, sometimes blown into heaps in the deserts of Arabia and Africa, and gathered and used as food; called also manna lichen.
The food on which Israel was fed in the desert, which prefigures the eucharist.
(Old Testament) food that God gave the Israelites during the Exodus
The food God provided to the Hebrews while they sojourned in the wilderness for forty years. See Chapter 3, Chapter 4.
Manna (sometimes or archaically spelled mana) is the name of the food miraculously produced for the Israelites in the desert in the book of Exodus. Manna ceased to appear when the Israelites first harvested their crops in their new homeland. "Man hu", or "manna" in the Hebrew language is translated as "what is it". | <urn:uuid:4dccbe44-3944-4f48-b0e6-fdf4a864a326> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.metaglossary.com/meanings/269812/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960161 | 251 | 3.375 | 3 |
In 1860, when he was 4 years old, little Noel Huxley died of diphtheria. The Reverend Charles Kingsley, muscular Christian and author of stirring books for boys, wrote to the grieving father, offering sympathy and the comforts of religion. Even in the depths of his grief, Thomas Henry Huxley, anatomist, controversialist, and friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, felt compelled to reply at length, articulating how he placed his hopes not in faith but in the stern task of living in the present in this world of ours, especially as it is revealed through science. Deliberately appropriating a religious metaphor, Huxley wrote:
“Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”
Huxley was one of many during the 19th century who tried to establish science's place in society, as the substitute for the exhausted religion of the past and as something for the industrial age. To this end, science had to be raised up as something special—as more than special and as positively sacred in its practices and products.
This is the major theme of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's deeply researched, although at times less than fully satisfying, Objectivity. Looking at the past 300 years of science, they see a movement from an individual-infused enterprise to one that strives to achieve an impersonal objectivity and so on to an even-more-sophisticated kind of expertise today. They see something that its practitioners praise for transcending human desires and prejudices and, hence, something that is rightly taken as the apotheosis of human understanding.
To establish their historical thesis, Daston and Galison focus on “scientific atlases”, books that try to convey information through the visual rather than the printed word. Carl Linnaeus's great Hortus Cliffortianus (1737) is a prime example. The authors argue that in the 18th century, producers of such atlases did not aim for extreme accuracy but rather to capture what people thought was the essence of the topic. Daston and Galison call this trying to achieve “truth-to-nature”. Then, in the 19th century, there is a move to more accuracy, something that embodies “objectivity”. Finally, in the 20th century, we get almost a reverse movement back to the scientist putting in his or her interpretation, although now the call is for “trained judgment”. The important point is that, in some way, we see a movement forward, as the atlases reflect the wrestling by scientists to offer a picture of reality that is both true to the way that the world is and that yet allows for the legitimate use of theory towards the end of ever-greater understanding.
There is much in this book that is interesting and insightful. As a nice example of the move from objectivity to trained judgment, I liked the discussion of an atlas of brain injuries and diseases co-authored (in the 1960s) by the German refugee Charles R Golthamer. The last thing that Golthamer wanted was a simple photographic record of problems—too often photographs are blurred or overlapped by other features. So he added various brain problems of interest to him to the original radiograph and sent it back to the photographer who produced the final image, which now showed everything that Golthamer thought important. There was no deceit. Everything was done right out in the open. It was just that Golthamer prized information-giving over photographic accuracy.
It was incidentally possibly that an attitude like this led to one of the more controversial set of pictures in the history of science, a set that still causes discussion and gives the American biblical literalists, the Creationists, one of their favoured arguments against the evolutionists. The German biologist, and great supporter of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, was the key formulator of the so-called biogenetic law. As is well known, Haeckel produced pictures supporting this idea, with drawings of chicks, mammals, and human beings in their various stages of embryological development. Immediately critics pounced on the pictures, pointing out that they were not drawn directly from life but used the same templates for the different species; it was no wonder then that organisms in their early stages looked alike in Haeckel's pictures.
Fraud was the charge made and many still think the mud sticks. However, Haeckel knew what he was doing and was unashamed. He was not so much trying to give a purely objective picture, but an idealised picture of what is dictated by theory. He was into truth-to-nature rather than some ethereal notion of objectivity. Paradoxically, Haeckel was in a way the victim of his own talents. Generally, he was, with his chum Huxley, trying to push objectivity and the consequent high status of science, but he himself was a brilliant artist and much given to drawing his own (idealised) pictures. The embryo pictures were just an instance of the artist Haeckel being a bit careless with the intentions of the scientist Haeckel, and hence his troubles.
Daston and Galison touch on other nice points. They hint that sometimes, especially in medicine, the drive for excellence in science masks less-than-honourable intentions. Some scientists do not much care for pure objectivity, because it pushes their expertise and status to the side. With the progress of technology came a call for trained judgment to make sense of objective findings; the technicians could have their machines and the specialists their status and their fees.
Yet, I confess that overall I found the thesis of Objectivity to be a bit thin. Without at all denying the importance of atlases, by and large atlases are a bit peripheral to the scientific enterprise. Think of the 19th century and the atlas-to-end-all-atlases, John James Audubon's Birds of America. Today its plates are reproduced as wall decorations and sold for high prices. But it is not much of a work of science. Certainly not compared to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, a tattered, coverless facsimile of which I have read and reread, and which contains only one diagram—a rather stylised (certainly not objective) picture of the tree of life.
The trouble is that, by focusing on atlases, the authors miss aspects of the story they themselves tell. Surely a major reason for this change was that the basic science—not to be found in atlases—was dictating just this turn. It is a fundamental premise of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection that variation is ubiquitous—there is no type and hence selection between organisms is effective. So, in at least one major case, and, I suspect, others, the move to messy variation was more than a function of new techniques (particularly photography) and as much a function of a change of theoretical stance. It would not surprise me to find that the move on again from pure objectivity was also a move fuelled by theory. By the 20th century, people were realising that the naive empiricism of calls for objectivity—simply recording nature as it appears—is not really science. One must also interpret and judge and decide.
Let me not end on a negative note. Much analysis of science treats science as though images had never been invented. Yet all who know anything of the workings of science must be aware of the overwhelming use of diagrams in every aspect of doing and thinking. Daston and Galison are right in their intuition that pictures are vital to the activity of science. So my differences are minor compared to my agreement with them that, in order to understand science, we must start with the fact that primates are visual brutes and that in this lies a vital key to the understanding of just about everything that we do, that we think, and that we produce. | <urn:uuid:5d8b116b-4eca-4a39-8a57-89a074a1007e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)60221-4/fulltext | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974461 | 1,717 | 2.890625 | 3 |
LED desk and table lamps
Let There Be LED
- $80 to $1,460
LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have been around since the 1960s, when they were put to use providing simple displays in electric components. But the technology has progressed to the point where LEDs can be used as a primary lighting source — not only in our HDTVs and smartphones, but in our homes.
They have incandescent bulbs beat. LEDs are more cost-effective and eco-friendly than both older, filament-based light bulbs and newer compact fluorescents. LEDs last for tens of thousands of hours, they don’t generate a lot of heat, they consume only a few watts, and up to 85 percent of the electricity they draw is converted to light, making them one of the most efficient sources of electric light. They are also versatile in the light they produce, from a soft glow to a sharp, blazing spotlight.
Here, we’ve zoomed in on the “soft glow” end of the spectrum, testing three artfully designed, LED-powered table and desk lamps. All of them use practically no electricity but still provide abundant illumination. There are cheaper LED lamps out there (these range from $80 to over $1,000) but we chose products that put design first, so you won’t offend your Barcelona chair and ottoman set by plopping one of these showpieces on the table next to it.
Energizer Edge Accent Light
There are no power switches to be found on Energizer’s Edge Accent Light ($80). Instead, the sides of the lamp base are all touch-sensitive. One touch and you get the full blast of light from 16 LEDs which kick out a whopping 400 lumens while drawing only a measly 9.3 watts. If anything, the Edge may seem too bright at first. Keep touching the base and the lamp will gradually dim until you find your sweet spot. All of the LEDs are located in the Edge’s short, black base. They’re pointed upwards, so they illuminate the four clear plastic panels from below. The panels glow softly, but the etched dots in the plastic plates show up as a grid of sharply lit pin-points, giving a nice, dramatic effect.
WIRED Unique, sci-fi-inspired design has no switches, just touch controls. Generous 66-inch power cord. Stays cool to the touch. Looks great on a living room table or on your desk.
TIRED At brightest illumination, light may seem too bright or glaring. Touch controls aren’t that sensitive, so it takes some trial and error to dial in the exact brightness setting you want.
The minimalist design of Flos’s $396 table lamp — created by French designer Philippe Starck — all but screams ultra-moderne. The chrome-plated, reverse-L-shaped extruded aluminum chassis is about a foot tall, and directly above the lighting element is a 30-pin port for charging an iPhone, iPad or iPod. The 14 LEDs’ power rating of 5 watts belie the amount of illumination they produce. The optical touch power switch can be dimmed to 50 percent with a second touch and powered off with a third. When set to either the 100 or 50 percent level, the lamp offers a rather concentrated beam that’s best suited for a desk or other workspace. And if you put it on a desk, the iOS port sits at eye level, so your phone is within reach.
WIRED Quality of light is very pleasant. Slick but simple design. iOS dock connector on top charges your handset.
TIRED Lights a small space on a desk, but little beyond that. The iOS connector works great with iPhones and iPods, less so for iPads. Polished chrome shows every fingerprint.
Vibia Mini Sigma Studio Lamp
With a curvy design worthy of the MoMA, the Mini Sigma Studio lamp from Vibia is more sculpture than lighting device (and at $1,460, it’s priced like a sculpture). The Mini Sigma’s single, graceful swoosh of lacquer (in white or black) and metacrylate (a type of plastic) seems to defy the laws of gravity. Integrated into the underside of the nearly 17-inch-tall lamp are five one-watt LEDs. The power switch is hidden in the base. While designed to be used on studio or office desks, the 27-inch width might be an issue on cramped desktops. The very look of the Mini Sigma seems to call for a desk with wide open space. Surprisingly, the array of five one-watt LEDs were rather muted, providing more of a soft glow than anything that could be described as vivid. So, this lamp proves itself to be ultimately more of a sensuous art object than a utilitarian one.
WIRED Eye-catching design makes your desk look like an art museum. Gravity-defying counter-balanced arm is a marvel.
TIRED Expensive. Impractical as a desk lamp. LED lights are not as bright as expected. | <urn:uuid:fb202bbd-f25b-4cba-a8cb-08a7b591d8fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wired.com/reviews/2012/03/led-lamps/?intcid=prenav | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929783 | 1,063 | 1.695313 | 2 |
incubation -- n. In birds and reptiles, the maintaining of a constant temperature during the development of the embryo. Birds incubate their eggs by sitting on them (also called brooding),while other animals, like crocodiles, bury their eggs in organic matter. If eggs are not incubated, the embryos within those eggs generally die. Some dinosaurs may have incubated their eggs by burial in sediment, in organic matter, or by brooding like birds.
ingestion -- The intake of water or food particles by "swallowing" them, taking them into the body cavity or into a vacuole. Contrast with absorption.
integrin -- adhesive protein of the extracellular matrix in animals.
island arc -- n. A curved chain of islands that rise from the sea floor, usually near a continent. The convex side usually faces the open ocean, while the concave side usually faces the continent, e.g., the Aleutian Islands in Alaska; volcanic arc- syn.
isotopic analysis -- n. The study of the geochemistry of stable isotopes in naturally occurring sediments and biological structures. Stable isotopes are atomic variations of elements that are stable over long periods of time, meaning they do not radioactively decay. Several elements, like oxygen and carbon, have several stable forms. Oxygen, for example, occurs in nature as 16O and 18O ó these two forms are isotopes. They have different numbers of neutrons (16O has two more neutrons than 18O), and and is therefore heavier. Because the two isotopes have different masses, chemical and physical reactions like bonding, evaporation, and precipitation occur at different frequencies. The ratio of stable isotopes is preserved in chemical compounds like water, ice, and calcium carbonate and provides information on the environmental conditions at the time the compound formed. For example, the ratio of 18O/16O in an ice sample is linked to the water temperature of ancient oceans, which in turn reflects ancient climates. | <urn:uuid:6ce4e1fd-f1a7-4642-9989-dbd523711a26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/glossary_I.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925811 | 414 | 3.375 | 3 |
On February 13, 2012, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia.
Rousseff said Brazil-China ties have witnessed strong growth in recent years and that political mutual trust has been enhanced amid frequent high-level exchanges. Rousseff said Brazil views its ties with China from a global perspective and believes in the strategic importance of bilateral ties. The China-Brazil High-level Coordination and Cooperation Committee is an important cooperation platform between the two countries. She said bilateral cooperation in trade, investment, finance, science and technology has developed greatly since the two countries held the first session of the China-Brazil High-level Coordination and Cooperation Committee in Beijing in 2006. The two sides have signed and earnestly implemented their Joint Action Plan, and started to develop a 10-year cooperation plan. Brazil welcomes Chinese enterprises to expand investment in Brazil and hopes to improve the trade structure and achieve a qualitative leap of bilateral economic and trade relations.
Rousseff spoke highly of the positive role played by China in the world economic growth, peace and stability, adding Brazil supports China's development. Brazil and China, as strategic partners, share broad common interests and tremendous prospects for cooperation, the Brazilian president said, adding that she hopes the two nations could strengthen their cooperation in various multi-lateral mechanisms including the G20 and BRICS and jointly lift the level of cooperation among emerging developing economies so as to promote world economic recovery and growth.
For his part, Wang conveyed the cordial greetings and good wishes from President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Wang said he agreed with President Rousseff's comments on bilateral ties. China is ready to work with Brazil to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries and give full play to the role of the China-Brazil High-level Coordination and Cooperation Committee as an important platform. He urged both sides to deepen pragmatic cooperation, enhance coordination on key international and regional issues and jointly safeguard the interests of developing nations to further enrich the connotations of China-Brazil strategic partnership. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development will be held in Rio de Janeiro this year. The Chinese side is willing to maintain communication and coordination with Brazil to push for the success of the meeting. | <urn:uuid:7a06e441-44d6-4c31-931f-e60d147537c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zgyw/t905070.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953075 | 459 | 1.632813 | 2 |
I’m not one prone to great passions. Rather, I try to live like Switzerland: neutral, isolationist, leggy. Like workaholics whose doctors tell them to slow down, to chill out, to reduce their blood pressure or risk heart disease and stroke, indifference is an attitude I’ve had to cultivate. I’m naturally more anxious than indifferent, but a concerted effort toward neutrality gives me a rather Zen attitude about life. At least, that’s how I look at it. Friends, family, and girlfriends have argued that I’m not Zen, I’m just too damn lazy to care about anything, but I consider my basic desire to stay out of it a personal strength.
I began my path toward neutrality at seven, a nervous age in which I often had panic attacks because one of my bike tires was white and one was black and spent most nights sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed like a golden retriever. One day after school, I mentioned to my mother that is was a shame we lost the War. What war, she asked. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War and for weeks she had been listening to war correspondents on NPR while looking outside at the ubiquitous yellow ribbons tied around our neighbors’ trees–ribbons indicating a son or a cousin or a father in Kuwait. The War of Northern Aggression, I replied. Duh. My mom quickly explained that it was actually called the Civil War and we didn’t lose anything–our ancestors were still bootlegging potato liquor in Dublin until the 20th century. Thus began my introduction to slavery, which was not an aspect of the Civil War my second grade teacher emphasized. This wasn’t surprising–the mascot of my elementary school was a Confederate general with the same facial hair and politics as Robert E. Lee–and so my mom decided to take over my history education. After that evening’s lesson on the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement (with a brief detour for suffrage and bra burning), my mom warned me about the dangers of looking at the world as North versus South, him versus her, us versus them. Nationalism, sectionalism, religion, ideology, alliances based on nothing more than the shape of your nose or your favorite sports team: this is why wars happen, she told me, pointing to yellow ribbon tied around a tree in the next door neighbor’s yard. We should try to be more like Switzerland, she said: secular, progressive, and not out to steal anyone else’s damn resources. I took her advice, and that’s how I’ve been for most of my life; like Switzerland, as calm and even-keeled as a Walt Disney in a cryogenic chamber. Currently, however, I live in a part of the world marked by a great and unavoidable passion that sparks waves of love and hate all around me. The cause is basketball.
Two years ago, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, a city of a quarter million people, 15 percent of whom (including me) live under the poverty line. Durham used to be known for tobacco and then it was known civil rights and now it’s known for food trucks and lesbians. Durham is home to Duke University, where the endowment is 5.8 billion dollars and the cost for one student to attend for one year is 56 thousand dollars, 23 thousand dollars more than the median income for those of us who live here year round. For this privilege, Duke pays no taxes. For the most part, life as a Durham resident has little to do with the university; this is even true when you live, as I do, in Walltown, an adjacent neighborhood that the University kept at bay by building a wall around itself. There isn’t a moat separating the two, but the lines are clearly demarcated. Yes, Duke students clog the aisles at the grocery store and throw their keg cups in the street, but Durham is not a college town. Duke, it seems, prefers it this way, ensconced within monied walls of academia. Summers in Durham, when all the students have gone back to Connecticut–those are best.
Part of my hatred for Duke is situational: before I moved to Durham, I lived eight miles down 15-501, in Carrboro, North Carolina, a town of 20 thousand people, 19 percent of whom live under the poverty line. Carrboro is literally across the tracks from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and while the two towns are culturally different–Carrboro passed a resolution opposing the PATRIOT Act, Chapel Hill made national news when police brandishing assault rifles stormed a vacant building taken over by protesters last fall–both townships have a common love for UNC basketball. When I first moved to Carrboro, this surprised me. My friends there were as politically radical as my friends elsewhere, and since when do radicals care about sports? How could these people who play in rock bands and make art and grow weed care about anything as inconsequential as basketball? It seemed so anti-intellectual, so non-thinking, so barbarian. My own alma mater, a liberal arts school most well-known for its high ratio of banjo players and white Rastas, may have had a basketball team, but who knows? The student body was too busy tripping on mushrooms in the botanical gardens to care about sports, although I do seem to remember a vibrant ultimate Frisbee scene.
I refused to care about basketball when I first moved to Carrboro. Sports, which exist solely to create winners and losers, are antithetical to my default neutrality. But UNC basketball is so universally loved there that it inspires passion even in those whose only nod to athleticism is hula-hooping on the co-op lawn. I tried to stay neutral, but the central winter pastime in Carrboro is watching basketball with your pals at the local bar, and so, in the midst of my first winter there, in the midst of insisting on my indifference, I found myself watching ESPN, working on my bracket, and really, really hating UNC’s biggest rival: Duke. As a friend–a woman who plays in bands, never wanted to be a cheerleader, and often says that Carrboro is where basketball and punk rock meet–predicted would happen, I became one of us. In March 2009, the year the Heels won the National Championship, I ran across the tracks to Chapel Hill with 30,000 other fans–30,000 other barbarians–to celebrate our victory.
But more than I love UNC, I hate Duke. All of my well-cultivated neutrality flies out the window when I think of Duke University. I can engage in conversation with people across the political spectrum and still maintain my equilibrium, but Duke, I cannot stand. I hate Duke students, I hate Duke fans, and, mostly, I hate Mike Krzyzewski, or as he is known to both fans and foes alike because his name is too damn hard to pronounce, Coach K. Coach K is the perfect foil. Nothing about him is neutral. His vocal support of religion and the military, along with his income, makes him the embodiment of all that I think is wrong with the world. My feelings for him are universal, as I found when researching Duke basketball for this article. This is illustrated by the following screenshot:
Coach K is the devil. Coach K is a rat. Coach K is a cheater. And, most offensive (to gay people), Coach K is gay. Let us contrast this to Roy Williams, beloved coach of the Tar Heels, a man with the sweet face of a plot hound who bought romance novels from the bookstore where I worked during the terrible season of 2010, when his team had the record of a third rate liberal arts school. Even then, Roy was friendly. He came in after depressing practices and embarrassing games, but still posed for pictures and signed autographs and graciously agreed things were not going well. That March, when the UNC men’s basketball team was as vibrant as a banana slug and Duke won the National Championship, I discovered the corollary to success. Every game that Carolina lost, every game that Duke won, found half my friends sobbing into their beers and the other half taking a Valium and going to bed early. And this, I realized, is why I am Switzerland: the disappointment isn’t worth the joy. My days as a fan were over, but my hatred of Duke only escalated when I moved the eight miles to Durham. For me, it’s not about basketball. It’s about privilege. I hate Duke because Coach K is worth millions and my neighbor lost her house; because Duke doesn’t pay taxes and Durham has no jobs; because this place for the rich is so close to the home I struggle to afford; because it’s right there, beyond the wall, a dark blue reminder that I’ll never be neutral. Maybe that’s what my mom wanted me to take from our afternoon history lessons: there’s a time to be Swiss and there’s a time to put on your school colors and scream. | <urn:uuid:5f591590-6a3b-4e1e-964a-8ce9fbb5c9fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://twentytwentyhindsight.com/?cat=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974766 | 1,917 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Like good parents the world over, Rudy and Vina Bueno wanted a better life for their kids. It's not that life was bad in the Philippines, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Rudy had a good job as president of a company, their three kids were healthy and thriving, they had a comfortable home. Any move abroad would set them back initially, not ahead.
Still, they wanted something ... more.
Thousands of miles away from his homeland, Rudy searches for the words to explain why they left. Simply put, they were thinking about their kids: securing a more stable future, the chance at countless opportunities, the certain knowledge that they had done everything possible to give them the world.
Rudy looks out at the nearby playground at Whistler Olympic Plaza, where kids are whooping and hollering down the slide, running through the tree fort, groups of heads bent together hatching plans for another mission of fun. He points to the small toddlers, exploring the world with those early uncertain steps.
That would never happen in the Philippines, he says with an almost wistful smile. The kids would never toddle around by themselves; their mother or their nanny would always be standing right beside them to make sure they didn't fall down.
A subtle difference about finding independence that Rudy sees first hand now in his own children, who have spent their formative teenage years bridging the cultural gap of two worlds.
Now, they want to move out of the family home and get places of their own. In the Philippines you just don't do that; you live with your parents until you get married.
It's not that Rudy yearns for how things are done back home. Rather, the opposite. One of the reasons they moved was to give their kids independence.
"I asked my daughter 'should we go?'" recalls Rudy of a conversation with his daughter Angela back in the Philippines. "And she told me 'if we don't try, we won't know.' That's the thing that made me decide to come here."
The Buenos have been living in Whistler for the past six years.
They are part of not only a burgeoning community of Filipinos, but also other immigrants from across the globe, coming not to ski and bike for a season or two but to settle, to forge roots, to find that better life, to call Whistler home.
• • •
When the Buenos arrived in Canada it was the spring of 2005. They were living with an old high school friend of Rudy's in Surrey, getting by. Rudy was a night auditor at a hotel. A few months later he noticed a posting from Whistler Blackcomb for a business development analyst. That was more in line with his employment background. The family of five travelled en masse to Whistler for Rudy's interviews.
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WhistlerUnfiltered advertising campaign extends into summer More... | <urn:uuid:d745414e-5876-453c-a998-dba4eeff15f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/choosing-whistler-as-home/Content?oid=2308658 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980727 | 662 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Minn. utilities don't want more coal power from NDby Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio
St. Paul, Minn. — Minnesota and North Dakota are caught up in a legal battle over energy from coal. North Dakota — a big coal producer — wants Minnesota to drop its restrictions on electricity generated by coal.
But utilities in Minnesota are already conforming to the new energy goals, and they say they aren't interested in buying additional coal-based electricity.
Minnesota's Next Generation Energy Act bars Minnesota utilities from building new coal-fired power plants or entering into new long-term contracts to buy coal-generated electricity unless they offset their new carbon emissions with reductions elsewhere. Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the law in 2007.
In a federal lawsuit filed Nov. 3, North Dakota officials contend that Minnesota's law interferes with interstate commerce because it prevents North Dakota power producers from selling more electricity in Minnesota. North Dakota claims only the federal government can regulate the interstate transmission of electricity.
The state of North Dakota and its Lignite Energy Council did not respond to interview requests.
Although the legal battle is only beginning, Minnesota utilities have been adjusting to the law for five years. They're not complaining about it — at least not publicly.
Officials at Minnesota's biggest utility, Xcel Energy, say it's ahead of schedule shifting to renewable energy sources, and according to Xcel's regional vice president for NSP Minnesota, Laura McCarten, the company is making the change essentially without any extra cost to customers.
"It adds diversity to our energy portfolio, it mitigates the impact or risk of costs for either higher fuel prices or environmental regulations that apply to fossil fueled energy sources and it is cost effective," she said.
But even in 2025, Xcel will still receive 30 percent of its energy from coal. In that year, Xcel plans to rely on nuclear power for 28 percent of its power, wind for 20 percent and natural gas for 16 percent. Six percent will come from other sources.
This is a good time for a shift in the industry, because the recession cut demand so drastically. Most utilities expect low demand to continue for five years at least. As a result, they won't need to build new baseload plants -- the kind of plants designed to run continuously -- for the next ten years or more.
Rick Lancaster, vice president for generation at Great River Energy, which supplies power to 28 cooperatives in Minnesota and Wisconsin, said his company has been encouraging conservation and investing in renewable energy for years, but Minnesota's 2007 law sets precise goals.
"Would we reach those goals without the law?" Lancaster asked. "On the conservation side I don't know. The law has definitely pushed us along to reach a higher level of renewables than we would have otherwise."
Great River Energy doesn't take a position on the legal wrangle over new coal plants. But the company received an exemption from Minnesota law for a small, highly-efficient plant near Spiritwood, N.D. Some of that electricity will be imported into Minnesota.
Otter Tail Power, based in Fergus Falls, will push conservation even harder, and add wind power and natural gas peaking capacity. The company also plans to spend nearly a half-billion dollars on air pollution control equipment at its Big Stone I plant, which burns coal. That's more than the plant cost to build in 1975. But environmental groups say the retrofit wouldn't be a cost-effective investment. They say Otter Tail should instead shift to natural gas.
The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce sides with North Dakota on the coal lawsuit. Bill Blazar, the chamber's senior vice president of public affairs and business development, said businesses want reliable energy sources and all options — including coal — should be available for long-term planning.
"Just because we don't need it today doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing the analysis, looking at all the technologies and thinking ahead," he said.
J. Drake Hamilton, science policy director at the non-profit energy policy group Fresh Energy, said instead of putting all its eggs in the coal basket, North Dakota should be promoting cheaper and cleaner options. Hamilton said North Dakota has better energy options than goal and should focus on them.
"The natural gas that they're currently flaring off the Bakken oil fields, and especially wind power," she said are good examples. North Dakota could create export markets for those commodities.
The Minnesota legislature last session passed a bill to remove the coal restrictions from the 2007 law. Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed it but approved the exemption for the Spiritwood plant.
North Dakota's lawsuit is unlikely to be settled even during the next legislative session. Last week, Minnesota asked a federal judge to dismiss it.
- All Things Considered, 11/28/2011, 3:54 p.m. | <urn:uuid:82f0b8eb-ee21-4f96-8e52-19645c6192de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/11/28/north-dakota-minnesota-coal-lawsuit?refid=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948696 | 994 | 2.03125 | 2 |
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NBC LOS ANGELES: Widespread Fraud Among SoCal Seafood Sellers: Report finds seafood widely mislabeled across LA and OC
April 17, 2012
By Melissa Pamer
Think you’re getting tasty red snapper at your local sushi bar? Probably not.
Seafood fraud is widespread in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to a Washington-based nonprofit group.
Oceana, an environmental advocacy organization focused on ocean policy, released a report (PDF) Tuesday showing 55 percent of seafood samples it collected were mislabeled. That’s fraud under federal law.
“The types and breadth of seafood fraud uncovered in Southern California should give all local seafood lovers pause,” the report stated. “Our testing indicates that consumers in the area have a roughly 50/50 chance of getting the actual seafood item they were sold when purchasing certain types of fish.”
The group examined DNA from 119 samples from unidentified grocery stores and restaurants in Southern California in May and December of last year. Eighteen types of seafood were collected to determine if they were properly labeled, with a target on species that have been found misidentified before: wild salmon, various types of soles, red snapper, yellowtail and white tuna.
Sushi restaurants were the biggest culprits, with 87 percent of their offerings mislabeled. Eight of nine “white tuna” samples were actually escolar, a fish that carries and health warning and can cause intense gastrointestinal distress.
State Sen. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, in February introduced legislation that would require large restaurant chains to accurately label seafood by species, country of origin and whether it's wild or farmed. The legislation is sponsored by Oceana.
"I was very surprised at the scale of how much this was going on," Lieu said of the new Oceana report. "A consumer would be paying for a more expensive kind of fish when in fact they're getting a cheaper kind of fish, and it could be from a foreign country, which means they might have a higher chance of getting sick from eating it."
A spokesperson for the California Restaurant Association questioned the samples taken by Oceana.
The study targeted seafood-sellers in coastal LA and Orange counties, and downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach and Hollywood. Restaurants were selected if they were listed as “most popular” under the Zagat guide’s seafood category.
The report said Los Angeles-area results were on par with those found in a study in the Boston area last year, and in research on other locales. | <urn:uuid:1fe71f4b-a67d-4a38-b57a-fadd434600f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sd28.senate.ca.gov/news/2012-04-17-nbc-los-angeles-widespread-fraud-among-socal-seafood-sellers-report-finds-seafood-wi | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964612 | 559 | 1.992188 | 2 |
More than 100 women of all ages came out for a discussion of women’s issues and overall empowerment at the 2012 Women of Color Expo on Saturday.
The expo at the DeYor Performing Arts Center sponsored by Jamz 101.9 has taken place annually for the last four years and covers a variety of topics concerning minority women. The expo is divided into a series of panel discussions covering topics such as women in business, relationships, being a single mother, things women say and diversity.
Tiffany “T-Luv” Allen, Jamz radio personality, said the discussion topics were taken from radio and magazine research along with discussions with women in the community about what issues most affect their lives.
“The goal here is to reach out to women in the Youngstown-Warren community, give them a place where they can feel empowered, give them a place where they can talk about issues that they have and then just give them something educational and entertaining to do,” she said.
Bonita Starkey, owner of Keystar Insurance Co., participated in the discussion panel “Women Who Rule the World.” She said the discussion focused on issues such as the corporate glass ceiling (does it exist and how to deal with it), but mostly spoke to women about embracing life experiences that ultimately will make you the person you become.
Starkey said the message is that life experiences are beneficial to and will shape personal and professional lives.
“This was absolutely a motivational piece for anyone listening,” she said.
Jammin’ Janay, Jamz radio personality, said the expo is beneficial not only for women, but also can help men understand the needs and wants of women.
“One of the benefits of this type of event is that it can give men a better understanding of what women want and need in relationships,” she said.
Madonna Chism-Pinkard, 21 WFMJ-TV community-relations director, also took part in diversity workshops during the expo. She said the target age-range for the event is urban women 18 to 40 years old, but the issues concerning relationships, family, career and education can be beneficial for a broad spectrum of women.
“The thing is to realize that there are so many resources and options available for your personal development and professional growth, regardless of what color you are,” said Pinkard.
Nia Simms attended the Saturday expo and said it was beneficial from a personal and professional standpoint. She said she only wishes more young people would have come out and taken part.
“I found there are many, many women in this community doing excellent work and are willing to help the younger generation,” said Simms. “For me and my organization [Leaders for Progress], there are different resources I did not know I could go to. I wish more kids would have come out to receive some of this information.”
Allen said the ultimate goal of the annual expo is for those who attend to leave more empowered than they were before the start of the event. She said one young participant declared she wants to make a career change to be a radio personality — that is the type of inspiration she wanted to see in all the participants.
“I hope they leave here inspired. I want to give them options on what it is to be a strong woman in today’s society. We want to empower and uplift them. That is the goal,” she said. | <urn:uuid:f135c1d3-833e-48e7-b74f-a2dfd867b6d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vindy.com/news/2012/apr/01/event-celebrates-women-of-color/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97865 | 727 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Gordon expertly analyzes the political culture of Depression-era California, where the enormous power of big agriculture kept tens of thousands of landless workers in peonage and despair. She portrays Lange as an ambivalent radical, deeply sympathetic to the plight of the migrants yet uncomfortable with the chaos that social conflict inevitably produced. Early in the Depression, Lange had tried but failed to photograph the labor protests that shook San Francisco....
A portrait photographer at heart, Lange stressed the inner emotions of those facing injustice and deprivation. “Her documentary photography was portrait photography,” Gordon says. “What made it different was its subjects, and thereby its politics.” An individualist at heart, Lange provided an alternative to the photography of wretchedness, which centered on the misery of beaten-down victims, as well as to the Popular Front mythology, which showed earnest, well-muscled men and women laboring together in fields and factories to produce a Soviet-style paradise on earth. Lange saw America as a worthy work in progress, incomplete and capable of better. By portraying her subjects as nobler than their current conditions, she emphasized the strength and optimism of our national character. She became, in Gordon’s words, “America’s pre-eminent photographer of democracy.”
Linda Gordon delivered a lecture on the book at U.C. Berkeley, posted here.
Also reviewed in the New York Times is THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman and THE FOURTH STAR: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe.
Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars by William Patry is taken up in the Los Angeles Times; The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan is reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. | <urn:uuid:ee51d4bd-83c1-4547-8d18-9f560bd78ab5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/gordon-on-dorothea-lange-and-more-in.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946314 | 397 | 2.28125 | 2 |
In April 1966, Esquire Magazine published a story by Gay Talese that is still considered one of the greatest magazine articles of all time; the article, the cover story, was titled “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
The piece, still very much worth the read, says much about celebrity, journalism, and, of course, celebrity journalism, but germane here is a point Talese makes early on: for most people, having a cold is a trivial matter–after all, it’s called the “common” cold–but when a man, a cultural icon, a giant of stage and screen like Sinatra (remember, this is 1966) has a cold, well. . . .
Frank Sinatra with a cold is a big deal. It affects him, his mood, his ability to perform, and so it affects his friends, his entourage, his personal staff of 75, his audience, and perhaps a part of the greater popular culture. In other words, as Talese wants you to understand, in this case, a cold is anything but trivial.
Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made some comments to the press earlier this week. Jaczko, it seems, is worried. He believes, as noted in an Associated Press story, that “U.S. nuclear plant operators have become complacent, just nine months after the nuclear disaster in Japan.” The NRC head thinks that a slew of events at over a dozen domestic nuclear facilities reveal the safety of America’s reactors to be something less than optimal.
To be clear, safety concerns at any kind of plant, be it a soda bottler or a microchip manufacturer, are probably not trivial, but when the safe and secure operation of a nuclear facility comes into question–as the aftermath of Chernobyl or the ongoing crisis in Japan will tell you–it ratchets up concern to a whole different level. So, when the man who more or less serves as the chief safety officer for the entirety of the nation’s nuclear infrastructure says he’s worried, many, many other people should be worried, too.
To put it another way, Greg Jaczko has a cold.
But that’s not the scariest part. Read the rest of this entry → | <urn:uuid:6655995a-f5f4-4b35-b659-1ff8d35908d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.firedoglake.com/gregglevine/tag/esquire/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966959 | 487 | 2.03125 | 2 |
For the exerciser needing a PC connectivity solution, the Oregon Scientific® SE833 heart rate monitor comes with the ability to download exercise data, including speed and distance measurement, to your computer. It includes a comfortable splash-proof chest belt that wirelessly sends heart rate data to the watch, and it stores 9 past exercise routines in the watch and 1 year's worth of data on your computer.
Heart rate monitor with speed and distance calculations
Wireless PC download via USB dongle
Provides a smart training program for user to achieve the best benefit from exercise
Smart training software program for Triathlons includes training plans, training records and nutrition
Water-resistant chest belt
Exercise data record (9) in watch, (1 year data) in PC
Target countdown index – reminds users the % of task achievement
Display calorie consumption and percentage of fat burning during workout
Cadence sensor for measuring speed and revolutions per minute (RPM) for biking (optional)
Comments about Oregon Scientific SE833 Heart Rate Monitor:
I bought this watch because it claimed to do a lot and had a good price point. Ultimately it tried to do everything, but was generally does nothing well. Clearly is is designed by a computer programmer and not someone who wants a functional watch for working out.
Was this a gift?:
Bottom Line No, I would not recommend this to a friend | <urn:uuid:34a5c710-5a63-4aab-8556-8a00b2a63e81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sportsauthority.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4106232&cp=3077634.693962&sr=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927346 | 283 | 1.75 | 2 |
Robotic Suit Aids Astronauts and Paraplegic Patients
Project engineer Shelley Rea demonstrates the X1, a newly developed wearable robotic suit with applications in space and on Earth.
CREDIT: Image courtesy of Robert Markowitz
It's a superhero suit for Earth and outer space. NASA and other research groups have made a wearable robotic suit, called X1, to live a double life of usefulness. Up in space, the suit would act as an exercise machine for astronauts, providing extra leg resistance for space travelers. On Earth, the suit can be tuned to lighter settings and support paralyzed people in standing and walking.
"It's the exact same suit," said Nic Radford, the former project manager for NASA's so-called exoskeleton research who now leads NASA's research into humanoid robots. The X1 is an example of the myriad uses that are coming out of NASA's Robonaut project, which sent a robot helper to the International Space Station last year, he said.
The X1, which incorporates many Robonaut technologies, straps onto wearers' shoulders with a harness and supports wearers' legs with separate shells. The shells have 10 joints, including four motorized joints for the hips and knees and six nonmotorized joints that allow wearers to step side to side, turn and flex their feet.
The X1 will be especially helpful to future missions to Mars or other planets, Radford said. On such long journeys, it will be important for human explorers to exercise two to three hours a day to fight against the bone and muscle loss that happens in low gravity.
But manned spacecraft to Mars wouldn't be able to tote around the exercise equipment that International Space Station crew members use, for instance. International Space Station astronauts exercise on "a ton of hardware," Radford told TechNewsDaily. "Literally 2,000 pounds of hardware. Well, something like that is not really going to be useful to a mission to Mars, where you have a small capsule." The X1, on the other hand, weighs 57 pounds.
Radford and his team are now starting negotiations to send the X1 to the International Space Station for testing. Such negotiations usually take about two years, Radford said.
Back on Earth, NASA is working with the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition to study the X1 for people who have paraplegia as a result of accidents, strokes or other conditions, and cannot walk.
The X1 is an especially safe device, Radford said, because it's based on technology developed for the Robonaut 2, the International Space Station helper. "If you're going to put a humanoid robot inside the space station, you don't want it poking its hand out and causing an accident," he said.
The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition is now testing the X1 in a small number of people with paraplegia, Radford said. Researchers are gathering people's feedback on the comfort of the X1. Supportive exoskeletons like NASA's can feel uncomfortable because they put pressure on people's legs in order to generate the force they need to work, Radford explained.
"I dream of the day when I can get people out of wheelchairs," Radford said. "I can relate on a very small level," he added. He recently had to have his ankle replaced and still walks with a limp. "It's been a difficult journey," he said.
In the future, NASA wants to develop X1 to help astronauts walk on the surface of planets. Space explorers could wear the exoskeleton along with a spacesuit. The exoskeleton would give wearers extra strength, much like the comic-book superhero Iron Man's suit does, and help wearers move more easily in low-gravity environments.
Researchers also want to make the suit balance on its own for people with paraplegia. Right now, paraplegic wearers must use arm crutches. "What you really want to do is have the exo device balance itself, so the patient has use of his hands," Radford said. That research will happen in NASA's humanoid research lab, he added, where the agency is studying how to give robots bipedal motion.
This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to SPACE.com. You can follow TechNewsDaily staff writer Francie Diep on Twitter @franciediep. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.
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