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BOSTON -- Catholic educators who gathered April 11-13 in Boston did not shy away from tough issues they face, such as declining enrollments, school closures and competition from charter schools.
During multiple workshops at the National Catholic Educational Association’s annual convention, educators were advised to do more lobbying, strengthen their boards and school leaders, and put strategic plans in place. Above all, they were urged to be true to the mission of their Catholic school.
In one workshop, Catholic educators heard about similar patterns found in 35 Catholic schools that have recently closed.
Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill, executive director of the Barbara and Patrick Roche Center for Catholic Education at Boston College, shared some of the center’s findings in interviews conducted with leaders from closed schools.
Researchers spent an hour with leaders from each school and came away with similar findings. Most of the schools had little or no communication with staff or parents or strategic planning. They did not look at indicators around them such as changing demographics in their area. The schools typically had ineffective boards and many of them had poor facilities and maintenance.
Weitzel-O’Neill urged educators at the April 12 workshop to take a close look at their own schools and determine if they shared any characteristics of these closed schools and if so, to make some changes.
Christian Br. Raymond Vercruysse, former director of the Catholic Education Program at the University of San Francisco, similarly urged Catholic school teachers, principals and presidents to pay attention to what makes a school effective and strive to keep their schools in line with those practices.
For example, a recent study about successful independent schools also has plenty to say to Catholic schools, he said. Many measurements of success were echoed in other workshops. The indicators included strong leadership, strategic plans and cash reserves not just for school operations but for student scholarships and financial aid.
Vercruysse also highlighted a key element that Catholic schools must have in place: “maintaining and continually strengthening their Catholic identity.”
He sees survival as linked to how well Catholic schools are tied into their mission -- which he said must be discussed when faculty members are interviewed for a job and reinforced during professional development programs throughout the year.
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Today, a man lies dying of liver failure in a hospital. There is little expectation that he will be one of the lucky few to receive a transplant before he becomes too ill to save. Even if he did receive a transplant, he will be burdened with taking multiple anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life, which in and of themselves would significantly compromise his health.
Tomorrow, scientists develop a method to build this man a new liver, one that would be a perfect match for him, requiring no anti-rejection drugs whatsoever. There is a catch. To perfect such a solution would require the destruction of other lives. Would Judaism sanction such a solution?
Jewish law clearly forbids the taking of one life to save another. The Talmud forbids saving one's life at the expense of another by asking how one knows that his life is more valuable than his neighbor's. Perhaps your neighbor's life is more valuable.
When The Fetus Is A Threat To Life
One may kill someone who is unjustly pursuing a third party to kill him.
But, what if the life that would need to be sacrificed was that of a fetus? May we permit abortion to save the life of an already born person? The Mishna clearly states that if the life of a woman in labor is threatened by her fetus, the fetus should be aborted. But once a portion of the baby has emerged, we may not abort the fetus, because "one may not set aside one person's life for the sake of another."
The principle behind this ruling is that one may kill someone who is unjustly pursuing a third party to kill him. Since the fetus, who is not yet considered a "complete" person, is "pursuing" the mother in a way that will inevitably result in her death, we may kill it first. But, once it has even partially emerged, it is considered a full-fledged person. Now we are faced with a dilemma, states Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the most respected rabbis of the 20th century: who is pursuing whom?
When Pursuing Each Other
Imagine that you are transported back in time to Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804. As you step out of the time machine you see Aaron Burr, pulling out a revolver to shoot Alexander Hamilton, former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Simultaneously, you see Hamilton also drawing his revolver to kill Burr! What should you do? Kill Burr? Kill Hamilton? Jewish law would rule that you may kill neither, because they are pursuing each other and you do not know which one, if either, is an innocent party.
In our case of the baby struggling to be born at the expense of the mother and the mother struggling to survive at the expense of the fetus, are not the baby and the mother each "pursuing" the other? In such a case, the general rule is that we may not choose either, since each is a complete and autonomous person, and each is both the pursuer and the pursued. Luckily for us, these scenarios are very rare occurrences in our day thanks to Caesarian sections.
A life-threatening situation for another adult does not justify killing a fetus.
But, since the rationale for abortion in Jewish law is based on the fetus being a pursuer of the mother, a life-threatening situation for another adult would not justify our killing a fetus, since the fetus does not threaten the life of anyone except the mother. Therefore, we cannot allow abortion, even to save the life of our patient with liver failure.
But there is hope. What if the scientists "merely" needed to destroy excess fertilized eggs from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures that are only a few days old and have not yet been implanted in a woman's uterus? Is the destruction of these "pre-embryos" ethically acceptable to us? That is exactly the debate that currently rages regarding stem cell research.
While stem cells can be derived from aborted fetuses and even adults, the best source for stem cells is the small clump of cells that compose the early zygote only a few days following conception. Therefore, to best investigate the latent possibilities inherent in stem cells, scientists wish to use the approximately 100,000 "excess" frozen pre-embryos that are "left over" from earlier IVF attempts. Is it ethical to allow the destruction of pre-embryos to obtain stem cells for research that may some day save thousands of lives?
Early stem cells have the ability to differentiate into every cell of the human body, potentially forming an entire fetus. If we were able to manipulate the conditions controlling cellular differentiation, we might create replacement cells and organs, potentially curing illnesses such as diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.
But, the ultimate promise of stem cell technology would be to combine it with cloning. Imagine our man dying of liver failure. If we could clone one of his cells, but instead of allowing the cloned cell to develop into a fetus, we might place it into the appropriate environment that would cause it to differentiate into a liver that would be virtually genetically identical to that of the sick man. If we could "grow" this liver to maturity, we could offer the sick man a liver transplant without the risk of rejection and without the need for anti-rejection drugs.
Unfortunately, we still do not know if we can successfully clone a human, nor are we sure what practical value can be derived from stem cells. It will require years of very expensive, labor-intensive research to determine the potential that stem cells hold for the treatment, palliation, and cure of human illness.
Are "Pre-Embryos" Included in the Prohibition of Abortion?
Is it ethical to sacrifice pre-embryos to experiment with their stem cells in the hope of some day saving many lives? While many ethical issues arise, the key one is whether pre-embryos are included in the prohibition of abortion. The consensus thus far is that it an embryo is not protected by the limitations on abortion until it is implanted in a woman. Most rationales given for why the Torah forbids abortion, except to save the mother's life, revolve around the fetus being within the woman.
An embryo is not protected by the limitations on abortion, until it is implanted in a woman.
The logic of only ascribing humanity to an embryo once it is implanted in the womb is simple. Left undisturbed, an embryo in its mother's womb will most likely continue to grow and reach parturition. But the pre-embryo created by IVF, if left untouched in its "test tube," will die. The pre-embryo requires active intervention to even reach a situation which we consider to be true potential life. The alternative to this reasoning would be to argue that the killing of adult skin cells is forbidden, since a person could potentially be cloned from any cell in an adult's body.
Additionally, there is another sound reason to allow destruction of pre-embryos to save a life. When necessary to save a life, Judaism requires us to transgress all of the laws in the Torah, with the exception of murder, adultery, and idol worship. For example, if someone is gravely ill on Yom Kippur, we would drive in a car to get them non-kosher food even if necessary to save their life. If a pre-embryo is not covered by the Biblical commandment of "thou shall not murder," then we might allow destroying a pre-embryo for its stem cells if it would save the life of an already born person. We are left with the question of whether research is considered the saving of a life. This argument becomes even more appealing if concrete life-saving medical treatments can be demonstrated.
For these as well as many other reasons, many contemporary halachic decisors have ruled that the destruction of preexisting pre-embryos for stem cell research is permitted (see my more extensive article on stem cell research and Jewish Law: http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/stemcellres.html)
Cheapening the Value of Human Life
Nevertheless, many Rabbis oppose the deliberate creation of pre-embryos for the purpose of their destruction, as this would cheapen the value of human life.
The halachic process offers fascinating insight into all areas of ethics, including biomedical ethics. It gives us the opportunity to evaluate the explosion of technology that surrounds us through the lens of the Torah, insuring that we remain the masters of our science and not vice versa. Judaism has no issue with technology. It only requires the ethical and responsible use of science to better our lives. Let us pray that tomorrow, our patient with liver failure will be cured.
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Welcome to Irish Traditions, Heritage and Folklore at SligoHeritage!
For the devotee of Irish history, heritage, mythology or folklore, County Sligo in the west coast province of Connacht, has everything. For those who take time to read the landscape, every stone and hill has its own unique, often bloody, story to tell. Here one can literally trace the dramatic tendrils of our nation, from mythological origins through a turbulent history to a modern nation. In its lofty mountains, its winding rivers, its jagged coastline, God has created here a land blessed by time and unspoiled by time or man.
The mighty prow of 'bare Benbulbens head,' made famous by the poet W.B. Yeats, defines the County Sligo landscape. This is the 'Yeats' country', a countryside rich in history, folklore and mythology. In Drumcliffe churchyard the poet himself lies at peace in the Sligo soil that inspired much of his work.
My name is Joe Mc Gowan, host of this, County Sligo's only heritage site. My interest in heritage, folklore and history has led to the writing and publishing of several books on the subject. These web pages have been created to give the visitor an understanding, not just of Sligo's history, and heritage, but also a taste of current events.
Knocknarea, final resting place of Maeve, Iron Age Queen of Connacht
Unfolded here are the beliefs of ordinary people, their superstitions, customs and way of life. Our journey revealing the character of Ireland, and County Sligo in particular, is a microcosm, not just of Sligo, but of a romantic Ireland on the verge of extinction. In a series of articles the lives of historical figures and events will be told. The warp and weft of everyday people, their existence mostly uncelebrated and unsung, will be discovered here too.
Courtesy of TheWildGeese: Click HERE
Some articles inside:
"Lissadell House, Coffin Ships, the Pomano and Sir Robert Gore-Booth" A saga of famine and coffin ships in Sligo... and on the same page: "The Story of the Voyage of Patrick and Margaret Burns..." New 26/12/'06: What the British PM said.
Find previous'Index' proverbs and quotations HERE
"In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland": For Gustave de Beaumont's view of Ireland in the mid 1800's go here and scroll down. See also what Prime Minister Tony Blair said about the Great Irish Famine.
"How many, ignorant of their own country, run eagerly into foreign regions to search out and admire whatever curiosities are to be found, many of which are much inferior to those which offer themselves to our eyes at home": Linnaeus
Continuing this week in HISTORY: Death on a Mountain: The story of a Civil War incident where six men, known as 'Sligo's Noble Six' were shot dead on Benbulben Mountain
HERITAGE Lissadell: Memories of life in the 'Big House' Part 2 cont.: Memoirs of Lissadell butler Thomas Kilgallon. Duty Days
"…When first I came to Lissadell there was a kind of feudal system or tribute, between landlord and tenant. It was called duty work. Each tenant farmer had to give in work so many days in the year free."
Go HERE for a great new initiative from TheWildGeese website. This site deserves the support of all lovers of Irish history and heritage.
To keep up with Sligo Heritage; for Bealtaine:The Fire Festival and Mary or Baal?; The Reewoge Days; How St.Patrick banished the last serpent; Imbolc/St. Brigid's Day: Links to the Christmas Mummers; A very Happy Christmas and New Year to all my Sligo Heritage readers; The Maryland Irish Festival; Ballintogher John Egan Festival; Cult of the Undead in Ireland?
For Sunday Miscellany Podcast on May customs go here: SunMisc "May: Mary's month or Baal's" is the last recording on the disc
|To keep up with latest events on Sligo Heritage visit our FB page HERE or HERE|
RTE Nationwide podcast: A glimpse of Inishmurray Island. Click HERE
Inishmurray: "A Trip to the Island" Click HERE
Podcast of RTE programme "Streets of Sligo" Click HERE
In Heritage archives:: Go HERE for text and pictures of the MUMMERS PLAY.
For an explanation of the STRAWBOY tradition, scroll to bottom of page.
Go HERE for a Youtube clip of the STRAWBOYS.
For an explanation of WRENBOYS go HERE
This project is funded by Sligo Leader Partnership with support from the Irish Government and the EU Structural Funds under the National Development Plan 2000-2006
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how the web changes your reading habits 06.24.2005, 2:17 PM
posted by ben vershbow
An article in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor looks at two research projects currently underway in Palo Alto, California - one at Xerox PARC, the other at Stanford. Both are building tools and devising methods to improve online reading, albeit by different approaches. The PARC project is developing ScentHighlights, an "enhanced skimming" function based on keywords and the associative processes of the human brain. On paper, we highlight important passages, or attach sticky notes, to make them more readily retrievable later on when we're re-reading, studying, or compiling notes. The PARC researchers are taking this a few steps further, exploiting the unique properties (and addressing the unique challenges) of the online reading environment. With ScentHighlights, the computer observes what the reader is highlighting and selects other passages that it thinks might be relevant or useful:
We perform the conceptual highlighting by computing what conceptual keywords are related to each other via word co-occurrence and spreading activation. Spreading activation is a cognitive model developed in psychology to simulate how memory chunks and conceptual items are retrieved in our brain.
While the PARC team is focused on deepening the often fractured experience of reading online, where the amount of text is overwhelming, the Stanford project is experimenting with a method for sustained reading in an environment that can barely handle text at all: the tiny screens of cell phones and mobile devices. Using a technique called RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), BuddyBuzz flashes words on the screen one at a time. It takes some getting used to, but apparently, readers can absorb up to 1,000 words per minute. Speed is adjustable, and the program is already set to make the tiny, natural pauses that come at commas and periods. The initial release of BuddyBuzz will syndicate stories from Reuters, CNET and a handful of popular blogs.
filologanoga on June 25, 2005 5:57 AM:
The first project reminds me uncomfortably of certain software trying to guess what I really want to write, or do. With the result that the guessing function gets turned off. Hopefully, the ScientHighlights algorithms will be more linguistically intelligent.
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It's not really a secret anymore, but nestled just a little bit away from the world-renowned Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains is one of the must-see winter destinations in the Arizona birder's travel log. Florida Canyon doesn't pull in quite as many spring and summer attractions as Madera Canyon or those old guard canyons in the Huachuca Mountains, but for the last two winters now it's hosted Rufous-capped Warbler, an exceedingly rare and beautiful vagrant from Mexico that does as much to give the canyon its namesake (meaning, 'flowered' in Spanish) as any of the flora. And there are lots of other great birds hanging out too.
I was fortunate to see Florida Canyon's main event last February while on tour with Birding Is Fun's Robert Mortensen and Jeremy Medina, but I was forever nagged by my unsatisfactory photos, and Pops still had to log this jaw-dropping bird to his ABA list. What more of an excuse is needed?
Truth be told though, I was feeling anything but confident when we arrived at the base of Florida Canyon. It was bitterly cold outside (in the 20s) and in from 7:30am to 9:30am we saw maybe seven actual birds and only four or five different species. With the canyon slopes keeping out the early morning sun, it was simply too cold and dark. The birds were much wiser than we were.
We ambled up and down the lower canyon, staying within a half mile or so of the old dam that used as a checkpoint for the Warbler location. The sun would occasionally burst through the clouds and we'd get small doses of activity, but with snow all over the ground and the weather so uninviting, I had a hard time imagining what would keep tropical Mexican warblers in this far north of their normal range.
For a while we had to content ourselves with some of the braver local birds, and sightings of the chromatically opposed Pyrrhuloxias and Mexican Jays, along with the sweet serenades of Canyon Wrens, kept our morale high enough.
By 10am the sun finally got its act together and the birds started to make up for lost time. The canyon started to echo with more and more chatter. Rogue groups of Lesser Goldfinches and Kinglets began their daring daylights raids and then, all at once we felt as though we were being swept off our feet! A massive mixed flock made it's way down the canyon, gathering birds and noise like a tropical storm. Dozens of Black-chinned Sparrows joined with Bridled Titmice and the Finches to form a feathery gallimaufry that conglomerated with Lincoln's and Song Sparrows along the creek to obliterate every exposed seed and insect in their path.
I was particularly jazzed to get so many nice views of the Black-chinned Sparrows, an uncommon emberizid I'd seen only once, and fleetingly, before. Of course, being camouflaged Sparrows with an affinity for low-lying scrub brush and an constant motion, they weren't the best photo subjects, but I wasn't complaining. These birds alone made me feel the trip was worth it, and there weren't even any Warblers (including Yellow-rumped!) in sight.
We followed the big mixed flocks down the Canyon, with great delight. After the first two hours of frigid birding we had scarcely logged a dozen species, but in the span of fifteen minutes it shot up near forty, as the Bridled Titmice and Bushtits met with the other foragers and caused a sensory overload. In all the madness we even managed to see (and hear) fives Wren species. The Canyon, Rock, Cactus, Bewick's, and House Wrens all made appearances--my first and only five-Wren day, and this was, again, all within a very short span of time. Thinking back on it now, the Wrennaissance was perhaps the most remarkable experience of the trip... obviously I didn't get any photos to prove it.
After half and hour or so of mixing with the mixed flock, Pops and I felt like we were finally starting to get a lid on everything. Ladder-backed and Acorn Woodpeckers were starting to pop in at points along the canyon, and jealous Jays were always squawking in the background. Some larger, pointy-headed Finches caught our attention as they made their way down the grassy canyon slope (west side), with their noises and coloration seeming very good for Cassin's. While trying to snatch a photo of these fleeting Finches, a different flash of color cut across the west-side path and stopped me dead in my tracks. I had almost forgotten we were after this bird!
From the grassy cover on the west side of the trail, a single Rufous-capped Warbler darted to the base of a scrub oak. After much shivering and scheming, it had finally worked out! Though the bird only stayed close for a minute, Pops and I both got beautiful up-close looks of this well-traveled bird--for all I know the exact same one I saw last year. We watched it forage down on the ground, mostly obscured from any clear shots. I was happy enough just seeing it again and knowing that Pops could add this incredible critter to his list. But the Rufous-capped Warbler did me one better. With no apparent aim other than to check us out and let us know that he was made of sterner stuff, he ascended the tree and perched right at eye level, first showing his fuzzy fanny...
Behold! One of the rarer butts in North America
We were on cloud-nine (one of the few clouds I like while out birding) as we descended the Canyon, picking up Spotted and Canyon Towhees on the way, along with Arizona Woodpeckers and a Roadrunner. It's been three weeks and I still feel buzzed thinking about this sighting. The remarkable turn-around from six species to forty in about thirty minutes, is thus far one of my best birding experiences. I've dipped on Mt. Lemmon and the Estrella Mountains this winter, but Florida Canyon has too much good stuff to dip, and this worked out to be one of those days when we just about hit it all (ok, to be fair, we didn't see any Montezuma Quail, but most scientists now believe those birds died out with the Aztecs two hundred years ago).
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Study Links Alcoholic Energy Drinks to Intoxication, Drunk Driving
Bar patrons who consumed energy drinks mixed with alcohol were three times more likely to leave drunk and four times more willing to drive drunk compared to patrons who drank alcohol alone, according to researchers who surveyed college-aged drinkers as they left bars.
The University of Florida researchers surveyed more than 800 bar patrons at random between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., and also collected breath samples to test blood-alcohol content (BAC). The average BAC for alcoholic energy drink consumers was 0.109 percent, well above the legal standard for intoxication.
Patrons who consumed alcohol mixed with highly caffeinated energy drinks like Red Bull also were more likely to have consumed alcohol for longer periods of time, and left bars later than other drinkers.
The study was led by Dennis Thombs of the school’s College of Public Health and Health Professions. “His approach is unique because it was conducted in a natural drinking environment — college bars,” said Wake University’s Mary Claire O’Brien, author of previous research on alcoholic energy drinks. “His results clearly support the serious concern raised by previous research, that subjective drunkenness may be reduced by the concurrent ingestion of caffeinated energy drinks, increasing both the likelihood of further alcohol consumption, and of driving when intoxicated.”
The study was published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.
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John McCain: keeping faith, on his own terms
How the Arizona senator, once a POW 'pastor,' finds purpose in his beliefs and survival.
John McCain does not believe in destiny. God, he says, gives us life, shows us how to use it, and leaves it to us to carry out as we choose.Skip to next paragraph
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
In other words, the senior senator from Arizona does not believe that in surviving the ordeal of 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, including torture and extended periods of isolation, he has somehow been tapped by God to become the next president of the United States.
But Senator McCain, now in the thick of his second run for the Republican presidential nomination, does believe that he is still alive for a purpose.
"There is no logical reason for me to be on earth, if you look at my life, so I should spend this time trying to serve a cause greater than myself," says McCain in a Monitor interview.
Until 1981, that meant serving in the US Navy. Since 1983, that has meant representing the people of Arizona, first in the House, then for four terms in the Senate.
As one of the better-known Republican candidates going into the 2008 presidential cycle, McCain brought to the table a well-honed persona born of blunt talk, intense personal drive, irreverent wit, and a dash of profanity. Most of all, perhaps, McCain is known for his strongly held policy views, despite the political costs.
He continues to support a major US military presence in Iraq, for instance, long after a majority of Americans reported they had stopped believing in it. His liberal positions on immigration reform and campaign finance have made him anathema to key segments of the GOP base.
But undergirding McCain's hard-charging image there lies a deep faith in God that he credits with getting him through his toughest moments as a prisoner of war – and which he still relies on. During his imprisonment in Hanoi, "there were times when I didn't pray for one more day or one more hour, but I prayed for one more minute," he says. "So I have very little doubt that it was reliance on someone stronger than me that not only got me through, but got me through honorably."
McCain says he is not "born again" and has not been baptized. He says he is "just a Christian," who for many years has been attending the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona with his family. He was raised in the Episcopal Church and attended Episcopal High School, an elite boarding school in Alexandria, Va., where he was required to attend chapel every morning and church on Sunday. At the US Naval Academy, church attendance was also required.
"So I certainly was exposed!" he says, chuckling.
Apparently a lot of it sank in, though McCain would be the first to admit he was hardly a choir-boy growing up, racking up his share of demerits in high school and teetering right on the edge of expulsion during much of his time at the Naval Academy.
In captivity, covert 'church'
Being taken captive matured him fast, he has said, and over time, he discovered that having faith gave him a common bond with his fellow prisoners.
Orson Swindle, an ex-POW who spent the last 20 months of his captivity at McCain's side, recalls how important "church" was when he and the others were being held individually in separate rooms. Every Sunday, after the midday meal was finished, the dishes were washed, and the guards had departed, the senior officer in the area would signal that it was time to pray together, by coughing in a way that signaled the letter "c" for church – one cough and then three coughs.
"It was time for a solid stream of thought among those of us there," says Mr. Swindle, now a policy adviser in Washington. "We all silently said the Pledge of Allegiance, we repeated the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer, and anything else you'd want to [say] in there that would get us some help – but not out loud. If we were heard talking, they would come in and start torturing us."
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The CFS scheduler does its best to divide the available CPU time between
contending processes, keeping the CPU utilization of each about the same.
The scheduler will not, however, insist on equal utilization when there is
free CPU time available; rather than let the CPU go idle, the scheduler
will give any left-over time to processes which can make use of it. This
approach makes sense; there is little point in throttling runnable
processes when nobody else wants the CPU anyway.
Except that, sometimes, that's exactly what a system administrator may want
to do. Limiting the maximum share of CPU time that a process (or group of
processes) may consume can be desirable if those processes belong to a
customer who has only paid for a certain amount of CPU time or in
situations where it is necessary to provide strict resource-use isolation
between processes. The CFS scheduler cannot limit CPU use in that manner,
but the CFS bandwidth control patches,
posted by Paul Turner, may change that situation.
This patch adds a couple of new control files to the CPU control group
mechanism: cpu.cfs_period_us defines the period over which the
group's CPU usage is to be regulated, and cpu.cfs_quota_us
controls how much CPU time is available to the group over that period.
With these two knobs, the administrator can easily limit a group to a
certain amount of CPU time and also control the granularity with which that
limit is enforced.
Paul's patch is not the only one aimed at solving this problem; the CFS hard limits patch set from Bharata B Rao
provides nearly identical functionality. The implementation is
different, though; the hard limits patch tries to reuse some of the
bandwidth-limiting code from the realtime scheduler to impose the limits.
Paul has expressed concerns about the overhead of using this code and how
well it will work in situations where the CPU is almost fully subscribed.
These concerns appear to have carried the day - there has not been a hard
limits patch posted since early 2010. So the CFS bandwidth control patches look
like the form this functionality will take in the mainline.
to post comments)
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A constitution, however, is merely a piece of paper - in the case of the U.S. Constitution, an old, frail piece of paper. More important than the paper itself, then, is the continual willingness of a country's citizens to defend the ideas written on it. Recently, however, several writers have lamented Americans' obsession with the Constitution, seemingly perplexed at why Americans would want checks on the power of their government. To take two examples:
"This fatuous infatuation with the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment, is clearly the work of witches, wiccans and wackos," writes Richard Cohen in The Washington Post.
And, at The Economist: "There is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century."
Alright, then, if the Constitution is obsolete, by what set of rules would these fellows have the government operate? I'm all ears: suggest away. But before we just toss the Constitution aside, Don Boudreaux has some questions:
...if government officials and the courts are free to choose which words of the Constitution to “adhere to” and which to ignore, what meaning does the Constitution really possess? And why did the Founding Fathers struggle so hard during the long, hot summer of 1787 over the precise wording of the Constitution? Why didn’t they – to ensure that they would win the respect of future generations of Very Smart Persons – simply draft a document that reads “Government may do whatever it judges to be best for The People” and leave it at that?
Granted, the American Founding Fathers were a flawed group of fellows: they owned slaves, thought women were daft, and didn't trust the common man to keep his wits about him. Fortunately, Madison, Jefferson, et al. thought to include Article V, which provides for a process by which the Constitution may, when absolutely necessary, be modified. And despite its imperfections, the Constitution - or, rather, adherence to its principles - has allowed one of the more cantakerous groups of people in human history to achieve unprecedented peace and prosperity.
This being a holiday week in South Korea, I've had a chance to take in a couple movies, the best of which was Mugabe and the White African. This documentary is an account of one white Zimbabwean farmer's struggle to keep his farm even as the government of Robert Mugabe uses violence to confiscate the land owned by white farmers. Mugabe justifies this policy by claiming that the land belongs to the black peasants, though in fact the land is generally given to the political cronies who keep Mugabe's Zanu-PF party in power. The film's lasting impression of Zimbabwe - one supported by countless other sources - is of a country ruled, not by law, but by the whims of one power-hungry man who couldn't care less if his policies destroy the economy and the lives of the Zimbabwean people.
The film, in short, is a painful example of what can happen when government power goes unchecked. While I'm not worried about America becoming Zimbabwe tomorrow, the film does show why these checks on state power are necessary, and why citizens must constantly fight to enforce them.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says demonstrators protesting against Wall Street and economic inequality are expressing the frustrations of the American public.
Speaking at a White House news conference, Obama says he understands the public's concerns about how the nation's financial system works. And he says Americans see Wall Street as an example of the financial industry not always following the rules.
However, Obama says the U.S. must have a strong and effective financial sector for the economy to grow. He says the financial regulation bill he championed is designed to make sure there is tougher oversight of the financial industry.
The Occupy Wall Street protests started Sept. 17 in New York. Related demonstrations have popped up around the country.
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Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified?
Do Americans really have to pay income tax? I have been told the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax, is invalid because Ohio was not legally a state at the time of ratification. So far I haven't had the nerve to actually try this argument out on the IRS, but with Christmas coming I could use the extra cash. What do you think, Cecil, is it worth a shot?
This is my absolute favorite anti-income-tax argument. Most claims that Americans aren't required to pay income tax rely on legal interpretations so tortured only a tax resister could possibly believe them. But the Ohio thing has just enough plausibility to give even sane people pause.
It all started when Ohio was preparing to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its admission to the Union in 1953. Researchers looking for the original statehood documents discovered there'd been a little oversight. While Congress had approved Ohio's boundaries and constitution, it had never passed a resolution formally admitting the future land of the Buckeyes. Technically, therefore, Ohio wasn't a state.
Predictably, when this came to light it was the subject of much merriment. One senator joshingly suggested that his colleagues from Ohio were drawing federal paychecks under false pretenses.
But Ohio congressman George Bender thought it was no laughing matter. He introduced a bill in Congress to admit Ohio to the Union retroactive to March 1, 1803. At a special session at the old state capital in Chillicothe, the Ohio state legislature approved a new petition for statehood that was delivered to Washington on horseback. Congress subsequently passed a joint resolution, and President Eisenhower, after a few more jokes, signed it on August 7, 1953.
But then the tax resisters got to work. They argued that since Ohio wasn't officially a state until 1953, its ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was invalid, and thus Congress had no authority to enact an income tax.
Baloney, argued rational folk. Enough states voted for ratification even if you don't count Ohio.
OK, said the resisters, but the proposed amendment had been introduced to Congress by the administration of William H. Taft. Taft had been born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1857. The Constitution requires that presidents be natural-born citizens of the United States. Since Ohio wasn't a state in 1857, Taft wasn't a natural-born citizen, couldn't legally be president, and couldn't legally introduce the 16th Amendment. (Presumably one would also have problems with anything done by presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, B. Harrison, McKinley, and Harding, who were also born in Ohio.)
Get off it, the rationalists replied. The 1953 resolution retroactively admitted Ohio as of 1803, thereby rendering all subsequent events copacetic.
Uh-uh, said the resisters. The constitution says the Congress shall make no ex post facto law. That means no retroactive admissions to statehood.
Uh, we'll get back to you on that, said the rationalists.
A call to the IRS elicited the following official statement: "The courts have … rejected claims that the Sixteenth Amendment was not properly ratified … In Porth v. Brodrick, 214 F.2d 925 (10th Circuit 1954), the court dismissed an attack on the Sixteenth Amendment as being 'clearly unsubstantial and without merit,' as well as 'far fetched and frivolous.'"
Just one problem. The Porth decision didn't specifically address the Ohio argument. It just sort of spluttered that attacks on the 16th Amendment were stupid.
OK, they're stupid. But great matters have turned on seemingly sillier points of law. It's not like the Ohio argument couldn't have been defeated on the merits. One suspects that from a legal standpoint "ex post facto" doesn't mean exactly the same thing as "retroactive." And of course the weight of 150 years of history, during which time everyone thought Ohio had been properly admitted, ought to count for something.
I'm not defending the crackpots. But if you're a parent you recognize that "because I said so" isn't much of an argument. Guess it's different if you're a judge.
Better late than never
You recently dealt with the argument that the 16th Amendment (income tax) was never properly ratified because Ohio was not a state of the union. You mentioned that the IRS referred you to the Porth case and that it "didn't specifically address the Ohio argument." Well, there have been court decisions that specifically addressed the Ohio argument. I enclose a copy of Knoblauch v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Fifth Circuit 1984), 749 F2d 200 [etc.].
Got a lot of mail about this, much of it actually pretty intelligent, which I hope is a trend. However, the case law isn't much help. Bernard cites two decisions: Knoblauch and Bowman v. Government of the United States. Knoblauch does briefly address the Ohio argument, but merely cites earlier cases in which said argument was rejected by the courts. Turning to the earlier cases, one finds the following declarations: In previous cases having nothing to do with the Ohio argument we upheld the constitutionality of the 16th Amendment, so too bad for you, Bobo. Since 1803 everybody had assumed that Ohio was a state, and we don't feel like upsetting the apple cart now.
Bowman deals with the issue in greater depth, but its finding boils down to: we ain't messin' with this one, Jack. Take it up with Congress.
Cecil understands that the courts don't want to open the door to substantive review of the Ohio argument, lest they be inundated by clowns seeking to have the government dissolved due to clerical error. Still, one can't help thinking the preceding arguments, while they may be legally solid, aren't exactly satisfying.
The Teeming Millions (well, dozens) to the rescue. As Cecil suspected, and as he certainly would've demonstrated had he the space and that law clerk he's been asking for, the Ohio argument can be refuted point by point, to wit:
- The ban on ex post facto laws refers only to criminal matters. Case law, 1798.
- Ohio's retroactive admission to the union was OK. Persons born in U.S. territories — not just in states — are U.S. citizens. (For example, Puerto Rico.) So Taft was a natural-born citizen and could legally serve as president.
- Even if he wasn't, so what? Presidents don't introduce constitutional amendments; members of Congress do.
- Ohio was a state even without the 1953 resolution. The statehood admission process was somewhat casual in 1803; it required no formal resolution of admission.
Whew, you say. The republic saved again. Not that this will stop the tax resisters. While the Ohio argument has some entertainment value, most tax-resister arguments are just stupid, e.g., the claim that the IRS is unlawful because it's an "establishment of religion." Taft not a citizen of the U.S.? These people aren't citizens of earth.
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1999 4.3% (9.4 million people) of the U.S. population
reported trying methamphetamine at least once in their
lifetime. The highest rate of meth use was among the 18-25
age group with 5.2% of them reporting lifetime meth use
lab seizures have gone up 577% nationally since 1995.
over the past few years show Oklahoma among the nations
leader in Meth labs, arrests, addiction and cases.
1994 the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 63 meth
labs. That figure climbed to 879 in 1996 and 1,627 in
numbers also indicate the drug has yet to make it to the
East Coast. Cities such as Oklahoma and Omaha have worse
meth problems, than New York City or Detroit.
is it a bigger problem that in the Midwest, where meth
accounts for nearly 90% of all drug cases, and nowhere is
it more prevalent than in Oklahoma, which ranks in the top
five in almost every meth category.
is surpassing cocaine as the drug of choice in Oklahoma.
The state medical examiner's office reports the number of
death cases testing positive for meth have been higher
than cocaine for the past three years. The office also
reports meth is found in more cases of homicides, and
motor vehicle accidents.
estimated cost of making meth is $100 an ounce, with a
street value of $800 an ounce.
cheap for the people who make it, meth is costly for
taxpayers. The OSBI estimates that it costs an average of
$2,000 to clean up a lab. Many law enforcement agencies
including the OSBI contract out for cleaning services. The
OSBI spent $1 million on cleaning services each year.
courts have felt the effects of the meth invasion, with
several distinct courts overloaded with cases. Many are
being dropped because of delays in meth testing at state
year, both the legislature and federal government have
increased funding to prosecute meth manufacturers.
high lasts for 6 to 12 hours, and 50% of the drug is
removed from the body in 12 hours.
street value is approximately $3,000 per pound.
is a highly addictive drug that can be manufactured by
using products commercially available anywhere in the
Trend Statistics Across the United States
trends across the United States are indicators of the rate
of Methamphetamine abuse, Methamphetamine addiction,
domestic violence, and child abuse. The Methamphetamine
trends for each state has a direct correlation to the
amount of Methamphetamine seized by federal authorities.
can help you with a the Meth Addiction Fill out the Form
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The Earth may be much more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, according to the first results from a massive distributed-computing project.
The project tested thousands of climate models and found that some produced a world that warmed by a huge 11.5°C when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached the levels expected to be seen later this century.
This extreme result is surprising because it lies far outside the 1.4°C to 4.5°C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same CO2-level increase - a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial times. But it is possible the IPCC range was wrong because its estimate is based on just a handful of different computer models.
"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the world," he explains.
Stainforth and his colleagues set up www.climateprediction.net to see what happened when models were not tuned in this way. They start with a climate model that divides the Earth's surface into boxes hundreds of kilometres square and then change some of the 29 or so parameters that govern aspects of the atmosphere and weather.
These tweaked models are farmed out to volunteers who run them on their home computers via a screensaver. Models that accurately simulate today's climate are then dosed with carbon dioxide, to give double pre-industrial levels, and projected forward 45 years to see how the climate responds.
Since the project launched in 2003 (New Scientist, 12 September 2003) more than 95,000 people from over 150 countries have donated spare computing time. The results have now come back from 60,000 simulations and the team have analysed around 2000 of these, focussing on six parameters.
While most of the models showed the global mean temperature rising by between 3°C and 4°C, some experienced much stronger heating. "When you see large areas of the northern hemisphere at 11°C above pre-industrial levels, you think this is quite scary," says Stainforth.
Geological data shows the Earth's climate has been much warmer in the past. Temperatures were around 6°C higher during the Cretaceous period, for example, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But Bob Spicer, an expert in the palaeoclimate at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, says there is no evidence that temperatures have ever been as high as in some of the climateprediction.net simulations.
Some iterations of the models showed the climate cooling after an injection of CO2, but these were discarded after close examination because the temperature fall resulted from an unrealistic physical mechanism, says Stainforth. In these scenarios, cold water welling up in the tropics could not be carried away by ocean currents because these were missing from the models.
There are no obvious problems with the high temperature models, he says. The climateprediction.net team were left with a range of 1.9°C to 11.5°C. "The uncertainty at the upper end has exploded," says team-member Myles Allen.
Clouds, which climate scientists have already recognised as the Achilles' heel of climate prediction (New Scientist, 24 July 2004), were the main cause of the variability in the high temperature models. The two most sensitive parameters governed the humidity at which clouds form and convection in the tropics. More observations of these critical processes could now help to narrow the uncertainty in the climate models' prediction.
But the climateprediction.net team stress that they are not saying we will see double-digit temperature rises if CO2 emissions go unchecked. "We're saying we can't rule it out," says Stainforth.
The next batch of climateprediction.net models will be making predictions of the timescales over which these changes might be seen, says Stainforth. "We need a lot more help, and we encourage people to continue getting involved."
Journal reference: Nature (vol 433, p 403)
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Send Me A Model On Rain Water Harvesting
Wed Jan 02 12:22:22 GMT 2008 by Mansi
Mon Feb 18 23:32:31 GMT 2008 by Sandra
I am not a scientist but I have this idea that is really bugging me and I would like some input regarding it. I think that a lot of the cause of Global Warming may be the large quantities of natural oil that is removed from underground. I think that the oil is there as a natural lubricant and coolant for our earth.
I also feel that the billions upon billions of barrels of oil that are removed is causing vast voids to the crust of the earth which could also be the cause of the increased volcanic and seismic activity.
We are removing all this oil and putting nothing back in its place, the center of the earth is heating up due to its lack of a natural coolant. I am surprised that I have never heard anyone even suggesting this could be a threat and would like to know why.
Fri Apr 11 20:27:05 BST 2008 by Alfred Evans
I think you are entirely right, this thing about fossil fuel and how people believe it boggles my brain.did all animals & vegeation die only in the middle east, give me a break.
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Russia Reiterates Concern Over Ukraine's Bid For NATO Membership
MOSCOW, Russia -- Russia is concerned over Ukraine's bid to join NATO which may seriously harm the former Soviet republic's relations with Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Saturday.
"The desire to accelerate (Ukraine's) accession to this military-political bloc, expressed by the Ukrainian leadership, will entail serious consequences for the development of Russian-Ukrainian relations and will harm European security in general," the ministry said.
The statement was issued one day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin held talks with Ukrainian Ambassador to Russia Oleh Dyomin on prospects of Russian-Ukrainian relations in light of Ukraine's future entry into NATO.
Last week, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko formally requested NATO to admit Ukraine to its Membership Action Plan, which is a necessary step on the path to eventual full membership the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko stated earlier that Ukraine would make its decision on whether to accept NATO's future membership offer after holding a national referendum on the issue.
A recent poll carried out by Ukraine's Democratic Initiatives foundation showed that over 50 percent of Ukrainians would vote against joining NATO.
In the survey, 51.9 percent of respondents said they viewed NATO as an "aggressive imperialist bloc that would draw Ukraine into military conflicts."
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John Manke is an active former Bay View resident who is involved in numerous neighborhood organizations, including the Bay View Historical Society, the Humboldt Park Fourth of July Association and the Shore Shore Farmers Market. He believes Bay View has a fine tradition in its past that we do not want to lose in the future.
When I was child, I got to go inside of the Manke greenhouses in North Milwaukee. This is the land where my father was born and raised. The greenhouses that I visited belonged to His uncle Fred Manke next door to his homestead. The greenhouses had a beautiful smell to them. It was like going to a florist shop, but all of the plants were alive. There were rows and rows of plants. There were hornets flying around the area. Feral cats kept the mice away from the plants. There were outhouses inside of the greenhouses. You could see spiders, flies and hornets in the area. There were steam pipes and radiators to heat the buildings when it got cold. The glass walls and roof kept a lot of sunshine inside. Some of the plants had to be pollinated by hand to create special varieties of flowers and other plants. The greenhouses had the best carnations that I know of, and they received awards for the varieties and quality of these flowers. Hot house tomatoes were grown in winter. During Christmas time, flocked Christmas trees were created here. It took hard work by Fred, Auggie, Fritz, Clem, Rudy and the girls to keep all of this working smoothly. They were kind of old fashioned in a way. Television and radio was not needed in this house. Hard work and good meals became a daily event here. Both English and German were spoken here. August Manke, the founder of the greenhouses came from near Stettin, Pommerania, Germany many years ago. His sons Fred and William divided up the land years ago after August's death. William Manke left the green house business, but his wife took care of his land and debts. Clem Manke was the main florist out here. Rudy and Auggie did most of the bull work attached to the land. There was a tractor inside of the barn and there used to also be farm animals inside. Most of the farm animals were gone when I visited there. In a way, it was like traveling to an older time when things were more simple. Hard work and smiles were seen everywhere. You would almost swear that there was no electricity inside of the house, but at night I was never inside of it. I was always at my dad's homestead at nighttime. I remember seeing my first television set inside of my Grandmother's house. Alvin Manke had brought it there during a Christmas get together of the family. It was inside of a suitcase like case and had a screen that was very small. We only watched for a short time, but it seemed like a miracle seeing people on television. It seemed like we were out in the country, as N. Teutonia Ave. (Cedarburg Road) was only two lanes then, and the house had a "Butternut Bread" advertising sign with the Manke name on it with the address number on it. On the field near the road, we used to play softball as kids during family get togethers. Across from the field was a large garage with pigeons roosting upstairs. Behind the garage, was a large field where the greenhouses used to be situated. The old power house with its tall chimney was there. There was a road there that went almost all of the way to N. 35th St., where the family also owned some land. When they made a four lane highway of N. Teutonia Avenue, the resulting new property taxes for all purpose destroyed the ownership of the greenhouses and adjoining land. Part of the family moved to Sussex, Wisconsin, while other family members moved to other areas of Milwaukee County. These buildings and lands were now a part of history that would be no more. Memories still exist, but the past is over. There is now a shopping center where the greenhouse were situated. The Milwaukee Police Department Academy is also close by that land. Now we have to live in the present time and enjoy what we have now.
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What Will Thanksgiving Dinner Cost This Year? — Dollars and Sense
The price of Thanksgiving is going up this year, but not as much as you might think.
According to the latest statistics from the American Farm Bureau Federation, the majority of households can expect to spend about 30 cents more this year to cover the cost of serving up Thanksgiving dinner—just under $50 to feed a family of 10.
That’s not too shabby, considering last year Thanksgiving dinner prices jumped by 13 percent, the highest increase in holiday groceries since 1990. However, this year, with the summer drought threatening to further elevate the cost of everything from gobblers to green beans, the end result has turned out less disastrous (for some) than predicted.
You can expect to pay about four cents more per pound for your turkey than you did last year—roughly $1.39 per pound. While the drought did hit farming communities over the summer, making it more expensive to feed turkeys than in years past, many retailers locked in their prices earlier in the year. Because of this, turkey prices will remain relatively low, at least for now.
The Federation adds that most items needed to cook your Thanksgiving feast have either stayed the same in price or decreased. Items like stuffing, sweet potatoes and whipped cream are all down more than 10 cents.
For a breakdown of the cost of Thanksgiving 2012, click here.
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U.S. soybean futures fell to a one-week low on Thursday as some weather models predicted rains in Argentina's crop belt, but the market pared losses late in the session on rumours that China was booking fresh soy purchases.
Corn rallied to close higher as cash markets firmed and consumption from the U.S. ethanol sector improved slightly. But wheat slid for a third consecutive session amid a lack of news.
At the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the March soybean contract settled down 1-3/4 cents at $14.35-1/4 per bushel after dipping to $14.15, its lowest level since Jan. 16. The November soybean contract, representing the 2013 U.S. soy harvest, settled up 1-1/4 cents at $13.05-3/4 (all figures US$).
March corn ended 3-1/2 cents higher at $7.24-1/4 a bushel, while March wheat was down 6-1/4 cents at $7.68-1/2/bu. after falling to $7.63, its lowest level since Jan. 14.
Uncertainty about crop weather in Argentina dominated the soy complex. Farmers in Argentina, the world's No. 3 exporter of soybeans and corn, are starting to worry that this season's crops may suffer from dry conditions after more than a month of consistently hot and sunny weather.
The main U.S. weather forecasting model calls for welcome rains in Argentine crops areas in early February, but the European forecasting model projected dry conditions for the same period.
"Going home, we paid attention to the European model and said, 'If it's not going to rain in Argentina, I don't want to be short'," said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co. in Chicago.
Additional support stemmed from talk that Chinese buyers were buying more U.S. soybeans for the 2013/14 marketing year, in the wake of a large sale confirmed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Private exporters reported sales of 510,000 tonnes of U.S. soybeans to China and 113,000 tonnes to unknown destinations, USDA said Thursday.
"The Chinese have positive crush margins. I think there are a lot of Chinese (buyers) trying to secure new-crop beans because of positive margins," Basse said.
Corn ends higher
Corn closed higher on strong cash markets, which helped front-month CBOT March corn to gain against the May contract on spreads. March corn settled at the same price as May, after settling at a two-cent discount to the May on Wednesday.
Analysts said demand for corn has improved among livestock feeders because a slowdown in the pace of U.S. ethanol production in recent weeks has raised the cost of dried distillers grains (DDGs), a byproduct of ethanol production that competes with corn as an ingredient in feed rations.
"The ethanol grind has slowed down and DDGs are trading at a premium to corn," said Joe Christopher, a grain merchandiser at Crossroads Co-op in Sidney, Nebraska.
U.S. ethanol production rose one per cent in the latest week, to 792,000 barrels per day, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said, rebounding from a 2-1/2-year low the previous week at 784,000 barrels per day.
"The numbers are kind of weak, but they did bounce back. I think what it says is that the ethanol margins improved in the last week," said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Wheat continued to slide after hitting a one-month high on Tuesday, tracking losses in soybeans and corn futures even though the U.S. winter crop was suffering from a lack of moisture.
Fundamental news was scarce. U.S. weekly export sales figures will be published on Friday, one day later than usual due to this week's federal holiday.
"There will be some light rain this week in wheat country but it will miss the driest areas in the west," said Andy Karst, meteorologist for World Weather Inc.
Drought deepened in Kansas over the last week, further jeopardizing this season's production of winter wheat, according to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor issued Thursday by a consortium of federal and state climatology experts.
-- Julie Ingwersen is a Reuters correspondent covering agricultural commodities markets in Chicago. Additional reporting for Reuters by Michel Rose and Valerie Parent in Paris and Naveen Thukral in Singapore.
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Overview of content related to 'mrc'
This page provides an overview of 1 article related to 'virtual research environment'. Note that filters may be applied to display a sub-set of articles in this category (see FAQs on filtering for usage tips). Select this link to remove all filters.
A virtual research environment (VREs) or virtual laboratory is an online system helping researchers collaborate. Features usually include collaboration support (forums and wikis), document hosting, and some discipline-specific tools, such as data analysis, visualisation, or simulation management. In some instances, publication management, and teaching tools such as presentations and slides may be included. VREs have become important in fields where research is primarily carried out in teams which span institutions and even countries: the ability to easily share information and research results is valuable. The concept of the VRE was studied by UK funding agency JISC in 2010 which highlighted issues such as researcher involvement in VRE design, sustainability, and consideration of the project as primarily one of community building rather than technology. The report also noted synonyms such as "collaborative e-research community", "collaboratory" and "virtual research community". JISC funded development of a number of VREs under its "Virtual research environment programme" from 2004 to 2011. In Australia, e-Research body NeCTAR has funding for a "virtual laboratory" program to be allocated in 2011. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Virtual research environment)
See our 'virtual research environment' overview for more data and comparisons with other tags. For visualisations of metadata related to timelines, bands of recency, top authors, and and overall distribution of authors using this term, see our 'virtual research environment' usage charts.
Ariadne contributors most frequently referring to 'virtual research environment':
To VRE Or Not to VRE?: Do South African Malaria Researchers Need a Virtual Research Environment?
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As I prepare for next week’s webinar on payment reform to align incentives with quality, I have been thinking a lot about how we pay for maternity care in this country, and the opportunities to rein in costs while improving the quality of care. I have concluded that we face both an unprecedented opportunity and an unprecedented responsibility to get serious about maternity care payment reform.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn care are collectively the most common and expensive hospital conditions billed to both Medicaid and private insurers. The national hospital bill for maternity care totaled $98 billion in 2008 – and no other condition came close to this figure. (See more facts about costs on Childbirth Connection’s updated Facts and Figures page.) With states across the country facing budget crises, strategies that responsibly reduce the Medicaid bill for births ought to be on the table, especially if we can do so while simultaneously improving quality. (More on that in a minute.)
What are the arguments for payment reform? They fall into a few categories:
- We’re paying too much
- Incentives and idiosyncrasies built into the current system virtually guarantee that we’ll continue to pay too much
- The payment system offers no accountability whatsoever for providing high quality care. In fact, it incents poor quality care.
Although maternity care seems to have been off the radar of those debating strategies to bend the cost curve, that seems to be changing. A flurry of recent articles and reports have demonstrated the points above:
We’re paying far more than other countries for maternity care: Citing the data in the Annual Comparative Price Report prepared by the International Federation of Health Plans, The Incidental Economist shows that average combined hospital and physician payments for a vaginal birth are nearly twice as high in the United States as they are in the next most expensive country (Australia).
We’re paying more and more each year. Facility charges for maternity care leapt from $86 billion in 2006 to $98 billion in 2008, according to data Childbirth Connection has obtained from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The response of insurance companies thus far has been to reduce their coverage for maternity care, a move that puts families at risk of bankruptcy. Several blogs (including Midwife Connection and Better Health) have covered the persistent practice of considering pregnancy a preexisting condition and denying insurance claims for pregnant women, a reality that childbearing women will face until provisions of the health care reform law go into effect in 2014. On the Costs of Care blog, essay finalist Tarcia Edmunds-Jehu shares a story of an insured pregnant woman seeking public assistance for the first time because she faced out-of-pocket expenses for just two prenatal ultrasounds that her insurance failed to cover.
Market forces don’t reward value: Over on Running a Hospital, hospital CEO, Paul Levy, borrows some slides from David Morales, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, showing that the highest paid hospital receives nearly double the payment for a normal vaginal birth than the lowest paid hospital and that hospitals that charge the most are rewarded with more business – the 10 hospitals being paid the most did four times the number of births than the 10 hospitals being paid the least. And these data don’t take into consideration the proportion of births that were c-sections, a rate that ranges from 17-44% in hospitals across the state. (C-sections cost more than vaginal births.)
C-sections drive profits: In California, where a 2006 study showed that most of the variation in c-section rates among low-risk first time mothers is attributable to practice patterns, not patient characteristics, for-profit hospitals have significantly higher rates than nonprofit hospitals, according to a recent investigative report by California Watch.
Women have caught on to these perverse incentives, and are opting out in search of better care. In an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, E.D. Kain talks about why he and his wife chose to have their second child born at home with midwives even though their insurance didn’t cover one penny. “The pre-insurance costs of a home birth ended up being pretty close to the post-insurance costs of having a baby in the hospital,” he writes, largely because “you don’t pay for the room, the bed, the doctors, or the drugs.” Kain and his wife also appreciated the personalized attention, house calls before and after birth, and the fact that they would know the midwife who would care for them in labor, “amenities” that shouldn’t be the purview just of home birth.
Aligning Incentives with Quality
So, can we reverse these trends and improve quality at the same time? A new bill introduced in Congress last month will, if passed, establish demonstration projects to evaluate alternative payment structures for covering maternity care. The bill requires that tested payment mechanisms measure and improve health outcomes and forbids denial of services. Tuesday’s webinar will feature a national expert who has studied payment reform models that drive quality improvement while lowering costs. Harold Miller, President and CEO of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement, and Executive Director of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, has been an active member of the Transforming Maternity Care Project. He’ll bring his insights to the issue of maternity care and present the most promising models to use payment incentives to drive improved quality. Having had a sneak peak at his slides, I’m confident that transforming how we pay for care will transform how care is delivered and experienced – for the better. I hope you’ll join us. You can register here.
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The Herring Era Museum is Iceland’s largest maritime museum. The Boat House recreates the town’s bustling harbour of the 1950s, with many old fishing boats at the dock. Grána, a herring meal and oil factory of the 1930s shows how men and machines processed herring into meal and oil. The oldest museum building is Róaldsbrakki, built as a Norwegian herring station in 1907, it now includes an exhibition on herring salting in Iceland. The old building has largely been left as it was when it housed dozens of girls working in the herring fishery. In summer on the museum dock there is a show of salting herring into barrels, singing and dancing to accordion music.
Open daily in June, July and August. The daily opening hours
are 10:00 - 18:00, from June 18th to August 20th, and 13:00 - 17:00 during spring and autumn.
Entry fee for all three museum buildings is ISK 1200 (for groups: ISK 1000) but senior citizens
and teenagers under 20 pay ISK 600. Admission is free for Children under 16 years old.
The Herring Era Museum was the first winner of the Icelandic Museum Award 2000 and won the European Museum Award 2004, the Micheletti award.
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Is the Copyright Public Domain Irrevocable? An Introduction to Golan v. Holder
PDF · Tyler T. Ochoa · Oct-3-2011 · 64 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 123 (2011)
Traditionally, the copyright public domain has been considered irrevocable. When a work enters the public domain, even if it failed to obtain any copyright protection in the first place, it remains in the public domain. However, Congress breached this traditional limitation when it enacted section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act in 1994. Section 514 “restored” copyright protection in the United States for all works of foreign origin that were not yet in the public domain in their source countries, but that were in the public domain in the United States for various specified reasons. By removing an entire body of works from the public domain, Congress challenged the idea that the Patent and Copyright Clause implicitly limits Congress’s power to grant patents and copyrights over material that previously was in the public domain and could be freely used by anyone.
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The New York region, where few snowflakes have been glimpsed all winter, launched itself onto emergency footing Thursday as authorities forecast a blizzard for Friday packing wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour and dumping as much as two feet of snow.
The National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning, taking effect at 6 a.m. Friday and extending to 1 p.m. Saturday, and said near white-out conditions would make travel "extremely dangerous."
While New England is expected to absorb the brunt of the winter nor'easter, late forecasts Thursday indicated that New York City, Long Island and New Jersey would begin seeing significant snowfall beginning as early as Friday afternoon.
In areas recovering from superstorm Sandy, authorities voiced concern that flooding and storm surge could wreck dunes and beaches that have been steadily rebuilding over the mild winter.
New York state emergency and transit officials said they were taking the impending snowstorm "very seriously," and recommended New York City residents avoid travel Friday afternoon—taking Friday off if possible.
Officials said the city could see between 12 and 20 inches of snow, with wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour. Storm surges in coastal areas could reach 3 to 5 feet, said Jerome Hauer, commissioner of the New York state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. He said that compared with Sandy-driven surges that topped out at more than 13 feet.
New York City schools planned to remain open Friday as of late Thursday, officials said.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority anticipated a hectic commute beginning Friday afternoon. Service could be "temporarily reduced or suspended" on Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.
In low temperatures, freezing rain, or with the accumulation of more than five inches of snow, subway service in New York City could also be hampered, the MTA said. Some express trains could run as locals, and other lines could be curtailed. Heavy snowfall also would likely hamper city bus service. The city Department of Transportation warned commuters on the Staten Island Ferry to expect delays Friday afternoon.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said more than 250,000 tons of salt was on hand and that crews aboard plows and salt-spreader trucks would be working round-the-clock starting at 7 p.m. Friday.
"Having it happen overnight Friday into Saturday is probably as good timing as we could have because the sanitation department then has the advantage of cleaning the streets when there's normally less traffic," said Mr. Bloomberg, who held a news conference at a West Village Sanitation Department depot.
Alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules are suspended Friday.
Mr. Bloomberg received some of the toughest criticism of his mayoralty following a Dec. 26, 2010 storm when city services seemed overwhelmed. That winter, 61.9 inches of snow fell in Central Park, federal records show. Since then, snowfall has been scant. During the 2011-2012 winter, 7.4 inches fell. This winter so far: 5.1 inches.
A blizzard is defined by sustained winds or frequent gusts of wind measuring 35 miles per hour or more, with snow falls that reduce visibility to less than a quarter mile, according to the weather service.
With historic snow totals and widespread power outages possible, emergency-management agencies set contingency plans into motion. The Long Island Power Authority, which serves Long Island and some sections of Queens, said that National Grid, which normally handles operations for LIPA, also would "communicate storm preparation and storm response to the public," a spokeswoman said.
LIPA was widely criticized for how it communicated with customers and local officials during and after Sandy. Lacking a computerized system to track information about power outages, LIPA relied on an outmoded system of paper maps, photos and Post-it Notes to coordinate its service efforts with National Grid.
A spokesman for the governor's office said it had been communicating with National Grid over several weeks to ensure they make advance preparations and response plans for storms.
Snowfall could reach two inches an hour Friday evening, said Gary Szatkowski, meteorologist for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Mount Holly, N. J. said.
"We could be looking at some very treacherous and dangerous road conditions," he said. "If you're stuck in your car for six to 12 hours, that's no fun."
According to FlightAware.com, more than 240 U.S. flights were canceled by late Thursday afternoon, and more than 1,100 were already canceled for Friday, including more than 200 at Newark Liberty International Airport, more than 50 out of La Guardia Airport and 24 out of JFK airport.
Amtrak officials said they would shut down service in the Northeast beginning just after midday on Friday. The final Northeast Regional train will depart Boston for New York at 1:40 p.m. Friday, and the final Acela Express will leave at 1:15 p.m., the railroad announced. The last departure from New York's Penn Station toward Boston will be the 1:03 p.m. Acela.
In New Jersey, the storm is expected to cause flooding and a storm surge of around three feet along the Atlantic coast north of Atlantic City—the same area ravaged by Sandy.
"This is going to slow people down there for several days and may undo some of what was done since Sandy," said Mr. Szatkowski,of the weather service.
Still, the storm surge is likely to be less than half that experienced during Sandy, Mr. Szatkowski said. He advised coastal residents to prepare for flooding, including bay areas that didn't traditionally get hit with water intrusions until Sandy.
Officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the agency was deploying additional staff and is assembling snow-fighting equipment for area's airports, bridges and tunnels, and the PATH train system. NJ Transit said it expected to run normal service on Friday and Saturday—but that was subject to change.
In Sandy-battered neighborhoods in the Rockaways, some residents who weathered the October storm said they were taking all precautions.
On Thursday, Jonathan Perez, a 25-year old construction worker who lives on Beach 114th Street said he was going to buy gas and all the supplies he might need in the event of a major disruption to heat and electricity.
"We're prepared this time," he said. "I stayed through all the storms this year—I'm not leaving for this. I've been rebuilding my home myself since Sandy."—Ted Mann, Eric Holthaus, Lisa Fleisher and Danny Gold contributed to this article
A version of this article appeared February 8, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Blizzard Barrels Toward Area.
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—(1) Any police officer may, without a warrant, arrest any person who —
has been concerned in an arrestable offence or is reasonably suspected of having been involved in one, or against whom a reasonable complaint has been made or credible information has been received of his having been so concerned or involved;
possesses a housebreaking tool without being able to provide a lawful excuse for having it;
has been proclaimed as an offender under section 88;
possesses anything that may reasonably be suspected to be stolen or fraudulently obtained property, and who may reasonably be suspected of having committed an offence in acquiring it;
obstructs a police officer while the police officer is doing his duty, or has escaped or tries to escape from lawful custody;
is trying to conceal his presence in circumstances that suggest he is doing so with a view to committing an arrestable offence;
has no apparent means of subsistence or who cannot give a satisfactory account of himself;
is known to be a habitual robber, housebreaker or thief, or a habitual receiver of stolen property knowing it to be stolen, or who is known to habitually commit extortion or to habitually put or attempt to put persons in fear of injury in order to commit extortion;
commits or attempts to commit a breach of the peace in the police officer’s presence;
is known to be planning to commit an arrestable offence, if it appears to the police officer that the offence cannot otherwise be prevented;
is subject to police supervision and who has failed to comply with this Code or any other written law; or
has breached any detention order under any written law.
(2) This section does not affect any other law empowering a police officer to arrest without a warrant.
—(1) A police officer may arrest any person who is accused of committing, or who commits in the view or presence of the police officer, a non-arrestable offence if, on the demand of the police officer, he refuses to give his name and residential address.
(2) A police officer may arrest such a person who gives a residential address outside Singapore, or a name or residential address which the police officer has reason to believe is false.
(3) Any person arrested under this section must be brought to a police station as soon as reasonably practicable and may, if required by a police officer of or above the rank of sergeant, be released upon signing a bond with or without surety to appear before a Magistrate.
(4) If the person refuses or is unable to sign the bond as required, he must, within 24 hours of the arrest (excluding the time necessary for the journey to a Magistrate’s Court), be brought before a Magistrate’s Court.
(5) The person who is brought before a Magistrate’s Court under subsection (4) may —
be ordered to be detained in custody until he can be tried; or
if so required by the Magistrate, be released upon signing a bond, with or without surety, to appear before a Magistrate’s Court.
—(1) Any private person may arrest any person who, in his view or presence, commits an arrestable non-bailable offence, or who has been proclaimed as an offender under section 88.
(2) The private person must, without unnecessary delay, hand over the arrested person to a police officer or take him to a police station.
(3) If there is reason to believe that the arrested person is a person referred to in section 64(1), a police officer must re-arrest him.
(4) If there is reason to believe that the arrested person has committed a non-arrestable offence and he refuses to give his name and residential address when required by a police officer, or gives a residential address outside Singapore, or a name or residential address that the police officer has reason to believe is false, he may be dealt with under section 65.
(5) If there is no reason to believe that the arrested person has committed any offence, he must be released at once.
(6) A person who commits an offence against any other person (referred to in this subsection as the victim) or that other person’s property may, if —
his name and residential address are unknown;
he gives a residential address outside Singapore; or
he gives a name or residential address which the victim or any person who is using the victim’s property in relation to which the offence is committed, or which the employee of either of those persons, or which any person authorised by or acting in aid of either of those persons, has reason to believe is false,
be apprehended by the victim, employee or such person referred to in paragraph (c).
(7) The person apprehended under subsection (6) may be detained until he can be delivered into the custody of a police officer, and subsections (3), (4) and (5) shall thereafter apply.
(8) If any person being lawfully apprehended under subsection (6) assaults or forcibly resists the person by whom he is so apprehended, he shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $2,000.
67. A police officer making an arrest without warrant shall, without unnecessary delay and subject to the provisions of this Code on bail or previous release, take or send the person arrested before a Magistrate’s Court.
—(1) No police officer shall detain in custody a person who has been arrested without a warrant for a longer period than under all the circumstances of the case is reasonable.
(2) Such period shall not exceed 48 hours exclusive of the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the Magistrate’s Court.
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Source Newsroom: Vanderbilt University
OVERALL SUPREME COURT EXPERTS:
James Blumstein - University Professor of Constitutional Law and Health Law and Policy; director, Health Policy Center, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies - Blumstein is an expert on constitutional law and the Supreme Court. He has extensive experience with national media outlets. Blumstein is ready to talk about the Supreme Court decision on President Obama’s proposed expansion of Medicaid. He believes the expansion should be denied on constitutional grounds.
Suzanna Sherry - Herman O. Loewenstein Professor of Law - Sherry is one of the top scholars of constitutional law and the Supreme Court. She often is asked to provide federal district and court of appeals judges with a review of recently completed Supreme Court terms. With more than 20 years of experience teaching law, she has written numerous books and dozens of articles on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Fourth Amendment Issues:
• U.S. v. Jones- Fourth Amendment debate on whether a GPS tracking device on a vehicle constitutes a search or seizure.
• Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington, N.J. - Fourth Amendment case that addresses jail strip searches for those arrested for minor offenses.
Christopher Slobogin- Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law, Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Criminal Justice Program - Slobogin is an expert in criminal procedure, mental health law and evidence law. He recently wrote an article on new technologies and the Fourth Amendment that specifically references surveillance like GPS in Is the Fourth Amendment Relevant in a Technological Age? Slobogin has served as reporter for the American Bar Association's Task Force on Law Enforcement and Technology. He has authored more than 100 articles, books and chapters on topics relating to criminal procedure, mental health law and evidence. Slobogin is one of the 10 most cited criminal law and procedure law professors in the nation, according to the Leiter Report.
First Amendment Issues:
• Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations - First Amendment case dealing with profanity and nudity in broadcasts.
• Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Opportunity Commission - First Amendment case dealing with religious freedom. Lower courts recognize a "ministerial exception" which protects religious associations from being sued when hiring religious leaders based on their beliefs.
David Hudson Jr. - First Amendment scholar, First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt, adjunct professor of law - Hudson is the author, co-author or co-editor of more than 30 books, including The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment, The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy and the Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008).
• Golan v. Holder— deals with whether Congress can copyright works that were once in the public domain.
Daniel Gervais - Co-director, Vanderbilt Intellectual Property Program, FedEx Research Professor in Law - Gervais focuses on international intellectual property law, having spent 10 years researching and addressing policy issues on behalf of the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers and Copyright Clearance Center.
• Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency deals with a district court's jurisdiction over EPA compliance orders concerning a couple who could not add onto their house because their backyard was a wetland.
J.B. Ruhl - David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law - Ruhl is an expert in environmental law, land use and property law. He has written influential articles on environmental law relating to climate change, the Endangered Species Act, ecosystems, federal public lands, and other land use and environmental issues. His works have been selected among the best law review articles in the field of environmental law six times from 1989 to 2011. He has recently completed work on an empirical assessment of climate change in U.S. courts.
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Science fiction is a form of literature that includes some form of speculation as to a possible scientific or technological discovery, invention, or project that has not yet come to pass at the time of writing. Such a project is usually, but not always, intended as a metaphor for an unsettling social change, or a vehicle to introduce a discussion of such change. A speculative project may, but does not necessarily, violate the laws of nature as most scientists understand them. A speculative discovery may be either a new scientific law, or a revision of an existing law, or of an object, substance, environment, or even an entire civilization previously unknown to man.
Alternatively, it may explore the implications of a kind of sentient being, society or civilization that is significantly different from any with which we are familiar at the time of writing. Such a kind would be a radical departure from anything that remotely resembles a human being, or the societies or civilizations that human beings have built.
It is notably difficult to define what is and isn't Sci-Fi as such stories can be set in the future, present or past, and on alien worlds, alternate forms of Earth or even Earth as it is or was historically. Even defining Sci-Fi as being a medium that contains at its core scientific or technological concepts that are used to either define, drive or resolve the story is inaccurate enough that, as a description, it would include such works as Bones, CSI, etc; which are notably not Science Fiction works. An oft running joke amongst Science Fiction and Fantasy enthusiasts is that while a fan struggles to provide an accurate description of what Science Fiction is and isn't, they still know Science Fiction when they see it.
History of Science Fiction
Science Fiction is a genre of art that deals with concepts of mankind set against the extra ordinary or the fantastic. Magic, space travel, time travel, aliens, teleportation, mind control, interdimensional travel, and other things that are all totally at odds with what mankind "knows" is scientifically possible, are used in many way to display ideas of the artist.
Modern science fiction as most people understand it today began in 1818 with the novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. However, examples of writing that are arguably science fiction are found in the 17th century with writers such as Kepler, John Wilkins, Athanasius Kircher, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bishop Francis Godwin, with their works dealing with a protagonist traveling to the moon and exploring that area, and each work containing and based on speculations of the development of science and technology going on what was known about those subjects in the authors' days. However, it is the 16th century that what is indisputably a work of science fiction in the modern sense can be found. The work is Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", first published in 1551, and is a work that even today is referenced in science fiction writings. It was the 19th century that saw the growth of science fiction writing with various works by Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe, and with the novel The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. These works mainly were warnings to a brash mankind that some avenues of scientific investigation would be better left unexplored. The projects resulting from them, however much good they might promise, inevitably bring harm upon the investigator, those closest to him, and any number of innocent bystanders. This applies even to Jules Verne and his works (such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon), because the heroes in them almost always come to sad ends. However, science fiction as a literary work was known even to the Ancient Greeks with the works of "Lucian's True History" and the story of Icarus.
Many of these works are also explorations of human psychology, or of philosophical questions regarding what man is. Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, for example, investigates the problem of good and evil, and of the conflict between these forces within an individual.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Herbert George Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs sounded similar dark themes in their work. But their warnings were less about someone investigating something he shouldn't and more about possible dire futures for human civilization and the planet itself. Wells' The Time Machine is the best illustration of this concept. Wells also was among the first to speculate on extraterrestrial attacks upon the earth, with his classic The War of the Worlds (1898).
Many early science fiction novels used the idea of time travel to promote "futiristic" socialist ideas. Examples include The Time Machine (which is a subliminal criticism of the class system) and Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy (which was written in 1887 but is primarily set in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia). However, this category has almost entirely disappeared in recent times. The general idea of using science fiction has continued to a lesser extent though, such as Robert Heinlein's 1960's libertarian-themed novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
The twentieth century saw science fiction become far less serious in its purpose. The works of Hugo Gernsback and others were intended merely to entertain and amuse--in other words, to help the reader escape an unpleasant reality. But reality would soon reimpose itself on the imaginations of science-fiction writers. The nuclear attack on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired many writers to create monsters (Godzilla, Rodan, etc.) of tremendous size and destructive power comparable to the power of nuclear weapons. Other writers speculated anew on the harms that can result from playing fast and loose with dangerous new forces--in this case, atomic radiation. The deepening mutual scorn in which the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics held one another, originally inspired works featuring extraterrestrial expeditionary forces coming to the earth to make war upon humanity (or occasionally to catch humanity in the crossfire). Later writers, editors, and producers, like Gene Roddenberry (of Star Trek fame), would speculate that humanity would expand on new voyages of discovery, only to end up fighting with enemies that looked and behaved very similarly to whatever power was foreign to the writer's nation-state of origin. This era would also see the writing of the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert, in which humanity would expand throughout a vast region of the universe, only to divide into interstellar and trans-galactic versions of the civilizations then extant in the 1960's, and even have conflicts over natural resources that closely mirror the struggle for control of such resources, chiefly petroleum, today.
Eventually, however, this theme would give way to hopeful tales of God-substitutes promising to solve all humanity's problems, if humanity's leaders were smart enough not to provoke such people to war. However, George Lucas, borrowing heavily from mythologycal archetypes, and somewhat from Frank Herbert's concepts for Dune, would create a story arc (Star Wars) set in a far-distant galaxy that, as he now reveals, is a metaphor for his perception of the War in Vietnam and the role (which in Lucas' view is not flattering) of the United States of America in the civilized world today. In the process, Lucas combined the technological prowess shown by producer Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey with the production values and sensibilities of the science-fiction B movies of the 1950's and 1960's to create the special-effects-laden "blockbuster" formula that dominates motion pictures today.
Science fiction and evolutionism influencing one another
H. G. Wells' work is the best example of prevailing paradigms of scientific consensus influencing science fiction. The meme of evolution was quite strong in Wells' day, and this surely must have informed his projection of the evolution of man and of civilization into the dire picture he painted in The Time Machine.
The 1950s saw several films that borrowed plot-themes from evolution. Many of them used atavism (the retrogression of a species, or even an individual, to a stage of macro-evolution several epochs in the past) as a plot-theme. Although many of these projects more properly belong to the genre called horror (from the Latin horreo I shudder), they all had a strong science-fiction element, using as they did a form of speculation on the progress (or alleged possible regress) of evolution.
In that same era, the author Larry Niven created a story arc that began millions of years before the present with an apocalyptic war that destroyed every thinking being of the period. Life, presumably, had to re-evolve after that, but artifacts of that war--some of them very dangerous--remained.
More recently, science fiction appears to have influenced "real-life" speculation. The Crick and Orgel theory of directed panspermia involves an obvious science-fiction device, namely a brace of interstellar or even intergalactic missiles and an extraterrestrial civilization to build and launch them. Crick and Orgel, in turn, influenced the successors of Gene Roddenberry to tell a story of the contact, on the part of humanity and its allied civilizations, with the very civilization that fired such a brace of missiles at earth and other worlds.
Even more recently than this, Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which he openly speculated on how the first "contact" with extraterrestrial explorers or "ambassadors" might unfold. This novel was subsequently adapted into a film.
Faith-based science fiction
At first glance, such a concept might seem oxymoronic. However, a writer of science fiction might choose to limit his speculations strictly to those for which a Scriptural warrant exists, and to create a character or characters whose abiding faith informs their decisions and actions. A writer might also project his characters into a world that the Bible or creation science might predict, and evolutionary science might declare impossible.
Plot-themes of recent faith-based science-fiction works have involved time travel, either real or virtual, to past human environments, for example to Jerusalem before its destruction by a Roman general or even to the civilization that might have existed shortly before the Great Flood. Eschatology is possibly the most frequent theme in Christian science fiction today. Television producer Glen A. Larson, in 1978, developed a short-lived series suggested by key tenets of his own Mormon faith.
Beyond these examples, a science-fiction writer might create an entirely artificial religious system and set stories in it. This raises the question of where science fiction ends and the larger category of speculative fiction, that might or might not include the treatment of a scientific invention or development, begins.
Cyberpunk stories, as pioneered by William Gibson, often take place in a dystopian near-future setting, usually populated mostly by criminals of one sort or another. These stories usually revolve around a hacker or similar anti-hero, often working for only their own good.
Hard science fiction stories usually place a lot of emphasis on possible technology, and scientific accuracy.
Soft science fiction stories, on the other hand, focus more on the human side of things.
Notable Science Fiction Series
- Future History - Robert Heinlein
- The Foundation series - Isaac Asimov
- The Star Wars Films - George Lucas
- The Star Wars novels (currently numbering in excess of 130) - Various Authors
- The Ringworld series - Larry Niven
- The Gap series - Stephen Donaldson
- The Lensman series - E.E. "Doc" Smith
- The Skylark series - E.E. "Doc" Smith
- 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Doctor Who - Various Authors, Writers, etc.
- Star Trek (original and all spin-offs) - Gene Roddenberry and Various
- Hoka - Poul Anderson
- The Psychotechnic League - Poul Anderson
- Tomorrow's Children - Poul Anderson
- Technic History - Poul Anderson
- Time Patrol - Poul Anderson
- History of Rustum - Poul Anderson
- Maurai - Poul Anderson
- Kith - Poul Anderson
- Harvest of Stars - Poul Anderson
- The Forge of God series - Greg Bear
- Battlestar Galactica - Glen Larson and Ronald D. Moore
- Blake's 7 - Terry Nation
- Farscape - Rockne S. O'Bannon
- Babylon 5 - J. Michael Straczynski
- ↑ http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Kepler.html
- ↑ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/wilkins/wilkins.html
- ↑ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/319046/Athanasius-Kircher
- ↑ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/148648/Savinien-Cyrano-de-Bergerac
- ↑ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236952/Francis-Godwin
- ↑ http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/tmore.htm
- ↑ Burns, Chris. "Lucas on Iraq war, 'Star Wars'." CNN, May 16, 2005. Accessed March 12, 2008.
- ↑ Lucas, furthermore, stated that his "Galactic Empire" could be a metaphor for the United States in its current war in Iraq.
- ↑ Ingermanson, Randall Scott. The City of God Series, including Transgression, Premonition, and Retribution. Published by Bethany House Publishers in 2000, 2003, and 2004.
- ↑ Johnson, Shane. Ice: The Greatest Truths Lie in the Darkest Shadows. Waterbrook Press, 2002.
- ↑ See, for example, LaHaye, Timothy, and Jenkins, Jerry B. Left Behind: a Series of the Earth's Last Days. Published by Tyndale House Publishers from 1995 to the present.
- ↑ Lorenzen, Michael. "Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism. Publised on-line 2002. Accessed January 7, 2008.
- ↑ Leventry, Ellen. "Born again 'Battlestar': The Theology of 'Battlestar Galactica'." <http://www.beliefnet.com>. Accessed January 7, 2008.
- ↑ Editor unknown. "James McGrath on Religion and Science Fiction: An Interview." TheoFantastique. Accessed January 7, 2008.
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Web Sites Using Joomla Content Management System
A great way to get to know Joomla is to take a look at what it’s capable of doing, which means taking a look at some Joomla-powered sites. Here are a few examples.
Oklahoma State University
First, check out the Oklahoma State University website. The home page has a custom logo, a navigation bar of drop-down menus across the top, an eye-catching Flash-based photo gallery, an integrated Google search field, and a second bar of navigation options at the bottom.
The site is well balanced, giving the impression of professionalism, and it’s powered by Joomla, which is operating behind the scenes. You can’t tell just by looking that the content of the page — the text, photos, and menus — is actually stored in a database. Joomla handles all the details.
Another Joomla-powered site is NZMac.com, which caters to the New Zealand Macintosh community.
NZMac.com is another good site, featuring a top menu bar, opinion polls, a news blog, a section for off-site links, and even a products review section box. This site is also powered by Joomla, even though it looks different from the Oklahoma State University site. This difference is one of the strengths of Joomla: It’s easy to customize.
Royal Oak Public Library
Now take a look at the Royal Oak (Michigan) Public Library site.
This site is well designed and easy to navigate, and boasts plenty of fresh content. Joomla excels at keeping site content up to date and makes the process easy.
Another good example is Jenerate.com.
All these websites look professional, and they also look different, yet they all use Joomla as their content management system. So just what is a CMS, and how does it work?
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Bexley, outer borough (1991 pop. 211,200) of Greater London, SE England. Bexley has many parks and open areas. Within the borough, Erith and Crayford are industrial centers. There are engineering and chemical works, oil and resin refineries, flour and seed-crushing mills, and cloth printshops. Factories additionally produce electrical equipment, building materials, cable, paper products, plywood, and plastics. Erith is also a yachting resort. Parts of the borough have histories more than 1,000 years old. Several ancient churches remain. Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822) lived at Crayford.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: British and Irish Political Geography
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The Trillion Dollar Gap: Nebraska
- February 18, 2010
- Contact Nicole Dueffert 202.552.2274
Nebraska is managing its long-term pension liability well. The state has funded nearly 92 percent of its total pension bill—well above the 80 percent benchmark that the U.S. Government Accountability Office says is preferred by experts.
Since 2002, the state has paid more than 90 percent of the actuarially required contribution each year. State and county employees were in a defined contribution plan until 2003, when Nebraska switched to a cash balance plan, a hybrid between a defined benefit and defined contribution plan.
In 2009, in an effort to boost the state’s pension assets, the legislature passed a law temporarily increasing employee and employer annual contribution rates for certain state pension plans, including the School Retirement Fund. Increased contributions started July 1, 2009, and will last through 2014, when the rate will decrease to its current level. These funding increases are expected to yield $241.8 million.
Nebraska does not calculate its liability for retiree health care and other benefits.
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A version of this essay appears in Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture, Fitzroy Dearborn (Taylor and Francis) Publishers
Text © 2003 Taylor and Francis Publishers. Posted on this web site only by permission of publisher. All rights reserved. Republishing this material, whether in print or on another web site, in whole or in part, is not permitted without advance permission of the publisher. Copyright status of images is unknown, except those marked with * are by author. Blue skies have been added by the author.contact | homepage | index of selected writings
"A common, ordinary brick," says Woody Harrelson, playing an architect in the movie, Indecent Proposal (1993), "wants to be something more than it is." Harrelson proceeds to turn this proposition into a metaphor for the human condition, something never envisioned by the real architect who served as an inspiration for the movie monologue. It was Louis I. Kahn (1903-1974) who first posed a question in the early 1970s that has since attained legendary status within architectural circles: "What do you want, brick?" The answer, according to Kahn, is that brick wants to be an arch and not merely an infill or cladding material with no structural role. In fact, a key to understanding brick as a modern architectural material lies precisely in its dual potential to be both structure and cladding. For the greater part of the history of architecture, brick walls assumed both roles, simultaneously supporting floors and roof while at the same time providing enclosure. It is only since the late 19th century that it has become possible to separate those roles by creating an independent framework of steel or reinforced concrete (structure) to which exterior brick may be attached (cladding). In this case, the brick no longer supports the floors and roof, although its appearance as cladding may well obscure this fundamental distinction.
From the Kahnian viewpoint, brick as mere cladding was inherently suspect. But other Modernists were equally distrustful of brick as load-bearing structure, since this seemed to negate the idea of the "free plan," the independence of structural framework from means of enclosure, and the opportunities for large glass areas. In fact, an influential faction of early 20th-century Modern architects and theorists eschewed the use of brick in any form, associating it with the 19th-century cultural forces they were attempting to overcome. They lobbied instead for the 20th century's revolutionary new materials of construction: glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Where construction with brick walls was still found expedient within this context, a coat of plaster could transform the deviant surface into something acceptably plane and neutral. As a symbol of traditional culture and pre-industrial technology, brick was an easy target. But brick's traditional role as load-bearing structure was also legitimately challenged by the need for greater heights and larger spans in the new commercial and industrial structures of the 19th and 20th centuries; and by the ascendency of heterogeneous, layered exterior wall systems that could accommodate air and vapor barriers, thermal insulation, and an air space (cavity) to block the migration of water through exterior walls.
In spite of this, brick was never rejected absolutely and was, on the contrary, often found capable of embodying precisely the abstract formal values that helped define the new Modernist aesthetic. Even load-bearing brick buildings remained influential well into the 20th century, acting as a kind of conservative moral datum of "honest" construction (what the brick really "wanted to be") opposed to some, but not all, Modern tendencies. Architects continued to use brick with enthusiasm and, like Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), boasted that in their hands the ordinary brick became "worth its weight in gold." Other practitioners, however, were less confident about the appropriateness of brick in modern construction; for them, brick represented a kind of compromise—accepted with various degrees of ambivalence—between the new culture, technology, and aesthetics of the 20th century, and that which preceded it. At the same time, brick itself was subject to technological change, evidenced not only in the increased systemization of its manufacture, begun in the late 12th century and culminating in the 19th century's relentless mechanization of all aspects of the brick-making process, but in the application of Frederick Taylor's theory of scientific management to bricklaying in the first decades of the 1900s.
Brick was widely used throughout the 20th century, accommodated within virtually all styles. The chronological survey that follows is therefore necessarily incomplete and somewhat arbitrary. That being said, several key developments can be highlighted, starting with the period before the first World War. Already, a number of trends may be discerned in the late 19th-century that continued to be played out well into the 20th century. The first may be illustrated by Daniel Burnham's design for the Monadnock Building in Chicago (1889) and H.P. Berlage's Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1903), both of which pointed the way towards a reinterpretation of brick informed by the Modernist bias towards simple, relatively unornamented surfaces, even when used in load-bearing wall construction. A second, more complex tendency can be seen in the brick facade of Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1890) which, while functioning as non-structural cladding, was meant to express symbolically the "idea" of the steel framework behind it. What resulted, though, was a certain ambiguity—some would call it deceit—in which the actual construction of the building was severed from its outward form.
A third trend derives from 19th-century brick-walled factory buildings characterized by flat brick surfaces, functional massing, and the use—at least internally—of heavy timber or cast iron structural elements. In Hans Poelzig's chemical plant at Luban (1911) the asymmetric massing and unornamented surfaces were distinctly Modern; in contrast, the small, rectangular and arched window openings that punctuated the brick walls evoked a pre-modern sensibility. On the other hand, the Fagus Works factory in Alfeld an der Leine (1911) and the model factory, Werkbund exhibition, Cologne (1914) by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer—both brick-clad buildings—contained elements of classical axiality in their massing, while their innovative glass curtain walls, when photographed from the proper perspective, gave the buildings a dynamic Modern appearance.
An additional variation on this theme can be seen in Poelzig's Upper Silesia Tower in Posen (1911) where brick cladding is clearly expressed as non-structural "infill" within an actual structural frame exposed on the building's surface. But this remained a minority position, in part because the exposure of an actual skeletal framework, especially of steel, invites problems with corrosion, differential thermal movement, water and air infiltration, and the continuity of thermal insulation. Instead, it is Sullivan's attitude valuing formal expression above "truth in construction" that informs most brick architecture in the early 20th century. For example, many of Wright's early projects, including the Larkin Building in Buffalo (1904), the Robie House in Hyde Park (1909), and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916), though nominally load-bearing brick structures, were filled with hidden steel and concrete elements that allowed his formal vision to be actualized.
Finally, a fourth trend combining the textural possibilities of brick bonding patterns with an interest in free-form massing and romantic silhouette finds an analogue in certain so-called "Expressionist" projects from the early 20th century: examples include Michael de Klerk's Eigen Haard, and Piet Kramer's De Dageraad housing estates in Amsterdam (1917 and 1923 respectively), in which otherwise straight-forward brick facades are enlivened with curvilinear brick elements and decorative treatments.
Between the two World Wars, brick was employed by a younger generation of European Modernists experimenting with new spacial concepts informed by notions of Cartesian orthogonality and populated by interpenetrating planes and abstract cubic masses. In particular, the early work of Mies van der Rohe, starting with his brick villa project of 1923, and including his houses for Wolf (1925), Lange (1927) and Esters (1927), as well as his Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) attempted to reconcile these new formal attitudes with traditional brick bearing-wall construction. But more commonly, where load-bearing brick was present, it was covered up with a smooth plaster finish, as in Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1921), Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder House in Utrecht (1924), or J.J.P. Oud's Kiefhook Housing Estate in Rotterdam (1930). In the United States, architects seemed less interested in the ideological struggle between an evolving Modernist aesthetic and the use of traditional materials: brick was used as a primary cladding material in Raymond Hood's American Radiator (American Standard) Building (1923); and, combined with stainless steel, in William Van Alen's sumptuous Chrysler Building (1930).
After the second World War the use of brick, in both load-bearing walls and exterior cladding, was revitalized by a new interest in raw materials of construction that could be expressed in an aggressively straight-forward manner. Of several such projects by Le Corbusier in France and India, the most influential was his pair of houses, the Maisons Jaoul at Neuilly-sur-Seine (1955), consisting of brick load-bearing walls supporting concrete-covered — but brick-faced — Catalan vaults. This so-called "Brutalist" aesthetic, in which brick was juxtaposed against deliberately-exposed steel or concrete structural members, reappeared in buildings such as the Langham House Development at Ham Common, London, by James Stirling and James Gowan (1958), and in several projects by Louis Kahn including the Phillips Exeter Acadamy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire (1972) and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India (1974). It is only with these projects by Kahn that the traditional load-bearing brick arch was finally permitted to enter the vocabulary of 20th-century architecture.
But having been once let in, load-bearing brick, whether as wall, pier, or arch, has had little further impact on 20th-century architecture. Instead, it is primarily as non-structural cladding that brick has made its presence felt, even within the Brutalist oeuvre. Mies' academic buildings at I.I.T., designed at the end of the second World War, used brick and steel as cladding over the actual steel framework: the brick appears ambiguously as both infill within, and foundation for, an elegantly detailed — but non-structural — grid of painted steel. Yet the fact that the brick (and steel) could be seen on both the inside and outside gave the construction a perverse kind of integrity, and it served as a role model for numerous other buildings, including the self-consciously Brutalist Hunstanton School in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1949.
During this time brick cladding became an accepted part of the Modernist oeuvre, representing a compromise in which the historically-resonant surface qualities of brick were fully integrated within the Modernist vocabulary of unadorned orthogonal planes and cubic mass; of articulated solid and void. Kahn's influential Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania (1961), with its expansive, windowless brick surfaces, spawned numerous derivative works including Ulrich Franzen's Agronomy Laboratory at Cornell University (1968) and Davis and Brody's Waterside Housing in New York City (1975). Earlier, Alvar Aalto, in his Baker House dormitory at M.I.T. (1949) and Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland (1952), made of the brick surface an even more explicit medium for the play of sensuality, imperfection, and historic reference.
Yet this compromise proved unstable. In the latter part of the 20th century, references to tradition involving brick, however stylized or ironic, became less constrained by the modernist formal aesthetic and more overtly rooted in historical precedent. A key moment in the development of this "Post-Modernism" was the Guild House in Philadelphia (1963) by Robert Venturi. His axially-positioned brick arch — nominally a load-bearing form, but here purposefully articulated as non-structural cladding—acted like a sign pointing to an intellectual attitude about history rather than as an attempt at some kind of reconciliation. James Wines and his group SITE produced a series of architectural projects beginning in the early 1970s that used various characteristics of brick walls as a starting point for an ironic integration of sculpture and architecture. This attitude, as in Venturi's Guild House, addressed not only brick forms as construction systems — SITE's use of "peeling," "notched," and "crumbling" brick walls was directed more at brick as cladding and at the recent banal history of big-box retail design — but also at the class-stratified culture supported by such projects. That issues of class became intertwined with the use of brick is illustrated as well by the so-called "red-brick" novelists in post-war Britain, associated with the "red-brick" universities (not the older and elite "stone" universities of Oxford and Cambridge), and the coincident phenomenon of Brutalist buildings in which the deployment of brick was meant to invoke a kind of working-class solidarity.
In a similar vein, American corporate Post-Modern office skyscrapers of the 1980s were generally clad with thin stone veneer rather than brick. Nevertheless, brick continued to be widely used in Post-Modern residences, schools, and related occupancies; a building that typifies the genre is the condominium project on 70th Street, New York, by Kohn Pedersen Fox (1987), in which a smooth, unadorned brick surface appears to support stylized stone moldings and pediments that step back much like the New York skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s. In Europe, a far different Post-Modernism emerged favoring a synthesis of classical and "platonic" geometric elements within which the Kahnian essence of brick — its weight, compressive strength, and solidity — were valued and exploited. Aldo Rossi's Burial Chapel in Giussano (1987); and Mario Botta's design for a private house in Vacallo (1989) may serve as examples of this tendency.
Whether embraced, hidden, disowned, contrasted with more modern materials, or co-opted within a new aesthetic, brick has played an active role within the cultures of both Modern and Post-Modern architecture. In contrast, so-called "Deconstructivist" architecture in the final decades of the 20th century has virtually ignored brick, reverting to the radical Modernist dogma in which abstract geometric surface and mass; the play of solid and void; the iconography of machine and grid; and the "new" materials of glass, steel, and concrete (or its non-structural analogue, stucco) are once more combined, albeit in a self-consciously distorted and fragmented way. Characteristically, where Deconstuctivist brick appears most famously—in Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1990)—it is as a fragmented and stylized archeological reconstruction of an armory denoting the site's past history, rather than as "the building" itself.
During the course of the 20th century, as traditional load-bearing forms of construction encountered new structural and environmental systems as well as new functional and spatial needs, and as traditional architectural paradigms encountered new forms of aesthetic expression, the answers to the question posed rhetorically by Kahn — "What do you want, brick?" — have shifted accordingly. That brick has continued to be commonly employed as cladding, in the face of competition from more modern and technologically sophisticated materials, is evidence enough that its non-structural qualities—reasonable cost, flexibility, durability, impact resistance, and visual appearance — continue to be valued.
The history of brick in 20th century architecture can be pieced together from readings in general architectural histories and in the accounts of individual architects, but sections or chapters dealing specifically with brick are unusual. Notable exceptions include Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967; and Patterson, Terry, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Meaning of Materials, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994. For a good general reference dealing with the production, properties, and historical use of brick, see: Plumridge, Andrew and Meulenkamp, Wim, Brickwork: Architecture and Design, New York: Abrams, 1993.
Building construction textbooks also contain information on bricks; an excellent chapter which includes a short history of brick masonry can be found in: Allen, Edward, Fundamentals of Building Construction, 3rd edition, New York: Wiley, 1999.
The Brick Industry Association (BIA) publishes numerous books and technical articles on brick construction which can be ordered at 11490 Commerce Park Drive, Reston, VA 22091. Alternatively, refer to their web site at http://www.bia.org/; especially their link to "technical notes."
Posted on web Sept. 13, 1999; last updated Oct. 5, 2010 [new Baker House dormitory photo by J. Ochshorn]
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If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and not just in bits, pieces and homework assignments. Following 2U’s lead, which set the ball rolling by pioneering the approach of partnering with graduate programs to go beyond asynchronous video learning to create custom, accredited full-service web and mobile-compatible graduate degree programs.
To date, 2U has worked with graduate programs in nursing, education, law, business and international, and today, Udacity took the next step — in what could mark an important moment for STEM education — announcing that it has partnered with Georgia Tech to jointly offer an accredited master’s degree in computer science, completely online. Not only that, but thanks to support from AT&T, the program will be offered for less than $7,000. So, really, this could be not just an important moment for STEM, but for MOOCs and online education as a whole.
The other point of note here is that Georgia Tech ain’t no safety school. According to U.S. News’ rankings of the best engineering schools in the U.S., Georgia Tech is tied for fifth place with Carnegie Mellon. So, it looks like Coursera and EdX aren’t the only ones providing online educational experiences with content from elite universities.
Furthermore, tuition (full-time, out of state) for Georgia Tech is $26,860 — which makes Udacity’s online degree look more than a little appealing in comparison. However, while anyone will be able to sign up and take Udacity’s Computer Science courses for free, only those actually enrolled at Georgia Tech will be able to earn credits towards a degree. The companies plan to launch a pilot of the program in the fall of 2014, beginning with a couple hundred students.
As for AT&T, it’s not exactly crystal clear what the company’s role in the partnership is, other than providing what the announcement calls “generous” support. Naturally, of course, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the partnership has transformative potential. He said:
We believe that high-quality and 100 percent online degrees can be on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus settings, and that this program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees, as well as exponentially expand access to computer science education for students around the world.
Again, while the idea itself isn’t new, and Udacity isn’t the first to partner with an elite graduate program to provide quality education and an actual, graduate-level degree to students online, the quality of the academic program (and presumably its content), its focus on Computer Science, combined with its relative affordability and the ability to receive credit and complete a full, graduate-level degree online, is absolutely huge. Sure, the launch is still quite a ways off, which is at once makes the announcement perhaps a little bit premature, but is also evidence that they’re taking the development of this program seriously. No status quo.
This is also refreshing news, because, over the last year, there’s been a huge amount of buzz around massive open online course (MOOC) platforms, particularly around Udacity, Coursera, EdX and 2U, among a few others. With how much play MOOCs have gotten in education and in the media, it’s as if MOOCs are expected to employ some kind of techno-voodoo magic to totally “save” higher education from collapsing under its own weight.
Of course, since online courses are far from being new, some questioned just how innovative, effective (and collaborative) MOOC platforms actually are at the end of the day. And for good reason. Porting a lecture hall to YouTube or putting your professor in a Google Hangout probably won’t end higher education. At least, not on its own.
Is accessibility important? Yes, of course. But even in the traditionally offline world of higher education, “scalable” and “cloud” can only act as stand-ins for real “innovation” for so long before schools will want to see more. There still needs to be substantial proof that MOOC platforms offer a better learning experience (improve outcomes and retention rates), before higher ed simply turns over the keys to the kingdom.
Reservations aside, what Thrun and Udacity have done in a relatively short amount of time is impressive and everyone — not just teachers — should be keeping tabs. In January, Udacity already played a part in a potentially key symbolic moment for higher ed, as California Governor Jerry Brown approved a partnership with San Jose State University to create Udacity-powered, low-cost and lower-division online classes.
This was significant because it was really the first time a MOOC platform has been tapped to build a complete, automated (remedial) class experience online — let alone state-wide at the largest university system in the world.
As of April, the pilot had seen 85 percent retention going into midterms. At time time, EdSurge noted that it’s not the 100 percent retention rate Thrun has boasted about previously, but it’s not a bad start.
In the big picture, it may not seem important, but retention rates are critical for online courses and course platforms. If entire remedial classes are being automated/flipped, they need to be more effective than their offline counterparts. (Un)fortunately, our current education system has set the bar pretty low on this one, which will hopefully make it easy to leap over it.
But, on the other hand, universities have limited resources, and class sizes continue to grow as more and more people go (or return) to universities, community colleges and continuing education programs. Online platforms take the scale issue out of the equation, but droves of students now matriculate with little to no grasp of fundamental concepts, San Jose State Provost and Vice President Ellen Junn told TechCrunch in January.
If technology and online education are going to truly transform education, maintaining the status quo isn’t acceptable, especially if these automated courses replace or curb the need for real, live human teachers. So, not to be party pooper or anything, but while this program has significant implications, it’s still all about quality content/presentation, improving retention, outcomes and ye olde learning experience. Without that, scale and affordability don’t mean quite as much.
Find Georgia Tech’s announcement here and Sebastian’s blog post here.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
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Morning came early this day, disturbing a blanket of darkness. It approached as a ball of molten fluid, something like an egg yolk providing a spectacular point of view.
Silhouettes evaporated alongside the tree-banked shore line, while an overview of the island showed undulating fields of green, a ribbon of spruce colliding with ridges and valleys, sprinkled with pot-shots of water holes, some larger than others.
Stretching limbs are the only movements in this peaceful estate, as two humans, one a man, and the other, a woman, unravel themselves, from a bed of moss they lay on throughout the night. Both are attired in a one piece light-green material.
It clings to their bodies as an outer layer of skin, protecting them neck to toe, from clutching branches, piercing mosquitoes and wayward rocky soil in addition to any bacterial attachments.
The man is named Papa.
The woman is named Mama.
And their Family is interspersed nearby.
Their four siblings no longer suckle, and their growth into maturity already established them as independent units. Training in self-reliance is constantly tested as they pursue new trails; often reminded the Family is their source of strength and protection.
They too are garmented in the same fabric, self-regulated, insulated from cold and coated with water resistant fibers. Openings in their suits provide for natural needs.
Sareen is a girling of sixteen seasons.
Walo is a man-to-be-son of thirteen seasons.
Tei is a middle son of almost eleven seasons.
And E‚lo is a child-son of nine difficult seasons.
Sareen thinks about the forest. It goes on forever. What adventures will mar her thoughts today? She is impatient. Cantankerous. Too often her vexations are directed against her younger siblings.
She has spent the nighttime, apart from Mama and Papa, with her back firmly against a tree, her usual sleeping position. To follow her own path is her middle name. What wild beasts lurk in these parts cause anxious moments as they overtake her thoughts?
Walo is unsure of himself. Being the eldest of three male siblings is too much of a burden. He does not enjoy the responsibility of caring for younger ones.
During the nights he alone among the siblings remains a few feet away from the sleeping forms of Papa and Mama. Security is his mantra, making sure he never strays too far from the shelter of the Family.
Tei is the quiet one. He discerns before making any decision and his lean-to is methodical, one slim limb placed carefully at a time, creating a firm shelter. His slanted roof is covered with spruce boughs stick ends facing the sky.
He doesn‚t mind drifting afar from the Family. He is a quiet protector; words are not his passion.
Tei enjoys responsibility and adventure. His sleeping habitat is usually in the crook of a tree, where he can spy out the countryside. He is the unofficial sentry a siren of urgency should there be any potential threat. So far the only assailants are hordes of winged blood sucking creatures desiring the remainder of their rich blood.
E‚lo is the self-declared leader of the sibling males, even though they disagree. He continuously leads them into danger. Whether it is running away to seek higher levels between a ridge or climbing slender tops of wavering birches.
He continues to be a serious concern to the Family. However their love for him is unquenchable. He brings substance into their daily lives.
After returning from ablutions, the six Family members gather in a circle. There is no need for speech, since they can communicate through reading thoughts. And a cacophony of arm and facial movements accompany their intermingling gestures, each sibling anxious to make their point heard.
‚Enough‚ comes quickly from Papa. When such a thought formulates as a command, siblings listen immediately. It is not allowed to dare question his authority. Mama also has such esteem among Family members.
Breakfast is eggs from their chicken roost, and bacon from the cellar dug out. Flat stones become their stove and the fire the result of friction fed to dried grass, and birch bark. Larger wood limbs are collected to sustain the hot fireplace.
After enriching their bodily needs the four siblings escape into the domain of their separate space.
Within eyesight four creatures observe:
a python licks his lips then slithers towards Sareen; a poisonous spider leaps in short hops towards Walo; a bear crouching in the shadows has plans for Tei; and an eagle drops like a stone heading towards E‚lo.
Papa and Mama are fully aware. Their senses are acute and all they can do is to be patient. Knowing their offspring are in danger is the most unpleasant of task as their siblings learn to sustain themselves away from the Family.
How else are they to grow in wisdom and be capable of having a Family of their own? The waiting will not be long.
The python is a rambling belly of in-satiated hunger. The creature is a whisper of movement as it gathers its eighteen-foot bulk, and squeezes delicately between stalwart trees, closer ever so closer to S who stares off into the distance.
Thoughts discover its mind, as Sareen directs a question. ‚Why must you play games with me? You know you‚re not allowed to cause me harm.‚
But this time the python coils itself in an aggressive stance and hisses menacingly, with its own thought patterns. ‚But you are too far away from the Family for them to be of help,‚ and lunges awkwardly at his prey.
Sareen easily ducks the creature‚s thrust, and the flickering tongue, which tries to wrap itself around her ankle. She trips, rolls and runs screaming back to the safety of Family.
Mama and Papa surround their sobbing child with loving arms. All the bravado and obstinacy Sareen recently had disappears, as she is swept into their security and comfort.
Walo had a short snooze and awoke feeling eyes staring, at him. Yes, somewhere in these deep woods is an intruder. Over there, no, here‚then his nerves turned to stone as he looked at his pant leg. A spider, the kind Papa explained could paralyze him in a few brief seconds.
If only‚a sneeze began to build. It came as a wind tunnel and erupted out of his mouth in a tornado of wind rushing against the surprised spider and flung it into the bushes. Walo turned and ran quickly to Mama and Papa, to safety with the Family.
Tei was sure there were steps following his. He had turned off the main trail from where the Family had their dwelling, and began exploring the edge of a river. He looked for any tracks that had dared come near their encampment.
The creatures of the forest knew Mama and Papa possessed certain skills of great proportions. And they easily defended the family on previous encounters. He moved very slowly when he finally saw the curved claws of a giant Ursus, where it moved across the water in the direction of his home. Now his skin shrunk with fear and thoughts muttered.
E‚lo is short for a sibling of his age. He busied himself pushing down rotten trees. He enjoyed listening to the crash of limb against limb, and their accompanying echoes. Suddenly his whole body shook as he spotted a furry creature, larger than the last one the Family watched two moons before.
Then Tei came into view, and both images were frozen in time as the youngest of the siblings realized the danger Tei was in.
In fact there were both in danger. Suddenly Tei spotted E‚lo and with thoughts of ‚There‚s much danger here,‚ not realizing he was rushing straight towards the huge creature as it now stood its full height, blending with the bushes and preparing to attack.
High above an eagle with a full expanse of ten-foot wings moving with the wind began its descent. It swooped closely over the landscape in full flight towards its victim. E‚lo did not comprehend the danger for himself and his older sibling. An extreme moment came hurtling towards him in the shape of deadly fury.
E‚lo sent warning signals to Tei, who now noticed the bulk within the shadows of the spruce tree and halted his running while he pondered. He had seen the flying wedge of feathers heading straight for E‚lo and thought-shouted ‚Earth!‚
It was all that was needed for E‚lo to flatten himself just as drooping claws from the winged creature singed the hair on his head.
At that precise moment of flying over the fallen E‚lo, Ursus stepped into the open prepared to charge Tei and was immediately struck in the back by the eagle, its talons striking deep into flesh.
Everyone was yelling and screaming; some through fear-thoughts, other sounds quite feral. Without hesitation the younger sibling allowed Tei to half-drag and carry him back to the security of the Family. In the background, a twisting, snarling combination of fur and feathers was left to sort itself out.
‚Well done‚ were thoughts of praise evaporating fear each sibling kept, hidden knowing Mama and Papa had much worry in their hearts. ‚Well done,‚ Papa repeated, as he explained the strength and security the Family provided, since no creature of the forest would ever come to their enclave.
As evening folded each knelt side-by-side, giving thanks for another day of survival.
¬ Richard L. Provencher
All messages for Richard or Esther can be sent directly to: firstname.lastname@example.org. They enjoy reading comments on their work. Readers are welcome to visit their website at: www.wsprog.com/rp/. Free downloads also available. They live in Truro, Nova Scotia. Canada. Blessings for your loved ones
Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com
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By Danielle Roth, ChildFund Program Officer-Youth Programs
There is one issue on the minds of many Americans these days (myself included). In one word, it’s the economy. Many of us are trying to make it work in this difficult financial climate. Some of us are looking for jobs, others are working two and everyone is hoping for some forthcoming solutions to our financial woes.
During my recent trip to Sri Lanka, I learned that those same worries are weighing on youth in the beautiful island nation. Youth account for approximately 26 percent of Sri Lanka’s populace, and those who are old enough, and out of school, are looking for work. The unemployment rate among youth in Sri Lanka is 17 percent. If you’re a woman there, that number goes up 11 points to 28 percent. Youth employment has become a focus area for the government of Sri Lanka, and ChildFund is providing support programs in this area.
There is significant breadth and depth to ChildFund Sri Lanka’s work around youth employment. Career guidance centers are serving as focal points for youth to learn about job opportunities. We’re also facilitating visits to places of employment so that young men and women gain exposure to different work environments.
Vision camps are helping youth develop a plan for their future that integrates their work and personal preferences. Youth are also learning entrepreneurial skills, participating in job placement programs and gaining practical life skills training that will serve them well as productive members of the workforce. Youth clubs are providing young people with hands-on leadership skills as they develop and administer projects that benefit their communities.
ChildFund is working to educate and empower youth in Sri Lanka to make decisions that ultimately will improve their futures, enabling them to contribute positively and productively to their country.
As humans sharing the globe, we are all connected in some way. Sri Lankans and Americans are both experiencing feelings of frustration in the job market and tentative excitement about new opportunities. We’re all looking to make a difference for ourselves, our families and society.
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The name ‘dieng’ which literally translates as ‘abode of the Gods’ says all you need to know about this collection small ancient temples set in the remarkable volcanic landscape of the Dieng Plateau. The misty location, sulphurous springs and colored lakes truly make this a place of natural wonder and cultural significance.
Come here and you will be transported back to ancient times. The temples are remnants from the glorious period of the Hindu empire in Java dating back to the 7th and 8th centuries. Standing on a plateau 2,000 meters (6,500 ft) above sea level, it is the extraordinary setting of these temples which make them most remarkable. It is believed that this place was chosen as the sacred location because of the spectacular landscape.
From the bubbling mudholes, brightly colored sulphur lakes and thick mist surrounding the plateau, visitors will easily understand why the ancient Javanese considered this place to be the seat of supernatural powers. Modern visitors to the plateau are enthralled by the unearthly beauty of this spot, with many finding it quite eerie.
Each of the small temples is named after figures in the epic tale of the Mahabarata such as Bima, Gatutkaca, Arjuna and Srikandi. It is believed that these temples used to serve as residences of Hindu priests who would spread Hindu teachings.
The natural splendors of this location are fascinating. From lakes with green and yellow hues to the pristine waters of the reflective ‘mirror’ lake, the natural beauty of this spot is superb. The mirror lake is particularly impressive as it offers a perfectly reflective image of the landscape. While sadly, the impact of logging can be seen as many of the trees surrounding the lake have been cut down, it still remains an impressive natural phenomenon.
Once you’ve walked to the top of the Dieng plateau you will feel like you are on top of the world. It will be difficult to know just where to look as the view from the plateau takes in steaming and colorful lakes, ancient temples and lush green landscape.
For a truly amazing spectacle, arrive at the plateau at sunrise and you will be spoiled with not one, but two amazing views of the sunrise, a ‘golden’ and a ‘silver’ sunrise. This double sunrise is a unique natural phenomenon. Visitors take in the first ‘golden’ sunrise from a watch tower while the second ‘silver’ sunrise can be seen from the temples.
Even the drive to the plateau offers impressive sights. On the way up, visitors will pass through tobacco plantations and beautiful mountain scenery.
The Dieng people are used to visitors and warmly welcome travelers to the region.
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Artificial neural networks grew out of researchers' attempts to mimick the human brain. In 1997 the Isaac Newton Institute hosted a landmark research programme in the area. Today, neural networks are able to learn how to perform complex tasks and are crucial in many areas of life, from medicine to the Xbox.
It's official: the notorious Higgs boson has been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Higgs is a subatomic particle whose existence was predicted by theoretical physics. Also termed the god particle, the Higgs boson is said to have given other particles their mass. But how did it do that? In this two-part article we explore the so-called Higgs mechanism, starting with the humble bar magnet and ending with a dramatic transformation of the early Universe.
In the first part of this article we explored Landau's theory of phase transitions in materials such as magnets. We now go on to see how this theory formed the basis of the Higgs mechanism, which postulates the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson and explains how the particles that make up our Universe came to have mass.
Infinity is a pain. Its paradoxes easily ensnare the unsuspecting
reasoner. So over the centuries,
mathematicians have carefully constructed
bulwarks against its predations.
But now cosmologists have developed
theories that put them squarely outside
the mathematicians' "green zone" of
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible — and this has led to a decades-long search for a theory of quantum gravity that could combine the two. But the particle physicist Richard Woodard thinks that the mismatch between the two could be nothing more than an illusion, created by the complicated maths techniques used in attempts to unite them.
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Does the world really need more scented candles? Bien sûr, says Frederick Bouchardy, whose Brooklyn-based fragrance house, Joya, produces candles for companies like Malin & Goetz, Barneys New York and Kiki de Montparnasse, as well as for his own line.
The 33-year-old entrepreneur has converted a 19th-century commercial building near the Navy Yard into a virtual wax museum. Visitors can watch the candle-making process, from perfume compounding to porcelain slip-casting, and buy all manner of fragrant offerings, including limited-edition collaborations like a floral-scented candle encased in draped porcelain that was commissioned by the Paris-based designer Hervé L. Leroux, and a heady room spray developed with I. T., the Hong Kong fashion chain. For those who don’t want to smell like the masses, prices start at $600 for bespoke perfumes, body lotions and laundry detergents.
The once-gritty space has been given a mod-looking redo by the Brooklyn firms Ellis & Donnelly Studio and Taylor and Miller Architecture and Design. Artist installations and perfumer-led workshops are in the works. “Some of the manufacturing techniques and tricks we employ are so unique, so old school,” Bouchardy says. “We hope that organizing and demonstrating them under one roof will make our space a rare and worthy destination.” 19 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn; (718) 852-6979; private appointments from Nov. 1, open to the public Dec. 1.
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Hundreds of Jordanians marched and protested in several cities on Friday against rising fuel prices, according to Al Arabiya, as they called for political and economic reform.
Around 300 people, including Islamists and leftists, demonstrated in front the Grand Mosque in the center of Amman, chanting slogans that included calls for the government to step down.
“This government has to go,” and “those who want to raise (fuel) prices want to see the country burn,” they shouted.
The protest ended peacefully in the presence of security forces and around 100 government supporters.
Protesters in the Kingdom’s capital burned their voter IDs, saying they refuse to participate in the upcoming parliamentary elections to be held by the beginning of next year, according to Al Arabiya’s correspondent.
Participating activists and opposition factions called for abolishing the State’s Security Court, in addition to ending the prosecution of activists and releasing those arrested over the past days, the correspondent said.
The protesters also urged King Abdullah to intervene and stop the decision to raise prices, calling him to stand by the people’s side, reported Al Arabiya.
In Zarqa, east of Amman, around 200 people protested in a demonstration organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and protesters also gathered in Maan and other towns in the south of the country, security officials told AFP.
A government announcement last week that fuel prices were set to rise, including household gas by up to 53 percent, sparked a series of protests.
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur defended the price hike, saying the decision was “unavoidable” given the country’s $5-billion (3.9-billion-euro) budget deficit, and that the measures would save $42 million by year end.
Initial protests against the announcement descended into violence, with one person killed and 71 injured, police said.
Jordan relies on imports for 95 percent of its energy needs and has been struggling to find affordable alternatives to Egyptian gas supplies, which have been repeatedly hit by sabotage.
Oil-rich Gulf monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council were considering ways to help Jordan shore up its fuel supplies, the United Arab Emirates said on Monday.
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Many asthma attacks due to patients not using their medication
Published Online: October 24, 2011
Inhaled corticosteroids are considered the most effective treatment for controlling asthma symptoms and preventing asthma attacks. Yet, poor adherence to prescribed inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) medication by patients is common. Measuring the contribution of this medication underuse to asthma attacks is difficult since patients with asthma often take their medication episodically based on their waxing and waning symptoms.
In original research featured in The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (JACI), Williams et al. were able to measure the contribution of ICS non-adherence to severe asthma exacerbations in the well characterized SAPPHIRE cohort. The SAPPHIRE cohort is a large, diverse population of patients with asthma from the Detroit metropolitan area who receive care at Henry Ford Health System.
Medication adherence was estimated using detailed electronic prescription and pharmacy fill data. Investigators assessed asthma severity and control through patient questionnaires, medical records for prior of asthma attacks, measured lung function, and patterns of short-acting rescue medication use. A severe asthma attack was one requiring an emergency room visit, admission to the hospital, or treatment with rescue doses of oral corticosteroids.
Accounting for variations in ICS use and asthma severity over time, the study found that approximately 24% of all severe asthma attacks could be attributed to patient non-adherence. Moreover, the benefit of inhaled corticosteroids was largely confined to individuals whose inhaled corticosteroid use exceeded >75% of the prescribed amount and to those whose asthma was poorly controlled initially. These findings evince the large contribution of medication non-adherence to severe asthma exacerbations, and the need for sustained, high levels of ICS medication use rather than low-level, periodic use to avert severe asthma attacks.
The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) is the official scientific journal of the AAAAI, and is the most-cited journal in the field of allergy and clinical immunology.
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Posted: Nov 28, 2012 9:52 PM by Associated Press
PORTALES, N.M. (AP) - Farmers in the revered peanut-growing region along the New Mexico-Texas border should be celebrating one of the best harvests in recent memory.
Instead, millions of pounds of their prized sweet Valencia peanuts sit in barns at the Sunland peanut butter plant. The plant shuttered for two months amid a salmonella outbreak that sickened 41 people in 20 states.
Farmers are worried about getting paid. Plant workers are nervous. And residents wonder what toll the shutdown will have on the region's economy.
The tension boiled over on Monday, when the Food and Drug Administration suspended Sunland's registration to operate because of repeated safety violations. It came just as the plant was set to resume shelling the bumper crop.
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It seems like these days we don’t have a lot of time to reach out to others. We’re so busy trying to keep up with the needs of our own families that there just doesn’t seem to be much time left for developing friendships.
I know I’m guilty of that.
So…here are a few ideas on how to reach out to others:
- Write a note of encouragement (a real handwritten note with that stuff called paper and a pen)
- Bake (or buy) cookies and take them to someone in need
- Grab a friend and go for a walk
- Chat with a neighbor like you have all the time in the world
- Call someone you haven’t talked to in a long while just to say “hi”
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Thurgood Marshall, 1908-1993: First African American to Serve on the US Supreme Court
Download MP3 (Right-click or option-click the link.)
This is Gwen Outen. And this is Doug Johnson with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Every week we tell about a person who was important in the history of the United States. Today we tell about a man who helped change the racial separation laws of America, Thurgood Marshall.
Thurgood Marshall was born a free man. But the father of his grandfather was a slave. He had lived in what was the Congo area of Africa. A man from the eastern American city of Baltimore, Maryland, brought him to the United States. He later set him free.
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July second, nineteen-oh-eight. In that city, and in many other parts of the United States at that time, black people were separated from white people by law. Black children did not go to school with white children. Black people lived only in areas where other blacks lived.
Over the years, Thurgood Marshall became a very good storyteller. He told stories about himself, or about places he had visited. Often, the stories were funny. But most also had a serious message.
One story was about being in trouble with his teachers when he was a boy in Baltimore.
Mr. Marshall said one of his teachers punished him by sending him to the room where the school's heating equipment was kept. There he was told to read and remember the words of the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution is a long document. Thurgood Marshall said he read all of it -- more than once -- and learned to remember most of it.
He said this schoolboy punishment gave him a life-long respect for the Constitution. As he grew older, he began to think about the Constitution's guarantees of freedom. Those guarantees, he believed, should be for people of all races, not just for white people.
Thurgood Marshall attended Lincoln University in the state of Pennsylvania. He completed his studies, with honors, in nineteen thirty. He wanted to go to law school at the University of Maryland. But officials at that school refused to let him attend because he was black. So he went to law school at Howard University in Washington D.C. Howard University was a school for African Americans. Thurgood Marshall graduated first in his class.
After completing his law studies, he accepted the case of a young black man who wanted to become a lawyer, too. The young man wanted to attend the University of Maryland law school. It was the same school that had refused to admit Thurgood Marshall. Again, the school refused to let a black man become a student. So, Mr. Marshall took legal action. He won the case. The young black man was permitted to attend the university's law school.
Thurgood Marshall would go on to win many more cases dealing with racial separation laws. And years later, the University of Maryland would name its law library in his honor.
Thurgood Marshall was a very good lawyer. The people he represented in court were black and poor. He never earned much money. But his name soon became well known. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People offered him a job. He went to work as one of its legal representatives.
In time, he became the organization's chief legal representative. He traveled across the United States. He fought against racial separation laws. He also defended black people who were charged with a crime, but who did not have the money to pay for legal help.
Many of those cases reached America's highest court, the Supreme Court of the United States. During his life as a lawyer, Thurgood Marshall argued cases before the Supreme Court more than thirty times. He lost only a few cases. Slowly, the laws of racial separation in America began to change. Many of those changes were the result of the work of Thurgood Marshall.
Legal experts say that Thurgood Marshall's most important case was the one known as "Brown versus Board of Education." The case involved the city of Topeka in the middle western state of Kansas.
A law there said that having separate schools for black students and white students was legal, if the schools were the same. It was the idea of "separate but equal". But the schools were not equal. White children received a better education than black children.
Thurgood Marshall agreed to argue the case before the Supreme Court. When newspapers reported this, he began getting messages threatening him with death.
Other civil rights lawyers said he was moving too quickly. They said a defeat in the Brown case would greatly damage the cause of civil rights. They told him to wait, to move more carefully and slowly.
Thurgood Marshall did not listen to the threats against his life. And he did not listen to those who said he should move more slowly. The Supreme Court heard the case in nineteen fifty-four. Mr. Marshall said it was a violation of the Constitution to separate people because of their race.
So, he argued, the racially separated schools in Topeka, Kansas, were illegal. He added that nothing could be equal in racially separated schools.
One Supreme Court justice asked him to explain what he meant by the word equal. He answered: "Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place." The Supreme Court agreed. It ruled that no one could be rejected from a school in Topeka because of race.
The case of "Brown versus Board of Education" provided the basis for other court decisions. It helped destroy the terrible wall of legal racial separation throughout the United States. Some people say it is the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century.
That decision was the beginning of years of legal battles against racial separation in America's schools. It also sent a message to the people of the nation that black Americans had the same rights as white Americans. Many African Americans said Mr. Marshall's victory in nineteen fifty-four changed their lives and their futures.
In nineteen sixty-one, President John Kennedy named Thurgood Marshall to be a judge of a federal appeals court. During his years on that court, Judge Marshall wrote more than one hundred opinions on different legal issues. Several of his opinions from those days have been approved as law by a majority of the Supreme Court.
In nineteen sixty-seven, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. President Johnson said the nomination was the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. Thurgood Marshall became the first black person to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. He served for twenty-four years.
Justice Marshall wrote opinions about legal representation in America's criminal justice system. He said everyone has the right to be represented by a good lawyer, no matter how guilty they may be.
In his last years on the Supreme Court, he often voted against the majority of the more conservative members. Justice Marshall always voted in dissent in cases in which the majority voted that a death sentence was legal. He said no one should be put to death for any reason.
In nineteen ninety-one, Thurgood Marshall announced that he would retire from the Supreme Court. Some reports said he no longer wanted to fight against the conservative majority of the court. At a news conference, a reporter asked him why he was retiring. Justice Marshall looked at the man and said, simply: "I am getting old and coming apart."
Another reporter asked Justice Marshall how he would like to be remembered. He sat quietly for a moment. Then Thurgood Marshall said: "I want to be remembered for doing the best I could with what I had."
This program was written by Paul Thompson. It was produced by Lawan Davis. This is Doug Johnson. And this is Gwen Outen. Listen again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.
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So I've recently ventured into color photography after years of B/W. I'm trying to do night shots with the shutter open on bulb in an almost pitch black area and light up things in the frame that I want lit up with a handheld flash.
Now this may seem like a rookie question, and it is, so bear with me.
I'm looking at flash guns online, and it seems like all of them have to be hooked up to the camera to fire. Since I'm virtually planning on running around the frame and blasting certain object, a cord connected to the camera won't work.
So are these handheld flash guns (ie vivitar 285, metz 45 cl1, sunpak 383, etc etc) able to be fired by just pushing a button on the unit itself, basically like pointing a gun at something I want to light up and "BANG", completely separate from anything to do with the camera, or do they always have to be syncd.
Again, general rookie question, and the answer is probably right in front of me, but I can't seem to find any indication that I can use these in the manner that I plan on using them.
Thanks ahead of time for any input.
Yes, you just short the contacts.
Originally Posted by degodan9
'guns like the Metz 45 series and the 60 series are perfect for this. They can be fired either on a manual setting or an auto - using the sensor on the gun for light control.
Don't forget that it is possible to have a smaller aperture on the camera than on the flashgun, just increase the number of flashes to build up the exposure.
Lighting different areas of a scene in this manner can create some creative "layering" of the flashlight.
Have used this method of lighting, years ago, to light huge places like theatres with just one 'gun, but have spare batteries!
Many flashes have a test or similar button that will trigger the flash. The Metz do, but also Vivitar 285 and (I think) 283. Baring that, I once put a momentary button switch at the end of a PC cord (attached to the flash) for the same effect.
"Far more critical than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know." - Eric Hoffer
All the 3 flashes you mentioned have the button for just that purpose. In fact I haven't seen a flash unit that doesn't have such a button.
Sponsored Ad. (Subscribers to APUG have the option to remove this ad.)
Right on. That's what I was figuring but I wasn't sure, since I have really only done landscape photography, which doesn't incorporate any type of flash. Thanks to all for your input.
Originally Posted by Chan Tran
To avoid the recycle time issue, and since you don't need to sync it to the camera (though you can), I would suggest any old Metz 60 series unit . The dry cell batteries give ton of flashes, even on full manual.
my real name, imagine that.
A CT 60 unit and its separate power unit also weighs a ton.
For that, the gain in recycle time - compared to 45-series Metz units - is minimal. The gain in output is that too. The extra capacity also isn't that impressing...
I pick up Vivitar 283's for around 20.00 USD routinely and considering you aren't even mounting them to the camera you don't have to go through the extra hassle of finding a low voltage example.
People shy away from 283's because some of them do have high synch voltages so this is why they go for cheap used.
They have a test button and you can also power them off a quantum Turbo if needed.
I use them for all my manual flash stuff.
Only drawback is they don't swivel but that's a non issue for your application.
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The Queen of the Night is central to the events in the opera Die Zauberflote although she only appears three times throughout the whole work. Her husband has died and passed Circle of the Sun to Sarastro, who is the High Priest of the Temple of Wisdom. As a result she has lost her powers. Sarastro has taken her daughter Pamina away because he does not want Pamina corrupted by her mother. The Queen refuses to accept this and the opera is about her attempts to wrest the Circle back from Sarastro.
She sings two arias which are regarded as amongst the most challenging works of any written for the coloratura soprano. These pieces are essentially what is known as "rage" arias, and cover a very wide tonal range. They are famous in particular because they both hit the top F - 3 F's above Middle C - which is about the highest of any music written for the soprano.
In the first aria O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn! she persuades Tamino to go to the temple and save Pamina from Sarastro because he has stolen her from her mother. This starts off the whole series of quests within the opera and as such is a central part of Act One. The second aria Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herz is in Act Two and is much angrier in tone than the first. In it, the Queen is not pleased to hear that Tamino has joined Sarastro's forces and tells Pamina to kill Sarastro. When Pamino refuses, the Queen tells her daughter that she will disown her.
The Queen's final appearance is right at the end of Act Two, after Tamino and Pamina have succeeded in the Three Ordeals. Monostatos has joined her and the Queen has promised him Pamina. She, Monostatos and the Three Ladies attempt to storm the temple but are repulsed and fall into the darkness.
The role of the Queen of the Night is essentially as Sarastro's opposite, representing darkness and evil. There are a lot of comments in the opera about women representing the "chattering classes" but it should be remembered that both Mozart and the librettist Schikaneder were Freemasons and the opera is full of Masonic symbolism. Note the number three appearing here again and again - the Queen appears three times, and makes three attempts to wrest Pamina back from Sarastro. The opera is also about good versus evil and each character has his or her own style of music. Sarastro's music is measured and calm, the Queen's music is full of sturm und drang style writing. Sarastro's music goes to the bottom of his range (a good bass is essential for the role) whereas the Queen's music goes right to the top of the coloratura soprano's range. Both roles are central in the opera and as important as the quest participants themselves.
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Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program
Unique Partnership Offers Only Dedicated Program in Wisconsin
One of the only programs of its kind in Wisconsin, it is one of the busiest adult CHD programs in the country. We have three of only a handful of physicians nationwide who are fellowship-trained to help patients make the transition from pediatric to adult care for their congenital heart disease.
|Congenital heart disease (CHD) is any heart defect or malformation that is present at birth. An estimated one in 100 babies is born with some kind of congenital heart defect, and these problems are often corrected with heart surgery during childhood. More and more children born with heart defects survive well into adulthood. But they face possible long-term complications, and need regular evaluations throughout life.
To meet the unique needs of adults with CHD, Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin, in conjunction with Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, offers the Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program. The program provides a full range of care options for patients, from testing and diagnosis to treatments including medication management, minimally invasive procedures, interventional procedures, surgery and follow-up care.
To find a doctor or make an appointment, call 1-800-DOCTORS
To request a second opinion, call 414-805-3666
Use our online form
. Our coordinators will call you as a follow-up to this online request.
There are many types of congenital and inherited heart disease, and adults with heart defects require lifelong monitoring to prevent serious cardiac and non-cardiac complications. Our multidisciplinary team of specialists takes a comprehensive approach to diagnosing and treating adults with all types of congenital heart disease.
Adult Congenital Heart Disease Conditions
One of just a few in Wisconsin, our hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) program offers the latest diagnostic and treatment techniques for this inherited disease that limits the heart’s ability to function properly. At Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin, our physicians have a level of experience and training in HCM not commonly found in Wisconsin.
We also work closely with the Marfan Syndrome Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin to coordinate care for patients with this genetic connective tissue disorder.
Advanced Diagnosis and Treatment OptionsCongenital heart disease is usually diagnosed at birth, but some cases may not be detected until later in childhood or even adulthood. There are more than 30 types of congenital heart defects, so having access to all advanced diagnostic tools and cardiac imaging tests helps physicians accurately understand each patient’s condition. As part of The Heart and Vascular Center at Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin, the Adult Congenital Disease Program offers state-of-the-art diagnostic imaging and capabilities.
Optimal treatment for patients with adult CHD takes a broad range of specialists working together. Our program offers a full menu of treatment options, from the simple to the complex. Read more about the advanced treatments available for patients with adult CHD.
Our Goal is Excellence in Patient Care, Research and EducationThe Adult Congenital Heart Disease program has three main goals: excellent clinical care, innovative clinical research and effective patient education. We want to give our patients the best care possible throughout their lives. We also want to educate our patients about their heart condition, the long-term risks they face and how to stay healthy. And, we want to improve the lives of future generations through research. Our team is involved in numerous national research projects to continue improving care for adults with congenital heart disease. Learn more about our research studies and clinical trials.
Exceptional StaffThe Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program takes a multidisciplinary team approach, with physicians trained and experienced in treating adult CHD collaborating to treat the whole patient. Meet our Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program team.
LocationsThe Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program is part of the Heart and Vascular Center, which has many convenient locations throughout southeast Wisconsin.
Date: July 23, 2012
Last Review Date: Aug. 10, 2012
Online Editor(s): Kathryn Adam
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We don't yet know if today's tragedy in Connecticut will spark a national debate over gun control, or whether, like many massacres before it, it will fade quietly without leaving its mark on a single law. If the past is any indication, the public response to these shootings isn't what you might think.
Three graphs tell the story. The first, from Quartz, shows that public support for gun control doesn't go up after mass shootings in the US. In fact, it has repeatedly gone down. Those down-ticks are part of a growing public aversion to gun control that dates back to the early 1990s.
So most Americans are against gun control right? Not so fast. The second graph, from a truly spectacular post by Ezra Klein, shows that there is broad public support for specific gun control policies, in particular: background checks; gun registration; banning high-capacity clips; and banning semi-automatics.
As a principle, "gun control" isn't popular. But specific gun control laws have national support. Yet, it gets more complicated. Even the term "national support" belies demographic gaps.
While nearly every demo -- men, women, white, blacks, Democrats, Republicans, north, south -- is more likely to support gun rights today than in the early 1990s, it remains true that fewer than half of the following demographics are clearly anti-gun-ownership-rights, in general: women, blacks, Democrats, and northeast residents. More than 55% of men and Republicans recently told Pew it was more important to protect rights of Americans to own guns.
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U.S. Irked By North Korean Activity
December 17, 2012 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
WASHINGTON, (UPI) – The North Koreans are clearly working to counter U.S. efforts to ensure the stability of the Korean Peninsula, the top U.S. military official said.
North Korea last week deployed a satellite into orbit using a rocket that was said to have a range long enough to reach the United States.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, however, said there was no threat to the U.S. mainland, though the incident was a surprise given technical difficulties reported by the North Koreans ahead of the launch.
U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the American Forces Press Service the launch was a clear effort to destabilize the region.
“My thoughts are that the North Koreans continue to be a force of instability in a region while we’re working diligently to increase stability,” he said. “Their decision to do that was very unwise.”
A failed effort to launch a rocket in April broke a North Korean pledge to halt military and nuclear testing in exchange for food assistance from the United States.
South Korean news agency Yonhap reports that Chinese officials met with South Korean leaders to consider diplomatic action against Pyongyang for last week’s launch.
Monday marks the first anniversary of the death of longtime North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
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(Plural of Latin magus; Greek magoi).
Rationalists regard the Gospel account as fiction; Catholics insist that it is a narrative of fact, supporting their interpretation with the evidence of all manuscripts and versions, and patristic citations. All this evidence rationalists pronounce irrelevant; they class the story of the Magi with the so-called "legends of the childhood of Jesus", later apocryphal additions to the Gospels. Admitting only internal evidence, they say, this evidence does not stand the test of criticism.
The subject will be treated in this article under the two divisions:
I. Who the Magi were;
II. The Time and Circumstances of their Visit.
We may form a conjecture by non-Biblical evidence of a probable meaning to the word magoi. Herodotus (I, ci) is our authority for supposing that the Magi were the sacred caste of the Medes. They provided priests for Persia, and, regardless of dynastic vicissitudes, ever kept up their dominating religious influence. To the head of this caste, Nergal Sharezar, Jeremias gives the title Rab-Mag, "Chief Magus" (Jeremiah 39:3, 39:13, in Hebrew original — Septuagint and Vulgate translations are erroneous here). After the downfall of Assyrian and Babylonian power, the religion of the Magi held sway in Persia. Cyrus completely conquered the sacred caste; his son Cambyses severely repressed it. The Magians revolted and set up Gaumata, their chief, as King of Persia under the name of Smerdis. He was, however, murdered (521 B.C.), and Darius became king. This downfall of the Magi was celebrated by a national Persian holiday called magophonia (Her., III, lxiii, lxxiii, lxxix). Still the religious influence of this priestly caste continued throughout the rule of the Achaemenian dynasty in Persia (Ctesias, "Persica", X-XV); and is not unlikely that at the time of the birth of Christ it was still flourishing under the Parthian dominion. Strabo (XI, ix, 3) says that the Magian priests formed one of the two councils of the Parthian Empire.
The word magoi often has the meaning of "magician", in both Old and New Testaments (see Acts 8:9; 13:6, 8; also the Septuagint of Daniel 1:20; 2:2, 2:10, 2:27; 4:4; 5:7, 5:11, 5:15). St. Justin (Tryph., lxxviii), Origen (Cels., I, lx), St. Augustine (Serm. xx, De epiphania) and St. Jerome (In Isa., xix, 1) find the same meaning in the second chapter of Matthew, though this is not the common interpretation.
No Father of the Church holds the Magi to have been kings. Tertullian ("Adv. Marcion.", III, xiii) says that they were wellnigh kings (fere reges), and so agrees with what we have concluded from non-Biblical evidence. The Church, indeed, in her liturgy, applies to the Magi the words: "The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents; the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring him gifts: and all the kings of the earth shall adore him" (Psalm 71:10). But this use of the text in reference to them no more proves that they were kings than it traces their journey from Tharsis, Arabia, and Saba. As sometimes happens, a liturgical accommodation of a text has in time come to be looked upon by some as an authentic interpretation thereof. Neither were they magicians: the good meaning of magoi, though found nowhere else in the Bible, is demanded by the context of the second chapter of St. Matthew. These Magians can have been none other than members of the priestly caste already referred to. The religion of the Magi was fundamentally that of Zoroaster and forbade sorcery; their astrology and skill in interpreting dreams were occasions of their finding Christ. (See THEOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE AVESTA.)
The Gospel narrative omits to mention the number of the Magi, and there is no certain tradition in this matter. Some Fathers speak of three Magi; they are very likely influenced by the number of gifts. In the Orient, tradition favours twelve. Early Christian art is no consistent witness:
The visit of the Magi took place after the Presentation of the Child in the Temple (Luke 2:38). No sooner were the Magi departed than the angel bade Joseph take the Child and its Mother into Egypt (Matthew 2:13). Once Herod was wroth at the failure of the Magi to return, it was out of all question that the presentation should take place. Now a new difficulty occurs: after the presentation, the Holy Family returned into Galilee (Luke 2:39). Some think that this return was not immediate. Luke omits the incidents of the Magi, flight into Egypt, massacre of the Innocents, and return from Egypt, and takes up the story with the return of the Holy Family into Galilee. We prefer to interpret Luke's words as indicating a return to Galilee immediately after the presentation. The stay at Nazareth was very brief. Thereafter the Holy Family probably returned to abide in Bethlehem. Then the Magi came. It was "in the days of King Herod" (Matthew 2:1), i.e. before the year 4 B.C. (A.U.C. 750), the probable date of Herod's death at Jericho. For we know that Archelaus, Herod's son, succeeded as ethnarch to a part of his father's realm, and was deposed either in his ninth (Josephus, Bel. Jud., II, vii, 3) or tenth (Josephus, Antiq., XVII, xviii, 2) year of office during the consulship of Lepidus and Arruntius (Dion Cassis, lv, 27), i.e., A.D. 6. Moreover, the Magi came while King Herod was in Jerusalem (vv. 3, 7), not in Jericho, i.e., either the beginning of 4 B.C. or the end of 5 B.C. Lastly, it was probably a year, or a little more than a year, after the birth of Christ. Herod had found out from the Magi the time of the star's appearance. Taking this for the time of the Child's birth, he slew the male children of two years old and under in Bethlehem and its borders (v. 16). Some of the Fathers conclude from this ruthless slaughter that the Magi reached Jerusalem two years after the Nativity (St. Epiphanius, "Haer.", LI, 9; Juvencus, "Hist. Evang.", I, 259). Their conclusion has some degree of probability; yet the slaying of children two years old may possibly have been due to some other reason — for instance, a fear on Herod's part that the Magi had deceived him in the matter of the star's appearance or that the Magi had been deceived as to the conjunction of that appearance with the birth of the Child. Art and archæology favour our view. Only one early monument represents the Child in the crib while the Magi adore; in others Jesus rests upon Mary's knees and is at times fairly well grown (see Cornely, "Introd. Special. in N.T.", p. 203).
From Persia, whence the Magi are supposed to have come, to Jerusalem was a journey of between 1000 and 1200 miles. Such a distance may have taken any time between three and twelve months by camel. Besides the time of travel, there were probably many weeks of preparation. The Magi could scarcely have reached Jerusalem till a year or more had elapsed from the time of the apperance of the star. St. Augustine (De Consensu Evang., II, v, 17) thought the date of the Epiphany, the sixth of January, proved that the Magi reached Bethlehem thirteen days after the Nativity, i.e., after the twenty-fifth of December. His argument from liturgical dates was incorrect. Neither liturgical date is certainly the historical date. (For an explanation of the chronological difficulties, see Chronology, Biblical, Date of the Nativity of Jesus Christ.) In the fourth century the Churches of the Orient celebrated the sixth of January as the feast of Christ's Birth, the Adoration by the Magi, and Christ's Baptism, whereas, in the Occident, the Birth of Chirst was celebrated on the twenty-fifth of December. This latter date of the Nativity was introduced into the Church of Antioch during St. Chrysostom's time (P.G., XLIX, 351), and still later into the Churches of Jerusalem and Alexandria.
That the Magi thought a star led them on, is clear from the words (eidomen gar autou ton astera) which Matthew uses in 2:2. Was it really a star? Rationalists and rationalistic Protestants, in their efforts to escape the supernatural, have elaborated a number of hypotheses:
These theories all fail to explain how "the star which they had seen in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the child was" (Matthew 2:9). The position of a fixed star in the heavens varies at most one degree each day. No fixed star could have so moved before the Magi as to lead them to Bethlehem; neither fixed star nor comet could have disappeared, and reappeared, and stood still. Only a miraculous phenomenon could have been the Star of Bethlehem. it was like the miraculous pillar of fire which stood in the camp by night during Israel's Exodus (Exodus 13:21), or to the "brightness of God" which shone round about the shepherds (Luke 2:9), or to "the light from heaven" which shone around about the stricken Saul (Acts 9:3).
The philosophy of the Magi, erroneous though it was, led them to the journey by which they were to find Christ. Magian astrology postulated a heavenly counterpart to complement man's earthly self and make up the complete human personality. His "double" (the fravashi of the Parsi) developed together with every good man until death united the two. The sudden appearance of a new and brilliant star suggested to the Magi the birth of an important person. They came to adore him — i.e., to acknowledge the Divinity of this newborn King (vv. 2, 8, 11). Some of the Fathers (St. Irenaeus, "Adv. Haer.", III, ix, 2; Progem. "in Num.", homil. xiii, 7) think the Magi saw in "his star" a fulfilment of the prophesy of Balaam: "A star shall rise out of Jacob and a sceptre shall spring up from Israel" (Numbers 24:17). But from the parallelism of the prophesy, the "Star" of Balaam is a great prince, not a heavenly body; it is not likely that, in virtue of this Messianic prophesy, the Magi would look forward to a very special star of the firmament as a sign of the Messias. It is likely, however, that the Magi were familiar with the great Messianic prophesies. Many Jews did not return from exile with Nehemias. When Christ was born, there was undoubtedly a Hebrew population in Babylon, and probably one in Persia. At any rate, the Hebrew tradition survived in Persia. Moreover, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus (Hist., V, xiii), and Suetonius (Vespas., iv) bear witness that, at the time of the birth of Christ, there was throughout the Roman Empire a general unrest and expectation of a Golden Age and a great deliverer. We may readily admit that the Magi were led by such hebraistic and gentile influences to look forward to a Messias who should soon come. But there must have been some special Divine revelation whereby they knew that "his star" meant the birth of a king, that this new-born king was very God, and that they should be led by "his star" to the place of the God-King's birth (St. Leo, Serm. xxxiv, "In Epiphan." IV, 3).
The advent of the Magi caused a great stir in Jerusalem; everybody, even King Herod, heard their quest (v. 3). Herod and his priests should have been gladdened at the news; they were saddened. It is a striking fact that the priests showed the Magi the way, but would not go that way themselves. The Magi now followed the star some six miles southward to Bethlehem, "and entering into the house [eis ten oikian], they found the child" (v. 11). There is no reason to suppose, with some of the Fathers (St. Aug., Serm. cc, "In Epiphan.", I, 2), that the Child was still in the stable. The Magi adored (prosekynesan) the Child as God, and offered Him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The giving of gifts was in keeping with Oriental custom. The purpose of the gold is clear; the Child was poor. We do not know the purpose of the other gifts. The Magi probably meant no symbolism. The Fathers have found manifold and multiform symbolic meanings in the three gifts; it is not clear that any of these meanings are inspired (cf. Knabenbauer, "in Matth.", 1892).
We are certain that the Magi were told in sleep not to return to Herod and that "they went back another way into their country" (v. 12). This other way may have been a way to the Jordan such as to avoid Jerusalem and Jericho; or a roundabout way south through Beersheba, then east to the great highway (now the Mecca route) in the land of Moab and beyond the Dead Sea. It is said that after their return home, the Magi were baptized by St. Thomas and wrought much for the spread of the Faith in Christ. The story is traceable to an Arian writer of not earlier than the sixth century, whose work is printed, as "Opus imperfectum in Matthæum" among the writings of St. Chrysostom (P.G., LVI, 644). This author admits that he is drawing upon the apocryphal Book of Seth, and writes much about the Magi that is clearly legendary. The cathedral of Cologne contains what are claimed to be the remains of the Magi; these, it is said, were discovered in Persia, brought to Constantinople by St. Helena, transferred to Milan in the fifth century and to Cologne in 1163 (Acta SS., I, 323).
APA citation. (1910). Magi. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09527a.htm
MLA citation. "Magi." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09527a.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by John Szpytman.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is feedback732 at newadvent.org. (To help fight spam, this address might change occasionally.) Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads.
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We demonstrate that silver nanoisland film self-assembled on the surface of silver-containing glass in the course of thermal processing in hydrogen is capable to detect 10−7 M concentration of rhodamine 6G in water using surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) technique. The film can be multiply restored on the same glass substrate via annealing of the glass in hydrogen. We showed that the film can be self-assembled after as much as ten circles of the substrate cleaning followed by annealing. The proposed technique of the silver nanoisland film formation enables multiple usage of the same glass substrate in SERS experiments.
Keywords:Silver island film; Reactive diffusion; Glass; SERS; 78.67.Sc; 81.16.Dn; 78.30.-j
Enormous sensitivity of the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has attracted a lot of interest to the synthesis of metal island films (MIF) which are widely recognized as key elements of SERS-based sensors [1-5]. MIF are conventionally manufactured by depositing metals onto dielectric substrates using thermal and e-beam evaporation, sputtering, and chemical and plasma-chemical metal deposition . The MIF performance in the SERS-based devices is mainly determined by the film morphology which can vary depending on the metal deposition technique as well as post-deposition processing.
Here we propose a new technique that enables MIF self-assembling on a dielectric substrate enriched with metal. The processing of such substrates in reducing hydrogen atmosphere results in the formation of the metal nanoislands on the substrate surface. This process can be described in terms of reactive diffusion of hydrogen, i.e., in terms of penetration of hydrogen into the substrate and its ionization via reducing metal ions to neutral atoms which are hardly soluble in glass and diffuse towards substrate surface. The accumulation of the metal atoms at the surface results in the formation of metal nuclei that grow and form metal nanoislands. We employed this technique to form silver island film on the surface of silver-containing phosphate glasses, and we characterized the morphology and optical properties of the MIF using atomic force microscopy, optical absorption, and Raman spectroscopy. In order to demonstrate the performance of the created MIF in SERS-based sensors, we showed that it is capable to detect 10−7 M concentration of rhodamine 6G (R6G) deposited on the glass surface. The developed technique does not require external metal source and enables multiple usages of the same glass substrate in SERS measurements.
The phosphate glass with composition of 45P2O5-20Na2O-5K2O-10Ag2O-2Nb2O5-2B2O3-5ZnO-1ZrO2 and contains 10 mol% of Ag2O was synthesized in silica crucible at approximately 1,500°C. Island films were formed on the polished glass surface in the course of thermal processing in hydrogen atmosphere at 200°C. The hydrogen was produced by water electrolysis. The morphology of the manufactured MIF was characterized using Dimension 3100 (Veeco Instruments, Inc., Plainview, NY, USA) atomic force microscope (AFM) using probes with curvature radii below 10 nm.
In order to perform the SERS experiments, we deposited 10-μL drop of R6G aqueous solution on the substrate. After drying at room temperature, it formed a film spot with diameter of about 3 mm. The concentration of R6G in the solutions and surface concentration of the created R6G films are listed in Table 1. Note that the average surface concentration of R6G which is equal to 6 × 1012 cm−2 corresponds to 0.06 of the monolayer.
Table 1. Samples for SERS experiments
Optical absorption spectra of the deposited R6G films were measured with UV–Vis Specord 50 spectrometer (Analytik Jena AG, Jena, Germany). Raman spectra at the excitation wavelength of 514.5 nm were obtained in backscattering geometry using Renishaw spectrometer (Renishaw PLC, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK) with Raman microscope and charge coupled device detector. In the Raman measurements, the excitation power at the sample was equal to 700 μW, the diameter of the laser beam at the sample was approximately 10 μm, and the signal accumulation time was 10 s. Since the excitation wavelength coincides with the electron resonance transition in R6G molecule, hereafter, we will refer to this process as the surface enhanced resonant Raman spectroscopy (SERRS) to emphasize the resonant enhancement of the measured SERS signal. The measurements were performed at room temperature 6 days after the films deposition.
Results and discussion
Island film formation and optical properties
In the experiment, nanoisland films were formed on the glass surface after processing the sample in hydrogen. AFM images of the sample surface before and after 20-min thermal processing in hydrogen at 200°C are presented in Figure 1a,b. In Figure 1b, one can observe densely packed nanoparticles with diameters of about 60 nm on the glass surface. The shape of the nanoparticles is close to hemispherical or hemiellipsoidal, with longer axis perpendicular to the glass surface and wetting angle of about 90° (see Figure 1c).
Figure 1. AFM images of the samples: (a) initial glass surface; (b) glass surface after the first anneal; (c) the profiles of bigger (1) and smaller (2) islands measured along lines 1 and 2 in image (b); the widths of maxima correspond to the particles size; (d) another region of the glass surface; (e) glass surface after 9 cycles of ‘removal-anneal’.
Figure 1b,d shows that the centers of nanoparticles are aligned. Such an alignment is due to the microscratches created on the surface in the process of glass polishing. The surface defects associated with these microscratches become the nucleation sites giving rise to the long range order in the created island film . It is worth noting that this phenomenon can be used to manufacture island films with prescribed geometry via formation of the required surface defects pattern on the glass surface.
The island film can be easily removed from the glass surface with e.g., water-wet cotton. It can be also transferred from the glass to a flexible substrate (e.g., scotch tape) that could be of interest for biomedical applications. After removal of the island film from the glass surface, e.g., by cleaning or transferring to a scotch tape), it can be easily restored by the thermal treatment of the sample in hydrogen atmosphere. Figure 1e shows the AFM image of the sample surface after 9 removal-anneal cycles. In this case we used mechanical cleaning of the glass surface with wet cotton.
Each annealing process at 200°C was 20 min long. Although particle size dispersion and packing density change after several annealing cycles (compare Figure 1d and e), our results demonstrate that the same silver-enriched glass substrate can be used in multiple SERS experiments. Figure 2 shows optical absorption spectra after several ‘anneal-removal’ cycles. One can readily observe from Figure 2 that the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) in silver nanoparticles in the region of 450 nm dominates the spectra. The developed technique enables producing films of different morphology via varying both processing conditions (temperature and duration of the annealing) and number of removal-anneal cycles. Detailed studies of the dependence of the island film morphology on the processing mode will be presented in our forthcoming paper.
Figure 2. Absorption spectra of the samples. Curve 1, after the first anneal; curves 2 and 3, after 4 and 9 cycles of removal-anneal, respectively; curve 4, after 9 cycles of removal-anneal and final MIF removal; curve 5, after the first annealing and film removal.
The process responsible for the formation of the MIF on the surface of metal-enriched glass is often referred to as the reactive diffusion. In this process, the diffusion of hydrogen ions into the glass is followed by the chemical reaction, in which silver ions bonded to non-bridging oxygen atoms are replaced by hydrogen :
-O−-Ag+ + 1/2H2 → -O−-H+ + Ag0,
where O− is non-bridging oxygen atom. This reaction results in changing of the glass composition in the subsurface region. The neutral silver atoms created in this reaction move towards the glass surface, nucleate, and finally form nanoislands of metal silver on the surface of the sample.
Optical absorption spectra of the silver nanoisland films formed using different number of removal-anneal cycles are presented in Figure 2. One can observe that the magnitude of SPR peak decreases with the number of annealing cycle and that the SPR disappears after cleaning of the glass surface. This experimental finding indicates that after the first thermal processing, silver nanoparticles are created on the surface of the substrate rather than in the bulk.
One can also observe from Figure 2 that the SPR ‘survives’ after 9 removal-anneal cycles (curve 3 in Figure 2). However, we found that after the final cleaning of this sample (curve 4 in Figure 2), the SPR peak remains in the absorption spectrum. This shows that the increasing reactive diffusion time results in the accumulation of silver nanoparticles not only on the glass surface, but also in the subsurface region of the phosphate glass. The modeling of the mechanism of the island film formation is presently in progress and it will be presented soon in our next paper.
It is necessary to note that in silicate glasses, the formation of nanoparticles on the surface was also both predicted and experimentally observed . However, in silicate glasses, the silver-sodium ion exchange and annealing in hydrogen result in silver nanoparticles growth predominantly in the subsurface layer . In contrary, our results show that in phosphate glass, the main sink for neutral silver atoms is the glass surface. Thus, the formation of nanoisland silver films in the course of reactive diffusion is more efficient in phosphate rather than in silicate glass. Such a difference may originate from a higher solubility of neutral silver in phosphate matrixes in comparison with silicate ones.
Figure 3 shows absorption spectra of the silver nanoisland films before (curve 1) and after the R6G film deposition (curves 2 and 3).
Figure 3. Absorption spectra of the samples: curve 1, after the first anneal; curve 2, after the first anneal and formation of R6G 10−7M film; curve 3, after the first anneal and formation of R6G 10−3M film. The positions of SPR are marked with arrows.
One can see from Figure 3 that at 10−7 M concentration of R6G, the R6G absorption resonance is not observable, while the SPR peak is red-shifted (compare curves 1 and 2). At 10−3 M R6G concentration, the R6G absorption resonance dominates the spectrum in 500 to 600 nm range, while the SPR peak remains at its initial position (compare curves 1 and 3). The reverse shift of the SPR may be due to the change in the R6G film composition and hence, the position of the electron resonance when the R6G concentration increases. Specifically, the detailed investigation of the silver MIF absorption spectra for different concentrations of deposited R6G performed by Zhao et al. has shown that the thickness of the deposited R6G layer and its composition (fraction of monomers, dimers, and more complex aggregates) influences the shift, width, and amplitude of the SPR peak.
To study the performance of the manufactured MIF in SERRS, we performed Raman mapping of the R6G 10−7 M film with spatial resolution of 10 μm. Figure 4 shows the intensity distribution of the 1,651-cm−1 Raman line of R6G (with background subtracted) over 60 × 70 μm2 sample region. One can observe that the intensity of the SERRS signal is nearly the same over the whole scanned area except in one point, in which the intensity exceeds 15 times the average value. The regions where signal essentially exceeds the average one are called ‘hot spots’ . The higher signal from the vicinity of the hot spot is due to the stronger enhancement of the local electromagnetic field by closely placed metal nanoparticles in comparison with an isolated metal nanoparticle. However, we have no evidence to suggest that the recorded signal is due to the hot spots because of the large area of the probing beam (10 μm) that should provide the signal about the same magnitude over the entire area of our scan . It is more likely that the anomalously high signal is due to a surface defect where the R6G coating is thicker than the average. In Figure 4, we present SERRS spectra of the 10−7 M film measured in the regions of the scanned area shown in the inset. Curves 1, 2, and 3 represent Raman spectra measured in areas where 1,651-cm−1 line intensity was below, above, and anomalously high in comparison with the average value, respectively. One can see here that even without anomalous spot enhancement (curves 1 and 2), the signal/noise ratio in the SERRS spectra is high enough to detect 10−7 M R6G concentration.
Figure 4. SERRS spectra (R6G 10−7M film) measured at different positions in mapped area. These positions correspond to 1,651 cm−1 line intensity below the average value (curve 1), above the average value (curve 2), and to ‘anomalous spot’ (curve 3). Inset: the SERRS signal mapping (at line 1,651 cm−1) for R6G 10−7 M film. Scan area, 60 × 70 μm2; step, 10 μm; vertical axis, intensity of the 1,651 cm−1 line in counts.
Hydrogen/metal ions reactive diffusion in phosphate glasses followed by transport of neutral metal to the glass surface enables formation of nanoisland silver films with the average island size of tens of nanometers. The dependence of the MIF morphology on the defects distribution on the glass surface allows one to create spatially structured island film of prescribed geometry. The developed technique can be employed to manufacture the films based on copper and other noble metals, and we believe that it will also find applications in SERS-based sensors in medicine and biology because it permits multiple usage of the same substrate in SERS measurements. We demonstrated in particular that MIF manufactured by the silver out-diffusion enables registering of 6 × 1012 cm−2 surface concentration of R6G molecules (0.06 of the monolayer) in the SERRS experiment.
AFM: Atomic force microscope; MIF: Metal island films; R6G: Rhodamine 6G; SERRS: Surface enhanced resonant Raman spectroscopy; SERS: Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy; SPR: Surface plasmon resonance.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
VZh searched the regimes of samples processing. PB carried out AFM measurements. VM performed SERS studies including mapping. TK dealt with the modification of measurements technique for SERS mapping and with optical absorption spectra measurements. YuS analyzed the optical absorption and SERS. VR prepared the samples from ion exchange until their annealing in hydrogen. AL supervised the whole work starting from sample preparation to analysis of data and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
This study was supported by the Ministry for Education and Science of the Russian Federation (project number 14.B37.21.1217), Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project numbers 10-02-91755 and 12-02-91664), Academy of Finland (project number 135815 and 137859), Joensuu University Foundation, and EU (FP7 projects ‘Nanocom’ and ‘AN2’). The work was carried out using AFM facilities of Joint Research Center ‘Material Science and Characterization in Advanced Technology’.
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Many Lancashire antique traders are familiar with modern technology such as iPads and smartphones, although finding an Android app that helps them price up a Victorian balloon backed dining chair might be difficult.
This was one of the subjects covered by Virginia auctioneer Wayne Jordan in his 15th June “Behind the Gavel” column, which he writes for Antique Trader magazine. Although it’s a US publication, it has valuable information which antique traders and enthusiasts on both sides of the pond would find useful.
This month, Mr Jordan came from behind his antique oak partners desk to go high-tech, exploring the area of mobile apps – short for applications, specialist software used by smartphones and other hand-held digital devices. When it came to antiques, it seems there’s a surprising number of applications available – so long as you have the right hardware.
The field of antiques is becoming ever more specialised and technology has largely followed suit, with big, cumbersome, multi-function software replaced by purpose-oriented programs covering specific tasks. This is especially true of mobile applications. There are already upward of 17 billion available for download, 80 per cent of them free. By 2014, that number is expected to rise to 100 billion. This means there’s no shortage of knowledge for someone wanting to know, for example, about collecting antique marquetry furniture. However, a Lancashire collector relying on his trusty Android tablet is limited to just two apps which Wayne Jordan could recommend.
Whether you want to know about Open Bookcases or antique oak partners desks , remember – Preston antique dealers are a mine of information.
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California has long been a pioneer in renewable technologies, in particular, solar power. But blazing a trail and staying on it are two different things. In this case, the Golden State has managed to succeed at both.
According to a recent report published by the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Environment California Research and Policy Center, the landmark “Million Solar Roofs Initiative” has been a huge success and will continue on this path for some time to come.
The report, “Building A Brighter Future: California’s Progress Toward A Million Solar Roofs,” makes several key findings about the program, which was created by lawmakers in 2006.
The original legislation established a 10-year, statewide interagency effort. It includes funding for solar projects on all types of structures, including homes, businesses, farms, and government and nonprofit buildings. It also set a goal of installing 3 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity by 2016.
According to the Environment California report—the first-ever analysis of the program—California is on track to meet its 10-year goal. Halfway through the timeline, it is close to installing more than 1 GW of rooftop capacity across the state. The report notes this statistic puts California in elite company on an international stage, as only five other countries in the world have reached the same level of capacity.
The report also emphasizes that California’s solar market has expanded despite a weak economy, growing exponentially by 40 percent per year. At this pace, the program is easily on track to reach its goal of 3 GW in another five years.
The cost of solar has also gone down since the initiative began. According to the report, the installed costs of solar in California have dropped by 25 percent for residential systems and 40 percent for commercial since 2007.
The Million Solar Roofs Initiative has also been a boon for jobs. The report notes that California’s solar industry has almost doubled since 2007, and now employs more than 25,000 people. With more than 3,500 solar companies located in California, the state is home to about 20 percent of all U.S. solar companies.
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Extra $2.7 Million to Help ACT Students with Disability in Government Schools
- Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations
- Member for Ginninderra
- Minister for Education and Training
Over 1800 Canberra students with disability in government schools will get greater access to classroom support, thanks to $2.7 million in funding from the Gillard Government’s More Support for Students with Disabilities initiative.
Parliamentary Secretary for School Education Senator Jacinta Collins said this funding is in addition to the previously announced funding to Independent and Catholic Schools, bringing a total of $3.4 million to help better support ACT students with disability.
"This funding, part of our overall $200 million national initiative, will provide much-needed specialist support and assistance to over 2000 students in government, independent and catholic schools across the ACT."
"Children with disability can face disadvantage in achieving education and employment outcomes, and without this type of support students with disability are less likely to reach their full potential, putting them at greater risk of unemployment and social exclusion."
Minister for Education and Training, Chris Bourke MLA, said that the extra funding to both government and non-government schools is welcome in the ACT.
"We know that due to this initiative all Canberra schools will have more capacity to meet the educational needs of students with disability," said Minister Bourke.
"In the government sector, the provision of 84 Disability Education Co-ordinators, one in every public school across Canberra, will help disabled students integrate into the school community and make sure they can access the resources and care they need—both inside and outside of school hours."
"In addition, public school teachers and principals will be able to better support disabled students with the roll out of a new $200,000 training package to be delivered by the University of Canberra, which is also set to form part of induction training for every new public school teacher."
"Successful new teaching strategies and support methods developed under this initiative will be shared with teachers, schools, students and parents around the country," Senator Collins said.
"We’re also making a real difference for families through initiatives such as the $220 million Helping Children with Autism program and the $147 million Better Start for Children with Disability program. We’re also developing the nation’s first National Disability Insurance Scheme," Senator Collins said.
"Rolling out the More Support for Students with Disability funding is an important part of this commitment."
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By James Barrante
I'm going to try something that may not work, but could be quite informative, if it does. More and more people are having MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) these days, and it can be a scary procedure, because the equipment seems so mysterious and intimidating. What most people do not know is that my Ph.D. research in the early 1960s at Harvard involved developing the technique. But, so you don't get the wrong idea about what I did, if you pretend MRI as it is today is like a modern refrigerator with all the bells and whistles, what I did was to take a box with a couple of gizmos in it, plug it in, and it got cold. I got it to work. That was it.
The technique actually is called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and when I started my graduate studies in 1960, NMR devices were just becoming commercially available to study liquids. There were no NMR instruments to study solid materials. In fact, it was not known at the time if they would even work, because the information obtained from the NMR study of solids is very different from the information obtained from the NMR study of liquids. Even the instrumentation is very different.
My research adviser decided that building an NMR device to study solids would make a nice Ph.D. project, though he never made it clear to me whether I would get my degree, if I couldn't get the instrument to work. I took a big chance, and with the help of an electrical engineer and a physicist from Freiburg, Germany, we set out to build this beast of a machine.
NMR is a form of spectroscopy, the interaction of "light" with matter. But light, better known as electromagnetic radiation, spans a wide range of wavelengths from long wavelength (low-energy) radio waves to short wavelength (high-energy) X-rays and gamma rays. We happen to see in a very narrow band of wavelengths that fall in about the middle of these two extremes.
NMR uses very low-energy radio waves. Atoms are comprised of a nucleus that is positively charged surrounded by a negatively charged cloud of small particles called electrons. The nuclei of the atoms of certain elements (not all) behave like little magnets. The element hydrogen happens to be a nuclear magnet. When nuclear magnets like hydrogen are placed in a magnetic field, they try to line up with the field. For reasons we need not consider, there are two alignment positions for hydrogen, one having high energy and one having low energy.
When a collection of hydrogen atoms in this magnetic field are bombarded with radio waves, the hydrogen nuclei in these atoms will change energy state and yield information about their environment like little probes. For example, water contains hydrogen atoms, and many solids contain water molecules, so by looking at the NMR spectrum of a solid containing water, we could obtain information like the orientation of the water molecules in the solid.
To get the best information, very strong magnetic fields must be used, because radio waves are not very energetic and are difficult to measure. We used a relatively small permanent magnet in our lab (it was still as large as a refrigerator and I ruined a number of wrist watches), but today's MRI instruments use very strong superconducting magnets that allow them to produce more detailed information. In any case, after three years of battling with the beast, I got it to work. I received my degree and happily left the university. I would have never dreamed back then that others would continue this research by developing an instrument that could image for disease.
So, when you are lying in the MRI beast, be assured that the only radiation you will receive is perfectly safe radio waves. Just be sure you take off your belt with the iron buckle. They may not be able to pry you out of the machine. Just kidding!
James Barrante of Cheshire is a retired college professor of physical chemistry.
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Popping into your head
Sometimes when I am thinking about a certain subject, meaningful lines pop into my head. I end up writing those lines down. When I do write them down, I dwell on them. I make them into something. I write them with lyrics. The verses all have the same beat, but the chorus has a different beat and so does the bridge. If it has a bridge.
Click here to post comments.
Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. How?
Simply click here to return to How to write a song.
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Wednesday night’s dinner was my favorite meal in a long time for two main reasons. First, I got to enjoy pesto, tomatoes and fresh mozzarella- the perfect summer combination! But more importantly, the true appeal of Wednesday’s dinner was Professor Michele Tine, a member of the Education Department at Dartmouth, who joined nine of my sorority sisters and me for a “Delta Dinner.” We sat around the table talking for nearly two hours with constant conversation about everyday Dartmouth life topics and eventually engaging Professor Tine’s expertise about underprivileged students and ways to enhance their education. Professor Tine has worked in a school herself and now is a professor and does research of her own. We chatted about the merits of educational topics ranging from teacher professionalism and respect, Teach for America, the unequal scale of opportunities and the invisible challenges teachers face in certain types of schools. As an education minor and teacher hopeful myself, the dinner was an incredible opportunity to hear first-hand from an intelligent woman with a life of experiences to share with us. This fall I will be teaching in a 1st grade classroom and, after the conversation over dinner on Wednesday, I am itching to start!
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Monitoring of forest damage within the National Forest Inventory (NFI) is undertaken using objectively collected data. The NFI has collected data about forest damage such as defoliation since 1984. National inventories of forest conditions are conducted over the whole of Europe since 1985 within the European cooperation programme ICP Forests. In Sweden the NFI is responsible for this monitoring. The monitoring of forest damage was conducted during 2009-2011 within FutMon (a project with EU's Life+ programme).
The NFI is the only annual, objective and uniform inventory of forest damage in Swedish forests at both the national and regional scales. NFI collects forest damage data from both individual trees (13000 sample trees in 2011) and stands (5800 sample plots in 2011). Defoliation is a key variable used in monitoring forest health. However, different types of damage (symptoms) and causes of damage also are recorded when it can be determined. The types of forest damage included are those which are most common or cause most damage to Sweden's forests. In total over 20 different types of forest damage are registered including fire, climatic damage, moose grazing, deer grazing, other cervidae grazers, beaver, small rodents, Tomicus sp., spruce bark beetle, other bark beetle, defoliators, resin top disease, decay or canker fungi, Scleroderris canker, needle cast fungi, needle rust fungi, pine twisting rust.
Monitoring of forest damage for 2009-2010 is part of the FutMon project (a project within EU Life+ programme). The project aims to create a harmonised forest damage monitoring network at national, regional and EU levels by linking established monitoring projects with new monitoring methods.
Defoliation in pine and spruce is presented annually in the NFI publication Skogsdata. Regular reporting of monitoring the forest condition has lead to a more balanced view of forest damage and the risk of substantial forest dieback. The proportion of trees with needle loss has increased significantly since the middle of the 1980's but has been stable for the last 10-15 years even if the effects of a Gremmeniella episode in pine during 2001 and outbreaks of spruce bark beetle following the serve storms of 2005 and 2006. More recently a significant outbreak of spruce bark beetle has been observed in southern Norrland but few observations during 2012 indicates that the population is now in decline. This situation can however change quickly, for example where wind thrown tree are not removed or a long warm summer. Other significant regional outbreaks seen are for resintop disease in younger pines in northern Sweden and Chalara fraxinea fungus in ash in southern Sweden. Both these outbreaks have been followed up with extra regional surveys by SLU within the framework of their environmental monitoring and assessment.
Target-tailored forest damage inventories (TFDI)
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The November 2004 issue of Budget & Tax News reports the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of local governments using eminent domain to aid private developments in order to generate more tax revenue.
The eminent domain case comes from New London, Connecticut, where 15 homes are being threatened with eminent domain to make way for a private development that promises to bring in more jobs and taxes for the city. "We have to restore the meaning of public use to what everyone once understood the term to mean--something the public would own and use, such as a road. Economic development is not a public use," noted Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice (IJ), which is representing the New London homeowners for free.
The issue also covers incumbent elected officials who lost primaries due to their support for tax increases; a federal appeals court rejection of tax incentives used by states across the country to retain businesses and attract new business investment; how a new proposal from Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA) could make the IRS obsolete; and "porker of the month" awards to Florida and Ohio elected officials.
Corporate tax reform; Bush, Kerry, and Congress's tendency to spend--and bust budgets; telecom deregulation, alcohol taxes, and TABOR; and state news from Florida, Michigan, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin round out the issue.
Newspaper Articles in this Issue
No matching newspaper articles
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When Apple announced unicode Tamil support in its latest Mac OS X "Tiger " system, we cheered at Hinduism Today. But what does it mean? Well, it is complicated and yet very simple. Unicode is a series, 1,114,111 "points " long, capable of holding characters from all languages. Each character has a unique "code point, " no two ever the same. For the future of computing the implications are awesome: the code point 2965 (U+OB95) will always and everywhere be the Tamil character ka, in any computer, any system, on any keyboard, in any software, in any e-mail, even in China or Botswana. For mankind, what an incredible agreement achievement--United Nations of the Mind! See http://www.unicode.org
Vegetarian cooking with Compassionate Cooks, a DVD by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau and Alka Chandnath, brings you six hands-on demonstrated recipes for mouthwatering, nutritional, satisfying dishes and a wealth of convincing information on vegetarianism. Ideal for beginners or experienced cooks alike, it runs 69 minutes and is available online, $20.00, plus shipping fromwww.compassionatecooks.org" target="blank">http:// www.compassionatecooks.org.
Shankar Nathan, Chennai, has done yeoman service to the ancient science of stone temple building with his documentary on the magical story of Hawaii's Iraivan temple, Iraivan, the Science of Ancient Traditions. You will be thrilled to watch the unfoldment of Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami's vision and the amazing collaboration of his monks with India's South Indian stone craftsmen under the direction of architect, Dr. V. Ganapati Sthapati. With an upbeat, modern sound track and state-of-the-art animation sequences, set in a Hawaiian paradise, this DVD will rivet your family to their seats for 45 minutes. Perfect also for presentation to young people to make them proud of their Hindu heritage. For more information and to order see http://www.iraivan.org.
Vedanta and Krishna have for sometime held the highest profiles in modern Hinduism, but Saivism is gradually coming forward. http://www.shaivam.org is a site that has been growing steadily and today offers a wealth of information about Lord Siva. Don't be put off by all the transliterated text. If you dig, you will find a broad range of useful information to enhance your understanding and practice of Saiva Neri--Siva's Way.
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May 18th, 2013 Armed Forces Day May 19th, 2013 Pentecost May 20th, 2013 Whit Monday May 21st, 2013 World Day for Cultural Diversity May 22nd, 2013 National Maritime Day May 22nd, 2013 World Biological Diversity Day May 25th, 2013 African Liberation Day May 26th, 2013 Trinity Sunday May 27th, 2013 Jefferson Davis Birthday May 27th, 2013 Memorial Day May 29th, 2013 International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers May 30th, 2013 Corpus Christi May 31st, 2013 World No Tobacco Day June 1st, 2013 Statehood Day June 3rd, 2013 Jefferson Davis Birthday June 4th, 2013 World Day for Child Victims of Aggression June 5th, 2013 World Environment Day June 6th, 2013 Isra and Mi'raj June 8th, 2013 World Oceans Day June 11th, 2013 Kamehameha Day June 12th, 2013 World Day Against Child Labour June 14th, 2013 World Blood Donor Day June 14th, 2013 Flag Day June 16th, 2013 Father's Day June 17th, 2013 Bunker Hill Day June 17th, 2013 World Day to Combat Desertification June 19th, 2013 Juneteenth
Beautiful Dedham Pottery Plate With Fish Decoration For Sale
I have up for sale a very nice Dedham pottery plate with fish decoration.Plate is #273 of 300 from the Dedham Historical society museum collection.Plate measures approx. 8 1/4" in diameter by 1" high.This is a reproduction of an earlier antique plate.This plate was made by Dedham pottery in the year 1999.Plate is very nice with great decoration and is in very good condition too.Thanks for looking and Happy offerding!
This item has been shown 97 times.
Beautiful Dedham Pottery Plate With Fish Decoration: $101
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Deputy Director of Prison Programs, Albion Correctional Facility for Women; Diagnosed in 1991
What I am most proud of are the women who are participating in the AIDS Education Program here within these prison walls. The program is the same one in which I was a peer educator over 20 years ago as an inmate myself. It is refreshing to know that these women understand the importance of knowing their status in addition to getting up-to-date information in preparation for their return to the community.
Every week we have the responsibility of introducing the option of knowing your status to new women entering into our facility. For many the opportunity to stop and take care of themselves is a somewhat overwhelming thought, as they were busy living life on their terms while in the world, as they say. While the stigma and discrimination are still alive here, they are running neck-and-neck with tolerance and understanding among both inmates and correction officers.
As we move forward to implement new HIV education programs, I can proudly say that women leaving state correctional facilities like Albion are well educated and interested in knowing their status, in addition to participating in all the available treatment options. I came to impart knowledge and empowerment, and that is what I am doing.
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Communications. You hear it a lot in the news, by psychiatrists, authors and consultants, about the best way to get people to work together and how communication is a perennial issue.
As my wife and I approach our 25th wedding anniversary in July, I can attest to the value of good communication. This, of course, we learned through years of both good and bad communication.
Technology has created many ways for us to communicate with each other. I'll stick with the one-on-one communications as opposed to mass communications, such as books, television and radio.
One-on-one communications started as face-to-face communications and I'll talk about that later.
Distance and other factors mean that we can't always communicate face-to-face. So early on, letters and mail service replaced the face-to-face communications. At one time, writing letters was an art form, and to read the many personal communications that went back and forth between people years ago, it's easy to see why they can be so highly valued.
Later on, we had the telegraph, which kinda, sorta, replaced the letter. The telegraph was more of the texting version of writing letters — short and to the point ... just the facts, ma'am.
The telephone came along and let people interact with each other live. It enabled them to hear the various voice nuances, to share a laugh, and gave them the ability to detect sarcasm, humor and other subtle changes in tone and delivery that can convey far more than the written word. And, when calling "long distance" meant speaking quickly because of the per-minute charges, even so, each message was precious when speaking with a parent, grandparent, or friend.
Eventually e-mails came along and, it seems, they have all but eliminated the personal letter. Interestingly enough, now I find that a personal note or letter sent via mail has far more value than it used to. With most people now having access to a computer, an e-mail account and spending more and more time online, it's pretty easy to zip off an e-mail to anyone, anywhere in the world, in a moment's notice.
As with any written communication, though, it lacks the ability to communicate nuances. Hence, we've developed emoticons, such as ;-) to denote a snicker; and :-( to denote sadness; and there are many others — better than nothing at all, but still a far cry from being a good way to communicate.
The advent of texting is perhaps the worst form of communication ever. While texting can be good for truly communicating just the facts, it's rife with errors in spelling, grammar and substance. Oh, and let's not forget the new acronyms, like ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing).
Another tool that's been around for a while is video-conferencing. While typically reserved for large corporations with big budgets, high-speed Internet service has enabled anyone with a personal computer and a webcam to make use of video conference as a means of communication. This has been a boon to parents who are traveling and want to say goodnight to their kids, or tech-savvy grandparents who want to see their grandchildren frequently.
Not to be outdone, a handful of companies still occupy the high-end video-conferencing space with a technology called "telepresence," which delivers high-definition video to those who can afford it.
But none of these are a substitute for in-person, face-to-face, press-the-flesh, solid communications with others. In a time when travel budgets — both personal and corporate — are restricted due to cost savings pressures, sometimes the need to meet someone in person is even greater.
In many instances, I've had a business or personal relationship that has been good, but for which we've not met in person. While these relationships have been good, they have been remarkably better after a face-to-face meeting and typically a meal or two together.
So, for me, all of the forms of communication available today simply serve as a backup for when I can't be with someone in person. After all, we are human and no technology can replace that.
Mark Mathias, a 30-plus year veteran of information technology and a resident of Westport, Connecticut, was named by Computerworld magazine to their inaugural list of “Premier 100 IT Leaders.” This column was originally published in the Westport News on Wednesday 23 June 2010.
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Cold, dry and sunny was the recipe for Wanganui's weather in November.
Georgina Griffiths, a climate scientist from Niwa, said Wanganui had well below average temperatures in November, but also below normal rainfall and more sunshine than normal.
Wanganui had its fourth-coldest November on record with an average temperature for the month of just 13.6C.
"That was 1.3C below the November average of 14.9C, which is a lot cooler than you'd expect for November," Ms Griffiths said.
She said a cold snap early in the month brought Wanganui's second-lowest temperature ever recorded in November - a very wintry 2.3C on the morning of November 7.
At the other end of the scale, a pleasant 20.5C was recorded on November 26, the highest in Wanganui for the month.
Ms Griffiths said solar radiation was also above normal at 113 per cent.
At 46mm for the month, Wanganui received just 60 per cent of its average rainfall.
The average is 75mm.
Ms Griffiths said cool conditions were experienced throughout most of New Zealand, due to more southerly winds than normal.
"The southerly winds were the result of much-higher-than-usual pressures over the central and southern Tasman Sea, and lower than normal pressures east of the Chatham Islands," she said.
The southerlies also meant most of New Zealand was very dry, with some parts of the Bay Of Plenty experiencing their driest November on record.
By contrast, northern Hawke's Bay and Gisborne had double their average rainfall.
The highest temperature for the month was 30.1C, observed at Blenheim on November 25, while Waiouru had the coldest of -5.1C.
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What is the Proper Abilify Dosage?
When determining the appropriate Abilify Dosage there are various factors that come into play that include the condition being treated, the severity of the condition, the patients age, the patients known response to therapy, other known medications and medical conditions.
Before taking the medication, it is important to notify your physician of all the different meds you are already taking, or intend to take, as there are some Abilify drug interactions that need to be taken into consideration.
Abilfy can come in various forms including tablets, disintegrating tablets, an oral liquid solution (although it contains sugar) and an injection form. The tablets are available in various doses including 2 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, 20 mg and 30 mg. The disintegrating tablets are available in both 10 mg and 15 mg doses. This is good because it allows for more dosing flexibility. The form and size you take will depend on the Abilify dosage.
As indicated above the Abilify dosage depends on several patient specific criteria. However, it also depends on the condition in which you are trying to treat as it is different for each type of psychosis.
The medication should be taken once daily and can be taken with or without food. The doses, as suggested by Bristol-Myers Squib, the manufacturer, are below.
In treating Schizophrenia in adults the initial dosage should be 10 – 15 mg/day. It is recommended that this also remain as the on-going dosage however the maximum recommended dosage is 30 mg/day.
In cases on Agitated Schizophrenia, the dosage usually starts at 9.75 mg/day and usually comes in injected form.
Adolescents (13 – 17 years)
In adolescents, the initial dosage starts at 2 mg/day, with a recommended daily dosage of 10 mg/day (based on physicians assessment) and should not exceed 30 mg/day.
Treating Bipolar Disorder
In treating adults with Bipolar Disorder or manic depression, the initial Abilify dosage is typically 15 mg/day and should remain that way on-going unless otherwise prescribed by the physician. The maximum dosage is 30 mg/day.
In cases of agitated manic depression, the dosage is the same as with agitated schizophrenia and starts at 9.75 mg/day and usually comes in injected form.
Adolescents (10 – 17 years)
With adolescents, ages 10 – 17 years old, the initial dosage is 2 mg/day, recommended dosage is 10 mg/day and maximum dosage is 30 mg/day. This can be in addition to lithium or valproate.
Treating Major Depressive Disorder
If you’ve read my page about Abilify medication, you now know that it can be used in addition to some other antidepressants to treat depression. In which case, the initial dose should start at 2 mg/day and can slowly increase to 5 mg/day. The dosage should not exceed 15 mg/day and 10 mg/day is the typical daily dosage.
As with all psychotropic drugs, treatment is not recommended in pediatric patients without a thorough evaluation by a medical / psychiatric professional.
Other important notes, an increase in dosage should happen gradually with the supervision and recommendation of a physician.
It is possible to overdose. Should this happen please contact the US Poison Hotline at 800-222-1222.
If you miss a dose take it as soon as possible. If it is close to the time where you need to take the other dose, do not double up. Instead, take the dose and resume doses as prescribed.
Also, please take note that there are Abilify side effects that should be taken into consideration, some more severe and common than others. Please take some time to read up on these. And, I recommend that you look at some other pages of mine that include:
Abilify and Pregnancy
What is Abilify?
Abilify and Weight Gain
Abilify Drug Interactions
Also, consider learning more about how depression medications work before making a decision.
Have you been diagnosed with depression? If not, you might want to take a depression test
Abilify Dosage to Depression Test Home Page
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The Albers MBA Specialization in Sustainable Business is premised on the belief that businesses will play a pivotal role in the problems and the solutions to one of the critical challenges facing the planet in the early 21st century. The aims of the program are to develop students who are capable of simultaneously leading firms to achieve acceptable profitability, reduce their environmental footprints and assure ongoing contributions to their communities.
Sustainable operation meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable business is profitable but does not deplete or despoil the planet, the society, or the culture in which it operates. The Specialization in Sustainable Business prepares students with a thorough review of sustainability concepts and frameworks, as applied to business, options to pursue focused sustainability issues in marketing, operations, business law, business strategy, among other specific disciplines, and a term-long consulting project with a partner firm, addressing a real-time, real-world sustainable business challenge.
MBA students may pursue a specialization in Sustainability which requires a minimum of 12 credits of their electives.
Required Sustainability courses:
- SUST 570 Introduction to Sustainable Business
- SUST 572 Sustainability Consulting
Choose 2 Sustainability electives (at least one from either SUST 571 or MKTG 560):
Please consult with graduate programs advisors for more information. To declare a specialization, complete the "Addition of Another Major, Degree, or Specialization" form (available from PIGT 318 or the Office of the Registrar website) and return the form to PIGT 318.
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Think about it. Dressed the way you usually do, you go into a police station to file an FIR. The moment the hawaldar or his boss or his boss’s boss sees you dressed the way you do, he’ll listen to you, probably get you a cup of tea and then take down a first information report with which you can proceed with matters according to the law of the land. Now imagine you’re dressed in either a discoloured old sari or a frayed shirt and trousers that seem to have been worn for ten days at a stretch. Chances are that before you open your mouth, the policeman will take a look at you, compute in his head that you either live in a jhopar-patti or something a tad better and tell you to scram. Of course, once you start talking and mention how you know the police commissioner (through that nice man who sat at the same table at that dandiya night dinner and whose sister-in-law is married to the deputy commissioner), the thana cop will realise his ‘mistake’.
Once you start wearing extremely plain clothes, over the years, such confusion in judging people’s backgrounds and social positions should result in police stations, banks, shops, restaurants, media offices, government offices and hotels treating everyone in the same manner just to ensure that ‘respectable people’ don’t get accidentally mistreated. And here, we need role models. What would it hurt Mukesh Ambani to wear a bush shirt bought from a Flora Fountain footpath? Or Rahul Gandhi wearing a Great Khali t-shirt from Palika Bazaar. It’s not that anyone in their right minds will mistake them for anyone else. But in the nation’s subconscious, everyone will look fundamentally from the same class and, therefore, be treated in the same manner. Just look at the good job that APJ Abdul Kalam has done simply by being a president who dressed down. It’s far more impossible — ask the economists — to get everybody to dress as ‘upper class’.
When I moved from Calcutta to Delhi a thousand years ago, I immediately noticed that people in general dressed better in the last capital of India than in the previous one. Every corresponding class, except the absolutely impoverished and the very rich, wore more drab clothes in Calcutta than they did in Delhi or Bombay. So if you saw a girl of indeterminate class wearing a noodle strap in a mall in Noida, you’d find the same attire only on a well-to-do, ‘English-medium’ girl in Calcutta. To put it simply, I found Delhi to have Hindi-only speakers wearing English-speaker clothes. And that, for me, was the inklings of a notionally classless society.
Which doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting you stop wearing your Benettons or your Nalli’s or even your Tarun Tahilianis or Ritu Beris. I’m not an idiot telling you to abandon good clothes. All I’m suggesting is that when you’re not among friends or at home, when you’re in public, wearing the kind of clothes your driver or maid wears (and they won’t be wearing tatters; after all, you pay them good money) would strengthen this nation immeasurably. The true sign of a real democracy is when it becomes virtually impossible to tell how much a person earns by the clothes he or she wears.
P.S. To end on a slightly internationalist note, the whole business of Europe fearing the burqa can be solved in one stroke if white European women decide to wear the burqa in public as a fashion statement. I can’t see Nicolas Sarkozy — or anyone else who sees the burqa as an affront to Europe’s liberal, secular way of life — having a problem with the burqa if underneath the portable tent, blondes, brunettes and red-heads of non-Muslim disposition walk about the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich and Berlin. Preferably on their way to a night club or a bar or a beach where, of course, they’ll take their kits off.
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A semi-identified flying object hovers over Oak Ridge (circa 1948)
OK, it's 1948 in post-war Oak Ridge. The Manhattan Project is a done deal, but the Graphite Reactor is still revved up and producing radioisotopes up a storm. This photo, which was discovered by the lab's Tim Gawne in a search of archives, shows a balloon of some sort that was being deployed on the west end of the lab site for air sampling. Looking at the horizon, just right of center, one can spot the world's first continuously operated nuclear reactor (now a National Historic Landmark). I'm not sure what to make of the barrels sitting in front of the hutment, shown in the foreground. One suspects they're now buried somewhere on the federal reservation.
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Toxic coal ash ponds represent a clear and present danger to our health, safety, and environmental. This study shows how significant an issue this is and that we’re not addressing this in a meaningful way. Riverbend and Marshal coal fired incinerators produce tons of toxic coal ash and Duke Energy Corporation stores it on the banks of the Catawba River. Learn more about this issue and speak out.
Proposed Rules for Coal Waste Disposal Ignore Lessons from 45 Years of Wildlife Poisoning
This is great paper published by two senior government scientists (Drs.Lemly of the USFS and Skorupa of USFWS) in Environmental Science and Technology on the huge economic impacts of damage to fish and wildlife over the past 45 years from coal ash ponds.
1. Direct and indirect costs of surface impoundments to fish and wildlife is $2.3 billion over the last 45 years, with projected 50-year future damage costs of $3.85 billion
2. NPDES “has not been effective in preventing serious environmental damage” from coal ash ponds.
3. EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis fails to include costs and benefits of pollution controls in avoided damages to natural resources.
4. “Surface impoundments pose unacceptably high ecological risks regardless of location or design.”
Download the full report here: Coal Waste Impacts on Wildlife – August 9, 2012
Thanks to Lisa Evans, Senior Administrative Counsel for Earthjustice for providing this information.
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For instance, in Florida the campaign has two distinct outreach plans. One focuses on Cuban-Americans in Miami who tend to lean Republican and are less concerned about immigration; the other speaks to traditionally Democratic Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens from birth, as well as new immigrants from Central America.
Obama also has promoted the new health law, which can resonate in states such as New Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of uninsured in the country.
Romney has plenty of ground to make up after a bruising primary season filled with tough rhetoric that even Republicans acknowledge turned off many Hispanics. He recently established a Hispanic advisory group that includes top elected Republican Hispanics.
During the primaries, the former Massachusetts governor pledged to veto legislation, known as the DREAM Act, that would give a path to citizenship to young immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children but have since attended school or served in the military. He has since toned down his anti-immigration stance, which included self-deportation, telling a Hispanic leadership gathering in the Orlando area that he would address illegal immigration "in a civil but resolute manner."
Alexandra Franceschi, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee's Hispanic effort, made clear that the GOP outreach will focus broadly on the economy. "Hispanics are Americans and are facing the same issues as everyone else, chronically high unemployment, lower pay and rising health care costs," she said.
Republicans have noted that under Obama, the Hispanic unemployment rate is higher than the national average. And Hispanics' median household income fell 7 percent between 2000 and 2010, from $43,100 to $40,000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
What drives Hispanics to vote depends on who's asked.
Lopez, a 20-year-old new citizen and college student from Colombia, cites Obama's policy shift on deportation as reason she's likely to pick him when she casts her first vote in the country.
"The issue didn't directly affect me, but I have many family members and friends who it did," she said.
In Arizona, Gomez, a 43-year-old priest who immigrated to Phoenix 15 years ago, backed Obama's policy change. But Gomez says immigration isn't his priority because "immigrants will continue coming across the border no matter what we do." He says he's voting for Romney because, like him, the Republican opposes gay marriage and abortion rights.
In Albuquerque, Maestas, a 37-year-old mother and office manager, is focused intently on pocketbook issues. Immigration, she says, is only important to "a certain point" because "If you can't take care of your own, how are you going to take care of others?"
Associated Press writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, Kristen Wyatt in Denver and Amanda Lee Myers in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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- Mitt Romney talks IRS, AP records,... 65
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- More Obama aides knew IRS targeted... 19
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Mother and Child Programs
Pregnant Teenagers and Teenage Mothers Receive Help Through Covenant House
Being a good mother is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and it's almost impossible when you are young, homeless, and without family. That is why our Mother/Child program was created to help these determined mothers and pregnant teenagers secure a brighter, more stable future for themselves and their babies.
Covenant House counselors motivate each mother to work hard toward achieving independence. Our counselors are available to help them create a plan for their future by lending an ear and offering advice or sometimes by being a stern voice, if circumstance calls for it.
Residents in the Mother/Child program attend workshops in parenting skills, child-bearing, and single parenthood, and we work to make sure the girls understand the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle – both for themselves and their children.
Covenant House's Mother/Child program also offers free on-site day care so that our mothers can complete their education or hold down a job. And our girls depend on one another as well, setting up schedules for shared baby-sitting. Living with other young mothers helps them bond, learn from each other, and gain a sense of family they probably have never experienced before.
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Despite cabinet's decision
to approve the allotment of NIS 695 million (about $174 million) for the fortification of Gaza vicinity communities, some 150 residents of Ashkelon protested Sunday against the continued rocket attacks emanating from north Gaza.
Demonstrators waved signs reading "We don’t want to die" and "children of the south are abandoned". The city's Parents' Association called for a boycott of the upcoming general elections (February 10) in protest of what it called the government's disregard for the region's plight.
"We want to tell the government: Enough with this ongoing catastrophe; enough with the anxieties and our children's nightmares," the association said in a statement.
One of the demonstrators, Yoram Ganish, said Ashkelon's schools have yet to be fortified despite the government's claims. "We don’t want to wait until children are killed here," he said, "the State must act immediately."
Fourteen-year-old Daniel Aharoni, a student at a local art school, said "I am afraid that a Katyusha will land on our school's grounds; I don’t even want to think what could happen. The school must be fortified."
Responding to the cabinet's decision from earlier in the day, Eshkol Regional Council head Haim Yalin said, "Now we can launch our next battle –expediting the fortification process.
"Fortification is merely a tool, not an objective. The goal is that the government will bring peace to Israel's southern communities; no one wants to live under concrete," he said.
Ilana Curiel contributed to the report
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The Department of Labor is awarding $15 million in grants that it says will provide 8,600 homeless veterans with job training.
The funding is intended to assist in the Obama administration’s goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015.
“This is a complicated challenge that requires an ‘all hands on deck’ response,” Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
The number of homeless veterans is below 60,000, according to Solis. Figures released by the Department of Veteran Affairs in December reported that 67,495 veterans were homeless in the United States on a single night in January 2011.
“We’re making some progress, but have to do more,” Solis said.
The grant money is being allocated to 64 groups around the country, including state and local workforce investment boards, and local public agencies, as well as faith-based and community organizations.
More such job training grants will probably be awarded over the next several years, according to Ismael “Junior” Ortiz, deputy assistant secretary of labor for veterans’ employment and training.
Labor will also provide $19 million for existing grants that provide job training, job search and placement assistance, according to the department.
Ortiz said he believes the goal of ending veterans homelessness by 2015 is realistic. “I truly do,” he said. “I think the goal is achievable.”
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A Washington-based organization that monitors human rights in North Korea says hackers attacked its website on the same day a cyber attack hit South Korean banks and broadcasters.
Greg Scarlatoiu, the executive director for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
, tells VOA unidentified hackers shut down his website for several hours Wednesday, removing reports that highlighted abuses in the North.
"Instead of satellite photos of political prison camp number 25, I saw a message reading 'Hitman 007 - Kingdom of Morocco.' And as we went into more depth, we noticed that all of our publications had been taken out," Scarlatoiu explained.
He says his group has not confirmed who is responsible for the attack. But Scarlatoiu says circumstantial evidence suggests a North Korea-related entity is to blame.
"First and foremost, what this organization has been doing for the past 12 years is exclusively dedicated to North Korean human rights. We don't address the Middle East, we do not address any other areas of the world," he says. "Secondly, this attack happened at the same time a massive cyber attack was conducted against targets inside South Korea."
Wednesday, a concerted cyber attack paralyzed computer networks at several major South Korean broadcasters and banks. South Korean officials have traced the virus to a Chinese IP address. But Seoul is investigating whether North Korea may have routed the attack through China, as it is believed to have done in the past.
Scarlatoiu also points out that the attack on his organization occurred a day before the United Nations Human Rights Council was set to vote on the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry on North Korea's human rights situation.
He says his organization was the first group to propose the establishment of the commission and has been working behind the scenes to push for its formation.
Earlier this month, a special U.N. investigator on North Korea, Marzuki Darusman, told the Geneva-based council that Pyongyang's violations, including torture, enslavement, enforced disappearances and murder, could amount to crimes against humanity.
The council was expected to approve the creation of the commission - the first of its kind to look into North Korean human rights. North Korea denies it is committing human rights abuses, saying such claims are meant to sabotage its government.
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AOL search data leak
The AOL search data leak was the release of detailed search logs by AOL of a large number of AOL users. The release was intentional and intended for research purposes; however, the public release meant that the entire Internet could see the results, rather than a select number of academics. AOL did not redact any information, causing privacy concerns since users could potentially be identified by their searches.
On August 4, 2006, AOL Research, headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period, intended for research purposes. AOL pulled the file from public access by the 7th, but not before it had been mirrored and distributed on the Internet.
AOL themselves did not identify users in the report; however, personally identifiable information was present in many of the queries, and as the queries were attributed by AOL to particular user accounts, identified numerically, an individual could be identified and matched to their account and search history by such information. The New York Times was able to locate an individual from the released and anonymized search records by cross referencing them with phonebook listings. Consequently, the ethical implications of using this data for research are under debate.
In January 2007, Business 2.0 Magazine on CNNMoney ranked the release of the search data #57 in a segment called "101 Dumbest Moments in Business."
In September 2006, a class action lawsuit was filed against AOL in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
- "The lawsuit accuses AOL of violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and of fraudulent and deceptive business practices, among other claims, and seeks at least $5,000 for every person whose search data was exposed."
Notable users
Although the searchers were only identified by a numeric ID, some people's search results have become notable due to various reasons.
Thelma Arnold
The New York Times successfully discovered the identity of several searchers, and with her permission, exposed search number 4417749 as Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Georgia. This privacy breach was widely reported, and led to the resignation of AOL's CTO, Maureen Govern, on August 21, 2006. The media quoted an insider as saying that two employees had been fired: the researcher who released the data, and his immediate supervisor, who reported to Govern.
User 927
One product of the AOL scandal was the proliferation of blog entries examining the exposed data. Certain users' search logs were identified as humorous, disturbing, or even dangerous.
Consumer watchdog website The Consumerist posted a blog entry by editor Ben Popken identifying the anonymous user number 927 as having an especially bizarre and macabre search history. The blog posting has since been viewed nearly 4,000 times and referenced on a number of other high-profile sites. In addition to sparking the interest of the Internet community, User 927 inspired a theatrical production, written by Katharine Clark Gray in Philadelphia. The play, also named User 927, has since been cited on several of the same blogs that originally discovered the real user's existence. As time has passed, more artistic renderings of individual user logs have appeared. A series of movies on the web site Minimovies called "I Love Alaska" puts voice and imagery to User 711391 which the authors have labeled as "an episodic documentary".
See also
- Michael Arrington (2006-08-06). "AOL proudly releases massive amounts of user search data". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2006-08-07.
- Barbaro, Michael; Zeller Jr, Tom (2006-08-09). "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-04-25. (Sign in or subscription required.)
- Katie Hafner (2006-08-23). "Tempting Data, Privacy Concerns; Researchers Yearn To Use AOL Logs, But They Hesitate". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
- Nate Anderson (2006-08-23). "The ethics of using AOL search data". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 2 September 2006. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
- AOL apologizes for release of user search data | CNET News.com
- AOL search data mirrors
- "101 Dumbest Moments in Business: Full list". CNN.
- AOL sued over Web search data release | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
- AOL user #4417749
- Li, Kenneth (2006-08-21). "AOL chief technology officer resigns: sources". Reuters.
- AOL executive quits after posting of search data - International Herald Tribune
- Frind, Markus (July 7, 2006). "AOL Search Data Shows Users Planning to commit Murder" (blog). The Paradigm Shift. WordPress.com. Archived from the original on 5 June 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
- AOL user #927
- Popken, Ben (July 7, 2006). "AOL User 927 Illuminated" (blog). The Consumerist. Retrieved 2012-12-09.
- "Leaked AOL search logs take stage in new play" (blog). CNet News Blog. CNET. Retrieved 2010-01-28.
- Popken, Ben (April 29, 2008). "AOL User 927, The Theatrical Production" (blog). The Consumerist. Retrieved 2012-12-09.
- "I Love Alaska - Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug". minimovies.org. Submarinechannel. January 2009.
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"We should not be afraid sometimes to confront beauty and horror."
ART21: Is there a story behind the stairs? How did this work come about?
NAUMAN: Steven and Nancy Oliver, in northern California, commissioned a number of outdoor works on their property by mostly California artists, or artists that have been in California. It’s a beautiful piece of property in a hilly little patch of ground above the Russian River. And when I drove up there to look at the property, as soon as we came onto the property, I thought, “Well, I should just build a stairway up to their house.” And didn’t mention that, but spent some time walking around the property and thinking about it, and came back and did the same and finally decided that’s what I’d do—build a stairway.
I decided the way I’d do it is to make the tread thirty inches square—or at least that’s what I ended up with, a thirty-inch-square tread—and the riser would be determined by the slope. So, I’d go out by thirty inches, and wherever that met the slope, that would be the height of the riser. So, we got a topographical map made, figured it out, and it runs six hundred and some feet of horizontal distance and almost two hundred feet of vertical distance, but a little under a one-in-three rise. And that’s what this average slope is.
So, I went ahead and built. I talked to them about it, and they said they were interested. So, I built these twenty-four steps here [in New Mexico]. I built this so that I’d have an idea of what the thing would kind of look like and feel like. And then they came out and looked at it, and it seemed good, so we went ahead and built it. Theirs comes out with almost three hundred steps, but again, the same average slope, so the smallest step is about an inch and a half and the biggest one is about twenty. That’s the way it worked out, on the property there. I was really pleased with the way it came out. It looks good.
ART21: What’s the experience of walking on it like?
NAUMAN: Of walking on it? It’s a lot of work, a lot more steps. The way the property runs, you can never see the whole thing at one time; there’s enough up and down as the slope changes. And so, that’s kind of neat because you have that ribbon in front of you, unveiling itself, or becoming exposed as you either go up or down. And there are some nice views of it as the driveway comes up in an S-curve. As you drive up, you see it from one side. And then you can see up and down it and then see it from another side. It doesn’t even really read as a stairway when you’re not standing on it and looking at it. I like that. It’s almost like a long, thin wall, and the scale kind of disappears. I like that about it very much.
ART21: Is there a particular way in which it works on your body or makes you think about your body as you walk down it?
NAUMAN: Because there is no regular rhythm to going up and down, you have to take each step and watch it. And so, it requires you to pay quite a lot of attention, even more down than up, because it’s a little less comfortable going down. But nothing is so abrupt that it totally catches you off guard. But you can feel yourself, your body, kind of measuring where your foot has to go at each step. You can’t ever quite find a rhythm, and it makes you very aware of yourself.
ART21: Could you talk about that experience in relation to some of your other works, such as the corridor pieces where people can walk down these very narrow hallways?
NAUMAN: Yes, it’s the same, kind of. You’re now a participant in the work. You’re very aware as you walk up or down that your body has to make an adjustment at each step. And so, you have to figure when you can change your weight, and where your foot is going to be placed, and how high you step, or how far down you step. And nothing is so great that you have to struggle with it, but everything is a little bit of an adjustment. So, you’re kept a little off-balance all the time, adjusting yourself.
ART21: What makes this stairway a work of art and not just a bunch of stairs?
NAUMAN: I guess it’s the intention that changes it from a stairway to a stairway as a work of art—because I said so! (LAUGHS)
ART21: Did you research the history of stairs in art and architecture?
NAUMAN: Well, there are stairs as architecture that artists have done, and I was aware of those. I did some research on stairs. I was curious about how traditionally things were seen, and to try to shift that a little bit. Usually they’re made to be more comfortable, and this was intended to not be comfortable.
ART21: You once made a piece with rats in a maze, where you were controlling or trying to teach them how to navigate a maze. Do you see a relationship between that sort of activity and this work?
NAUMAN: (LAUGHS) I don’t . . . I don’t think so.
ART21: Well, there is a similar interest, it seems, in control and freedom.
ART21: Wasn’t that work called Learned Helplessness in Rats? I guess I see a connection between rats, as subjects of an experiment, and your audience or the person walking down the steps, as taking part in an experiment in walking differently.
NAUMAN: Yeah, I’m hoping people can exercise a little more choice. And there’s no reward at the end of this one, except getting to the end.
ART21: Were you surprised at how well the work came out, in the end? Is it a major concern for you to make things that look beautiful, or are you generally surprised by it, just letting it happen?
NAUMAN: I’m surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I’m not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it’s got a certain completeness, then it’s beautiful. So, I’m not sure how I’m seeing that. But maybe this has more of a traditional idea of beauty. It’s a very pleasurable sensation.
ART21: Is that what drew you to this ranch, to living all the way out here in New Mexico—the beauty of it all?
NAUMAN: Well, this is a beautiful spot, right here. And the whole ranch is beautiful. There are some more beautiful spots than others. There are a couple of major Indian ruins here. And almost every flat spot on the other side of the creek has got some sort of site. And when you go to those places, you know that the Indians knew that they were beautiful. That’s why they went to those spots; they went to beautiful places. They also went to the places where there was some water.
ART21: Has living in this environment altered your relationship to how you make work?
NAUMAN: Well, it lets me do the kinds of things outside that I couldn’t do if I lived in town, in the city. But it helps me to have a sense of place and security to go in the studio, because that’s the place where you make yourself insecure. Other than that, I don’t think there’s a direct influence on the work. Maybe that’s pretty direct; I don’t know.
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|NTSB Targets Increased Use of Child Safety Systems for Passenger Vehicles|
|Written by Ryan Gray|
|Monday, 24 January 2011 12:18|
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman said she plans to renew her Certified Passenger Safety Technician status as the federal agency targets improved child and youth safety for passenger vehicles, including a recommendation that all children up to age 8 use child safety seats.
School buses are exempt from the recommendations, an NTSB spokesperson confirmed. But the recommendation to states could still affect millions of students taken to and from school by parents or others.
NTSB launched the year-long program in December during a symposium on "Child Passenger Safety in the Air and in Automobiles." The focus is on educating parents and caregivers on ways to keep children safe when traveling. This includes proper use of child safety seats and seat belts. Hersman made her comments about re-certifying herself as a CPST and more on seat belt and safety seat usage during a recent child safety seat check event in Bristow, Va.
"As state legislatures begin their 2011 sessions, the NTSB is calling upon legislators to pass laws that ensure that all children up to 8 years old are using child safety and booster seats," said Hersman, adding that 19 states still don't have primary seat belt laws. "Every parent wants their child to be safe, so knowing that trained and knowledgeable CPS technicians are available to make sure that their child safety seats have been installed properly is invaluable to them."
Estimates are that no more than a couple hundred pupil transporters across the country are registered as CPSTs for school buses, vehicles with seating structures that vary greatly from those in regular passenger vehicles. For example, booster seats that are commonplace in cars and trucks are not advisable for school buses. Specialized training on school bus passenger safety systems is given at state and national pupil transportation conferences, such as the STN EXPO, based on NHTSA-approved curriculum.
The National School Transportation Specifications & Procedures manual that is approved by the National Congress on School Transportation calls for selecting proper vehicles, equipment and child safety restraint systems (CSRSs) for infants, toddlers and preschool children. The specifications also cover the appropriate use of CSRSs (which include child safety seats, safety vests, integrated seats, related securement systems, vest mounting, seat belts, and wheelchair tie-downs) by school bus drivers and monitors.
But for transportation in personal passenger vehicles, Hersman noted that not all states have adequate child passenger safety laws. Florida has the most lenient in child passenger safety laws, as it only requires child safety seats children age 3 years or younger. Arizona, South Dakota, American Samoa and Puerto Rico cover children age 4 years or younger.
Twelve states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and South Carolina) mandate child restraints for children age 5 or younger. An additional six states (Connecticut, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, and North Dakota) only cover children age 6 or younger.
NHTSA currently recommends that children approximately age 4 and weighing 40 pounds be secured with booster seats in passenger vehicles until the reach age 8 or reach 4-feet, 9-inches tall. At that point, children should weat seat belts.
|Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 January 2011 15:25|
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An easy-to-use source for librarians, students and other researchers, each volume in this series provides illustrated biographical profiles of approximately 75 children's authors and artists. This critically acclaimed series covers more than 12,000 individuals, ranging from established award winners to authors and illustrators who are just beginning their careers. Entries typically cover: personal life, career, writings, works in progress, adaptations, additional sources. A cumulative author index is included in each odd-numbered volume.
While Gale strives to replicate print content, some content may not be available due to rights restrictions.Call your Sales Rep for details.
"Serves the many elementary schools that require basic information about the authors of books for children and young adults."
-- ARBA (American Reference Books Annual) 1999
Price: Sign In for price
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Do you have questions about autism and its treatment? Below are a number of Web sites that may help.
To find out more about Dr. Rebecca Landa, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, who appeared today on "Good Morning America" to answer viewer questions visit www.KennedyKrieger.org.
With the aim of accelerating the pace of autism research, this organization of parents, clinicians and leading scientists boasts of having committed more than $60 million to that goal since its inception.
Calling itself the leading source of information and referral on autism, this resource represents an organization that is nearly four decades old and comprises more than 20,000 members in more than 200 chapters in nearly every state.
The CDC's Web site provides a comprehensive overview of autism including screening, treatment, frequently asked questions and the CDC's latest research and findings.
With an annual budget of more than $1 billion, this component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducts research, supports research and distributes information on developmental disabilities.
This California-based nonprofit organization of parents of children with autism concentrates on three areas: education on dealing with and treating the condition; advocacy, increasing public awareness and support; and fundraising, to pay for research and education.
This Web site represents a program dedicated to studying and treating autism. It also includes a step-by-step guide on how to get help, and descriptions of current research projects.
This 300-page book gives a broad, if scholarly, look at the many approaches to education for children with autism.
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Published in Gene Therapy Weekly, January 29th, 2004
According to a study from Canada, "the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) is a major neurotransmitter receptor in the central nervous system (CNS), with functional roles in learning, memory, and sensation. Several mechanisms potentiate NMDARs, and NMDAR hyperexcitability plays pathophysiological roles in many conditions, such as neurodegenerative disease, ischemia, and chronic conditions arising from spinal cord injury. Previous research suggests that the NR2A subunit of the receptor contributes to NMDAR excitotoxicity in heterologous cells and in neurons in vivo."
Want to see the full article?
Welcome to NewsRx!
Learn more about a six-week, no-risk free trial of Gene Therapy Weekly
NewsRx also is available at LexisNexis, Gale, ProQuest, Factiva, Dialog, Thomson Reuters, NewsEdge, and Dow Jones.
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Reminiscent of the Old West, the National Western Stock Show is an event that anyone can attend and find something fun to do, and educational opportunities to be had. The Stock Show kicks off its 107th year this year, and will be held in Denver, Colo., from January 12-27th.
The NWSS is a premier place for producers of many livestock species to exhibit their animals to a judge, and to the general public. The events that take place over the 16 days of the stock show range from cattle shows to youth showmanship, market classes and draft horse competitions.
The NWSS hosts one of the largest cattle shows in the country, where producers can take their animals and compete as individuals, in pens of three, or in a carload, which is a set of 10.
According to the NWSS, “More than 15,000 head of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, goats, llamas, alpacas, bison, yak, poultry and rabbits step foot on the grounds of the National Western Stock Show each year. The National Western Stock Show is noted for hosting the world’s only carload and pen cattle show, held in the historic Denver Union Stockyards.”
The shows allow producers to showcase their genetic programs, and for students to show their market animals. Over the show, 25 different breeds of cattle will compete, including Gelbvieh, Red Angus, Black Angus, Limousin, Hereford, Charolais, Shorthorn, and Simmental cattle, just to name a few.
The junior market shows will also be held throughout the stock show, and youth will exhibit goats, lambs, hogs and cattle. Top placing individuals will earn their way into the Auction of Junior Livestock Champions, which will be held on January 25.
Over the course of the stock show, a variety of rodeos will also be held. The CenturyLink’s Team Colorado Rodeo Colorado vs. Cinch’s World Team Rodeo will take place three times on Jan. 12, with the finals being held at 8 p.m. in the Denver Coliseum.
The Mexican Rodeo will host two performances on Jan. 13, and on Jan.14-16, the PBR will come to town for the Denver Chute-Out PBR Touring Pro Finale.
On Jan. 21, the Martin Luther King Jr. African American Heritage Rodeo of Champions will take place at 6 p.m.
From Jan. 17-27, 19 PRCA rodeos will be held, with the finals taking place on Jan. 27 at 2 p.m. in the Denver Coliseum. All of the rodeos have an addition feature, such as the Miss Rodeo Colorado coronation on Jan. 17 at 7 p.m.,
Other entertainment events will also be held throughout the show. On Jan. 13, the RAM Freestyle Reining will take place in the events center at 4 p.m. On Jan. 18, the Gambler’s Choice Open Jumper stakes will be held at 7:30 p.m. On Jan. 19 and 20, the NWSS Wild West Show will take place, and on Jan. 21 and 22, 9 News Super Dogs will take the stage. On Jan. 23 and 24, an Evening with Dancing Horses will be held in the events center.
The stockshow is offering free parking this year with a ticket purchase as well. “We are excited to announce you will no longer pay to park when you enter a NWSS parking lot. We realize stock show and rodeo fans have many things to spend their money on, so this year, it will not be on parking at the National Western Stock Show” said President and CEO, Paul Andrews.
He continued, “We want fans and guests to receive the best value for their money so we will also offer a Value Snack Pack which will include a soda and snack for only $5.”
The National Western will say “thank you” to fans this year with Fan Appreciation Day, Jan. 27 when Grounds Admission tickets are just $8.
Throughout the entire show, vendors will be available for attendees to visit and purchase from. School tours will also be taking place during the show, where schoolchildren can learn about agriculture.
The stock show offers a wide variety of events for people of all ages, and is a great family activity. The NWSS is held in Denver, Colo. at the NWSS complex near I-25 and I-70.
This year marks the 107th year of the NWSS. According to the NWSS, “National Western Stock Show is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that provides college and graduate level scholarships in agriculture and medicine for practice in rural areas. It is also our mission to serve producers and consumers throughout the world by being the premier Stock Show, Rodeo, Horse Show and center for year-round events. The 16 day show also serves as an entertainment arena, hosting one of the world’s richest regular season professional rodeos, largest horse show and Colorado’s largest tradeshow.” ❖
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Dear University of San Diego faculty and staff:
Consistent with our mission and values, we are concerned about students who might be at risk because of emotional or psychological problems. The Action Guide to Helping Students in Distress was created for the purpose of giving you practical information should you be concerned about a student’s thoughts or actions. You may be surprised to know that data from the latest USD administration of the National College Health Assessment found that at some point over the past academic year,
- 30% of our students identified stress as the chief factor affecting academic performance
- 27% of our students felt so depressed it was difficult to function
- 18% of our students reported having been diagnosed and/or treated for a mental health condition and 3% seriously considered suicide
The units within the Student Wellness Area (Center for Health and Wellness Promotion, Counseling Center, Disability Services and Student Health Center) consistently provide a range of professional services to assist students who may be struggling. We are concerned though, that some of our students experience difficulties in silence because they are afraid to ask for help or do not know where to turn. We believe that by educating people throughout the University community on the signs and symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other common challenges, we can increase the likelihood that students will get the help that they need.
As a faculty and/or staff member, we know you have contact with a great many students, and that you are in a position to identify and assist those who may need help. If you encounter a student whose behavior concerns you, the action guide will provide you with information to assist him or her in accessing the appropriate support services on campus.
We strive to create a community in which students can grow and thrive while meeting the challenges inherent in college life today. If you would like to learn more about the challenges facing our students and the available resources to help them, please consult the on-line USD Guide to Resources for Helping Students in Need.
If you would like to receive additional information about USD resources or how to assist students in need, you can arrange for a presentation to any group of faculty or staff by simply contacting Dr. Melissa Halter at the Center for Health and Wellness Promotion (619-260-4618 or email@example.com) or by filling out a presentation request.
Moisés Barón, PhD
Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs
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I am trying to find out any information about the two necklaces in the attached photo, like which Native American tribe may have made them (if they are indeed genuinely made by a Native American). It seems like you may be quite knowledgable about these things so if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them!
Thank you. I am very interested and immersed in my work so I have gathered some knowledge about Native American jewelry over the years but there is so much more to know. That’s why I like to post these questions here on this blog to attract comments from others.
The necklace on the right certainly seems like it could be Navajo made. It has the look of a sterling silver necklace, simple but similar in layout to a squash blossom necklace. When I enlarge the photo, the beads seem to be hand made, not bench beads. It is a very nice necklace which I feel pretty certain would have been Navajo made.
The necklace on the left however, although very attractive, does not seem to be Native American made. The first thing that caught my eye was the brass beads which say India to me. The horizontal brass spacers between the brass beads are also not a design element associated with Native American jewelry. It seems the long dark beads and the shorter tube beads are made from horn or bone, again something I’d tend to associate with India or Africa. The rondelle beads which make up the majority of the necklace also could be bone……or perhaps they and the shorter tube beads are some sort of ivory. These things are hard to tell from a single photo.
Of course, many things can be determined definitively when viewing an item in person – using one photo is just guesswork.
It will be interesting to see what other readers think.
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Chinese Want to Put Computer 'Brains' in the Cloud
Operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS could someday move to the cloud.
CREDIT: Shutterstock: JonesHon
Millions of people use cloud computing without knowing it, by watching videos, sharing photos or using social media — online services such as YouTube, Gmail, Flickr and Facebook all depend on it. But could a cloud operating system become the brains for a new generation of mobile gadgets and household devices?
A cloud-based operating system being developed in Beijing would be the equivalent of running Windows or Mac OS online rather than booting it up from a computer's hard drive. That means just an online connection would be needed to turn any "dumb" device with a very basic computer system into a smart computing device — whether that device is a tablet, a smartphone, a refrigerator, a washing machine or a factory robot.
The Chinese "TransOS" system is being developed by Yaoxue Zhang and Yuezhi Zhou of Tsinghua University. A device using TransOS would need a minimal amount of computer code to start up and connect to the Internet. More details are expected in an upcoming special issue of the International Journal of Cloud Computing.
"The TransOS manages all the networked and virtualized hardware and software resources, including traditional OS, physical and virtualized underlying hardware resources, and enables users [to] select and run any service on demand," Zhang and Zhou said in a statement.
Google has attempted to create a simple operating system for the cloud through its Chrome OS — an online operating system that mostly looks like an Internet browser but also could run a no-frills computer. The Chinese effort is much more ambitious; it would essentially create a virtual version of a fully functional operating system.
A cloud operating system would come with new security concerns. Hackers already have demonstrated that practically anything online can be compromised, whether it's an individual iTunes user account or Sony's PlayStation Network. A second danger is that storing a computer's brains and data online can leave users dependent on the whims of the hosting company ― even of a hypothetical "nanny state" government.
Either way, the idea isn't likely to take off until users can rest assured that their mobile computing devices and smart gadgets won't lose their high-speed Internet connections.
MORE FROM LiveScience.com
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First lets start with our materials.
TOOLS YOU WILL NEED...
MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED...
46 fl. OZ can of fruit juice
6"x6" Aluminum screen
Container of activated carbon (pet aisle)
Now that we have our materials in our workspace, let's begin.
We start by opening the can of juice. Pour it in another container or drink it, because you don't want to waste it. Then open the other side, rinse out, and remove the label. You should have something like this...
Our next step is to cut the square of aluminum screen using our scissors. Cut the corners to make the square a circle. Once this is done, secure the screen to the bottom of the filter using duct tape. This prevents any sagging from the panty hose.
The next step is to secure the panty hose to the filter using duct tape. This prevents any charcoal debris from spilling out of the filter. It should resemble this...
Now, after rinsing our charcoal, we pour it into the filter.
Once this is done, we can secure our filter to our exhaust vent using the duct clamp. Just place it around the device in a snug spot and tighten it with the screwdriver. Make sure it's on there good, or the filter might fall off.
This filter can be produced for very cheap, less than 30 dollars. It's MUCH more effective than other scrubbers using carbon air filters. Do yourself a favor and make it as stealthy as possible... No smell, no questions.
And remember to change your carbon every 3 months!
Edited by nugglord_420, 13 October 2008 - 05:10 AM.
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This post is going to be about illegal aliens. No, I’m not talking about those who might be in the U.S. now. I am going to talk about those aliens who started coming here five hundred or so years ago. Those of us who have native American roots in our bloodline know our ancestors were the real citizens of this country back then. When Christopher Columbus stumbled on our shores along with him came hordes of uninvited aliens who eventually took over our country. They robbed us of our land with promises that were never kept. It took a few centuries for them to almost completely annihilate the original citizens.
When they had us in total submission they started stripping us of our deities and replacing them with their own. They put the few of us who survived their war machines on tiny almost worthless pieces of land to try and eke out an existence. They introduced us to their alcoholic drinks which proved to be very addictive to many of us.
Maybe the illegal aliens of today will some day provide some payback for all these atrocities If that happens remember that what goes around eventually come around. But I kind of believe that China will be providing the payback without setting foot on our soil. Aren’t the advances of the 21st century a wonderful thing. Let’s remember that almost all of us were illegal aliens in this land at one time or another.
And the journey goes on….
Here is another picture from our October trip to northern Wisconsin. We added about 40 barns to our photo inventory on that trip. This is one of the more interesting ones.
This land was made for you an me. Those words were written by Woody Guthrie. He was one of my favorite songwriters. The picture (that is me in the picture) was taken in June 2009 in northern California during our month long trip out west.
Thank you Island House hotel for providing us with quality accommodations during our recent stay at Mackinac Island Michigan. Your one hundred year plus hotel is awesome.
I celebrate the peacemakers of this world. One of those groups is certainly the Society of Friends known as Quakers. As a matter of fact they have even won a Nobel Peace Price for their efforts. According to Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. That is certainly an apt description of Quakers and their journey in following Christ’s words. While the Nobel committee has its flaws in picking award winners most are certainly for the most part peacemakers.
One of the Beatitudes found in the Christian Bible is
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the Sons of God.
Although we are all children of God all of us who call ourselves Christians certainly would be very honored to be called one of the sons of God. By the above words that is a special status in God’s kingdom. Being a peacemaker certainly indicates promoting God’s will here on earth. We in the U.S. allow our government to spend thousands of times more for our war machines than they do for peacemaking efforts. If only that trend were reversed even slightly. We need more peacemakers. Blessed are the peacemakers wherever they are.
And the journey goes on.
Here is one not too many people have probably seen. It is a small lighthouse in Neenah Wisconsin. The picture was taken in 1986 but it still looks the same today.
A close member of my extended family died yesterday after a long and agonizing downward spiral. For the last two years she was no longer of her own mind and became a very spiteful person. It was totally sad to see her in that state for so long. It is not that she was a superhuman before that but she was not unlike many today in her very self-centered world view. I am relieved that she finally passed and went into our Lord’s arms. She can finally enjoy some peace.
I know I have read several treatises about suffering in the world. I think that is one of the theologian’s favorite topics. But I personally still wonder why the Lord, who has infinite compassion for each one of us, puts some of us through such agony before we die? I know the bible says otherwise but in my mind it kind of gives credence to the concept of purgatory. If we suffer so much before leaving this life does that give us a little less judgment by our maker?
Even though it was eventually expected and actually hoped for the end of her life still came as somewhat of a shock. I can still feel the shutter when I was told of her demise. I just hope and pray that I don’t have to suffer in the circumstances as she did for such a long period of time. Thank you Lord for finally ending it. I may not understand the reasons behind those years but I can accept that you allowed it to happen for a reason.
Here is a picture of Glacier National Park in 1990. We were there in June and still had plenty of snow to contend with.
Here is a picture with Yvonne and I that was taken at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York in the early 1990s.
I, like most senior citizens have my share of health related issue. Probably more than most. It seems that every time I go to the doctor lately he has diagnosed me with yet another condition! The last time he notified me that my blood sugar is on the high side of normal so he added yet another prescription to my list. I also can’t seem to get out of a chair without grunting anymore. In other words, I am falling apart!
If I were to become fixated on all these conditions I would likely never get out of bed in the mornings. What a boring life that would be! Instead I choose to not focus on my declining health but instead do everything I can in spite of it. Yvonne will tell you that I am a pretty ornery person but I believe this is a good thing when health issues arise. Don’t sit back and feel sorry for yourself because you don’t have the energy you had twenty years ago or you have this condition or that condition. Just go out and do what you can. Doing what you can does not necessarily mean accepting arbitrary limits . I tend to try and push myself beyond what I think I can endure. Sometimes that gets me in trouble but mostly it just increases my endurance.
In other words get off your butt and stay active in life. Get up every morning and face the challenges that the day may bring. You will be a stronger and better person for it.
As mentioned in the last post I am in the initial process of building a slot car track in my old paint room. One important part of being retired is that I now have time to pursue things that I have enjoyed doing in the past. In my youth I built many a model car and airplane. It seemed to feed my ingrained engineering fever. Now that I have time I want to bring back some of that joyful time but with a different twist.
I was surprised to see that slot cars are still an active hobby. They came about before video games as a way to have a surreal experience without any real danger. I would have thought that video games would have replaced that experience but that seems to be not the case. At least not totally. I think the “high tech, high touch” syndrome feeds slotcars continued craze. That is to say we always need to get our hands around something and not to live constantly in a virtual reality. I can’t say that I played with slotcars as a youth as the kits were just too expensive for my family’s limited budgets back then. Speaking of virtual reality brings to mind one of my favorite movies “The Matrix” but that is for another blog post .
This picture above is of one fantastic track. I don’t strive to equal that track but I want to come close to achieving some degree of it’s reality. Some tracks are just that, tracks without the corresponding scenery. That would be boring to me so mine will be more like the above.
So now I am adding yet another hobby to my repertoire. It will give my creative and engineering sides the challenge that they need and will be fun to race the cars around the track. It will also get me out of the house and into the barn this winter. Yvonne will appreciate that (ha). So, if you are interested in this type of thing keep a lookout to some posts on my progress in this area in the coming months.
And the journey goes on…
I seem to be hobby deficient lately so have been looking for yet another hobby. Slot cars are on my mind. I have cleaned out a room in the barn to build a track. Of course I won’t look like the White Lake track about that that is a beautiful inspiration for mine.
My wife Yvonne’s maiden name is Wierschke. Of course that is very German in origin. I am going way way back in the photo archive to pull out the above picture. According to the note that was attached to it the picture is of her grandfather and the corresponding brothers and sisters. I don’t know exactly when it was taken but it was probably around 1900 or so. Since Yvonne is from Wisconsin which is the beer capital of the U.S. it is not surprising that she has a strong German background.
Retirement is not a onetime thing; it is a long term process. In earlier years when I was preparing for retirement I deemed it pretty much that event where I left the workforce and collected my virtual gold watch. But after that ceremonial event is when the real thing takes place. I must admit I struggled with just what to do for the first year or so of my retirement. I finally decided that I really didn’t want to fully retire so I ended up opening a woodworking cabinet shop. That lasted, to one success or another, for about six years and then I moved on to other things.
Basically retirement, among other things, is a period of experimentation. I made certain decisions and then changed them to something else as the years have progressed. If something didn’t work, and many things I tried didn’t, then I moved on to other things. Don’t worry that you may make some wrong decisions. You almost certainly will make wrong decisions. To me that is part of the retirement process. It is great that at this point in my life what I do is up to me (with my hubby’s permission of course ).
In the ten years since I left the corporate world I have been into several different things. I am now gladly in the full retirement mode. That is I no longer take money for what I use my time for. One thing that has remained constant during these years is my volunteer work. I have spent a couple of days a week giving back some of the blessings the Lord has showered on me during my life.
My latest thing is building a slot car track. I am going to fill the room which used to be my cabinet business paint shop in the back of my barn with a slot car layout. I considered model railroading but that just seems to boring for me (ha). In the Spring I may just migrate on to remote controlled trucks. I am eyeing a place behind the barn to build a track for those.
And the journey goes on….
Here is one of the many barn pictures we took on our recent trip to northern Wisconsin. Given the state of the barn this might be the last picture ever taken of it.
Since the Christmas season is quickly approaching I thought I would pull this one out of the archives. This is a picture of me and Yvonne’s first Christmas together. It was taken during my first visit to the “crazy” in-laws in 1987. We both had a lot more hair and a lot less wrinkles back then!
A few posts back I announced that I have given up on following or participating in politics. It has just become to grinding for me. Last night I was reading a book called The Essential Thomas Jefferson and I came across the following quote in his letter to John Randolph dated August 1775
My first wish is a restoration of our just rights (he was talking about the British government’s unjust laws for the colonies) ; my second, a return of the happy period, when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally fro the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquility, banishing every desire of ever hearing what passes in the world.
So, I am in pretty good company in wanting to tune out the rest of the world. Especially the ugliest parts.
Of course it was several more years before Jefferson was able to return to the tranquility of Monticello. He had to write the Declaration of Independence, become a minister to France, become a president of the U.S. and lastly to triple the size of the United States via the Louisiana Purchase. Me, I am not nearly as busy so I do go for days without hearing what passes in the world.
And the journey goes on…..
Nothing better than a county fair. The kids have fun and there is lots of greasy food to eat
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Pasco officials are working on a new plan for this old idea: Carving the county into garbage franchise areas that would each be served by one hauler.
Haulers have fought past proposals to change Pasco's long-established open market set-up, which lets the nine permitted companies compete for customers anywhere in the county.
But Jennifer Seney, county recycling coordinator, told Pasco commissioners last week that franchising collection services will be one of her top initiatives next fiscal year.
Her pitch: Fewer trucks on neighborhood streets, lower residential rates, more recycling.
As she later noted, with a chuckle, none of the commissioners objected to her moving forward with the plan: "They didn't stop me, did they?"
Seney said in an interview that the initiative to try again for franchising garbage pick-up coincides with the county's new planning efforts to focus on concentrating new development in urban areas.
"Franchising goes hand in hand with that," she said, because it is an efficient way to collect trash in densely populated areas.
The idea, too, is that haulers would charge residences less because their costs aren't as high: Shorter routes, reduced fuel costs and higher participation.
Recycling advocates have pushed for franchising as a way to increase participation. County officials could write franchise agreements so that the haulers bidding on them would be required to offer curbside recycling pick-up. Seney said the agreements could require haulers to invest in recycling bins for the service as opposed to the blue bags.
Officials tie increased recycling to another initiative for next year: Figuring out how to address the county's crowded facility that processes recyclables. That facility is at capacity and can't be expanded because it is surrounded by the Shady Hills wastewater treatment plant.
Seney told commissioners last week she'll also look into building a new facility elsewhere on the Shady Hill property or look for a long-term service contractor to process and market the recyclables.
Seney said she plans to spend next year, likely with the help of a consultant, studying franchise agreements in other counties and coming up with a proposal for Pasco.
Previous proposals for franchising included letting the nine haulers bid on four areas, something that didn't sit well with smaller firms that could not compete with the large national corporations.
Seney said she's seen other franchise agreements that have some protections for the smaller companies. Palm Beach County, for instance, limits the number of customers any one hauler can serve.
Commissioner Michael Cox said the details of the franchise agreement will be what sell him on it. He said his support may hinge on how many franchise areas county officials recommend setting up.
"The concern I have is for the small guys," he said. "I don't want to put them out of business."
Joe Assalti, division manager for Seaside Sanitation in Hudson, said he has no doubt that Pasco will eventually move to a franchise system, especially for the areas that are built out. Seaside is part of Arizona-based Republic Services.
"I think over time it's going to have to happen," he said.
The pros, he said, are lower rates, better efficiencies for haulers, "and the county roads would be maintained for a longer period of time."
But he said the cons are that smaller haulers may not qualify to handle franchise areas based on the geographic area. "And customers would lose their freedom of choice."
He, too, said the viability of a new system would depend on how officials set up the franchise areas, and how they set up the qualifications for each hauler.
"I think it's a complicated process and the county would have to think about how to do it," he said. "It may have to happen in Pasco County. We're not that rural little county any more."
Jodie Tillman can be reached at email@example.com or (727) 869-6247.
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'Hitler’s Shadow' Shows How War Criminals Escaped Justice
Within days of the release of Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, hundreds of media outlets, from the New York Times to the Jerusalem Post and CNBC, had run stories on the 101-page report.
Coauthored by AU’s Richard Breitman, a history professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, Hitler’s Shadow is based on newly declassified and analyzed government documents. It is available online at the National Archives Web site.
Why has the report’s release caused such a stir?
“People regard Nazi Germany as one of the most tragic episodes in history, certainly in modern history, and the Nazis . . . have come to be seen as symbols of evil,” says Breitman. “So the question is . . . can we get full and accurate depictions of what happened in Nazi Germany and to Nazi officials after 1945? And in that regard the release of what is really millions of pages of new material is really important.”
Again and again, the report documents how Western intelligence agencies declined to prosecute war criminals — often men responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and others, and some who had killed captured Allied soldiers. Instead, these men, implicated in monstrous crimes, were used as pieces on a global Cold War chessboard.
A sampling of the rogue’s gallery of war criminals that Hitler’s Shadow tracks:
- Wilhelm Beisner. One of a cadre of Nazis who escaped prosecution and even thrived after the war in the Middle East. The report notes that this group “played important roles in the systematic killing of millions of Jews, and they continued to fulminate about Jewish influence decades later.”
- Haj Amin al-Husseini. The notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and fervent anti-Jewish Arab leader who received a fortune in Nazi payments, as well as refuge in Germany, and who in spring 1945 with the war’s outcome no longer in doubt signed a contract for subsidies up to 12,000 marks per month to continue his and the Nazis’ shared political and ideological campaign after the war.
- Rudolph Milner. A Gestapo member who was responsible for the execution of perhaps thousands of suspected Polish resisters, and who also had a role in deporting 8,000 Danish Jews to Auschwitz. Used as an intelligence resource, it is possible that he was shielded from extradition by U.S. forces; he later fled to Argentina.
The use of war criminals for intelligence now seems unthinkable. But in an interview, Breitman noted that crimes against peace — the fact that Germany had dragged the world into war — and not crimes against humanity were the main focus of the Nuremberg trials. Tracking war criminals was not a high U.S. government priority, and a 1953 document, written by an official in response to an effort to find Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, noted that the CIA was “not in the business of apprehending war criminals, hence in no position to take an active role in this case.”
“I think some of the officials at the time shifted rather quickly their focus from what had happened in Germany to the next enemy,” Breitman said. “Insofar as they thought of Gestapo people as intelligence experts they made all kinds of exceptions to what was supposed to be the general policy of not using Gestapo people. They didn’t have a lot of sources on communists themselves, communists in Germany, communists in Eastern Europe, experts on communists in the Soviet Union, and you could call it desperation, or you could call it just very narrow, short-term thinking. They wanted people who were going to be useful against the current and future enemy.”
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On Wednesday night, former Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell walked off the set of Piers Morgan Tonight after refusing to answer a question about gay marriage. She said she hadn’t come on the show to deal with “a rude talk- show host, but to talk about my book and talk about the issues I address in my book.” Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann, once an outspoken social conservative, has reduced her comments on gay marriage to vague statements like “I’m not judging anyone” and “I think my views are clear.”
Tea Party candidates like O’Donnell and Bachmann have campaigned on libertarian economic platforms, leading some commentators to dig into old Ayn Rand novels for the source of this new economic populism. But what they’ve missed is that the Tea Party’s obsession with the size of government has been part of Christian conservatives’ platform for decades. The Tea Party was just a new name coined by clever activists and the media—a rebranding that has made it much easier for Christian-right candidates to run for office without having to air their views on social issues, which are increasingly viewed in a negative light by the general public.
The extent of the rebranding was confirmed this week by a new survey by David Campbell and Robert Putnam, the authors of last year’s monumental American Grace. Polling 3,000 people before and after the rise of the Tea Party, Campbell and Putnam identified the two characteristics most likely to turn someone into a Tea Partier: being strongly active in Republican politics and identifying with the religious right. A similar Pew study in February found that 69 percent of white evangelicals agree with the Tea Party.
Christian conservatives are strongly motivated to oppose “statism” or any policy that represents the expansion of government power.
Campbell and Putnam also found that the Tea Party is one of the most disliked groups in America, with negative ratings somewhere close to those of the religious right—also one of the country’s most unpopular demographics. That’s a significant change from 2006, when Pew found that most Americans had a positive view of the Christian right. Possibly because they are increasingly seen as anti-gay, evangelical conservatives seem to have tanked in the court of public opinion. As Campbell and Putnam put it, even as American voters have shifted to the right, they “have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics.” That may explain why O’Donnell would rather walk off a live TV show than talk about gay marriage.
These Christian conservatives’ unwillingness to discuss their social conservatism is in stark contrast to the 2004 presidential election, when George W. Bush’s team successfully used gay marriage as a wedge issue. In last year’s midterm elections, an overwhelming number of Tea Party challengers had deep ties to the religious right, but had scrubbed their campaign websites of anything but vague references to opposing abortion and, even more rare, to supporting “traditional marriage.”
Whether intentional or not, the almost universal overlap of the Christian right with the Tea Party somehow largely avoided media scrutiny. But after the midterm elections, it was immediately clear where the passion had come from: newcomers to the 112th Congress came overwhelmingly from conservative religious denominations. Suddenly populated with all manner of home-schooling activists, youth ministers, abstinence proponents, former members of radical anti-abortion groups, and even a Mennonite, the current House of Representatives is one of the most religiously conservative in recent history.
It was also apparent in state legislatures, which saw an influx of Tea Party candidates. Nineteen legislative chambers and more than 500 seats changed from Democrat to Republican last year. Almost immediately, they introduced a massive wave of socially conservative legislation: more than 80 anti-abortion laws have been proposed in state legislatures this year, along with a smaller but equally unprecedented blitz of measures aimed at getting creationism into public schools.
But during the campaign, few of these candidates spoke openly about social issues. It’s difficult to know if this was deliberate subterfuge or just a response to the political winds. Rep. James Lankford, an Oklahoma youth minister who won his first campaign in 2010, said he “didn’t talk a lot about spiritual issues” during the campaign because he saw it as a “secular task.”
It should not have been a surprise that Tea Partiers were so synonymous with the religious right. Above all, Christian conservatives are strongly motivated to oppose “statism” or anything that represents the expansion of government power. They see government as a secularizing force that at best has no respect for religious values and at worst is actively working to eradicate them. Taxes and expansive federal programs like Obamacare orient the federal government toward collectivism and, they fear, increased hostility to their beliefs. It makes sense that they would be the leaders of a movement against government encroachment on “liberty,” and would be the kind of intense crusaders Tea Partiers have grabbed headlines for being.
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One of the main draws to me of the Edinburgh Independent and Radical Book Fair was a talk titled Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland, by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach. Alexander Moffat is a former professor of painting at the Glasgow School of Art and Alan Riach is the present occupant of the chair in Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. Their talk was about their book of the same title, and they authors began by explaining it’s birth.
Both on a trip through China with other artists and poets, they were asked by an Arts College to talk about Scotland as a cultural idea. The hall, full at 9pm, had an audience that continued to grow throughout the night, and the two found themselves still discussing Scotland and its culture at midnight. A quite amazing experience, and one I am sure you will not find in Scotland. This talk inspired Moffat and Riach to try to rebalanced the understanding of Scottish culture within Scotland.
The aim of the book is to bring the main figures from Scotland’s culture into much greater focus and it does not treat the arts in isolation. The book looks mainly at visual art and poetry throughout the modernist period, with Hugh MacDiarmid as the catalyst of a cultural renaissance in Scotland, a renaissance that some may argue has not yet finished.
Moffat and Riach both felt that one of the main reasons why Scots themselves remain so ignorant of their own diverse and different culture is due to a lack of Scottish art, culture and history on the curriculum. While I would in no way argue with this assessment I would also add that particularly in contemporary Scotland that the media is just as big, if not bigger influence.
As the UK media is in the large part London based, very little that we watch on television, listen to on the radio (apart from “regional” stations), or read in or papers acknowledges the cultural diversity in the British Isles. The most recent condescension to regionality is on the news. Presenters have started saying “in England and Wales” after every headline, which only serves to remind Scotland (and Northern Ireland) how badly they are catered for by “national” news programmes. The BBC currently spends 3% of the license fee on Scottish programming while we have 9% of the population. The very fact that there is Scottish specific programming i.e. no one outside of Scotland is interested in Scottish culture (similar for other “regions”), tells us a lot about the mindset behind these decisions.
However this complaint is not, as some would have you believe, a nationalist one. I know plenty of people from the North of England, or from areas such as Devon and Cornwall, who feel equally frustrated about having their individual cultures at worst ignored, at best the butt of the joke.
I found the talk inspiring, and was slightly disappointed that the question and answer session had to be cut short, if only we were in China, it could have gone on until midnight.
Riach and Moffat managed to create a picture of Scotland in the last hundred of so years which was teaming with creativity and inspiration. A Scotland which was much more than a small country in isolation, but included international influences. And, more importantly, a country that can still mine this rich seam into the future, hopefully developing more talented writers and artists who are resistant to the homogenisation of culture.
With a head buzzing with ideas afterwards one comment has stuck with me. Alexander Moffat, the visual artist of the two said that the artists were jealous of the poets, after all how do you pain in Scots. However the conversation always started with the poets, because in Scotland’s culture it is the poets who have always taken the lead.
Poets of Scotland, you have a lot to live up to. Start living!
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PINEDA DE MAR, Catalonia — Restaurants are risky under the best of circumstances. But in Spain, where common sense can defy all logic, eating out has truly been part of the fabric of daily life for decades, so I felt my risk was fairly well calculated when I opened a small restaurant here, with a pan-Mediterranean menu, about five years ago. I was braced for the challenges of being chef and manager, but I was not prepared for La Crisis. Nobody was, as this week’s Dining article on the culinary fallout makes clear.
When Spain’s economy crashed in 2008, Pineda de Mar — a coastal town northeast of Barcelona — soon found itself with the highest unemployment rate in Catalonia. We also lost the tourism that had rounded out our local economy for 40 years. Despite soaring costs and a sales tax increase, local restaurateurs saw logic in freezing prices, though from there each took his own steps to ride out the recession.
As Pineda’s resident New Yorker, I decided to start a series of jazz suppers at my place, Tradescantia. The nightlife was welcome, and it looked as if I’d found my solution. But our economy worsened with alarming speed, and thinning crowds bought less and ate out less often. Vacationers who had dined out every day began to hold out for a single, last-night splurge. Pinedencs who had dined each week came every other, then not at all. My average checks slipped from 25 euros, to 20, to 12 and change. One night a week of live music couldn’t begin to offset such losses. I upped it to two, then three.
Eating out ceased to be a casual pleasure. A single entree could provoke enough anxiety to put people off a whole restaurant. “That’s expensive,” they’d say, pointing at the one offender on an affordable menu. I overheard too many sidewalk debates not to get that message loud and clear. With great reluctance, I began shaving a euro where I could, or pulling favorite dishes that had pleased so many customers, now gone.
Even the decor intimidated some people: “Looks expensive. Keep walking.” (Hilarious if you’d seen my humble digs.) When I used up my “good” disposable table runners, I called my supplier for a simpler alternative.
My outsider’s paranoia convinced me that every other restaurant must be doing better than I was, but other owners told me they had laid off staff or cut back hours. By the summer of 2010, a friend confided that even at his popular beach bar, most mornings he was hard pressed to sell a single café con leche. By year’s end, restaurants and bars began disappearing overnight without ceremony. A few changed hands, to the deep regret of their new owners. Soon enough, even selling cheaply was no longer a possibility, and our entire town was forced to simply forge ahead.
Price wars broke out. The sidewalk blackboards read like Dutch auctions. To my amazement, 40 cents made a difference in where one went for a meal.
Some survival tactics backfired. A favorite restaurant shrank its portions so much that guests were ravenous after a three-course menu. The main course? Six anchovies. Another killed its business altogether: who would risk a three-course meal that cost 4.90 euros? A new bar established itself with free tapas, and soon regretted it; each evening, unemployed residents crowded its terrace, eating their supper for the price of a single beer.
To stretch my own shrinking budget, I got very creative with a handful of ingredients. My remaining customers were appreciative, and new ones were glad they ventured in, though when the day finally arrived that I had to choose between toilet paper and a head of lettuce, it hardly mattered anymore. As I saw the inevitable approaching, I longed for incompetence. That, I could have fixed.
If watching your own restaurant slowly starve to death is hard, watching them all waste away in a town of more than 20,000 people is shocking. The face-saving excuses I used when there was no money to buy food or drink are universal: “The delivery hasn’t arrived.” “I didn’t like what was at the market.” “The tap is broken.”
No one here has been spared. Even at Can Formiga, which had earned a star in the Michelin Guide,12.5 euros has become too much to ask for a three-course luncheon. It has just replaced its classic menú del día with platos combinados — the fare of the greasy spoon — and lowered the price to 10.40 euros, dessert and beverage included. At another of the more refined places, they’ve hung a huge, garish banner out front with a list of silly theme nights, but it waves over a vacant street. And no one’s really in the mood for silliness.
So many colleagues have lost their entire life savings already, and many more will. We know the worst is yet to come.
It’s July, and my pueblo by the beach looks like a ghost town. Even the ice cream stands are empty. Each morning at the restaurants and bars, they wipe down tables, unstack chairs, set out their blackboards and shiny menus, like a daily dress rehearsal for a show that never opens. Many, exhausted by the charade, no longer bother. They’ll lose less money closed than open.
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What is copyright?
by Michael Patrick Goad
Although I am not a lawyer, or, perhaps, because I am not a lawyer, it seems
to me that concepts associated with copyright issues are sometimes made
unnecessarily difficult. I don't mean to say that copyright law is easy by any
means. However, it is my belief that interpretations and claims that are
often asserted concerning copyright do little more than cloud or confuse things,
and that sometimes it's done with that specific intention. While my interests
are primarily with literary copyright, much of what I will be discussing in this
and future articles applies to music copyright, graphic copyright, and copyright
for other forms of original expression.
To start with, copyright deals with the right to
that has been created. This right to copy belongs to the creator of the
"something" that he created, or, if he was hired to create it, to the person or
company that hired him.
The "something" that has been created is called a work. It can be a
literary work, such as a novel, a poem, or a short story. It can also be
an artistic work, such as a painting, drawing, or sculpture, or a musical work.
Other types of works that can be protected by copyright are maps, movies, sound
recordings, and architectural drawings.
The creator of the work is called its author in copyright law.
It doesn't matter whether the work is a painting, a drawing, a song, or a novel.
In copyright, its creator is called its author.
(Besides the right to copy the work
there are also several other rights that belong exclusively to the author of the
work. I will be discussing these in more detail in a future article.)
Two things are required for a work to be copyright protected. It must
be an original creation and it must be fixed in some
Originality is a prerequisite for copyright. A work that
is assembled from pre-existing material or that is developed by procedure will
have little or no originality to it. There must be some creativity
involved for a work to be copyrighted.
A copyright protected work must be fixed in some tangible format.
As I am writing this, my words are not protected because, if the computer is
turned off or loses power before this text is saved, what I have written will go
away and all I have left is the concepts and ideas that I wrote down. When
I save the file I am writing this to, the words are recorded to the hard drive
of my computer. The tangible format that they are saved to is the file
that resides on my computer.
In the simplest textual form, the tangible form required by copyright law
is the recording of words onto some sort of surface, usually paper. As
original, creative text flows from the pencil or pen, or as it is pounded into
the paper with an old-fashioned typewriter, the copyright protection for those
For other types of work, the medium in which the work is fixed is different.
Movies are fixed in the film, videos in the tape, paintings "in" the canvas and so
The key is that to be copyrightable a work must be in a form that can be
What, then, is copyright? Copyright is a set of rights that
belong exclusively to the author of an original, creative work. The
most basic of these rights is the right to make a copy of the work.
Except as allowed in the copyright law, making a copy of the work or any
portion of the work is an infringement of this right.
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But by the natural law of war, which no man made and no man can unmake, 9/11 was far more legitimate as a military act than the Utoye massacre. ABB is worse than OBL.
Why? Because the law of war is that all war’s carnage, whether it affects “soldiers” or “civilians” (a completely arbitrary distinction) is legitimate if and only if it serves a military purpose. What is a military purpose? Since the purpose of all war is the transfer of political power, a military purpose is a political purpose.
Slaughter that serves no purpose is sadistic, insane, terrible. Slaughter for purpose is the very nature of war, and cannot be separated from it. Since right-wing terrorism does not work, it is illegitimate as a tactic of war. Since left-wing terrorism does work, it is perfectly legitimate. Thus, OBL is legitimate and ABB is not.
Islamic terrorism (which is in every case left-wing) is legitimate because it’s effective. It’s effective because its political result is to expand the political power and privilege of Muslims and their progressive sponsors. Right-wing terrorism is illegitimate because it’s ineffective. It’s ineffective because its political result is to contract the political freedom and influence of conservatives (extremist or moderate).
If it was militarily possible to free Norway from Eurocommunism by killing a hundred communists, or a thousand communists, or ten thousand communists, we might have an interesting moral debate over whether this butcher’s bill was worth paying. Since it is not possible to free Norway from communism by killing a hundred communists, ie, roughly 0.01% of all the communists in Norway, leaving the other 99.99% with a permanent raging hard-on, no debate is possible. The verdict is clear: illegitimate, ineffective and wrong. I condemn Anders Behring Breivik! So there.
Of course, there are plenty of historical contexts in which right-wing terrorism did work — for instance, Germany in the 1920s. In these contexts, it was legitimate. Conversely, left-wing terrorism was ineffective in the fascist nations, and hence illegitimate.
Why does left-wing terrorism work, and right-wing terrorism not? As Carl Schmitt explained in Theory of the Partisan, terrorist, guerrilla or partisan warfare is never effective on its own. While an effective military strategy, it is only effective as one fork of a pincer attack. The terrorist succeeds when, and only when, he is allied to what Schmitt called an interested third party — either a military or political force.
Left-wing terrorism succeeds as the violent arm of a political assault that would probably be overwhelming in any case. In every case, the terrorist plays Mutt in a Mutt-and-Jeff act. Right-wing terrorism in the modern world is cargo-cult terrorism: Mutt without Jeff. Indeed, in historical cases where right-wing terrorism has been successful, in every case we see it aligned with powerful forces within the state. Right-wing terrorism worked in Weimar Germany, for instance, or prewar Japan, because it aligned with fascist conspiracies in the security forces. Somehow I don’t see a lot of that in 2011 Norway.
Thus, we note that there are two responses to terrorism: the natural response and the unnatural response. The natural response is to take revenge on the terrorist and everyone even remotely resembling him. If he is a Muslim, the natural response is to chastise the Muslims. When Grynzspan, a Jew, kills the German vom Rath, the German people must chastise the Jews. And, of course, when a right-wing piece of filth slaughters the cream of the Norwegian Komsomol, all racists and reactionaries are automatically suspect.
The unnatural response — which will not happen by itself, but can be made to happen by a sufficiently powerful psychological-warfare machine — is to look instead at the grievances of the attacker. After all, no one commits terrorism unless he has some complaint. No complaint — no terrorism. Thus while the Nazi response to the terrorism of Grynzspan is to collectively punish the Jews, the Atlantic response to the terrorism of Grynzspan (ineffective and thus illegitimate) is to attribute it to the injustices suffered by the Jews. This of course is also our response to the terrorism of Mandela (effective and thus legitimate).
In more typical cases, however, the political movement allied with a successful terrorist campaign adopts a strategy of dualism. Here is our Mutt-and-Jeff act: the unnatural response. We can always tell a Mutt-and-Jeff strategy because Mutt and Jeff have the same demands. Mutt tells you to satisfy these demands, or die. Jeff tells you to satisfy these demands, to “take the wind out of Mutt’s sails.” Also, Jeff and Mutt are frequently found at the same parties, enjoying the hell out of one another’s company.
Thus, Islamic terrorism is productive, because it results in increasing communal deference to the Islamic community and its progressive allies. Fascist terrorism is counterproductive, because it results in increasing communal intolerance toward the fascist community — which of course has no conservative allies. Rather, the community — whose information source consists almost exclusively of progressive organs — adopts a monist approach, ascribing guilt by association to everyone even remotely resembling a fascist. Ie, everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. Since this is the natural response, it is not at all difficult to orchestrate. The story writes itself.
This gets us to the essence of what’s wrong with ABB‘s thinking. The error of ABB goes far beyond his decision to run wild with a Glock. This is just his specific error. His general error is what Patri Friedman calls folk activism — a broad pattern of ineffective or counterproductive political action which extends across the entire right-wing spectrum, from moderate libertarians to hardcore neo-Nazis. It’s not just that running wild with a Glock is stupid. Almost everything the right does is stupid. Very few rightists are running wild with a Glock, but most are in some way or other guilty of folk activism.
Why did ABB think right-wing terrorism could work? Because ABB grew up in a leftist world, he thinks like a leftist. His heroes are leftist heroes — Max Manus, not Vidkun Quisling. Terrorism works for leftists — and so do many other forms of democratic activism.
Terrorism is anarchism: a shattering of order. Is there such a thing as right-wing anarchism? Of course not: the concept is retarded. If the word “right” means anything, its goal is not to shatter order, but impose it.
Who governs Norway? The Norwegian Labor Party? If an ABB wanted to accomplish something useful, he shouldn’t have decimated the Norwegian Labor Party. Rather, he should have joined the Norwegian Labor Party. After all, Chinese communism became fascist — why can’t Norwegian communism? ABB could have been Norway’s Deng Xiaoping, not its Timothy McVeigh. That’s the difference between action and folk activism.
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I love making flowers from paper, so today I am going to share with you a different way to use one of Samantha's Silhouette svg's. Here is a look at the cut.
So, the suggestion that Samantha gives for the use of this cut is to use it as an embellishment, maybe a border using running your thumb to make it stand out irregularly. I decided to go with something different. I am going to make a fringe flower and here's how you do it.
The cut is the Scallop Dot Fringe. When I pulled my cut up in the Silhouette software...I left the cut alone and didn't modify. The only thing I did was did a duplicate one right next to it. To cut it out I used the heavy paper setting with a speed of 3 and my blade set on 5. Now, I used Samantha's patterned paper Paris Girl, so this is a perfect setting for her paper. You may want to adjust your setting for the type of paper you use.
Here is a look at the cut.
Next you are going to want to roll your fringe, making sure the pattern you would like to see is on the inside. You can roll the fringe up with some tweezers, a quill or just use your fingers.
After it is rolled up, stick a pencil in the middle to widen the center. This allows for another piece of rolled fringe to go in the center. Tape it to hold in place.
Now, peel back all of the pieced of fringe until it looks like this:
Next, take your second piece of fringe and cut it in half. I did this because the the whole one would be too big to fit in the center of the first piece of fringe. Roll the second piece of fringe the same way you did the first. Next, slide it into the whole you made using pencil. Make sure you have a little bit of glue on it so it stays in place. Finally, unfold the pieces of fringe.
Look how cute it turned out. Add a brad or button to the center to make it look more like a flower.
I put my flower on a card, but you can use it for any crafting project. The black background piece is also one of Samantha's Silhouette cuts. It is called 12 Piece Tag Set. These cuts can be found in the Silhouette Store. Hope you liked my tutorial today! Thanks for stopping by!
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This is the second instalment of Signum Classics’ exploration
of the songs of Beethoven. The first instalment (SIGCD139) was reviewed
last December and featured low voices - the mezzo-soprano, Ann
Murray and the baritone, Roderick Williams. Now we hear a high
voice in the shape of another fine British singer, tenor John
Mark Ainsley. As before, the pianist is the redoubtable Iain
Beethoven’s is not the first name that springs to mind
when one thinks of lieder
. Susan Youens hits the nail
squarely on the head in her scholarly but very readable notes,
when she states of Beethoven: “Song was not his native
tongue.” Earlier in her essay she writes of the composer’s “discomfiture
with vocal writing”, a statement with which I think any
of us who have sung in performances of, say, the ‘Choral’ symphony
or, even more so, the Missa Solemnis
would heartily concur.
In those works Beethoven seems to think of the human voice in
instrumental terms and at times he’s pretty careless of
the demands that he’s placing on lungs or larynx.
But it’s important to remember that both of the aforementioned
works were composed fairly late in Beethoven’s career,
when his deafness had become a major issue. Most of the songs
here recorded are from earlier in his life and, while demanding
of the singer, they are more considerately written. Certainly
John Mark Ainsley seems to take them all in his stride. The chosen
songs suit well his easy, fluent delivery and throughout the
programme his singing gives great pleasure. His voice often reminds
me of Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, with whom I believe he once studied.
The tone is naturally sweet, the timbre essentially light, but
there’s a touch of steel in reserve when needed - indeed,
arguably Ainsley has marginally more of that latter quality than
I don’t believe all the songs in his programme are masterpieces
but one - or, rather, one collection - emphatically belongs in
that category. Beethoven’s songs may not be the foremost
part of his œuvre
but, true to form, the master
innovator contributed something new to this genre, as he did
to others, writing the first true song cycle, An die
. Ainsley ends his programme with this short,
continuous cycle and he does it very well. In some parts of the
cycle, not least the first song, ‘Auf dem Hügel sitz’ ich
spähend’, Beethoven comes very close to Schubert’s
world and Ainsley is excellent in such wistful, lyrical stretches.
But he seems to me to catch the various moods of all the songs
successfully. He’s at his most expressive in the sixth
and final song, ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ where
Beethoven brings the cycle back full circle and his ringing tone
at the culminating declaration is admirable. Signum’s presentation
of this recital is excellent but I wish they’d tracked
each of the constituent songs in this cycle separately, especially
as Susan Youens discusses each one individually.
Elsewhere, I much enjoyed Ainsley’s account of Beethoven’s
most celebrated single song, Adelaide
. His voice is just
right for the yearning, ardent tone of this mini-cantata and
he copes very well with the operatic dimensions of the music
that Beethoven provides for the last stanza. Incidentally, there’s
a poignant little point in the notes. A performance of this song
in January 1815 was Beethoven’s last public performance
as a pianist.
Several of the songs were new to me. The title of Abendlied
unterm gestirnten Himmel
is somewhat deceptive. This
offers no gentle eventide musings. Instead it’s a powerful
secular evening hymn. Another deceptive title is La Tiranna
which is not in Italian but in English. Unfortunately this exposes
to English-speaking listeners the embarrassingly fulsome nature
of the text. Quite frankly, I don’t think the music represents
Beethoven at his most inspired either so, apart from the novelty
of hearing an original Beethoven English setting, this one is
for completists only.
It’s interesting to be able to compare the two settings
of An die Hoffnung
, though I think the decision to separate
them in the recital was a sound one. Beethoven first set the
words by the poet Christoph August Tiedge in 1805. Six years
later he met the poet and, subsequently, he asked the poet for
a new copy of the text. When it arrived he discovered that the
lines he had set were prefaced by another five, and this led
him, in due course, to make a completely different setting, incorporating
the additional lines. The two settings are as chalk is to cheese.
The earlier one is a fine and deeply felt strophic setting but
in 1816 Beethoven plumbed much greater depths. The opening of
the 1816 setting - the five additional lines - strikes a philosophical
stance in both the vocal line and the piano part. The second
setting is much longer than its predecessor and much more expansive.
It’s an earnest, striving song and it’s through composed.
Though Beethoven attains a higher degree of eloquence in his
writing on this occasion I’m not sure that I don’t
prefer the simpler, more direct style of the earlier effort to
its careworn successor, even if the later music is much more
advanced. Ainsley and Burnside do both settings very well.
I’ve mentioned Ainsley’s singing several times but
I have failed to comment on the contribution of Iain Burnside.
As you might expect from Beethoven, his piano parts are far from “mere” accompaniments.
The piano is a significant protagonist in most of these songs
and Burnside rises to the challenges they pose extremely well.
One feels his is a true partnership with Ainsley and I found
their collaboration as satisfying as their individual contributions.
Beethoven’s songs may not be amongst his highest ranked
compositions in terms of public esteem but they are far from
negligible compositions and they are well worth hearing, especially
in committed, sensitive performances such as these. Excellent
sound and booklet notes complete the attractions of this welcome
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Permaculture design principles are tools that, when used together, allow us to creatively design our environment with less energy and resources. Permaculture mimics the efficiency of nature – the input equals the output – and because of this, it is the strongest model we have for sustainability.┬á Permaculture principles can be applied to all areas [...]
If you live in a part of the country that gets heavy frosts during the winter or that has a shorter growing season, a cold frame may be just what you need to help extend your growing season, grow veggies during the winter or start seedlings early. Most gardening manuals recommend starting your seedlings in [...]
A great video about gathering uneaten fruit from your backyard and neighborhood.┬á You never know where you’ll find your next meal!
Grow a new crop from seed this year, nurture it organically, and then successfully harvest enough seeds to grow next year. Saving seed used to be a common practice for anyone and everyone who owned any bit of land. The Native Americans have perfected the natural practice of saving seed and growing crops to be [...]
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In the US, there's a 68% chance you're charging that "green" plug-in electric/hybrid with fire and smoke. Dumbasses. Source.
Randy pointed out to me that 100% of traditional vehicles are petroleum-powered.
Of course, some traditional vehicles with small, efficient engines use less fuel than certain hybrids do. As always, gas-powered vehicles can be used frugally by combining trips, choosing closer destinations, car-pooling and walking or bicycling for trips when feasible. Cars themselves aren't the enemy. Sprawl, gluttony and excess are.
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NetWellness is a global, community service providing quality, unbiased health information from our partner university faculty. NetWellness is commercial-free and does not accept advertising.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Acidity during pregnancy
I feel acid refluxes, like sour taste in my throat and I feel food what ever I take coming back into my throat when I drink water. If I keep drinking water once in an hour, I get relieved. I don`t feel hungry soon. I feel stomach fullness even I eat lesser amount of food than I usually take. Lost 2kgs of my weight. Not getting proper sleep sometimes at night. Bowel movements are not bad and gas formation in stomach is there. Taken Prevacid for 15 days and found no improvement. Doctor done endoscopy and report is, no malabsorbtion and no H.pylori. I dont have any kind of heartburn or abdominal pain. Further doctor suggested CT scan. Do I really need this test done? I`m planning for pregnancy. Will this problem in any way effect the baby and If so in what way? I`m 31+ yrs old. Do I need to wait or can I plan for pregnancy now?
You may want to try to get the symptoms under control now because if they are due to acid reflux, it is common for the acid reflux to worsen throughout pregnancy.
Julia Gore Thornton, MD
Assistant Professor of Medicine
School of Medicine
Case Western Reserve University
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“It’s heartbreaking,” said John Gallin, the physician-researcher who directs the clinical center. “What happened this summer was a very unfortunate case. All of these cases are hugely sad cases.”
The boy arrived in Bethesda in April after complications arose from a bone marrow transplant he received last year. His underlying condition — a severe genetic defect that crippled his immune system — increased his risk of acquiring the superbug, as did the steroids and other drugs the boy was given to combat complications from the transplant.
“We worried he was set up for a bad infection,” said Gallin.
On July 25, routine rectal swabs of patients for hospital-borne infections — a measure put in place during the worst of the outbreak last fall — detected the superbug in the boy.
Genetic analysis showed the boy’s strain matched that of the superbug that arrived last year. It eventually spread to 17 additional patients, of whom 11 died. Six of those deaths were directly attributed to the superbug by NIH staff. The NIH did not make the outbreak public until describing it in a scientific publication last month.
As the superbug spread last fall, NIH staff members built a wall to isolate infected patients, ripped out plumbing that harbored the bacteria, hired monitors to ensure doctors and nurses were properly scrubbing their hands and even blasted patients’ rooms with vaporized disinfectant.
By January, those measures had apparently halted the spread. For six months, no new patients became infected.
But in July, the boy tested positive for the superbug. Clinic staffers isolated him in the intensive-care unit and raced to treat the infection.
The boy’s superbug originally appeared vulnerable to one antibiotic, but after a week of therapy, the infection grew impervious to that drug, too, Gallin said. The NIH obtained an experimental antibiotic, but it also failed.
“This kid probably got this infection because a patient who was a carrier [of the superbug] was on the same unit,” said Gallin. “There was undoubtedly some intrahospital transmission despite our best efforts.”
Swabs picked up the superbug on a railing outside the boy’s room, but Gallin said it’s impossible to know whether the boy or someone else deposited it there.
Gallin said that earlier this year, two other patients arrived at the clinical center carrying different strains of potentially deadly drug-resistant Klebsiella. Neither of those strains has spread to other patients, Gallin said. One of those two patients was treated at two hospitals in Maryland before transferring to NIH.
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I have spent much of the last week reading a 189-page report issued jointly by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada, with the dry title, “Joint FDA/Health Canada Quantitative Assessment of the Risk of Listeriosis from Soft-Ripened Cheese Consumption in the United States and Canada”. The reading is as dry as the title suggests. It’s full of technical statistical and research terminology, terms like “risk characterization,” “sensitivity analysis,” “mitigation,” “rank correlation,” and on and on. What that meant was that I had to read everything two, three, and four times before I could begin to make sense of it. But the more I read, the more upset I became, because I realized this is a very important document, one that could have a huge effect on food availability. If the authors of this report are successful in accomplishing what they want to accomplish with brie and camembert cheeses, you can be sure they will continue on to other kinds of cheese, and then other entire categories of food products, in their endless search for supposedly serious pathogen dangers. Equally troubling, the FDA considers this report ”science based and transparent,” when it is anything but. I wrote the following analysis to try to get my thoughts down in an orderly way. I encourage you, after you’ve read my assessment, to try your own hand at reading the report, or at least the summary, and then to take the opportunity the FDA is offering to provide comments, and let the agency know in no uncertain terms what you think about this particular piece of literature. )
Nearly 15 years ago, a business book came out with the strange title, Who Moved My Cheese?
It was the story of mice in search of cheese that had disappeared, a parable about how people need to prepare for change, in their business and personal lives, and it became a huge best seller.
The parable may be playing out literally in real life before too long for raw milk soft cheese, if regulators in the U.S. and Canada have their way. A newly released 189-page report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada concludes that there is “a 50- to 160-fold increase in the risk of listeriosis from a serving of soft-ripened raw-milk cheese, compared with cheese made from pasteurized milk.” As a result, the regulators suggest they want to see raw milk cheeses like camembert and brie either subject to unprecedented testing, processing similar to pasteurization, or else banned completely. I should note they also offer the option of doing away with the 60-day aging requirement for cheese, as a possible way to reduce the time pathogens have to multiply in the cheese, but it’s offered as kind of a straw man, since it “does not consider the effect of removing the regulation on the risk of illness from other pathogens…” (That risk assessment should be worth another few lengthy reports.)
The risk certainly sounds serious…until you read closely the full 189-page report and learn that the FDA-Health Canada conclusion about “a 50- to 160-fold increase in the risk” is based entirely on estimates and mathematical predictions, rather than real-life data on illnesses from the soft raw milk cheeses.
Even more remarkable, the actual real-life data presented in the report of illnesses worldwide from listeriosis in soft cheese over a 23-year period between 1986 and 2008 show not a single documented illness in the U.S. from listeriosis due to tainted brie or camembert. That data, in a table on page 17, documents four outbreaks of listeriosis in cheese in the U.S. over the 23-year period, but all four are from raw milk queso fresco cheese, a soft cheese served fresh, without being aged the required 60 days, and thus illegal in the U.S. (It gets made illegally, often in the Hispanic community, sometimes even mixed in bathtubs, which has earned it the nickname “bathtub cheese.”)
In Canada, two cheese-related outbreaks, which sickened 58 people, are attributable to “multiple types” of cheese.
Indeed, the researchers were only able to document 20 outbreaks of illness from listeria in all cheesesfrom all kinds of milk worldwide over the same 23-year period—less than one per year…and, according to the report, “half involved cheese made from unpasteurized milk.”
So in actuality, we’re talking about ten listeriosis outbreaks worldwide from raw milk cheeses over a 23-year period—a tiny number by any stretch of the imagination.
By way of comparison, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control documents more than 1,000 outbreaks, resulting in between 15,000 and 30,000 illnesses, from all foods each year in the U.S.
So, given the absence of a single documented illness from 60-day-aged soft raw milk cheeses over 23 years in the U.S., and just the possibility of a few dozen illnesses in Canada, how do the FDA and Health Canada come to their conclusion that such cheeses are up to 160 times more risky than pasteurized soft cheeses? As I recall my grade school math, zero times any number equals zero. The regulators do it via “mathematical / probabilistic modeling… to estimate the risk per serving of Camembert-like cheese in both countries,” according to the report.
Read More Here
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Berlin Conference For the Cold War conference see Berlin Conference of 1954.
The Berlin Conference
regulated European colonisation
and trade in Africa
. Its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference
, is often seen as the formalisation of the Scramble for Africa
Increased interest among the European powers in colonising Africa from the late 1870s created a desire to define to "the rules of the game," and to define their respective interests so far as practicable. Competing European territorial ambitions around the lower Congo River brought matters to a head, and it was agreed to hold an international conference on African affairs.
The powers represented were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Turkey and the United States.
The conference assembled at Berlin on November 15, 1884, and after protracted deliberations the General Act was signed on February 26, 1885 by the representatives of all the powers attending the conference. Ratifications were subsequently deposited by all the signatory powers with the exception of the United States.
The General Act dealt with six specific subjects:
- freedom of trade in the basin of the Congo
- the slave trade
- neutrality of territories in the basin of the Congo
- navigation of the Congo
- navigation of the Niger
- rules for future occupation on the coasts of the African continent.
The signatory powers undertook that any fresh act of taking possession on any portion of the African coast must be notified by the power taking possession, or assuming a protectorate
, to the other signatory powers. It was further provided that any such occupation to be valid must be effective. It is also noteworthy that the first reference in an international act to the obligations attaching to "spheres of influence" is contained in the Berlin Act.
For most of Africa, the conference foreshadowed the ending of independence, which was largely extinguished during the 1890s and 1900s.
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So typical of Costa Rica. The Chinese build an entire state-of-the-art stadium in no time. All the Ticos had to do was draw the demarcation lines for the football pitch and put in place the goal posts. Come to find out the goal posts are 6 centimeters short and the dimensions of the pitch were short.
All of this was found out Thursday, three days before the inauguration. Now they are having to paint over the previous marked white lines using green paint and “erasing” where they can. The kicker is that these were government topographers who were hired to do the job. Yes, the same folks that are used for demaracation of property lines throughout the country and even responsible for the demarcation of the country’s borders.
I’m sorry I’m ranting, but this is just so typical of the Costa Rican way.
Hugh Alexander Monge Salas
Los Angeles, California
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HONDA MOTOR Co. Ltd. has developed a fully automatic dual clutch transmission for large-displacement sport bikes. It's a technology the OEM says delivers fuel economy equal to or better than a conventional manual transmission.
Honda says the new dual clutch transmission is outfitted with electronic control technology that provides smooth, seamless gear changes. It's also equipped with three operating modes, two full-auto modes (D-mode for regular operation and S-mode for sporty riding); and a 6-speed manual mode, which delivers the same shift feel as a manual transmission.
Similar to the Porsche Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (PDK) used on the Porsche 911 last year, the new Honda transmission features a configuration in which independent clutches are employed for the odd gears (first, third and fifth) and the even gears (second, fourth and sixth), respectively. The two clutches operate alternately to effect gear changes. For example, when changing from first to second gear, the computer detects the up-shift and engages second gear, then releases the first-gear clutch while engaging the second-gear clutch to achieve a seamless gear change.
Honda says a new VFR equipped with the transmission will be released in North America and Europe in 2010, and says it intends to gradually expand the deployment of the new transmission to more and more of its large-displacement sport bikes in the future.
—Submitted by Guido Ebert
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The Artist in the Parking Lot
"Once upon a time in a kingdom, in a Middle Eastern democratic country, there was a watchman. The watchman sat for days on end in a booth, in the southern end of a pretty Mediterranean city, in a concrete parking lot . . . . He would often pose a question to an elegant woman of a certain age—who was his Fate: Why did you have to stick me in a booth? The woman didn't answer, but smiled mysteriously."
Thus opens a different window onto Israeli life, Leonid Pekarovsky's Metateh ve-Sipurim Aherim ("Broom and Other Stories," translated from Russian to Hebrew by Tanya Chazanovsky and Tomer Sarig), by turns acerbic, compassionate, witty, alienating, memorable and sad; in other words, what you get when an educated man with a richly cultivated sensibility is crammed for years in the guard booth of a sweltering parking lot.
Like many Russian olim, Pekarovsky, trained as a historian of the Northern Renaissance, is full of scorn for the cramped Levantine staging area into which he has been flung. Israel does not look pretty from his guard booth. Arrogant high-tech executives, bereaved and brokenhearted parents, dog-eating Thai guest workers, miserable Ukrainian prostitutes, along with unbearable Russian literati, all bake together on the asphalt. The few genuine idealists who appear, Jewish and Arab alike, are tragically earnest, and doomed.
Pekarovsky's own persona is unashamedly aristocratic and aesthetic—and it works because he is willing to train his hauteur on himself and the shabbiness of his own existence. Thus, in a classically Israeli story which tells of one bumbling repairman after another wreaking havoc on his home for weeks on end, Pekarovsky is left gazing in admiration at the perfect form of the finished product, even though it is only a kitchen cabinet: "Yes, I thought, Yossi the shlimazl caused us an entire month of grief, but look at it: what classic lines, perfectly joined, the geometric exactitude of the handles' placement . . . regal and restrained."
In spite of his aloofness, Pekarovsky can also be tender, as when he chronicles the death foretold of a stray cat, whose life, inner and outer, he traces with detail and even dignity. Or again, in the poignant story of Rachel, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant, who is turned away by uncomprehending hospital staff as she tries to bring her ailing sister a plate of home-made schnitzel. In a brief swipe at Zionist triumphalism, the only passers-by who understand Rachel or try to help her are a group of Hasidim: "Oh, how they delighted in Rachel's Yiddish—tasty, fleshy, true."
While Pekarovsky has little respect for organized Judaism—the lone rabbi appearing in his pages is a vain, narrow-minded functionary—one biblical verse ties the whole collection together. It is Genesis 2:15, in which God places Adam in Eden, "to work it, and watch it." The watchman's charge forms the crux of his stories and authorial persona, as observer of his society and guardian of his cultural riches and historical perspective. The call to work, meanwhile, is the focus of one of the best stories in the collection, set in the vast cemetery in Holon, where he worked as a gardener and, on one occasion, a gravedigger for a young soldier. Much as his guard duty is a far cry from overseeing paradise, his duty to bury this young man could not be more distant from Adam’s charge to tend God’s garden: "Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow! Of the kind one feels truly physically. It was as though it wrapped the entire cemetery in black. It lay draped on the branches, hid the sun, and the whole cemetery sank in darkness."
But Pekarovsky comes to find paradise within himself. On transferring from the cemetery to the guard booth in the parking lot, he began a different sort of digging, staving off despair and utter vapidity with the Stoic counsel of Marcus Aurelius: "Look into yourself, there you will find the fountain of goodness, it will never run dry, so long as you keep on digging." And so, he says, "I dug with great energy. It was lucky I'd gotten experience in the cemetery. In the end I reached the other side of the wall separating the inner from the outer world. There unfolded before me infinite spaces, astounding in their legend-like, unusual beauty . . ."
It is, of course, extremely tempting to try and read this book for insight into the Russian aliyah, a tough sociological nut to crack, for which every little bit of understanding helps. The finely honed mix of engagement and alienation on display here also invites comparisons with the historical and cultural experiences of the Fifth Aliyah, which deposited on the shores of "Palastina" tens of thousands of German Jews, among them accomplished scholars, artists, and intellectuals, many of whom found employment as street sweepers and sausage vendors. Indeed, the book should jolt all of us out of our deep indifference and awaken us to the seemingly transparent individuals around us—watchmen, gravediggers, and street people. Pekarovsky perhaps sheds most light on daily life in South Tel Aviv, whose racial tensions recently exploded into public view.
But I would rather, at the risk of unconscionable kitsch, contemplate the image of the guard, pushed upon us by these insistent yet often maddeningly oblique stories. Forgive me, but one has to ask, is Israel itself the guard booth? If so, then who or what are we guarding? And from whom, obvious enemies aside? Guarding a civilization, or the crossroads of several, whose seams run right through us? What—or, more importantly, whom—does our obsessive national guarding hide from view?
Comments are closed for this article.
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