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Heart Failure Drug May Only Help Heart's Function, Not Symptoms
Latest Heart News
TUESDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- A drug often used to treat chronic heart failure may not ease symptoms in people with one form of the disease, a new study suggests.
The medication, called spironolactone (Aldactone), failed to improve symptoms or quality of life among 422 patients with diastolic heart failure -- a form of the disease that affects about half of all people with heart failure.
The drug did, however, benefit the structure and function of patients' hearts. And experts said it's too early to know what to make of the results, which appear in the Feb. 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"It would be premature to say this is not beneficial," said Dr. Sanjiv Shah, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago, who was not involved in the study.
Shah is involved in an ongoing study of spironolactone's effects in people with diastolic heart failure. And that trial is focusing on the big questions: Can the drug prevent or delay hospitalizations, or prolong people's lives?
Spironolactone is in a class of drugs called aldosterone receptor antagonists. They cause the kidneys to eliminate excess water and sodium from the body, so they can lower blood pressure and get rid of fluid build-up in some people with heart failure.
And studies have shown that spironolactone can extend the lives of some heart failure patients -- namely, those with a low "ejection fraction." That means the percentage of blood pushed out by the heart with each contraction is abnormally low.
The problem is that heart failure is "heterogeneous," according to Shah, who described it as a "syndrome" -- or a collection of signs and symptoms -- rather than a disease. So a treatment that works for some patients may not work as well for others.
In general, heart failure is a chronic condition where the heart does not pump blood efficiently enough to meet the body's needs. That causes symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and fluid build-up in the legs and feet.
In systolic heart failure, the heart's left ventricle (the main pumping chamber) cannot contract strongly enough, and many people with this form of heart failure have a reduced ejection fraction.
In the diastolic form, the left ventricle doesn't relax enough between contractions, which means it cannot fill up with as much blood as it should. But the heart's ejection fraction is actually normal.
Diastolic heart failure is trickier to diagnose, and doctors know less about how to best treat it, said Dr. John Cleland, a cardiologist at Hull York Medical School in Kingston-upon-Hull, England, who co-wrote an editorial published with the study.
He agreed that it's too soon to draw conclusions from the current findings, and that doctors will know more when Shah's study results are in.
"I think the public should wait for TOPCAT," Cleland said, referring to the acronym Shah's trial goes by.
For the current study, researchers led by Dr. Burkert Pieske, of the Medical University Graz, in Austria, recruited 422 patients diagnosed with diastolic heart failure. They randomly assigned half to add spironolactone to their current treatment, while the rest received inactive placebo pills.
Over one year, the drug did lower patients' blood pressure and improve their heart function. Based on echocardiograms, there was less thickening and resistance in the left ventricle.
But the patients did not report any improvements in their symptoms or quality of life. Nor did they perform any better on a treadmill walking test.
Cleland said it's not surprising that the patients would not be feeling better despite the objective improvement in heart function. That's been seen with other drugs, he noted.
Pieske said that the reasons are not fully clear. It's possible that the drug dose was not high enough, he said. Or the changes in heart function that his team saw may just not translate into benefits such as better walking ability.
On top of that, the patients in this study were actually fairly healthy, Shah and Cleland pointed out. So they may not have been sick enough to expect symptoms or walking ability to get noticeably better.
Shah and Cleland both suspect that many study patients may have had diastolic "dysfunction" in their hearts -- but were not sick enough to really have diastolic heart failure.
"I think that may underlie the findings (on symptoms)," Shah said.
For now, Pieske said doctors could still consider spironolactone for diastolic heart failure patients who need better blood pressure control.
The usual treatments for the condition include lowering blood pressure with drugs such as diuretics and ACE inhibitors, and slowing patients' heart rate with beta-blockers or other medications.
"Most people with diastolic heart failure are hypertensive, and getting blood pressure under good control is very important," Cleland said.
All agreed that better treatments are needed. "There is a real need to find therapies that improve outcomes for people with this form of heart failure," Shah said.
For spironolactone, Shah said more study is needed on whether the drug affects patients' potassium levels too much, which can cause an abnormal heart rhythm. In this study, patients on the drug had a "mild" increase in potassium, on average -- but they didn't have a higher risk of serious increases, and there were no hospitalizations for it.
The study was funded by government grants, but some researchers on the work have financial ties to Aldactone maker Pfizer, Inc.
SOURCES: Burkert Pieske, M.D., head, cardiology, Medical University Graz, Austria; Sanjiv Shah, M.D., associate professor, medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago; John G.F. Cleland, M.D., Ph.D., Hull York Medical School, Kingston-upon-Hull, England; Feb. 27, 2013, Journal of the American Medical Association
Get the latest health and medical information delivered direct to your inbox FREE! | <urn:uuid:a65f2a47-aea6-48d4-a354-96f7847835dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=168119 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958209 | 1,323 | 2.25 | 2 |
There's good news for the Good News Club at Jenny Lind Elementary School in Minneapolis this week.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a Minneapolis school district likely engaged in impermissible viewpoint discrimination when it barred a religious club for elementary students from an after-school program open to other community groups, Education Week's School Law Blog reports.
The Child Evangelism Fellowship of Minnesota (CEF) is a chapter of an international non-profit organization that conducts weekly "good news clubs" (GNC) for children ages 5 through 12. Programs are available to all elementary-aged students regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
During the meetings, there are Bible stories and lessons on moral and character development, creative learning activities, prayer, songs and similar activities. The goals of the GNCs are to encourage learning, spiritual growth, service to others and leadership development. The kids are taught Christian Biblical principles, moral values such as honesty, forgiveness, and similar character qualities.
In 2000, CEF obtained a permit from the school district to host GNC meetings at the Jenny Lind Elementary School. CEF flyers distributed at the school contained a disclaimer that the district did not sponsor or endorse CEF's activity.
During the 2005-06 school year, the district either changed or formalized the way that it screened groups using its facilities for after-school activities. CEF was required to become a community partner and a member of the after-school program. It completed the new requirements, and operated without incident until the 2008-09 school year.
That year, the Jenny Lind School's new site coordinator, Sandra McDonald, became concerned about the religious content of the CEF clubs after overhearing a prayer and reference to Jesus Christ during a CEF meeting.
Due to these concerns about the "prayer and proselytizing," which occurred at GNC meetings, CEF was ultimately informed that it would be removed from the after-school program effective in the 2009-10 school year. It still had access to school facilities for meetings as a community partner, but removal from the after-school program meant that it no longer had access to transportation and food services from the district. Attendance at CEF meetings sharply declined.
CEF sued for injunctive and declaratory relief and damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, claiming that the school district violated its free speech and equal protection rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The district court denied CEF's motion for a preliminary injunction, concluding that CEF's GNC was distinguishable from those discussed in Good News Club v. Milford Central School and Good News/Good Sports Club v. School District of the City of Ladue, and that CEF was not likely to prevail. The Eighth Circuit disagreed.
This week, the appellate court reinstated the case, noting, "The Supreme Court and our court have both consistently held that this type of speech is private speech, not school sponsored ... Following this precedent, we hold that CEF's meetings, even as part of the after-school program, are not school sponsored."
- Child Evangelism Fellowship of Minnesota v. Minneapolis Special School District No. 1 (Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals)
- Sixth Circuit Mulls Recess in Bible Study Lawsuit (FindLaw's Sixth Circuit Blog)
- Second Cir. Decision on Church Services in Public Schools Stands (FindLaw's Second Circuit Blog) | <urn:uuid:08407737-8ec3-4f45-aa5b-e5030b35a70d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.findlaw.com/eighth_circuit/2012/08/viewpoint-discrimination-good-news-for-the-good-news-club.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96471 | 702 | 1.75 | 2 |
May 10, 2011
IVR for Transcription
At the heart of IVR technology is speech recognition, which turns voice audio into digital information that computers can translate into commands or text. Because of this, the same technology that runs much of what IVR systems do can also serve in transcription.
A good portion of what IVR systems do today is information-gathering. Particularly with IVR survey tools, the systems will take audio information over the phone and turn it into text that a company or organization can use. The speech recognition technology that does this has taken many leaps forward in the last few years and is now very accurate.
Transcription has, of course, been around for a long time. However, it has historically been people doing the transcribing as opposed to machines—people able to listen to speech and type or shorthand type the information quickly, even on-the-fly as in the case of courtroom stenographers.
What IVR systems offer is a transcription tool that is very accurate and also very easy to use while also cost-effective compared to expensive people-based transcription. With only the overhead costs of the IVR system itself and the phone minutes, organizations and companies can do transcription for their own needs or offer transcription services for customers at a relatively low cost.
Users would simply call into the system, which would lead them through the various options for transcription. They would speak whatever message they want transcribed, which the speech recognition software would turn into digital information. The IVR system would then turn the digital information into text on the other end. Simple and effective.
TMCnet publishes expert commentary on various telecommunications, IT, call center, CRM and other technology-related topics. Are you an expert in one of these fields, and interested in having your perspective published on a site that gets several million unique visitors each month? Get in touch.
Edited by Juliana Kenny | <urn:uuid:566b361b-0d43-4b70-bf47-040e58fce729> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://technews.tmcnet.com/ivr/topics/ivr/articles/173107-ivr-transcription.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966686 | 387 | 2.40625 | 2 |
DFLer to introduce state health insurance exchange billby Elizabeth Stawicki, Minnesota Public Radio
St. Paul, Minn. — A DFL state lawmaker from Inver Grove Heights says he'll introduce legislation to establish one of the central parts of the federal health care law: a state insurance exchange.
An exchange is an Expedia.com-like marketplace where consumers and small businesses will be able to compare and buy health insurance policies.
Rep. Joe Atkins said he'll author a bill based on recommendations from a health insurance task force that's been meeting for about the past two months. A bill to create an exchange failed last session but Atkins said he's not deterred.
"The hope is and my expectation and the positive feedback that I've gotten from members on the other side of the aisle makes me very optimistic that we can get this done in a bi-partisan fashion this year," Atkins said.
Atkins, an attorney and member of the governor's exchange task force, said an exchange will help rein in the cost of insurance.
"Every dollar a business like mine saves on health insurance is a dollar we can put towards growing our business and towards hiring people," Atkins said. "It's why the small business that I know so desperately want to get a health exchange done."
Some state Republican leaders say they won't "rubber stamp" the governor's exchange legislation but may provide legislation of their own. | <urn:uuid:00085767-e7fb-4742-bbec-f57c04370122> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/01/30/dfler-to-introduce-state-health-insurance-exchange-bill | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96399 | 292 | 1.507813 | 2 |
If Friday the 13th is a bad luck day, does that imply that Monday the 13th is a good luck day? Compose a logical argument for this question. Whoever sends in the best logical argument, arguing either side of this question, wins a Singing Turtle reward. Read the post to find out the details.
Archive | Math Riddles
The end of the year is near. So give students something different. Here’s an idea for a complete lesson plan that uses math riddles to grab students’ attention. The clip shows a math riddle from the movie “Die Hard.” This is a springboard to get everyone excited about riddles. From there you have many options for moving the lesson forward. Have fun! | <urn:uuid:6522ad1a-2bfb-4a3a-afc7-3a7c7c554cb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.algebrawizard.com/category/math-instruction-techniques/math-riddles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906998 | 155 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Established in 1995, the Singapore Environment Council (SEC) is an independently managed, non-profit, non-government organisation, and institution of public character that nurtures, facilitates and co-ordinates environmental causes in Singapore. The Council is also an approved charity that can offer tax exemption to donors.
SEC reaches out to the public through its educational, community and industrial arms. Each arm provides a range of holistic programmes that raises awareness of the natural environment and promotes a greater sense of environmental responsibility.
Some of SEC's more prominent programmes include the Singapore Environmental Achievement Awards, Project Eco-Office, Schools' Green Audit Awards and the Singapore G1. In addition, SEC also boasts a strong pool of volunteers who translate awareness into action.
Since its inception, SEC has built strong partnerships with corporations, government agencies and other non-government organisations (NGOs). These partnerships are vital for sustaining environmental programmes that eventually lead to positive action and change. Over the years, SEC has given strength and bearing to the environmental movement here.
As the most eminent green organisation in Singapore, SEC is often regarded as the umbrella organisation for many other environmental NGOs. The Council also sees itself as a catalyst to individual responsibility and action. It spearheads and co-ordinates national projects and leads island-wide responses to major environmental challenges.
The SEC aims to be the preferred non-government organisation partner for communities, businesses and governments to achieve best-in-class sustainable city development in Singapore and beyond.
To create a lasting impact on climate change by collaborating with people, industries and governments to encourage and achieve sustainable urbanisation.
- To set new sustainability standards for urban development
- To educate and empower communities to lead green lifestyles
- To conserve biodiversity in the urban environment | <urn:uuid:0724f3e7-ed10-4d43-809d-ccbe0de72e31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sec.org.sg/about | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931988 | 355 | 2.125 | 2 |
New Delhi, Dec 31 (IBNS): People in India welcomed the new year with toned-down celebrations, as large parts of the country continued to mourn the 23-year-old victim of the brutal gang-rape in Delhi.
Celebrations were visibly watered down in major cities across India - which usually play host to the most lavish New Year's bashes in the country as the Delhi gang-rape and subsequent debate about women's safety continued to play on in the national consciousness.
The victim, who had been raped and brutalised with an iron rod by six men on a moving bus on Dec 16, had been cremated under heavy security on Sunday, after losing a 13-day-long battle for her life at a Singapore hospital.
As a mark of respect for the woman and also sensing the sombre mood prevailed in the country, a number of official and private celebrations were also called off or toned down.
Sonia Gandhi, the powerful chief of India's ruling Congress party and the nation's armed forces were among those who announced that no celebrations were being organised for the New Year.
Several hotels, clubs and residents associations in the national capital also decided to either cancel planned festivities or scale back parties in a show of respect for the victim and her family.
President Pranab Mukherjee in his New Year message said that 2013 should be dedicated to welfare of women.
"We mark the advent of the New Year under a pall of gloom, as the nation mourns the tragic loss of a brave young girl who became the victim of a heinous crime," Mukherjee said.
Meanwhile, even as prohibitory orders remained in place in the nation capital, protests and demonstrations against the gruesome incident continued in New Delhi centred around Jantar Mantar. | <urn:uuid:dc8a81e7-6788-434f-9a59-188614b7dd74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indiablooms.com/NewsDetailsPage/2012/newsDetails311212u.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977446 | 365 | 1.546875 | 2 |
I have just learned that Elinor Ostrom died this morning of cancer. The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (I know, I know, the Swedish Bank Prize, blah blah), she was officially a political scientist, and there were some who complained about her receiving the award because of that and because she had "never published in a top 5 economics journal," although she did so after receiving the prize. Also many fussed about not having heard of her, including people as prominent as Paul Krugman. As it is, her most famous work, her seminal 1990 book, Governing the Commons, has been cited more than 13,000 times, more alone than the entire citations received by more than half of the other economics Nobelists.
Although the basic insight had been made earlier, particularly by Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup and his student, Richard Bishop in a 1975 paper in the fairly obscure Natural Resources Journal (now more or less run by lawyers), she was the one who really developed the point, working with multidisciplinary teams using a broad array of methods, including in-depth field studies, game theory, lab experiments, and a variety of other approaches, building up a massive institutional and historical knowledge and data base, she confirmed that the management system of a natural resource commons is what matters more than its official ownership. In a sense this is a rediscovery in a different context of the old ownership versus control argument that was initiated in the 1930s by Gardiner and Means, and was also a focus of the early behavioral economists as well who immediately followed Herbert Simon.
It remains the case even now in many textbooks that the issue is posed as "the tragedy of the commons," a phrase coined by Garret Hardin in the 1960s, with the idea being that there were two choices, either badly managed open access commons such as the encroached commons pastures of England, or private ownership of these resources. Ostrom and her associates argued that what mattered was the ability to control access, whatever the formal ownership scheme, and that privately owned properties that cannot control access, such as the homesteaded farmlands of the US Great Plains prior to the invention of barbed wire to keep the cattle out, were worse than many common properties that managed themselves. Much of this insight came from observing traditional management schemes of forests, and fisheriers, and irrigation systems, and pastures that worked, with the Alpine ones in Switzerland dating from the 1200s a classic example.
This ties with a broader story, that systems organized by the people who use the resources work better than ones imposed by outsiders. The classic case involves the forests of Nepal since WW II, a case emphasized by Ostrom. The forests ended up in basically three different kinds of systems. Some of them owned by corporations, influence from the British Raj, some of them were in state-owned and controlled systems from various socialist governments, and about a third remained in the hands of local groups managed in traditional ways. Today, most of the first two are gone, over-harvested and deforested. What is left of the forests of Nepal are those where the local traditional managers were able to keep on keeping on.
I can also attest that Lin Ostrom was a warm and engaging person, friendly to one and all and totally open-minded. She is a great loss to the broader intellectual and policy community of this world. May she rest in peace. | <urn:uuid:cae98faf-a65a-4b31-944a-d2d8507503ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://econospeak.blogspot.fr/2012/06/rip-elinor-ostrom.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984867 | 698 | 2.125 | 2 |
A cell phone in 1928? Nah! Meet George Clarkeof, an Irish filmmaker, who is also a fan of Charlie Chaplin. Last year, he purchased a DVD set of Charlie Chaplin film. While watching some extras from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’, he noticed something—- a footage shot in front of a theater during the premier of ‘The Circus’ shows what appears to be a woman, or a man walking down the sidewalk talking on a cell phone? The thing is, the footage is from 1928, long before any type of communication device was invented.
Naturally George Clarkeof made a YouTube video to show off his find. If you watch the video he has isolated the footage and plays it several times, including in slow motion, it certainly looks like the woman is talking on a cell phone. Plus, her looks–she’s dressed in a very heavy outfit, covering her up almost completely, while a man who walks by just prior to her is dressed normally with the era, and it looks like they have a good weather so its too warm to be walking around in a big heavy coat.
So who is this mysterious ‘woman’? Is she a Time Traveler on Charlie Chaplin The Circus? Is she really talking into a cell phone, or simply muttering to herself? In case it is a cell phone, how could she have one in 1928 decades before any mobile technology for communications? Let us know what you think after watching the Charlie Chaplin Cell phone video below.
Time Traveler on Charlie Chaplin The Circus : | <urn:uuid:dc56362a-3dfb-4f2e-84d3-c887421b4e53> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lugaluda.com/charlie-chaplin-cell-phone-time-traveler-on-charlie-chaplin-the-circus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955393 | 325 | 1.75 | 2 |
SAN FRANCISCO -- Groupon and its compatriots in the much-hyped daily deals business were supposed to change the very nature of small-business advertising. Instead, it is the daily deal vendors that are racing to change as evidence mounts that their business model is fundamentally flawed.
Groupon last week reported another quarter of disappointing earnings as its core business stagnated, sending its stock down 30 percent to an all-time low of $2.76. Its biggest rival, Living Social, is piling up losses, and part-owner Amazon.com earlier this month recorded a quarterly loss after writing down its Living Social investment.
Both companies are racing to diversify, venturing into more generic ecommerce areas like off-price sales through ventures such as Groupon Goods and LivingSocial's Shop. Meanwhile, upstarts are developing new variations on the discount coupon theme.
"It's clear that they need to have other models besides the email daily deals business," said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at Raymond James. "The problem is that a lot of these newer businesses have lower margins."
Critics say the torrid growth that enabled Groupon to go public at $20 a share just a year ago was fueled by merchants buying into a new type of marketing that they didn't fully understand. The discounts offered through the Groupon coupons have turned out to be costly, and the repeat business they generate uncertain.
"A lot of people made the mistake of
A Raymond James survey of roughly 115 merchants that used daily deals services during the fall found that 39 percent of merchants said they were not likely to run another Groupon promotion over the next couple of years. The top reasons cited were high commission rate and low rate of repeat customers gained through offering a promotion.
The survey also found that 32 percent of the merchants reported losing money on the promotions, and nearly 40 percent said the Groupon offer was less effective than other types of marketing.
"I've always maintained that this is a hype driven business built on an unsustainable business model both for the merchants and for Groupon," said Rakesh Agrawal, principal analyst at reDesign mobile, a San Francisco consulting firm.
Existing customers interested in signing up for daily deals has waned - Groupon reported last week that the average revenue per active customer (defined as an account that has purchased a deal from the site in the previous 12 months) fell to $63.96 in the 12 months to Sept. 30 from $76.49 a year earlier.
The company has also suffered a string of high-level executive departures as its market value has shriveled to just $1.8 billion, down from nearly $13 billion when it went public. Groupon has also been dogged by controversy over its accounting methods, though it said last week that it had $1.2 billion in cash and cash-equivalents with no long-term debt.
Beyond the daily deal
Groupon cites an array of new services and features that it hopes will make the company a crucial partner for many types of merchants over the long run.
Groupon Goods, a more traditional discount online retail operation, already accounts for much of the company's revenue growth.
"We're investing in the development of products and technology that help our merchants run their businesses more effectively, from payments and POS services to our evolving suite of marketing services including the daily deal," said Kal Raman, Groupon's senior vice president of international operations, in an email.
"By this combination we become a true merchant partner, serving the yin and the yang, both the operational and marketing pieces of each business."
A key part of that is the massive sales force that Groupon has built to market its daily deals to small businesses. The relationships it has built with merchants and a retail subscriber base that recently hit 200 million could help it beat back competition in daily deals and broaden its offerings, some analysts say.
Groupon controls about 50 percent of the daily deals market share in North America, according to Yipit, a New York City-based daily deal industry tracking firm.
"I don't think the industry it is completely going away, though it will settle," said Arvind Bhatia, analyst with Sterne, Agee & Leach. "There may be some market share shift to the benefit of Groupon."
The margin pressure, though, could be here to stay. Groupon laid off 80 employees last week, mostly in sales, as it seeks to bring more automation to the sale process and control costs. But a big sales force is central to the company's strategy.
"It's a business that scales with bodies, with humans," said Karim Faris of Google (GOOG) Ventures, which invests in online coupon company WhaleShark Media. "I'm a technology investor, and I like businesses that scale with technology."
WhaleShark and other competitors such as Coupons.com have focused on bringing traditional coupons into the digital era. Such companies typically get a small percentage of revenue for each sale generated by their coupons.
"Groupon is working with small retailers to give big discounts, irregularly," said WhaleShark Chief Executive Cotter Cunningham. "We work with big retailers, to give small discounts, every day."
Dholakia of Rice University said executives at new startups have told him they plan to make daily deals more attractive to merchants by offering them a bigger cut. He also cites interest in new models around "perishable inventory," such as restaurants and spa services, for which big discounts might make more sense for the merchants.
As such competition builds even as the original deals business flattens, there are no easy answers for Groupon.
"The heyday for the daily deals are behind us," said Bhatia. | <urn:uuid:7335e3c0-3633-42be-84dd-ceee5bb1bb77> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.contracostatimes.com/business/ci_21980060/analysis-groupon-fights-its-life-daily-deals-fade | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97291 | 1,187 | 1.5 | 2 |
You can jump at the age of 16 in some places with parents signing off on it. At the age of 18 you can jump anywhere.
Very cool that you want to jump for charity. I just jump for fun.
There are a couple websites you need to check out to get good info on skydiving.
is the website of the United States Parachute Association, the governing body for sport parachuting in the United States. There is a list of member dropzones on the website along with all sorts of great info on the sport.
is another great resource for everything about skydiving and some BASE too.
is just fun and a good place to feel like you’re at the drop zone when you can’t physically be there.
Make sure that you contact the drop zone you want to jump at directly. There are a few scams out there, one of which is 1800skyride. They will take your money and send you to any dropzone they want too but only about three dz’s in the country except skyride tickets. So please, please, please contact the dropzone directly.
The tandem is a great jump. I’d get video too. I made one tandem a little over two years ago and came back to start student training (good info about student training at uspa.org) and got my license. I’ve been jumping for two years and have a few hundred jumps. I love this sport and I sincerely hope that you’ll become a full time skydiver and I’ll be able to make some jumps with you at a boogie! | <urn:uuid:683fd575-8a4f-4069-8266-3e1714be4152> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enire.com/other-sports/charity-skydive-t39784.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93896 | 340 | 1.523438 | 2 |
A lot has been going on in the interactive voice response (IVR) space. From new releases to the latest trends and insights, this is all of the most interesting IVR-related news of the week!
This week, some presidential propaganda was brought to light about IVR polling. The entire debacle revolves around one accusation; that prior to the first presidential debate (when the majority of opinion polls painted a pretty picture of Obama in the lead), Republican pollster John McLaughlin charged certain polling organizations with deliberately outweighing Democrats in their samples of prospective voters, Fridson explains.
According to a recent Forbes article, McLaughlin claimed that “the Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want.”
In other news, specialized voice recognition software determined some interesting insights to a rare, endangered species of birds – the Gray Owls of Yosemite. Separated from their fellow flock nearly 30 millennia ago due to a glacial ice separation, the birds were involuntarily left to evolve over time. With less than 200 currently in existence in the small confines of the Sierra Nevada, it’s now being revealed that specialized voice recognition software developed by Joe Medley has captured so much data that it would take seven years to play back, which would hopefully shed light on the discreet animals.
Medley, a PhD candidate in ecology at UC Davis, accomplished this by placing 40 data-compression digital audio recorders around the surroundings which are thought to be favored by the uncommon creatures in hopes of identifying them by their mating, feeding and unique calls. To learn more about this incredible feat, read the article in its entirety by clicking here.
Wrapping up this week is news of Authentidate (News - Alert) Holding Corp., a provider of Web-based software applications and telehealth products and services for the healthcare sector, revealing its new IVR vital signs monitoring solution and Web services for the VA weight management protocol TeleMOVE.
After a required testing period to meet all criteria and needs, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) successfully completed the test-in phase for the IVR solution, which will help provide VA clinicians with a unique way to remotely monitor their mobile patients, thus enhancing patient care in their national Care Coordination Home Telehealth program.
"Authentidate is very pleased that the VA has approved the national rollout of our IVR solution with TeleMOVE,” said VP of Business Development at Authentidate, Gavin Stewart. “We believe that the other DMPs which are currently being pilot tested will be approved for national deployment in the near future and that our IVR solution provides a significant growth opportunity for our company. We continue to work closely with the VA to provide cost-effective solutions to help support their efforts to deliver the best health care for our veterans."
That’s going to do it this week for the latest IVR news. To see what’s new next week, be sure to check back in same time, same place – only here at TMCnet. | <urn:uuid:de59ea20-1fb9-4354-b0bf-6e92763dc696> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://technews.tmcnet.com/ivr/topics/ivr/articles/313690-tmcnet-ivr-week-review.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954792 | 678 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Dr Kallam Anji Reddy, chairman of Dr Reddy's Laboratories, would be wondering at how the world of pharmaceuticals has turned topsy-turvy.
For the past 25-30 years, Dr Reddy, a visionary scientist turned entrepreneur, built his Rs 5,000-plus crore (Rs 50 billion) business empire, confronting the might of multinational pharmaceutical companies through patent challenges and litigation. Thanks to the favourable patent regime in India till 2005, his team of scientists and he worked in small research and development laboratories in Hyderabad and successfully reverse-engineered patented drugs of multinationals to make low-cost generic drugs.
Multinationals, which make billions of dollars from their patent-protected drugs, viewed generics as a nuisance or a 'dirty business' (as termed by the chief executive of one of the largest companies).
Most of Big Pharma shunned generics, as its manufacturing required different process chemistry skill sets. Margins are very thin and require huge volume business to generate decent profits.
Compared to this, each of their patent-protected blockbuster drugs enjoyed a monopoly and gave multi-billion dollar sales. MNCs adopted strategies such as litigation and authorised generics to block entry of generics, which were eating into their profits and sales.
In an emerging trend, the same MNCs are now queuing to join hands with generic specialist companies such as Dr Reddy's and Aurobindo Pharma [ Get Quote ] to market their low-cost drugs in global markets.
"Multinational drug companies are under pressure, as their new drug pipelines are dwindling and many existing drugs are going off-patent in the near future. In the field of generics, branded generics offer the largest margins and this is an area where we will soon see many deals by Big Pharma with Indian generic companies," said Dominic Hollamby, global head -- healthcare group, Rothschild, one of the largest private banks.
Last week, GlaxoSmithKline [ Get Quote ], the second largest drug maker in the world, teamed with Dr Reddy's to market its 100 branded pharmaceuticals in emerging markets such as Africa, West Asia, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific, excluding India. Dr Reddy's will manufacture the drugs, license these and supply to GSK [ Get Quote ].
In March, the world's largest drug maker, Pfizer [ Get Quote ], had acquired rights from Aurobindo Pharma for 39 generic finished-dose products in the US and 20 in Europe, plus an additional 11 in France [ Images ]. Later, Pfizer expanded this supply pact for another 60 products, for selling in several countries through Asia, Latin America, Africa and West Asia.
Two months later, Pfizer entered into a partnership with Ahmedabad-based Claris Lifesciences, an injectable drug maker, to commercialise off-patent drugs in the United States, Canada [ Images ], Australia [ Images ], New Zealand [ Images ] and Europe.
"Such deals are a win-win situation for both Big Pharma and generic companies. Multinational companies enjoy big brand equity and have extensive sales and marketing set-ups, which will help the generics players to tap new markets and business," said Sarabjit Kaur Nagra, vice-president of research, Angel Broking.
It is estimated that about $70 billion worth of branded drug patents are set to expire through 2012. Big Pharma, trying to protect margins and revenues, is now looking at generics as a serious business.
At present, a dozen-odd Indian drug companies such as Piramal Healthcare, Jubilant Organosys [ Get Quote ] and Dishman [ Get Quote ] are engaged in contract research and manufacturing services for Big Pharma.
Indian contract manufacturing was estimated at $869 million in 2007 and is projected to grow at a rate of 41.7 per cent to $2.46 billion by 2010, says a study by KPMG and CII. According to a YES Bank [ Get Quote ] and Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India estimate, contract manufacturing in India will grow from about $625 million in 2007-08 to $3.2 billion by 2015.
"Chemistry skills required for generics manufacturing are totally different from that of innovative drug development. India has big skills in process chemistry and, coupled with that, the ability of Indian pharma to make drugs at 40 per cent cheaper than that in the western world attracts Big Pharma," said R B Smarta, managing director of Interlink Marketing Consultancy.
Dominic Hollamby noted that many Indian companies are supplying drugs to Big Pharma and the role of the multinational is just to put its label and sell the drug in the market. The entire generic cycle of dossiers to manufacturing and other regulatory clearances are handled by the generic company.
Pfizer, which last year formed an established products division to enter generics, has a generics division known as Greenstone. It is also scouting for generic assets and deals in the Asian market.
Switzerland-based Novartis [ Get Quote ] owns one of the largest generics companies in the world, Sandoz. Besides, in May, Novartis bought a specialty generics drug maker, Ebewe Pharma, a closely-held Austrian company, for $1.2 billion.
Sanofi-Aventis recently bought Czech generic company Zentiva, and Medley, a family-owned drug specialty generic manufacturer in Brazil [ Images ] for $660 million.
GSK also entered a drug outsourcing deal with Aspen Pharmacare of South Africa [ Images ] to source generics for developing markets. | <urn:uuid:ae11ed68-39e0-4bc5-854e-acd015d27fac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://business.rediff.com/special/2009/jun/19/big-pharma-comes-calling-to-india.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951755 | 1,157 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Daphne asked "How Does Your Garden Grow?"
My garden is growing, somethings are doing better than others, but this is nothing unusual.
Today, I did get a lot of planting done. All of my cabbage, the rest of the Swiss chard and my carrots were sown.
The front section was planted today. From left to right, two rows of cabbage interplanted with mixed lettuce, shallots, empty row, Swiss chard and the carrots are seeded to the right of the rose. The spinach patch is the left rear area.
Close up of the cabbage and lettuce seedlings.
The spinach patch.
|Notice that the growth is very uneven, I am attributing this to the use of open pollinated varieties.|
|Close up of 'Scarlet' spinach with it's lighter leaves and bold red stems and veins.|
The rear bed from left to right, spinach patch, an enormous volunteer 'Bronze Beauty' lettuce, mixed Thai greens with snow peas behind, radish and arugula.
|Mixed Thai greens, one week old and already showing an interesting mix of color.|
The last bed is to the back bed. It was planted with peas, but only the row by the fence germinated. The front portion now has lettuce, radish and beets as well as an over wintered parsley.
This is how my Potager grows.
Tomorrow I'll show how the pool bed is progressing. | <urn:uuid:582b8224-39ed-4bac-9b01-b0452ff33a54> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://talesfromthemountainside.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-my-garden-grows.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951313 | 309 | 1.757813 | 2 |
February 21, 2006,
Is the multimillion dollar deal that would hand over operations of six major United States ports to a company from the United Arab Emirates a major misstep from the Bush administration? We asked a few national-security experts. Here's what they had to say.
Alex AlexievWashington claims that the United Arab Emirates is a reliable friend and ally of the United States in the war on terror. To the extent that Dubai Ports World is a UAE state-owned company, this may in fact be the key question to ask. The answer is not hard to find if you start looking at the role played by the UAE as an eager financier of the huge worldwide infrastructure of radical Islam built over the past three decades by Saudi Arabia. An infrastructure that’s the main breeding ground of extremism and terrorism.
From the very beginning in the 1970s, the UAE has been a key source of financial support for Saudi-controlled organizations like the Islamic Solidarity Fund, the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), World Council of Mosques, and the Muslim World League (MWL) as documented in The Muslim World League Journal, an English-language monthly. The IDB alone, for instance, spent $10 billion between 1977 and 1990 for “Islamic activities” and at least $1 billion more recently to support terrorist activities by the Palestinian Al Aqsa and Intifada Funds.
One of the most successful Islamist operations in the U.S. early on involved the Wahhabi ideological takeover of the Nation of Islam after the death of its founder Elijah Muhammad. Of the $4.8 million “presented” to W. D. Muhammad, Elijah’s son and successor, in 1980 alone, one million came from UAE’s president Sheikh Zayad, according to the August 1980 issue of the MWL Journal. Zayad continued his “philanthropic” activities by donating $2.5 million for a Zayad Islamic Center at Harvard University’s divinity school of all places. The donation had to be returned after it became known that a similar Zayad Center in the UAE was closed because it had become a hotbed of Islamic extremism. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. A reliable friend and ally? Perhaps, but hardly one of ours.
Alex Alexiev is vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy.
Peter BrookesThe U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment’s decision to allow the United Arab Emirates’ Dubai Ports World (a government-owned company) to buy Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation (a private company), to run as many as six major American ports, including New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans, is by no means a trivial national-security matter.
While it’s likely that CFIUS made a sound at a minimum, a well-intentioned decision in its behind-closed-doors deliberations, considering 9/11, the al Qaeda threat, not to mention this election year’s charged atmosphere, it makes heckuva lot of sense to shed some light on the decision through congressional hearings.
American ports receive nine million containers annually, and in theory these large metal boxes could be used to bring nukes into the U.S. for use against American cities, surface to air missiles to down civilian airliners, or, even, smuggle terrorists ashore. While advances have been made in port security, some analysts still see shipping as a big fat Achilles’ Heel for homeland security.
Moreover, while the UAE has become a war on terror partner, its history is checkered to say the least. Critics claim that the UAE recognized the Taliban, and al Qaeda used it in 9/11 preparations. Dubai, a Middle Eastern banking “Mecca,” has long been the crossroads of money laundering and terrorist financing. In addition, the UAE has ties to Iran, and Pakistan’s Dr. Strangelove, A. Q. Khan, used the Emirates as a shipping hub for his nuke network.
It’s not clear that there would be any change in management, personnel, or security procedures at the British company currently running the ports if the sale is approved, but after all we’ve been through and don’t want to experience again this is a decision Americans have to feel comfortable with. “Trust us,” just won’t cut it.
James Jay CarafanoForeign companies already own most of the maritime infrastructure that sustains American trade the ships, the containers, the material-handling equipment, and the facilities being sold to the Dubai company. It's a little late now to start worrying about outsourcing seaborne trade, but congressional hearings could serve to clear the air.
Sure security is important. That’s why after 9/11, America led the effort to establish the International Ship and Port Security code that every country that trades with and operates in the United States has to comply with. And compliance isn’t optional—it is checked by the U.S. Coast Guard. And the security screening for the ships, people, and cargo that comes into the United States is not done by the owners of the ships and the ports, but by the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, both parts of the Homeland Security department. Likewise overall security for the port is coordinated by the captain of the port, a Coast Guard officer.
What happens when one foreign-owned company sells a U.S. port service to another foreign-owned company. Not much. Virtually all the company employees at the ports are U.S. citizens. The Dubai firm is a holding company that will likely play no role in managing the U.S. facilities. Likewise, the company is owned by the government, a government that is an ally of the United States and recognizes that al Qaeda is as much a threat to them as it is to us. They are spending billions to buy these facilities because they think it’s a crackerjack investment that will keep making money for them long after the oil runs out. The odds that they have any interest in seeing their facilities become a gateway for terrorist into the United States are slim. But in the interest of national security, we will be best served by getting all the facts on the table.
James Jay Carafano is a senior research fellow for defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.
Michael LedeenThis is the foreign-policy equivalent of the Harriet Meiers nomination to the Supreme Court, isn’t it? Just as her wit and wisdom were beside the point, so Homeland Security’s careful negotiations with the new owners have nothing to do with the main issue, which is that only a tone-deaf bureaucrat would turn over the operation of our ports to a company from Dubai. Not only does it add new security burdens to an agency already overwhelmed by its impossible mission, but it puts one of Iran’s closest partners in a most sensitive position inside the United States. As I’ve had occasion to note over the past few years, Dubai is home to billions of mullahdollars, and the black market through which all manner of illegal arms shipments and money-being-laundered have passed. I’m sure it will have the same outcome as the Meiers fiasco. Faster, please.
James S. RobbinsI have to wonder if the approval of Dubai Ports World is payback for recent support by Dubai and the UAE in the war on terrorism. Some data points:
December 2004: Dubai was the first government in the region to sign on to the U.S. Container Security Initiative to screen all containers heading for the United States for security risks.
May 2005: Dubai signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to bar passage of nuclear material from passing through its ports, and install radiation-detecting equipment.
June 2005: The UAE joined the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.
October 2005: The UAE Central Bank directed banks and financial institutions in the country to tighten their internal systems and controls in their fight against money laundering and terrorist financing. UAE banks routinely cooperate with U.N. and international law-enforcement agencies in supplying information about suspect accounts.
November 2005: In the wake of the terror bombings in Jordan, General Shaykh Muhammad Bin-Zayid Al Nuhayyan, heir apparent of Abu Dhabi and supreme commander of the UAE armed forces, stated that “Muslim scholars who live among us must adopt a stand toward this terrorism… If they do not declare [terrorists] to be infidels, they should at least consider them as non-Muslims. …If there are no honest stands toward these non-religious and inhumane operations, these [attacks] will continue.”
December 2005: The UAE National Consultative Council called for declaration of an all-out war against terrorism and depriving any person who pledges allegiance to foreign extremist groups the right of UAE citizenship. The council proclaimed that it regarded links to such groups as high treason.
The UAE has also assisted the Coalition effort in Iraq, in particular training Iraqi security forces and sending material assistance to the Iraqi people.
There is a lot on the other side of the ledger too particularly a thank you statement from Hamas to the UAE in July 2005 for all the support but given the way relationships work in the Middle East I can see Dubai expecting favorable treatment in return for its recent cooperation in the effort to combat terrorism, and especially for supporting the war effort in Iraq. It is the way of things.
James S. Robbins is author of the forthcoming Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point and an NRO Contributor. | <urn:uuid:1d54a99c-060a-4a0c-a29b-a4ea453abb6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://old.nationalreview.com/symposium/symposium200602211008.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956298 | 2,026 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Did you miss day #1 of GEOINT's "pre-conference" sessions? Perhaps you were just arriving, missed your flight or out on the golf course. Here's a recap of the day's activities (and even more pithy accounts on Twitter):
The sessions focused on several key themes:
- Open source geospatial solutions and open standards
- Gaming and how that impacts the GEOINT Tradecraft
- Tradecraft may be a misnomer; some want to elevate it to "profession" (ala Sue Kalweit of Booz Allen)
- There is a greater need to understand the impacts of "human geography" (culture, ethnicity, shifting populations, etc.) and its contributions to geospatial analysis
Opening session address provided by Ted Cope, NGA's director of Basic and Applied Research. Cope identified many emerging challenges to the applications of geospatial intelligence including:
- A quantum leap in the complexity of issues: there are more people, more mega-cities, more competition
There is a re-emerging geoint value proposition because of the following impacts:
- There are many "bad actors""
- People who are not bad yet
- More failing states/regions
- Several states/regions that have not failed yet
- Know the earth; show the way; understand the world
- ANTICIPATE where something is; why it happens and what may happen.
- Move from being TARGET-BASED to ACTIVITY-BASED analysis
- Change the tradecraft toward using an analyst's peripheral vision to incorporate activity other than purely geospatial information.
Open source panel started by defining what open source is in order to get attendees on the same page. This in itself was telling in that there may be confusion as to the licensing and intellectual property rights of open source. Here is a quick synopsis of thoughts from the panel:
- One case study that was presented started with using GOTS (government off the shelf software) and transitioned the project to GOSS (government open source software) with the final objective of moving to FOSS (free and open source software).
- Lt Col Quaid USAF says gov needs to use "commercial best practices" to build apps and help warfighter get geospatial capabilities "down range" as quickly as possible.
- Ben Tuttle of the NGA is working on mobile apps developed with open source software. One of these apps is called "MapCache" - app built for "offline" data caches. It's built on Android and iOS is coming soon. The app was built within three weeks and developed in partnerhsip with the Discovery Lab.
- Ollie Guinam of Skybox, the micro sat developer, noted that they expect 1 Terabyte of data per day to process with their constellation.
- And speaking of data, Budhendra Bhaduri of Oak Ridge National Labs focused his presentation on data storage. His finding: out of every minute, only 24 seconds is spent on "processing" data; the rest is spent on "moving" data. ORNL is involved in doing work on population density in the world's trouble spots. See more info on population data tables at http://pdt.ornl.doe.sgov.gov.
Human geography and the Arab Spring
- The most compelling issues in these sessions was a focus on understanding the impact of social media on events. Some believe that the source (a tweet, Facebook post, etc.) and the actual event are difficult to disambiguate. Sometimes the source location impacts what is reported and the event location impacts what happens.
- Obviously, counterintelligence and counterinsurgency operations have a difficult time with understanding the context of social media. The challenge, as a few presenters noted, is the ability to "detect and respond at Twitter speed."
Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Fellow, was the luncheon keynoter. To be able to do justice to what Jeff says in a 30-minute span of time would be folly. Jonas is an analytical thinker of the highest order and you simply need to be present to appreciate his insights. So, I'm "punting" on the analysis of Jeff's talk. But in a nutshell, here are the gold nuggets:
- Space and time enables absolute disambiguation
- Jonas' theory of "big data, new physics" results in the fact that "Errors in the data become your friend." "More data yields better predictions, lower false positives and lower false negatives.
- "Where and when are the single most powerful data points for context accumulation"
- More on "big data new physics" - IT'S A MUST READ, PEOPLE. | <urn:uuid:77392504-9af6-47c2-ab78-c24d90837e0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.directionsmag.com/channels/remote-sensing/blogs/geoint-day-1-crib-notes-geoint2012/283630 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937992 | 981 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Leo W. Gerard
By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President
Tragically, the government of Colombia exhibits the behavior of an addict. And, just as regrettably, the United States is co-dependent, so addicted to so called free trade that it plans to award Colombia an agreement based solely on promises.
Addicts always promise. They’ll stop, they pledge. Their co-dependents desperately want to believe, so they cooperate with the addicts’ demands.
Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, has pledged to try to stop the murders to persuade Congress to approve a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Promises, promises.
And the United States has agreed to accept those promises rather than demand performance before signing an FTA. American’s Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations crave another FTA so badly they will believe anything.
When the Colombia FTA was first proposed, Congress refused to approve it because so many trade unionists are assassinated each year by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces that the murders exceed the number of unionists killed in all other countries of the world combined. In 2007, the year that former President George W. Bush completed the agreement, 39 Colombian unionists were slain.
The Colombian government knew why Congress denied approval. It could have responded four years ago by protecting trade unionists and preserving their lives. It did not.
Instead, the murders increased. In 2008, 52 Colombian trade unionists were assassinated, one a week. In 2009, the number declined by 5 to 47, but it was back up to 52 last year. Six have been slain so far this year, including Hector Orozco and Gilardo Garcia, members of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, who were threatened by the Colombian military just before they were assassinated. Promises, promises.
In response to the concerns expressed by Congress about the murders, the newly-proposed FTA requires Bogota to improve safeguards for workers by April 22, and to develop a plan by May 20 to enhance the capacity of regional judicial offices because the murders of trade unionists go unpunished by the Colombian government – giving the killers an impunity rate of approximately 95 percent. And by mid-June, the Colombian government promises to increase penalties for threatening workers.
The government of Colombia could have completed all of those steps four years ago. It didn’t bother.
To this point, Congress has taken the moral high ground by refusing to approve the trade deal. It said, basically, as long as Colombia continued to countenance the slaughter of its community and labor leaders, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, America would not give it special treatment for trade purposes.
In addition, Congress recognized the FTA’s potential to devastate Colombian farmers. The FTA would speed forced displacement of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people by encouraging increased exploitation of their land by business interests, such as palm oil companies, half of which are owned by paramilitary groups. Expelling these farmers from their land would further swell Colombia’s internally-displaced population – the largest in the world at 4.3 million.
Making matters worse for Colombian farmers, the main U.S. beneficiaries of the FTA would be big agricultural companies which would be permitted to dump cheap, subsidized food stuffs into Colombia duty-free. This would result in farmers’ impoverishment and land loss because small growers would not be able to compete with the low-cost American produce. In Haiti and Mexico, domestic food production was wiped out by similar free trade agreements. It’s likely that Colombia would follow the path of Mexico, where, as the ability to grow legitimate crops became economically impossible, farmers turned more and more to producing illicit drugs. Colombia already produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s cocaine.
Business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, protested the refusal by Congress to approve the FTA, contending that increasing American exports and jobs was more important than protecting Colombian lives and human rights.
The Chamber’s position is not only depraved, it’s based on flawed calculations of exports and jobs. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and granting China entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Colombia FTA will cost America jobs and exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit.
Previous projections by the Chamber and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that NAFTA and China’s WTO membership would improve the U.S. economy proved catastrophically off base.
When the U.S. signed NAFTA in 1993, it had a $1.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. After the agreement, that surplus quickly morphed into a deficit, which ballooned to $64.7 billion in 2008. These annual deficits cost the U.S. 560,000 jobs between 1993 and 2004.
Similarly, the ITC predicted that the tariff reductions China offered when it entered the WTO would result in a trade deficit of $1 billion a year. Instead, between the years of 2001 and 2008, the actual result was deficits of $185 billion, and the loss or displacement of 2.3 million American jobs.
The U.S. already runs a trade deficit with Colombia. It was $1.86 billion in 2009. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the proposed FTA with Colombia would nearly double that trade deficit by 2015, which would cost the United States another 55,000 jobs.
Frankly, the EPI calculation, which factors in effects on trade like currency manipulation, is far more credible than the ITC and Chamber reports, which ignore these issues.
Bogota wants the FTA because it believes the deal will be good for Colombian business interests. One immediate bonus, for example, is that the FTA would eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of Colombia’s exports to the U.S.
To get what it wants, the Colombian government is willing to say anything. Just like an addict. Promises, promises. The Colombian government’s past performance shows its pledges to protect workers from assassination are empty.
America must reject the role of co-dependent. It must demand the proof of performance before rewarding the government of Colombia with an FTA.
Without proof of performance, the government of Colombia will get away with murder. It will export more of its goods – crude oil, coffee, fruit and flowers — to the U.S. And unwitting Americans will buy more blood red Colombian roses.
Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. | <urn:uuid:a86ade4c-bdbe-4ad9-8434-7a2a7716b697> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.usw.org/tag/colombia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958685 | 1,458 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Begun in 1962, the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) is a professional member service organization for the children’s museum field. ACM is the only organization representing museums and professionals dedicated to early childhood play, the starting point in the continuum of lifelong learning.
ACM strengthens children’s museums to be essential community assets by: establishing standards for professional practice; convening InterActivity conferences; collecting research and best practices; and initiating national and international partnerships with opportunities for local collaboration. ACM leadership initiatives include Good to Grow!, Diversity in Action and Playing for Keeps.
ACM partners with a variety of campaigns and organizations including Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens, American Academy of Pediatrics, World Wildlife Federation, Nickelodeon, Parents Choice Foundation, National Association of the Education of Young Children, Association of Science-Technology Centers and American Alliance of Museums.
Advocating that children’s museums — which annually serve more than 31 million visitors — are a major force in the informal learning community is a priority for ACM and its members. The Association promotes the impact children’s museums have in preparing children for school, building 21st century skills and nurturing a love for lifelong learning. | <urn:uuid:c1824b01-6613-4d0d-a06e-8a12e4609b9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.childrensmuseums.org/index.php/about-acm.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923211 | 254 | 2.34375 | 2 |
When Long John Wentworth was elected mayor in the spring of 1857, he pledged to clean up the city. Today that would mean an attack on political corruption. In Long John’s time, he meant a literal clean up: Chicago looked like a junkyard.
The Chicago Transit Authority is planning to install hundreds of electronic bus trackers at high-traffic stops throughout the city.The $3.7 million project will equip 400 bus shelters with LED screens to inform riders when the next bus is scheduled to appear.
This week, Rahm Emanuel marks his 100th day as Chicago's mayor. This is an artificial milestone - we know - but one Emanuel himself set before taking office, when he laid out some early goals.Among the promises: making city hall more transparent than in the past. | <urn:uuid:df350f44-083b-4da7-8ff5-dac028d0afbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbez.org/tags/chicago-mayor | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952345 | 165 | 2.25 | 2 |
If we had to list the priorities of this blog, I don’t know if we could do it. There’s of course the federal minimum wage issue (which we have a lot to talk about tomorrow), there are all of the state minimum wage issues, not to mention family and medical leave issues, health care issues, worker safety issues and safety poster requirements—and we haven’t even listed workers’ comp yet. So no, all of these topics are just as important as the next. It’s like trying to pick a favorite child out of your sons and daughters.
It just so happens, though, that the next topic is near and dear to my heart—health care benefits—but don’t be getting any ideas that I like talking about it more than the federal minimum wage or the FMLA federal labor law poster. It just happens to be next on my list of things to talk about.
Now that I have that all cleared up, let’s get into the nitty gritty of it—the state of Illinois’ legislature just passed a bill that would make dramatic and important changes to the way that health care benefits are done in the state. If this law gets signed by the governor of Illinois, it would prevent health care insurance companies from rejecting claims made by people who got hurt while they were drunk or high on drugs.
The law was already passed by both the House and the Senate in the state, so it is a matter of time before it hits the governor’s desk. It would be interesting to see just what sort of effect this law would have on the health care insurance premiums of employers in Illinois. I would suspect it would not make them any cheaper. At the moment, Oregon just passed a similar law earlier in the month, and Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware, and Indiana have similar laws.
A bill putting mental health insurance coverage on a par with surgery and other medical procedures has just been extended to the end of 2007.
The ruling by an agency that monitors compliance with health insurance and pension laws applies to 150 million workers nationwide, and has a dramatic influence on Illinois employee benefit plans.
The law is the Mental Health Parity Act, or MHPA, passed originally in 1996, and was just extended through a ruling by the U.S. Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). Benefits under the bill are now valid at least through December 31, 2007.
Mental health treatment includes the following:
Visits to a psychologist, licensed therapist, or psychiatrist.
Stays in rehabilitation facilities for drug or alcohol dependencies.
Stays in mental hospitals or the mental health sections of hospitals for such ailments as schizophrenia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The law does not mandate that all health insurance plans include treatment for mental health. What it requires is that, if an existing health plan already includes mental health benefits, those benefits cannot have a lower limit on payments than those for medical and surgical treatment.
Annual caps on benefit amounts must be equal. In other words, mental health coverage must be the same as the limits – whether lifetime or annual – of other treatments. The coverage may not put a lower lid on mental health coverage. For example, before the advent of the law, a plan could clamp a lifetime benefit limit of a quarter of a million dollars for medical/surgical treatment, but just $15,000 for mental health care. Under the MHPA, however, any plan putting a $250,000 lid on medical care must put the same among on mental health treatment.
The ruling by EBSA was released without attention. In essence, it continues the MHPA through the end of 2007. The MHPA has been amended five times to extend its original “sunset clause” expiration date beyond September 31, 2001. | <urn:uuid:fa09f485-5974-457c-bbcc-3a5f7d5cbe1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.laborlawcenter.com/category/employee-benefits/illinois-3/insurance-benefits-14/medical-27/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964442 | 783 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The recent mosquito specimens collected in Cheltenham and initially identified as being the Asian Tiger Mosquito ( Aedes albopictus), do not belong to that species of mosquito.
The mosquitoes are, in fact, Culiseta annulata.
Culiseta annulata is a widespread and common mosquito of the British Isles, and is also one of the most common mosquitoes in Ireland. This mosquito breeds in a wide variety of different sites in natural and artificial waters. These can be in sunlit areas or deeply shaded. The water in which the eggs, larvae and pupae are to be found can be fresh or brackish, clean or polluted and may include ponds, ditches, marshes, garden water butts and cisterns.
The adult female Culiseta annulata feed both indoors and outdoors on a wide variety of vertebrate hosts including humans.
Unlike most British mosquitoes, the aquatic stages, the males and the females are present throughout the year. All stages are able to over winter. When there are reports of mosquito biting in late autumn or early spring they can almost always be attributed to Culiseta annulata.
The reason why many people confuse this mosquito for the Asian Tiger Mosquito is probably because of the very distinctive and boldly striped legs. The legs of both species have rings of white scales which give this banded appearance.
The mosquitoes are, however, very different when examined closely.
The following approximate figures show that Culiseta is a much larger mosquito, with longer body length, greater wingspan and longer legs. (Adult size varies in mosquitoes, as in many insects, but the differences here are so great that it is worth highlighting them)
|Mosquito species, and feature||Size|
|Body length, not including the mouthparts||6 - 7 mm|
|Leg length||13 - 14 mm|
|Wing span||13 - 15 mm|
|Aedes albopictus (the Asian Tiger Mosquito)|
|Body length, not including the mouthparts||4 - 5 mm|
|Leg length||7 - 8 mm|
|Wing span||approx 7 - 8 mm|
This page provided by Killgerm Group, on behalf of the Mosquito Watch programme
Last reviewed: 5 April 2012 | <urn:uuid:369075c5-66d1-444e-87b4-6fd856b85437> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/Mosquitoes/GeneralInformation/mosqMosquitoesfromCheltenham/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938363 | 481 | 3.65625 | 4 |
The Cheesecake Factory
||This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.
|Traded as||NASDAQ: CAKE|
|Headquarters||Calabasas Hills, California, United States|
|Number of locations||151 restaurants|
|Key people||David Overton
(Chairman and CEO)
|Products||Types of Cheesecakes (White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, Pumpkin, Coconut Chocolate Cream), Burgers, Pizza, Pasta, Steaks, Sandwiches.|
|Revenue||US $1.757 billion (2011)|
|Operating income||US $133 million (2011)|
|Net income||US $95.7 million (2011)|
The Cheesecake Factory, Inc. a distributor of cheesecake in the United States. It is also a restaurant company. The company operates 165 full-service dining restaurants: 151 under The Cheesecake Factory marque, 13 under the Grand Lux Cafe marque and one under the RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen marque. The Cheesecake Factory also operates two bakery production facilities—one in Calabasas, California and the other in Rocky Mount, North Carolina—and licenses two bakery-based menus for other food service operators under The Cheesecake Factory Bakery Cafe marque. The company used to operate one self-service, limited-menu express food service operation under The Cheesecake Factory marque inside the DisneyQuest family entertainment center in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Its cheesecakes and other baked goods can also be found in the cafes of many Barnes & Noble book stores.
David M. Overton, the company's founder, opened the first Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, in 1978. The restaurant established the future chain's pattern of offering an eclectic menu, big portions, and signature cheesecakes.
History of The Cheesecake Factory
The Cheesecake Factory was founded by Oscar and Evelyn Overton. Evelyn first decided to open a business after making a cheesecake for her husband's employer in 1949. Evelyn opened a small cheesecake shop in Detroit, Michigan, in the late 1950s, but later gave it up in order to raise her two children. She continued to supply cakes to several local restaurants, however, through a kitchen in her basement. In 1972 Oscar and Evelyn Overton moved to the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles where they opened a wholesale bakery in which they produced cheesecakes and other desserts for local restaurants.
In 1983 the Overtons opened a second restaurant in Marina del Rey. By 1987 the Beverly Hills location had expanded into a 78-seat restaurant and was experiencing great financial success. This led to the opening of a third, larger location in Redondo Beach, which was eventually renovated into a 300-seat, 21,000 square foot location. By the end of the 1980s, The Cheesecake Factory’s one-page menu had expanded and the restaurant offered additional fast-food and short-order items.
Expansion beyond Southern California
The 1990s saw the opening of the first Cheesecake Factory restaurant outside of Southern California. The new restaurant was located in Washington, D.C. The Cheesecake Factory was incorporated in 1992 and went public September 1993. David Overton planned to open 3-4 units a year in the hopes of generating 25% a year increase in sales.
The company began changing the menu twice a year and added further items including steaks and seafood as well as vegetarian dishes. The company continued to open new restaurants, and by 1995, the chain was ranked 11th in the United States.[clarification needed] As of April, 2013, The Cheesecake Factory corporation operates 162 restaurants under The Cheesecake Factory name in 36 states.
On January 25, 2011, the company expanded into the Middle East in a partnership with Kuwaiti retail franchising company M.H. Alshaya Co.. The 300-seat restaurant opened on August 16, 2012, at the Dubai Mall. This is the first location for The Cheesecake Factory outside of the United States. As of March 4, 2013, the Cheesecake Factory Inc. has four restaurants operating in the Middle East, one being located at the Dubai Mall and another at the Mall of the Emirates (both in the UAE), the third in The Avenues Mall, Kuwait, and the fourth in Beirut.
The Cheesecake Factory Bakery Cafe operates two bakery production facilities, and licenses two bakery-based menus to other food service operators. This division operates in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Grand Lux Cafe David Overton designed the Grand Lux Cafe, a restaurant for The Venetian hotel-casino in Las Vegas. The restaurant is modeled after Italian, French, and Austrian styles. The Cafe offers, in addition to American and European-style food, Thai, Malaysian, Caribbean cuisine, and others. The Cheesecake Factory operates thirteen Grand Lux Cafe restaurants.
RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen is a contemporary Asian-fusion restaurant which opened on June 19, 2008, at Century City in Los Angeles. David Overton excluded Chinese and Japanese cuisines from the menu, as these are served at the Grand Lux and Cheesecake Factory restaurants.
The Cheesecake Factory has been criticized for their heavy promotion of large servings of high calorie and high fat foods, and a corresponding lack of healthy menu options. For these reasons, the chain was dubbed the "worst family restaurant in America" for 2010 by Men's Health magazine. The average sandwich at the restaurant contains 1,400 calories.
In 2013, the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that The Cheesecake Factory's "Bistro Shrimp Pasta" dish had more calories than any other entrée from a national chain restaurant at 3,120 calories, with 89 grams of saturated fat. The United States Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion states in its dietary guidelines that a typical adult should consume about 2,000 calories and no more than 20 grams of saturated fat per day. The 2013 report also noted that The Cheesecake Factory's "Crispy Chicken Costoletta" has more calories (2,610) than a 12-piece bucket of fried chicken from KFC.
In popular culture
A fictional version of The Cheesecake Factory is used as a setting in the U.S. sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The show's portrayal of the restaurant, however, is not visually accurate to the real Cheesecake Factory. According to the company, it "does not have any sort of arrangements with the show. The Cheesecake Factory is really pleased to be featured in such a funny and wildly popular show".
- "The Cheesecake Factory Reports Results for Fourth Quarter of Fiscal 2006" (Press release). Cheesecake Factory. 2012-02-06. Retrieved 2012-05-29.
- ""What Is The Cheesecake Factory?" About Page on the company's website". Cheesecakefactory.com. Retrieved 2010-04-17.
- "History of The Cheesecake Factory". Funding Universe. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
- Kowitt, Beth (February 25, 2013). "The Mystery Company Importing Americana to the Mideast". Fortune 167 (3): 90–96.
- Zinczenko, David (2010-11-19). "America's Best—and Worst!—Family Restaurants". Health.yahoo.net. Retrieved 2011-06-25.
- By HealthiNation (2010-12-10). "Worst Foods in America, 2010". Health.yahoo.net. Retrieved 2011-06-25.
- Xtreme Eating 2013: Extremism Running Amok at America's Restaurant Chains, Center for Science in the Public Interest, January 16, 2013, accessed January 18, 2013.
- Owen, Rob (2012-01-13). "TV Q&A: ABC News, 'Storage Wars' and 'The Big Bang Theory.'". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved August 6, 2012. | <urn:uuid:d3b6a88c-7015-4a79-867f-fb5541727574> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesecake_Factory | 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 | 0.906849 | 1,684 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Surgery for Sarcoma
The usual treatment for a sarcoma is a wide surgical excision.
If the lump is small, this can be performed through a simple incision.
Larger lumps may need a long incision.
Depending on the size and position of the lump, sometimes it's necessary to move blocks of the patient's own tissue around to the fill in defects. These are called flaps.
Hospital stay varies from day case to up to a week depending on the complexity of the surgery
Further details of the surgical procedures will be explained in detail by the surgeons.
- About soft tissue sarcoma surgery
Depending on the excision margin it may be necessary to treat the operative field with a course of postoperative radiotherapy.
This will be planned and performed by the oncology team.
Sometimes the lump is so large that preoperative radiotherapy is prescribed to try and shrink down the tumour before surgery.
Depending upon the prescription, radiotherapy may consist of treatments on five days a week for 6-8 weeks.
- About soft tissue sarcoma radiotherapy
A course of adjuvant chemotherapy may be prescribed for high-grade sarcomas. this is administered following healing of the wounds but on occasions may be given before surgery, (neo-adjuvant therapy).
Different chemotherapy agents are used depending upon the cell type. Each has a different effect and these will be discussed in detail by the oncologist.
- About soft tissue sarcoma chemotherapy | <urn:uuid:da098f75-c8ef-4b02-a9f8-64a68c8fd82f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.plymouthhospitals.nhs.uk/ourservices/cancerservices/sarcoma/Pages/sarcoma_treatment.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908938 | 314 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Last year’s presidential election brought heated debate about American exceptionalism. Republicans charged President Obama with failing to grasp it. But the meaning of American exceptionalism varies. Does it mean that the United States is inherently virtuous? Or that U.S. virtue depends on the survival of particular policies? Aren’t arguments about our exceptionalism really arguments about what approach we should take to foreign policy? Many early American leaders argued that policies that embroiled the nation in foreign conflicts would encourage the centralization of power at home and the maintenance of a large military establishment—and imperil the limited constitutional government that made the United States exceptional. Today, the loudest exponents of exceptionalism believe the opposite: that liberalism abroad depends on the success of U.S. military exertions.
Richard Gamble’s book, In Search of the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth, helps make sense of exceptionalism’s evolution. Gamble traces the “city on a hill” metaphor, from Puritan leader John Winthrop, who took it from the gospels, to its reincarnation in the 20th century as an explicitly political idea at the heart of foreign policy debates.
Historians Walter McDougall, the author of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, and Derek Leebaert, the author of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, will provide commentary. | <urn:uuid:ec15d0da-210a-413f-94b5-a428e92bc14c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cato.org/events/search-city-hill-making-unmaking-american-myth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92287 | 304 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Contact: David W. Booth / Cora Vasseur, NIU School of Theatre and Dance
April 16, 2007
DeKalb — Choreographer and dancer Martha Graham said in her 1992 autobiography, “Bloody Memory,” that “Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.” Dancers from NIU’s School of Theatre and Dance use the language of ballet in order to tell the story of Giselle from April 26 through April 29 in the Stevens Building O’Connell Theatre on the DeKalb campus.
Giselle is a young peasant girl who falls in love with Loys. Unbeknownst to her, Loys is actually Prince Albrecht in disguise, who is betrothed to another woman. Hilarion, who loves Giselle, discovers Loys’ true identity and tells Giselle. Distraught and her heart broken by the news, Giselle is killed when she falls on Albrecht’s sword.
When the Wilis, ghosts of young women who were betrayed by love, attempt to lure Albrecht deep into the forest to atone for his betrayal, Giselle emerges from the grave to save Prince Albrecht from a dance to the death.
“Giselle has a very recognizable storyline, which isn’t always apparent in ballets,” says dance senior Genna Sears, who performs as Giselle’s friend and in the Corps de Wilis. “Ordinary people can catch on to what is going on instead of just the dancers knowing and the audience guessing.”
One of the reasons that the unspoken language of this romantic ballet succeeds is that the dancers call upon their acting skills to make their characters more complete. While mastering the ballet’s challenging choreography, all dancers, from Giselle to the villagers, were required by director and coordinator of the comprehensive dance program at the school, Randall Newsom, to have a developed character and a “back story” that is demonstrated in their personalized movements and reactions to what is happening on stage.
“I know that the miming section is very difficult for everyone,” says junior dance major Joseph Schuman, who plays Hilarion. “[Newsom] was very specific about what he wanted us to do, but he left a lot of the work up to us to decide how we wanted to do it.”
Acting provides a personal challenge for junior dance performance major James Stevko, who plays Albrecht. “I’ve only been dancing for two years, I’ve never been given the chance to dance a dramatic role … the part of Albrecht relies very much on acting, in both acts.”
Stevko said the biggest challenge he still must face is the demanding choreography, ranging from quick pointe work (dancing on tiptoe) to performing moves that are simply not done in ballet any more. He says one dance move he must perform nearly kills him.
“In the second act, the Wilis force Albrecht to dance to the death, so as you can imagine, I do an awful lot of dancing.” The dance is not easy; Stevko executes 32 “entrechat sixes,” a technique where he jumps up in the air and beats his legs three times before landing.
“Nobody does them anymore, because they are so hard,” he says.
Giselle runs Thursday, April 26, through Sunday, April 29, in O’Connell Theatre, in the Stevens Building. There is no children’s matinee for this production and children younger than 5 will not be allowed in the theatre. Show times are 7:30 p.m. weekdays and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $14 for adults, $8 for seniors and $7 for students. For more information and reservations, call the Stevens Building box office at (815) 753-1600.
# # # | <urn:uuid:ea384bb6-24ee-49f5-8a14-ab6795867361> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://niu.edu/PubAffairs/RELEASES/2007/april/giselle.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952229 | 851 | 1.890625 | 2 |
First we had Horsegate.
Now we’ve got a survey suggesting that mothers don’t cook from scratch any more.
You’ve got to wonder why the food industry is wasting its best opportunity for decades to change consumer behaviour – and I’ve got to ask: Where are the marketers in all of this?
Let me being with one very basic, and slightly sideline, point.
Today is International Women’s Day. I find it depressingly interesting that the survey into British cooking habits conducted by Change4Life and reported in the Telegraph (plus other outlets) looks at mother’s cooking habits.
I thought that we’d maybe moved on as a nation to a point where men not only knew what a saucepan was, but how to use it as well.
Are we thus to assume from this report that a mother’s place is in the home, wedded to the stove? Are we still in the 1950s?
I leave you to draw your own conclusions. On with the main show.
The food industry is facing unparalleled turmoil.
Horsegate (which I covered here) has left many people unnerved by the prospect that their food not only contains something that they wouldn’t choose to eat, but by the fact that they can’t trust the packing promise any more either.
In fact, the whole food contamination issue has seen consumers changing their habits and heading to the vegetarian alternative aisle.
This means one thing. And I’m going to use a bloody great big font to underline the point.
Consumers are open to changing their behaviour
Marketing is all about creating behavioural change.
I talk about behavioural change a lot on this blog. Check out this post about why moving my kitchen bin reveals a deeply hidden marketing truth.
Here’s another post about marketing as behavioural change in the trust economy.
I shall stop being so self-referential. You get my point.
Marketers work hard to create the conditions for behavioural change, for overcoming barriers, to changing patterns of thought and action.
It’s what we do.
With the Horsegate scandal, consumers are changing their behaviour – with no prompting from us.
All of the normal barriers we’re faced with, habit, perception etc, are being washed away in a flood of damaging, negative press.
So why is no-one capitalising on this?
If the consumer cognitive momentum is already moving in favour of alternative food stuffs and alternative sources of that food, why is there no work nudging them in the direction that they’re already moving?
It is easier to push a car that’s already moving than try to deflect one that’s rolling towards you. Trust me, I’ve tried.
Now we’re told that children are being fed prepackaged, processed, food because mothers lack confidence and time.
To brands, this should send a clear signal.
Forget acting as the purveyor of food stuffs.
Start acting as the enabler of great food.
Teach, if that’s what it takes.
Combat perceptions, show alternatives. Push knowledge, content, engagement.
Understand the mindset of the customer, understand why they don’t feel confident or enabled, then take steps to remedy that.
Which brings me to my last point:
Where are the marketers?
As much as marketing’s all about data, creative, audience insight and cool stuff, it’s also about getting out of the ivory tower, taking a gut-feel pulse of what’s going on around the brand and then acting on that.
Marketers should be taking the understandings of horsegate, low confidence and high time pressures and devising flexible, agile solutions that cut right to the heart of consumer behaviour.
But, you know what? I don’t see any of this happening.
All I see as a shopper is the same old same. Hawking of product. BOGOF. Nothing inspirational.
Why are marketers not giving their brands the greatest service possible and positioning them to make a real difference to the lives of their consumers?
If you can answer that, let me know. Because I can’t.
All I smell is conservative fear – which I can’t understand.
An opportunity like this won’t come again.
Three things the UK food industry needs to do today:
1) Grow some balls and push back against Horsegate with finely honed, customer focussed creative which positions new opportunities and capitalises on the behaviour change that’s already happening.
2) Act now to become an enabler brand, helping your customers (be they mothers, fathers, care-givers or just harassed DINKYs) to eat cheaply and well.
3) If you don’t know how to do the above, get in contact with me. Because I have the ideas and I’ll be happy to consult for you.
So there we have it.
The UK is primed for a food revolution, and savvy marketers should be leading the way.
But the opportunity is being wasted.
And anyone who cares about what they eat, and cares as deeply as I do about the marketing industry, should be up in arms about it.
Neil Hopkins is a Marketing and Branding Theorist at heart, and a Marketing Communications Manager by day. His blog – interacter – is the primary location he shares insight and information relating to marketing, branding and advertising strategy.
You can follow Neil on Twitter, circle him (like an escaped bull) on Google+ or track him down in any number of other ways.
Feature image from RoadsidePictures on Flickr. | <urn:uuid:466e6225-fac7-4272-a6d8-422c9e1e0338> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://interacter.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/food-industry-marketing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93962 | 1,208 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Cooking With Your Kids
Cooking with your children is a great way to involve them in the process of decision-making and taking responsibility for themselves. Cooking also helps them develop a sense of accomplishment, practice language and math skills and gives them an opportunity to share their creations with others. As a bonus, children are more likely to eat foods they've prepared themselves, and they will be more willing to make their own snacks, meals and bag lunches when they have the skills to be successful at it.
- Plan Ahead – Choose a time when you will be relaxed and not distracted by other interruptions. Easier said than done, I know. Beginning cooks need lots of patience and time to learn by doing things for themselves. A relaxed pace will help you resist grabbing the utensils to do it yourself.
- Supervise – Have an adult nearby to help with sharp utensils, electric appliances and the stove.
- Prepare – Wear an apron or old clothes. Tie back long hair, roll up long sleeves and remove jewelry.
- Organize – Read the entire recipe and gather ingredients and utensils before you begin. If you put each ingredient away as you use it, it will be easy to tell what you have already put in if you get interrupted in the middle of the recipe.
- Safety First – Turn pot handles inward away from other burners so they don't overheat or get knocked off the stove. Never reach across burners or pots that are hot. Use potholders or oven mitts for handling hot utensils. Never use wet cloths, as steam will form and burn you. Be careful with electric cords. Use dry hands to unplug them and make sure they aren't lying across a stove burner or dangling onto the floor. Have a tray or rack handy to set items on for cooling. Double check that you have turned all appliances off when finished cooking.
With a little help and a lot of encouragement, your children will become confident cooks with the ability to prepare meals and make bag lunches on their own. Get cooking and have fun with your kids. | <urn:uuid:95b0c46d-98a1-4455-a6a1-8c06f1d91a42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://family.go.com/parenting/pkg-teen/article-772554-cooking-with-your-kids-t/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956524 | 434 | 3.296875 | 3 |
Deciding whether now is the time to operate on a descending aortic aneurysm depends on a number of factors, including the size and growth rate of the diseased area.
Aneurysms and Aorta Disease
Stay informed about heart, vascular and thoracic topics in this continuation of The Beating Edge blog from our Heart & Vascular Institute, which is ranked No. 1 in heart care in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.
It’s time to operate on an ascending aortic aneurysm when the risk of the aneurysm causing a life-threatening complication is greater than the risk of having surgery. Eric Roselli, MD, draws out the options.
Aortic aneurysm can be safely and effectively treated using either open surgery or minimally invasive techniques. The approach depends on where the disease is located in the blood vessel.
A tear in the aorta can be life threatening depending on its location. Eric Roselli, MD, tells us about type A and B dissection and how they are treated.
When is it time to operate on an aortic aneurysm? That depends on its location and type. Eric Roselli, MD, discusses types of aortic aneurysm.
For the body’s largest blood vessel, the aorta, understanding its various sections is important because treatment methods depend on the location of an aortic aneurysm.
Boston Celtics players Chris Wilcox and Jeff Green both suffered from aortic aneurysms. Cardiac surgeon Lars Svensson, MD, PhD, explains the life-saving procedure that got them back in the game.
Renal artery aneurysms can pose a real risk if they’re large enough to rupture. Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Daniel Clair explains how they’re diagnosed and treated.
Aortic aneurysms often go undetected. Basketball player Jeff Green’s early diagnosis led to a successful surgery at Cleveland Clinic.
We're counting down the top 10 medical innovations for 2013, picked by our doctors and researchers. Up next: Doctors have a new way to treat even the most complicated aortic aneurysms. | <urn:uuid:42d68dcb-f1ab-4c43-86f8-51a7e2b5afe9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://health.clevelandclinic.org/topics/heart-vascular-health/aneurysms-and-aorta-disease/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922252 | 471 | 2.375 | 2 |
Our electricity was out and I burned candles on the mantle and they left black spots in two places. How do I clean it off? Mr. Clean eraser didn't do it.
Any candle or fire soot will have "greasy carbon residue" in it. (Unless you possibly burnt the wood itself with the flame?)
Something that will break down the oils/grease would be my suggestion. I would first try something mild/inert like a bit of Dawn dish soap in hot water. Dip a clean cloth in to see if this can clean the area.
Some have cleaned fireplace surfaces using Scrubbing Bubbles bath cleaner (fairly safe for painted surfaces). I would also use this on a cloth to try and lift the soil.
TSP powder cleaner dissolved in water would be a next step up, and rinse with clear water rag after.
I use an oily cleaning product for soot residue. Something like Goo Gone, Lestoil, or even Dawn. Whichever you choose, use it full-strength (undiluted with water) on a soft rag or piece of cotton. Wipe, re-folding the cloth or cotton frequently as it lifts off the soot. Finally, wipe off any cleaner residue with a clean, soft cloth dampened with soapy water, if needed.
Thanks guys, I have several of those things. I'll try them tomorrow.
Let us know how that works...I will have a white wood mantle in new house and I'm sure I'll 'do something' to it!!!!!!!! I'm my own worst enemy
so far no luck
Curious: could you tell us how the soot got on the white mantle? Normally smoke goes up, and dissipates, does not fall down around the candle holder. Or am I seeing this wrong?
If there was a cleanable residue, you may perhaps have sanded it down into the surface with the Mr Clean eraser? In that case a stain blocking primer and repaint may be necessary. I'd make sure to get a great washable paint to recoat with. (And perhaps some battery/electric candles)
Instead of using the candles I normally burn when the power goes off, I used the tall Christmas ones. There's a top to the mantle over the mirror that sticks out a little. All I would have had to do was pull the back two out a little. I'm really ticked at myself.
You know, I almost ordered some of those candles before Christmas just for that very use.This message has been edited. Last edited by: Sis2,
So perhaps what you have is a scorch mark from both heat and candle/wax wick soot?
I would just sand it down and prime/repaint.
btw: I think the battery candles are great for many places. The timer and remote operated ones are especially nice, and the batteries seem to last for months at a time.
Got a set of 4 at BB&Beyond that have 4 hour timers and once turned on, can come on same time each day. DS got me three that have a 4 or 8 hour timer and multicolors to choose on a remote. Very cool.
|Powered by Social Strata| | <urn:uuid:fdc0f57b-565a-46d0-8606-01bc83c31195> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boards.hgtv.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/4284011632/m/1483982667?r=7253973667 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965754 | 670 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Security concerns, policy changes put heat on database administrators.
As if the role of database administrators in the IT universe was not important enough, many DBAs say growing concerns about database security have increased their workload and blurred their responsibilities with respect to application development.
The transition has occurred over the last year in a series of damaging security vulnerabilities in major DBMSes from Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and IBM. The high-profile Slammer worm, which hit in late January of last year, temporarily crippled the Internet and blew through unprotected servers running Microsofts SQL Server.
As a result of Slammer and vulnerabilities exposed in other databases, new mandatory security policies and best practices rippled across traditional boundaries in corporate IT departments. These have profoundly affected application development, the IT production environment and source code migration, resulting in heavier workloads for many DBAs.
"Before [Slammer], my focus of being a DBA was concentrating on making sure data was available in the enterprise," said Don Watters, datagroup manager at PhotoWorks Inc. "[But now its] not just machines giving data to the enterprise, its also our development environment, our test environment, our staging environmentbasically anywhere SQL exists."
Seattle-based PhotoWorks runs a SQL Server shop along with Unix-based Pick applications on the UniVerse database in the back office. Slammers impact did not surface until about three months after its debutand once it had already wreaked havoc on the online imaging providers development environment.
Although Watters had patched his SQL Server instances against Slammer, several instances of Microsofts SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, known as MSDE, were left unpatched. MSDE is often embedded within applications where it might not be administered by a DBA. Because of Slammer, PhotoWorks overhauled how it deals with its development environment by changing how it issues software patches and policies, Watters said.
SQL Server was not the only DBMS that had vulnerabilities exposed. IBM, Oracle and Sybase Inc. all reported vulnerabilities and patches to their respective DBMSes in the second half of last year. In September, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., plugged a buffer overflow security hole in two areas of its Version 7.2 of DB2 for Linux that could allow attackers to execute malicious code using an administrators root-level permissions. Separately, Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., in November acknowledged a vulnerability based on OpenSSL that affected versions 8i and 9i of its namesake database, as well as Oracle Application Server.
For its part, Sybase, based in Dublin, Calif., last month corrected more than 50 vulnerabilities in its mobile database, SQL Anywhere. According to NGSSoftware Ltd., the security company that discovered the Sybase exposures, SQL Anywhere was vulnerable to distributed-denial-of-service attacks and buffer overruns.
Next page: Tensions growing between DBAs, app developers?
Brian Fonseca is a senior writer at eWEEK who covers database, data management and storage management software, as well as storage hardware. He works out of eWEEK's Woburn, Mass., office. Prior to joining eWEEK, Brian spent four years at InfoWorld as the publication's security reporter. He also covered services, and systems management. Before becoming an IT journalist, Brian worked as a beat reporter for The Herald News in Fall River, Mass., and cut his teeth in the news business as a sports and news producer for Channel 12-WPRI/Fox 64-WNAC in Providence, RI. Brian holds a B.A. in Communications from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. | <urn:uuid:3efc31ce-855a-42b5-94a1-ce942fa8186f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/DBA-Boundaries-Blurring/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955435 | 752 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Matt Drudge featured a report on his website under the headline, "Gore Hearing On Warming May Be Put On Ice," stating that "Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming. But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings." However, climate scientists -- including at least one who has disputed aspects of the scientific consensus on global warming -- completely reject the notion that short-term changes in weather, let alone an individual winter storm in January, bear any relevance to the global warming debate.
On January 26, under the headline, "Gore Hearing On Warming May Be Put On Ice," Internet gossip Matt Drudge featured a "[d]eveloping" report, stating that "Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning [January 28] to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming. But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings." Drudge's report quoted from an email it said it received from an anonymous "Republican lawmaker," which stated: "I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside." One version of Drudge's report also linked to a live weather forecast for Washington, D.C. However, as The New York Times reported on March 2, 2008, climate scientists -- including at least one who has disputed aspects of the scientific consensus on global warming -- completely reject the notion that short-term changes in weather, let alone an individual winter storm in January, bear any relevance to the global warming debate.
As Media Matters for America has previously noted, despite overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming and warnings by experts that short-term weather conditions are not evidence for or against its existence, the Drudge Report, as well as media outlets, have previously suggested that winter storms are evidence against the existence of global warming. Indeed, on February 13, 2007, Drudge featured the headline, "House Hearing On 'Warming of the Planet' Canceled After Ice Storm." Drudge's report quoted from a "DC Weather Report" forecasting freezing rain, ice, and highs in the mid-30s for Washington, D.C., for February 14, 2007.
On February 14, 2007, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, as well as Fox News' Megyn Kelly and Brit Hume, reported on the cancellation of a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing on climate change due to severe winter weather conditions in Washington, D.C., with both Blitzer and Kelly deeming the turn of events "ironic," suggesting that cold weather and snow in February cast doubt on the existence of global warming.
Other recent examples of media figures suggesting that short-term cold weather events in December and January cast doubt on the existence of human-caused global warming include the following:
- Introducing the December 18, 2008, edition of his CNN show, Lou Dobbs said: "And tonight, unusual winter storms are dumping snow in unusual places across Western states, and a huge snowstorm is headed toward the Northeast. This is global warming?" During his segment on the issue, Dobbs hosted Heartland Institute senior fellow and science director Jay Lehr without disclosing that Heartland receives funding from the energy industry and without challenging Lehr's assertions that "[t]he last 10 years have been quite cool" and that "the sun" -- rather than humans -- is solely responsible for climate change.
Dobbs introduced his "special report" on what current weather "means for a discussion of global warming" by discussing substantial snowfall in parts of the United States and adding, "Perhaps Al Gore now is considering global warming isn't such a problem, because it is unusually warm in his home state of Tennessee. The forecast there calls for a high of 64 degrees in Nashville. Mr. Vice President, be careful."
- On the December 22, 2008, edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, guest host Douglas Urbanski cited Dobbs' December 18 segment to support the assertion, which has been widely discredited, that "man-made climate change" is "one of the biggest lies of our time." During the segment, Urbanski cited "snow in Las Vegas," "weather every place," and "cold records being set."
- On the January 22 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, on-screen text read, "Global What?" while Kelly teased an upcoming segment by saying: "[F]reezing temperatures in the Deep South, an arctic blast covering much of the nation. So if the world is getting warmer, then why is it so darn cold? Some answers next." While Kelly was speaking, Fox News showed scenes of snow.
- On January 26, moments after describing proposals to deal with global warming as "a new way to pick your pockets," Fox News host Sean Hannity said: "By the way, did you hear that, for only the second time in history, it snowed in the United Arab Emirates this weekend? Global warming?"
As Media Matters has noted, the IPCC's 2007 "Synthesis Report" concluded that "[w]arming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level" and that "[m]ost of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [defined in the report as a ">90%" probability] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [human-caused] GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations." The IPCC report specifically rebuts the suggestion that nature is primarily responsible for global warming in the last 50 years:
The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely [<5% probability] that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone. During this period, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would likely [>66% probability] have produced cooling, not warming.
In comparing human-caused and natural "radiative forcing," (which is defined as "an index of the importance of [a] factor as a potential climate change mechanism"), the IPCC's February 2007 Working Group I Report "The Physical Science Basis" concluded that since 1750, "it is extremely likely [>95% probability] that humans have exerted a substantial warming influence on climate. This RF estimate is likely to be at least five times greater than that due to solar irradiance changes. For the period 1950 to 2005, it is exceptionally unlikely [<1% probability] that the combined natural RF (solar irradiance plus volcanic aerosol) has had a warming influence comparable to that of the combined anthropogenic RF."
By 11:03 p.m. on January 26, Drudge linked to his report as the lead headline on his website:
From the Drudge Report:
GORE HEARING ON WARMING MAY BE PUT ON ICE
Mon Jan 26 2009 17:59:26 ET
Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming.
But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings.
A 'Winter Storm Watch' has been posted for the nation's capitol and there is a potential for significant snow... sleet... or ice accumulations.
"I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside," a Republican lawmaker emailed the DRUDGE REPORT. "And if the ice really piles up, it will not be safe to travel."
A spokesman for Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the committee, was not immediately available to comment on contingency plans.
Global warming advocates have suggested this year's wild winter spells are proof of climate change. | <urn:uuid:39c8dec5-7e23-42b8-9ef3-1146538ea689> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediamatters.org/research/2009/01/27/drudge-deacutejagrave-vu-winter-storm-cancelled/147023 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960427 | 1,664 | 1.828125 | 2 |
A wild bird
A Poem by Coyote Poetry
Some people need freedom. To lock them up. They will fade away and die.
A wild bird.
I saw the fear in her eyes.
She told me that “I love you.
I need you.”
But I’m afraid.
Afraid of losing myself in an emotion
where I won’t be able to escape.
A wild bird can’t be captured.
A wild bird may forget the freedom it once had.
But in dreams will fly free and have no walls to lock them in.
I heard her crying at night.
She was swimming in a sweet love
and dreaming of flying away.
Twisting up her dreams and heart.
A wild bird will slowly die.
The wildness in the eyes of the wild bird will be gone.
She quit talking of life and great dreams.
Her laughter faded away.
Her spirit of life was lost in the gentle breezes.
I try to motivate my love.
I took her to the sea, the mountains and
we took long road trips.
I saw her blue eyes become sadder.
I used to see the blue sky in her eyes.
Now I saw sadness and tears.
I will set my wild bird free.
I will tell her to fly away to her hope and dreams.
I will tell her.
I will wait for you.
Somethings can’t be held down.
Some dreams are so powerful.
They can kill your energy and joy of life.
I couldn’t kill my beautiful woman.
I could not cage her in a love with walls and barriers.
I released her on a sunny day.
I took her to the airport.
I broke my heart.
I found a sort of peace for setting a spirit free to
wander the great world.
I knew when you set a wild bird free.
They would not return. | <urn:uuid:1805cca9-900a-4866-bacd-d8f21d98fb52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://johncoyote.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/wild-bird/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948667 | 422 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Coming to a clinical trial near you.
In July 2004, AIDS activists trashed a Gilead Sciences exhibit booth at the international AIDS conference in Bangkok, Thailand, because of a proposed study of the company's drug tenofovir. The trial sought to assess whether tenofovir, arguably the safest AIDS drug on the market and already approved by the Food and Drug Administration, could prevent infection if given in daily doses. The proposed subjects were volunteer HIV-negative Cambodian sex workers. No matter. AIDS advocates objected because they thought the company was taking advantage of a vulnerable population and failing to offer the women medication if they became infected. Helping to lead the "zap" was ACT UP Paris, which splashed fake blood on the Gilead booth, hung a large banner that read "Closed Due to Death," and plastered the walls with signs that said "Sex Workers Infected by Gilead" and "Gilead Prefers Us HIV+."
The protest against Gilead is one example of pharmanoia, the extreme distrust of drug research and development that's sweeping the world. As Joep Lange, head of the International AIDS Society at the time of the Bangkok meeting recently wrote, the protest was based on "uninformed demagogy" and threatened to derail "arguably the most important studies for those at high risk of acquiring HIV infection around the globe." When Cambodian President Hun Sen pulled the plug on the study a month after the protest, he added his own uninformed demagogy to the fracas.
To be sure, major drug companies and the battalions of academic researchers on their payrolls deserve intense scrutiny. And they have received it, in this story in Bloomberg News about questionable clinical trials in Miami and in these stories in the New York Times about a defective heart device, which were honored this week by the George Polk journalism awards. Also justifiably unsparing is the Washington Post's 2000 series "The Body Hunters," which critically examined Pfizer's experiments with Trovan on Nigerian children who had meningococcal meningitis, and the recent hammering of Merck for its decision not to report heart problems in trials of Vioxx. But as Big Pharma becomes the new Big Tobacco, some critics wildly exaggerate—see Celia Farber's article on AIDS and the corruption of medical science in the March issue of Harper's—turning shades of moral gray into black.
Consider other recent narratives that involve AIDS and the testing of drugs on humans. In John le Carré's The Constant Gardener and the movie based on it, a big drug company and its affiliates cover up the toxicities of an experimental tuberculosis drug that they're testing on Kenyan AIDS patients. They then murder the people who try to expose their wrongdoing. Le Carré writes in an author's note: "by comparison with reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard." In fact, the plot is so over the top, it's a hoot. In January, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada's leading daily, ran an article titled "Sex Slaves for Science?" featuring Salome Simon, a woman described as "a medical guinea pig" who participated in a long-running Canadian program that's hunting for clues to develop an AIDS vaccine. Simon volunteered for the study. She can leave it at any time. And the researchers provide her with free medical care, as well as counseling about how to avoid infection. (Read more about this study.) Here are two other examples of drug R & D criticism run amok.
By overplaying unproved but sensational misdeeds, Big Pharma's watchdogs obscure serious ones—like the inane lawsuit that 39 drug makers filed against the South African government in 1998 to block it from making generic versions of anti-HIV drugs. The scattershot approach also draws attention away from a critical and increasingly complicated issue that AIDS has pushed to the fore: What do researchers owe people who volunteer to test new medicines and devices?
There's a fundamental rule of thumb for the ethics of conducting human biomedical studies: Don't behave like a Nazi. It was the cruel and deadly Nazi experiments on concentration-camp prisoners that led to the 1947 Nuremberg Code, which spelled out 10 core principles for human experiments. These include the requirement that research subjects must freely join a study with full knowledge of the risks and that researchers must make every effort to minimize unnecessary mental or physical suffering. After the Nuremberg Code came several, more specific canons—the Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines from the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, and the Belmont Report—that together spell out the international ethical tenets for human research.
The AIDS epidemic has spotlighted the ethics of clinical research like no disease in history. Early on, AIDS activists demanded a voice in drug R & D; today they sit on influential panels that help governments set research guidelines and evaluate the worth of HIV-fighting drugs. AIDS also brings ethics to the forefront because it preys on ostracized groups—sex workers, gay men, minorities, drug users, migrants. And when powerful but expensive anti-HIV drug cocktails became available, the developed world was forced to recognize that patents and profits were standing in the way of reaching the vast majority of the HIV infected.
Should researchers conducting a study that aims to prevent HIV infection be required to provide anti-HIV drugs to participants who become infected during the trial, for reasons that have nothing to do with it? No official guidelines address this difficult question, which was central to the protests surrounding the abandoned study in Cambodia. In a sophisticated exchange between two bioethicists a few years ago, one, Ruth Macklin of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, argued that researchers have this "moral obligation." The other, Charles Weijer of the University of Western Ontario, countered that in "moral theory, causation is a necessary condition of compensatory claims." In other words, the researchers had no obligation to provide treatment unless their trial caused the infection.
Weijer also argued that providing anti-HIV drugs to subjects was an "undue inducement" because it might lead poor people to volunteer. There is "something strange about this worry," wrote Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief bioethicist at NIH, in the Lancetlast July. "No person would become HIV positive just to get antiretroviral drugs," Emanuel and his co-authors reasoned. If someone joins a trial because of the offer of anti-HIV drugs, they concluded, then the inducement is not undue.
Last May, an unusual meeting of activists, researchers, and bioethicists convened at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to hash out the questions raised by the protest over the Cambodia trial. The group's report, "Building Collaboration to Advance HIV Prevention," wisely asserts that providing anti-HIV drugs to people who become infected during a prevention trial "is steadily becoming a question of logistics and implementation rather than a hot topic of ethical debate." This has major implications for ongoing tenofovir pre-exposure prophylaxis experiments, as well as trials of AIDS vaccines and topical gels and creams known as microbicides. Indeed, as the report notes, several large sponsors of AIDS vaccine trials now have promised to help make sure that people infected during studies receive the medicines.
Jon Cohen writes for Science magazine. You can reach him at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:722ecb42-a033-4a1b-8506-9bb3ee54eebb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2006/02/pharmanoia.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960749 | 1,526 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Voters in November, in choosing a president, also will choose between two starkly different energy plans for America. President Barack Obama's vision is impractical, costly and ideologically driven. Mitt Romney's is practical, profitable and driven by supply and demand.
Obama envisions switching the United States to renewable energy sources and casting off reliance on fossil fuels. That goal never has been more than a pipe dream, except to the select few cronies who prospered from taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and subsidies, such as the bankrupt Solyndra solar-panel maker. Despite shortcomings, the president is determined to follow through to his ideological goal.
What do the rest of us get for diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to energy sink holes such as Solyndra? Obama's U.S. Energy Information Office's annual forecast estimates renewable sources, like solar and wind, provide a scant 1 percent of the energy used in the United States today. In another 23 years, the White House's own energy mavens predict, solar and wind will provide maybe 3 percent of U.S. supplies.
The fawning media no doubt will cheer if renewable energy comes close to that predicted growth (200 percent!). But that's statistical smoke and mirrors. What will be downplayed is the uncomfortable fact that taxpayer-subsidized wind and solar still will provide a miniscule fraction of what's needed, according to the administration's own projections. If you rely largely on wind and solar in 2035, you'll have to turn off the lights, let alone the air conditioner.
70 cartoons on the GOP convention, Hurricane Isaac, election politics and more
Obama's Republican opponent has a better idea. Romney's Energy Independence plan, unveiled Aug. 23, would drill, baby, drill, as earlier advocates described the strategy. He would open up offshore oil drilling and onshore energy resources and lift government's heavy hand from the regulatory and permitting processes to allow America to retrieve the energy it needs. Odds are, by 2035 you not only could keep the lights on, you probably could even operate your computer, TV and whatever other electronic devices are in use by then. Not only that, Romney predicts, the nation could reach energy independence within eight years.
Romney says a substantial byproduct of increased oil, natural gas and coal production would be 3 million new jobs, a half-trillion-dollar boost in GDP, lower energy prices for "job creators and middle-class families" and a new era of national security not seen since before the oil embargo of the 1970s that underscored America's great reliance on Middle East fuel from providers who aren't always our friends.
The Obama and Romney approaches are fundamentally different, as reflected in their assumptions.
"Even if we drilled every little bit of this great country of ours, we'd still have to buy enough from the rest of the world to meet our needs," Obama said in March.
Romney said in August, "Energy experts, investment firms, even academics at Harvard University, now recognize that surging U.S. energy production, combined with the resources of America's neighbors, can meet all of the continent's energy needs within a decade."
Whom to believe?
Renewable-energy advocates' scare tactics have been undercut, thanks to the private sector's innovation and creativity. Not long ago, green naysayers insisted renewable energy must be the future because fossil fuels were being exhausted. But as has been the case since Thomas Robert Malthus infamously and wrongly predicted 200 years ago that human population growth would outstrip food production and decimate populations from starvation, green naysayers similarly overlooked humans' ability to innovate and invent. Technological advances have dramatically driven down the cost of acquiring fossil fuels.
"Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, for example, was developed by private industry, funded by private investors and tested on private lands," noted Paul Dreissen, author of "Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death."
Those technologies "did not have to depend on taxpayer subsidies, approval by federal bureaucrats or access to shale deposits on federal lands," Dreissen says.
Therein lies the difference of the relative merits and demerits of the Romney and Obama plans.
Citigroup, which measures such things not by voter appeal but in dollars and sense, said in its Energy 2020 report that the U.S. petroleum industry could add "as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020 and increase U.S. gross domestic product by as much as 2.3 percent." State and federal governments also stand to gain billions in leases, rents, royalties and taxes if fossil-fuel industries are allowed to expand.
Romney and Obama, each in his own way, touts the "market" as a fix for what ails U.S. energy. But Obama insists the market must be directed by the government subsidizing uneconomical alternatives that otherwise can't compete with fossil fuels, which he says already are subsidized by taxpayers.
There are two flaws in this. The first is that free markets are no longer free once government "assists" some at others' expense. Taxpayer subsidies for energy production don't level the field, they unlevel it. Subsidies give preferred companies capital denied their competitors. The redistribution of this money isn't based on whether the subsidized companies are more efficient, have greater demand in the market or are more profitable investments. If they were, they wouldn't need the subsidy.
Subsidies are delivered based on political preferences, not market preferences. They are based on politicians and bureaucrats' ideas of what people should want, not on what people actually want. That is not a free market. That is a corrupted market.
The second error is that the fossil-fuel industry enjoys taxpayer subsidies. For the most part, it receives a fraction of what "renewable" energy gets. What coal, natural gas and oil producers do enjoy are tax credits and write-offs for business expenses. Those credits and deductions reduce how much tax the companies pay.
But allowing someone to keep his own money is not a subsidy. Subsidies pay recipients with other peoples' tax money. Keeping your own money is what everyone who earns money is supposed to be able to do. Why else earn it?
As a point of distinction here, yours truly detests tax subsidies, and isn't crazy about tax credits and writeoffs either. The tax code should be used to pay for legitimate government purposes, meaning only those necessary to protect God-given rights, not to reward and punish or pick winners and losers.
It's wrong to take someone's money in taxes to give to someone else so the second person can compete in a market in which he couldn't compete without the subsidy. It is unjust to the taxpayer, whose money is taken, then redistributed. It is unfair to competitors of the subsidized company, who previously were preferred in the market because they operated their businesses well, based on supply and demand.
If you're having trouble sympathizing, imagine that you and I catch and sell fish. Now imagine the government forced you to pay taxes to give to me so I might use your money to compete with you in the fish market. With your money, I can buy a faster boat than you have and pay my fishermen higher wages than you pay yours. Your subsidy of me helps me catch more fish, hire away your employees and take business away from you. That's why subsidies are wrong.
Moreover, subsidies of uneconomical businesses force taxpayers to invest in companies and products they already chose not to invest in. If you weren't confident enough to buy stock in or to help finance a questionable renewable-energy company, why did it become a good idea after the government took your money?
Not only is Obama's energy policy an attempt to resuscitate a weak industry, it forces taxpayers to "invest" money in something they already determined to be not worth the risk. Taxpayers operating competing businesses are forced to finance their competitors. Such schemes are to the free market what socialism is to capitalism: Anathema.
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A NASA spacecraft has found an unusual three-planet system that consists of one super-Earth and two Neptune-size worlds orbiting a star similar to our sun, a new study reveals.
The planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope discovered the three planets around the star Kepler-18, which is only 10 percent larger than the sun and contains 97 percent of the sun's mass, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin said. The alien system could also host more planets than have been found so far, they added.
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All three planets, which are designated Kepler-18b, c, and d, orbit much closer to their parent star than Mercury does to the sun. The planet Kepler-18b orbits closest to the star, taking 3.5 days to complete its journey. The planet is about 6.9 times the mass of Earth and is twice the size of our home planet, making planet b a so-called super-Earth, the researchers said.
Kepler-18c, which takes 7.6 days to orbit the star, is about 5.5 times larger than our planet, and has a mass equivalent to about 17 Earths. Kepler-18d has a 14.9-day orbit and is about seven times the size of Earth, with a mass of about 16 Earths. According to these figures, planets c and d qualify as low-density "Neptune-class" worlds, the researchers said. [The Strangest Alien Planets]
The findings were presented Tuesday at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science in Nantes, France. The study will be published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in November.
Scanning the cosmos
NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunts for exoplanets using the transit method, which looks for periodic dips in a star's brightness over time that could indicate a planet is passing in front of it from the telescope's perspective. The alien worlds around Kepler-18 were found using this method, but the orbits of the planets themselves were a point of interest to the researchers.
Kepler-18c orbits its parent star twice for every one orbit that Kepler-18d makes, explained study leader Bill Cochran of UT-Austin. But the two planets do not cross the face of their parent star at these same orbital periods.
"One is slightly early when the other one is slightly late, [then] both are on time at the same time, and then vice-versa," Cochran said in a statement.
This suggests that Kepler-18c and Kepler-18d are engaged in something of an orbital dance.
"It means they're interacting with each other," Cochran said. "When they are close to each other … they exchange energy, pull and tug on each other."
Once Kepler identifies potential exoplanet candidates using the transit method, scientists around the world use ground-based telescopes to collect more data and try to separate real findings from any false positives. [10 Real Alien Worlds That Could Be In 'Star Wars']
The Kepler-18 system
The planets around Kepler-18 helped astronomers out because the orbital activity between Kepler-18c and Kepler-18d indicated that they must belong to the same planetary system. But proving the identity of Kepler-18b, the super-Earth, turned out to be a bit more complicated, Cochran said.
The team of astronomers used a technique called "planet validation," in which they examined the probability that the cosmic body could be something other than a planet. The researchers first analyzed high-resolution images of the space around the Kepler-18 star to see if the transit signal could have been caused by background objects in the vicinity.
"We successively went through every possible type of object that could be there," Cochran said. "There are limits on the sort of objects that can be there at different distances from the star. There's a small possibility that [Kepler-18b] is due to a background object, but we're very confident that it's probably a planet."
In fact, Cochran and his colleagues calculated that it is 700 times more likely that Kepler-18b is a real planet rather than a background object.
Identifying alien planets
The researchers said that this method of planet validation could play an important role in the ongoing hunt for habitable alien planets.
"We're trying to prepare the astronomical community and the public for the concept of validation," Cochran said. "The goal of Kepler is to find an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone [where life could arise], with a one-year orbit. Proving that such an object really is a planet is very difficult [with current technology]. When we find what looks to be a habitable planet, we'll have to use a validation process, rather than a confirmation process. We're going to have to make statistical arguments."
To date, Kepler has found 1,235 planetary "candidates" that are awaiting confirmation through follow-up observations. Researchers have estimated that at least 80 percent of these will be verified as real planets.
- A Field Guide to Alien Planets
- Top 10 Extreme Planet Facts
- Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets
© 2013 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com. | <urn:uuid:71cd427c-b088-406c-87a4-723133ec1b5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44795745/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/three-weird-planets-found-around-sunlike-star/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943321 | 1,209 | 3.453125 | 3 |
What did little girls of the 1930's wear and how was their hair cut?
This is an endearing photo from about 1933 showing two siblings standing with their arms around one another. They both have bobs, one is straight and one is curly. The girl on the right has bangs with a length that hits just past the ears. This short style was very popular during this era as women were entering the workforce in numbers and wanted an easy care cut. The kids were given the same haircuts which saved time and energy. They are wearing sun suits that were typically one piece and these have halter tops that synch up at the neck. The bottom half is like shorts with full and loose legs. | <urn:uuid:152061f2-142b-4676-9fcd-77afd25afe95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hairstyletwist.com/blog/category/kids-hairstyles/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993552 | 143 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Photograph by David Lynch
Written by Martin Richard
Last week we looked at the longest glacier in the Alps. We saw it from the outside, looking down from a nearby mountain.
In this week’s photo, we are looking into a glacier. It’s white on the top, but turns blue deeper inside. The white is from the snow. That’s not a surprise, since glaciers are made from snow. Where does the blue color come from?
A swimming pool is blue at the deep end. A glacier is bluer the deeper it gets.
Maybe they both turn blue for the same reason?
Yes, because they both have something to do with how light behaves when it goes through water.
What we want to know is, why does white light turn blue when it goes through a lot of water? Whether water is liquid (sloshing in a pool), or ice (frozen in a glacier), the light turns blue.
To understand the color of glaciers and swimming pools, you have to understand rainbows!
White light is actually light of all colors mixed together. You can separate white light into its colors by shining it through a prism. Here is a picture of a prism casting the spectrum of white light.
When you shine light on a prism, the light has to cross the edge of the glass. Crossing the edge pulls the light apart into its colors. To go through a prism, the light has to go through two edges so the colors get separated even more, and now you can see them.
When you shine light through a prism you get a rainbow of light. All the colors of a beam of light are called its “spectrum.” A rainbow shows the spectrum of while light.
Raindrops act like prisms...millions of them. Millions of raindrops have millions of edges and cast millions of spectrums. (Ooops! That’s not quite right. We don’t say “spectrums.” Spectrum is an old word and we still use the old plural, which is “spectra.” So let’s correct that sentence to say …)
Millions of raindrops have millions of edges and cast millions of spectrums spectra. We see all those spectra in the shape of a bow.
Dump those raindrops in a swimming pool – or in a glacier! – and the drops are not separate any more. All the edges are gone! No edges means no prisms means no rainbows!
The light in the pool or the glacier has to go through a lot of water. Water absorbs the red and orange colors. So you can’t see the reds and oranges; they are trapped in the water! The more water you have, like in the deep end of the pool, the more red and orange gets taken out.
But water does NOT trap blue light! Blue goes through!
So the glacier does not TURN the light blue; the blue was always there. The deep, frozen water of the glacier TAKES AWAY most of the colors EXCEPT blue.
What is really important in this week’s photo is what you DON’T see: you don’t see the red and orange light that was trapped by the water of the glacier. What you DO see is the blue light that escaped and made it all the way to your eyes.
We got this picture of the glacier here: Blue Glacier Ice. It is not written for kids, but you're welcome to check it out! | <urn:uuid:a6d36f67-b1f7-4087-af70-f8e0dd339272> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://epod.usra.edu/kepow/2012/12/glacier-lesson-2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9506 | 736 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Anger and dread and questions. Children this time. Children in an elementary school, kindergartners, and some sick young man comes in. Again.
We've gone crazy, that must be it. Our society has lost it. The anger in these guys. Just under the surface until out it comes. My life is terrible, they say, so take that and take that and take that. Again.
We sputter with the same questions.
What's happened to our young men? Why do they have no hope, no empathy, no response except rage to life's frustrations and disappointments?
How do we stop the next one? Ban guns and violent video games? Arm teachers like we did pilots?
We ask again, but the answers to these young shooters lie deep within their individual stories, says Dr. Ajit Jetmalani, a child psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University. Often there are "layer upon layer" of underlying issues, he says.
We can't get at them right now. We can't do anything.
Except maybe this, Jetmalani says: Treat each other better.
Because it's already too late when the angry young men come in with their guns.Kip Kinkel at Thurston High School in Springfield. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High. Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. Jared Loughner at the Tucson political rally. James Holmes in the Aurora movie theater. Jacob Roberts Tuesday at Clackamas Town Center.
Now Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., "which we always thought was the safest place in America," as one father put it.
Lanza's mother was a teacher at the school. He killed her at a residence and then shot 20 students at the school, most in the same classroom, according to the Associated Press. The children ranged in age from 5 to 10. He killed six other adults and then himself.
Close your eyes, kids, the cops said as they led survivors from the carnage. But they'll always see it, won't they? How will they ever remove that horrible stain from their childhood?
We're wounded, too. Because we have children in elementary school. We shopped at that mall. We went to that movie. We attend political rallies.
"I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do," President Obama said.
We'll dig in, to understand it. Jetmalani says we'll look for trauma, bullying, themes of isolation, previous bad behavior, emerging signs of depression or schizophrenia.
The shooters often kill themselves, too, so we can't grab them and make them explain. They lay waste, and leave us with nothing but anger and dread and questions.
That's the way they want it, Jetmalani says.
"Somehow, their final legacy before they die is this event," he says. "They're not looking to stick around."
We know many young men struggle mightily with the transition from childhood to adulthood. In some cases, their brains do not fully develop until they reach their mid-20s, and they lack judgment.
The poor economy has left them with fewer opportunities at a time when "imagery suggests that everybody should be wealthy and successful," Jetmalani says.
Toss in a media and entertainment culture dripping with violence. It's no accident some shooters -- Roberts, most recently -- wear a mask or costume.
"In a sense, they're enacting their own compiled sense of what an aggressor does," Jetmalani says. "It's sort of an heroic and powerful figure who seeks revenge -- and has a right to do so."
Families make mistakes. Kinkel, who killed his parents and two fellow students and wounded two dozen others at Thurston, had a history of anti-social behavior and showed signs of serious mental illness -- yet his parents allowed him to have guns.
"What do parents do with a teenage son who is playing first-person shooter games six hours a day?" Jetmalani asks.
Anger and dread and questions.
Children this time. Maybe we've gone crazy. What do we do?
Check your pulse. Tell your kids it's a really sad, terrible thing, and that you need to stick together. Maybe you give the homeless guy on the corner a nod instead of a sneer. Maybe you let that car into your lane.
"We should be focused on loving acts toward others," the doctor says, "because that's what we can control." | <urn:uuid:2275bd55-657e-483a-9d60-2b05cd6819b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2012/12/mass_shooting.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971853 | 946 | 1.625 | 2 |
Lessons from Michael Jackson and James A. Smith IV, CPA
Michael Jackson was a star on the international scene and Jim Smith a local star of Florida’s Treasure Coast business and court scene. Although they were as different as ebony and ivory, these men who dies much too young had attitudes much in common that we can learn from.
Both strived for superiority, not mere excellence or acceptability.
I never knew how hard Jackson worked on his albums or videos until I saw a program on “E” network. All the practice, planning, mistakes were unseen to his fans; all they saw and heard was perfection.
Jim Smith was similar in that way. Nobody would beat him or his clients in court, mediation or settlement. He had to win, and to do so be the very best; so he worked for that and was. This attitude led to Jim’s reputation as the go-to guy for litigation support and business valuation. Nobody in their right mind would want to go against him.
What can we learn? Isn’t that the way most of us are? How many CPAs do you know that go all-out to best the competition? Or are they happy with getting the job done and the work out the door?
If seeking superiority were the case, why do I see so many tax returns with obvious errors or simply things that were over looked? Why do so many citizens overpay taxes when they shouldn’t have to? Why have so many businesses failed that could have used advice but it was never offered?
Jackson and Smith were rightfully proud of their gifts and skills.
Jim Smith was the proudest CPA I ever met. When asked why he didn’t pursue other designations (as I and most others in the same consulting domain) did, he said “I’m a CPA. How much better can that get?” This attitude is important as it leads to very high fees, self confidence, client confidence and retention, and perceived value in the general marketplace.
What can we learn? If this attitude were the case, why are so many CPAs undercutting competitors below any reasonable possible profit in order to get work today? People like Jim and Jacko competed on a much different level, not on the price of what they sold, be it albums, tickets or consulting and CPA fees.
As we have all witnessed in recent days, Jackson’s fans were legion and his peers loyal. 1.6 million requests were received for 8,700 seats at his memorial.
Jim Smith also created a sense of loyalty from clients, friends and peers that few of us achieve.
Why is this important to today’s CPA firm?
How many training dollars go out the door when a long-time valued employee leaves or becomes the competition? Why do so many partners work until all hours and the staff go home on time? Why can’t the firm get anyone to step out and go to events and take on added responsibilities? It’s not because they hire the wrong people, it’s their attitude toward them that is the difference.
Jim loved his employees and his peers and friends. He created loyalty like I have never seen before. Malcolm Hayes CPA would drive weekly and spend days at Jim’s practice in Stuart, FL (east coast) from Plant City (west coast) all during busy season while Jim waited for a heart transplant that never came.
Jim created loyalty from selfless service to others and a generosity of spirit I’ve rarely experienced in 33 years in this profession. He graciously taught me (for free) an entire profession of litigation support and business valuation I couldn’t have experienced elsewhere. I will carry on his tradition of superiority the best I can with my limited intelligence in his honor.
By Allan Boress, CPA, CVA – author of The “I-Hate-Selling” Book, available at amazon.com
by Allan Boress, CPA - Based on over 25 years being a practitioner and consultant to the profession. Mr. Boress is the author of 12 published books in 6 different languages, including a best-seller, The "I-Hate-Selling" Book. | <urn:uuid:a793109e-6f88-4bd0-9978-70e7de375263> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/aboress/lessons-michael-jackson-and-james-smith-iv-cpa | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983176 | 884 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Fri October 5, 2012
Legislation to Regulate Pain Clinics Pending in Two Indiana Communities
Two southern Indiana communities are taking preliminary steps to more tightly regulate prescription pills by cracking down on pain clinics. Prescription painkiller abuse is becoming more common, and some say the pills are easier to get legally due to unscrupulous pain clinic operators.
The Courier-Journal reports that New Albany city councilman Scott Blair has introduced an ordinance to prohibit clinics from operating within 500 feet of a residential district and 1,000 feet of another pain clinic. Hospital clinics would be exempt under the proposed ordinance.
The Jeffersonville city council is in the process of enacting similar regulations after controversy surrounding a pain management clinic that opened in July. Residents near the clinic have voiced concerns over its potential to attract crime to the neighborhood.
And action on a statewide level could be coming, too. Indiana State Senator Ron Grooms announced plans in August to sponsor a bill that would require that owners of pain clinics be licensed physicians. | <urn:uuid:d5841653-14b2-4bff-bb29-2638a0c8bffc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wfpl.org/post/legislation-regulate-pain-clinics-pending-two-indiana-communities | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952776 | 204 | 1.664063 | 2 |
June 25, 2012
Instead of tossing stuff into big trash dumpsters when they move out of their residence halls, Knox College students are redirecting unneeded items to local charities. An expanded recycling initiative this spring boosted contributions to community agencies and slashed the amount sent to local landfills.
"We reduced our usage of trash dumpsters at least by half," said Scott Maust, director of facilities services at Knox. "I estimate that we went from around 10 dumpsters in prior years to four dumpsters this year."
When residence halls closed earlier this month, Knox College students, faculty, and staff volunteers collected literally tons of electronics, clothing, books and household items -- including furniture -- donated by departing students. The items were distributed to some half-dozen charitable organizations in the Galesburg area.
"We recycled 15 computer printers, 10 refrigerators, 10 microwaves, and other appliances -- either donated to charity or properly disposed of," said Todd Smith, coordinator of audiovisual services and a member, with Maust, of the College's Sustainability Task Force. "We took four truck-loads of reusable items to the Purple Hanger -- a resale shop that raises funds for Safe Harbor Women's Shelter."
With a goal of reducing the amount of year-end disposal as low as possible, the Task Force joined with a long-standing annual clothing drive spearheaded by Sue Hulett, the Rik and Sophia Henke Distinguished Professor of Political Science.
Hulett and student volunteers took four large van-loads of clothing to the various charities, including the Galesburg Rescue Mission and The Salvation Army. "This year we donated more than normal," said Hulett, who's been collecting surplus clothing from students for more than 25 years.
The effort to expand recycling and reduce waste originated with Smith and other members of the Sustainability Task Force, including recent graduate Annika Paulsen, who delivered several car-loads of materials -- 42 bags in all -- to the local charities.
"We want to divert usable things from the landfill and also help the community," said Paulsen, a 2012 graduate from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
"In the Sustainability Task Force this year, we talked about how a lot of usable items get thrown out," Paulsen said. The task force also wants to make sure that batteries and electronic devices are properly recycled.
The expanded recycling drew a high level of commitment at a busy time of year for everyone on campus -- Hulett, Smith, and the students accomplished their task from June 1-3, the same weekend as Knox's 2012 Commencement ceremony. Smith and his students worked the following week, sorting through discarded items and recycling the equivalent of an entire large dumpster. | <urn:uuid:dac09d2e-5a67-4092-be2e-4ae30b57e54e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.knox.edu/news-and-events/news-archive/expanded-recycling-cuts-year-end-waste-in-half.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961999 | 562 | 2 | 2 |
3.00 credit hours
This course focuses on the theory of experiential learning and its application at the individual, team, and organizational levels of analyses. This course offers the chance for students to gain insight into their individual learning and adaptive styles, and how such styles impact the way they interact and have consequence for team. The course also explores how teams and organizations learn, and the effect that cultural determinants have on learning and adaptability. In addition, the course examines how learning theory can be applied to focused institutional development projects and educational processes. The course uses presentations, lectures, research findings, interactive activities, and class discussion. The current topics of interest are for the Masters in Positive Organization and Change (MPOD) candidates. It is led by a faculty member of the Department of Organization Behavior. Reflective essays and integrative papers will enable participants to explore their learning styles and that of their organizations and teams to strengthen the practice of OD and human systems change and development.
No Syllabus Available | <urn:uuid:ccb8e760-7a61-4c86-93d8-7fbcafb0417a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weatherhead.case.edu/academics/courses/mpod431 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941706 | 202 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Butterflies - Whites, Orange-tips, And Yellows
( Originally Published 1917 )
FAMILY Pieridae The most familiar and abundant American butterflies are classified together under the family name Pieridae, or the Pierids. Three groups or tribes of them are popuarly known as the Whites, the Orange-tips, and the Yellows. Our two commonest butterflies, the White or Imported Cabbage Butterfly and the Sulphur Yellow Butterfly, are typical representatives of this family. Most of the rest, like these, are of moderate size with rounded wings which are more or less marked with black. There are six well-developed legs and the caterpillars of practically all the species are cylindrical greenish worms which under a lens are seen to be covered with short hairs. When the caterpillars are ready to change to chrysalids they spin a web of silk upon the supporting surface and just back of it, a loop of silk that serves to hold the chrysalis in place and keep it from swaying back and forth. The chrysalids are characterized by having a pointed projection on the front of the head, the rest of the body being more or less angular.
Notwithstanding their close general resemblance to their food plants, the caterpillars of this family suffer from attack by various enemies. Birds find many of them, not only eating them themselves but also using them freely for feeding the nestlings. Parasitic insects also take a heavy toll from these caterpillars. This attack of enemies is doubtless a chief reason why many of the common species are not much more destructive.
THE TRIBE OF THE WHITES
Three white butterflies of approximately the same size are found widely distributed over the United States. The most abundant species is the White or Imported Cabbage butterfly. The next in abundance is probably the Checkered White, and the rarest in most localities is the Gray veined White which is a northern form.
The White or Imported Cabbage Butterfly
There is probably no butterfly which one can generally find so easily in its early stages as the White or Imported Cabbage butterfly which is found practically wherever cabbages are grown and is generally so abundant that caterpillars and chrysalids are readily discovered. In the Northern states the insect passes through the winter within the chrysalis, coming forth rather early in spring as the familiar white butterfly with black dots upon the wings and blackish front angles of the fore wings.
The butterflies that thus appear in spring flit freely about over fields, meadows, and gardens, sipping the nee-tar of various early flowers through their long, coiled tongues and stopping occasionally to alight upon the leaf of a cabbage or other plant of the mustard family to de-posit the small, gale yellow eggs which remain attached by a sort of glue. The adult butterflies continue their leisurely life for a fortnight or more, thus extending the laying of the eggs over a considerable period.
About a week after being deposited the egg hatches into a tiny green caterpillar that begins feeding upon the tender surface of the cabbage leaf. It is commonly called the cabbage worm and it is doubtless the most generally destructive insect affecting this crop. It continues to feed for several days before the first moult, after which it becomes decidedly larger and begins to eat again more voraciously than before. It undergoes several successive moults during the next two or three weeks before it be-comes full grown as a caterpillar. Unlike most butterfly larvae it has changed very little in its general appearance during its growth. It is always of a pale green color, strikingly like the glaucous green of the cabbage leaf, a fact which doubtless helps to conceal it from the eager eyes of birds and other animals.
When the caterpillar is thus full fed it is likely to leave its food plant and find shelter elsewhere. Sometimes it will stop on the lower surface of the outer leaves, but more commonly it will find a piece of board, an overhanging stone, a fence-post, or the side of a building, where it will prepare for the change to the chrysalis. It will do this by spinning a silken thread upon the surface in which to entangle its hind legs and a loop of silk near by with which to hold its body. When these preparations are completed the insect will cast its last caterpillar skin, emerging as a grayish or brownish chrysalis, the color usually varying with the color of the surrounding surface.
A week or more later the chrysalis skin bursts open and the white butterfly emerges to expand and dry its wings before it flies away for its leisurely life. There are two or more broods each season, the number varying with the latitude. There is a decided variation in the length of time required for the completion of the cycle from egg to butterfly. In hot weather the insect may mature in about three weeks while in cooler weather it may require as much as five weeks.
Its Introduction and Dispersal
While it is well known that a large proportion of our most destructive insects have been imported from Euroi it is only in comparatively few cases that man has been able to make careful records of the times and places where the insects were introduced and to follow the spread of the pest from these original centres. The Imported Cabbage butterfly is one of the few species of which this is true. This insect has been known for centuries in Europe, where it feeds freely upon the leaves of cabbages and turnips. So far as known it was first introduced into North America about 1860, when it appeared in Quebec. Eight years later it was again introduced into the region of New York City. From these two points the insect spread gradually in various directions until in 1871 it covered the whole of New England and various parts of New York and New Jersey. From then on it spread even more rapidly and was evidently accidentally introduced into various parts of the country which became new centres of distribution. Of course it would be very easy for this to happen through the shipment of cabbages from one part of the country to another. Within thirty years of the time of its first introduction it had become a serious pest over practically all the United States and Canada.
The introduction and spread of such a pest is of inter est in itself, but in this ease there is to be noted the additional fact that the presence of this foreigner has practically led to the extinction of two native species of butterflies, both closely related to each other and to the invader and both feeding upon the same plants. An almost pure white butterfly-the Gray-veined White was formerly exceedingly abundant in many of the Northern states, while farther south there was another species, the Checkered White, which was also abundant. Both of these have now so completely disappeared that in some localities they are almost never seen, while their imported relative has become perhaps the most abundant of all American butterflies.
The Gray-veined White Pieris napi
One would naturally suppose that when a butterfly was reduced to the greatest possible simplicity in its coloring there would be little chance for the development of geographical or seasonal varieties. But he would only have to study a large collection of specimens of this species, taken at different seasons and in different regions, to find his supposition at fault. Here is a butterfly which is essentially a slender black-bodied creature with four white wings scarcely touched with color, and yet we are told that there are eleven varieties in the United States so distinct that they have received scientific names, not to mention various others which have been found in Europe. This is indeed a remarkable showing and it is a striking illustration of the infinite variations which Nature can produce with the most limited materials.
To me the seasonal variations of a butterfly are always of greater interest than those which are geographical. We know that in the case of a great many animals, from insects to mammals, the different conditions of climate and physical environment found in different regions produce variations of many sorts. So it does not seem especially strange that in Alaska there should be a different form of a certain butterfly than is found in Virginia. But that in the same locality there should be two or more forms of a butterfly existing under identical conditions as to climate and environment is not so easily explained. In the case of the Gray-veined White we collect in early' spring in New England, or other Northern states, a lot of chrysalids. We keep them until the butterflies come forth and we find even here two distinct forms, one smaller and more delicate than the other, with both surfaces of the wings pure white: scientists call this form, virginiensis; the other larger with the under surface of the wings slightly tinted with yellow: scientists call this form oleracea. The first named has but one brood a year while the second lays eggs which develop into caterpillars that produce butterflies of still a third form, in which the upper surface of the wings is pure white with a slightly greater expanse: scientists call this form cruciferarum. These three varieties occur in Eastern regions and may be found in the same localities, and differ considerably from various geographical varieties found in the Far West.
The caterpillar of the Gray veined White is a bit smalIer than those of the nearly related forms, and in color is green with no distinct longitudinal markings, but with many fine dots of black over the surface. The cylindrical body is covered with a fine down. When feeding upon cabbage it is more likely to attack the outer than the inner leaves, and so even when abundant it is less troublesome to gardeners than the imported species. It is now, how. ever, so rare that it seems to feed chiefly upon wild cruciferous plants and is more likely to be found along the borders of open woods than in gardens and fields. The winter is passed in the chrysalis state.
The Checkered White
Some years ago the Checkered White was commonly called the Southern Cabbage Butterfly but the general distribution of the imported species has had the same effect upon its abundance in the South that it has had upon the Gray veined White in the North. Consequently, it is now much less abundant than formerly, even in the Southern states where it is most at home. There are two fairly distinct forms: the spring form and the summer form. The latter is practically of the same size as the Imported Cabbage Butterfly: the males have the hind wings nearly white above and the fore wings with a few black dots or spots upon their outer halves. The females are much more definitely marked, having the upper surface of both pairs of wings marked in black or brownish black in such a way as to enclose a large number of white diamonds. The spring form is decidedly smaller and the markings are much less distinct than in the summer form.
The seasonal history of this species is comparatively simple. In winter the chrysalids are found. From these chrysalids in early spring the small butterflies of the spring form come forth. These lay eggs upon various cruciferous plants which hatch into greenish caterpillars that eat the leaves and soon mature so far as their caterpillar stage is concerned. They are then about an inch long, with downy cylindric bodies more or less marked with rather pale yellow stripes, touched here and there with purplish green or dotted slightly with fine black dots. These caterpillars now attach themselves by means of a button of silk and a silken loop to some support like a piece of board, the side of a stone, or almost any available shelter. Each casts its larval skin and appears as a grayish chrysalis from which probably a fortnight later the summer form of the butterfly emerges. There are commonly two broods of this summer form, making three sets of butter-flies for the entire season. The caterpillars of the second summer brood of butterflies go into the chrysalis stage in autumn to remain throughout the winter.
Some very interesting observations upon the sleeping habits of this butterfly have been made in St. Louis by Mr. and Mrs. Phil Rau. The insects were found abundantly resting upon the seed heads of white snakeroot. Early in October, when a warm south wind was blowing, the great majority of the butterflies slept horizontally with their heads toward the wind. At other seasons and in other places, many of them were found in a vertical position but practically all had their bodies toward the wind prevailing at the time. The observers were unable to ascertain definitely whether the insects thus oriented themselves at the time of alighting, so that their wings presented the least resistance to the force of the wind, or whether this was a mechanical result of the breezes.
The Great Southern White
There used to be in the Northern states before the advent of the Imported Cabbage butterfly a familiar white butterfly which then laid its eggs upon cabbages in much the same way that the imported pest now does. One who has seen this northern Gray-veined White and then sees the Great Southern White will be likely to think of the latter as a larger edition of the former, for in the males of the southern species the wings are practically white save for a narrow dusky border at the outer angle of the front pair, although in the female this dusky margin is wider and the hind wings show a series of dusky triangles near the margin. There is also a curious black marking suggestive of a crescent on each front wing near the middle of the front border, which helps to make the appearance of this butterfly very distinct from that of any other.
Although this species is at times so abundant that it swarms in great flocks and although it has been known for many years, its life history seems not to have been carefully worked out since it was first described by Abbott more than a century ago. The caterpillars feed upon cruciferous plants and when full grown are about an inch and a half long, of a general yellow color, more or less striped with purple lines. The species is distinctly tropical extending northward into our Southern states.
Dr. G. B. Longstaff reports this species as abundant in Jamaica where he found that the clubs of the antennae of the living insects showed a beautiful turquoise blue color, although another observer described them as bright green with a tinge of blue. This is an interesting color variation for a member of this group. In the tropics also there are two forms, one belonging to the dry season and one to the wet season.
Synopsis of the Whites
Imported Cabbage Butterfly (Pieria rapae). Expanse inches. Upper surface white with a black marginal dash on the front outer angle of the front wing. One round black spot on each of the four wings in the male. Two round spots on each of the front wings in the female and one round spot on each of the hind wings. Under surface of hind wings yellowish white; spots on front wings in same position as on upper surface. A spring form (immaculata) is smaller and the black spots are almost obsolete.
Gray veined White (Pieria napi). Expanse 2 inches. Upper surface white with only a darker marginal splash next the body. Under surface white with gray veins.
Checkered White (Pontia protodice or Pieris protodice). Expanse 2 inches. Upper surface white, strongly marked especially in the female with dark grayish brown on both pairs of wings. Along the outer margins these marks are so arranged as to enclose white diamond spots. Male with front wings only lightly marked and hind wings scarcely marked at all. Under surface much like upper, with a slight yellowish tinge in female.
Great Southern White (Pontia monde or Pieria phileta.) Expanse 2 inches. General color white with a liar-black margin around apical angle of front wings. These margins are wider in the female, in which sex there is a series of marginal spots on the hind wings. Easily known by its large size. | <urn:uuid:193882e2-837d-4e6e-b68c-f9012fd4f16b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oldandsold.com/articles30/butterflies-21.shtml | 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 | 0.963289 | 3,289 | 3.734375 | 4 |
It doesn't stop per se but you have to start doing some actual research in the records vs doing quick searches on subscription databases! ;o)
You see in America you have probably gone to ancestry.com and typed in the family name to find info on your family. However, a more traditional approach would have been to request civil birth, marriage and death records from the state/city they lived in. Another set of records to search here would have been the church records (baptisms, marriages and burials) - with each record providing more clues than their civil record counterparts, i.e. birth certificate vs. baptismal record. Both will usually give the name of the parents and the birthdate. However, the church baptismal records also provides names of Godparents or baptismal sponsors who were typically siblings or parents of the child's parents.
Well, ancestry.com has not really been able to access or provide the depth and breadth of records in other countries as they have here in the US. They are getting better and better all the time. However, the Mormons (the LDS church) have done an outstanding job providing access to all kinds of records through out the world.
For example, they have records for three different towns named Neuhof in Pommerania. Now it is up to you to order the various films and search until you find your ancestor in the records. What religion was the Petsch family? If catholic check those records - If evangelical, check those. You get the idea. Google the town and read up on it. Then google the town name and the word "genealogy or genealogie" the German spelling to see what you find.
Now, perhaps someday at www.familysearch.org
you will simply be able to type in Wilhelm Petsch and immediately locate where he was baptised because those church records for that specific town have already been indexed and added to their overall large database; however, until then (could be tomorrow or it could be 30 years from now) you will have to order the records and view them in your local LDS family history center. Of course, you could travel around the world and view the films in Germany but the expense, red tape, etc. would likely make it too difficult.
Hezekiah - you now have town names and thus your search is now so much easier. Many people never get that lucky to find their ancestors birth towns listed in their marriage records. Believe me, you are one lucky guy because instead of looking for a needle in a haystack you know exactly where to look in that huge haystack.
Of course, many people are just not able to get past the language barrier, etc. in which case you might be advised to hire a professional researcher to help you. How much you get into the whole thing is totally up to you and your overall desire to learn about your family's history.
Best of luck in your search or research to state it more correctly. | <urn:uuid:d6afe8e2-d2d8-41df-b7cd-bef04f5cc699> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.ceeurope.germany.general/58574.1.1.1.1/mb.ashx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972628 | 606 | 1.765625 | 2 |
By Dan Beard
Don't forget Audubon's Day, the 4th of May, and do not fail to turn out in force and put up bird-boxes on every tree, shed, and barn within reach.
After you have made the prairie schooner, the coasting wagon for running down hills, the pushmobile, and the sailing wagon, you will probably grow ambitious and want to try something on a larger scale.
Of course I am writing for boys of all ages and some of the older boys I know would like to take a vacation in a moving camp which possesses the same advantage as the shell of a snail, it is always with you. With a house-wagon you can spend a most delightful vacation, living the out-door life of a gypsy.
If you are too young to go alone on a trip of this kind, I assure you it has fascinations for any normal, healthy man, and you may induce your big brother, your uncle, or even your father to go with you, and they may take my word for it they will never regret the time they spent playing gypsy in a house-wagon.
Those beautiful summer days in the open fields, the free and independent life, the visions of the flapjacks and the aroma of the coffee, will always remain in their memory as a sort of green oasis in the desert of their business life.
You just tell them this, boys, and picture up the delights of the camp-fire and the scenery and all that sort of thing and enlist them on your side. Then show them the plans and directions, telling them how they can do it. There is no denying the fact that living in a house-wagon, combining as it does the delight of camping with the pleasure of traveling, is one of the finest ways in the world of having
fun in the summer, and is within reach of many boys. Of course, there will be necessarily some expenditure, but if economy and forethought are used, and the expenses divided up among the crowd, it will make a cheap outing, and the longer you stay the cheaper will be the rate per day, because practically all expense occurs in the original outlay. After you are on the road or in camp there is little opportunity to spend money, even if you so desire.
For the boys who cannot go on the road there is still plenty of fun. It is not even necessary to spend a cent in order that a small boy may have fun camping in a wagon. Neither is it necessary to own or hire a horse, because the camp need not be movable.
If you have an old wagon in the back lot, a tent may be made over it by erecting a pole at each end, fastening a
line across, and then throwing across it a piece of canvas, carpet, oil-cloth, or any "old thing" which will serve for a protection from the sun. A box under the wagon seat can be used to conceal your camp "duffle" when you are not at home.
The bodies of the house-wagons built in England (Fig. 70) extend out over the wheels sufficiently to give room
for Camp wagon for two bunks, one above the other, set crosswise at the end of the wagon. These wagons also contain a stove, table, and library, and are often fitted up with solid polished mahogany trimmings and furniture; but they cost a great deal more money than, I am glad to say, most American boys have at their command, for the boys with money enough to buy such an outfit are not the kind of boys that would ever enjoy using it. In Jersey there is a man who builds cheaper wagons for the gypsies, but these are also beyond the reach of the ordinary American boy. There are, however, many
readers of this book who can readily procure a horse and wagon for a summer outing. All that is wanted of the horse is a cheerful disposition and strength enough to pull the wagon over the country roads, and all that is wanted of the wagon is a running gear and body sufficiently well put together to practically do away with the chances of breaking down.
Fig. 71 shows an ordinary grocer's covered delivery wagon, the front-end view with the shafts removed to simplify the diagram. It is flanked upon either side by a lean-to tent, the front flaps of which meeting over the roof enclose the wagon and make a big, roomy camp. An arrangement of this kind gives the privacy of an upstairs bedroom to the upper part of the wagon and a roomy down-stairs bedroom as well. Fig. 72 shows a perspective view of a wagon arranged in this manner.
In arranging these side tents for a wagon it is necessary to have an extra piece of canvas to cover the top of the wagon and lap over the ends of the tent cloth, otherwise in stormy weather the rain will come down the sides of the wagon into the wing tents. In the first diagram (Fig. 70), I have shown the tents rolled upon the side of the wagon, and in Figs. 71 and 72, pitched ready for camp duty. In each case there is a flap attached to the top of the wagon which covers the upper edge of the tent; but this flap is not to be found on all covered wagons, and where it is absent it will be necessary to use a top cloth
or tarpaulin sufficiently large to lap over the tent cloth five or six inches.
We will suppose that the only wagon procurable is a common, wooden, spring-less, one-horse farm wagon, as represented by Fig. 73. Fig. 74 shows a top view of it and Fig. 75 the end view of the same. This is not an imaginary wagon, but a real one that I found standing in a country road and from which I made my drawings on the supposition that it was a typical wagon of the kind. The dimensions, as you may see by referring to the diagram (Fig. 75), are thirty-four by one hundred and ten inches, inside measurement. This would make it rather close quarters for two to sleep side by side if the campers were at all restless, but on a pinch four could sleep in the bed of the wagon two with their heads at the tail-board and two with their heads at the dash-board, allowing their feet to overlap each other in the middle; but for comfort there is only room in the bed of the wagon for two men, one to sleep with his head at the dash-board and the other to sleep with his head at the tail-board. It is supposed, however, that our gypsy family will be composed of more than two individuals, and it will be necessary to provide sleeping-room for the others outside of the wagon bed.
First, we must make a top to the vehicle. It is necessary to have clamps of some kind on the side of the wagon to hold the ends of the ribs of the wagon top (Fig. 76). These can be made at the blacksmith-shop, or may be made at home by hammering a piece of sheet iron, or even a piece of tin, into the proper shape to fit the ends of the sticks. You will need on this wagon about five ribs, one at each
end and three in the middle space (Fig. 73). If you are in town where you can get milled lumber, of course it will be better to have flat ribs for your wagon top, but if you are in the country where the farm wagon belongs, you must take your hatchet and go out and cut a number of hickory or ash saplings with which to make the ribs to support the top.
If the saplings are long and strong enough you can put the butt in at one side and bend the top over to the opposite side and then reverse the next one, but this will probably not be practical, and you will get a more symmetrical curve by taking two saplings for each rib. Select two young trees that are about the same dimensions and small enough to be elastic and large enough to be strong.
With your knife or with a draw-knife shave off the small ends of these sticks, as in Fig. 77, and then lash them together, as in Fig. 78. Trim off each butt end, as in Fig. 76, so that they will slide into the lower clamp but not through it. The upper clamp should be larger than the lower one, allowing the sapling to slide down freely through it.
After all the ribs are in place the wagon may be covered with canvas, as were the old pioneer wagons or the prairie schooners of the West. Fig. 79 shows rear end with the pucker string, B, drawn. Fig. 80 shows cover with loose pucker string, BB, and also lash strings in front.
To plan the tents for this or any other wagon, draw a diagram on a scale, as Fig. 83. That is, measure the height of your wagon from the ground to the top of the ribs, which latter are in this case supposed to be five feet six inches above the bed of the wagon. Then take a ruler and pretend that each inch on the ruler represents a foot, and measure the distance on a piece of paper and make a dot for the height of the wagon.
In the same way measure the distance between the wheels and the wagon bed and sketch it in according to the inches on your ruler. Then allow on the ground on each side room for yourself to lie down and be under shelter, and draw an upright line,
D C, twenty inches high; next draw a line from the top of the wagon to C, and continue to the ground. This will represent the top of the tent. The stay-rope from C is fastened to a peg at the back. In this way you can easily plan a tent to fit any sized wagon.
For the one we have been describing it would take a tent nine feet long on top, including the front flap, five feet ten inches high at the longest edge of the side piece, twenty inches high at the smallest end of the side pieces, and five feet on the ground-line of the same piece; the width of the tent would be the length of the wagon, a little over eight feet, but it is not necessary to have a tent this wide unless you have a large party; any ordinary width will answer your purpose.
Fig. 84 shows the pattern of the tent before it is sewed together.
If you have an open wagon with too narrow a bed you may extend the wagon by running girders across each end so that they will protrude on each side, and putting brackets in the middle, one on each side of the wagon, and then fastening planks along each side to these girders, thus extending your wagon over the wheels, as a farmer does his hay wagon, a foot or so on each side and giving more room inside for sleeping, as you may see.
In this case you can sleep crosswise, and you can pack as big a crowd in the bunks as the horse can pull between camps, but for real comfort the side tents will be found best adapted to your purpose, and if more room is wanted a common A tent can be packed in the bed of the wagon and pitched in front of the opening AB (Fig. 71), and used as a dining-room and lounging-tent.
But a group of boys may go off together with no tent except the wagon cover and no bed except the straw piled in the wagon bed and have a most jolly and enjoyable time.
For outdoor kitchen and dining-room, take tin plates, common kitchen knives and forks, a coffee-pot, tea-pot, bacon and salt pork to use in cooking your fish, game, or domestic fowls bought of the farmers. If you are so fortunate as to have access to an old-fashioned attic you may find there a lot of queer cooking utensils formerly used by your ancestors when all the cooking was done before an open
There may be long-handled frying-pans, small iron camp-kettles, Dutch ovens, broilers, toasters, and a lot of other long-handled utensils which are just the thing for a camp-fire, for the open fire of our grandsires was practically an in-door camp-fire.
Don't forget lanterns and candles. These utensils can be hung by hooks overhead or to the sides of the wagon, or put in a long box and strapped to the tailboard or placed under the front seat.
Pockets or small bags sewed to the inside lining of the wagon cover make splendid places to store your toilet articles, combs, brushes, etc. In fact, half the fun of a house-wagon is planning and making little conveniences of this kind. pails for watering the horse, and other articles which will not be harmed by dust, may be hung from the axles of the wagon.
The fascinating feature of this sort of camp life is that, like a snail, you carry your house with you and your tent is always pitched. You can stop your horse alongside the trout brook, on the mountain road, the lake shore, or the spring at the wayside, and all you have to do is to pull out your cooking utensils, build your camp-fire, and you are fixed for a day, a week, or a month, and when you return it will be with a bronzed skin, toughened muscles, good spirits, a voracious appetite, and a supply of health to last you through the winter months.
It may be possible that some of the older people desire a movable camp, and the last diagrams show how to form a box car into a camp. Figs. 85 and 86 show an ordinary box freight-car on a siding. Fig. 85 is the end view; A is the sliding shutter; D is an awning over the doorway; E and E (Figs. 85 and 86) is the stairway, which can be taken up and put in the car; B is the sliding door. Freight-cars can, with very little expense, be made into splendid movable camps. All the duffle may be packed in one and sent to the siding, where your father wishes to camp
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Last modified: August 20, 2012. | <urn:uuid:f02f5c7e-757b-4ab0-a978-d21e98441c3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inquiry.net/outdoor/spring/audubon.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954089 | 3,131 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Healthy life is not separated from healthy eating patterns. With a balanced nutritional intake, no less and no more, you will have the ideal body.
Ideal body, who did not want it? To get it, you need not fumble the money, but enough with the balanced nutrient intake. Balanced nutrition is needed in addition to health, as well as to address shortage and excess weight to form an ideal body.
Principle planning meal preferably with balanced nutrition. Energy from the carbohydrate composition of 60-70 percent, 10-15 percent protein, and 20-25 percent fat. There are no forbidden foods, but that must be considered is the portion of food should not be exaggerated.
But we certainly know, big-city life makes people hard to adapt a healthy lifestyle. Modern lifestyle may be to blame the spread of various diseases, like diabetes. Lack of exercise, often taking a source of high sugars and fats, eat less fiber, has excessive body weight (obesity), the pattern of overeating, high stress levels, as well as genetic factors is the trigger diabetes, which is now infecting even younger ages.
The trick, fill half the plate with vegetables, a quarter of a carbohydrate, and the remaining quarter with side dishes. Because if we eat foods high in fiber, glycemic load will help you eat will be low.
As is known, foods with high glycemic load should strive to make the pancreas release insulin. Also, if your diet contains more fat or carbohydrates, the excess can not be stored in the gut to digest the stomach wall.
Body fat has a large storage capacity, while carbohydrates do not. So if there is excess carbohydrates, is converted into fat in the stomach. And this will increase the risk of diabetes. | <urn:uuid:d5e0e43d-322c-4c51-b03a-6fe4673cf840> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leadsloop.com/category/vegetable | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947051 | 359 | 2.875 | 3 |
Maybe the Mayans saw this coming in their end of the world prophesies. Those who pray at the temple of bacon could see their world crumbling to bacon bits this winter.
A world shortage of pork and bacon next year is “now unavoidable,” a British industry group said in a press release.
Britain's National Pig Association (NPA) says that pig herds in Europe are shrinking. As if that isn’t bad enough, this trend is “being mirrored around the world,” the group says in the release. Drought conditions, especially in the U.S. and Russia, have taken a toll on the price of the grain crops used for animal feed, and world food prices are expected to reach record highs in 2013.
The number of slaughtered pigs could drop by as much as 10 percent in the second half of next year, the NPA says. This would double the price of European pork and pork products.
The NPA is advising supermarkets to pay Britain’s pig farmers a fair price to counter the high price of feed or “risk empty spaces on their shelves next year," said NPA chairman Richard Longthorp.
In the United States, CBS Chicago reports that the price of pork belly has increased to $1.40 a pound in August, up from June’s price of 94 cents a pound.
Read more about the looming bacon shortage in the LA Times. | <urn:uuid:4cc252c4-51e7-4561-9b5c-d7553cc31e3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/09/25/industry-group-bacon-pork-shortage-unavoidable/?test=latestnews | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958615 | 293 | 2.296875 | 2 |
This is 2 in a series of 10 early-season essays.
I think we can all agree that progress is a good thing: forward is preferable to back, and up is a hell of a lot better than down. Progress is all about development, advancement, evolution.
If you examine our history as a planet, you'll notice that a crucial element of progress is the development of authoritative hierarchy, structures that dictate what's better than what. Tribes evolve from hunting and gathering to dividing labor, and then to deciding as a group whose labor is more important. Organisms organize into a tidy vertical line, each looking downward to find out what's for dinner. (And when it comes down to it, the science/creationism debate is just a mild disagreement about whether authority had to be discovered, or if it was was simply there all along.)
Athletics are certainly not exempt from natural laws. Take the sport of basketball, for instance - an American game with profound spiritual cues, owing to its constant upward vertical tendency. In hoops' hundred-or-so year odyssey from Void to Great Sporting Spectacle, it's evolved from curious peach-basket exhibitions to regional friendlies to domineering national oversight. But that's progress for you.
The food chain in Division I isn't too difficult to divine - a peek at next Tuesday's Coaches vs. Cancer curtain-lifter betweenSyracuse
will provide plenty of biological research material. It's a game that will feature one of the widest disparities of on-court talent that you will see this year - figure a Vegas spread of at least 40 points.
In the shining white jerseys, a national powerhouse program that will be opening its defense of a top-conference championship; in glum maroon, a team that has traditionally struggled to find wins in the play-in-game-prone MEAC, a school used to seeing seasons die on the vomit-and-piss colored floor of Richmond's Ashe Center
. The home team will unleash an array of highly-recruited blue chip studs, while the visitors will counter with a collection of trickle-downs, junior college what-ifs and walk-ons.
Need I go on? One sideline will be patrolled by a newly minted Hall Of Famer, a recipient of the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award, a man two years removed from a National Championship... and if you forgot his name, it'll be painted right there on the floor. On the other sideline, some dude named Clifford Reed.
But look more closely. It may not have any impact on what happens on the Carrier Dome court, but there's one very important thing that the two coaches have in common. Both have stayed true to their schools, just like you would to your girl. Or guy.
Very few can match Jim Boeheim's 40-plus years of Orangey service (which began with a walk-on tryout), but Reed is a lifer if ever there was one. As a student-athlete, he knocked down threes in Moore Gym, and graduated on time in 1987. Four years later, after putting in some years at the high school level, he joined the BCC coaching staff. He was named head coach of the Wildcats four years ago, and has struggled valiantly to make a go of it, winning just 35 of his first 100 games. I love this line from his official biography.
Perhaps no one in the league is as cherished for doing more with less than Clifford Reed, Jr.
We're told by our media overlords how to follow college basketball: respect the teams with numbers next to their names, make punchlines of the bottom 50, forget the other 259 exist. When a power-conference team puts together a string of losing seasons, the camera swings away and leaves them in that dark in-between-land - all we see at home is winning, winning, winning. That's far more reality-show than reality.
The constantly-shifting tides of the Top 25 create a false world that breeds false dreams. Our natural instincts urge us to practice upward mobility, but for some (like eager college basketball coaches) this too can be illusory. Sometimes progress is best achieved by standing still, a Zen secret that separates the true Hall Of Famers and the nomadic mercenaries.
My heroes are the coaches who stick around, helped along by the AD's who keep faith in them. They're the ones who become synonymous with the basketball programs at their schools, who come to be regarded as pillars in their communities, who are strong-willed enough to brush off the "he can't coach" taunts during the down years. I have nothing but the deepest respect for folks like Fran O'Hanlon atLafayette
(10 years at a school without scholarships to offer) or Vann Pettaway, who's coming up on 400 wins in 20 up-and-down years atAlabama A&M
. And then there's Jim Phelan, who recently retired fromMount St. Mary's
a year before he made it to a half-century.
Next Tuesday night's game in Syracuse will be tidily completed (many ticketholders will likely leave early), guffawed about for a minute or two in the sports bars, and then quickly moved on from by most folks. Tucked away in a far corner of Hoops Nation, BCC will give Clifford Reed every opportunity to turn the corner with his beloved program, perhaps even achieve a modest legend for himself - I wish him all the best.
And you never know - as any old-time Orangeman will tell you, Syracuse was way down on the basketball food chain until a certain Mr. Boeheim showed up. | <urn:uuid:40e8e2a9-91c1-4bc5-9f96-6b5c8c618f5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.midmajority.com/p/284 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964877 | 1,184 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Minnesota's School Counseling Crunch
Minnesota school children's mental health and academic counseling needs have dramatically increased in the last two years; however, funding and hiring of school counselors has not kept up with this growing demand. Compounding the problem for children is that Minnesota has traditionally lagged behind the rest of the nation in student-to-counselor ratios, ranking 49th out of 50 since the beginning of this decade. As a result, student's academic, social and mental health problems are going unaddressed.
- Minnesota lawmakers have cut state aid to schools by an inflation-adjusted 13 percent since 2003, cutting the number of teachers, administrators, aides and paraprofessionals whose duties now fall to school counselors;
- With all of these cuts, plus layoffs among school social workers and nurses, counselors are often the school official of last resort helping students deal with problems at home and in school that might lead to dropouts;
- Counselors are also responsible for a bigger chunk of administering standardized tests, forcing them to divert their attention from traditional counseling tasks for about 10 school days in metro areas and up to 30 days in rural districts.
"The number of students in my school has doubled to tripled with the same number of counselors. I am now doing more recordkeeping and lunchtime supervision. I was able to meet the needs of students in the building ten years ago. Now there are more students with significant needs and less time to meet those needs."
A survey by Minnesota 2020 and the Minnesota School Counselors Association sought to explore these issues and their consequences. The study found that student mental health care needs have increased in the past 24 months, including interpersonal and family problems, depression, aggressive or disruptive behavior, anxiety and ADHD. About half of counselors say they spend less than 10 percent of their time with students on mental health issues or helping with career guidance. Increased testing and administrative workloads are cutting into counselors' time with students most at risk of dropping out, and while Minnesota's dropout rank is among the middle of the states, it is well below Iowa and Wisconsin.
Morale is also low among counselors, with almost 75 percent saying they did not feel completely supported by their school board.
If school counselors are doing the best with the numbers they have, one has to ask: How many dropouts could be prevented if counselors could spend more time helping students with career and educational decisions? How many students would have mental health problems spotted at a younger age and receive the counseling to work through these issues in appropriate ways? How many students would attend college if they were aware of financial opportunities? How many would advance to their full potential if they had a career plan?
"I asked a group of sixth-graders how many were planning to go to college. One student answered 'I didn't know I could go to college!' It's never even an option for so many students until they hear from an adult that they can do it."
The 21st century workforce requires more students to attain degrees from higher education institutions. School counselors are a linchpin in the process of getting students through high school to college. If Minnesota's leaders are serious about making the state viable for the 21st century, why are the most critical agents of advice and counsel being restricted from students and their families?
- Among the nation's worst
Minnesota's student-to-counselor ratio is among the nation's worst, and has been for years. Since the 2000-01 school year, it has been second to last among all states.
- Mental health care needs are exploding
The need for mental health care is expanding. More than 90 percent of Minnesota counselors say they have helped students deal with interpersonal and family problems, depression, aggressive or disruptive behavior, anxiety and ADHD in the last 12 months. More than 76 percent say student mental health care needs have increased in the past 24 months.
- Testing demands skyrocket
The dramatic increase in administering standardized tests has fallen almost completely to school counselors. Nearly 50 percent of counselors say they spend at least 10 days each year directly involved with federal- and state-mandated testing, and more than 10 percent say they spend at least 30 days or more each year administering tests.
- Budget cutbacks, staff cuts reduce time spent with students
The state has cut aid to schools an inflation adjusted 13 percent since 2003. This has caused schools to drastically reduce staff, which in turn has moved many duties previously performed by teachers, paraprofessionals and secretaries onto school counselors. Instead of helping students get into college or helping them with personal problems, counselors are performing minor duties such as hall monitoring and parking lot supervision.
- Less help for students with mental health problems, career guidance
Because of inadequate staffing and an increase in duties, about half the counselors say they spend less than 10 percent of their time with students on mental health issues. More than half of counselors say they spend less than 10 percent of their time helping students with career guidance.
- More dropouts
Minnesota's dropout rank is among the middle of the states and well below neighbors Wisconsin and Iowa. The lack of counselors results in a greater risk of students dropping out, engaging in dangerous behaviors, receiving less knowledge about how to handle common problems at different developmental levels, and less knowledge about higher education and financial aid.
- Lack of state funding
When asked what factors affect the current state of school counseling, 92 percent point the finger at lack of funding from the state. About 60 percent said they don't get enough support from the Department of Education and 70 percent said there is a lack of support from state elected leaders. | <urn:uuid:f078f264-98a6-411c-8fa2-b8e82a0eb020> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mn2020.org/issues-that-matter/education/minnesota-s-school-counseling-crunch | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973509 | 1,144 | 2.421875 | 2 |
Turkey vultures damage Taunton school roof
Birds peck at rubber membrane on Hopewell Elementary roof
Taunton officials say turkey vultures are to blame for up to $10,000 in damage to the roof of a city school.
Building Superintendent Wayne Walkden says the vultures roost on the roof of Hopewell Elementary School and peck at the rubber membrane. He tells The Taunton Daily Gazette that he counted 60 of the carrion-eating birds on the roof at one point last year.
The vultures have disappeared for the winter, but Walkden fears they will return in the warmer weather and cause more damage.
Getting rid of the birds is complicated. They are federally protected, so can't simply be killed.
Walkden says the city is consulting with environmental groups to figure out ways of discouraging the birds from roosting on the roof.
Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:8ce0e7e2-3590-4342-a834-f5eb9827d737> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/boston-south/Turkey-vultures-damage-Taunton-school-roof/-/9848842/18983494/-/view/print/-/bjth4qz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92169 | 213 | 1.773438 | 2 |
A collection of images by painter and former Principal of Falmouth School of Art, Tom Cross, has been digitised and made available online via the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS). The collection was kindly donated to University College Falmouth by his widow Pat Cross who is keen to ensure the legacy of Tom’s work continues and inspires students and artists alike, following his death in 2009.
Tuart Forest II by Tom Cross, 1999, from the Tom Cross Archive at University College Falmouth © Estate of Tom Cross.
Whilst in the role of Principal from 1976 to 1987, Tom Cross produced many paintings and drawings inspired by Cornwall’s landscapes and seascapes. He felt it was important for students to be taught by practising artists and invited many key characters from the St. Ives art scene to teach at the College. Prior to his time at Falmouth, Tom lived and worked all around the country and abroad, and was influenced by a range of popular styles including French Modernism and Russian Constructivism, making him a key British twentieth century artist.
Blue jug and oysters by Tom Cross, 1991, from the Tom Cross Archive at University College Falmouth © Estate of Tom Cross.
University College Falmouth acquired the Tom Cross Archive in 2010. The archive provides a personal account of the life and work of the artist and former Principal through sketchbooks, diary entries, news-cuttings and exhibition catalogues.
Sketch for Calamansac Wood by Tom Cross, 1987, from the Tom Cross Archive at University College Falmouth © Estate of Tom Cross.
Following the donation of the archive, Pat Cross also donated a substantial collection of Tom’s slides of paintings and drawings, which the University College has uploaded into its database ‘The Image Space’ for learning, teaching and research at University College Falmouth. Out of this collection, Pat has also kindly donated a selection of images for public access via VADS, as she was keen to share the prolific work of her late husband with a wider audience. Pat and the Image Collections Co-ordinator from University College Falmouth made the selection together, based on works which Pat thought were key in Tom’s career and which showed a cross section of the range of work from different periods.
To view images from the Tom Cross Archive on VADS, please see:
A case study on the digitisation of the collection at University College Falmouth has also been made available on the JISC-funded Look-here! project website at:
Doorway in Oman by Tom Cross, 1996, from the Tom Cross Archive at University College Falmouth © Estate of Tom Cross. | <urn:uuid:cd395a6a-b503-4471-acdf-929116e91eb3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vads.ac.uk/news/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966673 | 544 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Repealing Dodd-Frank Would Put the Economy in Danger
Wall Street Reform laid a foundation for financial stability
October 17, 2011
It was only a few years ago that our economy was hit by a financial crisis created by reckless behavior on Wall Street and a lack of consumer protection. It is shocking how quickly some in Washington have forgotten the painful consequences of inadequate regulation—though the millions of Americans who lost their jobs, homes, or retirement savings surely have not.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created a sound regulatory foundation to protect consumers, rein in excessive risk taking on Wall Street, and put an end to "too-big-to-fail" bailouts. The idea that we should return to the rules that were in place before the financial crisis would be laughable if it were not being proposed by Republicans in Congress.
Repealing Dodd-Frank would eliminate the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, giving a free pass to the subprime mortgage lenders who duped millions of Americans into predatory loans that ended in foreclosure. Opponents of the new consumer agency are apparently more concerned with protecting their friends on Wall Street than protecting families buying homes, students borrowing for college, or servicemembers falling prey to financial scams.
Repealing Dodd-Frank would put the entire economy in danger, by taking away the financial regulators' ability to deal with future crises. Lehman Brothers and AIG demonstrated how dangerous the failure of a single financial firm can be to the larger economy—and thus big banks are now required to prepare plans showing how they can be dismantled in an orderly fashion. And if an individual firm does fail, it will not be rescued. Instead, the FDIC will wind it down safely and at no cost to the taxpayer. A repeal would let the banks off the hook, make another AIG bailout possible, and stick American taxpayers with the tab.
Critics say the Wall Street Reform Act is too expensive, but ignore the trillions of dollars our nation lost because of inadequate regulation. They claim, without a shred of evidence, that repealing the law would somehow create jobs, apparently having forgotten the millions of Americans who are still unemployed because the old rules weren't strong enough. Efforts to tear down Dodd-Frank and return to the failed policies of the past are misguided, irresponsible, and dangerous. | <urn:uuid:0c2fec65-564e-4c83-853f-27dfaf753d8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-the-dodd-frank-act-be-repealed/repealing-dodd-frank-would-put-the-economy-in-danger | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952756 | 468 | 2.15625 | 2 |
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Can anyone tell me what you should feed a tree fern with,it is growing in an oak barrel. Feed continuously with liquid seaweed extract added to the daily watering. Bill
Follow Monty and Joe's simple step-by-step video advice to planting up the tree fern, Dicksonia antarctica.springMore advice on growing treesPlanting a bare-root treePlanting a fig treeTraining a nectarine tree against a fencePlanting a small tree
many of them(last year there were 8)any ideas to give it a bit of a boost? Are you feeding your tree fern well? And watering it well? From having seen them growing naturally they like to grow in the shade. Is yours in the shade?
A birch tree makes an ideal focal point and can be grown in a large container. Its silver-white bark and delicate foliage combine with the handsome, soft shield fern and evergreen heuchera leaves for a wonderful woodland combination
the following trees and shrubs grow well: sambucus, laurel, holly, laburnum, syringa, witch hazel...
I have a compost bin that I want to turn in to some sort of 'rockery', it's probably 1.5m tall and the same wide, only problem is it's under trees so is quite shaded, has anyone any ideas what plants could be put in there? I've tried a fern which
Hi all, Last year we moved into to a "tumble down" cottage so the auctioneer called it (after we bought it) !! Which has a 1/2 acre of garden/orchard with tree lines for borders and fields to all sides. The trees have ivy growing all over them which
and nothing else seems to grow... i have been advised to grow a few ferns there but does anyone else have any suggestions for me... Look out for some woodland plants (I just searched for exactly that) as they'll not mind shade, not much water or competing
instant response to my quiery, I look forward to more conversation on this site. In fact here is a quick one. I have an Australian Tree Fern, grows here in Bognor Regis no problem. During the last two winter's the leaves gradually went black
Does anyone know anything about tree ferns?? I have a magnificent example which has always produced loads of large fronds every year, but last year only a few tiny fronds appeared (the trunk is about 4ft tall). I always protect it from frost | <urn:uuid:ad2d12b2-f261-4741-aded-a64c852aab1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gardenersworld.com/search/growing-tree-ferns/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962859 | 536 | 2.171875 | 2 |
Frederick Knight's only album for Stax is one of the loneliest albums ever made. It speaks of failure, the sense of loss, and solitude. Of these things, Knight knew a great deal.
He was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1944, and spent years visiting record companies. Joe Tex's manager, Buddy Killen, helped Knight obtain an advance from Mercury for "Throw the Switch," but it was never released. Capitol issued "Have a Little Mercy," but it went nowhere. Knight looked for a career in New York, but had no luck. Eventually he returned to Alabama to work as an engineer at the Sound of Birmingham Studio. Knight's first hit, "I've Been Lonely For So Long," was written by Posie Knight, his wife, and Jerry Weaver (although they had someone else in mind when they wrote the song).
Released in April, 1972, the single was a unique, almost bizarre, example of Southern soul, its sound gentle and resigned, not over-the-top or too deep. Knight's falsetto suggests Al Green's, but it's more whining, less serene. Unlike most soul songs, the passionate tirade of a preacher is not at the heart of the performance. Instead, Knight's voice knows the value of keeping the peace. No drums were used on the recording session; the rhythms were made by tambourine and a stool hit with slats of wood. There is a silence imbedded even in the percussion work. | <urn:uuid:e7758222-1445-4435-b6a4-dc502ec089da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://popkrazy.com/tags/soul-music | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98466 | 309 | 1.734375 | 2 |
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Your child is having bowel surgery. This operation may involve the small intestine, large intestine (colon), or rectum (where stool collects before leaving the body). Your child’s doctor or nurse will discuss with you the reasons your child is having this surgery. This sheet tells you how to prepare for the surgery and what to expect during it. It also tells you how to help your child recover afterward.
Open surgery is the traditional method. It is done through one incision in the belly (abdomen). This incision is large enough for the surgeon to have a direct view of the bowel.
Laparoscopic surgery (also called laparoscopy) is done through several smaller incisions in the abdomen. A laparoscope (a thin tube with a tiny video camera and a light attached) is inserted through one incision. This gives the surgeon a clear view of the inside of the abdomen. Surgical tools are then put through other small incisions to perform the surgery.
Tell your child’s doctor what medications your child takes. This includes over-the-counter medications, herbs, and supplements. Your child may have to avoid taking certain kinds of medications before the surgery. This will help prevent problems during the surgery.
Carefully follow all instructions you are given to prepare your child for surgery. Below are some common things you might be asked to do the day before surgery:
Give your child nothing but clear liquids. For 12–24 hours before surgery, your child should not eat any solid foods. Give only clear liquids such as broth, gelatin, and clear fruit juice.
Help your child do bowel prep, if needed. A bowel prep may be done for 12–24 hours before surgery. It helps ensure that the bowel is clear of stool. This may involve your child drinking a liquid laxative. Or, you may be asked to give your child an enema (medication given through the anus). If necessary, both methods may be used. Sometimes, a nasogastric (NG) tube will be used to give your child liquids before surgery. This is a flexible tube inserted through your child’s nose down into the stomach. This will be done after your child is admitted to the hospital.
Make sure your child’s stomach is empty the morning of surgery. Do not give your child anything to eat or drink 6–12 hours before surgery. This means no water or even chewing gum. Your child may have been given antibiotic pills to take before surgery. These can be swallowed with small sips of water.
Arrive at the hospital on time. You will be asked to fill out certain forms.
Your child will change into a gown.
An anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist will meet with you. They will discuss the medications that will help your child sleep through the surgery. Be sure to ask any questions you have.
Your child will be given general anesthesia. This puts your child into a deep sleep.
A soft tube called a catheter may be placed into your child’s bladder. This helps drain urine.
The surgery will be performed. Your surgeon will use either the laparoscopic or open surgery method that has been discussed with you.
After the surgery, your child will be taken to the recovery room. This is also called the post-anesthesia care unit, or PACU. Later, your child may be moved to a regular hospital room.
Your child will be attached to monitors that check your child’s breathing, blood pressure, and pulse.
Your child will be given pain medication to stay comfortable.
The catheter used to drain urine will likely be removed shortly after surgery. The IV line will stay in place for a few days.
Your child may be asked to get up and walk around soon after surgery. This helps improve blood flow and prevent blood clots. It also helps the colon return to normal function (if the colon was not removed).
Your child won’t eat or drink anything until the colon (if not removed) begins working again. When this happens, your child will be given a liquid diet. When ready, your child will then return to eating solid foods.
Your child may have been given a stoma (an opening in the abdomen) during the surgery. If so, stoma care will be discussed with you.
Your child may need to stay in the hospital for 7 days or longer.
Bring your child back to the doctor 7 days after surgery, as scheduled.
Being active helps the body heal. But too much activity can harm the healing incision(s). Your child may walk as much as is comfortable. But your child should avoid lifting heavy things or vigorous activity such as running and sports.
Your child may have some bloating, loose stools, and more frequent bowel movements. This is normal after bowel surgery.
Give your child any prescribed medications as instructed.
Follow any other instructions you are given for recovery.
In an infant under 3 months old, a rectal temperature of 100.4°F (38.0°C) or higher
In a child 3 to 36 months, a rectal temperature of 102°F (39.0°C) or higher
In a child of any age who has a temperature of 103°F (39.4°C) or higher
A fever that lasts more than 24-hours in a child under 2 years old, or for 3 days in a child 2 years or older
Your child has had a seizure caused by the fever
Nausea or vomiting
Redness, swelling, or pain around an incision
Trouble passing stool
Abdominal pain that gets worse | <urn:uuid:8610ddb3-d7cf-4888-883e-3898a7d4b602> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.einstein.edu/einsteinhealthtopic/?articleId=88655&articleTypeId=3&healthTopicid=-1&healthTopicName=HealthSheets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937749 | 1,196 | 3.125 | 3 |
(Top left) Atomic arrangement in bilayer graphene, with the two main hopping parameters, and , between carbon orbitals within and between layers, respectively. (Top right) Electronic bands of bilayer graphene. Single-layer graphene features Dirac cones with sharp neutrality points, whereas bilayer graphene exhibits parabolic dispersion as shown. There are two valence and conduction bands, as each layer contributes with one set of bands. (Bottom) Feynman diagrams, such as the example shown, are used to calculate the electron-hole polarizability. This diagram depicts the dynamics of an electron-hole pair, obtained from the convolution of electron (red) and hole (blue) propagators. The calculation gives gives a logarithmically divergent polarizability. | <urn:uuid:97ca30d0-9aae-405c-b62a-0284b3eb2259> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://physics.aps.org/articles/large_image/f1/10.1103/Physics.3.1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920752 | 159 | 2.625 | 3 |
How can we as teachers begin to introduce 3D ideas to young
children? Where do they start? How can we lay the foundations for a
later enthusiasm for working in three dimensions?
Is it possible to remove ten unit cubes from a 3 by 3 by 3 cube made from 27 unit cubes so that the surface area of the remaining solid is the same as the surface area of the original 3 by 3 by 3. . . .
This problem is about investigating whether it is possible to start at one vertex of a platonic solid and visit every other vertex once only returning to the vertex you started at.
A half-cube is cut into two pieces by a plane through the long diagonal and at right angles to it. Can you draw a net of these pieces? Are they identical?
Explore the properties of oblique projection.
Here are four cubes joined together. How many other arrangements of
four cubes can you find? Can you draw them on dotty paper?
Can you mentally fit the 7 SOMA pieces together to make a cube? Can
you do it in more than one way?
The challenge for you is to make a string of six (or more!) graded
You have 27 small cubes, 3 each of nine colours. Use the small
cubes to make a 3 by 3 by 3 cube so that each face of the bigger
cube contains one of every colour.
Find all the ways to cut out a 'net' of six squares that can be
folded into a cube.
Can you make a 3x3 cube with these shapes made from small cubes?
Explore the properties of isometric drawings.
Can you visualise whether these nets fold up into 3D shapes? Watch the videos each time to see if you were correct.
Here are some pictures of 3D shapes made from cubes. Can you make
these shapes yourself?
In this investigation, you must try to make houses using cubes. If
the base must not spill over 4 squares and you have 7 cubes which
stand for 7 rooms, what different designs can you come up with?
Explore the properties of perspective drawing.
The second in a series of articles on visualising and modelling shapes in the history of astronomy.
This is the first article in a series which aim to provide some insight into the way spatial thinking develops in children, and draw on a range of reported research. The focus of this article is the. . . .
A tennis ball is served from directly above the baseline (assume
the ball travels in a straight line). What is the minimum height
that the ball can be hit at to ensure it lands in the service area?
This article, written for teachers, looks at the different kinds of
recordings encountered in Primary Mathematics lessons and the
importance of not jumping to conclusions!
This article (the first of two) contains ideas for investigations.
Space-time, the curvature of space and topology are introduced with
some fascinating problems to explore.
This article explores ths history of theories about the shape of our planet. It is the first in a series of articles looking at the significance of geometric shapes in the history of astronomy. | <urn:uuid:9a89d5a7-6aa2-4510-b966-627bf57eb5f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nrich.maths.org/public/leg.php?code=114&cl=2&cldcmpid=2392 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931753 | 654 | 4.09375 | 4 |
Risks with Being a Multinational Corporation - DOC
Risks with Being a Multinational Corporation document sample
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Questions to the literature used during week-5 Learning to glocalize. Gustavsson, P., Melin, L., Macdonald, S., (1994) In: Advances in Strategic Management, Volume 10B, pp255-288 JAI Press 1. What are the main difficulties that a company faces while implementing Glocal strategy? 2. To what extend do GKN and ESAB Company can be considered as a Glocal Company? 3. According to Gustafsson et al. “The international company must constantly review the advantages of being more global or of being more local in its international activities” 1 Why is this so? 4. What is glocalization? 5. What actually should a producer do in an attempt to glocalize and what are his possible benefits for glocalizing. Combined Questions and Answers: 6. For a multinational company, what does being geocentric mean? 7. How do firms devise srtategies that respond to the conflicting pressures for local responsiveness and integration? 1 Gustavsson et al., Learning to Glocalize, Advances in Strategic Managem ent, 1994, p 256 Questions to the literature used during week-5 Perlmutter, H.V (1969), "The tortuous evolution of the multinational corporation", Columbia Journal of World Business, Vol. The tortuous evolution of the multinational corporation pp.9-18. 1. What are three primary attitudes among international executives toward building a multinational enterprise? 2. What are the main characteristics of Multinational Companies considering the 3 attitudes (Ethnocentric, Polycentric and Geocentric) developed by H. V. PERLMUTTER? 3. What are the Intra-Organizational obstacles toward Geocentric? 4. What are the costs and risks of ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric orientations for the company? 5. To what extent geocentric approach is helpful in Globalizatio n according to Howard V.Perlmutter point of view in the “Tortuous evolution of the multinational corporation”? Questions to the literature used during week-5 The Myth of Globalization. By: Douglas, Susan P.; Wind, Yoram. Columbia Journal of World Business, Winter87, Vol. 22 Issue 4, p19 1. How does a company balance the Standardization Strategy and Differentiation Strategy when implementing marketing strategy? 2. According to Douglas & Wind, what are the external constraints to effective standardisation? 3. Outline factors which trigger unification of markets (development of global products or brands that is standardisation of products and brands)as well as its potential barriers. 4. When does the standardization of products become the most relevant strategy for global firms? 5. What are the constraints in the implementation of an effective standardization? 6. What are the internal and external operational constraints for an effective implementation of a standardization strategy? Questions to the literature used during week-5 The Power of Strategic Integration. By: Burgelman, Robert A.; Doz, Yves L.. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring2001, Vol. 42 Issue 3, p28-38 1. What are the two major challenges that executives face trying to implement a complex -strategic- integration? 2. What is strategic integration? 3. What are the forms of strategic integration? How does the company build a Complex -Strategic- Integration Capability? 4. What are the five forms of strategic integration? Which kind of strategic integration should the company avoided? 5. What are the prerequisites top management should implement to put CSI into action? 6. What are CSI skills? 7. According to this article, there are five types of strategic integration, what are their main properties dimensions and how do companies achieve the optimal one? 8. What are the context and skills in building Complex-Strategic-Integration (CSI) capacity ? Questions to the literature used during week-5 The Multinational Corporation as an Interorganizational Network. By: Ghoshal, Sumantra; Bartlett, Christopher A.. Academy of Management Review, Oct90, Vol. 15 Issue 4, p626, 20p 1. To what extend a single powerful Headquarter is less and less the dominant model for Multinational Companies? 2. What are the types of context in interorganizational interactions? 3. What are the important dimensions of inter-organizational interactions? 4. What is the impact of the density of interactions among the different units of a multinational corporation on the configuration of its resources’ repartition? Questions to the literature used during week-5 Interlinking Questions: 1. What is the key factor to the company success in global marketing strategy? 2. What is the link between the structure strategy of a MNC and the Ethnocentric/ Polycentric attitude of this firm? (Articles 2 and 5 + Philips and Matsushita case) 3. How does a company gain competitive advantage through building up global integration and local responsiveness? 4. What are the difficulties for the transnational companies in the real business world? 5. What is the influence of linkage density on the formation of geocentric organization? 6. How to obtain a balance between the efficiency that lies in being globally competitive and the flexibility that is apparent in a local responsiveness approach? 7. What is the relationship between the corporation learning ability and implementation of complex strategic integration? 8. Is success on international markets actually dependent on the strategy of global products and brands? 9. Why do companies have to change their management structure? What are the factors that force multinational toward Geocentric? 10. What are the key functions that we must have in-between subsidiaries and HQ relation to get competitive advantages? 11. What are the obstacles faced by MNC when it comes to becoming global? 12. What is the role of geocentric man in building a Complex-Strategic-Integration (CSI) capability in a company? 13. Which of the forms of strategic integration should multinational corporations seek? Justify your answer, Also clearly brief the challenges underlying(this) its execution 14. What are the major benefits of decentralization of activities globally from the point of view of risk management? 15. What is the crucial and unique role of top management in a multinational company? 16. How can the Headquarters and Subsidiary relations be improved? What are the key management capabilities? | <urn:uuid:708b4448-ff55-4a2c-85d1-5fe443970f84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.docstoc.com/docs/62379358/Risks-with-Being-a-Multinational-Corporation---DOC | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911049 | 1,330 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Author Dostoyevski's Book
Crime and Punishment
Rodion Raskolnikov is a student living in poverty, struggling to make ends meet. He is obsessed with the idea of great, "extraordinary" people who have the right to overstep human laws in order to make a difference, to help the society. Some are doomed to live miserable lives because they are unable to think and rise above the rules; but others are bigger than that. Determined to find out whether he is one of "the great", Rodion carefully plans and commi...
House of the Dead
House of the dead is a excellent novel by Fydor Dostoyevsky. It shows the true power of being alienated and the extent of misfortunes in a siberian prison. In Dostoyevski writings their seems to be a sence of struggle between prisonmates as well as a sence of freedom. It shows that materialism still is the main focus within the prison. Dostoyevsky with a unique style of descriptive writing allows you to feel remorse for the criminals and their situat...
Notes From Underground
Sometimes translated as "Letters From the Underworld," this short, two-part novella sprang the first existential modernist on the world in 1864. Addressing the reader directly, the "Underground Man," a rude and spiteful government official of about 40, has quit his job and ruminates in his poor apartment, remembering past foolishness and humiliations, and going out only to embarrass friends and abuse a prostitute. He talks much sense about the illusions ...
The Brothers Karamazov
There is many mental ordeal between Ivan and Dimitry and Dimitry and his father Fyodor. The violence in this novel is taken in by Smerdyakov (perhaps mentally ill). Ivan struggles with guilt, feeling that he caused father's death....
Prince Myshkin is an epileptic returning from a sanitarium. On the train, he meets Rogozhin and they become friends. Myshkin visits his distant relatives, the Epanchins, a fashionable family. General Epanchin gives him a job and he fascinates Madame Epanchin and her daughter, Aglaya, with his innocence and awkwardness. The Prince boards with Ganya, a schemer who wants to marry Aglaya for her money. Myshkin pities Natasya; in their innocence they are t...
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky Message Board 9/5/2006 12:30:27 PM
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Dostoyevski has written! | <urn:uuid:a7c8c532-a28a-4bc5-96a8-bcbbf36c5eb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.allreaders.com/topics/Topic_353.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955592 | 558 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Could Friday night be one of those defining moments in the career — and potential presidential candidacy — of Sarah Palin?
Egypt is on the brink of a revolution that could transform American and global foreign policy for years — a crisis that is testing President Obama and makes clear the life-and-death stakes for anyone who might think about replacing him.
And as it happens, Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is scheduled to give a major speech Friday night at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif., in honor of what would have been the 40th president’s 100th birthday.
It’s possible that Ms. Palin could use the opportunity to deliver a broadly conceived foreign policy speech that uses the turmoil in Egypt to advance an understanding of her national security beliefs that goes beyond her use of Twitter messages and Facebook posts.
Mr. Reagan, after all, was a onetime governor (and actor) who had little foreign policy experience when he ran for president. And yet his presidency was in some ways defined by the manner in which he confronted the changing world around him.
The history books recall Mr. Reagan’s confrontations with the Soviet Union, his push to build a missile defense system, his clandestine support of the Contras in Nicaragua, bombings in Libya and the brief war in Grenada.
Ms. Palin has likewise been criticized for a lack of sophistication when it comes to foreign policy. During the 2008 campaign, critics mocked an answer she gave about Russia so much that a phrase from a Saturday Night Live skit — “I can see Russia from my house” — took on an apocryphal resonance.
In her recent book, “America by Heart,” Ms. Palin begins to lay out some of her thinking about foreign policy. She repeatedly talks about the need to view America as “exceptional” and she takes issue with politicians who don’t — and she accuses Mr. Obama of being one of them.
In a chapter about her son’s service in Iraq, Ms. Palin talks about the importance of freedom around the globe, and says she regrets that so many Americans do not fully respect the men and women who fight for freedom on behalf of their country.
But despite those chapters, there is precious little known, specifically, about how Ms. Palin would pursue an American foreign policy were she to be elected president. Most of the publicity surrounding her — often self-generated — has been about her views on social issues or the economy.
How would she handle Egypt? Would she have sided more quickly with the protectors demanding freedom from oppression? Or would she, as some of her conservative rivals said they would have, been wary of an Islamist regime taking over in Egypt once its president, Hosni Mubarak, departs?
So far, Ms. Palin has been mum. She has not sent out a Twitter message about Egypt. She has not posted her thoughts on her Facebook page. There have been no slickly-produced videos distributed through the Internet on the subject.
Which brings us back to Friday’s dinner.
Sponsored by Young America’s Foundation, the dinner does not start until 9 p.m. East Coast time, and Ms. Palin may not start speaking until nearly two hours into it. That will diminish the likelihood that her remarks will be widely viewed.
But the site, and the timing of the speech coming during the height of the events in Egypt, could increase the amount of coverage that Ms. Palin’s remarks receive. (Recently, Ms. Palin has given speeches to large groups that were completely closed to the press.) And the subject of the dinner and her speech is freedom — the very subject of the anger among protectors in Egypt.
The group says Ms. Palin will “reflect on the seminal speech by President Reagan, ‘Time for Choosing,’ that discussed the risks and rewards before an America at a crossroads in the early 1960s. Governor Palin will draw parallels to today while calling for young people to continue the Reagan revolution into the future.”
On the group’s Web site, Ms. Palin is quoted as saying:
I am very excited to have been selected to address Young America’s Foundation’s Reagan 100 dinner. Young America’s Foundation has been sharing the values of President Reagan with young people for more than 40 years, and there is no organization more committed to preserving freedom’s future.
It is not clear yet whether Ms. Palin wants to run for president in 2012, or whether she will spend the next several years writing books, giving speeches, appearing on television and serving as a kind of Tea Party queen- and kingmaker.
But if she wants to challenge Mr. Obama, its possible that the speech Friday night could serve as an early opportunity to define how she would differ when it comes to the world outside of America’s borders. | <urn:uuid:4ce10d9c-e135-42a0-aae8-ed7df1640a07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/could-palin-use-speech-to-end-silence-on-egypt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973927 | 1,013 | 1.695313 | 2 |
The General Catechetical Directory, the 1971 document, in section 97, reviewed these six tasks. Included in these tasks is “drawing attention” to the many challenges to the Christian faith. I think many Catholics demur at this point, but I don’t think we Catholics have anything to fear from being honest about our obstacles and challenges.
175. So as to respond to the more profound needs of our time, adult catechesis must systematically propose the Christian faith in its entirety and in its authenticity, in accordance with the Church’s understanding. It must give priority to the proclamation of salvation, drawing attention to the many difficulties, doubts, misunderstandings, prejudices and objections of today. It must introduce adults to a faith-filled reading of Sacred Scripture and the practice of prayer. A fundamental service to adult catechesis is given by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by those adult catechisms based on it by the particular Churches. In particular, the tasks of adult catechesis are:
– to promote formation and development of life in the Risen Christ by adequate means: pedagogy of the sacraments, retreats, spiritual direction;
– to educate toward a correct evaluation of the socio-cultural changes of our societies in the light of faith: thus the Christian community is assisted in discerning true values in our civilization, as well as its dangers, and in adopting appropriate attitudes;
– to clarify current religious and moral questions, that is, those questions which are encountered by the men and women of our time: for example, public and private morality with regard to social questions and the education of future generations;
– to clarify the relationship between temporal actions and ecclesial action, by demonstrating mutual distinctions and implications and thus due interaction; to this end, the social doctrine of the Church is an integral part of adult catechesis;
– to develop the rational foundations of the faith: that the right understanding of the faith and of the truths to be believed are in conformity with the demands of reason and the Gospel is always relevant; it is therefore necessary to promote effectively the pastoral aim of Christian thought and culture: this helps to overcome certain forms of fundamentalism as well as subjective and arbitrary interpretations;
– to encourage adults to assume responsibility for the Church’s mission and to be able to give Christian witness in society:
The adult is assisted to discover, evaluate and activate what he has received by nature and grace, both in the Christian community and by living in human society; in this way, he will be able to overcome the dangers of standardization and of anonymity which are particularly dominant in some societies of today and which lead to loss of identity and lack of appreciation for the resources and qualities of the individual.
Note the first task listed involves the spiritual life. Not just the liturgy, but retreats and spiritual direction. I’d have to ask how much of this my parish provides. What about yours? Is it a priority for catechetical ministry?
Do we look for the “true values” in contemporary society as the Church here suggests? Or is it always about circling the wagons? Why is this important? Lay people live in that world. Do clergy who rail continuously against the world realize much of their audience is connected, favorably inclined, dependent upon, or even self-identified with their lives outside of the Church?
What about that last point, that it is the laity who bear responsibility for the mission of Christ in the world? Does it seem our current crop of outspoken bishops understand this?
What about your observations? Anything to say about either of these or about the other points: morality, social justice, and those “rational foundations of faith”? | <urn:uuid:2835f72c-a626-4a9a-a1b4-d3e372c8e12e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://catholicsensibility.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/gdc-175-general-and-particular-tasks-of-adult-catechesis/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=4b5b0dc21b | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959508 | 772 | 2.5 | 2 |
ON THIS PAGE: You will read about your child’s medical care after cancer treatment is finished and why this follow-up care is important. To see other pages in this guide, use the colored boxes on the right side of your screen, or click “Next” at the bottom.
After treatment for AML ends, talk with your child’s doctor about developing a follow-up care plan. This plan may include regular physical examinations and/or medical tests to monitor your child’s recovery for the coming months and years. All children treated for cancer, including AML, should have life-long follow-up care.
Based on the type of treatment your child received, the doctor will plan what examinations and tests are needed to check for long-term side effects, such as problems with the heart, lungs, or growth hormones, the development of a learning disability, and the possibility of a secondary cancer. This is a new type of cancer that develops after treatment for the first cancer. While this risk is generally low, your child should be closely monitored for their entire life for secondary cancers. Your child’s doctor can recommend the necessary screening tests. Follow-up care should also address your child’s quality of life, including any developmental or emotional concerns. Learn more about childhood cancer survivorship.
The child’s family is encouraged to organize and keep a record of the child’s medical information. That way, as the child enters adulthood, he or she has a clear, written history of the diagnosis, the treatment given, and the doctor’s recommendations about the schedule for follow-up care. The doctor’s office can help you create this. This information will be valuable to doctors who care for your child during his or her lifetime. ASCO offers cancer treatment summary forms to help keep track of the cancer treatment your child received and develop a survivorship care plan once treatment is completed.
Children who have had cancer can also enhance the quality of their future by following established guidelines for good health into and through adulthood, including not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, eating a balanced diet, and participating in regular physical activity. Talk with the doctor about developing a plan that is best for your child’s needs. Learn more about the next steps to take in survivorship .
To continue reading this guide, choose “Next” (below, right) with a list of questions you may want to ask your child’s doctor. Or, use the colored boxes located on the right side of your screen to visit any section. | <urn:uuid:f55f7891-cff3-4afc-9e23-7557f854fd39> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cancer.net/print/19061 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959813 | 532 | 2.25 | 2 |
On Eve of Nuclear Security Summit, Faster, Broader Global Effort Needed to Secure All Nuclear Materials in Four Years
Would Greatly Reduce the Chances of a Terrorist Nuclear Attack
April 12, 2010
As more than 40 heads of state convene in Washington for President Obama's nuclear security summit, a new report released today finds that despite significant progress, the world is not yet on track to meet the Administration's goal of securing all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials within four years.
To meet the four-year objective President Obama set in Prague in April 2009, global leaders must redouble efforts following the upcoming nuclear security summit, shifting the global nuclear security effort onto a faster and broader trajectory, according to Securing the Bomb 2010, which can be found at www.nti.org/securingthebomb
"Nuclear terrorism remains an urgent danger to world security, and securing nuclear weapons and materials within four years would dramatically reduce the risk," said Associate Professor Matthew Bunn of Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom, the report's author. "Sustained White House leadership will be needed to overcome complacency and convince policymakers around the world to act. We need to hit the ground running in translating summit commitments into concrete actions on the ground to secure these stockpiles and keep them out of terrorist hands."
Securing the Bomb 2010 highlights impressive progress: the United States has helped remove all highly enriched uranium (HEU) from nearly 50 facilities around the world; security and accounting upgrades have been completed at 210 of the weapons-usable nuclear material buildings in Russia and Eurasia of an estimated total in the range of 250; 19 countries have removed all weapons-usable nuclear material from their soil - with four countries having done so between President Obama's Prague speech and early 2010.
Still, the threat looms large. Terrorists are seeking nuclear weapons, and the materials needed to make them are still housed in hundreds of buildings and bunkers in dozens of countries -- many in urgent need of better security. There have already been 18 documented cases of theft or loss of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, along with incidents that provide striking evidence of security weaknesses -- including a 2010 break-in by unarmed peace activists at a Belgian base where U.S. nuclear weapons are reportedly stored and a 2007 armed attack on a South African site housing hundreds of kilograms of HEU.
According to the report, the greatest risks are in Pakistan, whose small and heavily guarded stockpile confronts immense threats from both insiders theft and outsider attack; Russia, which has the world's largest nuclear stockpiles in the world's largest number of buildings and bunkers, security has improved dramatically but still has important weaknesses, and which faces substantial threats, particularly from potential insider thieves; and HEU-fueled research reactors around the world, which often have limited stocks of nuclear material, but generally have the weakest security measures in place.
Securing the Bomb 2010 calls for a greater sense of urgency, continuous engagement from Presidents and Prime Ministers, and clear metrics that give focus and traction to the global project.
"We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the pace of cooperation has accelerated. This report shows significant progress, but spells out clearly the required imperatives of a global effort," said former Senator Sam Nunn, Co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which commissioned the report. "It makes clear that we need worldwide understanding of the threat, the scope and urgency of the essential work, as well as clear goals and accountability for progress. The Obama-led nuclear security summit is extremely important in terms of putting a spotlight on the threat and the required global response."
As part of meeting the President's important four-year goal of securing nuclear weapons and materials globally, the report argues, it may be possible to cut in half the number of countries with weapons-usable nuclear material and all remaining countries could have clear and well-enforced rules requiring operators to protect nuclear stocks against a robust set of insider and outsider threats.
While these gains are possible, they can be accomplished only by expanding and accelerating current efforts. The report recommends several essential steps:
- Build a sense of urgency. Only if policymakers around the world become convinced that nuclear theft and terrorism are real and urgent threats to their countries' security, the report argues, will the four-year nuclear security effort succeed. To make that case, the report calls for joint threat briefings, outreach to intelligence agencies, nuclear terrorism exercises, and realistic tests of a country's ability to defeat insider and outsider threats. The nuclear security summit is an important step in building this sense of urgency.
- Upgrade nuclear security to higher standards in more facilities in more countries. Achieving effective security for all nuclear material worldwide will require going well beyond the former Soviet Union and Pakistan, and ensuring security measures will be effective against a broad range of insider and outsider threats. The four-year deadline cannot be met with lengthy negotiations for U.S.-funded upgrades at every site - it will be essential to combine U.S.-funded upgrades with steps countries are convinced to take on their own. These efforts must include not just equipment but training, exchange of best practices, steps to strengthen security culture, and measures designed to ensure security will be maintained for the long haul.
- Take a broader approach to reducing the number of sites where nuclear weapons, plutonium and HEU exists. Consolidating sites is essential; it can be cheaper, faster, and more effective to close down a nuclear site than to secure it. The four-year effort should seek to consolidate more types of nuclear material, using different incentives and a broader range of policy tools.
- Work to ensure that countries implement and enforce effective nuclear security regulations. These rules should include realistic testing against insider and outsider threats.
- Forge effective global nuclear security rules. The United States should work with other key nuclear countries to seek a common understanding of the essential elements that have to be in place for nuclear security and accounting systems to be "appropriate" and "effective" as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1540, and help countries around the world to put those essential elements in place.
- Broaden best practices. Global leaders should help countries with nuclear materials exchange best practices and strengthen nuclear security culture.
- Create mechanisms that hold countries accountable. Countries participating in this effort should build an international understanding of the work to be done, as a baseline for judging progress of the four-year effort. Each country should designate one key official to be responsible for their states efforts and to confer with officials from other countries and international organizations.
- Provide leadership. Only intense and continuous engagement from Presidents and Prime Ministers will overcome a maze of obstacles posed by complacency, secrecy, political disputes, sovereignty concerns, and bureaucratic obstacles.
- Fund this effort like the indispensable national security effort that it is. The sums spent by the U.S. government to lock down nuclear materials worldwide are a tiny fraction of the budgets of the Departments of Defense, Energy and State. Nuclear security, the report argues, is affordable. Congress should ensure that steps to sharply reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism are not slowed by lack of money.
"The challenge is large and complex, but it is a finite task; it is doable," said Professor Bunn. "Our biggest obstacle is not complexity; it's complacency."
Securing the Bomb 2010 is the only available source for "one-stop shopping" on all aspects of the effort to secure nuclear weapons and materials worldwide. Since NTI first commissioned this annual report from the Managing the Atom Project in 2002, the report and its recommendations have increased public awareness of the nuclear terrorism threat and helped spur increased government action to reduce nuclear dangers.
The Project on Managing the Atom, based at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is Harvard's principal research group focusing on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. NTI is a Washington-based non-profit organization, focused on reducing the threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials.
For more information about this publication please contact the Belfer Center Communications Office at 617-495-9858.
For Academic Citation: | <urn:uuid:940b2ecf-aebe-4c8c-9a0b-c088cc9ec04c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/20069/on_eve_of_nuclear_security_summit_faster_broader_global_effort_needed_to_secure_all_nuclear_materials_in_four_years.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fby_type%2Fbook%3Fgroupby%3D1%26page%3D4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941856 | 1,673 | 2.203125 | 2 |
U.S. trade deficit narrowed in 12.1 per cent in April-June period
A South Korean bank clerk works next to bundles of U.S. banknotes at the head office of the Korea Exchange Bank in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 3, 2011. (AP Photo/ Lee Jin-man)
Published Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:35AM EDT
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. current account trade deficit narrowed in the April-June period, pushed lower by an increase in American exports and cheaper oil imports.
The Commerce Department said Tuesday that the deficit in the current account decreased 12.1 per cent to $117.4 billion in the second quarter. That's down from a deficit of $133.6 billion in the January-March quarter, which had been the largest in three years.
The current account is the broadest measure of trade. It tracks the sale of merchandise and services between nations as well as investment flows. Economists watch the current account as a sign of how much the United States needs to borrow from foreigners.
Many economists predict it will widen again in coming quarters. A global slowdown has dampened demand of for U.S. exports. And oil prices are rising again, in part because of increased Middle East tensions.
Europe's debt crisis has pushed much of the region into recession. The region accounts for about one-fifth of U.S. export sales. And other major export markets, including China, India and Brazil, have experienced slower growth.
The current account deficit hit an all-time high of $800.6 billion in 2006. It then shrank after a deep recession reduced U.S. demand for foreign goods by a greater amount than U.S. export sales were dampened. The trade gap began widening again after the recession ended in June 2009.
The economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 1.7 per cent in the April-June quarter and job growth has been disappointing.
The Federal Reserve last week said it will purchase an average of $40 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities until the economy shows significant improvement. The goal of the program is to lower long-term interest rates and encourage more borrowing and spending. The Fed also said it plans to keep its benchmark short-term interest rate near zero until mid-2015.
In the April-June quarter, deficit in goods sold shrank to $185.8 billion, down from a deficit of $194.3 billion in the first quarter. U.S. exports rose 1.4 per cent to $394.1 billion. Sales of farm products, led by a sharp rise in exports of soybeans, drove exports higher. Imports fell 0.5 per cent to $579.9 billion, reflecting a drop in petroleum imports.
The U.S. surplus in services increased 1.3 per cent to $46.5 billion. The gain was due to stronger U.S. overseas sales of financial services, business and professional services and higher royalties to U.S. companies.
The surplus in investment income increased 0.8 per cent to $184.6 billion in the second quarter, reflecting higher interest and dividend payments earned by U.S. investors on their overseas holdings.
Net unilateral transfers, a category, which includes foreign aid payments, rose 2.7 per cent to $33.6 billion in the second quarter.
The various changes left the current account deficit at 3 per cent of the total economy, down from 3.5 per cent in the January-March quarter.
Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, said the 3 per cent level for the current account deficit was less than half the peak hit in late 2005 when the deficit represented 6.5 per cent of the overall economy.
He predicted that the deficit will decline modestly in 2013 as exports receive a boost from a weaker U.S. dollar which makes American products cheaper and more attractive in overseas markets. | <urn:uuid:70001cdd-c8d0-4718-a093-f58e5442ac70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/u-s-trade-deficit-narrowed-in-12-1-per-cent-in-april-june-period-1.960891 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958582 | 815 | 1.679688 | 2 |
It's incredibly frustrating when you work really hard to take care of a plant, but no matter what you try its leaves turn yellow. Before you chuck it away in frustration, try and figure out what may have happened. If you can figure that out, you may be able to restore it to its former magnificence.
Leaves can turn yellow if the temperature suddenly drops, like with a sudden frost. Prevent this from happening by either transplanting your plants indoors before the cold weather season arrives, or by providing your outdoor plants with adequate cover during the winter months.
Conversely, leaves can also turn yellow in cases of intense heat and too much direct sun. The leaves will respond by weakening and yellowing. Move them to an area where they can receive more shade and partial sun.
Overwatering also causes yellowing. The roots of the plant become overwhelmed with water, and the leaves react by turning yellow. Ease up on the water if you suspect this is the case. Make sure you're giving your plant the adequate amount of water for its variety.
On the flip side, a plant's leaves can turn yellow when it doesn't receive enough water. The stems don't have the strength to support the leaves, and it will start to shed them.
A condition called decline occurs when there's a sudden and rapid yellowing of leaves follow by an intense shed. This can be caused by a plant living in one environment, like a nursery, and suddenly being brought into another environment, like your home. There's nothing you can do except continue to give the plant the living conditions it requires. The yellowing leaves are done for, but the new ones should grow in fine.
If you buy a plant at full bloom, it may already have reached its peak, so your yellowing plant may have passed its prime. Buy plants in bud, not bloom.
If you've had the plant for a while, and none of the above conditions apply, you may have a pest or disease problem. | <urn:uuid:c9d61240-64c2-4cb3-b937-5882592e898d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ask.com/explore/what-does-it-mean-if-my-plants-have-yellow-leaves | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977122 | 409 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Knee joint pain is a common problem which is experienced by many people across the globe. There is no doubt that knees serve a lot of functions. Knees are essential for movement. As a matter of fact, there is no one factor that causes the knee joint pain. Some of the common causes of knee joint pain include arthritis or joint inflammation, gout or increase in uric acid deposits, baker cyst, bursitis, chondromalacia, and pellegrini stieda syndrome.
Now that you know some of the major reasons why your knee aches, it would be important to consult your doctor to get the right treatment. However, there are several ways to treat an inflamed knee. For instance, Orthovisc is one of the most popular treatment options for people suffering from joint or knee pain that occurs mainly due to osteoarthritis. If you are among those people suffering from severe knee pain then this hyaluronan injection can help to restore the cushioning as well as lubricating properties within the joint fluid. It acts quite similar to the synovial fluid which is a naturally occurring substance present within the joints.
orthovisc is available in injection form and is directly administered into the knee joints. The injections are offered for three to four weeks and given weekly. But, there are some factors like medical history, age etc that are taken into account to determine the accurate dosage for any person. For the best results, it is recommended to take the prescribed dosage. Expert consultation is considered significant. It is important to provide disclosure about the medicines including herbal products, vitamin supplements and over the counter medications that one must be taking.
Orthovisc is mainly administered when patients gain no relief from the orthopedic pain while taking any ordinary pain killers. This injection has a combination of liquefied hyaluronan. When the hyaluronan ingredients drop in the joints, it supplements the Orthovisc injections to restore the usual activities of the body and also strengthen joints thereby curing the knee pain. People having allergy with egg and bird products must discuss all factors with the doctors before using this medication. | <urn:uuid:a6012f9a-34f0-4b99-a53d-a829a612ed55> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://medicine.ezinemark.com/know-the-best-way-to-get-rid-of-joint-pain-7d3534a220ff.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950217 | 437 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Hey Guys, Can you have multiple domain registrars? for example, register.com and dnsmadeeasy.com both hosting your A and Cname records simultaneously??
You are not understanding the difference between a DNS service provider and a registrar, probably because most registrars will also act as DNS service providers if you want/pay them to.
A registrar takes your $10/year or whatever and makes sure that your domain ends up in the giant list of all domains. So if you pay GoDaddy to register "example.com", GoDaddy takes your $10 and sends $8 of it to Verisign (the operator of the .com top-level domain) and asks Verisign to please tell the world that example.com exists, that you are the "owner", and that a small group of DNS servers will be responsible for telling the rest of the world how to communicate with example.com.
That's it, the registrar's job is done, other than updating the WHOIS contact database if you move, change DNS service, or transfer the domain.
Your DNS provider(s) run the machines that are listed with the .com domain as the authoritative sources of information about your domain.
You can be your own DNS provider. You can pay someone else to be your DNS provider; many registars do this for free as part of their yearly charge, but it's not technially part of a registrar's job.
So you could have register.com register your domain - let's say they will provide you with 2 DNS hosts as part of their package. You set up your domain information with them to say that you're going to have four authoritative servers for your domain - register.com's 2 nameservers, and 2 from dnsmadeeasy.com. You would then set up all of your A and CNAME records on register.com's systems, and set up their systems to allow a "zone transfer" to the nameservers for dnsmadeeasy.com You would set up dnsmadeeasy.com to provide "secondary" or "slave" DNS service, pulling their information from the master copy at register.com.
In this scenario, you have one registrar - register.com. You have two DNS service providers - register.com and dnsmadeeasy.com. Each DNS server would act as a "failover" for the others - although I suspect it's more likely that your host or your network connection will fail.
You can have as many DNS providers as you like, but the domain name itself can only be registered with a single organization.
You can only have one registrar per domain name.
That is the company that will have the contract with the relevant TLD registry for the provision of your domain name.
You could have multiple independent domain hosters for your domain, but you had better be damned sure they always have the same information in their copy of the domain, or things will break.
Usual practise is to have one primary hoster, and then use secondary hosting too. The secondary hoster would need to be able to "zone transfer" the zone from the primary hoster. | <urn:uuid:b9c99df2-7abf-42bd-879f-19257d28e311> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://serverfault.com/questions/161720/can-you-have-multiple-dns-registrars | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9469 | 661 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Lectures: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session
Dynamics of Complex Systems is an introduction to theoretical studies of systems of many interacting components, the individual dynamics of which may be simple, but the collective dynamics of which are often nonlinear and analytically intractable. Format includes both pedagogical lectures and round-table reviews of current literature. Subjects of interest include: problems in natural science (e.g., geology, ecology, and biology) where quantitative theory is still in development; problems in physics, such as turbulence, that demonstrate powerful concepts such as scaling and universality; and modern computational methods for the simulation and study of such problems. Discussions will be in context of contemporary experimental or observational data.
This seminar will focus on dynamical change in biogeochemical cycles accompanying early animal evolution -- beginning with the time of the earliest known microscopic animal fossils (~600 million years ago) and culminating (~100 million years later) with the rapid diversification of marine animals known as the "Cambrian explosion." Recent work indicates that this period of intense biological evolution was both a cause and an effect of changes in global biogeochemical cycles. We will seek to identify and quantify such coevolutionary changes. Lectures and discussions will attempt to unite the perspectives of quantitative theory, organic geochemistry, and evolutionary biology.
Differential Equations (18.03), Physics II (8.02)
Students are expected to come to each class prepared to discuss the readings. At the culmination of the course, students present recent papers in the subject to their classmates.
Grading for this course is based 100% on class participation and presentations. | <urn:uuid:35f5b81a-8032-4851-8ecf-9f95efc7fec2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/earth-atmospheric-and-planetary-sciences/12-517-dynamics-of-complex-systems-biological-and-environmental-coevolution-preceding-the-cambrian-explosion-spring-2005/syllabus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914711 | 340 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Posted by Richard B. Hoppe on May 25, 2004 04:10 AM
Since I seem to be on a roll, I thought I’d take a look at a claim that’s made frequently by ID proponents, namely that archaeology uses a design detection procedure akin to that allegedly formalized by Dembski’s Explanatory Filter. (Gary Hurd: Feel free to interject/comment/correct at will.)
Review of the Explanatory Filter
Recall that the Explanatory Filter classifies explanations into just three mutually exclusive kinds: regularity (or law), chance, and design. It employs a decision tree to determine which explanation is appropriate for a given phenomenon, with the decisions determined at each node in the tree by a probability estimate. The first decision to be made is whether a given phenomenon is best explained as a “regularity” — an inevitable consequence of natural law(s). Such are high-probability events, and if the probability of the phenomenon is high, the decision is “regularity” and the decision process terminates.
The second decision is whether the phenomenon is due to chance. One estimates the probability of occurrence of the phenomenon, where the events or parts comprising the phenomenon are assumed to be mutually independent, the phenomenon is assumed to be a discrete combinatorial object (in space for structures or sequence for processes), and the PDF is assumed to be uniform. If the probability of spontaneous aggregation of the phenomenon is “intermediate,” which apparently means somewhere between 1 in 10^150 and the near vicinity of 1.0 (1.0 being the best-of-all-possible-worlds “regularity” probability and 1 in 10^150 being Dembski’s “Universal Probability Bound”), one attributes the phenomenon to “chance.”
If the phenomenon is “specified” and if its probability of occurrence (estimated as above) is less than 1 in 10^150, we are to attribute it to design. “Specified” means (roughly) that the phenomenon displays a pattern that we recognize. For example, the specification of the eubacterial flagellum is an “outboard rotary motor” (No Free Lunch, p 289). I will leave (nearly) unremarked Dembski’s assertion that
Specification is never a problem. The irreducibly complex systems we consider, particularly those in biology, always satisfy independently given functional requirements (see section 3.7). … This is not to say that for the biological function of a system to constitute a specification humans must have independently invented a system that performs the same function. … At any rate, no biologist I know questions whether the functional systems that arise in biology are specified. (p. 289)
I will here note only that in section 3.7, which is slightly less than 2 pages long, Dembski manages to use “specified” (or “specification”) in at least 7 different senses and settles on none of them. No wonder no biologist would question it — one doesn’t know what “it” is! Since for Dembski “specification” reduces to ‘this system has a known function,’ then “specified complexity” reduces to ‘this system is very very very VERY unlikely to have spontaneously aggregated.’
The IDist claim about archaeology
Dembski and other IDists claim that a number of “special” sciences like SETI, forensics, and archaeology employ an informal “pretheoretic” form of the Explanatory Filter to ascertain whether a given phenomenon is due to natural causes (regularity), chance, or (human) design. For example, in Reason & Revelation we read
Intuitively, we know that design cannot be a concept that is foreign to science because there are disciplines of a scientific nature that seek to tease apart natural causes from intelligent agency. Dembski is not proposing a change in the way that these scientists work. All he has done is to formalize the process that they (and many of us) already use, and to show that the process can detect design in a reliable fashion.
One such discipline is forensic science. A typical task of forensic investigators is to determine the cause of death: Was it natural or suspicious? Should they be looking for a person—an agent—who caused this death? Another science is archaeology, which on a regular basis must distinguish genuine artifacts from stones, sticks, and other items that so often clutter excavation sites. One of the best-known examples of design detection is SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). (Bolding added)
(I won’t remark on the groundlessness of the “reliability claim here.) From the Institute for Christian Teaching:
This [Dembski’s The Design Inference] is all very exciting to the “design crowd” because complexity and specification are “testable” and “quantifiable” characteristics, and Dembski has established an objective method for testing structures, processes, etc. to determine if they are the result of law, chance, or design. No longer are the defenses, “You just need more imagination” or “You believe in the ‘God of the Gaps’”, tenable, because the invocation of design is no longer a response to our ignorance, or our aesthetic judgment, or our biases. What we have now is a scientifically defensible basis for saying “With current knowledge, we have shown that unintelligent causes are unable to produce this artifact.” This isn’t really “new” science, either. It borrows from the same kind of work that goes on constantly in archaeology, forensic science, etc. (Bolding added)
Finally, from Dembski himself:
There does in fact exist a rigorous criterion for discriminating intelligently caused from unintelligently caused objects. Many special sciences (e.g., forensic science, artificial intelligence, cryptography, archaeology, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) already use this criterion, though in pretheoretic form. I call it the complexity-specification criterion. (No Free Lunch, p. 6; Bolding added)
and later in the same book
Intelligent design is a scientific research program that examines the role of specified complexity in nature. Since many special sciences already employ specified complexity as a criterion for detecting design (e.g., SETI and archaeology) there can be no principled objection to teaching intelligent design within a science curriculum, and particularly whenever the origin and history of life comes up in grades K-12. (NFL, p. 314; Bolding added)
What do archaeologists actually do?
I took an undergraduate degree in anthropology back in the dark ages and was required to take some ‘bones and stones’ in the course of doing that degree. I deem myself to be an informed layman about such matters: I can read the literature and interpret it with some small effort. I don’t recall from those courses or my subsequent reading that a “pretheoretic” version of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter was used then or now. My most vivid memory, in fact, is of a junior faculty member sitting on a table in front of the lecture hall knapping stone tools while lecturing about them. That is, he demonstrated how the tools were manufactured; he didn’t estimate their probablity of occurrence, considering them as spontaneously aggregated discrete combinatorial objects, against a uniform probability distribution.
Most interesting about his demonstrations were the several products. Since he started from scratch (a nodule of flint), when he finished there was a nice projectile point, but there was also characteristic debris — the flint core off which he had hammered several large flakes that later became the points he knapped, some unsuitable flakes, and a slew of chips and pieces of varying sizes, ranging from largish chips produced by percussive blows to get the initial flake into some kind of rough shape, to the tiny chips produced by the final pressure flaking (using a deer antler) to finish the sharp edges of the point. (Incidentally, I’m told that chips show a characteristic microscopic pattern on the struck edge created by a percussive blow that’s different from that caused by pressure flaking.)
Now, one can obviously identify the final product, a projectile point, as “designed” by its shape, referring it to any number of instances of known human manufacture. But since the manufacturing process left characteristic debris, one could also say something about how the point was produced — one is not restricted to the object itself. A year ago I found a projectile point manufacturing site on a hillside at the edge of a newly plowed field. I found no points or cores, but I found a concentrated area thick with the kinds of chips produced by the manufacture of points from flakes. Did I do a probability analysis to infer that they were produced by a human? Nope. I compared my observation of the distribution of chips (yes, I picked up as many as I could find to sort and count them!) to the known distribution of debris produced by manufacturing projectile points from good Mercer flint, a straightforward distributional comparison process.
Consider the most primitive known tools manufactured by hominids, the Oldowan (sometimes Olduwan) pebble tool assemblages from the Olduvai Gorge explored for decades by the Leakeys. There are hammerstones, cores, and flakes associated with the manufacturing of Oldowan assemblages, as well as choppers and scrapers. That is, one finds the tools used to manufacture flake tools (hammerstones) and the two main components left by the manufacturing process, the flakes and the cores from which the flakes were struck. There’s no probability calculation involved; human design is inferred from evidence left by the manufacturing process.
Experimental archaeologists have done a variety of studies that provide information on characteristic distributions of debris types, characteristic usage wear patterns, and the relative utilities of tools for various functions, as for example testing unretouched flakes against bifacial hand axes as large-animal butchering tools. Again, there’s no probability calculation to eliminate regularity and chance in order to infer design, there is a systematic study of the artefacts and their properties and context in order to make inferences about early hominid tool manufacture. Microscopic examinations of tool edges yield information about use, as well. There is even a mathematical model that explains the consistency of the Pleistocene Levallois stone tool assemblage across a considerable geographic area in Eurasia and Africa in terms of the efficiency of a manufacturing process utilizing stone raw materials.
So rather than looking at an artefact in isolation and calculating some cockamamie probability, archaeologists look at objects in context, and make strong efforts to ascertain the method of manufacture, seek evidence left by the manufacturing process (both on the object itself and on scrap material and tools in the vicinity), and analyze the marks left by functional use. And not least, they look for direct evidence — fossils — or other indications, independent of the artefacts themselves, of the presence of the humans who made the tools, for example, fire pits and other traces of dwellings or camp sites.
Nothing I see in that research methodology would be even mildly helped by Dembski’s Explanatory Filter, say nothing of embodying a primitive version of its alleged formalism. It might help what Dembski imagines that archaeologists do, but his familiarity with archeological research methodologies seems even more tenuous than his familiarity with evolutionary biology. I therefore conclude that claims that archaeology uses a “pretheoretic” version of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter or his “complexity-specification criterion” are false. | <urn:uuid:83e11038-c85b-4d91-9b9c-7bd1296733fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/print/2004/05/archaeology_and.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945776 | 2,503 | 2.46875 | 2 |
"There's no downside to energy efficiency projects," says Pierre Langlois, president, Econoler
. Not only do they reduce costs, help the environment and put people to work—you also usually get new, more reliable equipment that improves reliability and productivity. "So why are so few implemented?"
Is it the typical one-to-three-year payback? That's better and more certain than most other corporate investments, and with prices bound to rise in the long term, it will increase over time. So it's not because energy efficiency projects aren't worth doing.
"It's because of internal barriers," Langlois told attendees of his session, "Developing Energy Efficiency Projects Using Energy Performance Contracting," this week at ABB Automation and Power World 2012 in Houston. Langlois asserted that in a typical manufacturing company, the combination of lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, lack of capacity (no one is dedicated to the task) and, perhaps especially, lack of financing and lack of confidence in obtaining the promised returns add up to—doing nothing.
That barren field has become fertile ground for the energy performance contract (EPC), defined by Langlois as "a contractual arrangement between a beneficiary (your company) and a provider called an energy service company (ESCO) for the implementation of an energy efficiency project, where the global investments have to be paid for through a contractually agreed level of energy cost reduction."
The ESCO works with contractors, equipment manufacturers, governments, financial institutions, consulting engineers, energy suppliers, etc. to define and implement the project. You get a single point of contact—the ESCO—and a guaranteed return on the project for a specified period of time. (The ESCO's skill set includes risk management so it can guarantee savings.)
EPCs come in several flavors. Under a "guaranteed savings" contract, the end user company finances the project and the ESCO guarantees the returns. Results are measured and verified during an expected payback term, typically three or five years, and any shortfall is paid by the ESCO.
Under a "shared savings" contract, the ESCO finances the project and takes the lion's share of the savings for a defined period. The end user has no up-front cost. "You will never have a deficit and will have an immediate savings as well, from Day One," Langlois says, "along with better equipment and production." This approach has been very popular in the United States, involving "probably 20,000 projects over the past 10 years," Langlois said.
A third contract format, "chauffage," has the ESCO taking over an energy-related asset or system, such as a boiler or compressed air, and providing its output to the plant under agreed-upon terms. The ESCO pays an equity share—typically 10% to 30% of the assessed value of the asset—then finances, implements and owns the improvements.
It's important to note that one of the ESCO's most critical skills is financing. Financial institutions are used to providing "asset-based" lending at 70% to 80% of the market value of assets being financed or other collateral. They don't recognize the cash flow generated by energy efficiency projects as a new asset to be valued in the financing structure (credit enhancement), and they're not familiar with the intricacies of financing energy efficiency, so they impose a high-risk lending profile for energy efficiency projects.
So ESCOs have become proficient at alternative financing, drawing on one or a combination of the end user, the ESCO, leasing and special-purpose vehicle (project) financing. This non-technical aspect of energy efficiency projects is not a strength of most engineering and operations teams, so it's an important ESCO capability for enlisting the folks in finance and accounting.
Since a major benefit of the EPC is the guarantee of savings, measurement and verification (M&V) becomes critical. Langlois said, "You can't measure savings because it's not there." Instead, you measure and establish a consumption baseline before the project, measure the consumption after the project, and calculate an estimate of the savings. Post-project measurements must be adjusted for any differences—weather, production rates—between the baseline and current conditions.
"The most critical part is to agree on how these adjustments will be done," Langlois said. That agreement must be in place before the project is performed, because it affects how the baseline measurements will be taken and for how long. "Once the project is done, the baseline is gone—you can't go back and take more measurements."
Baseline measurements might be possible using only the utility metering, as in the case of an office where the primary adjustment would be weather, or it may require additional metering, as in a complex facility where the energy savings due to, say, replacing motors might be impossible to separate from other consumption variations from product mix or equipment condition or operation.
Baseline measurement periods may be brief, as for a motor replacement where efficiency is essentially constant over the equipment lifetime, or may have to be extended to account for equipment efficiency variations due to, say, product mix, weather or maintenance. A good resource for understanding M&V and how it affects baseline measurements is the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP).
To decide if you need an ESCO to help you get an energy project done, bear in mind that it will add some cost to the project compared to doing it all internally. Langlois estimated the additional cost for the ESCO's profit adds about 8% of the construction costs, and guaranteeing the results adds about another 6%. But the rest of the project costs are about the same as they would be if you did them with your own company resources.
The biggest cost—and risk—is doing nothing. | <urn:uuid:ebd8c29e-351b-4858-86b7-dbfc9250061e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2012/ABB-APW-11.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949342 | 1,207 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Huaconada, ritual dance of Mito
Inscribed in 2010 (5.COM) on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
- Huaconada, ritual dance of Mito
- © 2001 by S. Mujica
Huaconada is a ritual dance performed in the village of Mito in the province of Concepción in the central Peruvian Andes. Every year, on the first three days of January, masked men known as huacones perform a choreographed series of dances in the centre of the town. The huacones represent the former council of elders, and for the duration of Huaconada they become the town’s highest authority. The tronador (whip) they carry and their masks emphasize this role, the latter characterized by accentuated noses that evoke the beak of the condor, creature that represents the spirit of the sacred mountains. The dance involves two types of huacones: elders who wear traditional costumes and finely-carved masks inspiring respect and fear; and modern huacones who wear colourful dress, their masks embodying terror, sadness or mockery. During Huaconada, the modern huacones dance circumscribed steps around the elders, who have greater freedom to dance improvised movements because of their seniority. An orchestra plays different rhythms, beating out time on a small indigenous drum called a tinya. Huaconada synthesizes distinctive elements from the Andes and Spain while incorporating new, modern elements. Only those of good conduct and moral integrity may become huacones. The dance is traditionally passed on from father to son, while clothing and masks are also inherited.
Decision 5.COM 6.34
The Committee (…) decides that [this element] satisfies the criteria for inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as follows:
- R.1: Huaconada ritual dance, continually adapting and transmitted from generation to generation by the inhabitants of Mito, regulates their communal life and reflects their local cultural identity;
- R.2: Inscription of Huaconada of Mito on the Representative List could contribute to greater visibility of intangible cultural heritage while reflecting its ability to synthesize influences with diverse roots;
- R.3: Safeguarding measures elaborated by the communities and the State aim at research, at recognizing tradition bearers, and promoting the manufacture of traditional instruments, outfits, masks and other objects used in the dance;
- R.4: The communities, through the Sociedad de Huacones de Mito, initiated the nomination and participated actively in its preparation, providing their free, prior and informed consent;
- R.5: Huaconada was declared National Cultural Heritage by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in 2003, upon the proposal of the communities concerned.
© 2004 by S. Mujica
These videos (and many more) can also be consulted through the UNESCO Archives Multimedia website | <urn:uuid:9beb0a33-5214-4798-b5b9-92a595821830> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00390 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92483 | 613 | 3.34375 | 3 |
The first-ever bird count at one of Delhi's new city forests, Garhi Mandu, has found 90 species, including 26 species of migratory birds and several threatened ones. However, the census also revealed a number of local threats to these birds such as fishing, playgrounds, garbage dumping, besides human intrusion and disturbance.
"We found 33 species of waterbirds, including 13 migratory ones. Of the 57 species of terrestrial birds, 13 were migratory," said TK Roy, one of the team members, who did the count. Spread over 894.73 acres along the left bank of the Yamuna in northeast Delhi, Garhi Mandu is a protected forest by the Delhi government and because of adjacent wetlands, is a good habitat for birds. Though this was the first official count, during the last one year, about 100 bird species were spotted in the forest.
Roy, who is also the Delhi state coordinator of Asian Waterbird Census, said, "But because the wetlands are unprotected, the condition of the natural habitat has deteriorated. Local threats such as fishing and garbage dumping make several resident species such as the Oriental Darter, Cinnamon Bittern and Greylag Goose avoid the wetlands."
The census was conducted as part of the annual 'big bird day' celebrated at various locations in Delhi and NCR and a total of 222 bird species were recorded. Of them, 90 species were recorded at Garhi Mandu forest and the adjacent wetlands.
Top Delhi forest department officials, including GN Sinha and AK Shukla, were present during the bird count at Garhi Mandu and appreciated and thanked the team for their valuable support to explore the diversity of the various species here and creating environmental awareness.
The Big Bird Day is an annual event of the Delhi Bird Club, which is held to create awareness about birds. | <urn:uuid:fc62bf07-56b1-43a2-9ada-83ddc7f960f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/newdelhi/Maiden-bird-count-records-new-species/Article1-1020636.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978271 | 374 | 3.078125 | 3 |
The “Dance of the Weave” exhibition at Vadhera features photographs that will appear in your forthcoming book of the same name. Describe the field work that went into compiling the book.Briana Blasko:
I have been working as a photographer for 13 years with a specialization in dance photography for the past 9 years. Frequent trips to India since 2003 have informed the conception of this book project through a deep appreciation for the arts and crafts of Indian textiles and dance. For over three and half years, I visited dance schools and festivals across India to research various forms of classical, folk, and tribal dances. Simultaneously, I visited weaving villages in these states to document the costumes and textiles used by the dancers.
Dance research for the project was conducted in eight Indian states: Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Assam. Textile research began in collaboration with the Upasana Design Studio in 2008 and then continued with dance costume designer Sandhya Raman and Amba Sanyal in New Delhi. This process consisted of constant collaboration among leading dance-institute professionals and local dancers, weavers, and villages.TMN:
Do you yourself practice dance?BB:
No. But I practice Asthanga Yoga, as taught by the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois from Mysore, India.TMN:
How did you gain access to so many communities?BB:
Many, many people collaborated and assisted in this research. Dance institutes like Sangeet Natak Academy and Kalakshetra were immensely helpful. Other leading dance institutes were also instrumental in my research: Kalamandalam University Kerala, Uttar Kamalabari Satra Majuli, Jawaharlal Nehru Manipuri Dance Academy, Benares Hindu University, Seraikella Chhau Academy, Royal Chhou Academy Balarampur, Baripada School for Chhau, and CVN Kalari Calicut and Trivandrum. The Craft Council of India as well as weaver service centers across India were amazing resources. Countless dancers, weavers, and professional working in these fields have also guided me.TMN:
In several photographs, the dancer’s face is not visible. Was it your choice to hide the faces, or did the dancers wish to remain anonymous?BB:
My focus is mostly on the expressions of the dancer’s body and the textile or costume. In each photo session I explore how a dancer inhabits the textile and plays with fabric through movement. I did not make an emphasis on the jewelry, make-up, flowers, or any other adornment that is often essential to a dancer’s presence while performing on stage for an audience. By highlighting the drapes that are used in dance, I showed how the way a single piece of cloth is used is still relevant in India. The photographs celebrate textiles as they do the aesthetic of those who wear them.TMN:
Any region that particularly fascinates you for its traditions?BB:
I have really enjoyed documenting weaving traditions in the northeast, especially in Assam (Muga Silk) and Manipur (Inaphi Jamdani).TMN:
What do you miss most about New York City, if anything?BB:
I miss my family and friends. | <urn:uuid:5c6b0a92-b984-443e-825a-49015a3a91a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/the-weavers-dance | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953099 | 711 | 1.679688 | 2 |
“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”—Mark Victor Hansen
Decolonisation in the classroom doesn't have to be that hard.
Okay, so you don’t have the institutional power as a single teacher within the system to radically alter the method of teaching that you are required under contract to abide by. Okay. That sucks, yes.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t begin the process of decolonisation while still respecting state-mandated curriculum.
I am teaching my students the history of the Americas. I am reaffirming for them that this history did not begin at Contact.
We don’t have time to do University-level explorations of individual indigenous cultures, and that’s fine. That can come later. However, I start from the tip of South America (Tierra del Fuego) and bring it ‘up’ (lol at the concept of up on a sphere), quickly noting the variety of indigenous nations throughout the Americas, stopping to briefly study some more in-depth.
And when it comes time to introduce the Europeans? It’s not hard to do some from the indigenous perspective as peoples who were here first. From the Conquest, to the Peace and Friendship Treaties, you can track the different approaches and the consequences of those approaches. You can see the way the relationships changed, for the better, or (and in most cases) for the worse.
Some people have been questioning my approach as being too radical. Which is hilarious to me. What is radical about telling the truth? | <urn:uuid:3c97d136-254c-4df4-b17e-9d689b3d4402> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/start%20now | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943447 | 386 | 2.875 | 3 |
“User intent”. These are two words I’ve written and said a lot in the past 1,5 years. It’s the ultimate goal of the search engines: finding out your user intent and delivering you with results based on that intent.
But “user intent” is really hard to grab. The search engines try to grab it as much as they can by making the results as personal as possible. In the US Google has made the next step in trying to find the intent by making search news even more personal.
From now on Google News will show you stories based on articles you’ve clicked on before. You need to be signed in to Google for this. Then Google will look at your news-related web history (note WEB history, not SEARCH history) to see what kind of articles you clicked on most and will then return news items based on that.
Next to that they are giving you “Recommended Sections” in the side column. These are suggested topics based on the same history as mentioned above.
Google News also still has the personalization features which you can manage yourself, like the “news for you section” in which you can tell Google how often you would like to read about specific news topics.Google, News | Tags: Google, Google News, News, Personalized Search | <urn:uuid:96864a67-9e39-4bc3-8661-e716955bdb16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stateofsearch.com/google-further-personalizes-google-news/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966937 | 279 | 1.84375 | 2 |
ONALASKA, Wisconsin (WXOW)-- During his budget address Wednesday night, Gov. Scott Walker laid his budget proposal, which outlined plans for funding education. Part of that plan includes expanding the voucher program, which is currently only in place in Milwaukee and Racine. The program provides state subsidies for students to attend private schools.
"For communities where some schools fail to meet expectations, we include an expansion of the parental choice program in this budget," Walker said.
The Governor's proposal would provide vouchers in districts with more than 4,000 students and two or more schools with a ‘D' or ‘F' grade on the state report card. Meaning, nine districts in the state would be eligible. But, some wonder if state funds should be invested in private schools.
"The question is: is the legislature suppose to fund public education or is the legislature suppose to public ally fund education?" said Dr. Francis Finco, the superintendent for Onalaska schools. "And there's a big difference."
No district in The Coulee Region would qualify for a voucher program, but Finco says there is an indirect impact.
"That's the problem with vouchers, there's only a finite pot of money that goes to schools, and if it goes to private schools or parochial or charter, it doesn't go to public," Finco said.
Families making 300 percent of the federal poverty level or less in those under performing districts can receive the private school tuition assistance.
"Since wealthy families have a choice because they can pay to send their children to a private school, we give low income and middle class families an opportunity to also chose a viable alternative," Walker said.
However those private schools aren't required to meet the same standards as public schools.
"There's no accountability or little accountability for schools that get voucher funds like there is for schools that get voucher funds," Finco said. "People argue about that too, you know, should it be fair if public money is going for private schools, should they also have to accept all students, and should they get a school report card and so on."
The voucher expansion along with the rest of the budget must be approved by the state legislature before any changes would go in to effect.
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EL CAJON Both East County community colleges are getting into the commemoration of Black History Month with free events that are open to the public during February.
A library exhibit featuring John Robert Clifford, a seminal figure in African American history (and a forefather of a Cuyamaca College administrator) and a stepping demonstration by members of a historically black fraternity are part of the commemoration at Cuyamaca College.
At Grossmont College, the celebration will take on a culinary and artistic flair, with events ranging from a soul food lunch with live jazz, a visit by a pair of blues and jazz masters and the showing of a student documentary on multiculturalism.
The Cuyamaca library is showcasing the accomplishments and times of key figures such as “J.R.” Clifford, a trailblazer in education, journalism, law and civil rights, and the great-great-great uncle of Danene Brown, interim vice president of instruction at the campus.
Tanis Starck, the director of the Office of Intercultural Relations at San Diego State University, will be speaking at the Cuyamaca College Student Center at 1 p.m. Monday, Feb. 11, followed by a special step show by SDSU’s chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity.
At Grossmont, two celebrated musicians – the “Queen of the Kansas City Blues,” Jeannie Cheatham and jazz artist John Handy — will talk about their lives, careers and craft from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, at Griffin Gate in the student center.
Grossmont College film student Sicarra Devers, 22, cites her mixed-race heritage as the inspiration for her documentary film, “Who Are We Really: An Exploration of Multiculturalism Self-identity,” which will be shown 4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 19, in Room 220 of Building 26. The film explores self-identity through the lens of a multicultural society and utilizes interviews from students, faculty, community members and social commentary to highlight issues relating to race relations. | <urn:uuid:69dd4224-ffb2-4ddb-8f1f-97d4477dc9a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/08/community-colleges-to-celebrate-black-history-mont/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930746 | 436 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Claims that AMD has a some kind of Damascene conversion and is to finally target the netbook sector directly are, frankly, nonsense. An old slide showing the chip maker's notebook roadmap re-appeared this week, and pundits rushed with 'AMD targets netbook' stories after spotting 'Ontario', a dual-core chip that contains AMD's …
What size will it be, 45 or 32 nm? I suppose it could be both but then they could have striped the block or something.
Re: Just wondering
> What size will it be, 45 or 32 nm?
Rumours have it Ontario & Llano will be 32nm - and that's a genuine single die with integrated DX11 GPU, unlike the cobbled together item from Intel. And you can bet the graphics will beat the c**p out of Intel, which was/is the biggest drawback with Atom.
Athlon vs Atom
I seem to rember AMD's argument was actually that their low end Althlon and chipset range had a better power consumption/ figures to the Atoms processor, (along with chipset) - only nobody thought of using a processor, that wasn't specifically tailored to the netbook market.
I think Nvidia can Do better in this domain ?
< Stupid Mode >
Assumin that they are the custodians of Transmeta CMS IP they can and perhaps they will do better .
that is why i m bettin on Nvidia 4 This Platform
< / Stupid Mode >
I would LOVE to see
AMD shake up the netbook market and wrest it back from the cold dead hands of Wintel.
Having said that, I don't hold out much hope in that regard, I'm just hoping the ARM based kit starts arriving soon or have Wintel successfully managed to kill that baby in its crib too?
- Geek's Guide to Britain INSIDE GCHQ: Welcome to Cheltenham's cottage industry
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- 'Catastrophic failure' of 3D-printed gun in Oz Police test
- VIDEO Herschel Space Observatory spots galaxies merging | <urn:uuid:443fa0c3-f13d-48af-8678-10c50d7e415b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/03/12/amd_netbook_processors/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928186 | 451 | 1.546875 | 2 |
|Computer memory types|
|Early stage NVRAM|
||This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. (June 2011)|
In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs (sequences of instructions) or data (e.g. program state information) on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which function at high-speed (i.e. RAM), as a distinction from secondary memory, which are physical devices for program and data storage which are slow to access but offer higher memory capacity. Primary memory stored on secondary memory is called "virtual memory". An archaic synonym for memory is store.
The term "memory", meaning primary memory is often (but not always) associated with addressable semiconductor memory, i.e. integrated circuits consisting of silicon-based transistors, used for example as primary memory but also other purposes in computers and other digital electronic devices. There are two main types of semiconductor memory: volatile and non-volatile. Examples of non-volatile memory are flash memory (sometimes used as secondary, sometimes primary computer memory) and ROM/PROM/EPROM/EEPROM memory (used for firmware such as boot programs). Examples of volatile memory are primary memory (typically dynamic RAM, DRAM), and fast CPU cache memory (typically static RAM, SRAM, which is fast but energy-consuming and offer lower memory capacity per area unit than DRAM) .
Most semiconductor memory is organized into memory cells or bistable flip-flops, each storing one bit (0 or 1). Flash memory organization includes both one bit per memory cell and multiple bits per cell (called MLC, Multiple Level Cell). The memory cells are grouped into words of fixed word length, for example 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 bit. Each word can be accessed by a binary address of N bit, making it possible to store 2 raised by N words in the memory. This implies that processor registers normally are not considered as memory, since they only store one word and do not include an addressing mechanism.
In the early 1940s, memory technology mostly permitted a capacity of a few bytes. The first electronic programmable digital computer, the ENIAC, using thousands of octal-base radio vacuum tubes, could perform simple calculations involving 20 numbers of ten decimal digits which were held in the vacuum tube accumulators.
The next significant advance in computer memory came with acoustic delay line memory, developed by J. Presper Eckert in the early 1940s. Through the construction of a glass tube filled with mercury and plugged at each end with a quartz crystal, delay lines could store bits of information within the quartz and transfer it through sound waves propagating through mercury. Delay line memory would be limited to a capacity of up to a few hundred thousand bits to remain efficient.
Two alternatives to the delay line, the Williams tube and Selectron tube, originated in 1946, both using electron beams in glass tubes as means of storage. Using cathode ray tubes, Fred Williams would invent the Williams tube, which would be the first random access computer memory. The Williams tube would prove more capacious than the Selectron tube (the Selectron was limited to 256 bits, while the Williams tube could store thousands) and less expensive. The Williams tube would nevertheless prove to be frustratingly sensitive to environmental disturbances.
Efforts began in the late 1940s to find non-volatile memory. Jay Forrester, Jan A. Rajchman and An Wang developed magnetic core memory, which allowed for recall of memory after power loss. Magnetic core memory would become the dominant form of memory until the development of transistor-based memory in the late 1960s.
Developments in technology and economies of scale have made possible so-called Very Large Memory (VLM) computers.
Volatile memory
Volatile memory is computer memory that requires power to maintain the stored information. Most modern semiconductor volatile memory is either Static RAM (see SRAM) or dynamic RAM (see DRAM). SRAM retains its contents as long as the power is connected and is easy to interface to but uses six transistors per bit. Dynamic RAM is more complicated to interface to and control and needs regular refresh cycles to prevent its contents being lost. However, DRAM uses only one transistor and a capacitor per bit, allowing it to reach much higher densities and, with more bits on a memory chip, be much cheaper per bit. SRAM is not worthwhile for desktop system memory, where DRAM dominates, but is used for their cache memories. SRAM is commonplace in small embedded systems, which might only need tens of kilobytes or less. Forthcoming volatile memory technologies that hope to replace or compete with SRAM and DRAM include Z-RAM, TTRAM, A-RAM and ETA RAM.
Non-volatile memory
Non-volatile memory is computer memory that can retain the stored information even when not powered. Examples of non-volatile memory include read-only memory (see ROM), flash memory, most types of magnetic computer storage devices (e.g. hard disks, floppy discs and magnetic tape), optical discs, and early computer storage methods such as paper tape and punched cards. Forthcoming non-volatile memory technologies include FeRAM, CBRAM, PRAM, SONOS, RRAM, Racetrack memory, NRAM and Millipede.
Management of memory
Proper management of memory is vital for a computer system to operate properly. Modern operating systems have complex systems to properly manage memory. Failure to do so can lead to bugs, slow performance, and at worst case, takeover by viruses and malicious software.
Nearly everything a computer programmer does requires him or her to consider how to manage memory. Even storing a number in memory requires the programmer to specify how the memory should store it.
Memory management bugs
Improper management of memory is a common cause of bugs.
- In arithmetic overflow, a calculation results in a number larger than the allocated memory permits. For example, a signed 8-bit integer allows the numbers −128 to +127. If its value is 127 and it is instructed to add one, the computer can not store the number 128 in that space. Such a case will result in undesired operation, such as changing the number's value to −128 instead of +128.
- A memory leak occurs when a program requests memory from the operating system and never returns the memory when it's done with it. A program with this bug will gradually require more and more memory until the program fails as it runs out.
- A segmentation fault results when a program tries to access memory that it has no permission to access. Generally a program doing so will be terminated by the operating system.
- Buffer overflow means that a program writes data to the end of its allocated space and then continues to write data to memory that belongs to other programs. This may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, a crash, or a breach of system security. They are thus the basis of many software vulnerabilities and can be maliciously exploited.
Early computer systems
In early computer systems, programs typically specified the location to write memory and what data to put there. This location was a physical location on the actual memory hardware. The slow processing of such computers did not allow for the complex memory management systems used today. Also, as most such systems were single-task, sophisticated systems were not required as much.
This approach has its pitfalls. If the location specified is incorrect, this will cause the computer to write the data to some other part of the program. The results of an error like this are unpredictable. In some cases, the incorrect data might overwrite memory used by the operating system. Computer crackers can take advantage of this to create viruses and malware.
Virtual memory
Virtual memory is a system where all physical memory is controlled by the operating system. When a program needs memory, it requests it from the operating system. The operating system then decides what physical location to place the memory in.
This offers several advantages. Computer programmers no longer need to worry about where the memory is physically stored or whether the user's computer will have enough memory. It also allows multiple types of memory to be used. For example, some memory can be stored in physical RAM chips while other memory is stored on a hard drive. This drastically increases the amount of memory available to programs. The operating system will place actively used memory in physical RAM, which is much faster than hard disks. When the amount of RAM is not sufficient to run all the current programs, it can result in a situation where the computer spends more time moving memory from RAM to disk and back than it does accomplishing tasks; this is known as thrashing.
Virtual memory systems usually include protected memory, but this is not always the case.
Protected memory
Protected memory is a system where each program is given an area of memory to use and is not permitted to go outside that range. Use of protected memory greatly enhances both the reliability and security of a computer system.
Without protected memory, it is possible that a bug in one program will alter the memory used by another program. This will cause that other program to run off of corrupted memory with unpredictable results. If the operating system's memory is corrupted, the entire computer system may crash and need to be rebooted. At times programs intentionally alter the memory used by other programs. This is done by viruses and malware to take over computers.
Protected memory assigns programs their own areas of memory. If the operating system detects that a program has tried to alter memory that does not belong to it, the program is terminated. This way, only the offending program crashes, and other programs are not affected by the error.
Protected memory systems almost always include virtual memory as well.
See also
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Computer memory|
- Miller, Stephen W. (1977), Memory and Storage Technology, Montvale.: AFIPS Press
- Memory and Storage Technology, Alexandria, Virginia.: Time Life Books, 1988
- A.M. Turing and R.A. Brooker (1952). Programmer's Handbook for Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II. University of Manchester.
- For example: Stanek, William R. (2009). Windows Server 2008 Inside Out. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 1520. ISBN 9780735638068. Retrieved 2012-08-20. "[...] Windows Server Enterprise supports clustering with up to eight-node clusters and very large memory (VLM) configurations of up to 32 GB on 32-bit systems and 2 TB on 64-bit systems." | <urn:uuid:44fdaa46-032e-4345-822b-0ee20b5cdb6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_(computers) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923038 | 2,234 | 3.4375 | 3 |
In a case brought by a lesbian French couple, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights does not obligate member nations to guarantee marriage rights to same-sex couples. The couple hoped that the Court’s ruling in their favor would push France to change the current law, which allows only married couples to adopt children. Ms. Dubois wanted her civil-partner, Ms. Gas, to be able to adopt Ms. Dubois’ daughter but since their union under French law is not equal to marriage she is unable to do so. The Telegraph reports that the judges said “With regard to married couples, the court considers that in view of the social, personal, and legal consequences of marriage, the applicants’ legal situation could not be said to be comparable to that of married couples,” and went on to add “Where national legislation recognises registered partnerships between same sex, member states should aim to ensure that their legal status and their rights and obligations are equivalent to those of heterosexual couples in a similar situation.” So while there is recognition by the Court that homosexual and heterosexual couples ought to be treated the same under the law, it is more of a theoretical agreement than a practical call for change in member states.
The Court’s decision is not optimal but not everyone thinks that it is a step backward. Seattle Gay News writes that Robert Wintemute, a professor of law at King’s College London, is actually optimistic about the future of gay marriage after this ruling and another one that the Court applied in the French couple’s suit. In 2010 in the case Schalk and Kopf vs. Austria, the judges agreed “that governments may offer same-sex couples equal rights to marriage, but were not required to do so.” That 2010 decision Wintemute thinks may in fact be an advantage in the future and Pink News quotes the Professor saying,
“Although the court ruled that Article 12 of the Convention did not yet impose an obligation on European governments to allow same-sex couples to marry, the court changed its interpretation of Article 12, saying that it ‘would no longer consider that the right to marry enshrined in Article 12 must in all circumstances be limited to marriage between two persons of the opposite sex,’ and he also noted “When more Council of Europe countries than the current seven (out of 47) allow same-sex couples to marry, the court will be willing to consider ordering all of them to do so. The number of European countries that allow same-sex marriage increased from three in 2005 to seven in 2010, and could double again while this case is pending.”
Whether we subscribe to Wintemute’s positive outlook or not, the battles for equal rights are nowhere near being over. Millions of Europeans who wish to marry their same sex partner will continue to be discriminated against if they live in a nation that has not extended equal marriage rights to homosexuals. The middle ground between preserving marriage as a hyper-traditional model for men and women and opening up to more progressive thinking has been achieved in some places with civil unions, but those are not equal to marriage in most cases. While heterosexual couples can enter those same civil unions if they choose, giving the illusion of equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals, if a heterosexual pair in a civil union wishes to gain all the privileges that come with marriage it can change its status but a homosexual pair cannot.
The inability by homosexuals to do what heterosexuals take for granted is blatantly discriminatory. Currently there are two European countries that are thinking of including homosexual couples in the marriage worthy category. The UK and Denmark both have plans to make marriage for same sex couples a reality. Opponents of equal marriage use various arguments for why allowing gay couples to marry is unthinkable, including being worried that religious institutions will be forced to perform gay marriages against their beliefs or conscience, which then flies in the face of religious freedom. That argument is troubling considering the fact that in various cases heterosexual couples are not allowed to get married inside a religious institution; a Roman-Catholic couple married in the Church and then divorced in civil law, without an approved Church annulment, is not allowed under canon law to re-marry inside the Church again. Since I have personally witnessed more than one case like the one I describe, and as I discussed last week in my post about Denmark’s gay marriage legislation which would give individual clergy the ability to decide on their own whether they want to perform a same sex marriage, the concern over religious freedom is a hollow argument. Religious institutions in democratic countries decide everyday what they will or will not do based on their interpretation of their faith, so gay marriage becoming equal under secular, national law will not change that. In the end, it will undoubtedly be a tough political battle forcing non-compliant and discriminatory member states into a new era of acceptance of homosexual married couples. Gay and lesbian couples that wish to get married continue to have the moral advantage in this fight and will surely prevail in the legal arena as well. | <urn:uuid:3122b771-a4bb-4c4f-b3e3-384c6b4e5bf8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.genderacrossborders.com/2012/03/29/egalite-not-quite-yet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961842 | 1,035 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Quotes and Sayings about Animals - Page 2
Non- violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
- Thomas A. Edison
I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.
- Mark Twain
Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.
- Roger Caras
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.
- Thornton Wilder
A house is not a home without a pet.
I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.
- Brigitte Bardot
Deer hunting would be fine sport, if only the deer had guns.
- William S. Gilbert
Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.
- Elias Canetti
An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.
- Martin Buber
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Winston Churchill
The trouble with loving is that pets don’t last long enough and people last too long.
Animals don’t hate, and we’re supposed to be better than them.
- Elvis Presley
To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Four legs good, two legs bad.
- George Orwell
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
- Anatole France
We all love animals. Why do we call some “pets” and others “dinner?” ~ k.d. lang | <urn:uuid:07023cc9-09e8-41ae-92ff-abacea125c87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coolnsmart.com/animal_quotes/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906777 | 426 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Sleep disorders are extremely common. Millions of Americans experience problems sleeping at least three nights a week and many of these suffers have been diagnosed with sleep disorders like Sleep Apnea and Insomnia. Narcolepsy is a less common sleeping disorder, affecting around 200,000 Americans. Of those 200,000 Americans with Narcolepsy, or possible symptoms of Narcolepsy, around 50,000 of them are undiagnosed. One symptom of Narcolepsy is Cataplexy.
Of the small population of narcoleptic victims in the world, there is a very small subcategory of patients who experience a dangerous complication. Cataplexy is uniquely associated with Narcolepsy, and is thought to plague one in every 3,000 Americans. Worldwide, Narcolepsy with Cataplexy affects two percent of adults.
What is Cataplexy?
Narcolepsy and Cataplexy are odd and dangerous neurological conditions associated with sleep. While it is a rather rare side effect of Narcolepsy, medical professionals have dubbed Cataplexy as a Narcolepsy symptom. In fact, it is the first symptom identified by ten percent of all patients diagnosed with Narcolepsy.
Cataplexy, as a sign of Narcolepsy, is defined by sudden attack on muscle tone, and the resulting loss of muscle control. When an episode of Cataplexy occurs during waking hours, patients are unable to move for the duration of the attack. Immobility usually occurs on both sides of the victim’s body. Most attacks of Cataplexy are relatively short, less than thirty seconds, but extreme cases can occur. In extreme cases of Cataplexy, it is possible for a patient to remain paralyzed for several minutes at a time. Because these attacks usually happen so quickly, they are often overlooked by sufferers and medical professionals.
The loss of muscle tone that occurs during an episode of Cataplexy mirrors REM activity in the brain. The loss of muscle activity that occurs during an attack is almost the same as the interruption that takes place in brain activity when a patient enters the deepest levels of sleep. During the REM stage, a small group of neurons in the brain stem stop moving around and prevents muscle activity. Essentially, it is the same process for Cataplexy patients.
Why is Cataplexy Dangerous?
Cataplexy and its detrimental affects on muscle weakness can range from relatively mild to dangerous and severe. Attacks can range from the loss of muscle tone and slackening of the face; to the dropping of the head, neck, or jaw; to weakness in the knees; and even to total collapse. Attacks can be partial or complete, affecting a variety of different muscular groups. Most patients are in the middle of daily routine activities during attacks of Cataplexy; they are often in standing positions or are holding things in their hands. When a Narcolepsy patient loses all control of their muscular functioning during seemingly mundane routine activities, these activities suddenly become dangerous. Although Narcolepsy patients remain conscious during an episode of Cataplexy, they have absolutely no control over the severity or length of the episode.
Narcolepsy patients who also suffer from Narcolepsy signs and Cataplexy are at a very high risk of being involved in dangerous accidents. Driving, operating machinery, raising children, and performing at work become extremely difficult when you cannot ensure the maintenance of muscle control or wakefulness.
What Causes Cataplexy?
Cataplexy is such a unique and mysterious disease because it is triggered by very odd stimuli. Most cases of Cataplexy are triggered by the patient’s exposure to a strong emotion. Heightened emotional responses like laughing, crying, and shouting can bring on Cataplexy attacks. Although the collapse of muscle tone in response to emotional situations may seem like a laughing matter, it’s anything but funny. Being social means interacting with other people and interactions often include some kind of emotional response that may possibly trigger an attack in Narcolepsy patients with Cataplexy. Emotional triggers can not be easily avoided. When you walk into the grocery store, you can’t plan whether or not strangers will laugh as they walk by you.
What are the Symptoms of Cataplexy?
Narcolepsy symptoms and Cataplexy usually arise in teenage narcoleptics, but can develop at any stage of life. A significant amount of medical research shows that Narcolepsy, and even Cataplexy, are more common in families with members that suffer from the disorder. Keep an especially close eye on teenage narcoleptic patients and the relatives of Narcolepsy sufferers.
There are varying degrees of Cataplexy symptom severity. Some patients experience symptoms so mild that they are hard to even notice. Other patients suffer from severe cases of Cataplexy and often find themselves unable to move or speak. The debilitating symptoms of the sleep disorder can make it difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle or an acceptable quality of life. Going to school, having a career, raising a family, and staying healthy all become much harder goals to accomplish when you are struggling with an unmanaged medical disorder as severe as Narcolepsy with Cataplexy.
Many patients are too afraid to seek help because they are embarrassed or ashamed of their Cataplexy or situations that were a result of their disorder. Don’t be afraid; if you are struggling with this disorder, or think that you may exhibiting any of the symptoms listed below, seek medical help from a trusted health care provider.
Cataplexy and Narcolepsy Symptoms:
- Loss of Muscle Tone- Ranging From Moderate to Severe
- Sense of Weakness
- Drooping of the Eyelids
- Inability to Move, Speak, or Control Their Eyes but Still Conscious
- Emotional Triggers
- Arm Weakness
- Sagging Jaw
- Drooping of the Head
- Shoulders Slump Over
- Speech Becomes Slurred
- Vision Becomes Blurry
- Knees/Ankles Become Weak or Buckle
- Total Collapse
Cataplexy in Narcolepsy Patients can become extremely dangerous to the patients suffering from the rare disorder and the people closest to them. Undiagnosed Cataplexy has a high risk of developing from a mild, over looked disorder to a life-altering accident waiting to happen. If you are experiencing Cataplexy and Narcolepsy signs, or are in fear of developing the disorder, seek medical attention immediately. The sooner your Cataplexy is diagnosed, the sooner it can be treated and managed. Medical professionals, sleep study facilities, and Narcolepsy support groups are ideal resources for seeking Cataplexy information, help, and support. | <urn:uuid:6f9f8700-7430-4db6-a17c-8b8206d7f865> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aboutnarcolepsy.org/44/cataplexy-and-narcolepsy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951952 | 1,429 | 3.546875 | 4 |
President Ilves in Riga: Latvia’s success is also Estonia’s success
"Estonia has no other neighbour that we understand as well as we understand Latvia. We have been connected by Livonia and we share a common history, but what's even more important is that we share a common future in Europe and the euro area," told the President, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, at his meeting with Latvian Head of State, Andris Bērziņš.
President Ilves, who arrived in Riga today, began a three-day state visit to the Republic of Latvia.
The Estonian Head of State recalled the armoured trains of the War of Independence, where Estonians and Latvians fought side-by-side for the freedom of their countries. He also recalled that in the very same way – by train – the first Latvian Head of State, Jānis Čakste, came to Estonian in 1925, saying back then: the closeness between Estonia and Latvia cannot be just words and ceremonies; this has to be encoded into each Latvian and Estonian to make it survive all the storms.
"We have helped each other and been mutually good partners, sometimes also competitors. Today, Estonia is strongly supporting Latvia's pursuits to access the euro area, which of course assumes compliance with all the Maastricht criteria," told President Ilves. "This is quite possible, as over the last couple of years Latvia has set the example of being responsible to a number of former euro area countries with questionable economic futures."
It is important to believe in one's country, Europe and the euro area; belonging to these organisations usually means economic stability, security and general self confidence for countries that are abiding by the rules, emphasised the Estonian Head of State.
"In economic terms, Latvia and Estonia are large countries for each other, as our entrepreneurs have very good mutual business relations," told President Ilves. "Therefore, Latvia's success is also Estonia's success, as the good progress of Estonia depends on your good progress and vice versa."
According to the Estonian Head of State, today's joint ventures of two neighbouring countries should be channelled into realistic projects.
"Baltic co-operation, if this is meant to be more than just a slogan, assumes a contribution to realistic infrastructural projects or investments into joint projects, which can be measured in money and really improve the lives of our citizens, fusing us in both a physical and economic sense," told President Ilves. "Our co-operation needs to be specifically channelled into common transport and energy projects that also involve the other European Union Member States, and into enhancing security in the region in general."
President Ilves and Mrs. Evelin Ilves gave the Latvian Head of State a watercolour by artist Valli Lember-Bogatkina, "Cesis" and to her wife, Dace Seisuma, a silver brooch and ear-rings, made by jewel artist Anneli Tammik.
During the state visit, President Ilves will also meet with the Speaker of Latvian Parliament, Solvita Aboltina, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, and Mayor of Riga, Nils Ušakovs, open an Estonian-Latvian business forum, participate in a discussion of opinion leaders, visit an Estonian school in Riga and visit areas inhabited by Livonians in Courland.
The Estonian Head of State will host a reception on a Tallinn ship, Silja Festival, which is travelling on the Riga-Stockholm line.
President Ilves is accompanied by a 22 member business delegation.
Office of the President
Public Relations Department
Phone +372 631 6229 | <urn:uuid:c3a4175a-052b-48dc-a3dc-c24dccfd3c69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.president.ee/en/media/press-releases/7572-president-ilves-in-riga-latvias-success-is-also-estonias-success/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965113 | 790 | 1.5 | 2 |
Demand to shrink Rio’s iron share: AlbanesePUBLISHED: 28 Jun 2011 15:34:00 | UPDATED: 29 Jun 2011 04:00:10PRINT EDITION: 28 Jun 2011
Natalie Gerritsen and wires
Rio Tinto chief executive Tom Albanese says that even with the company’s unprecedented expansion program, it could still lose market share by 2020 as demand for iron ore grows.
“If we expand the Pilbara to 333 (million tonnes per year) or even more, in the next ten years - and that’s all we do - post-2020 we’re probably going to lose global share in iron ore,” Mr Albanese said.
“It’s not enough to keep up with the demand. We’ve got to even do more than that.”
Mr Albanese said Rio’s iron ore head Sam Walsh was constantly asking for funds to push forward with growing the company’s operations in the Pilbara.
“Hardly a board meeting that goes by where Sam doesn’t ask for more capital,” he said.
“And Sam is getting that capital.”
Rio has already added 20 million tonnes to its Pilbara capacity this year, bringing total capacity to 220 million tonnes per year.
Mr Albanese said adding to the problem of keeping up with global demand are shortages in skills, greater regulatory burdens and a lack of infrastructure, not just in WA but in all resource hubs around the world, including Chile, and Canada.
"I see underlying strength for the kinds of products Rio Tinto makes over the next 10 years," he said.
But Mr Albanese said investors and consumers were worried at the moment due to the sovereign debt problems in Europe.
"We're going to climb a world of worry over the next 10 years," he said. | <urn:uuid:5facdc91-b0f7-43af-b936-dae8241534c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afr.com/p/business/companies/demand_to_shrink_rio_iron_share_cdioDyE2TkDPPMfuejJpFI | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953644 | 396 | 1.5 | 2 |
Natasha at Maw Books Blog has worked from dawn till dark to produce today's Book Review Blog Carnival. No matter how hard I tried I lost count every time, but there are more than 80 posts in this issue. The range of subjects is, not surprisingly the biggest ever. There is something for every book lover on your Christmas list.
The eighth edition will be hosted by Bloody-Kisses.org on January 4th. You may submit a book review post from your blog at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_5161.html. Everybody is welcome to participate.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
This is another book that I learned about by listening to the Diane Rehm Show on the radio. The author was on for an interview and aroused my interest because Diane, David Wroblewski and I are all dog people. Wroblewski has written a novel set in an unusual dog breeding kennel which produces unusual dogs and the dogs are central to the story he tells. The founder of this kennel, the grandfather of it's central character, had the idea to breed dogs based on behavior instead of conformation. He took dogs of many, and sometimes no breed, that had performed unusual and sometimes heroic acts, dogs that got written about in the newspaper, and he created his own breed of dogs. He clearly researched both breeding methods and obedience and service dog training for the book, although the results achieved by this fictional kennel are probably not possible.
The book is written from many points of view, sometimes even that of one of the dogs, but never sinks to a level of cuteness or anthropomorphism while doing so.
The difference between us and our animal companions is one of degree and not of kind, Descartes notwithstanding.
The idea of creating these dogs that are intelligent and loyal but able to to make moral choices is a fascinating one. It gives the book a kind of Sci Fi speculative edge. What if you bred and trained dogs for intelligence and judgment? How far could you take them? What part of their behavior is learned and what effect does inheritance have? This question is played out in the dags and in the humans in this story.
This is a coming of age novel, as many first novels are. A young man, Edgar, grows up on this farm, where his parents are engaged in breeding and training these amazing dogs. Edgar is unable to speak, although he hears normally, and communicates with a half made up sign language, to everyone, including the dogs. Edgar is destined to take over the kennel and continue breeding and training these amazing dogs.
But this coming of age novel takes a wrong turn when Edgar's uncle Claude comes home after a long absence. In fact, not until Edgar's father suddenly dies and Claude starts paying unwanted attention to Edgar's mother, does the reader realize the Wroblewski is re-telling the story of Hamlet on a dog breeding farm.
Like the play, the novel ends tragically. I won't spoil it by telling you how. It is a satisfyingly thick book, a good long read, and I highly recommend it.
Note: revised 12/22/08
Kindelicious has given me the Lemonade Award for showing great attitude and gratitude. Now I'm supposed to pass this award on to at least ten other blogs who show similar attitude and gratitude.
On the other hand, I just kicked Entrecard off my blog. My attitude may be a bit sour just at this moment. I have met some outstanding bloggers through my association with Entrecard, but the burden or working their system has also interfered with my ability to effectively manage and post to my blogs.
When the world hands you lemons, make lemonade, the old saying goes.
I want to give this award to the best lemonade maker I know, JohnC of Life Onwards.
Shinade of The Painted Veil deserves this award. She has been a good friend and now she needs her friends' support to help her through a rough spot. She has good music on her blog, too.
Silvie Dixie of A Glimpse of La Rochelle has been a steadfast friend to a whole community of bloggers at FuelMyBlog.
Scott at My Thermos gets an award for occasionally making me stop and think.
Carol at Bass-ically Speaking gets the lemonade stand, too. Solidarity forever, sister.
A special mention to Turnip at Turnip of Power, a blog that gives real, good advice to aspiring bloggers, rather than warmed over gruel and hype.
Mudge at Left Handed Compliment seems to need a nudge. Bro, don't forget your blog!
Sugar Queen, we're praying for you, gal. Get well and post when you can.
That's eight, not "at least ten" blogs. I'm not good at following directions.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues
Let me say first, that there was not a lot of new information in this book and I found the title only slightly less offensive than the "for dummies" series of books, which I refuse to consult on principle. I've read over a couple of them, meh. It went downhill from there.
The book starts off talking about elections and explains about voting districts and political parties and the electoral college. Then it gets into voter suppression and fraud, gerrymandering campaign finance and the trouble with electronic voting machines. The following chapters take on a long list of hot button issues: recession. stagflation, the mortgage crisis, isolationism, health care, homeland security, no child left behind, all the while maintaining a neutral non partisan tone, the News Hour with Jim Lerher, on Prozac. "Some believe that torture is inherently morally repugnant and is never justifiable. Others think there may be some very restricted circumstances in which torture is morally acceptable, while still others contend that those conditions are broader."
Some people bend over backwards to not have an opinion, too, and Jessamyn Conrad is one of them. Some people think torture is sometimes OK? Let's put it out there, Jessamyn. The Bush Administration denies that it ever tortured anyone and if it did, then they must have deserved it. And besides, if the President does it, it's legal.
I became weary of the neutrality. None of the burning issues of the day have any relevance weight, meaning or value in this book, just on the one hand and on the other.
The publisher got blurbs from Barack Obama and Bob Dole for the front cover. I guess John McCain was too busy to answer the email. | <urn:uuid:fd7f86fa-9dad-4644-b7ba-4be7ed7818b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://residentreader.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966186 | 1,403 | 1.5 | 2 |
Net Delusion and Horseless Carriages
Doug Hadden, VP Products
I’ve been trying to enjoy The Net Delusion – the Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to enjoy: littered with sparkling disdain for cyberutopia and biting turns of phrase. Morozov, (@evgenymorozov) whose tweets and magazine articles are crisp and insightful, has managed to squeeze a magazine article into a full length book. With a hodgepodge of evidence (aka confirmation bias). And no data visualization, so the proof points appear weak.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t have anything important to say. Morozov’s view that technological determinism is a vapid explanation for change deserves thought. After all, who wants to believe that they are a gadget? (Not Jason Lanier for one.)
The Horseless Carriages of Technological Determinism
The Cold War figures heavily in the historical context of The Net Delusion. Morozov questions whether radio broadcasts or fax machines really had any effect on the end of the Soviet empire. He also suggests that because Twitter did not change the regime in Iran, therefore, it doesn’t work. (And so on.) This is an example of where holes in the net denialism seem to form.
- Technology speeds up communications, so the introduction of any technology does not create social change unless there are the economic or political pre-requisites to do so. The new medium alone does not create change.
- Technology has macro effects. So, the micro situation (i.e. Tunisia compared to Iran) is not easily resolved even when there is evidence that people or the government did or did not use social media in any fundamental way. The effects of social media is in a network, so it doesn’t behave like broadcast or propaganda.
- Different technology has different effects. Morozov points out that Marshall McLuhan suggested that radio led to extreme nationalism and seems to imply that other media has the same effect. Radio is a hot medium. One-way. Social media is multidirectional. Anyone can be a content provider.
- Social media is in the early days. So, the trivial can dominate the echo chamber. And, the previous medium (i.e. reality television) forms the content of the new. So, it’s a bit early to pass judgement on social media. And, we are in the “horseless carriage” days where we are looking at social media as an extension of old media (i.e. social media journalism).
- Technological determinism and the “medium is the message” are two different things. The first supposes a specific outcome (i.e. democracy) while the other suggests changes in society (i.e. the relationship between citizens and government, but not necessarily “democracy”). So, the fact that twitter did not lead to democracy in Iran does not mean that social media is not fundamentally changing something.
Morozov crafts stirring invectives at social media proponents. He’s the Captain Haddock of social media criticism. (Although not so far as to characterize cyberenthusiasts as amoeba or protozoa – explicitly. It’s just that they haven’t thought things out. So, just a slightly lower form of homo sapien.)
Get a Horse?
Are we tied to values of the past? My sense is that Morozov sees more value in journalism than social media. More value in books than e-books. Ever since Socrates, who believed that writing destroys memory, every new medium has been criticized as lacking value. Or, like rock and roll, destroying values.
It’s not unusual for someone whose livelihood is predicated on previous media to find fault with the next. We could suggest that Morozov could join the luddites and get off twitter and back to the typewriter. And off the grid. That would be a mistake. The Net Delusion opinionated noise can get in the way of more important questions:
- Despite state interventions, is technology power shifting from governments to people as an overall trend? If so, what does this mean for governments?
- Is democracy, as we define it today, a vestige of the past? Is the narrative that Russia is not a democracy rather fuzzy logic? Will the relationship between the state and citizens change in the era of social media and transnationalism?
- Are private sector actors like Google an extension of national policy? Or, do these organizations operate within unique value systems? | <urn:uuid:5026c0b2-12ca-498a-81aa-5116265eddc5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freebalance.com/blog/?p=1937 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925028 | 975 | 1.664063 | 2 |
A laptop, also called a notebook, is a personal computer for mobile use. A laptop integrates most of the typical componentsof a desktop computer, including a display, a keyboard, a pointing device (a touchpad, also known as a trackpad, and/or a pointing stick) and speakers into a single unit. A laptop is powered by mains electricity via an AC adapter, and can be used away from an outlet using a rechargeable battery.
Portable computers, originally monochrome CRT-based and developed into the modern laptops, and were originally considered to be a small niche market, mostly for specialized field applications such as the military, accountants and sales representatives. As portable computers became smaller, lighter, cheaper, more powerful and as screens became larger and of better quality, laptops became very widely used for all sorts of purposes.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop | <urn:uuid:cea900e1-dfc5-46a8-af6d-9e328aaba170> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zelaptop.com/laptop/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962131 | 188 | 2.859375 | 3 |
A Message of Hope and Responsibility
I was very inspired by President Obama's message to students this year! In my opinion, no matter what political side you're affiliated with, it really was a message of hope and responsibility, a teachable moment for social studies classes, and an uplifting and motivating message for kids of all ages.
---full transcript here----
Back-to-school advice for safe & ethical social networking
"Back-to-school time is an excellent time for kids, parents, and teachers to think and talk about the safe and appropriate use of the Internet and social-networking tools."I've been teaching Internet Safety since 2000...I was first asked to do so by Maryland Public Television and then the Horizon Foundation...and through their patronage i created a website called Internet Safety for Parents & Teens that covered a lot of information about how to be more AWARE of the pitfalls and dangers on the Interwebs. The subject i think that is foremost now is not Safety but Awareness. We have to encourage our kids to be aware of their own digital footprint. To be mindful of what they post and how they cultivate a good Internet profile so that when they apply to college, or a job, they know how they will be perceived by those people who will be digging for information ...and dig they will. They need to know that embarrassing or inappropriate pictures posted are there and can be found forever.
Parents: what you can do at home
- have the Internet connected computer in a main room of your house...like the kitchen or living, or family room
- If you have kids who have laptops and a wireless router, disconnect the router (unplug & remove) the power cord at bedtime. late night texting is also a concern
- re-charge teen cell phones in YOUR rooms overnight
- know what usernames your kids use on facebook, twitter, myspace, etc. ask to see their page...then ask to see their REAL page!
- make sure that ANY social network they belong to is set to private
- know how to search the history of your kids computer
"Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace offers some Online Safety and Back to School advice especially suited to youth who use social-networking services like MySpace and Facebook (MySpace is one of several companies that provide financial support for ConnectSafely). He starts off with the usual Internet safety advice: "Don't post anything you wouldn't want the world to know" and "don't get together with someone you 'meet' online unless you're certain of their identity." Then, perhaps a bit uncharacteristic of his background as a former federal prosecutor, Nigam also provides advice about the compassionate and kind use of social networking:
from: Back-to-school advice for safe & ethical social networking - CNET News
- Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.
- Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.
- Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.
Talk to your kids about the risks.
- Explain that online information and images can live forever. It can be very hard and sometimes impossible to take down information that is posted, and photos and information may already have been copied and posted elsewhere.
- Tell your children not to post any identifying information online. This includes their cell phone number, address, hometown, school name, and anything else that a stranger could use to locate them.
- Explain that anyone in the world can access what they post online. Tell your children that some college admissions boards and employers are checking social networking sites before they admit students or hire people.
- Remind your children never to give out their passwords to anyone but you – not even their friends. Explain that if someone has their password, they could post embarrassing and unsafe information about them on their personal pages and even pose as your children to talk to other people.
- Make sure that children understand that some people they meet online may not be who they say they are. Explain that on the Internet many people are not truthful about their identity and may even pretend to be someone else. It’s important to stress that young people should never meet people face-to-face that they met online.
The Guidance dept. and i will be holding a parent information night about cyberbullying and internet awareness later this year....stay tuned!
Social Networking Sites: A Parent’s Guide
Social Networking Sites: Safety Tips for Tweens and Teens
Blog Sites, Profile Sites, Diary Sites or Social-Networking Sites | <urn:uuid:92a037dc-4624-44c7-a0bf-599de18d2a13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mhms-media.blogspot.com/2009/09/bts-welcome-president-obama-mhtv-social.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954804 | 1,041 | 2.796875 | 3 |
I purchased this book for its cover. A curly tail from what I presumed was a lizard, and as you all know my boy LOVES lizards and reptiles, I just couldn’t resist. What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page. I didn’t even open the book. It was just an impulse buy. I didn’t really know what to expect.
What Do You Do With A Tail Like This? is not just about tails, it’s not about the adventures of a lizard, it’s more like a game. Animals are different from one another. Their eyes, noses, mouths, and tails look different and they’re used differently. You get a glimpse of a nose and have to figure out what animal it belongs to. You then get to see the animal and how they use it. Although this book was not what I expected it to be…we love it! The kids also come out with some really great questions and comments every time we read it. | <urn:uuid:bbf3dfbd-9d4f-4be1-b5fc-11e3f8d545df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://whenthekidsgotobed.com/2012/04/05/the-bookshelf-18-what-do-you-do-with-a-tail-like-this/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966863 | 216 | 1.882813 | 2 |
The Moroccan construction industry is estimated to have experienced real growth of around 7.4% in 2011, with the sector recovering from the period of relatively subdued growth seen in 2009 and 2010. Underpinned by a healthy pipeline of infrastructure projects, multilateral financing and a robust economic growth outlook, we expect the sector to continue on this strong growth trajectory over the medium- to-long-term. We have pencilled in real growth of 7.0% year-on-year (y-o-y) for Morocco’s construction industry in 2013 and we expect real industry growth to average at 7.4% per annum between 2013 and 2020.
The infrastructure developments which underpin our outlook for the sector over the forecast period are:
- Morocco’s expenditure on infrastructure will help underpin average real GDP growth of 3.9 %per year in the period 2011-2016, according to BMI’s forecasts. The government stepped up its spending on basic infrastructure to MAD400bn (US$47.26bn) for 2008-2012, up from just MAD80bn (US$9.45bn) for the previous period. Roads, ports, airports and transmission grids have been among the assets to benefit from the stronger spending, providing a windfall for established firms.
- In November 2011, the World Bank agreed to provide US$297mn in financial assistance to Morocco for the development of one of the world’s largest solar power plants. The loan will support the first phase of the solar power plant, which is due to have a capacity of 500MW. The Ouarzazate concentrated solar power plant is part of the country’s solar power programme, worth US$9bn, and holds significant importance for Morocco. Of the total loan amount, US$200mn will be provided through its fund that lends to middle-income countries, while the remaining US$97mn will be granted under the World Bank Clean Technology Fund.
- As part of the fund reports it was announced in September 2012 that the African Development Bank (AfDB) will provide a US$800mn loan to the Moroccan government. The loan will be used to finance the development of the country’s renewable energy sector. This will include the construction of a solar power plant at Ouarzazate, which will eventually generate 500MW of electricity. Termed as the largest CSP in the world, it is to include an investment of EUR1.04bn (US$1.3bn), which will also be funded by six other agencies, including the World Bank and the European Investment Bank. In addition, the amount provided by AfDB will also be used to increase the country’s wind power capacity by 1,070MW and help to provide electricity for 79,436 homes. This will be undertaken as part of the Moroccan Integrated Wind/Hydro and Rural Electrification Programme. The project requires a total investment of US$2.16bn, with completion due for 2017. Morocco intends to generate 42.0% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
- Also, on September 24 2012, the consortium led by ACWA Power International received a contract worth nearly US$1bn to construct a solar power plant in Morocco. The consortium also includes Aries Ingeniería y Sistemas and TSK Electrónicay Electricidad. The announcement was made by Mustapha Bakkoury, the head of Morocco’s solar energy agency MASEN. The plant will cover an area of 2,500 hectares and will be located near the desert frontier town of Ouarzazate. Construction work is due to begin at end-2012, with commercial operations to begin in H215. The plant will have a power generation capacity of 160MW and will use concentrating solar power (CSP) parabolic trough technology. The World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, KfW and the French Development Agency are to provide financial support for the project.
- German engineering company Siemens announced that it was holding talks with potential buyers to sell its solar energy business. The company is looking to divest its photovoltaics unit and solar thermal power plant maker Solel. Siemens had acquired Solel in 2009 for US$418mn, but the unit has consistently failed to generate profits. During the same announcement, Siemens said that it will focus its renewable energy activities on wind and hydro power after the divestment. As part of its withdrawal from the solar power sector, Siemens also withdrew from Morocco’s DII project in October 2012.
- In May 2011, Moroccan state power company Office National de l’Electricité (ONE) invited wind turbine companies to submit expressions of interest in building and operating a 150MW wind farm 300km north-east of Rabat. Morocco – the only North African country without significant thermal indigenous resources – has launched a renewable energy drive focusing on wind and solar energy in order to reduce its reliance on costly imports and meet rising demand.
- In an effort to turn around its near-total reliance on energy imports, Morocco aims to generate as much as two gigawatts (GW) from wind power and 2GW from solar power by 2020, according to Energy, Mines and Water Minister Amina Benkhadra. The country expects to spend EUR13.4bn (US$17.2bn) on the sector and will concentrate on renewable energy production, according to Electricite et des Energies Renouvelables, as quoted by La Figaro in May 2010.
- In a move that signifies creditor belief in both the company, and the project, Abu Dhabi’s TAQA announced in June 2012 that it has secured a US$1.4bn financing arrangement for the expansion of its Jorf Lasfar coal-fired power plant in Morocco. BMI believes that TAQA’s continued interest in the MENA region is highlighting a trend where regional players seek to take advantage of their established ties to venture in places that other investors might fear. TAQA is strategically positioned to take advantage of such a move, yet we note that the company remains heavily leveraged and thus much dependent on its benevolent state benefactor.
- It was announced in March 2011 that the African Development Bank (AfDB) is providing a EUR300mn loan to Morocco to support the investment plans put forward by the country’s rail operator. Morocco’s national rail company Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF) is investing heavily in Morocco’s transport infrastructure, with a US$13bn investment plan running to 2035. Plans include the construction of almost 2,000km of major rail lines linking the country’s largest cities, in addition to urban rail and high-speed lines.
- Encouraged by earlier flagship public-private partnership (PPP) projects, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) signed an agreement with the Ministry of Economy and Finance in early-December 2010 to help it structure a dedicated PPP unit. The IFC has been spending considerable resources in Morocco to help wean its construction and infrastructure industries off public sector demand and ramp up private sector participation. Both parties hope that the new unit will successfully institutionalise previously ad hoc PPP projects such as irrigation and desalination projects in the Chtouka region.
- The government of Saudi Arabia is scheduled to make an investment worth US$1.25bn through the Saudi Fund for Development in order to support several development projects in Morocco. Saudi Arabia’s Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf said in October 2012 that the investment would be made in the areas of health, education, transport, communication, hotels and agriculture. The investment is part of a financial assistance package extended to Morocco and Jordan by four GCC countries, with Morocco set to receive a total of US$5bn. The Saudi private sector is currently making investments in the tourism, agriculture and ports industry in Morocco, which is seen as the best investment destination in the Arab world.
- Vision 2010 project, established by King Mohammed VI, was an effort of the Moroccan government to develop the country’s tourism. The project has been reintroduced as Vision 2020; as part of the programme, two major development plans have been outlined which will create new commercial infrastructure opportunities in terms of resorts and hotels and which will encourage investment and the financing of new sustainable projects. These are the Azure 2020 and the Plan Bidali. | <urn:uuid:8c563a1f-b64b-4e2d-a12a-5ac394798621> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/morocco-infrastructure-report-2013-market-report.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948367 | 1,731 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Unwilling the others named my people; we called ourselves Faithful.
Tauron's summons we refused, to abide in the welcoming woods of Ennor. Long ages we wandered freely through endless expanses of wildlands, honouring their bounty, singing to our stars in peace.
But Men felled our forests, disfiguring the earth with monstrous dwellings, stone pathways, and raucous noise. They defiled the water, befouled the air, and stole our beloved stars from the night.
My people have faded. I follow.
Men rushing by the solitary, gnarled yew overlooked the single dewdrop that clung, trembling, to the tip of a twig.
This is a work of fan fiction, written because the author has an abiding love for the works of J R R Tolkien. The characters, settings, places, and languages used in this work are the property of the Tolkien Estate, Tolkien Enterprises, and possibly New Line Cinema, except for certain original characters who belong to the author of the said work. The author will not receive any money or other remuneration for presenting the work on this archive site. The work is the intellectual property of the author, is available solely for the enjoyment of Henneth Annûn Story Archive readers, and may not be copied or redistributed by any means without the explicit written consent of the author. | <urn:uuid:758ef463-4c1d-4727-84f0-d896aa64a021> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.henneth-annun.net/stories/chapter_view.cfm?stid=7350&spordinal=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921192 | 286 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Few college graduates can say they have a job waiting for them in this economy, or that they run their own company. Even fewer can say they are breaking barriers in a male-dominated sport.
But then again, Shea Holbrook is anything but ordinary.
The 22 –year-old is a full-time professional race car driver, runs her own career and actively works with a charity that’s fighting a disease close to her heart.
In between that she managed to squeeze in a college education, and on Saturday, May 5, at 9 a.m. she’ll collect her bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida.
Some of her racing buddies questioned her commitment to the sport, especially when they observed her spending hours on buses and planes doing homework and studying for exams.
“A lot of race car drivers, when they transition to pro, don’t choose school,” Holbrook said. “But school has always been a priority for me. I was determined to earn a four-year degree in four years.”
At UCF, many of her colleagues didn’t believe her when she talked about her history-making racing career. In 2011, she became the first woman to win a Long Beach Touring Car Race at the Long Beach Grand Prix. She’s only the fourth woman to have ever won a professional race on that track.
Now with a degree in Interpersonal/Organizational Communication and a minor in Marketing, she’ll be even better equipped to run her company — Shea Racing – and stay in control of her own career.
“Racing started as a passion, but became my career,” said the self-proclaimed adrenaline-junkie. “I love it.”
Blame Her Dad
A “life-changing” trip to the Richard Petty Experience in Daytona Beach with her dad in 2007 inspired Holbrook’s racing career. Too young to drive the car at the time, the experience of being a passenger was exciting enough to spark an interest.
A natural competitor, she previously fulfilled her craving for adventure as a water-skier. When she was old enough to drive she found something she was naturally good at that required a similar sense of fearlessness.
“If I was scared, I wouldn’t be doing this,” Holbrook said.
Although 15 is considered a late age to begin thinking about professional racing, her greatest challenge didn’t lie behind the wheel of her Honda Civic Si. It was trying to keep up with schoolwork while also balancing what had become a full-time job.
A competitor in the Pirelli World Challenge Touring Car Division, Holbrook typically races once a month from March to August, when the pro races run. She practices, or “tests,” bimonthly.
Despite the hectic schedule, the Central Florida native graduated from Montverde Academy in Lake County, earned her Associate’s Degree at Valencia Community College and arrived at UCF in 2010 through the DirectConnect program.
“Shea is a remarkable student and professional athlete,” said Bill Steiger, a visiting instructor in the College of Business. “She manages to balance both roles while maintaining a fantastic attitude and focus. She’s bright, driven—no pun intended—and loaded with entrepreneurial traits.”
Finding A Sponsor
The process of finding a sponsor had been a long one for Holbrook. Several “too-good-to-be-true” deals fell through.
“There were times I thought, ‘This is never going to happen for me,’” Holbrook said.
But her career has taken off since joining the TrueCar Racing team in 2011. The sponsor hosts a “Women Empowered” initiative, which guides female racers in their careers and raises awareness of women’s roles as serious competitors in a male-dominated sport.
She is grateful for the TrueCar opportunity, which helps fund her racing while also giving her a platform as a woman at the forefront of the sport.
“Racing is dominated by males and there are few role models for young girls,” said Holbrook.
On and off the track, Holbrook is constantly striving to be one of those role models. As part owner of Shea Racing, she oversees five employees, in addition to managing her social media profiles, race and practice calendars and sponsorship duties.
“I’m constantly trying to sell myself and look for new opportunities,” Holbrook said. “Even though you’re not in the car every day, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done off the track. That’s why I decided to study communications and marketing.”
More than Just Driving
In 2008, Holbrook lost her 18-year-old cousin, Matthew to a fatal genetic disorder called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It affects mostly boys, and although medicine can slow its progression, there is no cure for Duchenne. The life expectancy for people with the disease is about 25.
Matthew’s loss, as well as the battle with Duchenne being fought by another cousin, Jordan, inspired Holbrook’s advocacy.
“I drive for selfish reasons, but I also realize I’m in a position to help people,” she explained.
So for the past three years, Holbrook has worked to raise funds and awareness for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, which benefits the fight against Duchenne.
As part of her outreach on behalf of Duchenne, Holbrook regularly invites young boys with the disease and their families out to her races.
“Working with Duchenne families is extremely humbling,” Holbrook explained. “They are the strongest people I’ve ever met, and they deserve some fun every once in a while. What little boy doesn’t like race cars?”
As for her future, the road ahead is wide open for Holbrook. With support from TrueCar and her Shea Racing team, she says she hopes to draw more attention to females in motorsports.
After commencement, she’ll travel to California to compete in the Monterey Grand Prix. When it comes to the actual races, Holbrook says winning is important, but not everything. She’s already living her dream, fueled by the rush of rounding tracks at 140 miles per hour. And from the race track, Holbrook says she’s got the best view in the house.
“When my fans show up—I live for that.”
For more information on commencement activities click here.
For more graduation profiles visit: | <urn:uuid:7c94096d-3088-4a79-a85e-d18ec0fddcf7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://today.ucf.edu/steering-her-own-destiny/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968041 | 1,417 | 1.695313 | 2 |
This is truly shocking. A young woman named Amanda Collins mustered the courage to testify before a Colorado legislative committee on that state’s proposed gun ban legislation. Ms. Collins testified in opposition to a blanket ban on guns on college campuses, and described her own rape. She had a permit to carry a pistol but was unarmed when she was attacked. Ms. Collins was treated sensitively by Republicans on the panel, but when the questioning turned to Democratic Sen. Evie Hudak, the Democrats’ war on women was unleashed.
The Democrat ridiculed Ms. Collins, telling her that “statistics are not on your side.” She said that Ms. Collins had rudimentary training in martial arts, yet the rapist overpowered her. She suggested that the rapist would therefore have been able to wrest her gun away and use it against her, if she had been carrying. This is, of course, a non sequitur. A small woman probably can’t outwrestle a large, strong man, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t shoot him. This is why the 19th century Colt .45 was referred to as “the Equalizer.” The Democrats’ treatment of this rape victim is appalling:
The most important point here is the woman’s right to choose. There is no way to know whether Amanda Collins would have defended herself successfully against the man who raped her if she had been carrying a handgun. But she at least would have had a chance, and the Democrats want to steal from her the right to choose to defend herself. Shame on the Democratic Party!
UPDATE: Rep. Hudak has apologized for her insensitivity. As far as we know, however, she is still trying to deprive Colorado women of their freedom of choice. | <urn:uuid:169263ca-ccad-4d6d-ae17-e1e0274fafbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/democrat-to-rape-victim-you-were-screwed-anyway.php?tsize=large | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987293 | 369 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Palmer to build Titanic IIPUBLISHED: 30 Apr 2012 09:54:00 | UPDATED: 30 Apr 2012 13:47:20PRINT EDITION: 30 Apr 2012
Second time’s the charm? ... Mining magnate Clive Palmer is backing a project to build a second Titanic. Would-be passengers will be hoping this venture turns out better than the first.
Mining magnate Clive Palmer hasn’t had a whole lot of luck with floats, but the Queenslander’s hoping his ship will finally come in with a bold project to build the Titantic II.
Just on 100 years after the original Titantic sunk to a watery grave, taking more than 1500 passengers and crew with it, Mr Palmer has announced plans to build a fleet of luxury liners with Chinese shipping outfit CSC Jinling Shipyard.
Perhaps tempting fate, Mr Palmer said his Titanic II would be designed not to sink. But he hedged his bets in a series of statements that may leave some would-be passengers wondering if it’s too risky to take a fare.
“Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it,” the sometimes jocular Mr Palmer quipped. “It will be designed as a modern ship with all the technology to ensure that doesn’t happen. But of course if you are superstitious ... you never know what could happen.”
Mr Palmer told reporters in Brisbane that he was building a state-of-the-art Titanic II as a tribute to the passengers and crew of the original Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg. He said the ship was expected to make its maiden voyage from England to North America in late 2016.
The mining billionaire announced his plans to build the Titanic II as he declared his intention to take a tilt at a lower house seat in Federal Parliament, going up against nemesis, Treasurer Wayne Swan in the Queensland seat of Lilley.
It’s not the first time Mr Palmer has run for Federal Parliament – like the ill-fated Titantic, he embarked on a fruitless journey towards pre-selection in Peter Slipper’s seat of Fisher in 1984 – and the superstitious may watch the 2013 election for any harbingers of future success – or doom. | <urn:uuid:282f5db1-5b44-4631-aff6-d1f57e21971f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afr.com/p/national/palmer_to_build_titanic_ii_uYfunrzpTUPGHQyiXxmBNM | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962605 | 477 | 2.046875 | 2 |
My daughters just like to browse their friends blogs ... so they chose News Squares - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newssquares-stylish-readi/mkmehbmdeabanfnddlekelahkaclfdhl ... which is a Chrome App.
Click through on the titles or pictures below for the full articles.
One parents' experience with allergy testing ... I found this especially interesting because Story would become extremely ADHD behavior every time she had any milk products - even a tiny amount. Sometimes she would also suffer a horrible "diaper rash" 48 hours after consuming the milk product - usually blisters that would go all the way up her back and stomach and would disappear as rapidly as they arrived 36 hours after they erupted - the only trace of their existence was the scabby sores left from the blisters that had popped. It took me over a year to figure out what was causing the rashes. ... BUT people would laugh when I told them about her behavior issues, because it was rare to associate behavior as part of allergy symptoms.
(The parameters they have to determine this do not include parents who prefer homeschooling ... but it is still an interesting list).
The ABC's of a Godly Mother
FREE Math Placement Test
Information about "Common Core"
If you home school - you NEED to be fighting this. Learn what it is and why it is so dangerous.
And some of you might remember Kevin Sorbo of Hercules fame? His wife homeschools their 3 kids and they are quite conservative.
Recently she has posted several posts about Common Core. | <urn:uuid:ae7292dc-fc5c-461e-8791-c04e67c4a51d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eaglenestmom.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975893 | 337 | 1.890625 | 2 |
This is a legitimate question from me about Mitt Romney...Submitted by Rebelucion on Fri, 07/13/2012 - 23:55
I just had an argument with my father about who I should vote for.
Here is some background to put this question into context.
I collect an income tax return when tax day comes around. I only pay into social security and medicare in Texas based on my taxes.
My father states that because he pays tens of thousands in taxes due to his tax bracket, he is going to vote for Romney.
My father says that every presidential election comes down to those that pay into the system through taxes and those that take out through taxes; the Democrats being the latter and the Republicans in the former in his scenario.
He says that since I don't pay into the tax system as he does(which is tens of thousands of dollars), he lives in the real world and I do not. Him being in his stated "real world", he knows the only choice for him and for others living in the "real world" is to vote for Romney, the lesser of two evils. He is aware of the lesser of two evils bit.
He even goes as far as saying that voting for Romney is voting for positive change because he will at the very least be able to save some money in taxes.
I brought up how Bush's term raised the national debt by $5 trillion. He responds by saying that Obama is raising it by $1 trillion per year.
His main sticking point is that during his years of running a business, he has had to pay less taxes under Republican presidents than democratic presidents.
If there is an argument I can convincingly counter this argument with, I would love to hear it.
Thanks for any responses. | <urn:uuid:8814e9f1-6771-4f4f-badb-20deba841141> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailypaul.com/244588/this-is-a-legitimate-question-from-me-about-mitt-romney | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987522 | 363 | 1.75 | 2 |
Q."Why do many codes require vacuum breakers on hose bibbs?" A. There is a very small chance that you could have your hose in a puddle of dirty water while the water main (or well pump) is shut off or the water main/line broken. Then a negative pressure could arise and suck this potentially bacteria laden or toxic water back into the water main. Yes, it is a slim chance but it can and does happen. Vacuum breakers prevent the water from being able to be sucked back into the hose. Also, sometimes people use submersible pumps which lay in non potable water.
Q."Will these valves (hosebibbs) and vacuum breakers hold up to freezing (not break)?" A. Any water in ANY brand of faucet (even if the walls are many times as thick as what we offer) will break if subjected to freezing conditions. The strength of water expanding during freezing is incredible. If water is left in the hose bibb or vacuum breaker during a freeze, you always run the risk of breakage. If you are in an area where freezing is a concern, we recommend installing only freeze proof hose bibbs, which we offer here. | <urn:uuid:62cf3b85-cc6d-45de-9648-2715a9581e64> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.plumbingsupply.com/lead-free-hose-bibbs.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954376 | 252 | 1.828125 | 2 |
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — One of two Oklahoma men accused of going on a racially motivated shooting spree in a predominantly black section of Tulsa this month says he has no ill-will toward black people and counts several of them among his friends.
SEE ALSO: What Obama Can Learn From LBJ
“I always got along with everybody. It didn’t matter what color you (were),” Jake England told his attorney, Clark Brewster, in a brief videotaped interview from jail that Brewster gave to The Associated Press.
A judge entered not guilty pleas Monday for England and Alvin Watts, who appeared in Tulsa County District Court via closed-circuit television from jail, where they have been held since their arrests Easter Sunday. They face murder and hate crimes charges for allegedly killing three people and wounding two others.
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Special Judge William Hiddle assigned a lawyer to Watts and entered not guilty pleas for both men to charges of first-degree murder, shooting with the intent to kill and malicious harassment in the April 6 attacks in Tulsa. The harassment counts imply the victims were targeted because they are black.
The first-degree murder counts are punishable by execution or life in prison. Prosecutors have not decided whether to seek the death penalty.
“I want to reiterate that this is the first step in obtaining justice in this case,” said Doug Drummond, Tulsa County First Assistant District Attorney. “In these types of cases, it’s more of a marathon than a sprint.”
Authorities, who have described the pair as white, contend the two housemates targeted their victims because they believe England wanted to avenge his father’s shooting death by a black man two years ago. Police said England and Watts confessed after their arrests and said they chose the victims at random.
The early-morning shootings terrorized Tulsa’s black community over Easter weekend. William Allen, Bobby Clark and Dannaer Fields were killed, and David Hall and Deon Tucker were wounded.
A day before the shootings, England apparently wrote a Facebook post saying that it was the second anniversary of his father’s death, using a racial slur and lamenting that “it’s hard not to go off.”
Brewster said England is Cherokee Indian. In the videotaped interview, Brewster asks England why he used the slur on the posting.
“It was just express(ing) the way I was upset about the guy that shot my dad,” England told Brewster in the video, which lasts less than eight minutes. “That’s the only time I ever expressed anything like that about somebody.”
Documents filed with the charges said anonymous callers to a police hotline before the men were arrested claimed England was a racist who hated black men and that he “has mentioned he will die in a shootout with the police if he has to.” England’s family and friends have said the death of his father and his girlfriend’s January suicide sent him into a downward spiral.
Oklahoma’s hate crime law applies in cases where a defendant targets a victim specifically because of that person’s race, religion, ancestry, natural origin or disability.
Weak penalties, however, have resulted in it usually only being used in cases involving low-level misdemeanors where prosecutors want a longer sentence. The malicious harassment law is a misdemeanor on the first offense and carries a sentence of up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. | <urn:uuid:3c21f3d9-8499-4d79-8512-9f18557bc71a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsone.com/2003098/tulsa-oklahoma-hate-crime-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973571 | 744 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Permthrin Impregnation Kit
The DeBugger fabric treatment kit contains permethrin, which is an insecticide suitable for use on clothing and mosquito nets. It kills mosquitoes and other insects and arthropods including ticks and fleas when they alight on impregnated material. It is not a repellent and should not be applied to the skin.
The DeBugger is supplied as a concentrate that must be diluted and applied at a rate of .5g/sq m. Please note that the amount absorbed depends on the material to be treated. As an approximate guide, the amount in this kit will be sufficient for 2 standard size mosquito nets or at least 10 T-shirts. This is best done by soaking the net or clothing in a plastic bag or bucket. For maximum effect, nets need to be retreated every 3 - 6 months and kept stored out of direct sunlight. Impregnated T-shirts and sheets have no vapour once treated, can be used for children's clothing and will last at least 5 washes. If using this method for clothing, a run through a washing machine following treatment is recommended.
The use of DEET-containing aerosols and permethrin soaked nets and T-shirts significantly reduces the likelihood of insect-borne diseases including malaria. However in some areas, you may also need anti-malarial medications.
- Health Information for International Travel 4th edition 1995, Australian Government Publishing Services, Canberra.
- Textbook of Travel Medicine and Health, eds Dupont and Steffen, Pub BC Decker 1997.
- Health Effects of Permethrin-Impregnated Army Battle Dress uniforms. NRC review. National Academy Press Washington DC 1994 | <urn:uuid:4cde919f-021e-46f5-8f09-42fa21904d29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.travelclinic.com.au/permthrin-impregnation-kit.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911885 | 349 | 2.34375 | 2 |
ACP develops common climate change policy
Pacific Islands nations are meeting in Vanuatu to work on an enhanced, regional cooperation policy to cope with the effects of climate change.
The meeting in Port Vila is part of a briefing series for the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States, organised with the European Union's Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development (CTA).
"The impact of climate change on small islands, like the ones in the Pacific and elsewhere, is much more important than in other countries," Isolina Boto, head of the CTA office in Brussels, Belgium, told Pacific Beat.
Small island nation contribute less than 0.03 per cent of current global greenhouse gas emissions, but say they are among the first to feel the environmental, social and economic effects.
"The challenges we are all facing are a stark reminder for the need to reinforce globalism and to force long lasting partnerships," Alfred Roland Carlot, Vanuatu's Minister of Foreign Affairs & External Trade, said at the opening ceremony.
It's hoped the policy-makers, researchers, civil society groups, and development partners due to gather in Port Vila between 31 October and 2 November will begin developing shared responses and common strategies to climate change.
"Some of the islands - if you talk about Mauritius or if you talk about Singapore - they have really shown resilience by having the right strategies, the right policies in place," Ms Boto said.
"It requires a policy, frameworks in place, and actions, and in the case of the Pacific we believe very much that they can take advantage of experiences elsewhere and that there is added value in building a regional strategy and a regional approach."
This week's briefing will feed into the first ACP Council of Ministers on Climate Change to be held in Brussels from 7 to 9 November.
It will also contribute to the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to
the Kyoto Protocol, which take place later this month in Qatar. | <urn:uuid:4168d170-0a7c-4b8d-85ad-e61d127d8272> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-29/an-vanuatu-hosts-acp-climate-change-meeting/4338826 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937677 | 438 | 2.34375 | 2 |