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West students 'Warrior up' for Bastrop Bears, send trailer load of donated supplies to fire victims
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everything>Several organizations are collecting items to donate to victims of the Bastrop wildfires.everything>Some include:
In the aftermath of the Bastrop wildfires, Christine McDonald said her students exemplified West High School's motto to "Warrior up."
McDonald, who teaches a family community services class, among others, on Sunday dropped off a trailer full of donations from West Warriors to the Bastrop Bears.
"It was a nice way to be a Warrior," McDonald said. "We just 'Warrior'd up' from one teenager to another."
When the collection began just a week ago, McDonald said she planned on at least filling up her Nissan Sentra with donations to take directly to the Bastrop High School principal.
After donations started pouring in, some from students McDonald had never even had in class, she booked a pickup truck for the transport.
By the time she was ready to pack up the donations, she had to scramble for a trailer large enough to hold all of the items.
"They just started thinking what another teenager would need and, throughout the week, the donations just kept coming in," McDonald said.
McDonald told her classes Monday of how she delivered the supplies directly to the school, which had at least 144 students whose homes were destroyed by the fire.
Students donated everything from nail polish to toiletries, she said.
Along with supplies, though, the class sent notes saying things like "Bears stay strong. Warriors are here to help."
"We also discussed the concept that the sentiment from the heart will last even longer than the items," McDonald said. "And it would hopefully mean a lot coming from one teenager to another."
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After we were brought safely through, 1we then learned that 2the island was called Malta.
23The native peoplea showed us unusual 4kindness, for they kindled a fire and welcomed us all, because it had begun to rain and was cold.
When Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and put them on the fire, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand.
When 5the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, 6"No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, 7Justiceb has not allowed him to live."
He, however, 8shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm.
They were waiting for him to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But when they had waited a long time and saw no misfortune come to him, 9they changed their minds and 10said that he was a god.
Now in the neighborhood of that place were lands belonging to the chief man of the island, named Publius, who received us and entertained us hospitably for three days.
It happened that the father of Publius lay sick with fever and dysentery. And Paul visited him and 11prayed, and 12putting his hands on him healed him.
And when this had taken place, the rest of the people on the island who had diseases also came and were cured.
They also honored us greatly,c and when we were about to sail, they put on board whatever we needed.
After three months we set sail in 13a ship that had wintered in the island, a ship of Alexandria, with the twin godsd as a figurehead.
Putting in at Syracuse, we stayed there for three days.
And from there we made a circuit and arrived at Rhegium. And after one day a south wind sprang up, and on the second day we came to Puteoli.
There we found 14brotherse and were invited to stay with them for seven days. And so we came to Rome.
And 15the brothers there, when they heard about us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us. On seeing them, 16Paul thanked God and took courage.
And when we came into Rome, 17Paul was allowed to stay by himself, with the soldier that guarded him.
After three days he called together the local leaders of the Jews, and when they had gathered, he said to them, "Brothers, 18though I had done nothing against our people or 19the customs of our fathers, yet I was delivered as a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans.
When they had examined me, they 20wished to set me at liberty, 21because there was no reason for the death penalty in my case.
But because the Jews objected, I was compelled 22to appeal to Caesar--though I had no charge to bring against 23my nation.
For this reason, therefore, I have asked to see you and speak with you, since it is 24because of 25the hope of Israel that I am wearing 26this 27chain."
And they said to him, "We have received no letters from Judea about you, and none of 28the brothers coming here has reported or spoken any evil about you.
But we desire to hear from you what your views are, for with regard to this 29sect we know that everywhere 30it is spoken against."
When they had appointed a day for him, they came to him at his lodging in greater numbers. From morning till evening 31he expounded to them, testifying to 32the kingdom of God and 33trying to convince them about Jesus 34both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets.
And 35some were convinced by what he said, but others disbelieved.
And disagreeing among themselves, they departed after Paul had made one statement: 36"The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet:
2637"'Go to this people, and say, 38You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.
2739For this people's heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed; lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and 40turn, and I would heal them.'
Therefore let it be known to you that 41this 42salvation of God 43has been sent to the Gentiles; 44they will listen."f30
He lived there two whole years at his own expense,g and 45welcomed all who came to him,
3146proclaiming 47the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ 48with all boldness and 49without hindrance.
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Applicants seeking admission to Pellissippi State to enroll in regular credit courses for a degree must comply with the following procedures:
- Submit a completed application for admission along with a nonrefundable application fee.
- Provide official academic transcripts and test results as applicable.
- Submit immunization documents:
- Certificate of Immunization or proof of two doses of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines.
- Hepatitis B health history form (may be completed online if over 18 years of age).
- Certificate of Immunization or proof of two doses of varicella (chicken pox) vaccine.
Admission of first-time freshmen
Graduation from high school. Except as provided for below in the section on General Educational Development certificate (GED), applicants for degree admission as first-time freshmen must provide an official transcript showing graduation from high school. The high school transcript must be a regular or honors diploma. A special education diploma or certificate does not meet this requirement. The transcript of graduates of Tennessee public high schools must include a notation that the student passed the required proficiency examination. GED (General Educational Development) certificate. Applicants for degree admission as first-time freshmen may present a GED certificate in lieu of a high school diploma provided that their composite GED score is at least 450, with no individual score below 410.
Standardized examination scores. Applicants for admission as first-time freshmen must complete an entrance test or submit valid ACT or SAT scores. Valid ACT or SAT scores are those earned within three years prior to the first day of the first term of enrollment. Pellissippi State will use the scores for advisement purposes and as a component in placement decisions. Students who do not meet minimum requirements for learning support courses cannot be admitted to the College and will be referred to the Adult Education program.
Additional requirements for admission of transfer students
Any degree-seeking applicant who has attended another college or university shall be considered a transfer student. Admission of transfer students shall be consistent with the following criteria:
- Official transcripts from each school previously attended must be submitted to Enrollment Services.
- Applicants with college credit earned prior to fall 1989 are admitted without regard to the minimum high school unit requirements.
- Applicants with 60 or more transferable semester hours are eligible for degree admission without regard to the minimum high school unit requirements.
- Applicants with an associate’s degree (A.A., A.S.) designed for transfer to baccalaureate institutions are eligible for degree admission without regard to the minimum high school unit requirements.
Awarding of transfer credit
Transfer credit will not be processed until all official transcripts from each school attended by the student are received by Enrollment Services. Upon completion of a student’s file, including the receipt of all college transcripts, transcript analysts with Enrollment Services will evaluate all coursework taken. Transfer credit will not be computed into a student’s grade point average at Pellissippi State. Transfer credit is awarded for individual courses that parallel Pellissippi State’s courses for content, level of instruction and preparation of faculty teaching the courses for which transfer credit is requested, provided a grade of C or better was made in each course. Elective credit may be awarded by the respective academic division if it is determined there is no Pellissippi State equivalent.
The following information may be required to evaluate the comparability of courses for the purpose of awarding transfer credit:
- Course syllabus—copy of the syllabus used at the time the course was taken. A determination of the comparability of course content and level of instruction is made through a comparison of the following syllabus elements: course prefix, number and title; lecture/lab contact hours and credit hours; course description; prerequisite/corequisite courses; course objectives/course goals; grading scale; required textbook and other instructional materials; and methods of evaluation. If the syllabus does not contain the information specified above, supplemental documentation (e.g., assignment schedules, grading policy statements) should be submitted along with the course syllabus.
- Faculty credentials—verification that faculty teaching the course(s) for
which credit is requested meet the following academic and/or professional
- Courses designed for transfer to four-year colleges and universities—master’s degree and at least 18 graduate hours in the discipline.
- Courses not designed for transfer to four-year colleges and universities—master’s degree and at least 18 graduate hours in the discipline or bachelor’s degree and work experience in a related field.
- If applicable, the name of relevant specialized or program agencies/ boards may be submitted along with the above information.
The transfer credit appeal process may be used by students to request reconsideration of transfer credit decisions. Steps in the appeal process are as follows:
- The student completes the Petition for Transfer Credit, available online (www.pstcc.edu) or at the Student Assistance Center, and requests an advising appointment with the Student Assistance Center to discuss why he or she thinks the petition for particular courses should be reconsidered for approval.
- Course descriptions, course syllabi and other documentation as described above must be provided by the student or by the institution where the courses were taken.
- The advisor may request that the student provide copies of college transcripts and supporting documentation, to be sent with the Petition for Transfer Credit form to the appropriate academic dean for review.
- The respective academic dean makes a determination, then submits the Petitition for Transfer Credit and a recommendation to Enrollment Services, and the transfer credit decision is processed by the transcript analysts. The academic dean’s decisions regarding the awarding of transfer credit are final.
- Enrollment Services will notify the student through campus email of the transfer credit decision.
The appeals process is the same for students transferring from regionally and non-regionally accredited colleges and universities. Students transferring from international colleges and universities follow the same steps—with the additional requirement that supporting documents (e.g., course syllabi) must be provided with English translations—and submit the required documents to an approved credential evaluation service. This process ensures that students have access to a fair and accurate assessment of the credentials by experienced evaluators.
Readmission to Pellissippi State
A student who has not attended Pellissippi State for three consecutive terms must complete a new admissions application, with no application fee. If the student has attended any other college(s) since leaving Pellissippi State, he or she must submit complete transcript(s) from the college(s) in addition to the application.
Academic Fresh Start: criteria
Academic Fresh Start is a plan of academic forgiveness provided for students who have demonstrated academic responsibility following their return to college. The Academic Fresh Start allows the calculation of the grade point average (GPA) and credit hours toward graduation to be based only on work done after returning to college.
Students who were formerly enrolled at Pellissippi State and who have been separated from Pellissippi State and all other institutions of higher education for a minimum of four calendar years from last date of attendance are eligible for the program. A transfer applicant’s GPA on transferable courses must be at least equal to that which Pellissippi State requires for the readmission of its own students. Applicants who do not meet the Pellissippi State standards may be admitted on academic probation or other appropriate status.
- Separation from Pellissippi State and all other collegiate institutions for at least four calendar years
- Formal application to Enrollment Services requesting Fresh Start and describing an academic plan at the time of readmission or admission as a degree student or after the time of readmission but prior to completion of 15 hours of degree coursework
- Completion of at least 15 semester hours of earned degree coursework with a minimum GPA of 2.0 for all work attempted
Terms of Academic Fresh Start
- Once the student has satisfied the above requirements, Pellissippi State may grant Academic Fresh Start status. The student may be granted a Fresh Start only once.
- The student’s permanent record will remain a record of all work; however, for degree or certification purposes, the student will forfeit the use of all college or university degree credit earned prior to the four-year separation upon the granting of Fresh Start status. Previously satisfied placement test requirements will not be forfeited.
- Upon degree admission, Fresh Start applicants who did not satisfy placement test requirements at the time of previous enrollment and whose academic plan includes completion of a college-level English or mathematics course must meet current placement test requirements regarding enrollment in college-level English and mathematics courses.
- The student’s transcript will note that the Fresh Start was made and the date of the Fresh Start. The record will also carry the notation “QPA and credit totals are based only on the work beginning with the date of the Fresh Start.”
- The student will apply for the Fresh Start with the understanding that all Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) institutions will honor a Fresh Start provision granted at another TBR institution.
Students should understand that non-TBR institutions may not accept the GPA as it is calculated with the Fresh Start.
Mandatory placement of degree admission students
For regular admission to a degree program, an applicant must meet one of these two criteria:
- Applicants who have not attended college previously must submit valid ACT or SAT scores or take the COMPASS test. Applicants who do not show proficiency in basic academic competencies in mathematics, English and/or reading must complete a placement test prior to registering for classes. The results of the placement test will determine the appropriate learning support courses that a student is required to take. Such students may not be enrolled in a regular college-level course that requires that competency as a prerequisite until they have satisfactorily met the exit criteria of the appropriate learning support course(s).
- Transfer students whose previous academic records from a college or university indicate appropriate English and/or mathematics proficiency will be considered for regular admission. Students whose records do not include such transfer credit in English and mathematics must establish proficiency in the basic academic competencies by test scores, according to conditions explained above.
Students admitted to degree programs may later prove deficient in a basic academic competency. Faculty should refer such students to a counselor or the dean of Transitional Studies. Upon verification of the deficiency through placement testing, such students will be withdrawn from the related course(s) with a grade of W and may not re-enroll until they have met all exit criteria of the appropriate learning support course(s).
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Michael J. Morykwas, PhD
Michael J. Morykwas, PhD, Professor of Surgical Sciences - Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
Dr. Michael Morykwas was born and raised in Michigan. He received his Bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Detroit. He then received his Master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Bioengineering, with a focus on Biomaterials. He then completed a short Post-Doctoral stint investigating electro-rheologic fluids with Dr. Frank Filisko at the University of Michigan. Following this, he accepted a research position in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Wake Forest School of Medicine in 1988. He is currently an Associate Professor. He has cross appointments with the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Department of Biomedical Engineering at WFSM, and also through the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University School for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, mainly in the field of wound healing. He and Louis Argenta, M.D., are the co-inventors of the V.A.C. wound healing device.
SYNOPSIS OF AREA OF INTEREST: Dr. Morykwas is interested in the normal and abnormal processes of wound healing. He is also interested in the effects of applied sub-atmospheric pressure, and the related tissue and cellular deformation, on wound healing.
DETAILED AREA OF INTEREST: Wound healing is a process fundamental to continued life. Delayed or interrupted wound healing can be devastating to quality of life and can potentially result in death. In order to understand abnormal processes of wound healing the normal process of wound healing must also be understood. Dr. Morykwas and his team has discovered that application of a controlled sub-atmospheric pressure to wounds in a controlled environment results in an increased rate of formation of granulation tissue. This has been patented as the commercially available V.A.C. device. The group is examining the effects of the applied sub-atmospheric pressure, and subsequent deformation, at the tissue, cell, and molecular level in order to help understand the mechanisms of accelerated wound healing.
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Current State - Current Sports
Most Active Stories
Fri April 27, 2012
Automakers May Have Dodged Resin Shortage Threat
The auto industry may have steered its way around another crisis. Ford says that it doesn't expect a resin shortage to disrupt production at any of its factories.
That's a sign that its peers will be able to avoid problems as well.
Just last week, automakers and parts companies feared that factories could be forced to close due to a shortage of a key plastic resin. Supplies are low because a March explosion and fire knocked out a German factory that makes much of the world's PA-12, a unique resin used to manufacture fuel lines and other parts.
But Ford says it has alternative resins available. An industry expert says that means other carmakers have similar substitutes.
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i want to
live librarian help
July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011
PICU Admissions: 1,977
Average Length of Stay*: 3.3
Average Daily Census*: 18
Total Patient Days*: 6,624
Number of Beds: 25
* Excludes observation patients
Pediatric intensivists who are board certified/eligible in pediatric critical care medicine provide 24-hour on-site, attending-level inpatient care. Critical Care at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is an active resident and fellow teaching and research program that provides pediatric critical care transport, PICU coverage, bedside dialysis, specialized monitoring and more.
Critical Care has had an accredited fellowship program since July 2004.
Critical Care does not provide outpatient services, but may be reached at (614) 722-3435 for phone consultation or information, Mon. through Fri. 8 am – 4:30 pm.
Critical Care Research
The Section of Critical Care Medicine is a leading presence in the field of critical care research. Three tenure-track faculty members (Drs. Mark Hall, W. Joshua Frazier, and Jennifer Muszynski) form a core of researchers focused on the immunobiology of critical illness. Learn more about our Critical Care Research.
Transfusions Dampen Kids' Immune Function
Among pediatric patients who are critically injured, receiving a blood transfusion is associated with suppression of the immune system, an effect that might be exacerbated when the blood used is older, researchers found.
Patients in the pediatric intensive care unit who received a transfusion had significantly lower production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha on post-trauma days 1 to 2 compared with those who were not transfused (461 versus 1,024 pg/mL, P=0.002), according to Ryan Nofziger, MD, of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Read the full article »
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Symptoms of Cavus Foot
The most obvious symptom of cavus foot are a very high arch or arches in the feet. People with cavus foot may also have:
- Calluses on the side, heel or balls of their feet
- Bent toes (hammertoes)
- Tightly flexed toes (claw toes)
- Pain while walking or standing
- Tendency to sprain ankles
Cavus Foot Diagnosis
First, we ask your child to stand while we examine their feet for signs of cavus foot. Because cavus foot tends to run in families, we often ask to examine the feet of parents and other family members, too.
We also check:
- The strength of your child's legs, ankles, feet and toes since cavus foot often comes along with diseases that make muscles weak
- Your child's spine to make sure it is flexible and the right shape
- Your child's reflexes in the legs and belly (abdomen)
We will ask whether your child has had any problems controlling bowel movements or bladder. Finally, we will take radiographs of your child's back and feet.
Once we know that your child has cavus foot, we will begin to look for the cause of the problem. At Seattle Children’s, our orthopedic doctors work closely with our neurologists to find the right answer.
Your child may need to have several tests to find the cause of cavus foot, including:
- Electromyogram and nerve conduction velocity (EMG/NCV) studies
- Blood test for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT)
- MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the spine and brain.
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Predict-HD and the future of therapeutic trials
Since its description by George Huntington in 1872, Huntington's disease (HD) has been recognised as a devastating, incurable neurodegenerative disorder, characterised by disorders of movement (especially chorea), cognition, and behaviour. Typically, symptoms present during the third and fourth decades with death 10–20 years after clinical onset. The disorder is autosomal dominant and caused by a CAG triplet repeat expansion in the gene encoding huntingtin. Prevalence is about 7–8 cases per 100 000 in populations of western European descent, with many more at risk of the disease.
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Welcome to the website for the laboratory of George N. DeMartino, Ph.D., at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
The general interest of our laboratory is the study of biochemical mechanisms and physiological regulation of intracellular protein degradation. Our research focuses principally on the ubiquitin-proteasome system, a complex proteolytic system responsible for many aspects of protein degradation in eukaryotic cells.
Intracellular protein degradation is a fundamental and extensive process in all living cells. Cells utilize protein degradation as a mechanism to regulate many processes including transcription, progression of the cell cycle, flux of metabolites through metabolic pathways, signaling pathways, net growth and atrophy, and protein quality control. Because regulated protein degradation is essential for normal cellular function, it is not surprising that many human diseases involve altered protein degradation. Such diseases include many types of cancer, tissue wasting diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases. Consequently, components of protein degradation pathways are targets of drug therapy.
The proteasome is a complex molecular machine responsible for most intracellular protein degradation in eukaryotic cells. The Proteasome is composed of multiple subunits and multiple multisubunit subcomplexes.
Intracellular protein degradation is an extensive process in all cells. It performs many essential roles for the normal growth, development and regulation of cells. Protein degradation controls critical processes by setting cellular levels of critical regulatory proteins. For example, protein degradation controls the cell cycle, transcription, signal transduction, and the flux of substrates through metabolic pathways by eliminating proteins that are required for activation of inhibition of these processes. Moreover, the regulation of global rates of protein degradation determines the net growth or atrophy of whole tissues.
The number of cellular processes and proteins controlled by regulated proteolysis probably rivals that controlled by regulated phosphorylation. Defects in protein degradation have important medical consequences and lead to many human pathologies including cancer, muscle wasting diseases, neurological diseases, and metabolic diseases. Therefore, components of proteolytic pathways are active targets for drug therapy.
Kircher, M. Trends Biochem. Sci. M42-M44
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Computers haven't just revolutionized the practice of academic research, they've also revolutionized the way we think about and measure research success.
With virtually every journal online now, and the ability to build a database showing how publications are linked to one another via citation, there's a little bit of Bill James statistical wizardry going on in the ivory tower.
For example, the University of Texas - Dallas School of Management has recently created and published a database of the top 100 business schools, as ranked by the production of academic papers and their ability to inspire others to cite them, going back to 1990. Duke's Fuqua School of Business came in third overall, ahead of a school that starts with an H. (Kudos to UTD for making this public, showing they rank 20th in North America and 21st worldwide, well behind UT Austin.)
Another fascinating example of this effort to statistically analyze the research enterprise came in the 25 July cover story of Science: "Follow the Money," about the state of HIV/AIDS research. Here, Duke ranked fifth in HIV/AIDS research funding, and fourth in impact (citations per paper).
Duke's Barton Haynes MD, leader of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) topped the list for largest budgets, and David Montefiori, director of the surgery department's Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development, came in 8th on the high-impact authors list (156 papers averaging more than 49 citations each -- wow).
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Linked by fran on Tue 23rd Nov 2010 22:26 UTC
The CPU industy is working on 16nm chips to debut by around 2013, but how much smaller can it go? According to the smart guys, not much smaller, stating that at 11nm they hit a problem relating to a 'quanting tunneling' phenomena. So what's next? Yes, they can still add core after core, but this might reach a plato by around 2020. AMD's CTO predicts the 'core wars' will subside by 2020 (there seems to be life left in adding cores as Intel demonstrated a few days ago, the feasibility of a 1000 core processor.) A Silicon.com feature discusses some potential technologies that can enhance or supersede silicon.
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Did Abraham Lincoln spout the s-word? Did his colleagues use the f-word? Steven Spielberg's film places those foul words (and others) into the mouths of its historical characters. But James McPherson, a Lincoln biographer and consultant on the movie, says, "The profanity actually bothered me, especially Lincoln's use of it. It struck me as completely unlikely—a modern injection into Lincoln's rhetoric." The Hollywood Reporter reports that McPherson says he emailed his objections to the screenwriter after reading an early draft, "but I see that that language made it in the movie anyhow." David Barton, who has appeared as a history expert on Fox News, CNN and other outlets, furthers McPherson's point by saying, "There are records of [Lincoln] confronting military generals if he heard about them cursing. Furthermore, the f-word used by [W.N.] Bilbo was virtually nonexistent in that day and it definitely would not have been used around Lincoln. If Lincoln had heard it, it is certain that he would instantly have delivered a severe rebuke." [hollywoodreporter.com, 12/5/12]
"[The label] made me change a couple of things on [my last album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans] and I felt disgusted about that. I didn't do that on this album. If I can't be me doing it, I'm not going to have any fun. If I'm changing things around because people might think it's a hard pill to swallow—like, 'Wait a minute, this isn't the Bruno we know'—then I'm going to feel like a circus clown onstage, selling something fake."
—singer Bruno Mars, on what Billboard magazine characterizes as 'darker, edgier lyrical themes' on his forthcoming album Unorthodox Jukebox (which arrives in stores this week) [Billboard, 10/6/12]
Actress Vanessa Hudgens recently told the Canadian magazine Glow that her participation in a three-way sex scene in a swimming pool with co-stars James Franco and Ashley Benson in the forthcoming film Spring Breakers was "very nerve-racking for me. I told my agent that I never want to do it ever again."
Meanwhile, Glee star Lea Michele is more than happy to continue exploiting her body for fame. After doing scantily clad photo shoots for the likes of GQ, she talked about her breasts in the current issue of Marie Claire: "These babies are great. They are my prizewinners. … So I'm going to continue to give them more opportunities." [dailymail.co.uk, 11/15/12; foxnews.com, 12/10/12]
Singer Katy Perry has ignited a firestorm with comments she made during her acceptance speech for Billboard magazine's Woman of the Year Award. She said, "I'm not a feminist, but I do believe in the power of women."
Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams responded in an article, "Let me just point out that if you believe in the strength of women, Ms. Perry, or their equality, you're soaking in feminism." Jezebel.com's Madeleine Davies added, "The ignorance and ridiculousness of Perry's comments—especially in the context of accepting the Woman of the Year award—is enough to set the teeth of any feminist on edge." Atlantic contributor Noah Berlatsky, in contrast, believes Perry's stated aversion to feminism has less to do with being 'ignorant' and more to do with avoiding a label that might hinder sales: "One reason Perry and other public figures may forswear feminism, of course, is because feminism is controversial; embracing it may irritate fans."
Noted feminist Camille Paglia blasted not just Perry, but also Taylor Swift. "Despite the passage of time since second-wave feminism erupted in the late 1960s, we've somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s," she says. She then acknowledges one big difference: "Most striking about Perry, however, is the yawning chasm between her fresh, flawless 1950s girliness, bedecked in cartoonish floral colors, and the overt raunch of her lyrics, with their dissipated party scenes. Perry's enormous commercial success actually reflects the tensions and anxieties that are afflicting her base audience. … As a glance at any suburban high school prom these days will show, there has been a vast increase in sexually revealing, super-adult clothing among middle-class girls. Yet most seem curiously unaware of the erotic charge of their racy regalia, which has become as standard issue as army fatigues. Sex is already routine in a hooking-up culture. Whatever sex represents to this generation of affluent white girls, it doesn't mean rebellion or leaving the protective umbrella of hovering parents." [theatlantic.com, 12/12; hollywoodreporter.com, 12/6/12]
"Last month voters approved the Washington [marijuana legalization] initiative and a similar one in Colorado by surprisingly healthy margins of about 10 points in both states, in contrast with a California legalization measure that lost by seven points two years ago," writes Jacob Sullum in his Daily Beast article "With Pot as With Gay Marriage, Familiarity Breeds Tolerance." "The change in opinion about marijuana in some ways resembles the trend in attitudes toward gay marriage, which also scored landmark victories in last month's elections, winning approval from voters in three states. … A CBS News poll conducted a few weeks ago found that 72% of 18-to-29-year-olds supported gay marriage, compared to 53% of 30-to-44-year-olds, 44% of 45-to-64-year-olds, and 33% of respondents who were 65 or older. Support for legalizing marijuana, which was 47% overall (another record), was 54%, 53%, 46%, and 30%, respectively, in those four age groups. While these patterns could be read to mean that people become more conservative on these issues as they become older, the upward trends in overall support show something else is going on: Familiarity is breeding tolerance. Just as an individual's attitude toward gay people depends to a large extent on how many he knows (or, more to the point, realizes he knows), his attitude toward pot smokers (in particular, his opinion about whether they should be treated like criminals) is apt to be influenced by his firsthand experience with them." [thedailybeast.com, 12/6/12]
How much do university students use their mobile phones these days? According to new research from Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business, most students interact with their phones about seven hours daily, including sending an average of 109.5 texts, receiving 113 texts and checking their phones 60 times. James Roberts, Baylor professor and author of the book Materialism 2.0, says of the findings, "At first glance, one might have the tendency to dismiss [this level of] mobile phone use as merely youthful nonsense—a passing fad. But an emerging body of literature has given increased credence to cell phone addiction and similar behavioral addictions." [dailymail.co.uk, 12/1/12 stats]
Among social network users of all ages, the average female user spends 18 hours and 20 minutes monthly on such sites, compared to about 13 hours for males. Among 18- to 24-year-olds of both genders, those numbers rise to 21 hours monthly, with 25- to 34-year-olds close behind at 20 hours. [Nielsen/NM Incite; usatoday.com, 12/3/12; AP, 12/3/12 stats]
About 41% of tablet owners and 38% of smartphone owners tweet at least once a day while sitting in front of the television. And the channels they're watching may soon know exactly when they're doing it—or anything else in the family room. Verizon has patented a new DVR that monitors what you're doing while watching TV and sends you targeted ads that, presumably, fit your immediate activities. And the phone company is not even the first to create and patent this sort of device. Comcast has patented similar technology, and Google TV has proposed another patent for something that would use audio and video recorders to monitor how many people are watching a given show. [usatoday.com, 12/3/12; AP, 12/3/12; arstechnica.com, 12/3/12]
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Government of Karnataka
About the District
Hassan District is one of the 30 districts of Karnataka state located in the south-western part of Karnataka in India. The district has had an eventful and rich history. In the past, it reached the height of its glory during the rule of the Hoysalas who had their capital at Dwarasamudra, the modern Halebeed in Belur Taluk. The district, noted for its enchanting natural scenic beauty is also a veritable treasure-house of Hoysala architecture and sculpture, the best specimens of which are at Belur and Halebeed. Shravanabelagola, in Channarayapatna taluk, which is studded with Jain moduments, is a renowned centre of pilgrimage for the jains.
Origin of Name
Like most of the other districts in the State, this district also derives its name from its headquarters town, Hassan. According to the Sthalapurana, the name 'Hassan' is a contraction or derivative of 'Simhasanapura', associated with janamejaya, a great grandson of the Pandava hero, Arjuna. But the popular belief is that the place is called Hassan after the goddess Hassan-amma or Hasanamba, the presiding deity of the local Hasanamba temple situated in the old town area. Hasanamma or Hasanamba means, in Kannada, a smiling mother or goddess. In this connection, a traditional story, as to how the goddess Hasanamba came to be established at this place, is narrated thus : The Saptamatrikas (seven mothers or goddesses), in the course of their journey from Varasasi (Kashi) to the South, were pleased with the scenic splendour of this area and decided to make it their abode. Accordingly, of the seven mothers, who were sisters, three settled at Hassan and another three in a tank called Devigere, also in Hassan proper, and were called Hasanamba, while the other one settled in a forest near Kenchammana-Hosakote in Alur taluk and was called Kenchamba.
GEOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF HASSAN DISTRICT
GEOGRAPHY:- Lying between 12° 13´ and 13° 33´ North latitudes and 75° 33´ and 76º38´ East longitude, Hassan district has a total area of 6826.15 Sq. Kms. The greatest length of the district, from south to north, is about 129 kilometers, and its greatest breadth, from east to west, is about 116 kilometers. The District which has 8 taluks 38 hoblies & 2369 villages. The geographic area of the district of Hassan is 6845 square kilometers. The population is 15.67 lakhs and the average rainfall is about 1031 mms annually. Coffee, Black Pepper, Potato, Paddy and Sugarcane are the major agricultural crops.
Hassan district lies partly in the "malnad" tract and partly in the southern "maidan"(plains) tract. By considering the physical aspects, climate, rainfall, etc. the district may be divided into three regions, viz., (1) southern malnad, (2) semi-malnad and (3) southern maidan. western and north-eastern portions of the Belur taluk, western and central parts of Alur taluk and the whole of Sakaleshapura taluk constitute the "southern malnad" region, the central parts of the Arkalgud taluk, the western portion of the Hassan taluk, the eastern portion of the Alur taluk, the central and eastern parts of the Belur taluk and the western parts of the Arasikere taluk form the "semi-malnad" region. The southern maidan region includes the whole of the Holenarasipura and Channarayapatna taluks, eastern parts of the Arasikere and Hassan taluks and the south-eastern portions of the Arkalgud taluk. The southern malnad is a forest-clad hilly region with a heavy rainfall.
POPULATION AND GROWTH TRENDS:
As per the 2001 census the population of Hassan district is 17,21,669. Out of which 14,16,996 is the rural population and 3,04,673 is urban population. The percentage of rural and urban population to the total population of the district is 82.31 and 17.69 respectively. The percentage of rural and urban population to the total population according to 1981 census (1357014) was 85.37 and 14.62 respectively. Between 1981 to 1991 there is an increase of 2.76 percent in urban population. The decadal growth rate works out to 15.67 percent (1981-91). The decadal growth rate was highest between 1951-61 and it was 25.57 percent. It reduced to 23.05 percent during 1961-71, increased to 23.10 percent during 1971-81 and reduced to 15.67 percent during 1981-91. There is a decrease in 7.43 percent of growth in population between 1981-91. The district has a balanced male, female ratio (996) as per 2001 census.
The density of population varies considerably amongst the taluks. With a density of 385 persons per sq.km Hassan taluk tops the list and this is followed by Arkalgud (295), Holenarasipura (290), Channarayapatna (266), Arasikere (238), Belur (217), Alur (199) and the lowest density of 129 persons per sq.km is noticeable in the case of Sakaleshapura taluk according to 2001 census. The density of population per square kilometer for the district is 251.
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Women in Swaziland risk arrest if they wear miniskirts or tops which expose part of their stomach as they will be violating moral standards, a police spokesperson has said.
"The act of a rapist is made easy, because it would be easy to remove the half-cloth worn by the women," Wendy Hleta was quoted as saying.
Offenders face a six-month jail term under the ban, which invokes a colonial criminal act dating back to 1889.
The ban also applies to low-rise jeans.
"They will be arrested," she said.
Hleta said women wearing revealing clothing were responsible for assaults or rapes committed against them.
"I have read from the social networks that men and even other women have a tendency of 'undressing people with their eyes'. That becomes easier when the clothes are hugging or are more revealing," Hleta said.
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A recent article in Harper’s highlights the huge distortions in the economy of Afghanistan.
Mathieu Aikins wrote the piece about what he says is a bubble in Kabul.
The title is “Kabubble.”
Scenes of crass conspicuous consumption, alongside highly inflated prices for land and goods and services are unsustainable, he argues.
And, he says, a crash is inevitable, probably as soon as the majority of foreign forces leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to firstname.lastname@example.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.
Marco Werman: A new article in Harper’s Magazine highlights some huge distortions in the economy of Kabul, Afghanistan. Scenes of crass conspicuous consumption, highly inflated prices for land and goods and unsustainable public services. A crash is inevitable, the article argues, probably as soon as the majority of foreign forces leave Afghanistan in 2014. Matthieu Aikins wrote the piece about Kabul’s economic bubble or as the title puts it, Kabubble.
Matthieu Aikins: There was a World Bank report last year called Afghanistan one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world, in history, really. So this is both military and development spending. Some of it is direct aid and some of it is just the inevitable billions that surge into an economy when you have hundreds of thousands of foreign troops and contractors deployed there.
Werman: So what happens when the international forces pull out as scheduled in 2014.
Aikins: Well, what the article tries to layout is that it’s almost like a law of gravity–what goes up, must go down. And the sort of structural impact of this amount of money withdrawing from the country is guaranteed to have somewhat drastic effects.
Werman: What I find really interesting in your Harper’s article is kind of where the money has gone to, and according to your report, there’s a clear hierarchy of wealth these days in Kabul. Who’s at the top and what are the levels below it?
Aikins: Well, let’s talk about the Afghans. You have the Afghan contractors, and politicians, and big businessmen who’ve had access to these million dollar contracts, right? They’re driving around in armored land cruisers with armed guards and they’re living in palatial so-called poppy palaces and tower
Werman: Poppy palaces because of allegedly those palaces have been built with opium proceeds?
Aikins: Right, the second largest source of the Afghan economy after international spending is the fact that it produces 90% of the world’s opium.
Werman: Who’s below that level?
Aikins: So below that level you have what is I guess in terms of the country as a whole, a very tiny group, but in a relative sense within Kabul, at least a sizable contingent of professionals, you know, who are making international salaries working for foreign NGOs or embassies. And they’re actually gonna be the ones who are gonna be the most drastically affected by this pullout because it’s just not a reality that a country like Afghanistan, which has a per capita GP of $103 a year, you’re gonna be able to find tons of jobs that pay $10,000 or $5,000 a month.
Werman: Now, you report that a lot of money is leaving the country. Tell us what you actually saw and were these legal or illegal transfers of money?
Aikins: Well, one of the figures that’s mentioned in the article that I’m not mistaken, four and a half billion dollars in cash left the country in one year. And this was
Werman: Recently or a while ago?
Aikins: Yeah, I believe it was, I believe it was 2010. And that’s legal money that was declared at the Kabul airport.
Werman: Is the Afghan airport doing anything to placate foreign donors who might be upset by this reality?
Aikins: Yeah, they’re, it’s always a balancing act. They are announcing various corruption bodies and always sort of talking about how they’re gonna change things, but the reality is that the situation is not gonna change until the money finally dries up.
Werman: Now there’s one place anyway in your report where a lot of money does stay in Kabul and that’s at glitzy wedding receptions. This is the way the Joneses in Kabul keep up with each other now?
Aikins: Yeah, Afghan culture isn’t a very public one. You know, most of their life takes place, at least the family life, takes place inside the home. They don’t go out to restaurants very often and there’s certainly no nightclubs or you know, it’s a conservative culture. But the one occasion for really letting it all hang out are these giant wedding parties, which are sort of an occasion to display your social status and wealth, right? So this is in tandem with the bubble economy really gotten out of control with people dropping tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on lavish wedding ceremonies and these glittering, neon-lit cavernous wedding halls which have sprung up all over the city like mushrooms.
Aikins: And this is one of the images that I sort of juxtapose in the article, you know, the parable of the wedding hall and the factory, right? The factories are sitting abandoned because the you know, economic policies that have been pursued have allowed foreign countries to dump their goods in Afghanistan. There’s been no support for manufacturing. Labor prices, and land prices and costs are just so high because of the aid booms, so none of the factories can operate. But as proof of, perverse proof of Afghan industriousness, you do have these massive wedding halls that are of course, importing almost everything, even down to the cooking oil and you know, rice that they use. And will almost assuredly just vanish like mirages once the money finally dries up.
Werman: Matthieu Aikins reported the article Kabubble in the recent issue of Harper’s. Thanks very much for speaking with us, Matthieu.
Aikins: My pleasure, Marco.
Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at email@example.com.
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As the brain drain of the baby boomer generation begins in the workplace, largely made up of white men, women necessarily will play a crucial role in filling the open spaces. Our latest Women to Watch honoree, Wanda Chambers, stated that “innovation is born from necessity,” and so goes the case for the promotion of female executives.
Because the boomers are such a large generation that will be retiring, female executives must comprise a larger part of the management mix. Gen X as a whole coming up behind the baby boomers is so small relatively speaking, it is a good thing that many of the boomers are pushing retirement back until 67 years of age, up from 63 just a decade ago according to Gallup. However, the shifting demographics and attitudes will also make it easier for junior female executives to rise up the ranks as they choose.
Women represent nearly half of the workforce but comprise just 23% of all American CEOs, but that percentage has increased three-fold over the last 20 years, according to Jean Lau Chin, a professor at Adelphi University. The number of female executives coming up behind them was not much better, according to “Gender Bias and Compensation in the Executive Suite of the Fortune 100” in the Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications & Conflict.
Females held 24, or 5.8%, of executive positions in 2003 based on the proxy statements of Fortune 100 (2007). However, this finding represented a massive improvement over 1997 figures, which showed 51, or 2.6%, of the officers at Fortune 500 companies were women. Relatively little has been done to study the impact specifically on the credit union community.
The JOCCC piece sited a 1996 survey, which found that male executives said that women lacked the requisite experience. Female executives admitted that was an issue but felt it was secondary to male stereotyping. A combination of both is the truth.
Does sexism still exist? In the truest sense of the word, I’d have to say no. In the 21st century, it is more subconscious but still systemic. Networking is one area where you can see it exists. I once made a joke about taking up golf because that was the only way to get anywhere. The male I was talking with told me, “No, you don’t want to do that because men get frustrated that women can’t hit the ball as far.” Thus, women can be excluded from heavy-duty networking opportunities.
“The Advancement of Women to Top Management Positions in the Human Resource Management Domain: A Time for Change?” published in the International Journal of Business and Social Science, stated that women are often pigeon-holed into positions that are considered feminine, such as human resources because it involves caring for others. The report stated that markets demanded diversification and promoting women up through human resources achieved that goal “without giving up the traditional classification of female and male work.” It also noted that at the same time as women were taking the human resources departments by storm, the esteem of the profession was rising.
More research is needed on leadership development and how that can impact the rise of female executives. When the baby boomer exodus does ramp up, as I stated previously, more female executives will necessarily have to backfill those positions. Proper experience and training must be ensured, but thus far many programs are focused on fixing women to play the man’s game, as stated in “Taking Gender Into Account: Theory and Design for Women’s Leadership Development Program,” published by the Academy of Management Learning and Education.
The article noted research that found, among graduates of top business schools, women’s career trajectory was not on par with the men’s, and females’ advancement in their careers has even slowed in recent years. Rather than jamming a round peg in a square hole, the article suggests providing tools for leaders to do what the author called the “identity work” to become leaders by internalizing that identity and developing an elevated sense of purpose.
The gender bias and compensation article pointed out that twice as many women as men launch startups. They’re looking to carve out their own destiny and want to be in charge. Korn/Ferry International surveyed women who left careers to strike out on their own and found that 40% cited lack of advancement and 43% stated lack of recognition were key factors. Another 48% said they were turned off by the corporate politicking, and a full 58% wanted the opportunity to make a strategic impact.
Don’t let these leaders stray from the credit union community, one of the most inclusive industries in existence. Promoting qualified women more as part of succession planning is crucial to business continuity within credit unions, as well as ensuring diversity of ideas and styles for greater innovation.
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Bring your guns, but leave your perfume at home
After paying out thousands of dollars in compensation to allergic workers, US authorities are banning artificial scents
In some parts of the US no one will blink if you take a handgun to the office or even a civic building like a library, but increasingly you had better beware of darkening their doors with Hermes, Chanel or even Old Spice about your person.
As studies show an ever greater number of Americans suffer adverse medical reactions, sometimes severe, upon involuntary exposure to artificially scented substances, bans are being imposed across the country on the wearing of smelly aromas, whether pricey perfumes or bottom-shelf colognes.
Freedom of expression is a fiercely guarded right in the US, but it is slowly being trumped by something more modern than the Constitution – allergies. As many as 50 million Americans suffer from some form of allergic condition that can be triggered by things ranging from foods – gluten, peanuts, dairy and chocolates are popular culprits – to animals and chemical substances, including perfume.
"It's got no formal action behind it but it is working," says City manager Tim Young, referring to the sign that has been hanging near the front entrance of City Hall in Tuttle, Oklahoma, for the past four years. It merely says, "Allergy Alert! No Fragrances Please!" Anyone who spritzed before leaving home is asked to wait in the public area and meet the official they wanted to see there.
The policy was adopted for a simple reason. "We had a former employee who had some extreme medical issues with this," Mr Young said. "She kept working as long as she could, but when other people came in with certain fragrances, she would turn red and swell up and we had to take her to the hospital."
Though hard to enforce – no one has deployed any pong-patrols yet, nor is it easy to determine how much fragrance is too much – edicts elsewhere in the country are stricter. On a federal level, the US Census Bureau enacted a ban on scent-wearing for employees in all of its offices in 2009 and the US Health and Human Services Department followed with a similar policy a year later.
The city fathers in Portland, Oregon, a place with a history of progressive social initiatives, instituted a fragrance ban for all city employees last year. It also told custodians of public buildings to use scent-free cleaning products.
The science of perfume allergies is not simple. The most vulnerable are sufferers of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), who can react to an array of substances that go into perfumes but also into paints and cleaning fluids. By some estimates just over one in 10 Americans has MCS. But experts say asthma patients are also at risk because perfumes can set off their symptoms.
"The chemicals in some of these products can trigger nasal congestion, sneezing and the runny nose," said Stanley Fineman of the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma Clinic. "With the asthmatics, there's really good data showing their lung function changes when they're exposed to these compounds."
National attention to the problem can be traced back to 2006, when a Detroit public worker, Susan McBride, sued the city, saying that perfume worn by co-workers had prevented her from doing her job because of allergies. The city paid $100,000 in compensation and issued a city ordinance against scented bath products for public employees. For two years now, public servants in Motown have been told not to wear perfumes, colognes, body lotion, scented deodorant or use scented candles.
Revealed: Devastating impact of 'bedroom tax' sees huge leap in demand for emergency hardship handouts for tenants
Notes from a small island: Is Sealand an independent 'micronation' or an illegal fortress?
You thought Ryanair's attendants had it bad? Wait 'til you hear about their pilots
Revealed: Eerie new images show forgotten French apartment that was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II and left untouched for 70 years
Chloe Johnson death: Family of five-year-old British girl who died in a pool at in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh resort 'angry' that more wasn't done to save her
- 1 Stoke City investigate 'religious abuse' after 'pig's head is found in Kenwyne Jones' locker'
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Academic Advising for First-Time in College (FTiC) Students
Hands On-Line Advising, or HOLA, is a communication solution, developed at Northwest Vista College, that will revolutionize how students are served. HOLA provides the academic advising that is required for all First-Time in College (FTiC) students via dynamic, interactive, self-paced, online modules. These modules may feature audio narratives, photo galleries, and/or videos along with the standard dynamic reading content. Quizzes at the end of each module ensure that students have understood and mastered the curriculum. Another great feature of HOLA is the integrated live chat application which gives students the ability to chat with an Academic Advisor whenever they need assistance.
HOLA...the last step in our FTiC Admission's Process
The following items must be completed before you are eligible to attend an HOLA sessions...
- ApplyTexas Admissions Application
- Qualifying Placement Exam Scores
- Official High School Transcript or original GED Certificate with attached scores
- Welcome to NVC
- Exploring Your Educational Opportunities
- Choosing Your Educational Plan
- Understanding Your Educational Plan
- How Your Placement Exam Scores Affect Your Plan
- Building Your College Schedule
- Paying for College
- Staying Informed and Getting Involved
- The Importance of Academic Advising
Learn about all of the resources available to you at Northwest Vista College and how to successfully register for your first semester...sign-up for an HOLA session today!
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Indy Hospital ERs Seeing More Flu Patients
Some Indiana hospital emergency rooms are seeing double the number of patients with flu-like symptoms compared to last year.
St. Vincent Hospital's Dr. Ryan Venis says the rise in flu patients creates a public health issue alone with the potential spread of the virus within hospitals. He says they've seen a huge jump in sick patients that are keeping the St. Vincent ER busy. Dr. Venis says they're seeing upwards of 30 patients each day with flu-like symptoms. He says that figure is cause for serious concern. He says only ten-percent of the flu patients he's seeing have gotten flu shots. He adds that it's preferable for patients with primary care doctors to visit them rather than flood emergency rooms that are already challenged with patients with other issues.
Dr. Venis says children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems are the one who require the greatest attention. He says for the most part, influenza is an illness that requires "waiting out" with the patients taking lots of fluids, rest and flu medicine. Flu symptoms include: body aches, cough, high fever, vomiting and diarrhea.
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Why is Customer Service ownership important to focus on?
In a large organization, where customer service reports may impact the level of service provided to the customer. The objective of the customer service organization is to help customers with their problems and hopefully satisfy them in a timely fashion. Choosing where customer service reports will impact the strength of some of the processes that surround the customer service offerings.
a. Skill of the Front Line staff on the use of the Customer Service software
b. Quality of the product or service
c. Ease of determining what the cause of the problem is the customer may be calling about
d. The features the product or service offers
e. The expectation set with the customer as to nature of the product or service the customer purchased.
What are the alternatives?
1. Report to IT.
Generally customer service has an application that handles service requests, then the service organization might report to the IT organization, in case there are issues with the service application. Often the customer service organization is treated as a cost center but the staff are well trained on the customer service software application.
2. Report to Product Development
If the service organization for a product reports to the product development organization, there cost of the customer service organization is included in the budget of the product development organization. There is an incentive for the developers to ensure a high quality product or service is produced and if the offering is an actual product, development will also build in problem determination tools to help isolate problems quickly when they do occur. Produce a poor quality product and development pays for it in the service costs.
Another benefit of a close link between customer service and development is that customers often leave requirements for new product and services with the people they talk to in customer service. If an organization captures these customer suggestions, and feeds them to development, they know what to work on next.
At IBM, the customer service organization in the US reported to the development division that produced it and the costs were allocated back to development.
3. Report to Country / Geography Management
Sometimes though, the situation gets more complex. If your product division is in the US and your customers are worldwide and want to be serviced in their language, then it might be beneficial to set up customer service organizations in other locations around the world where bilingual staff can support the customer in the local language and be able to communicate with the development division in their language.
In those cases, there might be a centralized customer service organization per country or for several countries with the same language, reporting to the marketing organization, who is motivated to ensure the customers are satisfied.
At IBM, for many years, each non US country had its own customer service organization, often reporting to a customer service executive in the senior management ranks which covered all the products sold by IBM in that country.
There are other options such as creating a ‘follow the sun’ approach to reduce or eliminate overtime and have product specialists in centers with local language capabilities that can service customers 24/7 and electronically switching from one center to another so there is always someone working day time shifts.
4. Report to Marketing and Sales
There is a school of thought that Marketing and Sales should control the customer service organization. The rationale is that Marketing should not be making unreasonable promises or setting expectations to high for the products they sell to customers. If the marketing or sales organizations set too optimistic expectations with customers, eventually clients will call the service organization wondering why they are not getting the value they expected. If the customer service organization is charged back to marketing, then there is less likelihood that overselling will take place, as the costs of service will be reflected in the marketing and sales budgets.
Another benefit of having customer service report to Marketing and Sales deals with product requirements. When customers provide feedback the service organization that they would like additional features or functions or services, there is a need to prioritize which of those new capabilities to build into the product. A close alignment between customer service and sales, allows for the sales team assigned to an account to provide feedback on what volume of sales might be attributed to a new feature or function. When development has to chose between what new features, functions or services to add, the input of the sales organization, who is closest to the customer can really bring rationality to which make it into the next release or version of the product and which features do not.
In my opinion, there is no ‘right’ answer for where customer service should report. With creative accounting, it is possible that all the benefits of paying attention to product development, marketing and staff training can be achieved, despite where customer service actually reports.
What is your opinion? Are there other places Customer Service could report?
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Brussels is rapidly emerging as the capital of Europe. It is the home of the European Union and its accompanying array of diplomats, politicians, lobbyists and reporters. It is the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the key institution in transatlantic security cooperation. It is the meeting point for thousands of international corporations and non-governmental international organizations. When you are in Brussels, you are in the center of European decision-making.
American University’s Brussels Center offers three academic programs that give students the chance to live, study, and experience this international capital city. Click on a program to learn more!
European Union Program (Fall and Spring)
Brussels Summer Internship Program (Summer)
European Public Affairs Institute (Late June - Early July)
American University in Washington, DC offers a wide range of academic programs and degrees. If you are interested in learning more about our home campus in Washington, please visit www.american.edu.
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Historical atlases/plat books contain details regarding property ownership, school locations, city plats as well as photos of select residents. The original pages were scanned and digitally retouched so that they would be clear for printing and viewing.
These are not official Hall County documents, and should not be relied upon for surveys, navigation, or other such purposes. The maps/atlases are provided here for educational/informational purposes only.
The following maps/atlases are currently available:
1885 Nebraska State Atlas [the pages that relate to Hall County] (orig. pub. by Everts & Kirk)
1890 Hall County Atlas [all pages] (orig. pub. by Wm. Wangersheim & Co.)
1904 Hall County Atlas [all pages] (orig. pub. by Geo. A. Ogle & Co.)
Early maps of Grand Island/Hall County (orig. pub. by various publishers)
Early maps of Nebraska (orig. pub. by various publishers)
In addition to the historical maps you can view the list of Nebraska National Register Sites in Hall County (Nebraska State Historical Society).
If you are researching the early history of Hall County you may also want to read:
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There are many things we don't know about the upcoming 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLR supercar. But after a curious and quick drive of the Ferrari fighter, we know quite a bit more.
First off, the world has been flooded with supercars, and we get the sense that Mercedes folks were getting a little tired of reading all the overexcited prose about the outlandish Ferrari Enzo. Consequently, we found ourselves in northern Spain at a test facility with an unusually high level of security, standing next to two SLR prototypes, one silver and one black (the only available exterior colors). Well, somewhere under the crazed black and silver tape Mercedes applied to them they were silver and black. The SLR won't go on sale in the U.S. until April 2004.
Our first impression of the two-seater that will sell for about $350,000 was that it's freakishly long, low, and flat and is festooned with vents and strakes on nearly every surface. Overstyled? Perhaps. McLaren, the race-car manufacturer that did much of the development work and chassis design for the new Mercedes (and will assemble the car in England), has radically lengthened the nose compared with that of the 1999 Vision SLR concept on which the production car is based. It did so to fit the supercharged 5.4-liter V-8 AMG motor behind the center line of the front axle for better weight distribution. As a result, the SLR carries 51 percent of its 3000-plus pounds over its rear axle.
Mercedes won't say how much power that V-8 makes—and we weren't even permitted to pop the hood. But it uses the same bore and stroke and screw-type supercharger as the Mercedes SL55 AMG engine. With modified three-valve heads, more boost, twin intercoolers, lighter internal components, a redline raised to 7200 rpm, and a low-restriction exhaust (with gnarly side-exit pipes), this V-8 should make about 600 horsepower and 625 pound-feet of torque. Unlike other AMG motors, the SLR's uses a race-car-style dry-sump lubrication system and has no variable valve timing.
The engine is bolted to a five-speed torque-converter automatic. Why an automatic in a supercar? According to Mercedes, the automatic is part of its quest to make the SLR an "everyday supercar." The transmission is similar to the one used in the Maybach ultra-luxury sedan, but it gets gear ratios appropriate to the sporting task of the SLR, and the software that controls the manumatic operation of the transmission was written specifically for the SLR to provide lightning-quick shifts. "Lightning quick" is overstating the case based on our brief drive. Even in the most aggressive of the three driver-selectable shift programs, there's a frustrating delay in shifting. Mercedes says it's looking into further quickening the shifts. The SLR should rocket from 0 to 62 mph in 3.8 seconds and will top out at "comfortably over 200 mph."
Stopping all of this are fiber-reinforced ceramic brake discs grabbed up front by eight-piston calipers and in back by four-pot units. Like other Mercedes cars, the SLR has an electrohydraulic braking system that reads the position of the brake pedal and interprets how aggressively to clamp down. The floor-mounted brake pedal is a bit sensitive and makes graceful braking difficult. Familiarity likely would smooth our stops. The SLR also has an air brake incorporated into the trunklid (just like the SLR's namesake, the racer of the 1950s). The front-hinged panel flips up to 65 degrees automatically under hard braking to increase stability. This contraption also acts as a rear wing to reduce lift, rising to 10 degrees as you accelerate past 59 mph.
Our test cars rode on 18-inch wheels wearing 245/40ZR front and 295/35ZR rear Michelin Pilots. Nineteen-inch wheels will be available. The SLR uses none of Mercedes' electronically adjustable suspension tricks. It rides on dual control arms front and rear, Eibach springs, and Bilstein shocks, with an anti-roll bar in front but not in the rear.
Underneath the carbon-fiber skin is the real beauty of the SLR. The entire structure of the car from the A-pillars rearward is constructed of carbon fiber (since the roof is an integral part of the structure, there will be no convertible version). Bolted to the front of this are two cast-aluminum girders that look sturdy enough to support the average train trestle. These are the mounting points for the engine and front suspension.
How does it all work together? Well, we'll reserve judgment for a longer drive under less controlled conditions, but here are some early impressions: At the handling limits on the tight autocross course Mercedes set up, the SLR understeers a bit. From the low-mounted driver's seat, the SLR feels big, with an acre of hood stretching out before you. The car's body rolls more than the go-kart-like Ferrari Enzo but is more tightly controlled than the 575 Maranello (Mercedes' prime target). The super-quick, fixed-ratio steering is also super light, belying the car's size and capabilities. And now we know that we've wasted all the superlatives in the English language to describe the high-speed stability of previous Mercedes cars. The SLR's thoroughly benign nature at positively stupid speeds surpasses them all by an order of magnitude. We clocked 192 mph on the high-speed oval, and the SLR was still pulling hard—that was with the driver's-side window down. More remarkable is that we felt entirely comfortable reaching down to raise the window and adjusting the A/C at speeds approaching 190 mph. Now that's an everyday supercar.
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Start the Guide
How to Make Tofu
I had the great pleasure of taking a tofu making course with Minh Tsai who is the founder of Hodo Soy Beanery. Their tofu is the best I've ever had. This is what I learned.
To get started you have two options: (1) Soak soybeans overnight and then grind them to a slurry using a blender. (2) start with a high quality fresh soy milk such as what Hodo Soy sells (what I did.)
Whether you start with your own slurry or use soy milk put it in a pot on the stove and bring it to at least 150 degrees. If you have a refractometer you'll want the slurry to be around 10 brixs.
The slurry will be a thick batter.
This is a pretty basic tofu press with cheesecloth.
Start assembling your press. Note the holes go on the bottom like so.
Align the cheesecloth so that it rests like a diamond shape over the cheesecloth. Gently press it down so that none of the edges are falling into the press.
The press and cheesecloth should look like so.
Shake your coagulant and pour it into the bowl. I am using calcium sulfate as the coagulant but since this is hard to find you might use nigari instead.
Pour the warm soy milk into the bowl containing the coagulant. Do it fast and even and don't pour too high (you want to avoid bubbles.)
The soy will quickly begin to coagulate. When you shake it you'll notice it has gotten stiffer.
After about 5-10 minutes you're ready to breakup the tofu, I'm using a whisk to do it.
Scoop the broken up tofu into the tofu press you prepared.
With the tofu in the press start to shake the water out so you can fill it up as much as possible without spilling over.
Fold the cheesecloth over the tofu, first from the long sides, then from the shorter sides.
Put the top on the press and start pressing the tofu until water comes out the bottom. It took me about 5-10 minutes of evenly applied pressure to get a good tofu consistency.
You'll notice that a lot of water will start to come out of the tofu. It's a good idea to do this on top of something so that the water that accumulates can be easily discarded without making a mess.
Pour some water into a bowl.
Carefully transfer the tofu into the water. Then remove the side and top.
Gently remove the bottom of the press from underneath the tofu and begin to unwrap the cheesecloth.
The tofu will appear nicely pressed.
Put your hand under the tofu and gently turn it over while removing the cheesecloth.
At this stage you could put the tofu in the refrigerator and store it. But, I'm in a class 20 minutes from home so I put the tofu in a ziplock bag to transport it!
The tofu stays fresh in water so I put some water in the bag for the car ride home.
Here's my bag of fresh tofu ready to be driven home.
Once I arrived at home I removed the tofu and immediately put it in a bowl of water. It'll last for 3-4 days in the refrigerator.
Marvel at the tofu you made one last time.
Then put the tofu in the fridge.
Check out other guides by this author!
Building tools to inspire more makers. I work on Snapguide.
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Source Newsroom: Columbia University Medical Center
Newswise — An experimental treatment for blindness, developed from a patient’s skin cells, improved the vision of blind mice in a study conducted by Columbia ophthalmologists and stem cell researchers.
The findings suggest that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – which are derived from adult human skin cells but have embryonic properties – could soon be used to restore vision in people with macular degeneration and other diseases that affect the eye’s retina.
“With eye diseases, I think we’re getting close to a scenario where a patient’s own skin cells are used to replace retina cells destroyed by disease or degeneration,” says the study’s principal investigator, Stephen Tsang, MD, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology and pathology & cell biology. “It’s often said that iPS transplantation will be important in the practice of medicine in some distant future, but our paper suggests the future is almost here.”
The advent of human iPS cells in 2007 was greeted with excitement from scientists who hailed the development as a way to avoid the ethical complications of embryonic stem cells and create patient-specific stem cells. Like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells can develop into any type of cell. Thousands of different iPS cell lines from patients and healthy donors have been created in the last few years, but they are almost always used in research or drug screening.
No iPS cells have been transplanted into people, but many ophthalmologists say the eye is the ideal testing ground for iPS therapies.
“The eye is a transparent and accessible part of the central nervous system, and that’s a big advantage. We can put cells into the eye and monitor them every day with routine non-invasive clinical exams,” Tsang says. “And in the event of serious complications, removing the eye is not a life-threatening event.”
In Tsang’s new preclinical iPS study, human iPS cells – derived from the skin cells of a 53-year-old donor — were first transformed with a cocktail of growth factors into cells in the retina that lie underneath the eye’s light-sensing cells.
The primary job of the retina cells is to nourish the light-sensing cells and protect the fragile cells from excess light, heat, and cellular debris. If the retina cells die – which happens in macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa – the photoreceptor cells degenerate and the patient loses vision. Macular degeneration is a leading cause of vision loss in the elderly, and it is estimated that 30 percent of people will have some form of macular degeneration by age 75. Macular degeneration currently affects 7 million Americans and its incidence is expected to double by 2020.
In their study, the researchers injected the iPS-derived retina cells into the right eyes of 34 mice that had a genetic mutation that caused their retina cells to degenerate.
In many animals, the human cells assimilated into mouse retina without disruption and functioned as normal retina cells well into the animals’ old age. Control mice that got injections of saline or inactive cells showed no improvement in retina tests.
“Our findings provide the first evidence of life-long neuronal recovery in a preclinical model of retinal degeneration, using stem cell transplant, with vision improvement persisting through the lifespan,” Tsang says. “And importantly, we saw no tumors in any of the mice, which should allay one of the biggest fears people have about stem cell transplants: that they will generate tumors.”
Tsang hopes to begin a clinical trial for macular degeneration patients in the next three years, after more preclinical testing in animal models.
Already a similar trial – testing retina cells derived from embryonic stem cells – has seen encouraging preliminary results. A paper from this study, published earlier this year, reported that the stem cells are safe and have potential to improve the vision of two patients with macular degeneration.
“These results are encouraging, but iPS cells could be a more attractive option than embryonic stem cells,” Tsang says, “because patients may not need drugs to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells.”
Regardless of which cell works better, the prospect of stem cell transplants may mean many people with macular degeneration may never lose their vision.
“We have a good idea which patients will eventually lose their vision. In the early stages of macular degeneration we can tell by looking in the eye, and new genetic tests can now predict vision loss with 70 percent accuracy even before those signs emerge,” Tsang says. “If the therapy is safe, we could intervene very early to prevent much vision loss.”
Here's a link to a visual slide show about Dr. Tsang's research: http://www.slideshare.net/sconova/can-stem-cells-restore-sight
The study was published online in advance of print in the journal Molecular Medicine. The research was supported by NIH grants 5P30CA013696, P30EY019007, and R01EY018213; Department of Defense grant DOD-TS080017-W81XWH- 09-1-0575; the Schneeweiss Stem Cell Fund; Research to Prevent Blindness; and the Foundation Fighting Blindness. Dr. Tsang is a Fellow of the Burroughs-Wellcome Program in Biomedical Sciences, and has been supported by the Bernard Becker-Association of University Professors in Ophthalmology-Research to Prevent Blindness Award and Foundation Fighting Blindness, Dennis W. Jahnigen Award of the American Geriatrics Society, Joel Hoffman Fund, Gale and Richard Siegel Stem Cell Fund, Charles Culpeper Scholarship, Schneeweiss Stem Cell Fund, Irma T. Hirschl Charitable Trust, and Bernard and Anne Spitzer Stem Cell Fund, Barbara & Donald Jonas Family Fund and Professor Gertrude Rothschild Stem Cell Foundation.
Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, pre-clinical and clinical research, in medical and health sciences education, and in patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Established in 1767, Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons was the first institution in the country to grant the M.D. degree and is among the most selective medical schools in the country. Columbia University Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest in the United States. For more information, please visit www.cumc.columbia.edu.
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- First point I want to address is a gross mischaracterization of people working on Bohmian mechanics or other hidden variable interpretations. I quote
Quantum mechanics remains unacceptable for many people, for quasi-religious reasons.
it's time for those people to seriously consider the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is really how the world works.
People for whom it is hard to swallow the hard reality of quantum mechanics, people who want to understand nature in terms of every day classical intuitions are the ones who often advocate Bohmian mechanics.
This is a straw man. Nobody I know working or having worked on hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics, be it Bell, Bohm, Goldstein, Bricmont, Maudlin, de Broglie or other, denies the reality of quantum mechanics. Quite the contrary, I would even say they are/were more aware of the implications than many people otherwise working with quantum mechanics. In particular they fully recognize the non-local nature of quantum mechanics. But I'll come back to that. I can of course not speak for ALL people dealing in hidden variable theories or other alternatives. I'm sure there will be a faire share of crackpots and other cranks. But there are many people who know their stuff.
Second point is the Zeilinger article that @Luboš Motl mentions. I've only skimmed through the article, but it seems that the only non-local hidden variable theories that are disposed of are ones devised by Leggett. Moreover, on page 3 of the article, the authors recognize that while their work indeed rules out a vast class of non-local hidden variable theories, it does not rule out Bohmian mechanics. So it is disingeneous to use this article to discredit Bohmian mechanics. The work in the article is however very valuable since it puts more strict constraints on the type of non-local hidden variable theories that can reproduce the results of quantum mechanics. This is an interesting question that is also discussed in the excellent book Quantum Paradoxes by Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich. In one of the later chapters, they discuss the very special nature of non-locality in quantum mechanics, pointing out that there are many varying degrees of non-locality which are either stronger or weaker than the non-locality of quantum mechanics. They say it is still an open problem to find a precise characterization of the nature of quantum non-locality which could be turned into a postulate from which quantum mechanics could be derived in a way analoguous to the way special relativity is derived from its basic postulates.
Now, about Bell's theorem. I'll quote a piece of the following article which itself refers to a thought experiment proposed by Tim Maudlin. Of course, you'll recognize it is a variant of an EPR type experiment.
Here is a puzzle: two persons, call them $X$ and $Y$ , leave a room
through opposite doors; at that point, each is asked a question. The
precise nature of the questions does not matter, but there are three
possible questions (say, $A$, $B$ and $C$). Each person must answer yes
or no. This “experiment” is repeated many times, with sometimes
the same question, sometimes different questions being asked at the
two doors. The two persons are allowed to decide, before leaving
the room, to follow any strategy they want, but not to communicate
with each other, after they have heard the questions.
The statistics of answers have some strange properties. First
of all, it turns out that when the two people are asked the same
question, they always give the same answer. Is that mysterious? Of
course not; they simply decide, before leaving the room, to follow a
certain strategy: for example, to both say ‘yes’ if the question is $A$,
‘no’ if the question is $B$ and ‘no’ if the question is $C$. Altogether,
there are $8 = 2^3$ different such strategies. Before proceeding further, the reader has to answer for himself or herself the following
question: Is there any other way? Is there any way to account for
the perfect correlations between the results at the two doors without assuming that the answers were predetermined (if we assume
that the people cannot have any communication whatsoever with
each other once the questions are asked)? I have never seen any
suggestion of another possibility and I believe that if Bell’s theorem
is arguably the most widely misunderstood result in the history of
physics, it is precisely because this question is not answered before
So, let us consider, for the time being, the assumption that the
answers are predetermined and let us call $v_i(\alpha) = \pm 1$, $i = X, Y$ ,
$\alpha = A, B, C$ those answers. These are “random variables”, namely
they may take different values when one repeats the “experiment”.
However, if one looks at the statistics of answers when different
questions are asked at the two doors, one finds that the frequencies
of the events in which the same answers are given is 1/4. And this,
combined with the perfect correlations is strange. Indeed, a version
of the no hidden variable theorems (similar to the one discussed in
the previous section), known as Bell’s theorem.
I'll leave out the proof, you can read it for yourself in the article. It is just the usual Bell type inequality.
What is the conclusion of all this? We started from one crucial
assumption: absence of “communication” between the two persons
once they are asked the questions. I will from now on revert to a
less anthropomorphic language and call this assumption “locality”
– assume that there is no causal connection whatsoever between the
two wings of the experiment. Then, we are led to a contradiction,
so that this assumption has to be dropped.
It is important to understand the logic of the argument: the
perfect correlations plus the absence of communication (i.e. locality) between the two wings of the experiments, leads us to postulate the existence of the variables $v_i(\alpha)$ [...]. However, merely assuming that
those variables exist leads to a contradiction with the experimental
results obtained when different questions are asked. To put it simply: locality plus perfect (anti)correlation implies hidden variables;
however, the latter plus statistics when different angles are measured implies a contradiction. Both the perfect correlations and
the statistics for different angles are empirical results; the theorem
is a theorem, namely a logical deduction; the only assumption was
the lack of “communication”, or locality. Hence, locality has to be
given up, period.
So, I'll stress again the most important point of this text: hidden variables are postulated to explain the correlations in the absence of communication (i.e. locality assumption). But this leads to a contradiction with the predictions of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is right, we have tested it experimentally, therefore locality isn't right. I think that's fairly limpid. Anybody claiming that quantum mechanics doesn't force us to conclude non-locality is the one who doesn't really accept quantum mechanics, contrary to what detractors claimed in point 1.
In his book Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics, which is really a collection of Bell's papers, there are various presentations of the theorem, some of which are clearer than others. Another book which does a good job at explaining the interpretation and consequences of Bell's theorem is Tim Maudlin's Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity.
- And I've barely addressed Bohmian mechanics yet and the question of the OP. Why do people still work on Bohmian mechanics? Well, the original intent of EPR was to show that quantum mechanics is incomplete. EPR showed that assuming locality inevitably leads to hidden variables, which is the first part of the previous argument. But the second part of the argument, provided by Bell shows that this is inconsistent with quantum mechanics. Therefore locality can't be right. One might wonder, even if we have to drop locality, why insist on supplementing the theory with hidden variables?
It's important to understand that the only variables added in Bohm's theory are the positions of particles. There are no hidden variables for spin, momentum, angular momentum, etc... It does however explain how the measured values for spin, momentum, etc... arise from the specific experimental configurations. This is what is called contextuality and has already been mentioned by @Sina Salek. Non-locality is explained by the fact that the wave-function is a function on configuration space and not in physical space. Hence the possibility of entanglement. You can read more as well as find further references in the article I mentioned.
Beyond the fact that Bohmian mechanics makes the non-locality in quantum mechanics more explicit, it also provides a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, showing that quantum mechanics does not force randomness upon us.
Now, wether one likes Bohmian mechanics or not, one can not deny that these are definitely strong points of the theory. However, it does have its weaknesses as well. As @sb1 mentioned, Einstein thought it was cheap and in a way, I do agree that the way the extra equation for the positions is added is rather cheap and even ugly. It does also have its fair share of problems, for instance in trying to generalize into a QFT.
Anyway, I leave this link containing a short exposition of Bohmian mechanics and further references.
- Finally, I want to address @Matt Reece about QFT and locality. I'm no expert in QFT, but I do remember that locality is imposed on the level of operators by requiring that two observables localized within distinct space-time regions should commute. I'm not entirely sure what this implies w.r.t. entangled states, but I suppose it doesn't rule them out otherwise QFT would be in contradiction with experiment. (I wonder though if there is a complete treatment of entangled states within the context of QFT?) But if entangled states are allowed, then violations of Bell type inequalities still are possible and thus non-locality is a fact. What this means is that whatever the status of the principle of locality in QFT, it's a weaker form of locality than the one required in setting up Bell's inequalities.
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- On Exhibit
- Offering Format: Permanent Exhibit
- Blue Wing, Lower Level
- Free with Exhibit Halls admission; purchase online
- Learn more about field trip reservations
Share with Your Friends
Explore the science of the super small in this exhibit developed by Museum-led NISE® Net (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network). Learn how scientists can manipulate matter on a very tiny scale to build materials and devices used in computing, engineering, medicine, and other fields.
Interactive stations explain nanotechnology's varied applications, including tennis racquets made from carbon nanotubes, which are very light but are ten times stronger than steel, and "GreeneChip," a tiny device that can detect almost 2,000 pathogens, making it possible to detect diseases more accurately than ever before.
Photo © Michael Malyszko
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My favorite research starting point Wikipedia has plans to black out its English language site for 24 hours in an effort to seek support against the proposed U.S anti-piracy legislation that will threaten the future of the Internet.
Wikipedia is the highest profile name to join an ever growing protest starting midnight January 18 to black out its page and visitors will see only information about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
Wikipedia readers will be asked to contact their local member of Congress to vote against the bills.
Cofounder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales stated in an interview “This is a quite clumsily drafted legislation which is dangerous for an open Internet.”
The English language version of Wikipedia has more than 25 million average daily visitors from around the world. (That’s a Wow!) The bills pit technology companies like Google Inc and Facebook against the bill’s supporters, including Hollywood studios and music labels, with the goal of cracking down on online sales of pirated American movies and other goods.
U.S. advertising networks could also be required to stop online ads, and search engines would be barred from directly linking to websites found to be distributing pirated goods.
“Google has repeatedly said the bill goes too far and could hurt investment. Along with other Internet companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, it has run advertisements in major newspapers urging Washington lawmakers to rethink their approach.”
You see where this is going—it probably means that the innocent business will be punished. They will likely be vulnerable to unjust litigation while the offenders will not be touched because their activities are fluid.
What seems simple at first glance is actually a very complicated issue. Now that the White House is commenting on the situation, News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch who supports the bill slammed the Obama administration.
“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” he posted on his personal Twitter account Saturday. News Corp owns a vast array of media properties from Fox TV, the Wall Street Journal to Twentieth Century Fox studios.
Wales said the bill in its current form was too broad and could make it difficult for a site like Wikipedia, which he said relies on open exchange of information. He said the bill also places the burden of proof on the distributor of content in the case of any dispute over copyright ownership.
“I do think copyright holders have legitimate issues, but there are ways of approaching the issue that don’t involve censorship,” Wales said.”
Senate leader Harry Reid stated on Sunday’s Meet the Press that he plans to bring the online piracy legislation to a vote next week. I hope they understand all the vagaries of the situation better than I do.
Click on the links below to read all the source documentation:
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Hurricane Sandy—which was, technically, not a hurricane by the time it buzzed into the Jersey Shore—was a terribly destructive cyclone. But blaming it on global warming, as did Al Gore, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg, is scientifically ludicrous.
One has to be amazed at how little fact-checking the global warming alarmists do. I guess they don’t want the latest storm crisis to go to waste, but they don’t help their cause by mis-stating the obvious.
There’s a pretty sizable scientific literature out there on hurricanes and global warming. From the “modeling” end, probably the most cited paper is a 2004 study by Tom Knutson from the government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Although he’s tweaked it a bit since then, the result remains the same. There should be a slight increase (8 per cent) in hurricane power by the end of this century. But the inter-annual variability of these storms is so great that this signal will not emerge from the noise until around 2080.
From the “real world” point of view, I published a bunch of papers in response to Tom’s work in which we found, using his assumptions about the amount of oceanic warming, that there would be a similar—again 8 per cent—increase in the number of big (Category 3 or higher) storms in the same time frame. When we adjusted for the pokey rate of oceanic warming being observed, that figure dropped by half.
Chunzai Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has performed a very interesting data-based analysis of Atlantic hurricane tracks showing that increasing the area of warm water results in a significant lowering of the likelihood that a storm will strike the U.S., something that should happen with continued oceanic warming. The reason is because storms form further out to sea, and there are more chances for a kink in the mid-atmospheric winds to direct them to the north.
“One has to be amazed at how little fact-checking the global warming alarmists do.”
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) purports to show an increase in hurricane-related storm surges that conveniently begins in 1923, which was during a decade-long lull in hurricane activity. Starting something at a low point pretty much insures a trend in any randomly distributed variable. This problem was noted by the above-mentioned Tom Knutson.
But the real killer to the hurricane-global warming hype comes from Dr. Ryan Maue (pronounced like the island) of Weatherbell Analytics. Using satellite data that gives global coverage beginning in 1972, Maue has calculated what is called the “Accumulated Cyclone Energy” (ACE) index. This is a mathematical integration of storm wind speed and longevity. There obviously is no change in hurricane energy that at all relates to warming, and it is currently near its lowest levels on record.
Ryan Maue’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index for the globe (blue circles), Northern Hemisphere (black circles) and the Southern Hemisphere (area between the circles) shows no relationship between overall hurricane severity, frequency and global warming. Thanks to Ryan Maue and Weatherbell Analytics.
I trotted this out once in a discussion with Nick Kristof on CNN’s Piers Morgan show on November 1. CNN, of course, cannot let go of the meme that Sandy (which was not a hurricane at landfall) was amped by global warming, so Kristof’s substantive response was to accuse me of not publishing any scientific papers since 1992. (I emailed him the 8-page single spaced list beginning in 1992, presuming he will set the record straight with CNN—and also rag on whomever gave him that little bit of libel.). Morgan’s producer also had copies of the papers dealing specifically with oceanic temperatures, climate change, and hurricane intensity.
What is really modulating Atlantic hurricanes is the distribution of temperature in the Atlantic. It was in an unfavorable mode in the 70s and 80s, which reversed in the mid-90s, concurrent with the start of a ten-year very active period. Since the big storm outbreak in 2005, the Atlantic hasn’t been unusually energetic since then. In fact, we are now enjoying the longest interval in the modern record (seven years and counting) without a major (Category 3) hurricane strike in the U.S.
The bottom line is that, everything else being equal, warmer oceans should produce stronger or more frequent storms. But the change has clearly been so small that there is simply no detectable signal—and is likely to remain so for a long time. Further, everything else is almost never equal. It would have been nice if Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo had done a bit of fact-checking before stirring the global warming pot. As for Gore, the lack of any increase in hurricane energy related to global warming is just an inconvenient truth.
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The Crisis of Writer’s Block
The return of Liliana Heker after 10 years of writer’s block.
A few days ago, I watched a YouTube video of an interview with the excellent Argentine short-story writer Liliana Heker. The 2011 interview was about the publication of her book of short stories, La Muerte de Dios (The Death of God), after a ten-year hiatus. She claimed that the extended silence was not because she didn’t want to publish anything, but because she was not able to write during that time. She was blocked, or, as Uruguayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga put it, she had lost “the hunger” to tell a story.
- Corkscrew is focused on Latin American issues. Literature, journalism and politics are the main concerns of this column. A corkscrew is useful only if it opens a bottle, hopefully full of something that would enlighten our spirits, but we could also set loose a cruel Genie or a rotten wine. The author will follow this principle: look for topics that open debates, new perspectives, and controversy. Cheers!
- Horacio Castellanos Moya is a writer and a journalist from El Salvador. For two decades he worked as a journalist in Mexico, Guatemala, and his own country. He has published ten novels, five short story collections and two books of essays. He was granted residencies in a program supported by the Frankfurt International Book Fair (2004-2006) and at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh (2006-2008). In 2009, he was a guest researcher at the University of Tokyo. Currently he teaches at the University of Iowa.
Being blocked, or unable to write, is something that most of us writers have suffered from. It creates anguish, doubts about what it means to write, and fears that the creative impulse has been lost forever, or that the raw material for telling stories has dried up. Of the many writers who have confronted this problem, most of them say the best thing to do is persevere with the certainty that “the juice will return.”
Ten years is a very long time, of course, and it would require an enormous capacity for resistance to bear that burden without falling into a well of depression or self-destruction. That’s why I was interested in Heker’s reflections.
She says that writers generally confront the crisis of writer’s block in one of two ways. The first is unconscious: Without realizing they’re in crisis and without facing the problem, they dedicate themselves to writing repetitive works that add nothing to what they’ve already done, producing works that are not only minor, but unnecessary. The second way is to acknowledge the crisis head on, through the bravery of silence, and also of reflection, knowing full well that they’re in a risky situation, but also that they will not get out of it through the escapism of empty, repetitive writing that would turn them into hacks.
Another of Heker’s interesting reflections had to do with the cause of her block, or, as she calls it, her ten-year “crisis.” It was her dedication to teaching creative writing workshops for so many years that blocked her, since her energies had been focused on reading, thinking, and editing the work of her students, among whom are several of the most outstanding young writers of Argentina. She has no regrets about this, and calls it a “marvelous” experience.
But Heker, as she explains, was only able to begin writing again after she stopped teaching creative writing workshops, took a year’s sabbatical, and found her “triggers”– that is, the motivations that allowed her to return to her true calling, the writing of stories.
Of course, Heker’s experience is very personal. Great writers have been able to combine teaching workshops and writing their own work, without slighting either of the two. Mentioning them all by name would turn this column into a telephone directory. But in any case, for those of us who at one time or another have dedicated ourselves to teaching creative writing seminars, Heker’s reflections shouldn’t fall on deaf ears. It will be smart to remember that it could happen to you.
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Another Okinawa Battle
Feb. 11, 2011
In June 2009, Okinawa became the unexpected political graveyard of Hatoyama Yukio, who quit after months struggling to bear the weight of, then reversing, a pledge he made to its citizens.
He had come to power the previous September in an election that ended half a century of LDP rule, promising to tackle one of the great Cold War anomalies. For over half a century Japan, constitutionally pacifist and neutral had sheltered beneath the US military umbrella as a loyal and in recent years increasingly proactive ally. "We're still in Cold War mode," he lamented to this journalist before he took power.
Two years later, Mr. Hatoyama, who was forced out as Prime Minister over his inability to resolve the question of a new Marine air station on Okinawa as demanded by the US, appears to still recognise the long-term unsustainability of that arrangement. "The idea of having one nation's military based on another's soil and depending on its military is not something seen anywhere else in the world," he reminded the Japan Foreign Correspondents' Club on Feb. 2nd. "I felt this was something the Japanese people could not avoid confronting."
So it is with a jolt that we arrive in present-day Okinawa, where reality is sharply at odds with Mr. Hatoyama's good intentions. Activists there say the US and Japanese authorities, now under Hatoyama's successor, Naoto Kan, have begun a new push to break the 15-year-old stalemate over replacing old US military facilities.
At Henoko, sight of a proposed US military seaport, including an 1800-meter runway, to replace the Futenma Marine Air Station in the middle of Ginowan City, a concrete wall is being erected to separate civilian and military land on the beach and conceal construction from the eyes of demonstrators on the other side - likely the first move toward construction.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Takae, a 160-household village in Yanbaru Forest have been protesting round-the-clock against the renewed construction (since December 22) of six US helipads to accommodate the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft with a controversial record of accidents and protection by vested interests (see this January 11 Air Force Times story on political infighting within the Pentagon over an investigation of an April 2010 Osprey crash). The villagers say that its forcible construction would pave the way for a similar strategy on Henoko. They have accused the authorities of harassment.
Democratic Party politicians are, perhaps, more vocal about Okinawa's burden than their Liberal Democratic predecessors. "It doesn't make sense to put 75 percent of US military facilities on 0.6 percent of Japan's land," points out rising lawmaker Kiuchi Taketane. But there the hand wringing ends and the realpolitik begins: "We have already made a promise country-to-country so we have to go ahead with moving the base to Henoko," he says. Hatoyama now agrees, adding: If the Henoko facility cannot be built, the airbase in Futenma will be made permanent, and this is an option that we should avoid at all costs."
The mainland press has been quick to back this scenario, and warn of a huge spike in military spending - held at 0.9 percent to 1.0 percent of Japan's GDP for decades - if it begins uncoupling from the security alliance with the US. Opting for the Hatoyama route meant that Japan ‘would have to increase its 5-trillion-yen defence budget by 10 percent annually for the next 10 years,' warned Sentaku political magazine in February 2010.
The latest push on Okinawa follows last year's spat between Japan's coastguard and a Chinese trawler in the Senkaku Islands that badly mauled bilateral relations and added to Japanese paranoia about Beijing's strategic aims in Asia. Conservatives in Japan are now increasingly vocal about China's growing military clout, with some claiming that it is operating spies and provocateurs in Okinawa as the prelude to an eventual claim on the islands.
Takesada Hideshi, executive director of the National Institute for Defense Studies, recently told the Shingetsu Institute that Chinese professors in Japan have been "spreading Chinese government propaganda" to their students, in line with Beijing's interests. Takesada expressed concern that "China will soon make a formal claim to Okinawa by citing old manuscripts of the Qing dynasty showing these territories as being tributary."
Such views may be taken as the inevitable byproduct of Japanese anxiety as it accommodates uneasily to China's growing economic and geopolitical clout - or something more sinister. As others have pointed out, there are few peaceful historical precedents for such a huge transition of power and influence from one nation to another. But whatever happens, there seems little doubt that Japan and the United States will continue to press Okinawans to keep bearing the weight of the US-Japan military pact.
This pact keeps US military forces concentrated on Okinawa largely out of sight and mind of the mainland,until a protest or particularly heinous crime in the prefecture pushes it back onto the nation's front pages. It remains to be seen how Okinawans will react to the latest initiative; in his FCCJ speech, Hatoyama appeared to offer a coded warning to the administration of Kan Naoto. While advising the government to push ahead with the relocation, he added: "We can not be too optimistic about the government's prospects (about the base on Henoko). "Many things will depend on the construction methods - it should be made in such a way that is friendly to the environment, and it shouldn't be permanent. The land needs to be returned to the people of Okinawa. What's needed before then is frank and fair discussion," he said. But the time for talking may have ended.
The Asia-Pacific Journal has published extensively on Okinawa. Some articles of recent interest include:
Written by David McNeill, Japan/Korea correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and a regular contributor to The Irish Times and The Independent. A similar version of this What's Hot appeared on the Tokyo Notes blog of The Diplomat on February 9.
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Well awhile back many of you asked for a tutorial on how I make the flower rosettes. I am no expert and these are not original designs but I finally put together a little video on how I was taught to make them.
I have to give fair warning. First of all, I have never made a video tutorial nor posted a video on my blog so just keep that in mind. You will also notice that I get a text at some point in the video, my glue gun breaks and I have a terrible time working my fingers. You see I was looking through the camera as I made it and whenever I tried looking around the camera I ended up out of focus or even out of the frame. But overall I think you will get the idea. So go easy on me......
And if you can't stand my voice (or my video) than here are some photos to try and walk you through it.
Start with a strip fabric about 2 inches by 18 inches. The smaller the rosette than the smaller the strip and vice versa.
Then fold the fabric in half.
Then fold it in half again. How wide this beginning part of your fabric is, dictates how thick your rosette is. I like my flowers on the thinner side. Thus the double fold.
Then start rolling it to form a little bud which will be the center of your flower.
Once the bud is about the size of your fingernail secure it with a little hot glue. It is important to give your flower a little glue every few folds so it doesn't come unraveled. First you need to learn how to make these folds though. This is where the video may be more helpful but let's try it with pictures.
Just keeping folding as you go around and around. And don't forget to give it some glue every few folds.
And don't worry about messing up. You can't go wrong.
I hope you found this tutorial helpful. And please don't hesitate to ask any questions.
Thanks for stopping by!
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With Harvard playing at Yale this weekend, the easiest method of transportation is by student-organized shuttles. We hope you’ll use this six-hours round-trip to better appreciate all things in, on, or around buses. Whether they inspire you, instruct you, or simply make the time go by faster, each of these songs will make the journey to and from America’s number one safety school a little bit better.
Legend has it that a gnome lives in the tunnel between the Harvard Square and Central Square T stops. The statue is said to reside near an old abandoned T stop—a ghost station—that can still be seen from the Red Line trains. We found the gnome, and so can you.
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We’re kind of surprised we haven’t covered this concept before since it only uses techniques that are commonly avaialable for home PCB fabrication. [Ray] made this solder paste stencil out of a sheet of copper using the same etching techniques you would for a circuit board. He designed and printed a resist pattern, with toner everywhere except the places where there should be holes in the stencil. He transferred the toner to the copper using an iron.
The difference here should be obvious; this a thin copper sheet with no substrate. Because of that, you must protect the copper surface before etching. he covered the entire thing, both sides, in packing tape. After that it’s into the Cupric Chloride bath to dissolve the exposed parts. Once the tape and toner has been removed you can scree a precise amount of solder paste onto your boards.
This isn’t for everyone, but if you’re assembling many boards it’s not a bad approach. If the stencil is no longer used it can be recycled, but we do wonder how corrosion on the copper will affect the stencil’s performance.
The idea for this technique came to [Ray] from a guide that’s been around for years.
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Not all monthly donors are created equal: Nonprofit Federation show
Washington -- At the Direct Marketing Association's annual Nonprofit Federation conference, representatives from Greenpeace, Habitat for Humanity International, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Craver, Matthews, Smith & Co. spoke to the variety of about the growing trend that not all monthly donors are created equal.
Monthly donor programs can be set up automatically through a credit card or checking account. Check writers who mail a gift each month are also often eligible for monthly donor programs.
"Our goal here is to provide you with templates to produce a variety of monthly donor reports and to understand the different benchmarks that organizations use," said Steve Froehlich of ASPCA. "Donors need to be inspired and we have used backed analytic reporting to help better suit donors."
In order to attract monthly donors organizations may use direct response television, online donation monthly giving, telemarketing, house mailings or acquisition mail.
Greenpeace uses a face-to-face program called direct dialogue, where recruiters approach people on the streets of six different U.S. cities. They ask for monthly donors and only accept credit cards and EFTs.
"Our direct dialogue has produced 95 percent of our new donors," said Danny McGregor of Greenpeace. "We pay recruiters whether they recruit or not and this includes health insurance and being on the payroll as staff."
Factors determining the cost of the program include hourly wage, fixed cost per recruiter, office and program, and number of supporters recruited per hour and hours worked per week per recruiter. Average monthly gift and attrition also play a role.
"Donors see the face of Greenpeace through our recruiters, which is very different from receiving a piece of mail," Mr. McGregor said.
Of the 55,000 active HopeBuilders for Habitat for Humanity, approximately 52 percent use direct pay via a credit card or EFT. The file is built mainly from newly acquired donors in the $0-99 range.
"We try to advert as many donors as possible to direct pay," said Debbie Roskowsky of Craver, Matthews, Smith & Company. "The HopeBuilder program targets donors who have behavior of monthly donors and that give a few times a year."
The HopeBuilder program spends three cents to make a profit of $1 from donors.
"We have found that instead of asking for one $100 gift that asking for $15 a month for 12 months is more successful," Ms. Roskowsky said.
In order to improve relations, Habitat has enacted several strategies driven from analysis. These include adding an anniversary package to improve retention at 13, 25 and 37 months, adding a pre delinquent Book of Hope to increase retention at 18 months and revamping first and third delinquent mailings.
The anniversary package features a letter from a child who's home was built by Habitat, along with a HopeBuilder's plastic bracelet and pin. The tag line reads, "HopeBuilders Build Hope."
The Habitat Book of Hope allows for donors to write their names and a brief message for the book that is kept at the reception desk at the nonprofit's headquarters in Atlanta, GA.
The third initiative for pre-delinquent donors is a roster package that includes a letter citing other donors in their home city and how they came back to Habitat.
"It doesn't place guilt upon the donor," said Rowena Cala for Habitat for Humanity. "It welcomes them back."
If recognition is not made after the third and final letter, the donor's account is then closed and they are enrolled back into the appeal series.
Moving forward, Habitat will continue to monitor retention and efficiency of anniversary and delinquent packages and also develop a sustainer offer and monthly program for new donors acquired during times of disaster.
"Our new efforts for this year include a 12 by 12 renewable sustainer program where donors commit to $12 a month for a 12-month period," Ms. Cala said. "We also plan to develop an online sustainer offer and monthly program for new Web donors."
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION
During December, interested delegates drafted a resolution on "Implementation of the
outcome of the World Summit for Social Development." Consensus on this resolution
was achieved only after lengthy consultations. One of the more difficult issues was
agreement on the methodology for involving relevant actors of civil society in the field of
social development to contribute to the work of the Commission for Social Development.
Since this item was considered in the General Assembly Plenary, it was not brought to
the Third Committee for adoption but rather was expected to be adopted in the General
Assembly Plenary before it adjourned on 22 December 1995.
The draft resolution addressed both the critical importance of national action and
international cooperation for social development and the role of the UN system. With
regard to national action and international cooperation, the resolution endorses the
Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action and reaffirms the pledge by the
Heads of State and Government to give the highest priority to national, regional and
international policies and actions for social development. The draft resolution also:
- stresses the need for political will;
- emphasizes the interdependence of economic development, social development and environmental protection;
- recognizes that implementation of the Programme of Action is primarily the responsibility of Governments;
- reiterates the call to governments to define time-bound goals and targets for poverty reduction and eradication, expanding employment and reducing unemployment, and enhancing social integration;
- reiterates the call for comprehensive cross-sectoral strategies for implementing the Summit outcome;
- reiterates the call for assessing national progress toward implementing the outcome of the Summit through periodic national reports;
- reaffirms the need for an effective partnership between governments and civil society;
- recognizes that the implementation of the Programme of Action and the Declaration will require mobilization of financial resources at the national and international levels as well as substantial debt reduction;
- reaffirms the importance of implementing the 20:20 concept between interested developed and developing countries; and
<$TSpInterLn=1335>With regard to the role of the UN system, the draft resolution calls
on all parts of the UN system to adjust their activities and programmes to take into
account follow-up to the Summit. The General Assembly, ECOSOC and the Commission
for Social Development will form a three-tiered intergovernmental process for Summit
follow-up. A special session of the General Assembly will be held in the year 2000 for
overall review and appraisal of the implementation of the Copenhagen Declaration and
Programme of Action.
- urges the Secretary-General, the World Bank and the IMF to study the impact of structural adjustment programmes on economic and social development.
The draft resolution also calls on ECOSOC to: oversee system-wide coordination in the
implementation of the Summit outcome; improve its own effectiveness; and review the
reporting system in the area of social development.
The draft resolution calls on the Commission for Social Development to:
- develop a multi-year programme of work to the year 2000, selecting specific themes and addressing them from an interrelated and integrated perspective;
- adapt its mandate to ensure an integrated approach to social development;
- integrate the current sectoral issues on its agenda; review and update its methods of work;
- invite experts to contribute to its work;
- consider integrating high-level representatives on social development issues into its work;
- consider at its next session the composition of its membership and the frequency of its sessions and make recommendations therein to ECOSOC; and
The draft resolution also invites the Regional Commissions in cooperation with regional
intergovernmental organizations and banks to consider convening, on a biennial basis, a
high-level meeting to review progress made toward implementing the outcome of the
Summit. UNDP is requested to facilitate UN-system capacity building efforts. The ILO,
the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organization are also asked to
contribute to the implementation of the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of
- enable the participation of relevant actors of civil society in the field of social development.
The Secretary-General is requested to: ensure an effectively functioning Secretariat to
assist in the implementation and follow-up of the Summit; and strengthen UN capacity
for gathering and analyzing information and developing indicators for social
development. Finally, the resolution decides that the Trust Fund of the Social Summit
should be continued and renamed "Trust Fund for the Follow-up to the World Summit for
Social Development," with the aim of supporting programmes, seminars and activities for
the promotion of social development and the implementation of the Copenhagen
Declaration and Programme of Action and invites all States to contribute to it.
[Return to start of article]
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What Good is God? In Search of a Faith that Matters
By Philip Yancey.
Reviewed by Rob Ogilvie, CBWC’s Regional Minister for BC & Yukon
With most Philip Yancey books, the title usually gives away the theme, and this book is no exception. Trying to understand what good God is, in a world filled with disasters and traumatic events, is Yancey’s quest. He makes this happen by including talks he has given in ten different places around the world from Mumbai to Johannesburg to the campus of Virginia Tech. The chapter that precedes each of these stories gives the background as to how he came to be invited to this place, introduces the reader to some of the people that he has met and outlines the relevant issues these people are facing.
In the Introduction, Yancey describes how polls in the USA show that in 1957, when asked about their religious affiliation, 2.7% of the population stated “no religion” and that by 2009 that number had grown to 16%. However, he goes on to say that two-thirds of those who claimed “no religion” still believe that God exists and he believes that many of these people judge organized religion as hypocritical or irrelevant. As a way of exploring the value of religious faith and wrestling with the question about God’s goodness Yancey says, “I prefer to go out into the field and examine how faith works itself out, especially under extreme conditions.”
I found it an interesting format for a book that could easily be viewed in two ways. The cynical or strictly business approach could say that it can’t get much easier to write a book than this, because half of it was already written from the talks Yancey had previously given to ten different groups, and the other half was him just telling the stories of how he got invited to such places.
The other perspective recognizes Yancey’s ability to tell stories and to help his readers understand that many of the questions they themselves are asking are also being asked by others, and he does so in dramatic fashion. A young woman who survived the Columbine High School shootings accompanies him to Virginia Tech where together they meet with the families and loved ones and attend a memorial for the 32 students killed by a fellow student. He travels to China where he hears firsthand the realities of what it means to be a pastor of a Christian church in the midst of communism. He attends a conference in Wisconsin on ministry to women in prostitution, where he spends three hours dialoguing with former “professional sex workers” and hearing their stories of “degradation and transformation.”
I learn best from stories and for that reason I appreciated this book. It reminds us that God is present, even when we don’t readily see him, and that we, as ordinary people, are called to be examples to the world around us of the hope and assurance of the goodness of God.
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At this time there are no specific guidelines for reducing your risk of
. The cause is unknown and most of the identified risk factors are beyond your control. The only risk factor you can control to a certain extent is your exposure to industrial chemicals.
If you are exposed to any chemical for prolonged periods of time, check with a Poison Control Center (in the phone book or at
) to determine the risks associated with this exposure. If your exposure is at work, there may be information or assistance available through your employer. The toxins suspected of causing MDS are petrochemicals, benzene, and rubber.
, Fanconi’s anemia, or von Recklinghausen’s disease all increase your risk of MDS. If you have one of these conditions, you should be monitored regularly by your doctor for signs of MDS.
, used almost exclusively for treating cancer, may increase your risk of MDS very slightly. If you have received either of these treatments, see your doctor for checkups on a regular basis.
This content is reviewed regularly and is updated when new and relevant evidence is made available. This information is neither intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with questions regarding a medical condition.
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Today’s love goes to science fiction author William F. Wu who has donated his archive of comics containing Asian images to New York University’s Fales Library. Fu’s collection of comics, published between 1947 and 1986, will be on exhibit at NYU starting in May.
I grew up reading comics and always loved them, but the Asian characters when I was young ranged mainly from stupid to evil to banal — with just a very few exceptions. To my regular collection, I added an adjunct collection, of comics with Asian characters. I was concerned, outraged, and amused because popular culture reaches virtually everyone. The role models—good and bad—can have real world effects on people’s perception of themselves and those around them.
Writer Jeff Yang is more than thrilled to be the curator of this rare exhibition. In the process of researching comics, Yang came across the first edition of “The Yellow Claw,” published in October 1956. The work features “perhaps the first-ever Asian-American pulp hero and protagonist: Jimmy Woo, a Chinese-American FBI agent.” You can see the images from Yang’s blog.
The exhibition will publicly and visually denounce Asian American stereotypes by showing Asian American characters positively portrayed as heroes instead of as the menacing villan or side-kick character. Growing up, I never saw many Asian Americans portrayed in comics or literature in a positive light, if they were even featured as characters at all.
Wu grew up in the midwest, Kansas City, Missouri, where there were few families of Asian descent during the time he was growing up. In a casual biography, Wu said:
I enjoyed and hated high school. While I was a good student, I was not as good as most people thought; I took honors classes in everything but math, in which — despite a common American stereotype — I was no better than average and probably worse. I dated, was no athlete, and most of all kept writing.
We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to email@example.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve got the rights to share any media you send.
To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page
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SRINAGAR: Asserting that gun or economic measures cannot solve the political issues, Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah reiterated the necessity of dialogue to find out ways and means of addressing these issues politically in an atmosphere of peace and amity.
In his Independence Day message to people on Doordarshan and Radio Kashmir, the Chief Minister said that both internal and external dimensions of Kashmir issue require equal focusing.
The Chief Minister said that he is hopeful that the dialogue process restarted between India and Pakistan will yield results. He expressed confidence that while discussing the major issues, the two countries will devote attention to resolve smaller issues like converting Cross LoC Trade into normal trade from the present Barter status, making visa regime easy, helping implementation of rehabilitation policy for youth, etc. in the upcoming Foreign Ministers’ Conference.
Omar Abdullah also appealed to the leaders (separatists) with different political viewpoints vis-à-vis mainstream political parties to take best advantage of current favourable political scenario and come on table to discuss their viewpoints with the Government of India and contribute in seeking secure and bright future for the State and its people. “When they are ready to talk with one country there should be no reason for them not to talk with other country”, he added.
Listing elimination of violence, addressing unemployment crisis, curbing corruption and resolving the electricity deficiency in the State as four important concerns flagged in the policy planning of his government, the Chief Minister said that there has been visible improvement in peace situation since last over one and the half years.
The Chief Minister said that the graph of violence is decreasing and his government has reduced the presence of security forces. “We have removed various bunkers in Srinagar and similar action will follow in other places with the improvement of situation and restoration of peace.
Giving full credit to people for the prevailing peace and law and order situation in the State, the Chief Minister said that he is committed to take dividends of peace to every household. He said that his government would continue in the direction of restoring permanent peace in the State. He said that his government wants to create such a conducive atmosphere as would help the return of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who have left the Valley during disturbance. He said the peace has helped to carry forward development holistically all across the State. “It has helped to empower people and strengthen the institutions”, he added.
The Chief Minister said that creation of powerful panchayat system in the State is his endeavour and all necessary measures have been taken to empower panchayats. He said that the panchayat system in Jammu and Kashmir is being put in place after a period of over 30 years as such, it would take some time to provide strong edifice to this system to flourish and grow. He said 3-tier Panchayat Raj is his commitment and reiterated that urban local body elections will be held by the end of this year.
The Chief Minister cautioned the people of the designs of those who want to disturb peace. He asked them to foil such designs for the larger interest of the State and its people. He said the restoration of tranquillity and carrying forward development process on fast track has been possible by the wholehearted support given by the people to his government in maintaining calm and peace during last about two years.
On employment crisis, the Chief Minister said that he has never tried to hide the facts on this count and deceive youth. “I have told time and again that government would take all steps to absorb educated youth in government departments to the degree possible but the huge unemployment problem cannot be resolved by providing government jobs to youth. We have to look beyond this and find out solution to this crisis”, he said and cited the measures his government has taken to expand employment orbit for youth and help them get meaningful employment in the reputed private sector companies.
The Chief Minster referred to the SKEWPY initiative taken by his government to address unemployment problem in the State and said that thousands of youth have started taking benefit of this initiative. He also talked about the centrally sponsored schemes of Udaan and Himayat launched in the State to upgrade the skills of educated youth and get them placed in various private companies. He expressed gratitude to Union government and Prime Minister for these schemes. He said many youth have availed the grants provided under SKEWPY and many have got jobs in private companies through Udaan and Himayat initiatives.
Describing corruption as an universal phenomenon in the country, the Chief Minister said that his government has strengthened the institutions and enacted laws to curb this evil effectively. He cited the example of revitalizing and reconstituting the J&K State Accountability Commission, implementation of State Right to Information Act, enactment and implementation of Public Service Guarantee Act, introduction of e-tendering and e-procurement in various government departments, putting in place 3rd party monitoring and well framed transfer policy. He said these initiatives have helped a lot to restrict corrupt practices and save public money.
Omar Abdullah said that the development profile of the government registered during last three and the half years is so comprehensive that it will take a book to be recorded. He said that the State will witness double than this progress during the next two and the half years of his government’s tenure.
While conveying Ramadan and Eid greetings to the people along with Independence Day congratulations, the Chief Minister referred to the gloom given by the fire that damaging Dargah of Peer-e-Dastageer (RA) at Khaniyar and by the untimely demise of so many Amarnath Ji yatries. However, he expressed satisfaction over the calm exhibited by people and described it as a good omen for peace and prosperity in the State.
On electricity deficiency, the Chief Minister said that his government has flagged this sector as an important area for holistic development. He said while attention is on enhancing generation through various power projects and add about 3000 MWs in next a few years, his government has also focused on unbundling the transmission and distribution system. He said power leakage is highest concern for the State. He said that meeting electricity losses of over Rs. 2000 crores out of the Rs. 7300 Annual Plan 2012-13 sanctioned by the Union Government, is a huge burden to bear.
The Chief Minister appealed the people to pay the electric charges in accordance with its consumption. He said that the unaccounted use of electricity by industrial houses, showroom owners, big businessmen and moneyed people at the cost of State’s development has to go and they have to pay the fee as per they consume the electricity. (KMW News)
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The Ballad of Barnaby (poem)
The Lords of Human Kind. Black Man, Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire by V.G. Kiernan
Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1880-1914 by Heinz Gollwitzer
Critics of Empire by Bernard Porter
Britain and the Russian Civil War by Richard H. Ullman
The Fall of the British Empire, 1918-1968 by Colin Cross
Britain in the Century of Total War by Arthur Marwick
Poems from the Vietnam War (poem)
The Task of Gestalt Psyhology by Wolfgang Köhler, with an Introduction by Carroll C. Pratt
Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid by Peter Nabokov
La Raza: The Mexican-Americans (to be published in January) by Stan Steiner
Uprooted Children The Early Life of Migrant Farm Workers (to be published in February) by Robert Coles
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation Volume II: The Science of Freedom by Peter Gay
Elegy 1969 (poem)
Illuminations. Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn
Napoleon, I. From 18 Brumaire to Tilsit 1799-1807 by Georges Lefebvre, translated by Henry F. Stockhold
Napoleon, II. From Tilsit to Waterloo 1807-1815 by Georges Lefebvre, translated by J.E. Anderson
Napoleon in Russia The 1812 Campaign by Alan Palmer
Napoleon Recaptures Paris by Claude Manceron, translated by George Unwin
Napoleon after Waterloo by Michael John Thornton
Napoleon’s St. Helena by Gilbert Martineau, translated by Frances Partridge
African Art, Its Background and Traditions by René S. Wassing
African Art by Michel Leiris, by Jacqueline Delange, translated by Michael Ross
Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins Jr.
Prints and Books: Informal Papers by William Ivins Jr.
Notes on Prints by William Ivins Jr.
How Prints Look, Photographs with a Commentary by William Ivins Jr.
Isadora Duncan: The Russian Years by Ilya Ilyich Schneider
W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was an English poet, playwright, and essayist who lived and worked in the United States for much of the second half of his life. His work, from his early strictly metered verse, and plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, to his later dense poems and penetrating essays, represents one of the major achievements of twentieth-century literature.
D. W. Harding (1906–1993) was a British psychologist and literary critic. In1933 he joined FR Leavis as an editor of Scrutiny, where much of his literary criticism appeared, but also work, notably on aggression, that led to The Impulse to Dominate and Social Psychology and Individual Values.
Francis Haskell (1928-2000) was an English art historian. His works include Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italyand History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. Haskell taught at Oxford.
Martin Bernal is Professor Emeritus of Government at Cornell. His controversial study of Ancient Greece, Black Athena, explores the origins of Hellenic culture and, in particular, the influence of Egypt and Phoenicia on the development of Ancient Greece.
Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.
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This is a guest post by Norf London
Writing in The Guardian, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, claims that the UK election does not mean much for the U.S.: “What differences exist have few implications for the United States.”
Weisberg is wrong. Britain’s alliance with the U.S. is a cornerstone of British foreign policy and the differences between the parties are substantial.
Labour is the true Atlanticist party. Just look at their record under Blair and Brown (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq)—and compare to the Tories under Major during the Bosnia war (1992-5). Don’t let any Tory con you by invoking Thatcher’s Atlanticism, because Cameron wants to have nothing to do with her). The Tories in opposition under Howard and Cameron have been equally poor on Atlanticism. Howard and Cameron were happy to take side swipes at the U.S. and against the Iraq war. Indeed, Howard was so proud of being told he was not welcome in George W. Bush’s White House that the Tories leaked this to the newspapers. The Tories also pushed for the ridiculous Iraq inquiry led by Chilcot. (Does anybody remember this Cameron speech?
“We should be solid but not slavish in our friendship with America,” “I fear that if we continue as at present we may combine the maximum of exposure with the minimum of real influence over decisions. The sooner we rediscover the right balance the better for Britain and our alliance.” Sub-text: Blair’s a poodle.)
From a historic perspective Labour Atlanticism and Tory sniping at the U.S. alliance is not new–there was Tory anti-Americanism during the Second World War (see Orwell Notes on Nationalism). There was similar Tory distaste for the Americans after the war, a period when Labour was involved in setting up NATO. Bevin was awful on Palestine, but superb on the U.S. alliance. Americans who think that anti-EU sentiment means the Tories are pro-U.S. are fooling themselves. The Tories are quite capable of being anti-U.S. and anti-EU.
Of course, the Tories do a fine line in telling American audiences one thing and UK audiences another. For example, the Tory foreign policy team visited the U.S. earlier this year and told American politicians that the Conservatives are pro-U.S. and, because it was an American audience, they also claimed to be pro-Israel. Contrast the claim that the Conservatives are friends of Israel with Cameron’s comments to the Financial Times in which he backed the Obama policy of pressure on Israel, called East Jerusalem “occupied” and was rather proud of having gotten into an argument with Tzipi Livni, the previous Israeli foreign minister. The same approach of tailoring messages to different audiences also happens in the UK—when the Tory leadership is speaking to the Conservative Friends of Israel. Different messages for different audiences is an old Middle East trick for which Yasser Arafat was famous. Arafat did it in different languages. The Tories manage it in the same language. So kudos of sort to them.
This style first, substance whenever approach is what Cameron is all about. It’s worth noting that the one Tory who is genuinely decent on these issues is Michael Gove. He will probably go down in the history books as the best prime minister we never had. No other Tory has Gove’s intelligence, his passion or his grasp of the issues.
Labour, as Nick Cohen has argued, has something to give. Brown is awful, but only Labour has a solid commitment to a genuinely progressive agenda key issues such as foreign policy, social policy, and the economy. Of course, it would have been preferable to have Blair stay on, he scared the Tories, but Brown was too ambitious and bloody minded. A further asset to Labour is its attitude to ethnic and religious minorities, especially when compared to the Tories and, now sadly, the Lib Dems. The Tories have long been willing to stir up immigration scares and place the race card (remember the Smethwick election in 1964, Thatcher’s “alien culture” remarks, the Daily Mail in every election, Michael Howard’s use of the immigration issue when in government).
In recent years, the Lib Dems have been happy to work with Islamist anti-Semites. Indeed, the Lib Dems have become weird and sinister. They gladly shelter anti-Semites. Their europhilia is sickening and unpatriotic.
Can one question somebody else’s patriotism? Easy, it happens all the time in UK politics. Britons are not touchy feely about this. The Tories, for example, have done this constantly. They told us we should not criticize the government when the troops were in action (and conveniently when they were in power). Yet, when in opposition, such as during the Kosovo and Iraq wars, they were happy to do so. Of course, the Tories, for all their flag waving are happy to take money from foreigners with a tenuous commitment to democracy. Remember Gordon Brown’s famous joke at the Tory’s expense when it was revealed in 1991 that they taking money from John Latsis, a Greek shipowner who had supported the Colonels’ military junta in Athens, that Latsis “had gone from supporting Colonels to Majors.” And remember also that the Tories have had a sickeningly close relationship with the Saudis—with one Tory cabinet minister, Jonathan Aitken, going to jail for perjury after his Saudi dealings were revealed.
So, I am voting Labour.
Editor’s Note: Harry’s Place will accept party-political guest posts for the purpose of generating political debate. No collective or individual endorsement of any party is necessarily implied or should be assumed.
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I am trying to get the promoter sequence of my gene. I used the method of Genome Walker from Clontech. Well, it works somehow, i got one bonds after two rounds of PCR, and i've clone and sequenced it, it is the up stream sequence of my gene. However, the size of this fragments is just about 500bp, I designed different primer, try to get longer upstream fragments, it didn't work.
Then, i tried digest the genome with other eight different enzyme, and performed same procedure, at the end, i got one bond for all the these eight libraries, but the bonds are same size as i got before.
I also tried to amplify different gene with same library, it gave me very good results, the size of the amplified bonds were different from these
libraries. (from 0.5 - 1kb ), and sequence matched well. It means the enzyme cut genome well, and adaptor was ligated well.
I am really confused about this results. It impossible that all enzyme cut same site of the genome, why different library gave same fragment? (there are slitty differences, some has two bonds, some only has one, but the biggest bond was always same, around 0.5 kb).
Anybody has a clue?
From the sequence i've got, it seems the upstream sequence of this gene has lot of AT rich sequence, will this affect the size of PCR amplification?
BTW, The polymerase i used was from Clontech GC Advantage 2 polymerase.
Thanks a lot.
PCR Walking got same size bonds for different library
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Career benefits of an AAT qualification have been highlighted in a recent salary survey of AAT students and members. Here are the findings…
In finance departments and the wider financial industry, AAT qualifications and membership are held to be beneficial to accountants in all walks of life. But how? That’s what the organisation set out to determine in its recent salary survey of students and members. The answers provide a fascinating insight into how AAT qualifications and professional membership are influencing pay, prospects, work-life balance and job security at a challenging time for the economy.
The survey shows the vast majority are satisfied with their jobs and that they intend to stay with the same employer – more than half in the same role. The survey, which is sponsored by specialist financial recruitment firm Page Personnel, shows that, as one would expect, average salaries rise progressively as members progress through the different stages of AAT membership, ranging from £17,673 for a level 2 student to £35,997 for a fellow member. There are also only minor gender variances: the average across the country for men is £21,500 compared to £20,000 for women.
But salary levels are less important than long-term career prospects, says Gareth Davage, managing director of Page Personnel Finance. ‘The qualification is more in demand now than it was two or three years ago,’ he says. ‘It is seen as more practical and so makes people more employable. The value for money that AAT-qualified people give is far superior in a recession than someone who needs to spend a lot of time studying.’
Work-life balancing act
So, AAT may help secure posts and provide a long-term advantage. But what about the here and now? Apart from a company pension (which 58% of respondents receive), other benefits are rather more scarce and tend to be offered to those in larger businesses. The survey did highlight that, while private-sector staff are more likely to benefit from private health insurance, life assurance or car allowances, public-sector and voluntary staff are more likely to benefit from family-friendly policies, such as part-time working.
That work-life balance, though, has been skewed by the economic climate. Even though the number of hours worked by full-time staff remains in line with national averages – with 36 to 40 hours a week notched up by 67% of males and 61% of females – those in larger organisations are more likely to be putting in longer hours. Some 22% of those in the smallest firms are now working longer compared to 33% in the largest. As a consequence, the majority of respondents feel overworked.
But does working harder lead to a greater feeling of job security? Again, despite the impact of the global economic downturn, the survey shows that most AAT members feel fairly safe in their jobs, with 74% feeling very or quite secure. The most secure were directors and senior managers (85%), while administrators felt most at risk. Those in large companies feel least secure: 66% by comparison with 81% of those in mid-sized companies with 11-50 employees. Unsurprisingly, confidence in the public sector is lower than outside it. Only 59% of public servants feel confident about their job security compared to 79% of workers in the commercial sphere.
So are accounting technicians more content than others? According to a recent survey by Michael Page – the parent company of Page Personnel – 63% of those in the wider financial sector also feel secure or very secure in their jobs. And that many – 45% – are not planning on changing jobs. Nonetheless, some 73% say a pay rise would seal their loyalties, while half say a promotion would stop them moving on. Although more training was cited by 34%, the good news for employers is that 67% of respondents are happy with the training their companies provide.
Investment in training
On a similar theme, AAT membership – and the continuous development it implies – is seen as a vital stepping-stone to gaining membership of other professional bodies. Some 21% of AAT members and fellows, and 17% of affiliates, are also with ACCA. For CIMA, those figures are 11% and 10%.
This has been crucial in the economic downturn. Few accountancy technicians have escaped unscathed, yet those who are affected the most – student members and those in the lower tiers of their careers – can take heart from the views of senior practitioners: 78% of both FMAATs and MAATs agree that studying for, or completing, AAT qualifications does help improve earning potential.
But there is an added – and very timely – benefit, according to Davage. He believes that those with, or working towards, AAT qualifications are better placed during a recession to pick up employment and gain career progression. Jackie Switzer, a learning and development expert at consultancy Penna agrees: ‘In a highly competitive job market,’ she says, ‘people who invest in their training and qualifications are providing potential employers with a quick and reliable way of selecting them from hundreds of unsolicited CVs. Also, by being able to show a history of training and qualifications, you demonstrate that you are interested in your field and motivated to develop your career.’
That message is already filtering through, with 67% of AAT affiliate members (AAT qualified) and 75% of students agreeing that the qualification does
increase earning capacity. It’s just one of many positive notes from the 2011 AAT salary survey. While nearly half of all respondents saw no salary rise this year – 3% even reported a pay cut – it has not had a major impact on morale.
To download the full report please click here
For the main AAT site, click here
For full job listings on AAT Jobs, click here
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Up next in How to Give a Massage (21 videos)
Learn basic massage techniques from massage therapist Renee French with the demonstrations in these Howcast videos.
Hi, my name is Renee French and I'm here at Practical Massage Therapy in Nashville, Tennessee, and I'm going to be talking about massage therapy. Ancient Indian massage come from the holistic healing system called Ayurveda. It's also know as Abhyanga. Traditionally, Abhyanga is performed as a daily self-oil massage, or by by or two trained massage therapists, on a massage table. It is recommended that pure, cold-pressed sesame oil, or a blend of other vegetable oils, is used. The oils are warmed to slightly above room temperature. Abhyanga, or ancient Indian massage, is known to increase circulation, calm the nervous system, and generally relax and restore the body.
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French artist Junior Fritz Jacque uses origami-inspired technique to turn discarded toilet-paper rolls an cardboard into incredible sculptures. On his website, Jacquet states that he loves to experiment with different folding techniques by finding new methods to create forms and objects.
But Jacquet understands that the face isn't the only part of the body involved in self-expression. So he's also created the Bonhomme Canelle collection–a series that revolves around the same little man, always in a different position. The figure is made out of one sheet of cardboard and stands upright on a wooden support.
This is an amusing little man, Bonhomme Canelle, who appeals to the playful and spontaneous spirit in all of us. His body is like his spirit: sincere, funny, and glib. Bonhomme Canelle is a story on his own. Bursting with energy, he laughs loudly, always ready for action, sitting down breathlessly, tapping with his foot while he waits. Once he is tired he relaxes, chattering wit fully, and finally falling asleep. He also sits, lies down and feels at ease almost anywhere.
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The drop in U.S. births to their lowest level since 1920 is sounding alarms about the nation's ability to support its fast-growing elderly population.
As public concern mounts, a growing number of books, reports and columns are laying out challenges the United States will face because of this demographic upheaval: Fewer babies are being born while the wave of 78 million older Baby Boomers have only begun to retire (the oldest turn 67 this year).
What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster, a book by Jonathan Last, went on sale this month. A University of Southern California study out last month reported an unprecedented decline in California's child population that "will pose significant challenges for the state's future prosperity."
The recent decline, fueled largely by a deep recession and slower immigration, has pushed the U.S. fertility rate below the 2.1 "replacement level'' - the number of children women are expected to have in their lifetime if current rates continue and the number needed to keep the population stable.
The slowdown is worrisome to many because of the growing gap between working-age populations that fund social programs and the elderly who rely on them.
The imbalance between children and retirees is growing. The economic burden on a child born in 2015 will be nearly twice that of a child born in 1985, according to the USC study.
"These are two trends going in the opposite direction," says demographer Dowell Myers, director of the Population Dynamics Research Group at the University of Southern California. "We will be increasingly dependent economically and socially on a smaller number of children."
In California, where about half of babies are born to immigrant mothers, the immigration slowdown is having a big effect, and it's not clear whether proposed changes to immigration laws will change the pattern. White House and congressional proposals would give illegal immigrants a way to become citizens but that would affect those already here.
"It's totally up in question to what extent immigration will return," says Last, senior writer for The Weekly Standard and author of the latest book on the subject. "All the energy goes out of society when fertility rates get low."
If fertility rates continue at their current pace, Myers predicts "a dropoff in taxpayers, more people selling homes, fewer people buying homes."
In 1970, there were 22.2 Americans age 65 and over for every 100 working-age adults ages 25 to 64, Myers says. By 2010, that had gone up to 24.6 and based on Census projections, the ratio will rise above 40 by 2030.
"One of the most important strategies is invest in the younger generation, the human capital," Myers says. "We can actually survive with fewer kids but we need to bring them along ... At the end of the decade, when Baby Boomer retirement hits us really hard, at that point we'll be begging for workers."
Despite the dip in the U.S. fertility rate to 1.9 children per woman - the lowest in 25 years - and slower population growth, the U.S. is still growing and is a long way from grappling with the demographic crisis other developed nations face.
"Fertility rates across the entire world are all heading downward in ways that are somewhat mystifying," Last says. "It's a global trend."
Italy, for example, has a fertility rate of 1.4. Only 14% of its population is under 15 and 21% is 65 and older. Its population is flat.
Japan is also at 1.4, with 13% under 15 and 24% elderly. Deaths outnumbered births in 2012.
By contrast, 20% of the U.S. population is under 15 and 13% is 65-plus. The nation added 2.3 million people from 2011 to 2012, growing 0.75% to 313.9 million.
"Compared to Europe and Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, we're in fine shape," says Carl Haub, demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. "Once employment improves, one would think we would return to previous levels."
The fertility rate was even lower in the 1970s, when it dipped to 1.7 - a result of inflation and more women going to work to bring home a paycheck.
"We rebounded from this," Haub says.
Whether births will bounce back along with the economy this time is not clear, says Sam Sturgeon, president of Demographic Intelligence, a Charlottesville, Va., company that produces quarterly birth forecasts for consumer products and pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Procter & Gamble.
"We haven't been able to find a substantial difference in people's attitudes toward childbearing," he says. "The two-child family is still kind of the ideal culturally ... However, you can only delay so long and it will have an impact on the number of children we have."
For those who worry that more people will hurt the environment, Last says: "Population growth leads to human innovation, and innovation leads to conservation ... There are no cases of peace and prosperity in the face of declining populations."
Contributing: Paul Overberg
Copyright 2013 USATODAY.com
Read the original story: As U.S. birth rate drops, concern for the future mounts
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Brief SummaryRead full entry
This is a bird of the open Arctic tundra of both the New World and Old World. Snowy Owls nest on the ground and feed mainly on lemmings, which they hunt both day and night (other mammals and birds are also eaten, as well as some fish and carrion). In winter, there is some movement south and individuals are seen at least irregularly south to the northern United States (and even, rarely, the Gulf Coast), Iceland, the British Isles, northern continental Europe, central Russia, northern China, and Sakhalin. These wandering winter birds are generally seen in open country such as prairie, marshes, fields, pastures, and sandy beaches. In years when lemming populations crash, many Snowy Owls move south to the northern tier of states in the United States and some go much farther. These wandering birds (usually heavily barred younger birds) often perch on the ground, low stumps, or buildings.
In many Arctic regions, Snowy Owls breed mainly in years when lemmings are abundant and fail to nest at all when lemmings are scarce. Although Snowy Owls are silent off the breeding grounds, males defend their breeding territories with deep hooting in early spring. A courting male flies with deep, slow wingbeats, often with a lemming in his bill; reaching the female, he leans forward and partly raises his wings. The nest site is typically a mound or ridge in hilly country or a hummock in low-lying areas. It is always in very open tundra with high visibility. The same site may be used for several years. The nest (which is built by the female) is a simple depression in the tundra with no lining added. Clutch size is highly variable (3 to 11 eggs) and correlated with prey abundance. The eggs are whitish, but become stained in the nest. The female incubates the eggs for 31 to 33 days and the male brings food to the incubating female. Egg hatch is not synchronized, so the female cares for her first young while still incubating her last eggs. The female remains with the young and the male brings her food, which the female feeds them. The young may leave the nest after 2 to 3 weeks, but they are not able to fly until around 7 weeks and are fed by their parents until at least 9 or 10 weeks.
Although most North American Snowy Owl breeding areas are far from major human disturbance, this species has declined in parts of its breeding range in northern Europe.
(Kaufman 1996; AOU 1998; Dunn and Alderfer 2011)
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Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915)
Booker T. Washington was an African-American educator and reformer who was the first president and principal developer of the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). He became the leading spokesman for Black Americans after the death of Frederick Douglass. His autobiographical work, "Up From Slavery," is his most famous literary work.
- 1890 circa 15 years
- Original Format:
- Photographic Print
- Schumacher (Los Angeles)
- download hi-res watermarked image
All Licensed images are available for download as jpeg files at 300 dpi of original size.
If your project requires an image at higher resolution, please contact us (be sure to include item number). Custom requests may require an additional charge.
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Tobias DantzigArticle Free Pass
Tobias Dantzig, (born Feb. 19, 1884, Latvia, Russian Empire—died Aug. 9, 1956, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), Latvian-born American mathematician, best known for his science and mathematics books written for the general public.
As a young man, Dantzig was caught distributing anti-tsarist political tracts and fled to Paris, where he studied mathematics under Henri Poincaré and met and married Anja Ourisson. In 1910 they moved to the United States, where at first he worked as a lumberjack in Oregon because of his lack of familiarity with the English language. During this period, their first son was born; George Dantzig would go on to become the father of linear programming. Tobias later attended Indiana University, from which he received a doctorate (1917) in mathematics. Dantzig subsequently taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., Columbia University in New York City, and the University of Maryland.
Dantzig’s major works include Number: The Language of Science (1930), Aspects of Science (1937), Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), and The Bequest of the Greeks (1955). Two of Dantzig’s essays, “
Fingerprints” and “
The Empty Column,” are included in Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books (1963).
What made you want to look up "Tobias Dantzig"? Please share what surprised you most...
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The Rothschild Archive was established in 1978 to preserve and arrange the record of a family that is widely recognised for the major contribution it has made to the economic, political and social history of many countries throughout the world.
The Archive continues to reflect the many facets of the family's history and maintains an international research centre for the furtherance of study in these fields.
The research centre is based in London, and this web site has been developed to make the contents of the archive more readily available to remote users. The site aims to cater for the needs of all Rothschild Archive researchers:
The On-line Guide describes the contents of the Archive series by series.
The Information Bureau provides basic information on a range of commonly asked questions.
The Research Forum is a secure, password-protected area containing selected lists, images databases and other resources from the holdings of the Archive and The Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor.
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For over a year now, since receiving a copy of Dr. Ivanov's paper, I have been attempting to get it all online and trying to derive a better understanding of how the 'gravitational spider' effect works. Here are my thoughts on what is being described and what appears to correlate with other modern reports totally uncognizant of the spider phenomenon.
The images below show when the tail of the spider is at the top of the mass with the legs towards the bottom, then gravity is fully present.
When the spider is not present and the interference patterns balance on the left and right side of the mass, then weight is nullified.
When the tail of the spider is on the bottom end of the mass, gravity is repelled.
The following images show the headdress of the god as being strikingly similar to the tail end of the spider with the arms representing the field lines.
Fig. 30. Where the gravitational spider creeps, there the body moves.
At KeelyNet, we have for many years now, been fully supportive of Walter Wright's 'Gravity as a Push'. If we conceive of gravity as a pushing effect that flows from the high 'energy pressure' (aether/zpe) of space and which moves into the earth and into all masses, then gravity and the very existence of mass relies on the continuation of that aether/zpe influx.
Note that the tail of the spider looks like the smaller end of an egg and the focal point of a vortex, like a tornado with the point facing towards the earth. The influx of aether/zpe into this vortex moves into Keely's 'neutral centre of mass'.
Something causes masses to oscillate and re-radiate the energy flowing into them. That something appears to be the influx of aether/zpe. A similar phenomenon occurs in an excited atom when the electrons in its outer shell collapses to emit photons. In a similar manner, the continuously excited mass emits waves that dissipate the excess energy to not only distort its own field pattern but that of other mass waves as well.
Legends, anecdotes and other reports indicate the production and use of anti-gravity effects using sound, magnetism, high voltage and even trance states such as with the Lung-Gom-Pa in Tibet. The Rhythmodynamics research of Dr. Yuri Ivanov shows the simplicity of what is actually going on in many of these cases which is energetic inertial redirection of the mass field that is distorted by background interference into the 'gravitational spider' pattern. For an overview of other reports check out; Saucer Song and my correlations..
As the above diagram shows, this apparent vortex action focuses the incoming aether/zpe/gravity waves to push the mass towards the earth. The surrounding field lines serve to hold the mass together and in material form. From the information provided by this new understanding, we should all now be in a position to carry out tests in hopes of producing a controlled weight loss.
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We are committed to working to preserve the values fair play, sportsmanship and drug-free competition in the world of sports. But we are building on a foundation that was laid by many courageous individuals and organizations before us, and they deserve to be recognized. That is the purpose of the Foundation for Global Sports Development Humanitarian Award.
The Foundation for Global Sports Development Humanitarian Award is presented to individuals and organizations that have stepped up as leaders and champions for social, economic, political or environmental justice and equality. This award honors those who actively fight against indifference, injustice and intolerance. It recognizes those who promote an international spirit of understanding, cooperation, friendship and development. But special attention is given to organizations and individuals that have enhanced the quality of life in their communities through mentorship and outreach, as well as those whose contributions have not yet been appropriately recognized.
The next Humanitarian Award is to be presented during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Follow us on our blog to find out who the next recipient will be!
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Several weeks ago a reader wrote in to ask a question about a very serious vaccine reaction in her cat, and last week I received a panicked phone call from the owner of one of my dog patients. The dog developed a little mass at her rabies vaccination site which has since gone away.
How often do vaccine reactions occur?
Vaccine reactions are usually mild and fortunately are quite uncommon, occurring in 40-50 of every 10,000 dogs or cats vaccinated. Life-threatening reactions are extremely rare following vaccination.
What does a vaccine reaction look like?
Puppies and kittens may be tired, lethargic or have a mild fever after their first inoculations. This is also the most common reaction in adult dogs and cats. Allergic reactions also occur. A pet with an allergic reaction to a vaccination has facial swelling, redness around the eyes and itching. Allergic reactions can occur rapidly after a vaccination and you might notice one even before you check out of your veterinarian’s office. You might notice swelling at the injection site a few days after a vaccination is given.
What type of pet is most likely do develop a vaccine reaction?
Small breed, young adult dogs are at greater risk for developing vaccine reactions than are older, large breed dogs. Administration of multiple vaccines at one time increases the risk of a reaction in both dogs and cats. Cats are more likely to have injection site swelling than dogs.
What can be done to prevent a vaccine reaction the next time my pet is vaccinated?
Before vaccination, discuss your pet’s lifestyle with your veterinarian to help him/her recommend the best vaccination protocol for your dog. If multiple vaccines are to be administered, your veterinarian may recommend only one vaccine be given at a time. To lessen the signs of an allergic reaction and to make your pet more comfortable, your veterinarian may choose to administer medications which lessen an allergic reaction. In some pets the reaction is so severe, vaccinations are not administered again.
If you notice anything strange about your pet following vaccination, call your veterinarian. Guidelines recommend a post-vaccination swelling be biopsied if it is growing larger within a month after vaccination, is greater than 2 cm (1 inch) in diameter or persists 3 months after vaccination. If your pet is having an allergic reaction, head straight back to the clinic or to your nearest animal ER.
This may also be found in the “Tales from the Pet Clinic” blog on WebMD.com.
For over a century, The Animal Medical Center has been a national leader in animal health care, known for its expertise, innovation and success in providing routine, specialty and emergency medical care for companion animals. Thanks in part to the enduring generosity of donors, The AMC is also known for its outstanding teaching, research and compassionate community funds. Please help us to continue these efforts. Send your contribution to: The Animal Medical Center, 510 East 62nd Street, New York, NY 10065. For more information, visit www.amcny.org. To make an appointment, please call 212.838.7053.
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Slow-growth Euro zone nations risk deflation, and persistent debt concerns put the Euro zone's future in doubt, the International Monetary Fund warned today. Companies and households hesitant to spend because they hope prices will fall in the future can be pushed into bankruptcy as real estate and other asset prices fall. Banks can be saddled with potentially ruinous levels of bad loans.
Countries such as Italy and Spain, where growth is slow and governments are counting on tax increases to reduce their staggering debt, face a 25 percent risk of consumer price deflation before 2014, the fund said.
Deflation, falling prices, can lead to a spiral in which price decreases lead to lower production, which leads to lower wages and demand, which in turn leads to further price decreases.
A deflationary spiral would additionally increase the difficulty for countries like Italy and Spain to control government debt because falling prices and wages would further depress tax receipts, the fund said.
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According to a report that was recently released by Statistics Canada, Saskatchewan had a 26.8 per cent decrease in EI initial and renewal claims between May 2011 and May 2012, the largest percentage decrease in the nation. There were 1,950 fewer claims during this period (seasonally adjusted). Nationally, claims decreased by 6.4 per cent.
"The strength of the Saskatchewan economy is having a positive impact on our workforce," Economy Minister Bill Boyd said. "It shows there are real jobs, real opportunities for people who are currently in the province looking for work or for those who are considering moving here."
On an unadjusted basis, EI beneficiaries dropped by 18.8 per cent in Regina and decreased by 6.0 per cent in Saskatoon between May 2011 and May 2012.
Monthly, claims decreased by 11.0 per cent between April 2012 and May 2012, well ahead of the national decrease of 4.2 per cent.
"With one of the lowest unemployment rates in Canada and with declining EI claims, Saskatchewan is becoming a destination of choice for job seekers," Boyd said.
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Cloud security should be as automated and efficient as cloud services
The lure of cloud computing is powerful indeed: lower costs and risks, faster execution of strategies, improved business agility, and thus a more competitive outlook. But realizing these benefits also requires that organizations find a way to address many new issues.
Security issues, for instance, often stand in the way of cloud deployment. A cloud may be a unified architecture in which the underlying resources and hardware are shared, but it's critical to ensure that data, applications, and services are not shared; instead they should continue to be managed in a governed fashion—just as in a conventional IT infrastructure—based on enforced access rights and security policies. And that's especially true given the fact that clouds are accessed by an increasingly diverse range of endpoints, which in many cases use operating systems that weren't originally designed to deliver enterprise-class security in the first place.
Furthermore, for the cloud to work as intended, new virtual servers will have to be continually created, managed, and retired automatically, based on fluctuating business needs. This means each of those servers will also have to be secured as comprehensively as possible, despite the fact that new security vulnerabilities, threats, and patches emerge every week. Correspondingly, regulation compliance—already a headache for many organizations—only becomes more complex and difficult to achieve for cloud services.
The upshot is that unless IT finds a way to orchestrate and secure the cloud's virtual servers in an automated, consistent, and cost-efficient fashion, the cloud could wind up requiring a great deal more manual oversight and operational resources than it should—compromising the total business value it delivers.
IBM Tivoli solutions deliver unified, cradle-to-grave security for all of a cloud's virtual machines
Fortunately, IBM—as a world leader in both cloud architectures and IT security solutions and strategies—is in a unique position to help. In particular, the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio includes a number of interoperable solutions that can combine to help secure cloud servers faster, more completely, and at reduced operational costs.
"SmartCloud Foundation's provisioning capabilities are exceptionally advanced, and fast enough to support the needs of even the largest clouds. Many thousands of new virtual servers per hour can be created, if need be, and subsequently monitored and managed across their full lifecycles."
And because they also work for conventional IT infrastructures, organizations will find that management is simplified in a holistic sense: they'll have one IT management platform that supports all contexts.
To understand how this happens, begin with IBM Endpoint Manager—a truly centralized solution that, using a single server and console, can manage up to a quarter-million different endpoints. This solution's intelligent agent supports an exceptionally wide variety of operating systems—Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, and various mobile device operating systems such as Android. It collects information from them, reporting it back to the server; it also carries out tasks on those endpoints, including software installation and configuration.
This comprehensive, elegant design (one agent, server, and console) means that organizations can use IBM Endpoint Manager to orchestrate a single, integrated security strategy not just for traditional endpoints (laptops, desktops, and smart mobile devices) but also production servers—meaning both traditional servers and virtual servers, such as those running in a cloud. Thus, as a cloud's virtual servers are created, they can be immediately secured in accordance with the organization's security policies.
How? For organizations empowered with a second IBM offering, IBM SmartCloud Foundation, it happens in an exceptionally seamless, rapid way. SmartCloud Foundation's provisioning capabilities are exceptionally advanced, and fast enough to support the needs of even the largest clouds. Many thousands of new virtual servers per hour can be created, if need be, and subsequently monitored and managed across their full lifecycles.
And to help secure those servers, SmartCloud Foundation integrates directly with IBM Endpoint Manager. Each new virtual server that SmartCloud Foundation creates includes the Endpoint Manager agent; thus, each of those servers is immediately discovered by the Endpoint Manager server. Subsequently, any new security task that must be fulfilled on that server—such as reconfiguring a firewall, deploying a new version of an application, or installing a new operating system security patch—can be carried out by Endpoint Manager as well.
Continuous compliance keeps cloud servers constantly secure—despite ever-changing threats, vulnerabilities, and patches
But how does the solution know which such tasks it needs to perform, on which servers?
Historically, this has been a very difficult question for IT teams to answer. This is because as servers and system images are gradually changed over time, their security postures are affected, and it becomes harder in proportion to establish whether and to what extent they conform to security baselines. So, as a result, there is always a lag between the point when a security standard should apply to all servers and the time when it actually does.
All of that changes for the better via IBM Endpoint Manager. Its intelligent agent, deployed in every one of a cloud's virtual servers by IBM SmartCloud Foundation, automatically tracks the security status and configuration of those servers—from cradle to grave. The configuration information it provides to the Endpoint Manager server, in turn, allows IT to establish in real time which servers require which security modifications (such as patches). Then, to address these discovered issues, Endpoint Manager directly communicates with the agent—orchestrating whatever modification is required.
This, in sum, is what IBM means by "continuous compliance"—there is very little lag time in executing any necessary change to the security baseline. The total IBM solution not only tracks and monitors the security posture of the complete cloud infrastructure, but actually enhances it as required in the shortest possible time, using minimal resources, and creating the smallest business impact.
When you add it all up, what kinds of benefits can organizations expect by implementing these IBM capabilities to secure cloud servers? Among others:
Finally, it's important to remember that Endpoint Manager's value extends far beyond clouds per se. The same capabilities it delivers to cloud servers, it also delivers to endpoints of all kinds, throughout the infrastructure—including conventional servers, user endpoints, and now, smart mobile devices used to access cloud-based services from anywhere in the world, using any network.
"Security Essentials for CIOs" article series: Navigating the risks and rewards of social media
Engaging in social media allows companies and their employees to access a global community of experts, innovators and potential clients. It also opens the door to new risks. Review best practices to build a risk-aware culture for the social world.
Read the article (PDF, 829KB)
Leverage and contribute to the collective wisdom around Tivoli
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The sub-teams are trusted to build a module in a short sprint of some form and the results are validated. Where a paradigm shift in trust is needed is between the organization's senior management and the Agile project leadership.
Traditional project management grew in an environment where the triple constraints of time, cost and output could be clearly defined early in the project life cycle, and certainly well before major funds were committed. For example, builders would tender on a reasonably complete set of design documents and offer a firm price and time.
The concept of predictability flowed into Waterfall; senior management expected a defined design, backed by cost and time estimates before committing to the project. This approach does not work very often but sits comfortably with the "command and control" management paradigm most organizations adopt.
An Agile approach to problem solving is quite different. The Agile team wants to be trusted to work with the product's end-users to craft a solution over a period of time. They are saying to senior management: "Trust us to come up with the best outcome. We'll know what it looks like at the end."
With the right level of two-way trust, senior management can use Agile to maximize value. Essentially they can guide their teams using one of two approaches:
We want the biggest bang for our buck. You have X budget and X months to do the most you can. We trust you to spend our resources wisely to achieve the greatest value.
We need this regulatory requirement embedded in our systems by X. We trust you to deliver the required change in the most cost- and time-efficient way.
In both scenarios the Agile team is trusted to craft the optimum solution working with the end-users. The challenge is developing this level of trust. Unfortunately, even where change is desperately needed, it rarely occurs. In Leading Change, J.P. Kotter suggests over two-thirds of change efforts fail. Clearly, building the trust needed to allow the benefits of Agile to be realized will require some serious project management discipline.
To be continued ...
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Best Buy store closings were announced Thursday when news came that the electronics company is reformatting their sales portfolio. 50 big-box locations throughout the United States will be shut down in addition to 400 employees being laid off. It's another hit for American retailers after Sears announced closing 120 stores last December.
There's a never-ending change in how the U.S. and the world does business. Typically it means workers pay the biggest price when they lose their jobs. In this global economy bigger being better isn't the only way to profitability. Sometimes it's a matter of consolidating.
The only good news about the Best Buy closures is that the company is opening 100 smaller stores to better serve customers in picking up online orders faster, have staff assist shoppers, and better streamline sales of trending items such as tablets, smartphones, and e-readers.
An exception to the Best Buy closings is two Connecticut stores and one in San Antonio, Texas will have room for expansion. Stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota are selected to be part of a massive test referred to as the "connected store."
A list of 50 locations for which big-box stores are closing hasn't been released by the company yet. There are 1,450 stores nationwide and 2,900 around the world. They want to keep lay-offs at a minimum and hope to save about $250 million this year alone. By 2015, their hope is the streamlining format will save them $800 million in costs.
Will such a strategy work for the store finding itself competing against online giants such as Amazon.com?
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NGC 4038: The "Ringtail Galaxy"
Deep sky objects often have more than one nickname and/or catalog designation; the galaxy NGC 4038 in the constellation Corvus is one such example. It's known both as the "Ringtail Galaxy" and as the "Antennae". Whatever you call it, this is one of the more interesting deep sky objects. At magnitude 10.7, it's easily visible on spring nights from a dark site. To locate it, draw an imaginary line from the star ä (Delta) to ã (Gamma), then about an equal distance further to the general field of NGC 4038.
This is not really a single galaxy, but an interacting pair (believed to be spirals) whose "Antennae" name refers to twin filaments of gas drawn out by tidal forces. Its more complete designation is NGC 4038/9, and it's also in the catalog of peculiar galaxies as Arp 244. New radio observations of the colliding galaxies suggest that they contain far more molecular gas -- the raw material of star formation -- than previously recognized. Using radio telescopes, University of Illinois astronomers have mapped carbon monoxide emissions from the pair. By making sensitive wide-field and high-resolution maps, they picked up signals that had been overlooked in earlier studies that only detected a handful of dense molecular clouds. They predict that NGC 4038/9 will undergo what's called an "ultraluminous starburst" about 100 million years from now, when the ongoing collision compresses the galaxies' reservoir of molecular gas to form billions of new stars in a spectacular galactic eruption. So in the far distant future this galaxy may become one of the most luminous objects in the heavens.
Another feature of this pair of galaxies is a number of globular clusters that appear especially bright in the blue end of the spectrum. This indicates they are unusually young for globulars and has led some astronomers to conclude that they were formed as a result of the interaction of the two galaxies.
As with any such object, the larger your telescope, the more you'll see. In my 10-inch, the hubs of the two galaxies stand out as separate nodes, with the arms fading off and becoming gradually indistinct. The system shows faint structure along both the major and minor axes. The following CCD image by Michael Purcell gives some indication of the complex structure of this system. Note the nodules of bright matter scattered throughout the disks of the galaxies. Catalogs show the fainter of the two galaxies, NGC 4039, as about magnitude 13; however, I found it quite easy to see, no doubt due to its proximity to NGC 4038.
After locating a galaxy such as this, it becomes an interesting mental exercise to consider the implications of what's going on out there. In the emptiness of space, two galaxies happen to have encountered one another, so near that they are tearing each other apart. They may actually be colliding. Too bad we won't be around in 100 million years to watch them erupt in spectacular fashion!
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Homeland: Images of Post-9-11 America
February 12–May 2, 2009
About the photographerNina Berman
is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been extensively published, exhibited and collected, garnering praise in both the art and journalism communities with awards from the World Press Photo Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Open Society Institute documentary photography fund. Her first monograph, "Purple Hearts — Back From Iraq" a collection of portraits and interviews with U.S. soldiers wounded in the war, was published by Trolley in 2004 and received wide acclaim. The book was made into a feature length documentary film by the same name and screened worldwide. Her work on wounded veterans has continued and her 2006 "Marine Wedding" portrait, which shows a severely disfigured marine with his young bride on their wedding day, is considered to be an iconic image of life during wartime. Her work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and throughout Europe. She is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in her hometown of New York City.
Press about the Exhibition:
- Newcity Art—In a most grisly and brightly colored photo-documentary about how the United States
has been turned into a playground for anti-terrorist...
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Researchers (and brothers) Brian and Craig Wansink have examined 52 of the most famous images of the Last Supper -- where Jesus and his disciples observed a Passover seder, the last before the Crucifixion -- and found a sizable increase in portions over the past millennium, from the year 1000 to ten years ago.
Brian Wansink told the LA Times, "I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or 'portion distortion,' is a recent phenomenon. But this research indicates that it's a general trend for at least the last millennium." Wansink, who authored Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and who has conducted many portion-size studies as director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, brought his years of nutrition research to the study. Meanwhile, his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, brought the religious studies chops to their analysis of what they are calling "history's most famous dinner party." Their findings, which have been published in April's issue of The International Journal of Obesity, showed that over the last 1,000 years, the main course size of the Last Supper increased by 69%, plate size by 66%, and bread loaves by 23%. The researchers used the disciples' heads as a point of reference, comparing them to their dinners. And the largest increases started about five hundred years ago -- right about the time Leonardo da Vinci finished painting his lush masterpiece, The Last Supper.
Why the increase in portion sizes? The researchers suggest they may reflect the better-fed lifestyles of the artists and their contemporaries, as time went by -- a result of "dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food." Which sheds new light on today's overeating culture. As the Wansinks put it: "The contemporary discovery of increasing food portions and availability may be little more than 1,000-year-old wine in a new bottle."
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Temporary files are the ones that are created by applications and placed in the Temporary Items folder.
In earlier versions of the Mac OS, getting rid of temporary files was generally and automatic process. However, Mac OS 9 doesn't seem to do this as well. Eradicator assists you in finding these files and then lets you delete them.
After these files are deleted, you have hard drive space available for more important items, like all those MP3s.
Please read the documentation for clear details on how to use Eradicator. It's really an easy process, and it's free.
Requirements: A PPC-based Macintosh; 2 MB of free RAM; MacOS 8.x or greater. International OS users: Users of international (non-English) versions of the Mac OS may not be able to utilize the "Cleanup at Startup" feature of Eradicator 1.6. A future version will hopefully resolve this issue. International users will still be able to take advantage of the "Temporary Items" features and related bug-fixes.
In this episode, we'll be looking at setting up a Bluetooth accessory, we'll offer a few power-saving tips and we'll take a quick look at how copy and paste works on the Samsung Galaxy SII 4G. view it
In this episode, we'll be taking a look at some of the pre-installed apps on the Galaxy SII including the Android Market, Gmail, the browser and the camera. view it
In this episode, we'll be taking a look at some of the Android tweaks that Samsung has made with its TouchWiz interface. We'll also take a look at adding widgets and app shortcuts to our homescreens, including Samsung's own specialized apps and widgets. view it
In this episode, we're going to take a look getting the SII setup with our Google and other accounts so we can begin using it right away. view it
The Samsung Galaxy SII 4G, AKA the Samsung Galaxy Epic Touch 4G, is a top-tier smartphone. view it
In this episode, we’re going to offer a few battery saving tips so your phone will last the whole day and beyond plus we’ll take a look at how copy and paste works on the Photon 4G. view it
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SEATTLE — A recent University of Michigan study has demonstrated that steam vapor rapidly and effectively destroys microbial biofilms, according to a press release.
Chuanwu Xi, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Michigan, and his research team found that treated steam from a novel steam disinfection system utilizing Accelerated Nano Crystal Sanitation (TANCS®) technology rapidly kills highly resistant biofilms with greater than 99.95 percent killing efficiency in a three-second treatment and to a non-detectable level in a less than 10-second treatment, the release stated.
"Scientific studies have found that biofilms can be up to 1,000 times more resistant to biocide inactivation than are suspended microbes," said Dr. Xi.
"It is extremely difficult to get rid of biofilms and kill them. The efficacy of the steam vapor system is important because even strong chemical disinfectants such as bleach when allowed 20 minutes of dwell time did not achieve the same degree of kill that the steam vapor unit accomplished in three seconds," Dr. Xi added.
Click here to read the complete release.
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- Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon
HarperCollins, 128 pp, £9.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 00 255497 6
Best known as an eloquent campaigner against pornography, Catharine MacKinnon is a lawyer – a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Not all of this book (based on talks given at Princeton) sounds much like legal argument, and particularly when she is talking about pornography she gives a rhetorical display which may well have been breathtaking in the lecture hall. But the book does in fact offer a legal argument, one which is interesting, and also deeply American, in the sense that MacKinnon discusses the problems raised by pornography and also by speech that constitutes sexual or racial harassment in terms of American law and the American Constitution. MacKinnon herself does not accept those terms as presently defined, and her book is an eloquent plea to Americans to move beyond what she sees as the prejudiced limitations of current doctrine, in particular of current liberal doctrine. As a plea to Americans, it takes for granted several aspects of American discussions. Some of this a British reader may find rather bewildering.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects ‘freedom of speech’; this has been interpreted in a robust way that makes it quite difficult to ban anything. There are some provisions to restrict pornography, in particular to make child pornography illegal, but hard work has gone into generating the rather shaky formulae that support the restrictions. Some of those who do not want pornography to be Constitutionally protected have tried to argue that it does not count for the purposes of the Constitution as ‘speech’. This is not because it now more often consists of pictures than words – a great deal of Constitutionally recognised ‘speech’ is not verbal. The claim is, roughly, that pornography is not ‘speech’ because it does not convey ideas: it is designed to produce erections rather than opinions. But this line has not found much favour, particularly with liberals. While most pornography conveys no ideas, some expressions that convey ideas may be thought pornographic (a mild case is a jacket of the Vietnam War era, often mentioned in the literature, which said ‘Fuck the Draft.’) More generally, it is hard to draw a line between different types of expression, with respect to their form, or their intentions, or their effects, and proclaim that some and not others count as the ‘speech’ which the First Amendment protects.
This is a point, then, at which liberals do not want to draw a line, and in order to understand some of what MacKinnon says, in particular some of her more vituperative asides, one has to see that she is attacking them on this score. MacKinnon does want to draw a line here. Since she wants the law to suppress pornography (or at least to provide remedies to those who have complaints against pornography), but does not want to suppress political argument on sexual subjects, she needs a distinction between more and less argumentative forms of expression.
While liberals are not keen to draw a line by distinguishing a kind of expression that is (so to speak) less than speech, they do need to distinguish what is ‘merely’ speech from what is more than speech – that is to say, from action. The First Amendment protects speech, argument, the exchange of ideas, and that includes obnoxious ideas, for instance of a racist character; but it does not protect hostile actions designed to intimidate people of another race. The extremely obvious problem is that some speech acts just are intimidating acts of that sort; or, to put it the other way round, some acts of an intimidating kind take the form of ‘mere’ speech, produced in some specific circumstances to a specific audience. In the case of political speech or anything that might conceivably be construed as political speech, the prevailing interpretations of the First Amendment go to remarkable lengths to protect the speaker, rather than the people whom the speech is intended to insult. In 1978, the American Nazi Party proposed to hold a march in Stokie, Illinois, a site chosen because many Jewish Holocaust survivors lived there. This demonstration was legally held to be protected speech, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court (Justice Blackmun dissenting).
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Mouse songs modified to be audible by humansScientists have known for decades that female lab mice or their pheromones cause male lab mice to make ultrasonic vocalizations. But a new paper from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis establishes for the first time that the utterances of the male mice are songs.
This finding, to be published Nov. 1 online by the journal Public Library of Science Biology, adds mice to the roster of creatures that croon in the presence of the opposite sex, including songbirds, whales and some insects.
"In the literature, there's a hierarchy of different definitions for what qualifies as a song, but there are usually two main properties," says lead author Timothy E. Holy, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. "One is that there should be some syllabic diversity—recognizably distinct categories of sound, instead of just one sound repeated over and over. And there should be some temporal regularity—motifs and themes that recur from time to time, like the melodic hook in a catchy tune."
The new study shows that mouse song has both qualities, although Holy notes that the ability of lab mice to craft motifs and themes isn't quite on a par with that of master songsmiths like birds.
Sonograms show mouse tune.
"Perhaps the best analogy for mouse song would be the song of juvenile birds, who put forth what you might call proto-motifs and themes," he explains. "It's not yet clear whether singing conveys an advantage to male mice during courtship, as it appears to do in birds."
Holy and study co-author Zhongsheng Guo, a programmer in his lab, came to be interested in the mice's vocalizations via the Holy lab's studies of the response evoked in the male mouse's brain by female mouse pheromones. Pheromones are chemical signals emitted by many different species that are frequently linked to mating.
"Studying this kind of response in mice lets us model higher-level tasks such as pattern recognition and learning in a brain where the neuroanatomy is much simpler than it is in humans," he explains. "The idea is to help us lay a foundation on which we can eventually construct a very concrete understanding of how these tasks are accomplished in the human brain."
According to Holy, scientists have not previously recognized mice vocalizations as song because they are unusually difficult to record and analyze. Only with the advent of improved technology for recording and analyzing the sounds and more powerful computers did it become possible to finally subject the vocalizations to careful analysis.
"We started recording the vocalizations to assess the factors that lead to recognition of female pheromones, but the vocalizations turned out to be much more complicated and interesting than we expected," he says. "That led us to decide to study them in their own right."
Likely areas for follow-up investigation include the question of whether wild mice vocalize in the same manner as laboratory mice, which have been kept and bred inside laboratories for more than a century.
"It's easy to imagine the wild mouse vocalizations will be different, since 'domestication' has changed many aspects of mouse behavior," Holy says. "So it would be intriguing to find out if their songs are more or less birdlike than the lab mouse songs."
Holy also wonders if mice learn singing from a tutor, as birds do.
"If these processes occur in mice, it may be a little bit easier to study the genetic factors that underlie song-learning in mice, because we already have a completed mouse genome, and the mouse is well-suited for genetic studies," he says.
The Washington University Genome Sequencing Center was a major contributor to the completed mouse genome, which makes it easier for scientists to draw links between genes in mouse DNA and proteins and processes they observe in the mouse. Comparative genomics can then be used to look for genes in human DNA that are likely to be linked to similar functions.
Holy T and Guo Z. Ultrasonic songs in male mice. Public Library of Science Biology, Nov. 1, 2005.
This study is currently available at: http://www.plos.org/press/plbi-03-12-holy.pdf
Funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Pew Scholars Program supported this research.
Washington University School of Medicine's full-time and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Consumers who are concerned about the impact of derivatives on their finances and the broader economy should consider the benefits over the past 30 years as well as the costs over the last two.
For example, derivatives have helped bring down the cost of mortgage borrowing significantly. Before interest rate swaps were widely adopted, the rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was over 15%. For almost a decade now, they have remained under 10%.
That's partly because certain products, like interest-rate swaps, allow banks to offset the risk that rates will change dramatically, that people will repay early en masse via refinancing, or that people will stop paying their mortgages altogether -- all of which occurred in recent years.
Similarly, derivatives have helped mitigate the blow of big commodity-price swings on consumer products. Commodity futures are contracts that allow big companies that make food, fly planes or have a vast distribution network that relies on fuel to offset the risk that fuel prices will climb tremendously.
That's partly why during the oil scare in 1974, before derivatives existed, prices surged 11%. In 1979 and 1980, when another fuel crisis was followed by a recession -- and derivatives were still just a glimmer in Wall Street's eye -- prices spiked 11.3% and 13.5%.
But in 2008, when oil prices reached the highest level ever recorded and as the credit crisis was coming to a head, consumer prices rose a measly 3.8%. Inflation hasn't risen above 10% since 1981, when the first major derivatives transaction was structured -- not on Wall Street, but between IBM and the World Bank.
Of course it's silly to argue that mortgage rates and consumer prices owe their stability to derivatives entirely. But there's a definite correlation between derivatives and Main Street that can't be ignored -- unless you sit in the halls of Congress, of course.
The "D" word has received a lot of negative attention since the exotic variety helped to tear down American International Group and some investment banking counterparts. Lawmakers have fueled the hostility and represent a misunderstanding of how they are actually used. They've often used their pulpits to characterize derivatives as profit centers for banks on Wall Street that do little good for average Americans.
One of the most recent attacks came on April 27, when Goldman Sachs executives were grilled about a questionable derivatives deal structured in 2007. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) was particularly incensed, referring to a Goldman honcho as a "pit boss in Las Vegas" and criticizing the synthetic collateralized debt obligation involved in the trade.
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Variable stars is our theme for May – stars that vary dramatically in brightness over hours, days, months or even years. The key to following their variations is the light curve, as Keith Cooper and Gemma Lavender explain, before looking at a particular class of pulsating star, the Cepheid variables, which have changed the way we look at the Universe. Finally, they take a look at the violent world of eclipsing binaries and cataclysmic variables.
Elsewhere we look at the weather forecast for Saturn’s moon Titan, which habours methane rain and a somewhat chilly temperature of -179 celsius. Keith Cooper finds out what drives the weather on Titan, while Joseph Baneth Allen meets the scientists on a question to find the missing asteroids – the Vulconoids – lurking between Mercury and the Sun. Sir Patrick Moore describes how, during the Second World War, he was able to take advantage of black outs and night time bombing raids to still observe the night sky.
In our regular section Telescope Talk, Martin Mobberley reminds you how to keep your telescope safe and Nick Howes looks at some recession busting tactics to keep doing astronomy in the lean times. Ninian Boyle compares an upgrade for the Vixen Sphinx mount with its predecessor in In the Shops, and we present two sky tours of variable stars and globular clusters in our extensive night sky section.
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Bring your products from Symbian, BREW, Palm, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry to the iPhone 3G!
iPhone is an integrated cellular telephone with flush multi-touch screen and internet-connected multimedia, designed and marketed by Apple Inc., that is being yearned by everyone these days. It is a revolutionary phone that needs minimum hardware input. In addition to its primary function as a cellular telephone, the iPhone includes music and video player, digital camera, PDA, and an Internet communications suite. iPhone applications are software programs that can be downloaded to the phone to give it new features. But iPhone applications need a different approach than the general desktop applications as the features of desktop applications might be unfeasible in the iPhone Applications.
iPhone is the fastest growing mobile phone platform in the market today. With the release of the SDK for iPhone, Apple has provided developers with an amazing platform for creating the next generation of innovative mobile applications.
Telkite with its expertise in Mac development is interested in partnering with innovative start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies for developing applications and Casual games for iPhone and iPod Touch. We also assist companies in bringing their favorite applications from other smartphones to the iPhone.
We have been at the forefront of Mac development for more than a decade. We have experience developing a large number of innovative products for the Mac and since developing for the iPhone is intuitive to a Mac OS developer, we can leverage our knowledge of Mac OS and drive the next wave of innovation for the iPhone.
The market for smartphone applications is much larger than that of the desktop market. With analysts predicting more than 25 million iPhones to be in the market before the end of 2008, the iPhone is all set to capture a major chunk of the smartphone market.
If you have your application on other smartphones and are looking at bringing this application on to the iPhone, we can help you. We assist you in deciding which existing application from other smartphones can be brought over to the iPhone and what features of the iPhone can your application leverage upon. We assist you right from the initial stages of deciding as to which application can be brought over to the iPhone till the application gets listed in the App Store.
Telkite for iPhone Application Development:
Telkite, a global iPhone Solutions provider has adequate resources to develop Custom iPhone Applications. With The applications developed by us, you can get the maximum benefit of this most exciting trend and get more out of your business. You can make your iPhone your pedometer, a voice recorder, a gym coach, a budget tracker or something more by adding applications to it. Whether you need it for business perspective or for personal use, we can serve you the de facto solutions for iPhone Development.
We have an adept staff of iPhone SDK Developer who can offer you:
iPhone Application Development
iPhone Website Development
iPhone Social Networking Application Development
iPhone Software Development and more
Following are few areas that we have been supporting in iPhone Application Development:
Tools for News and Blogging
We can offer you robust and scalable applications considering all your specifications. We cater you iPhone Applications having custom features as most of the websites need modifications to be displayed appropriately on iPhone. We can alter the existing applications as well as create them from scratch to make them compatible with iPhone.
to discuss your iPhone development needs.
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Obama Aims to Send Astronauts to an Asteroid, Then to Mars
This story was updated at 3:57 p.m. ET.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - President Barack Obama unveiled a sweeping new space vision for NASA and the United States Thursday, one that aims to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid and ultimately on to Mars in the mid-2030s.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 200 that included scientists, astronauts and policy makers here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, President Obama outlined his plan for NASA's future space exploration. That plan includes resurrecting a pared down version of the capsule-based Orion spacecraft initially slated to be scrapped under the president's cancellation of the Constellation program in February.
By 2025, the United States should be ready to test manned spaceships for deep space exploration, vehicles capable of exploring beyond the moon on the first-ever manned trip to an asteroid, Obama said.
"By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth," President Obama said. "And a landing on Mars will follow, and I expect to be around to see it!"
The new version of the Orion spacecraft would be launched unmanned to the International Space Station to serve as an escape ship for American astronauts, giving NASA more flexibility from its reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, White House officials said. Orion will also play a part in American deep space exploration, Obama said. [Fact sheet on Obama's space plan.]
"I think this president gets it," NASA chief Charles Bolden told the crowd after the president's speech.
Bolden called on the group to bring new ideas to a series of follow-up discussions on the future of the International Space Station, solar system exploration and fundamental technology research.
"This is not for show," Bolden said. "We want your ideas. We want your thoughts."
New big rocket by 2015
The president also announced his commitment Thursday to building a heavy-lift rocket in 2015, one which could be geared to launching new spacecraft and payloads for ambitious expeditions to a nearby asteroid and stable points in space called Lagrange points in preparation for a manned spaceflight to Mars. Obama has proposed a $19 billion budget for NASA in 2011, and added another $6 billion over five years onto that in his announcement today.
"We will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it," Obama said. "I want everyone to understand. That's at least two years earlier than was previously planned. "
NASA's original Constellation program aimed at retiring the space shuttle fleet in late 2010 and replacing it with Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets by 2015. The plan, announced in 2004 by then-president George W. Bush, sought to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.
But an independent review by a White House committee found the program behind schedule and underfunded to accomplish its end-goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020.
"I understand that some believe we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned," Obama told the invitation-only audience. "But I just have to say pretty bluntly here. We?ve been there before...there?s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it?s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach and operate at a series of increasingly demanding targets while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward. And that?s what this strategy does. And that?s how we will ensure that our leadership in space is even stronger in this new century than it was in the last."
Edward Crawley, an MIT professor who served on the White House committee, said Obama?s plan falls in line with one of the committee?s recommendations ? a flexible plan that allows for incrementally more ambitious deep space missions by astronauts using a new heavy-lift rocket.
"This is essentially ? the flexible path," Crawley told reporters before Obama's speech.
Obama unveiled his space plan at the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, the very same building NASA turned over to the Constellation program in 2009 to build and service Orion spacecraft. This is the first time in 12 years a sitting U.S. president has visited the Florida spaceport.
The last Commander in Chief to visit the NASA spaceport was President Bill Clinton, who went to watch original Mercury astronaut John Glenn rocket into space aboard the shuttle Discovery at age 77.
"For me, the space program has always captured an essential part of what it means to be American ? reaching for new heights, stretching beyond what previously did not seem possible," Obama said. "And so, as President, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury or an afterthought in America?s quest for a brighter future. It is an essential part of that quest."
Unpopular space plan
Obama?s proposal to cancel the Constellation program and call on commercial spacecraft builders to provide the spaceships to launch astronauts into space has drawn harsh criticism from lawmakers and the public alike.
Most recently, famed Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong ? the first person to walk on the moon ? and other lunar explorers spoke out against the plan in an e-mail statement sent to the media. Armstrong and fellow Apollo program astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan called Obama's space vision "devastating" to the United States' spaceflight legacy.
"To be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature," the former astronauts wrote.
Other critics blasted the plan because of its initial apparent lack of destination, while supporters contend that it will free NASA to tackle more ambitious space missions by using commercial vehicles to ferry American astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
Those supporters include Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the moon with Armstrong during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.
"I hope NASA will embrace this new direction as much as I do, and help us all continue to use space exploration to drive prosperity and innovation right here on Earth," Aldrin said in a statement. "Mars is the next frontier for humankind, and NASA will be leading the way there if we aggressively support the President?s plans."
NASA already has contracts in place with two American companies to provide unmanned cargo delivery services to supply the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet retires. Those companies ? the California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences in Virginia ? plan to begin testing their respective rockets and spacecraft over the next year.
Before arriving for his speech, Obama met with SpaceX founder Elon Musk at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where SpaceX is readying its new Falcon 9 rocket and prototype Dragon spacecraft for a May 8 launch debut.
"Handing over Earth orbit transport to American commercial companies, overseen of course by NASA and the FAA, will free up the NASA resources necessary to develop interplanetary transport technologies," Musk said in a statement. "This is critically important if we are to reach Mars, the next giant leap in human exploration of the universe."
More missions, more destinations
White House science advisor John Holdren said Obama's new space plan will boost the number of human spaceflights, and the number of destinations for space exploration ? manned and unmanned ? across the solar system between now and 2020.
Obama's space plan, which still needs to win approval from a skeptical Congress, still includes retiring NASA's shuttle fleet, but adds some funding to allow flights between September and December 2010 if there are slight delays. It would also extend the International Space Station's operations through at least 2020.
"It will expand the roster of deep space destinations that humans will explore after 2020," Holdren said.
NASA plans to fly just four more shuttle missions ? one of which is under way now ? before retiring the shuttle fleet later this year.
The space shuttle Discovery is in space today. The shuttle and a crew of seven astronauts are in the midst of a two-week delivery mission to the International Space Station. Discovery is due to depart the space station on Saturday and land Monday morning.
Here at the Kennedy Space Center, workers are focused on the 2,500 jobs beyond what was coming for the planned Constellation program ? also promised in Obama?s space plan. The center expected to lose thousands of jobs with the shuttle retirement in September and the cancellation of Constellation. Some 10,000 jobs are expected to be created across the country as a result of commercial spacecraft development, the president said.
Obama also said he is proposing a $40 million initiative to support Florida's regional economic development. The program would be aimed at preparing the local workforce for the coming shuttle fleet retirement to help find new jobs.
"I am 100 percent committed to NASA and its future because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society," Obama said.
- THE FACT SHEET: Obama's Space Plan Revealed
- Images: The Best Manned Spaceships of All Time
- NASA's Far-Out New Plans
MORE FROM SPACE.com
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Got your attention?
Good. May that be the last time you see the word displayed so prominently.
Today is the annual Spread the Word to End the Word Day. I've said enough about it, so I'm not going to say anything else. Read this for some perfectly perfect remarks about the word.
And read this, an essay that my ten year old son Oliver wrote all by himself as his submission to the No Name Calling Week contest:
“RETARDED” AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
The word “retarded.” What is its beauty and what is its downside and what does it mean? The question remains. When I get home from school, I wonder to myself about some of my friends and just anyone in general who says the word “retarded” whether they really know what that word means. And all the times when they say it, are they sure that they know what it means and are they sure that when they say it, they are not hurting anyone's feelings around them? The question remains. People think the word “retarded” means dumb, stupid and lots more hurtful things. All of those words hurt my feelings because my sister is cognitively disabled, which means it's harder for her to learn than it is for people with a normal brain. She can't walk without help and can't talk either, but that doesn't mean she's stupid or dumb. She stills knows how to think and interact with other people; she is just different. When people use the word “retarded” as a put-down or a joke, it hurts me and my sister and all the people like her. I wish they would stop.
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| ||C: N/A|| ||If the player is eligible to play a position he will have a fielding rating.|
All players have a rating of the form AeB. A is the range rating at that position (5 is best, 1 is worst). B is the error rating. This rating is a percentage indicating how this player's error rate compares to the average fielder at his position in the era in which he played. A rating of 100 means the player is average -- that is, he makes 100% of the errors expected of someone at that position. A player who makes only 50% as many errors as his peers is rated 50. Someone who makes twice as many errors as his peers is rated 200.
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"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." ~ Mark Twain “Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.” ~ H. G. Wells
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself." ~ John Adams
“Islam doesn't even have an original Qur'an. It was made up supposedly from "memory" and a few scraps found under a bed. This was about 150 - 200 years after Muhammad died at his wife Ayish's home in Medina, and he was lowered into a hole in the ground, where he remains.” ~ Steve Keohane, USN (Retired)
"I believe that President Obama has met all the requirements of citizenship AS SET FORTH BY THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, and therefore is eligible for the office of the presidency." ~ Senator Jeff Sessions via letter, April 21, April 25, & April 28, 2011.
“Freedom is not a gift nor does it simply exist for us to have, but rather it is a sacred duty, and its blessed yield of hope is born from none other than the blood of the innocent.” ~ Bryant H. McGill
The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [88 U.S. 162, 168] parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words 'all children' are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as 'all persons,' and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.
Under the power to adopt a uniform system of naturalization Congress, as early as 1790, provided 'that any alien, being a free white person,' might be admitted as a citizen of the United States, and that the children of such persons so naturalized, dwelling within the United States, being under twenty-one years of age at the time of such naturalization, should also be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States that might be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, should be considered as natural-born citizens. 8 These provisions thus enacted have, in substance, been retained in all the naturalization laws adopted since. In 1855, however, the last provision was somewhat extended, and all persons theretofore born or thereafter to be born out of the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were, or should be at the time of their birth, citizens of the United States, were declared to be citizens also. MINOR v. HAPPERSETT, 88 U.S. 162 (1874)
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Bay Arrea Indymedia Brenda Norrell | August 26, 2009
Indigenous Havasupai people held a gathering to stop uranium mining in the Grand Canyon and protect ancestral Havasupai Territory, at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, in July of 2009. Indigenous peoples and activists came from the four directions, from Arizona Hopi land and from as far away as Hawaii, to participate with sacred songs and ceremonies.
For four days, Havasupai elders gathered on sacred Red Butte and listened to the legacy of uranium mining on Indian lands. They heard directly from the victims of the trail of death and cancer left behind by uranium mining corporations that were never held responsible on Pueblo and Navajo lands in the Southwest United States. They also listened to the promise of solidarity from the hundreds who gathered here to stand with them: Navajos from Big Mountain, Hualapai, Hopi, Kaibab Paiute, Paiute, Aztecs, and other American Indians from throughout the Americas.
The Havasupai Nation, with the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, and Grand Canyon Trust, sponsored the gathering to halt uranium mining on Red Butte, July 23-26, 2009. Supai elders gave testimony for official U.S. records in their Havasupai (Pai) language and in English. Supai traditional singers sang as a camp was established on this mesa where Toronto-based Denison Mines is threatening to reopen a uranium mine.
Recent congressional legislation protects the Grand Canyon from new mining claims, but does not deter mining under existing claims held by Denison and others………………
………. “In Numbers, There is Strength”
During the panel, Larry King, Navajo from Church Rock, NM, told the gathering how he worked for the United Nuclear Corporation from 1975 to 1983 as an underground mine surveyor. King said he has lived all his life in Church Rock and still raises his cattle on the land where he grew up. Now, a community activist, he said Navajos in the communities of Church Rock, Pinedale, Coyote Canyon, and Iyanbito, NM, have suffered greatly from uranium mining.
…………… Speaking of the corporations who have contaminated this region for decades, Pino said, “Why would they want to mine uranium in one of the natural wonders of the world like the Grand Canyon? If they will mine uranium here, they will mine uranium anywhere. They have no heart, they have no soul.”
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You cracked a puzzle about the structure of strange crystals called approximants that had gone unsolved for eight years. Tell us more.
Sven: Approximants are related to quasicrystals, which are ordered atomic structures, but with symmetries that were believed to be impossible, for example fivefold symmetry. The approximants we studied have fivefold and 10-fold symmetry.
The result was Linus's name on a paper that was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A this month. What did you make of that?
Linus: It's rare and strange and cool. I don't know how many other 10-year-old kids have done this.
How did this father-son collaboration begin?
Linus: Me and my father did some sudoku. He was, like, "Let's put this number here and this number here", but I said that he was wrong. Then he was, like, "You're better at puzzles than me", and he asked if I wanted ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
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Lan Fang Chronicles 2012 is an exhibition by artist, Choy Ka Fai — investigating the 18th century Lan Fang Republic. Founded by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo, the Republic lasted for 107 years before it disintegrated. The project investigates and documents the insignificant histories of the Republic, reconstructing the story of what was and what could have been the Lan Fang Republic.
A currency was designed to symbolize the possible existence of a republic. This reconstructs the narrative of whether the Lan Fang Republic once existed or still exists, leaving the viewer to question and piece together their own version of this utopian world.
For more information:
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The Liminal Points Project by Nick Rochowski.
Series of 15 (2008-2011)
162 x 123 cm Lambda C-type print, edition of 5
“One of my first memories of the wood was on a family walk.
At one point while playing with my sister I decided to run ahead.
I came into a clearing and then quickly slowed down and stopped as I approached an entrance.
Despite the daylight it was dark at the edge of the clearing where the path continued into the wood.
Fear gripped me for a moment with a vivid thought.
Then we all continued in .”
The term liminality stems from Latin limen meaning boundary or threshold. Concepts of boundaries exist in all aspects of humanity and have been the study of many ethnologists, folklorists and philosophers. In particular, Plato considered the boundary between a reality and a heightened reality or altered state of mind.
My practice involves extensive observation and explorative research of a landscape, built environment or interior space. The work examines past experiences and memories in the context of a new, technologically developing and globally linked society and the psychological effects that permeate. The experience is solitary, raw and elemental and reaches deep into the psyche.
Penn Wood is a 500 acre area of woodland bordering the village where I spent most of my childhood. It is an ancient wood with mixtures of evergreen and deciduous trees, open planes and dense foliage. It also contains over a dozen trees that are uncommon in the county. Records of the wood go as far back as the Domesday survey in 1086. A book written by Miles Green in 1995 details the history of it and also helped in winning the fight against turning it into a golf course. The wood served as a source for the county’s famous chair industry, in fact in 1938 Europe’s largest chair factory was located in the local village of Penn Street next to the wood. During the second world war it’s resources were diverted to the manufacture of Mosquito wings. Upon entering England for the first time after WW2, my grandfather moved into a Nissen hut on the borders of the wood with a returning US army regiment. There he met and married my grandmother. The most important thing for me as child were the various dells that still existed from left over bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. Combined with the trees, overgrown rhododendrons, swamps and abundance of bracken they provided the perfect background for family walks, bikes rides, games, stories and aimless wandering. My fears and fantasies were manifested.
The project is in collaboration with music producer Deepsea and artist Greg Haynes
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The Second IASTED International Conference on
Power and Energy Systems and Applications
November 12 – 14, 2012
Las Vegas, USA
A Survey of Alternative Energy Sources and Conservation Approaches
This talk is a visual presentation/survey of several technologies covering alternative energy production as well as energy conservation, meant to heighten the interest of students in the subject. Escalating demand for energy, in a general sense, has created a particular and ever-increasing demand for alternative and renewable energy sources to help combat the shrinking supplies and/or increasing cost of retrieving conventional sources of carbon-based energy sources. This has given rise to a variety of approaches to try to achieve the goal of providing these alternative energy sources. The first approach is to try to provide, on a governmental fiscal level, tax incentives to entice consumers to use these technologies. These include, for example, tax rebates when installing photovoltaic systems in residential homes. Other technologies being looked at are: concentrating solar electric power generators, wind power, and geothermal generation of electric power or hydrogen production that can be thought of as an energy carrier.
The other side of the equation is to utilize technologies to try to restrain energy consumption so as to minimize the “energy footprint” of increasing energy usage. These technologies include, amongst others, better insulation, radiant barriers and reflective paints, and designing “zero energy” homes. Technologies such as these will help minimize energy usage in residences as well as institutional buildings. However, depending on where the residence/building is constructed some of these technologies may or may not be applicable.
Ultimately, in a free economy market forces will be driving the common place distribution of these technologies. For these technologies to survive on a large scale the life cycle costs must prove themselves as viable alternatives to the traditional energy generating technologies.
Biography of the Keynote Speaker
Dr. Moujaes received his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering respectively from the American University in Beirut (AUB) in 1972 and 75. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 1980. His general area of research and teaching is in the Thermal Sciences.
Dr. Moujaes is currently a Full Professor of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He also has had seven years of prior experience in the area of R&D in alternative energy sources and in HVAC applications respectively. He has over 94 refereed publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is also an Associate editor of the Journal of Energy Engineering (JEE). He has obtained over $1.5 M in various funded projects over the last few years. These areas include high temperature hydrogen production applications using solar and nuclear energy, high level nuclear waste thermal issues, solar energy, indoor environmental quality issues, HVAC applications, energy conservation and issues relevant to air duct leakage in HVAC air delivery systems. He has also consulted with regional and national companies on some of these topics.
He has been active with several engineering societies and has founded three student chapters at UNLV those of ASME,ASHRAE and ANS as well as being the chair of the local ASME professional chapter for several years.
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Trans-Lex Administrative Information
[click here to copy citation to clipboard]
Please Cite as: "http://www.trans-lex.org/968900".
No. XIII.1.1 - Arbitration agreement
(a) An arbitration agreement is an agreement by the parties to submit to arbitration - whether administered (institutional arbitration) or not (ad hoc arbitration) - all or certain disputes or disagreements which have arisen or which may arise between them in respect of a defined legal relationship, whether contractual or not.
(b) An arbitration agreement may be in the form of an arbitration clause in a contract or in the form of a separate agreement (submission agreement).
(c) An arbitration agreement shall be in writing. An agreement is in writing if it is contained in a document signed by the parties or in an exchange of letters, telex, telegrams or other means of telecommunication which provide a record of the agreement, or in an exchange of statements of claim and defence in which the existence of an agreement is alleged by one party and not denied by another.
(d) The law applicable to the arbitration agreement is to be determined according to Principle XIV.1 .
Please click below for (full) text references[arbitral awards] [court decisions] [national legislation] [international legislation] [arbitration rules]
There are no Threads related to this document. Open one by yourself.
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The Republican party lost one of its most treasured figures this weekend. North Carolina Senator and noted civil rights foe Jesse Helms died Friday at the age of 86.
Since his early days in the Senate, which date back to 1973, Helms used his position and connections to reinforce the conservative movement. In fact, many attribute his passion as the impetus behind the rise of the right wing in America, particularly his championing of Ronald Reagan:
Helms’ decision to back Ronald Reagan’s upstart bid against President Gerald Ford in 1976 led the struggling California governor to an upset win in the North Carolina primary, setting the stage for his eventual White House win four years later.
“In one sense, the role that Jesse played in that one primary 32 years ago was key to electing a president — which was key to Reagan, which was key to America winning the Cold War,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime political operative in the Helms machine.
Though beloved by Republicans, the left found Helms archaic politics repugnant. Of Helms’ many political sins were his fight against the Civil Rights Amendment, which he took as an affront to the “Southern” way of life, by which he meant state-sanctioned racism. Along the same lines, Helms also fought against establishing Martin Luther King Day, saying that our Congress couldn’t possibly idolize a man who had ties to socialist activists. Helms also used his seemingly bottomless loathing to fight against modern art and, of course, gay rights. Not only did he introduce and support anti-gay legislation, he consistently blamed the homos for AIDS, saying, “I’ve never heard once in this chamber anybody say to the homosexuals, ‘stop what you’re doing.’ If they would stop what they’re doing there would not be one additional case of AIDS in the United States.”
An ideologue through and through, Helms – who left the Senate in 2003, scoffed at party peers who “liberalized” their politics and adapted to changing times. Evangelical leader Billy Graham touched upon Helms’ conservative commitment in a brief public statement:
Jesse Helms, my friend and long-time senator from my home state of North Carolina, was a man of consistent conviction to conservative ideals and courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics.
In the tradition of Presidents Jefferson, Adams and Monroe — who also passed on July 4th — it is fitting that such a patriot who fought for free markets and free people would die on Independence Day. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, I thank God for the blessings we enjoy, which Senator Helms worked so hard to preserve.
Ironically, Helms death counts as a strike against the national conservative movement, which, with the death of Jerry Falwell and now Helms, has yet to find a young champion to lead it into the 21st century. His legacy, however, lives on in North Carolina, where the GOP platform continues to rail against the homos, “Homosexual behavior is not normal and should not be taught as acceptable.” Helms would be proud, we’re sure.
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Planning officials in D.C. are rewriting the city's zoning rules for the first time in 54 years, and the process is increasing residents' anxieties about growth, The Washington Post reported.
The proposed changes are small — allowing a corner store here, fewer parking spaces there — but the debate has grown in recent months, pitting some longtime residents and civic activists against city officials and advocates of denser transit- and pedestrian-oriented development.
A man broke the world record by riding a Ferris wheel.
Can you guess why this pigeon is the world's most expensive?
Something unusual: Acupuncture for ailing sea turtles. (Photos)
Check out the most expensive home for sale in the U.S. (Video)
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Welcome to Favorite Freezer Foods:
Freeze Food, Eat Well, Be Well
Learn how to freeze food and you can simplify your life.
Freezing food is the easiest method of preservation, keeps food closest to it's natural texture and flavor without needing additives and this simple technique of making meals ahead can get you eating real food with your family again.
This site is your guide to freezing food, freezer cooking and meal planning with recipes, instructions and community.
Is your kitchen table looking lonely? If you want to have more meals at home with your family even on days when you don’t have time to cook I can help.
I’m Michelle Zack, freezer cook extraordinaire, and I’ll guide you in your quest to start having homemade meals again.
Freezing food ahead allows you to save time, money and be healthier eating homemade meals with simple from scratch recipes.
It’s a bold statement, I know, but it’s absolutely true. Let’s face it; we’re all busy, we all know we need to eat better and we all know that good food and quality meals are essential to a healthy lifestyle.
Pulling a meal out of the freezer is faster than the drive through, delivery or your favorite eat in restaurant.
Homemade meals are cheaper than eating out and since you control all the recipes and ingredients you can rest assured that your family is eating healthy food.
But how can we get home cooked meals made without quitting our jobs or going insane? My solution is to prepare homemade from scratch meals when I have the time and freeze food for later when I don‘t have the time, energy or desire to cook.
So drive past the line at the drive through, put down the phone, step away from the boxed entrees in the grocery store and get a healthy homemade dinner on the table.
What Can You Find On Favorite Freezer Foods?
This site is all about freezing food and all it’s nuances. That includes meals and recipes that freeze well, cooking tips and advice and more.
Whether you’re new to freezer cooking, a seasoned OAMC (once a month cooking) veteran, looking for new recipes for a supper swap or an overwhelmed novice just learning to freeze food you’ll find what you need.
Let’s start with a quick and easy guide to help you navigate your way around.
1) Get started learning how to freeze food.
This section is your guide and reference. Learn the proper freezer temperature, how and why to keep an inventory, what foods freeze well, what containers to use, how to thaw food and a everything you need to know to start freezing meals ahead.
2) Find recipes that freeze.
I don’t believe in secret recipes, any recipe worth bragging about is worth sharing.
Every recipe on my site is freezable and has or is linked to detailed freezing, thawing or reheating instructions. Sure I could share recipes that can’t freeze but you can find those anywhere.
3) Find variations.
I do my best to include variations for those who want to try a new twist on an old favorite or are looking for gluten free substitutions and welcome your suggestions for new variations as well.
4) Join the Community
Use the forms on this site to share your best make ahead meal ideas, recipes, ask questions or help others.
Share your own freezer friendly recipes; tell us how you adapted your family’s favorite dinner into a freeze ahead meal or tempt us with your scrumptious sides.
Q & A:
Ask questions and get answers from someone who’s been there and done that.
Ok, I haven’t tried everything under the sun but I’ve got resources and if I don’t know the answer to your question about how to freeze food I’ll help you find it.
This site is also being added to so if you want to know about a cooking or freezing topic I haven’t covered yet ask away. I do recommend you use the site search before asking because if it’s already covered you’ll get your answer a lot quicker.
Have a different solution or opinion than mine? Share that too, it makes us all better cooks!
Tips and Techniques:
Share the best tips and techniques you use to freeze food.
Do you double meals and share a frozen batch with your elderly parents when you visit them Sunday nights? Make an extra serving to freeze for your college kid? Freeze brown rice ahead and microwave on busy weeknights when you don’t have to time to cook it fresh?
We wanna heard all about it!
I’m an avid reader and have read nearly every book on how to freeze food that there is. In this section of the site you’ll find my personal reviews of make ahead and freezer cookbooks.
It’s the most complete review collection online for make ahead and freezer cooks, some of these books don’t even have reviews on Amazon yet.
Leave your comments on my reviews or write your own.
Join me on Favorite Freezer Foods Facebook Page for even more content. I like to share freezable meals from around the blog-o-sphere, food news and politics, even the occasional cooking video as I happen to stumble across them in my cyber travels.
The page is also set up so you can make posts of your own and share the freezing food techniques and recipes you come across (only available for people who like the page).
5) Freezer Meals: Recipes and More Blog
If you use an RSS reader you can add my blog feed.
If you don’t know what an RSS reader is than just know that the blog page is the one place on the site that gets updated whenever new content is added. A new book review, chicken recipe, question and answer, they’ll all show up on this one page.
So when you come back to the site you can check one page and see all the new content since you’re last visit, or at least the most recent content.
6) Favorite Freezer Foods Ezine
The monthly ezine comes out on the 4th. In it you’ll find updates on the site and a few articles with more unique tips and techniques about how to freeze food, meal plan and more.
You’ll also receive a free printable freezer inventory sheet as my gift to you when you sign up.
- Favorite Freezer Foods Ezine
- Favorite Freezer Foods ezine about freezer cooking, meals, recipes and more.
- Freezer Meals: Recipes and More
- Instructions for freezing foods and free recipes for freezer meals. Favorite Freezer Foods blog.
- Personal coaching with a freezer cooking and meal planning expert can help you save time, money and eat healthier.
- Googel search on Favoritefreezerfoods.com
- Freezer Cooking Getting Started
- Getting Started With Freezer Cooking. Freezer cooking is simpler than canning, drying or any other type of preserving food. It does not require additives to your food or large investments in supplies
- Freezer Inventory
- Freezer Inventory. Organize your freezer meals so nothing gets lost and forgotten ever again. Know what's in your freezer without even opening the door.
- Cookbook Reviews
- Cookbook reviews for the home cook with emphasis on make ahead and freezer cookbook reviews.
- Freezer Containers To Keep Your Food Safe and Fresh
- Quailty freezer containers are the single best investment you can make to protect your freezer meals. Learn about the different types of containers and when to use them.
- Freezing Food Crash Course
- The Freezing Food Crash Course: A guilt-free guide to making evenings more peaceful and dinner more simple for working moms who want to take even better care of their families.
- Freezer Cooking Questions
- Get answers to your freezer cooking questions!
- Your Fabulous Freezer Recipes
- Discover mouth-watering freezer recipes submitted by visitors or shar your best freezer meal recipes here.
- Frozen Vegetables | Frozen Vegetable Recipes
- Learn about the nutrition of frozen vegetables, how to freeze them at home and discover freezer cooking recipes for vegetables.
- Frozen Bread Recipes and Techniques
- Frozen bread and baked goods. Recipes for homemade bread and instrutions on freezing bread.
- Homemade Soup Recipes and Freezing Techniques
- Homemade soup recipes that are great for lunch or dinner with a sandwich,a salad or by themselves. Freeze soup is single serving portions for any meal.
- Diabetic Dinner Recipes For the Freezer
- Diabetic Dinner Recipes | Recipes that you can make ahead and freeze for people with diabetes. Also find information on freezing food, book reviews and more.
- Quick and Easy Chicken Recipes
- Quick and easy chicken recipes you can make now or freeze for later.
- Simple Homemade Marinade Recipes AKA "Dump" Recipes
- Simple homemade marinade recipes are known as "dump" recipes in freezer lingo. Making your own marinade sauce is easy. There's no need to buy expensive marinades or that are full of preservatives.
- Quick Easy Cookie Recipes
- I love quick easy cookie recipes. Check out my favorites, share your own and see what cookie recipe variations others share.
- Quick Easy Dessert Recipes You Can Make Ahead
- Quick easy dessert recipes that you can make ahead mean you don't have a hassle after dinner. What good is a great dessert if you're not relaxed to enjoy it?
- Cook a moist, tender turkey
- Everything you need to know to cook a delicious turkey for a holiday meal.
- Contact Favorite Freezer Foods
- Contact Favorite Freezer Foods
- About Favorite Freezer Foods
- Who's behind Favorite Freezer Foods?
- Ethical Advertising and Disclosures
- Favorite Freezer Foods policies about advertising and disclosures.
- Freezing Corn on the Cob
- Freezing Corn on the cob: Direction on how to freeze corn. Also find freezable recipes, timesaving ideas, cook book reviews and more.
- Cranberry Sauce Recipe
- This cranberry sauce recipe is simple to make and adds a much more elegant touch to your Holiday meal than the store bought variety.
- Meal Planning Ideas |Tips and Advice on How to Easily Prepare a Menu
- Meal Planning Ideas | Simple tips and practical advice to make dinner time easily, saving your time and your precious sanity.
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A Comprehensive Analysis of Economic Community in East Asia: Japan's Leadership in the Regional Development on both Economic and Financial Sides
AbstractEast Asian nations are currently undertaking the future development of an economic community by creating a viable framework for closer cooperation and deeper integration. However, the intractable problem is that there are a lot of diversities and heterogeneity that have prevented the East Asian nations from reaching coordinated policies for the promotion of regional cooperation and combining efforts on integrating their economies with each other. This paper thus presents that a successful process of forthcoming regional integration on the economic side would accompany with strenuous efforts to create a common market among ASEAN, China, South Korea, and Japan by establishing a free trade area covering the entire region. As the two major countries in the region, in the arrangement, China and Japan would have centered roles in promoting economic cooperation in East Asia. However, it is practically impossible to decide either China or Japan is capable of taking the initiative in the development without providing various rationales for economic cooperation and examining economic challenges facing the both nations. In the development,, in addition, Japan’s agricultural policy could be defined as the essential part of assessing its regional and bilateral measures consistent with the rules of the WTO, in particular, GATT Article XXIV requirements that raise the problem of the concise interpretation of “substantially all the trade.” East Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 also serves as a catalyst in considering the issues of regional integration on the financial side, the principle of which is to sustain an economic recovery and minimize the risk of another crisis. The important point is how the East Asian nations foster a regional financial framework under ASESAN+3 in which there has been ongoing debates on the development. This paper thus discusses possible approaches to enhance regional financial cooperation and provides various rationales for developing regional financial schemes while examining Japan’s assistance measures shortly after the financial crisis, which became a significant step toward attaining the economic recovery of the crisis-affected countries and bringing the financial stability to the region. In order to sustain the economic growth in the region, the East Asian nations are currently considering the issue of monetary integration in the feasibility of introducing a common currency basket regime that is best understood as the willingness of jointly working toward a full currency union. The evidence supports my conclusion, while answering the question of how Japan should exercise its leadership in developing regional integration on both economic and financial sides, that the creation of the economic community resulting from the common market with the full currency union would bring the huge prosperity to the region.
Download InfoIf you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by EconWPA in its series International Trade with number 0510003.
Length: 46 pages
Date of creation: 15 Oct 2005
Date of revision:
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 46
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://188.8.131.52
regional integration; East Asia; Japan; FTA; poverty reduction; agriculture; WTO; GATT Article XXIV; substantially all the trade; East Asian Financial Crisis; ASEAN+3; monetary integration;
Find related papers by JEL classification:
- F1 - International Economics - - Trade
- F2 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business
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RI Director Gideon Peiper looks at a patient recovering from cataract surgery during an eye camp in Lagos, Nigeria, in October.
By Suman Ramesh, a member of the Rotary Club of Lago-Palm Grove Estate, Lagos, Nigeria
Seeing the joy on people’s faces when they receive their sight back is an unforgettable experience.
Every year, the Rotary Club of Lagos-Palm Grove Estate, Lagos, Nigeria, sponsors an eye camp with medical staff from the Eye Institute in Navsari, India, treating nearly a thousand patients in the Nigerian states of Lagos and Ogun spread over 10 days. Continue reading
Pulmão de Aço (Iron Lung), published this year in Brazil, tells the story of Eliana Zagui, a polio survivor who has lived for decades in a hospital in Brazil.
By Eliana Zagui, author of Pulmão de Aço (Iron Lung)
Before it was eradicated through the effort of massive immunization campaigns in 1989, poliomyelitis was prevalent in Brazil. The lack of vaccine and poor sanitation in small towns resulted in thousands of victims a year. Avoiding polio was often a matter of luck.
In January 1976, at the age of two, my luck ran out. I woke up with a fever and weak lower limbs. Although my parents were used to my recurrent episodes of sore throat, they brought me to the nearest city of Jaboticabal for medical treatment. The next day, lacking a diagnosis, I was sent to Ribeirão Preto, a larger city with better medical facilities. By the time the doctors Continue reading
Polio survivor and Rotarian Ramesh Ferris meets Rukhsar Khatoon, India’s last reported case of polio.
By Ramesh Ferris, a member of the Rotary Club of Whitehorse-Rendezvous, Yukon, Canada
This month, around the second anniversary of India going polio-free, I traveled to southern India to meet my biological father for the first time. Rotary International also arranged for me to meet another special person, Rukhsar Khatoon, who at 13-months of age, contracted the last reported case of polio in India in 2011. Continue reading
Rotarians in Mexico promote polio eradication during the Panamerican Car Race.
By Leticia Parra, a member of the Rotary Club of Bellavista-Atizapan
Rotarians in Mexico were proud to be part of a great effort to publicize Rotary’s work in eradicating polio. During the Panamerican Car Race 19-22 October, more than 100 cars were decorated with End Polio Now stickers as they raced 3,100 kilometers (about 1,900 miles) across Mexico.
Drivers took part in events each day where they discussed the importance of ridding the world of the disease. Continue reading
By Tim Ryan, a member of the Rotary Club of Toledo, Ohio, USA
I was in Abuja, Nigeria, last month as part of a team taking part in National Immunization Days (NID). I danced with nurses at lunchtime. I had lots of fun. I did not want to leave.
The entire team met committed doctors, saw lots of polio victims (mostly children), and took many photos. Experience has shown that by aiding polio victims from the local infected communities, Rotarians help the families become the best advocates for polio immunization. Continue reading
Rotarians in Argentina display an End Polio Now banner at River Plate soccer stadium. From left José Luis De Laurente, Roberto Fontanella, Federico Frangiosa, Marcelo Frangiosa and Javier Costalonga. Photo courtesy of District 4855
By Marcelo Enrique Frangiosa, governor of District 4855 (Argentina)
On Sunday, 2 December, our district had a very busy and very happy day. It started with a “Polio Plus Fellowship Asado,” a barbecue where more than 150 Rotarians and friends celebrated their friendship, while raising funds for polio.
After taking a “This Close” photo, part of the district polio plus committee and I rushed to the River Plate Stadium to focus even more attention on the polio eradication efforts. Our team circled the soccer stadium proudly displaying the End Polio Now banner. Continue reading
Nigerian Health Minister C.O. Onyebuchi Chukwu takes part in a polio-corrective surgery during the medical mission.
By Rajiv Pradhan, past governor of District 3132 and primary project contact for the medical mission to Nigeria
The medical mission to Nigeria was a life-changing experience for the Indian doctors who took part and for the children who underwent polio-corrective surgeries.
The orthopedic surgeons, all with experience in these types of surgeries, came from all corners of India. Many more surgeons and anesthesiologists wanted to join than we had room for on the team. Continue reading
By Julia Yank, a member of the Rotary club of St. Clair County Sunset, O’Fallon, Illinois, writing from Nigeria as part of a team taking part in National Immunization Days
When my mother asked if I would go to Nigeria for a National Immunization Day to assist in the eradication efforts against polio, I had no way of imagining what lay ahead.
Being the daughter of past District Governors Greg and Catherine Taylor Yank, in District 6510, I have Rotary in my blood. Continue reading
By Al Bonney, a member of the Rotary Club of Traverse City, Michigan, USA, writing from Nigeria as part of a team taking part in National Immunization Days
Before this trip, I had never looked a polio survivor outside the United States in the eye, engaged him in conversation, and seen his pain, sadness, and even resignation.
As a Rotarian, I have been aware of Rotary’s efforts to eradicate polio once and for all. But this was just two humans, mano a mano, seeking the same life of dignity and respect as the other, and it was my responsibility to communicate that respect and dignity. Continue reading
Ann Lee Hussey immunizing a child against polio in Chad.
By Ann Lee Hussey, polio survivor and member of the Rotary Club of Portland Sunrise, Maine, USA. Hussey is one of 12 Rotarians being honored 5 April at the White House as a Champion of Change.
As a 17-month-old toddler, I contracted polio. Burning up with fever, I was paralyzed from the waist down. It was July 1955, only three months after Jonas Salk’s vaccine was released to the public. I was lucky to regain the use of most but not all of my leg muscles. Today, after multiple surgeries, braces, and physical therapy, I am able to walk with limitations. Continue reading
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The death of King Henry VIII throws his kingdom into chaos because of succession disputes. His weak son Edward, is on his deathbed. Anxious to keep England true to the Reformation, a ... See full summary »
An aspiring young physician, Robert Merivel found himself in the service of King Charles II and saves the life of a spaniel dear to the King. Merivel joins the King's court and lives the ... See full summary »
Robert Downey Jr.,
Biography of Camille Claudel. Sister of writer Paul Claudel, her enthusiasm impresses already-famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. He hires her as an assistant, but soon Camille begins to sculpt ... See full summary »
The death of King Henry VIII throws his kingdom into chaos because of succession disputes. His weak son Edward, is on his deathbed. Anxious to keep England true to the Reformation, a scheming minister John Dudley marries off his son, Guildford to Lady Jane Grey, whom he places on the throne after Edward dies. At first hostile to each other, Guildford and Jane fall in love. But they cannot withstand the course of power which will lead to their ultimate downfall. Written by
Samantha Santa Maria <TE7441667@ntuvax.ntu.ac.sg>
The only ever cinema film score composed by music composer Stephen Oliver whose work was mostly in television. See more »
Although the film is correct to portray Jane as a precocious and talented scholar, it contains a number of historical inaccuracies. Jane was not a social reformer during her reign as in the film. That type of social reform was not part of political thinking during the Tudor era. See more »
A proverb says that a wonder lasts nine days then the puppy opens his eyes. So... what happens on the tenth day?
See more »
This is one of those movies where after you turn it off, it sticks with you. The acting is exquisite and the whole movie is executed with sensitivity. After watching it, I felt like I had to know more about Lady Jane Grey's real story. The truth, as the history books tell it, isn't quite as pretty or romantic as the movie made it seem, but other than that it is very historically accurate as most period piece movies go. I would strongly recommend this film (10 stars!) and would see it over again.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
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- Future Students
- Giving to LC
You are here
Summer Programs for Youth
Louisiana College is proud to host several summer programs for the youth in our community.
CATS--Center for Academically Talented Students
The Center for Academically Talented Students (CATS) demonstrates Louisiana College's commitment to meeting the needs of the academically strong student. Each summer, CATS provides elementary and junior high students the opportunity to receive accelerated enrichment experiences designed to challenge the academic ability of each child. In addition, social actitivies with peers (daily swimming, healh and physical activities, etc.) independent study projects at each grade level, and in some classes small group field trips will be provided. Enrollment is lmited in each class to ensure the quality of the program.
For further information, please email Pam McLin at email@example.com. If you would like a brochure to be mailed to you, please email your name and address to the email above.
Offered biennially, the LC Nurse Camp is designed to help high school juniors and seniors explore the field of nursing and determine if a career in nursing is right for their future.
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CHICAGO – An 88-year-old suburban Chicago man said he was "tickled" to receive France's highest honor for his service in World War II.
But James Butz, of Schaumburg, was humble about the award, saying during a ceremony in Chicago on Friday that thousands of other service members -- American and French -- did what he did.
"I'm not a war hero," Butz said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "The heroes are the ones that didn't come back."
French Consul Graham Paul presented Butz with the Legion of Honor medal for his help in liberating France in World War II. It is the country's highest distinction, and is awarded only to those with the most distinguished records, according to the French Consulate. It is not awarded posthumously.
Butz enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 and was sent overseas the following year. He fought fought in D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and the Colmar Pocket.
Butz said the harshest campaign was the Battle of the Bulge.
Troops fought for weeks in subzero temperatures, sleeping outdoors. Butz called it "the worst period of my life" but said he's grateful because the allies turned back the Germans. Butz earned two Bronze Stars for his role in the battle.
"I'd never been so cold, I'd never been so frozen, I'd never felt so completely all alone," he said.
After returning to the United States he married, attended the University of Notre Dame and started a job in Chicago.
His family began working two years ago to document Butz's service so he could be considered for the award. Butz suffers from leukemia and is losing his vision due to macular degeneration. His family was able to get the medal early so they could give it to him at Christmas.
As the French Consulate in Chicago on Friday, Butz's voice cracked as he thanked France for the honor.
"At 88 I'm tickled to be standing up to receive this award," he said.
As part of the ceremony, Butz was inducted as a chevalier, or knight.
He was joined by more than 20 family members, who raised a champagne toast to "Sir Grandpa."
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- Special Sections
- Public Notices
Most Christians know little about our Jewish heritage. Little is known of the seven Jewish feasts that were celebrated in the spring and in the fall.
Hidden in the spring feasts are foreshadowing’s of the first coming of the Messiah.
This year, Passover, Pesach for Jewish observers, comes on April 20. For the Jew, this is a remembrance of how “the Angel of Death” passed over, and they were delivered from 400 years of bondage in Egypt.
For the Christian, this is a reminder of how Jesus delivered us from the bondage of sin and death.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the Brunswick Beacon, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
If you are new to the award winning Brunswick Beacon and wish to get a subscription or simply gain access to our online content then please enter your ZIP code below and continue to setup your account.
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The Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association of Ontario
About the National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association (HBPA)
In the early years, the sport of horse racing seemed simpler. There was no simulcasting, discussion of appropriate marketing strategies, super testing, or betting via direct computer links. At the time there were no organizations know today merely by acronyms such as the THA, TOC, KTA, TOBA, UTTA, AQHA that represented horsemen’s interests.
Horsemen have a habit of taking care of their own. If someone was sick or down on his luck, they “passed the hat” taking up collections. It was during the year 1940 in New England that a group of committed horsemen brought into existence what is now known as the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association. The founding group included such names as Irv Gushen, Doug Davis, John Manfuso, Dr. Alex Harthill, Johnny McDowell, Mort Wolfson, and Jack DeFee. From this meager beginning the HBPA has developed into an organization representing the horsemen’s interests on a myriad of issues.
Today there are over 35,000 thoroughbred Owner and/or Trainer members throughout the United States and Canada focused on a common goal — the betterment of racing on all levels and collectively adopting the following mission statement:
“We are committed to the future of horse racing; – We are horsemen who have one horse and a dream; – We are horsemen who spend millions of dollars; – We are horsemen who race throughout the country; – We are Owners, Breeders, and Trainers. Big and small, young and old; from one end of the country to the other — we horsemen are the HBPA. We are Horsemen Helping Horsemen.”
In order to take an active role in the direction and policies of the organization we recommend all thoroughbred horsepeople notify the Association when they become licensed as an Owner and/or Trainer in the Province of Ontario.
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When a judge ruled that Alejandrina Cabrera’s name couldn’t be on the ballot for City Council in San Luis, Arizona, because she couldn’t speak English well enough, it was not only a blow to her, but to her fellow citizens, Cabrera told CNN.
“When he took my right to be on the ballot he took away the right of the people who want to vote for me,” Cabrera said in an interview conducted in Spanish with CNN en Español.
A battle over Cabrera's run for office began when Juan Carlos Escamilla, the mayor of San Luis, said he was concerned that Cabrera might not have the proper grasp of the language for the job. Escamilla filed a lawsuit in December that asked a court to determine whether Cabrera's skills qualified her under state law to run for the council seat.
The fight began as a purely political one, with opponents seeking to block her from running for office after she tried to recall Escamilla from office twice, according to The New York Times. But it has turned into a firestorm in a town where many constituents have the same grasp of English as Cabrera. Those questions, and the political fight they stirred, led to a court hearing to determine whether Cabrera spoke English well enough to be able to run for office. The ruling was that she did not.
The issues at the center of this debate: Just how much English must you understand to run for a political office? And what does it mean to be proficient?
According to a judge, you need to know more English than Cabrera was able to demonstrate.
But by Cabrera's account, she's fluent enough to serve her community, and she isn't running for national office.
“I think my English is good enough to hold public office in San Luis, Arizona,” she told CNN.
“I am not going to help (at the White House)," she added. "I will be helping here.”
When she said her English is good enough for San Luis, she brings up a point that’s been a large part of the debate about her language skills.
In San Luis, 87% of residents speak a language other than English in their home and 98.7% are of Hispanic origin, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. Most of the people there, by all accounts, speak in English and in Spanish. In the comfort of communal settings, they'll speak the way they're most comfortable.
Which may be why, when CNN en Español asked if she would conduct the interview in English, her lawyer instructed her to speak only in Spanish.
Instead of the confident, strong way she speaks in Spanish to the residents of San Luis, Cabrera speaks a bit more slowly, and perhaps with a bit less conviction, when she switches to English. That's something she admits, but she says that she can communicate at the level she needs to in English, given where she lives. She grades her English proficiency at a 5 on a scale from 1 to 10.
“It is true my English is not fluid, I am a very honest so I can tell you I’m not fluid in English, but I do understand it. I can read a a letter. I can read a book,” Cabrera said. “Right now I have a private tutor helping me improve my English.”
While she’s doing that, Cabrera still feels her language skills are where they need to be.
“From my point of view, it would be more helpful to have someone who speaks Spanish (in San Luis),” she said.
Escamilla, the mayor who began the fight over Cabrera’s skills, notes that many of the other council members are also Hispanic but they are truly bilingual.
“With all due respect for Ms. Cabrera, I think she is a good person, but her understanding in English is not good enough. She struggles to speak it, and she doesn’t understand it,” he said. “All our meetings are in English.”
During the court hearing on the issue, Yuma County Superior Court Judge John Nelson made the ruling after testimony from linguistics experts and Cabrera's own testimony, where she answered questions and read a few documents.
Cabrera, a U.S. citizen who graduated from the bilingual Kofa High School in Yuma, Arizona, was questioned in English on the stand about where she graduated, where she was born and what her name was. She was able to tell her lawyer her name and where she was born, but struggled with what school she had graduated from, according to the Yuma Sun.
Cabrera believes that ruling is stripping her of the her right to run for office. Escamilla believes the court is just enforcing the law.
In 2006, Arizona passed a law that made English the official language of the state. Earlier, in 1910, Congress passed the Enabling Act, which allowed Arizona to become a state with certain requirements. Among them was one that addressed the English language.
"The ability to read, write, speak, and understand the English language sufficiently well to conduct the duties of the office without aid of an interpreter shall be a necessary qualification for all state officers and members of the state legislature," a section of the act reads.
But Cabrera's lawyers argued in court that her disqualification was unfair and may be unconstitutional, seeing as there is not an actual standard for a specific level of proficiency for a council candidate.
That’s something Escamilla disagrees with vehemently.
“We are not taking Alejandrina’s rights away – we are just following the state law,” he said.
Cabrera believes the mayor and others have taken the issue too far, that she is well-qualified to serve the community she lives in, and that the language testing she was given was at a much higher level than necessary.
“I am not applying for a job with President Obama,” she said. “All I want is to do my job as an activist helping my community.”
Glenn Gimbut, the city attorney for San Luis, says he believes the right decision was made for the people of San Luis.
“The votes of the people who might have voted for her would have been wasted, because they could have voted for someone better prepared to be an elected official,” Gimbut told CNN.
But one resident, Ana Maria Beal, said that someone with Cabrera’s background is exactly the kind of person she’d like to see represent her.
“She is someone who wants to work and worries for our people. That’s the type of person we need up there,” she said. “We don’t want someone who comes from Harvard.”
And that sentiment may be why Cabrera plans to appeal the decision, according to an interview with the Yuma Sun.
“I can't give details about the appeal, but the judge's decision was not just,” Cabrera told the newspaper. “He can't take away my constitutional rights, and if he takes away my rights, he takes away the rights of the community.”
While we’ll have to wait and see what happens with an appeal, one thing is sure: Cabrera’s case has sparked a national debate about whether English should be the official language of the country and also leaves open many questions about the democratic process.
Let us know what you think about Cabrera’s situation and her response to being taken off the ballot in the comments section below.
– Journalist Valeria Fernandez, CNN Español's Gabriela Frias, Fernando del Rincon and Gustavo Valdes contributed to this report.
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TrendingXbox One | Apple | Gold | Housing market | Keystone | Telus-Mobilicity | REITs | CMHC | BlackBerry | Earnings | Loblaw's Joe Fresh | BCE-Astral hearings | Poll: Do you like the new $5 and $10 bills? | Air Canada | RBC | Samsung Galaxy S4 | Target Canada | ‘Can’t make it to your wedding, I’ll catch your next one’
Look out Baby Boomer leaders, Generation X is about to take over. Xers, born between 1960 and 1980, are not going to lead like the Baby Boomers. Xers are also leading in a very different world economy and in a very different business model than that of their Boomer counterparts.
What are the essential differences in leadership and work attitudes between the two generations? And what changes will Xers drive in the workplace, in collaboration with the dominant Boomers, or without their co-operation? Since the largest proportion of the workforce is now under the age of 35, the kind of leadership required in organizations is not the kind that makes Boomers feel comfortable. Xers are generally well-educated, independent and eager to learn, which requires a different leadership style than the Boomer “command-and-control” style.
In my article in the National Post, Generation X Will Change Work Culture, I argued that this group’s assets are adaptability, technological literacy, independence and creativity. Generation X leaders thrive on change; are fair, competent and straightforward; are very adaptable, flexible; and hate being micro-managed.
Bruce Tulgan, an acknowledged expert on Generation X and author of Managing Generation X: How To Bring Out the Best In Young Talent, wrote that employees with different work characteristics will be more effective and productive with different leadership styles. Studies by Tulgan, Douglas Coupland (author of Generation X) and Australian company HCM Global, show that Xer managers are typically mature beyond their years and very team oriented.
A study by Personnel Decisions International (PDI) shows companies face a substantial employee skills shift and knowledge void. The study surveyed the competencies of 24,000 mid-level managers, and found Xer managers received higher ratings in self-development, work commitment and analyzing issues than did Boomer managers.
Huichun Yu and Peter Miller, writing in the research journal, Leadership and Organization Development, compared the leadership styles of Xers and Boomers. They argued that one significant difference between Xers and Boomers are their value systems. Xers tend to be more independent, self-motivated and self-sufficient, whereas Boomers tend to be more diligent doing their assigned jobs and prefer stable working environments.
The most consistent finding in the research literature, when comparisons of work characteristics are made between Xers and Boomers, is that each group exhibits a different mixture of lifestyle values and work ethics. Boomers tend to work hard and are generally loyal to their employer. They accept the chain of command and expect their mangers to give them direction and lead them toward organizational goals. They are not highly technologically savvy, nor do they like change.
In contrast, Xers emphasize personal satisfaction with work as being most important. They look for opportunities to improve their work skills, not just doing the work assigned. They are loyal to their profession rather than their employer. They are more individualistic. They have a high need for autonomy and flexibility in their lifestyles and jobs and thus less need for directive leadership.
Xers have broken the traditional Maslow hierarchy needs rules and have challenged individual development progress schemes. Whereas Boomers have tended to follow a career path of education, career, marriage and promotion up the ladder, to a final mid-life self-realization, Xers compress this process. They require self-realization from their job and life at the same time and do not want work to impact negatively on their quality of life. For Xers, job satisfaction is more important because they focus on life outside the job. They are not prepared to make the sacrifices demanded by their organizations if it means becoming workaholics.
Xers place a high value on the importance of participating in decision-making and in job autonomy. They prefer a relationship-oriented leadership style, while Boomers tend to prefer teamwork directed by leaders in positional authority, and a task-oriented leadership style.
Jason McLean, chief executive of Vancouver-based McLean Group of Cos. and chairman of the Vancouver Board of Trade, is an accomplished, personable and charismatic 36-year-old Xer, who reflects much of my research into Xer leadership style. When asked about his leadership style, he said, “I try to be non-reactive,” and “I try to live the way that the people who I lead expect me to live.” McLean sees his role as a CEO as being enrolling, inclusive and relationship oriented. “I don’t get threatened by including other people and perspectives in decision-making,” he says, and “I’m more concerned about giving credit than taking it.”
When asked what he sees as the most important part of his job, he said it was “ensuring there is integrity between the organization’s strategic direction and enrolling people to be aligned with that direction.” In commenting on the differences between the Boomers style of leadership and his own and other Xers, he said, “command-and-control leadership can be effective in specific crises, but the problem with this style over the long-term is you absolve the team around you of responsibility and accountability … and you give them an opportunity to fail.”
McLean contends that one of the essential roles of leaders is to build a strong leadership team around him — building from within and going outside for talent. When asked about the public’s concern about the integrity of leaders, given the Enrons and Wall Street events, he said that a leader “can’t be a complete moral relativist,” and cautioned that legal perspectives “can’t drive critical decisions, and they must be driven by basic ethical principles.”
He summarized his views on leadership by stating, ” Good leaders don’t have all the answers and understand their limitations. They must act with humility.”
McLean’s style is consistent with recent research, which identifies “transformational leadership” as the most effective style for modern organizations. Transformational leadership has been described as managing energy, first in yourself and then in those around you; the ability to transform individuals and organizations; and representing the high moral road, involving a unique bond among leaders and followers
It appears we’re moving into a time when the kind of leaders we need and the availability of Generation X leaders coincides. And a time when Baby Boomers need to step up and make room for Generation X leaders or step aside.
Ray Williams is Co-Founder of Success IQ University, and President of Ray Williams Associates, companies located in Phoenix and Vancouver, providing leadership training, personal growth and executive coaching services.
A new study shows Canadian business leaders have become more pessimistic about global economic conditions than their U.S. counterparts, despite enjoying a much healthier economy.
A new study has identified Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver among the world's 10 lowest risk markets when it comes to human capital for their skilled and diverse workforces and opportunities for advanced and ongoing education.
With some CEOs so intrinsically tied to the corporate brands they represent, risk management plans should include succession planning and damage control around the continuity of a leader's vision -- and charisma.
Maryse Larouche articulates the role actuaries play in civil litigation proceedings, including work with lawyers, their clients and serving as expert witnesses.
With an increasing number of incidents of organizations losing personal and corporate data, a new strategy, mindset and set of regulations is needed to bring Corporate Canada into a new era of data security.
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Published 2011 (First edition published by McGraw-Hill in 2004; Second edition by DisABILITIESBOOKS, 2011)
Reflections from a Different Journey includes forty inspiring and realistic short essays written by successful adult role models who share what it is like to have grown up with a disability and advise parents based on their personal experience.
Summary | Table of Contents | Excerpts | Reviews | Meet the Authors/Editors
Most parents of children with disabilities lack personal experience with adults with disabilities. Hearing from people who have lived the disability experience can provide all parents with essential information about the possibilities for their children. Reflections from a Different Journey includes forty inspiring and realistic essays written by successful adult role models who share what it is like to have grown up with a disability.
Each eloquently written essay is an insightful source of wisdom, inspiration, and emotional support as well as a rare glimpse inside the lives and minds of people with many different disabilities - cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism, learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, mental illness, developmental disabilities, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, congenital amputation, and chronic health conditions.
In preparing their essays, each author was asked to write about something they wished their own parents had read or been told while they were growing up. The essays, which demonstrates that, first and foremost, people with disabilities are human beings with the same needs and desires as people without disabilities, are arranged thematically:
- "Love and Accept Me as I Am" essays express appreciation for parents who provided unconditional love and a sense of belonging and who accepted them as whole people-including that part of them considered to be a disability.
- "Parents Are the Most Important Experts" essays describe how their parents addressed their unique needs and became the most important experts in their lives.
- "Parental Expectations" essays present different approaches to expectations and standards and encourage every child to have hopes and aspirations.
- "Sexuality" essays explore how all children need to talk about and learn about intimacy and sexuality.
- "Education About Disability" essays explain the importance of why parents and children need to learn all about a child's disability and how to facilitate necessary accommodations so that each child can enjoy a full life.
The foreword is written by Marlee Matlin, the Academy Awarding winning actress who is deaf. The afterword is written by the book's co-editor, John D. Kemp, a successful attorney and advocate, who was born without arms and legs.
Brimming with a wealth of life-affirming lessons, Reflections from a Different Journey offers many specific suggestions for parents as well as older children with disabilities, family members, and the education and health care professionals who serve them.
Table of Contents
|Part One. Love Me and Accept Me as I Am
|Ain't Done Too Bad for a Cauliflower
Disability Does Not Equal Liability
What I'd Tell That Doctor
Please Believe Me
Parents Without Prejudice
The Virtues of "Ballpark Normalcy "
Take Me As I Am
Please Accept Me-All of Me
|Part Two. Parents Are the Most Important Experts
|What's A Mother To Do
The Rules of the "Game"
"Deaf People Can Do Anything But Hear
The Autism Bomb
Solutions From the Heart
My Secret Childhood Existence
As Normal As Can Be
Another Way of Seeing
If Mom Only Knew
Christina M. Pean
Donna F. Smith
Taryn L. Hook
Juan B. K. Magdaraog
Darren R. Cecil
|Part Three. Parental Expectations
|Affirmation and Challenge
A Stubborn Sense of Entitlement
Independence Lessons from my Mom
Go For It!
Tapping My Potential
The Hand That You're Dealt
Alien or Activist? A Woman in Search of a Big Life
Giving Our Children Roots and Wings
|Lucy C. Spruill
Tameeka L. Hunter
Douglas N. Little
Jamie C. Ray
|Part Four. Sexuality
Code of Silence
My Mother's Warnings
|Part Five. Education About Disability
|Honesty, The Best Policy
No Secrets: A Kid Is a Kid
Does Your Child Have Epilepsy? So Do I!
Learning Was Always Hard for Me
Please Don't Be Put Off By Your Doctor
Listening Is the Key
As Much Love As You Can Muster
Groups Offer Valuable Life Lessons
Creating an Individual
|Donna M. Laird
John G. Miers
Damaris A. Mills
Lesley A. Jones
|Afterword: Disability Culture
Resources for Parents and Family Members
|John D. Kemp
From the Foreword by Marlee Matlin
In this book, people with all kinds of disabilities make clear that they can be capable role models for children, advisors to their parents and family members, and teachers to educators, healthcare professionals, and the many other adults who provide services for children with disabilities and their families. In fact, the essays have important messages for all of us as we strive to make our world a more caring, loving, and peaceful place for all children and families.
This book is a wonderful celebration of diversity. The essay writers have grown up with many different kinds of disabilities in many different places, including some countries outside the United States. They are not people who have "overcome" their disabilities. Rather, they have overcome the prejudices of society that all too often stereotype people with disabilities in destructive ways.
As some essay authors describe, they could also have become victimized by another kind of prejudice--the prejudice of prognosis. But, their parents did not accept the predictions of well-intentioned physicians and other professionals. With the love and support of their parents, they were not imprisoned by dire prognoses. Instead, they were encouraged dream, to try, to make mistakes, to be active participants in the life of their families and communities, and to reject the limitations suggested by scientific and clinical stereotypes. With the help of these essays writers, I hope that "helping professionals" will appreciate that their prognoses can be based on "truths" that have taken years to evolve, can be based on prejudicial attitudes, and may no longer be accurate.
From the Introduction by Stanley D. Klein, Ph.D. and John D. Kemp
The best way for parents to help their children plan for the future is to meet and talk with adults who grew up with disabilities. These people who have lived the disability experience are a tremendous source of wisdom and inspiration. Yet, many parents do not have such opportunities. Parents and the health care and education professionals who serve children and their families have begun to appreciate that adults with disabilities can be an important source of emotional support and wisdom. However, many health care and education professionals working with children with disabilities and their families also lack experience with successful adults with disabilities and are unable to address parental concerns about "What will happen when my child grows up?"
For this book, adults with different kinds of disabilities and/or special health care needs have written short essays for parents-as well as for older children with disabilities, family members, and the education and health care professionals who serve families. In the invitation to prepare these essays, the authors were asked to write something that they wish their own parents had read or been told while they were growing up. We hope that the range of personal perspectives provides not only emotional support and inspiration but also practical child rearing information. In addition, we are confident that these essays will instill a stronger sense that adults with disabilities can and do make vital contributions and are tremendous role models as well as advisors to families and professionals...
Our essay writers are relatively ordinary, accomplished individuals-they are not superstars. All too often, the media focuses its attention on the relatively few individuals who happen to have disabilities who do extraordinary things. The result is a different kind of prejudice-people with disabilities are to be superstars. While such an attitude may be an improvement over excluding people with disabilities from participation in community life, we hope that this book will illustrate that people with disabilities are just like everyone else-each with his or her own strengths and limitations, striving for a decent quality of life.
From "Code of Silence" by Anonymous
I look back now and wonder if I had had a traditional family, would the empty spot have been filled. Maybe there's a wholeness that comes with children, which I will never know, and all of my life I've been trying to deny it and run away from it or at least trivialize it. I ask myself why I've never wanted children in my life, when everyone else, it seems, does. I read about people who will do almost anything to have biological replicas, and I truly don't understand it. All of my siblings have children. It never seemed to be a choice, just a natural progression of their lives. We all went to college and graduated and mortgaged houses and married, but then the parallels ended. Now, in my 40s and starting to ask myself why I don't have misgivings, I'm going all the way back to try to figure it out.
My friends and I were always playing house, but, I don't remember any adults ever saying to me, "When you're a mommy... " Or, "When you get married... "
My parents seemed to have a pact to treat me "normally," like all the other kids in my family. But when it came to anything sexual, not just having children, they seemed to put their rule of equity aside.
I don't know why, I have never understood it. But I see it now as a cultural characteristic that they could not transcend or trash, this refusal to assume that anyone disabled was a sexual being. I have tried most of my life to ignore this insult, but its always hovered on the edges of my dignity, threatening to eat it away. When I realized that my mother didn't expect me to get married or encourage me or ever mention my having children except in horror, I concluded that she was as ignorant as the culture. And hung up on sex to begin with. But, I have to admit that it still hurt me.
“As the mother of a son with profound physical disabilities, I want every parent of a child in similar circumstances to read this remarkable eye-opening book. The lessons it brings from adults with disabilities are essential to giving our kids the start they deserve, and to understanding how close their hopes and aspirations are to kids we see as 'normal.'" --Judy Woodruff, former anchor, CNN
“A fabulous contribution to the field of disabilities. Parents everywhere need to read this book. Everyone involved with children with disabilities needs to read it. It answers so many questions about what works and what doesn't. And it answers the questions in the most reliable manner--in the voice of the son or daughter.” --Patricia McGill Smith, former Executive Director, National Parent Network on Disabilities
"The significant education for those helping, supporting, advising, and motivating people with disabilities is in listening to them. These writers with disabilities are brilliant in portraying their lives with pathos and even humor. Professionals and parents, trying to achieve equality for people with disabilities must read this masterpiece." --Henry Betts, M.D., former Medical Director and CEO, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
“Advice to parents about how to raise and guide their children with disabilities is rarely offered in such a compelling and insightful way as it is in Reflections From A Different Journey. Nobody says it any better than people with disabilities themselves when topics such as risk-taking, social acceptance, envisioning a life of greater independence, and all the challenges confronting any parent arise. These essays will educate, inform and entertain every parent who wants to know how to be the very best parent each can be.” –Former Senator Robert Dole
“Parents of children with disabilities…could use the advice of someone who’s traveled ahead of them but don’t know where to begin to look… I met a whole army of bright, wonderful grown-ups more than willing to help. They jumped off the pages of a new book… They cope with all manner of disabilities, physical and mental. And their stories make up a joyous, life-affirming guide to possibilities…”
--Helen Henderson, Toronto Star
“…a must read for all parents, relatives, and teachers.”--Dyslexia E-Newsletter, Spring 2005
“…comes as close to a how-to manual for parents of children with special needs as any book will ever come…
“Each [essay] makes its point in a way that respects the good instincts parents possess, the grief that we each need to come to terms with, and the desire we each have to help our kids reach their potential…
“The fact that each author has a different set of disabilities does not stop their writing from having a broad application to parents of children with many different kinds of disabilities. The themes addressed are basic to all children: acceptance and love, expectations of success, sexuality, and educating ourselves and others about our children…this book left me feeling empowered and able to accomplish the task that is before me. I have a better idea of what my job as ‘mama’…and how it will need to change as the boys grow. This book will be a resource to me as the boys enter each new stage of growing up inside a body that is different from that of others.”--Robin Hurd, Parents’ Corner, AAC Institute, Edinboro, PA
“…an extraordinary new book. It should be required reading for all professionals and advocates working with children or adults with disabilities and their families. Parents will find it particularly useful.
“The essays are very moving and inspiring—and their messages linger. While some essays are critical of parents, the dignity and wisdom of each one illustrates that adults with disabilities can and do make vital contributions to their families and communities.” --Ginny Thornburgh, Director, Religion & Disability Program, American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) and Lorraine Thal, Program Officer, Religion & Disability Program, AAPD
"…the essays do not tend to the extreme sentiments of "my parents screwed up" or "my parents were perfect" that one might expect. Instead, most of the contributors offer a nice mix of both positive and negative comments… The resource section includes a few listings that are often missing from such lists, nicely rounding out the text.” --KellyJo Houtz Griffin, Library Journal
“I require this book for my graduate students in special education…The stories in their collective power give aspiring teachers a perspective not easily found in college textbooks. Each essay gives the detail necessary to properly put public school into a lifetime perspective. Teachers need to know what can happen to their students after the entitlement for a free public education has expired.”
--Gerald S. Fain Ph.D., Professor, School of Education, Boston University
“Looking to engage your students and teach them the importance of believing in students when no one else does? Reflections from a Different Journey is a text I have been using in my Exceptional Children and Their Families course for the past seven years. Year after year students rave about this text and comment on the impact it has had on them, even years later. It's a book I would recommend to everyone; but, it is a must read, especially for those working in any capacity with anyone with a disability.”
--Lauren McFadden, Ed.D., Assistant Professor, Seton Hall University
Meet The Authors/Editors
Stanley D. Klein, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, university educator, and frequent speaker to parents and health care and education professionals from Brookline, Massachusetts, has worked with children with disabilities and their parents for fifty years and has received numerous national awards for his work. A co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Exceptional Parent magazine, he has co-edited The Disabled Child and the Family (Exceptional Parent Press, 1985), It Isn't Fair: Siblings of Children with Disabilities (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993), You Will Dream New Dreams: Inspiring Personal Stories by Parents of Children with Disabilities (Kensington Books, 2001) and From There to Here: Stories of Adjustment to Spinal Cord Injury (No Limits Communications, 2004; DisABLITIESBOOKS, 2011). He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
John D. Kemp became the President & CEO of Abilities! of Albertson, NY, a national disability service and education organization in 2011. Prior to Abilities!, John was a principal in the Washington, DC law firm of Powers, Pyles, Sutter, & Verville, P.C., and had a federal disability law and legislative practice. John has served as chief executive officer of United Cerebral Palsy Associations, VSA Arts, HalfthePlanet Foundation, U.S. Business Leadership Network, Disability Service Providers of America, and The Abilities Fund. He has also served as a member of several nonprofit boards of directors, including the American Association of People with Disabilities (co-founder), Independent Sector (vice chair) and the U.S. International Council on Disabilities (chair). In 2006, John received the Henry B. Betts Award, America's highest honor bestowed for disability leadership, service and advocacy. A much sought-after keynote speaker and humorist, John delivers many major addresses each year at conferences, conventions, and annual meetings. He is married and lives in Roslyn, NY.
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Mrs Gertrude Kimball (née Parsons)
New York Herald, 18 April 1912
(Cameron Bell, Northern Ireland)
Mrs Edwin Nelson Kimball (Gertrude Parsons), 45, was born 4 October 1866.
Travelling from Boston, Massachusetts she boarded the Titanic at Southampton with her husband Edwin. As first class passengers, they occupied cabin D-19.
The couple were rescued in lifeboat 5 with their friends Richard and Sallie Beckwith, Karl Behr and Helen Newsom.
She died in Wellesley, Massachusetts on 21 March 1962, at the age of 95.
Philip Hind (Editor)
Related Articles and Documents
Titanic Passenger and Crew Summary
Name: Mrs Gertrude Kimball
Cause of Death: Cancer
Buried: Newton Cemetery Newton Massachusetts United States
Travelling Companions (on same ticket)
Contact us if you have new information.
Search now for more on Gertrude Kimball
Join our group on Facebook for the latest discoveries.
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I was feeling a little bad for the Aussies today and wondering why they had to pay so much more for their video games. So I did a little research, and my findings were really unexpected.
The Australian, Canadian, and US dollar are virtually on par with one another, and yet the same deluxe Wii U system that goes for $350 in Toronto or New York sells for $428 in Sydney. Seems unfair, right? Until you take into account the minimum wage in these countries.
Minimum wage varies in both Canada and the US, but averages around $10 & $7.25 a hour, respectively. Australian minimum wage, from what I understand, is paid weekly, and works out to $15/hr for a 40 hour week!
While the price is higher down under, the average Aussie only has to work 28.5hrs to afford that Deluxe Wii U, whereas in Canada it's 35hrs, & the US, over 48 hours. However, it's the worst in the UK, where the same system costs nearly $500 and one must work over 50 hours at a minimum wage job to afford it.
My eyes almost popped out when I saw the price of an Australian Wii U game--$78!! But again, 5.2 hours work at min wage compared to 6 for Canada @ $60.
If this is true, then Australians have it the best out of anyone! Of course, this was all done without taking into account different taxes, and making the assumption of a 40hr workweek in Australia. Is this true? Are my numbers way off? I'm just genuinely curious, because $15/hr seems incredibly high for minimum wage to me.
And yes, I had a lot of free time at work over the past few days, with little else to do but surf around the net and read about this stuff.
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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Some northern house mosquitoes as seen through a microscope eyepiece on Wednesday. This type of mosquito is a carrier of the West Nile virus. Mosquitoes carrying the virus have been found in Eastern Washington this year but not Western Washington, yet.
© 2010 The Seattle Times Company
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A new Gawker report shows Twitter lagging far behind Facebook in revenue. If the numbers are accurate, they show big trouble.
For those who have wondered about the financial underpinnings of Twittermania, Gawker claims to have a leak of the company's financials from an insider. And, whew, are they bad. They're not poor enough to justify the Gawker headline "Twitter’s Secret History As the World’s Worst Tech or Media Business"—there have been some doozies in this industry—but, if accurate, they're bad enough... and raise questions about the accuracy of the Bloomberg Businessweek story suggesting that Twitter "may be on the verge of a real business model." (We have a request in to Twitter for a comment.)
The dot com bomb may have officially ended by the early 2000s, but a financial miasma continues to haunt the high tech industry. Palpable in the pitches that echo in VC offices, this noxious odor is the smell of the ongoing trend in strategic business models: Ramp up the number of customers fast and then figure out how to monetize. Twitter seems to have jumped on that bandwagon with both feet. A difference in philosophy helps explain why Facebook has become not only dominant in its market but also positioned for future success with revenue and profit, even though it's only a couple of years older than Twitter: Facebook is old fashioned when it comes to business.
"Revenue was a sideline" early on, CEO Dick Costolo said in a video interview with Bloomberg. "They were growing and trying to get the service stabilized. And now what we look at is really an ad business that for the first time is courting big brands [like Verizon, McDonald's, and Nike]."
Things don't add up enough
The story that Costolo is pitching to Bloomberg Businessweek's Brad Stone is that the company has turned the corner and success is just ahead. And maybe that's so, but only if, as they say in investment disclosures, the past is not necessarily an accurate predictor of the future. Here are the numbers from Gawker:
The 2010 numbers stand out because they were so much worse than Twitter's own projections from 2009 for the same year of a $140 million run rate. In short, the company brought in 20 percent of what it had expected to make.
You might write that off as a remnant of an old managerial regime, except that Costolo became COO in the fall of 2009, so he should have been heavily involved in and responsible for the success of those projections. And Twitter had been in business for four years at that point.
Twitter talked up a positive future for Bloomberg, but as I've mentioned before, you cannot trust management that won't show financials. There have been too many cases of companies—LinkedIn (LNKD), Groupon (GRPN), and Demand Media (DMD) all come to mind—that claimed profitability, only to have those claims obliterated when the truth came out in IPO filings.
Your grandfather's Facebook
And then there's Facebook. It's new, it's modern, it's riding the crest of the social media wave. Read CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter in the company's S-1 SEC filing for its IPO and you get the impression that offering the services are more important than making profit:
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
It might seem to be the same as bringing in customers now and coming up with a monetization scheme later, but actually it isn't.
Instead, Facebook has used a business strategy that seems to date back at least 30 years, if not more. Yes, what a company does is important. Check out Facebook's financials in its S-1:
Facebook started in 2004. Within four years, its losses were rapidly dropping as its revenue continued to ramp up, unlike so many recent tech IPOs that have shown losses continuing to increase over time. By its fifth year, Facebook had real net income, rather than some redefined accounting concept machined to make people think that the company was profitable.
One other comparison: revenue per customer. Twitter claimed to have 100 million users as of last September. If the first four months saw $23.8 million in revenue, triple it for a full year and add a generous 50 percent. That would yield $1.07 per user in its fifth year of existence. Back in the fall of 2009, Facebook's fifth year, Zuckerberg wrote that the company had hit 300 million users. With $777 million in revenue, that was $2.59 in per-user revenue.
Facebook's revenue and net income have moved ahead because someone at the company realized that plans to make those bellwether numbers increase are as fundamental as attracting customers. Because if the revenue, profit, and customer numbers don't all increase simultaneously, you can find yourself with a growing problem that only gets worse over time.
The time to look at revenue strategies is early on in a business. The longer you wait, no matter what the fashion may be, the more difficulty you'll have in creating a financially viable company. And that's with massive VC backing—something that most entrepreneurs don't get.
More from Inc.com:
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Repairing after eruption: the Waimangu Valley and Mt. Tarawera
One of the more impressive areas I visited while in New Zealand was the Waimangu Valley near Mt. Tarawera (above). The valley itself was created by blast explosions (phreatic explosions) during the 1886 eruption of Mt. Tarawera. These eruptions cut right down the axis of the rhyolite domes (most of which erupted ~1305 A.D.) and extended off the volcanic edifice to form the valley to the west of the volcano. In the valley, no juvenile lava was erupted, instead explosions carved out large pits that formed the Waimangu Valley and today the valley is filled with lakes and thermal features (below).
The 1886 eruption at Tarawera was not large by any means, erupting only ~0.7 cubic kilometers of basalt (compare that with the 1305 Kaharoa Rhyolite from Tarawera that erupted 5 cubic kilometers). However, hundreds of Maori villagers died during the eruption and basaltic tephra can be found all over the area north of Tarawera into the Bay of Plenty. Yet, only about a century later, most of the destruction caused by the eruption has been erased by vegetation. Compare the photo of the valley just after the eruption (top) to the one I took in January of 2009 (bottom) to see how things have recovered.
Waimangu Valley, 1886
Waimangu Valley, 2009
Volcanoes are truly destructive, but still just a flash in the pan for most earth processes.
Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment.
Follow @eruptionsblog on Twitter.
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IMF Executive Board Concludes 2007 Article IV Consultation with AngolaPublic Information Notice (PIN) No. 07/115
September 13, 2007
Public Information Notices (PINs) form part of the IMF's efforts to promote transparency of the IMF's views and analysis of economic developments and policies. With the consent of the country (or countries) concerned, PINs are issued after Executive Board discussions of Article IV consultations with member countries, of its surveillance of developments at the regional level, of post-program monitoring, and of ex post assessments of member countries with longer-term program engagements. PINs are also issued after Executive Board discussions of general policy matters, unless otherwise decided by the Executive Board in a particular case.
On August 27, 2007, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the Article IV consultation with Angola.1
Angola's recent macroeconomic performance has been good. Output growth has been robust since 2001 both in the oil and non-oil sectors (diamonds, manufacturing, construction, processing, and services). Inflation has fallen considerably from high levels. However, poverty remains deeply entrenched with infant and maternal mortality, literacy, sanitation, and access to clean water for most of the population comparing poorly with other African countries of similar per capita income.
Real GDP growth in 2006 reached 18.6 percent, supported by double-digit growth in both the oil and non-oil sectors. Oil production increased by 13 percent mainly from new deepwater oilfields while diamonds production rose on the back of increased production from kimberlite mines. The manufacturing sector benefited largely from the better economic environment and construction from ongoing rehabilitation of infrastructure. Good weather, timely availability of inputs, and an increase in the cultivated area, helped agricultural production although this was partly offset by drought conditions in some central and southern provinces.
Inflation fell to 12 percent from 19 percent during 2006. The nominal exchange rate held steady throughout 2006 while the real exchange rate appreciated by about 6 percent. Interest rates adjusted for inflation have been negative. The growth of monetary aggregates remained high in 2006 except for base money, which was flat following the National Bank of Angola's (BNA's) interventions in the market to mop up liquidity.
The fiscal balance has moved to a surplus, but on average Angola has saved a smaller portion of its oil windfall than other African oil-producers. The fiscal surplus in 2006 reached 15 percent of GDP, against a deficit of 6 percent of GDP in the budget. This was a direct result of the government's weak capacity to execute fully the capital budget. Excluding oil revenues, Angola saw a large decline in the non-oil primary deficit.
The external current account surplus widened to 23 percent of GDP in 2006, and official reserves doubled and reached US$8.5 billion in the year, equivalent to about four months of imports of goods and services. This is partly because Angola's two main exports, crude oil and diamonds, have experienced large volume increases. Export revenues have also been boosted by the rise in crude oil export prices. During late 2006 and early 2007, Angola paid the bulk (US$2.3 billion) of its principal and interest arrears to Paris Club creditors. Angola also plans to pay the remaining arrears (US$49 million) and has begun making payments on maturities falling due. The outstanding issue concerns the late interest for which Angola is seeking favorable treatment from the Paris Club. The external debt-to-GDP ratio declined to about 20 percent in 2006 from 40 percent in 2005. Progress under structural reforms has been modest. Angola's most successful initiative on public financial management (PFM) and fiscal transparency continues to be the information system, SIGFE. This system covers all provinces and will be extended in 2007 to include some autonomous bodies and new modules. The SIGFE has helped strengthen budget execution and reporting and the sharing of information on PFM issues. In the private sector, however, a comparison with other regional economies highlights areas for improvements in the business climate.
Executive Board Assessment
Directors commended the Angolan authorities for the recent good macroeconomic performance, characterized by double-digit growth rates, a fall in inflation, large fiscal and external surpluses, and a reduction in the debt-to-GDP ratio. They noted that both prudent policies and rising oil production and prices have led to these achievements.
Looking ahead, Directors underscored that major challenges remain. A key challenge will be to reduce inflation further, boost external competitiveness, and achieve medium-term fiscal and external debt sustainability while accommodating Angola's large infrastructure and social needs. Also, a strong effort will be required to develop the non-oil sectors of the economy. This is crucial for reducing the dependence on oil production and achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Directors encouraged the authorities to take advantage of the present favorable economic environment to advance quickly with structural reforms.
Directors urged the authorities to exercise caution in implementing the planned scale-up of government capital spending. They were sympathetic to the pressures for scaled-up spending as a "peace dividend" and to help re-build the country following the end of the civil war. Nevertheless, they stressed that the scaling up should be consistent with the country's implementation and absorptive capacity, and should not undermine the competitiveness of the non-oil sectors through upward price pressures. Furthermore, care should be taken to ensure that only economically sound investment projects are undertaken. Most Directors urged adoption of a medium-term fiscal framework to guide government spending, with fiscal policy anchored on further reducing the non-oil primary fiscal deficit as a share of non-oil GDP and on a conservative oil price rule. However, a few Directors felt it would be important to wait until the economy has achieved a more stable trajectory before adopting a medium-term fiscal framework. The establishment of an oil fund based on well-defined, flexible, and transparent rules, and fully integrated into the budget process, would enhance management of the oil wealth. Directors also supported a gradual phase-out of fuel subsidies, in conjunction with targeted measures to offset the impact on low-income households, and tax reform to strengthen the non-oil revenue base.
Directors commended the progress in strengthening public financial management and enhancing governance and transparency in the extractive industries. They urged further action to address remaining weaknesses in the capacity to execute and monitor public expenditures. They also encouraged the authorities to rapidly implement the recommendations of the Fiscal Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes, to phase out the state oil company's quasi-fiscal operations, and to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Directors commended the central bank's prudent conduct of monetary policy. Given the extensive dollarization, shallow financial markets, and instability of money velocity, Directors emphasized that monetary policy should continue to be pragmatic and flexible. They supported the use of a target range for the monetary aggregate in conjunction with a broad set of inflation indicators, and recommended that the choice of intermediate policy target be evaluated continuously. Directors considered the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) planned for 2008 to be an important step toward deepening and strengthening the financial sector, and thereby increasing the effectiveness of monetary policy.
Directors welcomed the authorities' revaluation of the nominal exchange rate earlier this year. A number of Directors encouraged a gradual shift to a more flexible exchange rate to support a reduction in inflation and to accommodate appreciation pressures on the currency. Several other Directors, however, felt that the authorities' strategy of managing the exchange rate without a pre-determined path is appropriate in view of the extensive dollarization and under-developed financial sector, and the possible adverse impact of a currency appreciation on the development of the non-oil sectors.
Directors encouraged the authorities to eliminate the remaining exchange restrictions, so that Angola could accept the obligations under Article VIII, Sections 2, 3, and 4 of the IMF's Articles of Agreement.
Directors commended the authorities' progress in clearing Angola's arrears to Paris Club creditors, and encouraged the authorities to continue their efforts to resolve the issue of overdue arrears.
Directors called for faster structural reform to develop the non-oil sectors of the economy. Institutional and legal reforms to improve the business environment would increase productivity, reduce the cost of doing business, and enhance legal protection of businesses. This would stimulate private investment and enhance external competitiveness.
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by J. Patrick O’Leary
In the face of financial challenges, Denver is doing its darndest to keep compostable garbage, grass clippings and hazardous materials out of its landfill. Rather than throw in the towel, the city is charging fees for some programs and publicizing no- or low-cost practices to conserve natural resources and protect the environment.
Denver Recycles continued to run its curbside composting collection
pilot program last year, thanks to grant money received after the
program came to an end. Originally, 3,000 households in select
neighborhoods volunteered to collect and put out their food scraps,
soiled paper and yard debris – 100 percent compostable -- which was
picked up weekly and trucked out to A-1 Organics in Keensburg for
Organic material makes up most of what Denverites
toss, and the program diverted 1,800 tons of compostable material from
the landfill since the pilot program started in October
2008, according to Charlotte Pitt, Recycling Program Manager at Denver
Recycles. That not only saved space, but reduced the amount of methane
released into the atmosphere; organic matter that decomposes in a
landfill produces the potent greenhouse gas.
When the grant
money for the program ran out, Denver Recycles chose to continue the
environmentally healthy program this spring by charging a nominal amount
($58.50 for six months) for continued service. But participation
declined with the change.
“Almost half paid for the service right
away,” says Pitt. “This is about what we expected because, as with any
new pilot, lots of people opt in and then lose enthusiasm, or move and
turn (green composting) carts over to other neighbors.” At least 100
participants were lost because service wasn’t transferred with the cart.
So, Denver Recycles is recruiting new participants in those original
neighborhoods. At press time, there was space in all but two on the very
west of Denver, according to Pitt. Denver Recycles will accept sign-ups through
July until the program is filled. Residents can check for eligibility
by visiting www.DenverGov.org/DenverRecycles and clicking on the “Denver
Composts!” link – it has an online database that is searchable by
Only a limited
number of households can participate in the curbside program, but anyone
can do their own backyard composting. To encourage that, Denver
Recycles and Denver Urban Gardens are continuing to offer weekly,
hands-on composting classes – including “vermiposting” with worms –
through the summer and into fall at Gove Community Garden, E. 13th Ave.
and Colorado Blvd. Classes are free, but space is limited – July’s
offerings were booked solid at press time. Click on “Free Learn to
Compost Classes” on the website to see what’s available in the future,
and sign up.
GrassCycling continues in the face of budget
cutbacks, simply because it’s free and easy. It’s simply a catchy word
for the green practice of leaving grass clippings on the lawn when
mowing, instead of bagging them for collection. Up to 37 percent of what
Denver residents put in the trash during the growing season is yard
waste, primarily grass clippings. Not only does GrassCycling free up
landfill space and reduce hauling costs, it returns nutrients to the
soil and shades the roots and soil, reducing the amount of water needed
by a lawn. Details and mowing recommendations can be found at the
website as well, on the “GrassCycle” link.
waste (HHW) can sometimes be recycled, but should always be kept out of
the landfill. To that end, the city restarted its door-to-door
collection and drop-off program, which was shut down last fall when its
budget was exhausted. The door-to-door program is limited to Denver
Solid Waste Management customers, residing in a single family home,
townhome, or apartment building of seven units or fewer, and can only be
used once a year. Residents make a phone call to schedule a pickup
date, then receive a disposal kit and instructions in the mail.
To stretch the budget this year, the city has changed the rules to
“more efficiently use” its funds: A $20 co-pay is charged, and there are
minimum weight requirements and waste type requirements. If the weight
and content guidelines aren’t met, the resident pays the whole disposal
fee of $90-114. Other materials (antifreeze, motor oil, car batteries,
latex paint and CFL bulbs) are being directed to free retail disposal
“The stricter requirement on materials is an attempt to
drive people to use free drop site options for some of the easier to
recycle materials first, before using the HHW program,” Pitt explains.
“Again, another attempt to stretch dollars to service more residents.”
For detailed information on what the city can and cannot collect,
do-it-yourself options, procedures and fees, click on the “Hazardous
Waste” link on the website.
Curbside recycling is still offered
to eligible residents at no charge; click on the “Residential Recycling
Services” link for details.
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The head of the United Nations warned of nuclear weapon threats, such as the possibility terrorists could obtain them, on Friday in Monterey.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a crowd of about 200 invitation-only guests at the Monterey Institute of International Studies that nuclear disarmament progress "is off track."
"Delay comes with a much higher price tag," he said. "The longer we delay, the greater the risk that these weapons will be used ... and even terrorists may acquire these nuclear bombs."
Ban, 68, said all nations with nuclear weapons need to make disarmament and arms control a priority.
"There are no right hands for wrong weapons," he said.
The secretary-general said nuclear-capable member states must come up with a "bold set of measures" to increase transparency of its nuclear arsenal.
Ban criticized President Barack Obama for not signing the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear explosions by military and civilians.
"We were assured by President Obama when he was elected that the U.S. would ratify this CTBT," he said. "But somehow, it has not happened."
The treaty has been signed by 44 countries since it was introduced in 1994, the U.N.'s website says.
Ban also said U.N. member states should reduce the money they spend on military and use it for education, fighting global warming and other issues.
"The profits of the arms industry are built on the suffering of ordinary people," he said.
The U.N. chief said he visited Iran last August and was not convinced its nuclear program was peaceful. He also said North Korea's successful rocket launch in December "exacerbated global concern of its pursuit of nuclear weapons."
Ban said he supported Obama's proposal for stricter U.S. gun laws, despite saying it was a "domestic issue."
He said it is almost impossible to run into a private citizen in South Korea with a gun, "so there are many things that I cannot understand."
"I welcome President Obama's announcement," he said. "... I hope this will be helpful and I hope Congress will support his proposal."
Ban was the South Korean minister of foreign affairs for 37 years before coming to the U.N. He earned a master's degree in public administration at Harvard University, according to his official U.N. biography.
Disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation have been key issues for Ban since his appointment in 2007.
MIIS graduate student Aoi Sato, 27, of Japan, said she was in Hiroshima when Ban came in August 2010 to speak about the harm of nuclear weapons.
"I'm so impressed he hasn't changed," she said after the speech. "I'm impressed with him as a man and a leader."
Phillip Molnar can be reached at 646-4487 or email@example.com. Twitter:
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