text stringlengths 213 24.6k | id stringlengths 47 47 | dump stringclasses 1 value | url stringlengths 14 499 | file_path stringlengths 138 138 | language stringclasses 1 value | language_score float64 0.9 1 | token_count int64 51 4.1k | score float64 1.5 5.06 | int_score int64 2 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Celebrity designer motivates girls to define themselves
Award winning fashion designer and star of MTV's House of Jazmin made her debut Jan. 22 in the world of motivational speaking at Ruby Hill Golf Club at the Defining Girl Academy, a workshop aimed at empowering teen girls to find their passions in life.
Jazmin Whitley, 22, spoke to about 50 teens on how obtainable individual dreams really are. At 17, Whitley was the youngest designer ever to show her line of clothing, Li Cari, at New York Fashion Week. Now she dresses Hollywood's hottest celebs, including Paris Hilton.
Defining Girl was the idea of Twisted Silver Jewelry designer Deb Mitchell.
"The world has such a loud voice -- TV, movies, music, magazines, what 'the crowd' is doing -- that it can be hard for girls to hear that quiet voice inside that can lead them to success," Mitchell said. "I want to show girls that it can be done. My message is you define you, or others will do it for you."
Jazmin Whitley spoke to the girls about her passion for designing and her drive from early on, saying that her faith is her guidepost in a loud world. Then, shaking off the seriousness, she got down to fashion, demonstrating how to change a look in a flash by shrugging off her jacket and switching around her Twisted Silver Jewelry.
Whitley told the girls to stick with their goals, never following the crowd, and she attributed her success to her family, including her business manager mom.
"When the going gets tough, I have had someone to fall back on, someone to lift and encourage me, and someone to always point me in the right direction," Jazmin said.
"Jazmin's message was so real, in fact the importance she puts on family and family support struck a cord with me -- I called my mom right after the event and told her how important it has been having my family always there for me, and how I never want that to change!" said Twisted Silver intern Candice Newell.
In classic Hollywood style, each Defining Girl in attendance was able to meet, greet and have a photo op with designers Whitley and Mitchell, leaving the event with a swag bag of goodies.
Girls from everywhere are invited to join the Defining Girl page on Facebook, noted organizer Donna Garrison. | <urn:uuid:dce74572-cb44-4796-a7bd-7a13616aaf0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pleasantonweekly.com/story.php?story_id=7814 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971077 | 496 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Games To Get Them Outside
Luring kids outside isn't easy when so many electronic options beckon indoors. Next time you’re struggling to pry your kids away from the screen, encourage them to get up and moving and to stay active. invite them to play one of these fun outdoor games.
Giant Slip 'n' Slide
Make your own slip 'n' slide by laying out a tarp, spraying it down with water, then letting the hose continue to run on top of the slide. Take turns running across your lawn, then sliding across the tarp for a slippery, exciting game.
Best played after the sun goes down, flashlight tag is the perfect outdoor game for late-night birthday or block parties. One player is designated "it" and is given a flashlight. The other players hide. When "it" finds a hidden player, he shines the light on the hider and the hider then becomes "it." The original "it" then hides, and the game continues.
Jump Rope Challenge
Give each player a plastic cup filled with water. Start spinning a large jump rope. One at a time, each child must attempt to enter the rope and jump three times, all while spilling as little water as possible. The child with the most water left in his cup wins the game.
Hole in the Bucket
Fill up a large trashcan with water and place two empty trashcans about 40 feet away. Split kids into two teams and give each team an empty milk carton with 10 to 12 holes in the bottom. When you say "go," the first player from each team fills her carton with water, then places it on her head while she walks or runs to her team's empty trashcan. She empties the remaining water into the trashcan, then runs back, passing the carton to the next player. The first team to fill its trashcan with water wins the game.
Sticks & Stones
If you have a sizable group of kids, playing sticks and stones will make them laugh while also tiring them out. Split the kids into two teams -- the sticks and the stones. Line them up facing one another. Designate an area roughly 30 feet behind each team as that teams' safe zone. To start the game, yell out "sticks" or "stones." The team you call on must begin chasing the opposing team, which begins racing toward its safe zone. Any tagged players must switch teams, and the two new teams line up to play again. The team to bring all the players to its side wins the game.
Split the kids into two teams. Each team gets two shoeboxes. Tape the lids onto the shoe boxes and cut an "I" shape into the top of the box, with a four-inch slit and two one-inch slits. Have the first player from each team slip her feet into the shoeboxes. When you say "go" the players wearing the shoeboxes have to run from the starting line to a designated spot, then back again. Players pass the shoeboxes to their waiting teammates, and the relay continues until all the players have participated and a winning team is crowned.
Blind Man's Walk
Set up a simple obstacle course in your yard and let all the kids examine the course. One at a time, blindfold the kids and let them work their way through the obstacle course. The child to make it through the fastest wins the game.
If your kids love sports and want to play catch with a twist, introduce them to the game of 500. Give one child a football and have him stand about 20 feet in front of the remaining children. The child with the ball throws it up into the air toward the waiting players while calling out a number between 50 and 500. The player to catch the ball earns the number of points called, but if she drops the ball, she loses those points. The first player to accumulate 500 points becomes the next thrower.
More outdoor game ideas
Hula Hoops, hopscotch & horseshoes
In this episode of Quality Time, Daddy Brad introduces his family to some outdoor games and activities that are fun for kids and adults alike. Watch to get great ideas on classic fun activities like Hula Hoops, hopscotch and horseshoes.
More activities for kids | <urn:uuid:e2618be6-6068-4b47-84de-68ba4f0d92de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sheknows.com/sheknows-cares/articles/827893/8-fun-outdoor-games-for-kids | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955809 | 897 | 2 | 2 |
Slovakia: "Hard to imagine" recognizing KosovoSource: B92, Beta, Tanjug
BRUSSELS, BELGRADE -- Slovakian PM Robert Fico doubts his country would recognize a unilateral declaration of Kosovo independence.
“It’s hard for us to imagine recognizing a unilateral declaration of independence,” said Fico after meeting European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
The Slovakian prime minister called for EU unity on the matter and warned that it would be a “deadly mistake” if member-states failed to reach a consensus.
“That would be a sign of weakness. I have a feeling that certain superpowers are already counting on it,” he added, without going into any further details.
Barroso said that it would he “difficult to justify” if EU states were not in a position to adopt a common European stance on Kosovo.
The Associated Press (AP) reiterates that EU member-states are divided, with Hungary, Greece, Spain, Slovakia, Cyprus and Romania maintaining that independence for the province could spark separatist tensions throughout the continent.
Meanwhile, the U.S., according to the AP, has on more than one occasion suggested that independence would be the optimal solution, and that it could recognize a potential declaration on the part of the Priština authorities.
In Belgrade on Monday, Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardžić met with Slovakian Foreign Minister Jan Kubiš, who said his country "would not recognize independent Kosovo."
Kubiš told to Samardžic that Slovakia, as a European Union member state, opposed a unilateral proclamation of Kosovo's independence and that it would "not acknowledge any such possible act", the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija said in a statement.
The Slovakian chief of diplomacy said that Bratislava backed sending a European Union mission to Kosovo, since, according to him, in doing that the EU would assume responsibility for the security and stability in the region.
Kubiš agreed that the process of the resolution of Kosovo's future status had to continue under the UN auspices, respecting international law, "particularly UN Resolution 1244 which should remain in force until a new resolution is adopted at the UN Security Council," the statement said. | <urn:uuid:b45d4ab7-dbca-413d-b141-9f16285af473> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2007&mm=12&dd=04&nav_id=45929 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953377 | 480 | 1.945313 | 2 |
When Elena Dukhovlinova first heard about the HIV virus in her native Russia in the late 1980s, the reference was to a crisis far away. "It was already kind of perestroika time, and we started getting updated news from other worlds," Dukhovlinova recalls. But HIV did not remain a distant threat; in the years since, HIV/AIDS has become "one of the most complex problems for Russia," the scientist says. Russia's HIV/AIDS problem inspired Dukhovlinova to study molecular epidemiology at the Biomedical Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she recently received a Ph.D., studying "the viral population circulating in the city," she says.
This kind of research -- figuring out which of the many HIV strains are affecting local people and how they are transmitted -- is essential for designing an effective vaccine. It also requires a blend of skills that are not easily acquired in Russia: "This field is not recognized," she says. But Dukhovlinova had some unusual opportunities: to join a lab with up-to-date equipment, to attend overseas conferences, to train in the United States, and to work within international collaborations. "I cannot say that there was a special plan in my career," she says. She just followed her interests and ended up with a package of skills that could make a real difference in her country.
Read more about the state of the epidemic in Eastern Europe this week in Science magazine's special section on HIV/AIDS .
Like many scientists, Dukhovlinova was inspired to study science by a teacher -- a high school biology teacher named Elena Vorobyova. At Saint-Petersburg State University , Dukhovlinova was ready to choose psychophysiology when a molecular biology course inspired her to revise her plans. This new interest led to a student rotation at the Biomedical Center, which is focused on the development of a vaccine against HIV. She joined the Biomedical Center for a bachelor's degree thesis, working on DNA-vaccine delivery using Salmonella strains.
Andrei Kozlov, the founder of the Biomedical Center and Dukhovlinova's mentor, accepted her in his lab because she proposed an unusual approach to her project, he writes in an e-mail to Science Careers. "Since then she succeeded in almost everything she did." She even shared a patent based on this work, which is "very unusual for the Bachelor student," Kozlov says. Dukhovlinova continued at the center for a master's degree on optimizing vaccine production using Escherichia coli.
After graduating in 2003, Dukhovlinova knew she wanted to continue working with HIV, but she was unsure about the details. While still at the Biomedical Center, she was offered an opportunity to spend a year at Yale University as part of the Training and Research in HIV Prevention in Russia program. At Yale, she attended master's degree lectures in public health -- a degree that didn't exist in Russia. "I learned a lot about all the epidemiology of sexually transmitted diseases ... and general public health topics," she says.
At Yale, she also analyzed the genetic diversity of the HIV viruses infecting injection drug users (IDUs) and men who have sex with men (MSMs) in St. Petersburg. The HIV virus evolves very quickly, so over time infected individuals become hosts to diverse populations of HIV strains. Dukhovlinova tracked transmission chains between infected individuals by looking at the genetic diversity and evolutionary relatedness of their virus populations. She worked under two advisers, a molecular biologist and a prevention specialist. "It was very interesting because it ... was such an interdisciplinary work," she says.
Dukhovlinova continued this line of work when she returned to the Biomedical Center, pursuing a Ph.D. Although a great diversity of viral strains develop in patients due to frequent mutations, not all of these strains are transmitted. As a consequence, different viral strains become prevalent in different parts of the world. In Russia, "In the initial phase of the epidemic, we had subtype B strains, which were spread mostly by ... homosexual and heterosexual [routes]," Dukhovlinova explains. In 1998, subtype A strains started appearing in injecting drug users and spreading very fast. Dukhovlinova confirmed this pattern, but she also detected another common mechanism for HIV genetic diversification: In individuals infected with several different HIV viruses, the genetic material gets reshuffled to form brand-new strains.
Dukhovlinova also continued to track transmission chains among HIV-infected patients. Injection drug users (IDUs
) are the main risk group in Russia, but "our studies show that HIV is being spread from this group through the so-called bridging population" -- people who are sexual partners of IDUs but not IDUs themselves -- to the general population by the heterosexual route, Dukhovlinova says. She also found that today transmission occurs mainly among the countries of the former Soviet Union -- a contrast to earlier days, when the MSM population mainly contracted subtype B strains imported from other countries via travel.
Dukhovlinova started pursuing a new line of research when some of the IDUs in her noninfected cohort became acutely infected with HIV. Acute HIV infection corresponds to a phase right after contamination, when the virus replicates rapidly but is temporarily contained by a strong immune response, resulting in often-dismissed flulike symptoms. Dukhovlinova started analyzing the genetic diversity of HIV in these patients in 2008 using single-genome amplification, a sensitive technique that some U.S. collaborators of the Biomedical Center had just reported using.
She joined the collaboration and visited the lab of Ronald Swanstrom at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, to learn the technique. The resulting work showed that the viral population circulating in newly infected IDUs in St. Petersburg is highly homogeneous, suggesting that in this setting HIV is transmitted mainly by other acutely infected individuals. This contrasts with a study by another group, of a Canadian IDUs cohort, which showed transmission of multiple strains. "We were very surprised by this," Dukhovlinova says.
To be most effective, DNA vaccines need to be based on the genes of the viruses present in the target population, so regular genetic diversity monitoring is essential, Dukhovlinova says. Also, if "we prove that people who are acutely infected transmit the virus most, we can use this group as a target group for prevention measures." The Biomedical Center is in the process of getting its first DNA vaccine against HIV into a phase I clinical trial.
Dukhovlinova also applied the knowledge she gained during her stay at Yale to training the next generation of scientists, becoming a teaching assistant for a master's degree program in public health that was being set up at St. Petersburg State as she was returning. She also worked as the coordinator of the Russian side of the international research and education program she attended at Yale. "She does lab work, grant-management work, and project coordination, and in this multidisciplinary and multitask environment, she is able to work effectively," Kozlov says.
Despite her successes, Dukhovlinova regrets the limited impact her work has had on HIV/AIDS in Russia. Partly, it's a policy issue. Many Russian nongovernmental organizations work on the prevention of the HIV epidemic in collaboration with U.S. institutions, but the massive HIV-prevention campaigns the Russian government undertook some years ago seem to have disappeared. Meanwhile, prevention-related studies are routinely ignored, she says. "In our center, we do a lot of research and we publish these data," but "we do not get much attention from the government or from the city government in terms of what to do."
On the human-resources side, too, it's a struggle. The Biomedical Center is one of very few places in Russia where scientists can gain experience in the field. The difficulty of obtaining funding is an obstacle in nearly all research fields in Russia, Kozlov says -- but there's an "obvious lack of interest of the governmental officials [in] this particular topic. Also, the opportunities for individual support of young scientists are quite few." Dukhovlinova has been supported by the various institutional grants that the research programs at the Biomedical Center have attracted -- from two U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes, the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation , and the Russian Ministry of Science -- but between grants she has had to work as a translator to support herself.
Dukhovlinova recently obtained a joint HIV & Drug Use Fellowship from the International AIDS Society and NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse , which she will use to fund a postdoc with Swanstrom. During her previous stays at UNC, "She was very focused," Swanstrom writes in an e-mail. "Her English is very good and she has a delightful personality, so it was ... an easy choice to accept her ... as a postdoc." Dukhovlinova will continue her current project from UNC, in collaboration with the Biomedical Center. "We need to increase the sample size to be more confident we understand the transmitted virus," Swanstrom says.
When Robert Heimer, one of Dukhovlinova’s Yale mentors, met her when she was a recently graduated master’s student, she was "very desirous of getting more training, improving her English, working on her laboratory skills, but also developing a more well-rounded approach to understanding the problems associated with drug use in HIV disease," he says. The work she has done since demonstrates "that well-trained Russian scientists can do work [that is] equivalent to their American and Westerner counterparts." Her ties to other countries have been "absolutely indispensable because without it, she would be mired in a system that would undervalue her work."
Elisabeth Pain is contributing editor for South Europe. | <urn:uuid:986df5ce-8582-46a8-92c2-19f7ca9ccdda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/print/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_07_09/caredit.a1000068 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972281 | 2,072 | 2.625 | 3 |
After the excesses of the McMansion era, when houses ballooned out to 4,000 square feet and more and the average-sized one reached 2,500 square feet, homeowners today want smaller houses, said panelist Dan Gregory, an architectural historian and editor at HousePlans.com, a firm that sells home plans (www.houseplans.com). As evidence of this trend, Gregory cited his firm’s sales figures — for the past two years, its best-selling plan by far has been the one-floor, 2,091-square-foot “Storybook Craftsman” No. 120-162 (see accompanying graphic).
Still, Gregory also said buyers who want smaller, one-story houses are not going back to the modest “ranchers” of the 1950s and ’60s. The popularity of the No. 120-162 plan clearly indicates that the desire for the luxury and comfort of the McMansions continues unabated. The plan’s master suite has a big bathroom and two large walk-in closets, and the kitchen, breakfast nook and family room are generously sized.
What are buyers of the plan willing to give up to get a smaller house? The living room (whose demise has been predicted for 20 years) and a fourth bedroom. Buyers are also willing to accept smaller second and third bedrooms. A formal dining area was retained, but it is configured so that it could be enclosed and used for an additional bedroom or home office.
Does the popularity of No. 120-162 indicate a new look for suburbia? Gregory resisted giving a definitive answer but said that similar configurations have been bestsellers for other home plan services.
Seguing from home-buying trends to individual home owners, would similar smaller-house floor plans be right for you? While architects and home builders can easily visualize 2,091 square feet of living space, most people have no idea what this means or even the size of the place they live in now, said panelist Gale Steves, author and former editor-in-chief of Home Magazine. The best way for a family to know what will work for them is to assess their current house, a process Steves calls “right-sizing.”
Before you begin your own right-sizing analysis, toss out room names and focus on the household activities that occur in each space, Steves said. Be honest with your daily habits and see where they logically take you in planning a new house or a remodeling, she urged. Some rooms can be repurposed while others can shrink. For example, if you rarely cook and most dinners are “reheated carry-out or microwaved frozen entrees from Trader Joe’s,” you could be happy with a modest-sized kitchen that might have basic appliances incorporated into a single counter along one wall and a dining table (the classic country kitchen arrangement). | <urn:uuid:72ad602d-fd56-4668-bc0e-a9c5e51081d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/now-might-be-the-right-time-to-downsize/2012/02/13/gIQANlHmHR_story.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956067 | 610 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Wheeled Victory, or The Cyborg of Interstellar Justice Spring 2008
-- Like Athena bursting from the forehead of Zeus wielding an instrument of righteous justice, the figure of the cyborg leaps from the Earth for the stars, bringing with it the bicycle, on a mission to Universe.
-- Representing a future in which the traditional biological human form is preserved by continued use of the efficient and fully
engineered bicycle artifact; the figure shows the humanizing effect of the bicycle through time and space, and reveals a vision of the future in which the tools that we shape end up shaping
--The sculpture was commissioned as a public art project by the Arlington County, Virginia Cultural Affairs Office in a partnership with the Phoenix Bikes non-profit after school education program to combine the working arts with skills from bicycle mechanics and foster creative thinking, making, good junk salvage, and reuse.
-- Influenced by previous work on an actual spaceship by the designer, the sculpture is a testament to the timeless beauty, simplicity, and utility of the bicycle. It also serves as an homage to the forward thinking planners of the Apollo Moon landing mission who initially planned on the astronauts using bicycles for roving duty on the Lunar surface.
-- The main control panel is an oscilloscope from a decommissioned Navy submarine. Mounted on the back of the figure, housed in a sealed titanium tube salvaged from a nuclear power plant, is a ten year time capsule containing letters, pictures, and predictions for the future from all those who worked on the sculpture. The entire sculpture is entirely mobile and can be ridden about at will.
-- The human scale figure is composed primarily of electrical wiring and conduit scrupulously gleaned from the trash by its makers. Electro-luminescent wire and LEDs, along with battery packs and control boxes compose the organs, nervous system, eyes, and cortex. On display at the Planet Arlington Festival, and most recently in the atrium of the Arlington County, VA Central Library for the 2009 Recycled Art Show. | <urn:uuid:551bac4d-f3a2-4f54-baff-a2825b10c583> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lukeidziak.com/wheeled-victory/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926394 | 409 | 2.109375 | 2 |
View as HTML
In this Newsletter…
Audio Now Available from Leonard Marcus’ Lecture
New Faces at the CCB and the Bulletin
Stay tuned for orientation events and the CCB Open House, which will take place in early September!
Technical difficulties have prevented us from posting this month's bibliography of short story collections. We will post the link on the CCB homepage as soon as as possible and we will also link to the bibliography in the September newsletter. Thanks for your patience.
"What I realized was that, while picture books written by celebrities aren't unique . . . they are unusual in that they are not really written for the same audience as most picture books. They are written for the gatekeepers."
How did you become interested in your topic?
I came to GSLIS intending to get my master’s degree and be a children's librarian. A couple years into being a librarian I realized that I wasn't quite able to achieve the balance between day-to-day librarianship and pursuing my own research. I love librarianship. I am passionate about public libraries, but what was feeding me, what was keeping me interested, were the research projects I was pursuing through presentations at ALA and writing articles. And so I decided to combine my passion about libraries, my enthusiasm about teaching, my interest in research, and come back for my PhD.
When I worked at the main branch of the Clarke County Library in Springfield, Ohio, I had noticed a pattern with books that I specifically remembered had gotten bad reviews and yet were getting huge numbers of requests. So books that we wouldn't have purchased at all – or we would have bought a single copy – suddenly I was ordering three or four copies and I sat down to look at that more carefully and I realized that they were all celebrity books. They were Madonna and Paul Simon.
And so I did what I usually do when I find an interesting topic, I threw it to my kids, may patrons. . . read more.
Tell me about your research.
I kind of view it as an inverted triangle. First, I'm interested in identifying celebrity. I'm specifically interested in folks who aren't authors but are coming to this clean. For better or worse, what comes along with celebrity picture books are these huge publicity tours. What sparked the ire of the library world was Madonna going on David Letterman when English Roses came out and she said, "You know, Dave, I started reading to my daughter and I realized there's nothing good out there."
Read the complete interview or skip to a question . . .
Do you have a sense, having been a librarian yourself, of how this research might inform the work of practicing librarians?
Our Affiliates Out and About
SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) Conference
New Books We Just Had to Read
Every month, the CCB Graduate Assistants highlight books reviewed in the most recent issue of the Bulletin that we were excited to read. These decisions are based on personal preference, but all books listed are Recommended by the Bulletin. For complete reviews, visit the Bulletin website (http://bccb.lis.illinois.edu/) to learn how to subscribe.
Laurel ’s Choice: Mr. Sam: How Sam Walton Built Wal-Mart and Became America’s Richest Man by Karen Blumenthal
Miriam’s Choice: Putting Makeup on Dead People by Jen Violi
Donna Parisi is still weighted down by her father’s death three years ago and now she has to figure out whether to go to college or follow a different path. Donna’s situation calls for a parent, friend, mentor, or counselor who can connect with her and help her process her feelings. But that person never comes along. Donna’s relationship with her mother becomes increasingly strained, in large part because Donna decides she doesn’t want to go to college and instead wants to study mortuary science. Donna finds bits and pieces of support from other people, but most importantly, she begins to rely – shakily at first – on herself. She makes friends with a new girl at her high school, Liz, whose self-assurance keeps Donna a bit in awe of her. Donna starts dating an older college guy who introduces Donna to intimacy and pleasure but whom Donna never trusts to share her emotional burdens. Throughout, Donna’s simple and observant reflections are honest, they are often uncomfortable, but they are genuinely reflective of the imperfect process of healing grief, growing older, and being in difficult and rewarding relationships with family, friends and lovers. Donna’s attention to certain details also hones in on the physicality of her experience – whether she is observing a classmate’s earlobes or locating her grief as a feeling in her chest – and in this way Violi reminds us of our own very physical – and mortal – existence.
Highlighted Book from Our Wish List
San Vicente, Luis. The Festival Of Bones (El Festival De Las Calaveras): The Little-bitty Book For The Day Of The Dead. El Paso, Tex: Cinco Puntos Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0938317678.
Created by Mexico City native and first published in Mexico, this lively book for young readers illustrates and explains the traditional Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead.
For more book selections or to order this one, visit the CCB’s Amazon Wish List.
CCB Summer Hours and General Information
Monday: 9 am – 1 pm
To read the CCB’s mission statement and find out more about our collection and services read About Us on our website.
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your email address, visit https://mail.lis.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccb
The Center for Children's Books
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel St. | Champaign, IL 61820 | 217-244-9331 | email@example.com | <urn:uuid:35c79108-36ef-41d2-ad88-56e45c52a194> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://illinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/14665.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957226 | 1,278 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Last year, SocialBusiness.org covered Red Button Design’s Midomo Bracelet, which was designed by Alex Monroe in order to fund delivering a Midomo water purifier to an African community. Well, after developing the project for three years, Red Button Design has written on their blog that the Midomo Launch in Mwinga, Kenya was a success.
Located in the Eastern province of Kenya, Mwingi is a district of about 304, 000 people -- 79 percent of whom don’t have access to potable water. The majority of the population source drinking water from surface water, which is an unsafe source that can cause water-related illnesses.
In order to address this problem, this is where Red Button Design’s Midomo comes in to help produce safe drinking water as well as make the trip to the dam and back less physically grueling for the women who often walk for at least an hour to get to the source. One of the philosophies behind Red Button Design is “Design Against Dependency,” which, for this particular project meant not pushing any unneeded people, products and/or materials on the Mwingi community. Indeed, this is an approach that many development initiatives could benefit from taking into consideration, as there have been numerous failures when it comes to innovations not fit for local people.
The successful Midomo launch in Mwingi, Kenya goes to show that humanitarian product design coupled with grassroots initiatives can have buoyant results without disrupting a community's livelihood and way of life.
Jewelry-Funded Water Purifiers
6,405 clicks in 92 w
More Stats +/- | <urn:uuid:38afec35-0831-4b1b-89c5-6adb67faaf4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/midomo-launch | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954141 | 335 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Are you the last kid on your block without a social network? I'm not asking if you've somehow avoided joining a social network - I'm almost certain everyone in the known universe is a member of at least two or three. I'm asking if you haven't actually created your own social network yet. I'm guessing there's at least two or three of you out there who haven't. If you're one of those folks sporting a frowny face now that I've exposed your secret shame, you can turn that frown upside down - now's your chance to get started while running the absolute best social networking platform out there. Ever.
Despite my sarcasm and hyperbole, Mashable reader Ehab D. stumbled onto an open source project that looks fairly interesting, if you're into the business of building social networks (and judging from the load of emails in our inbox, there's more than one or two of you in that business).
The platform is dubbed Insoshi, and it's an open source product and project built on the Ruby on Rails platform with the aim to become the best open-source social networking platform.
The project seems fairly recently launched, with no blog posts dating any further back than the 28th of this month, though the project was covered back in March by VentureBeat as one of the "Ten Y Combinator Companies that want to revolutionize social networking..".
I don't have a working Ruby on Rails server with which to test the install, but they have a running installation on the site that seems to be functioning with little trouble (and if you're interested in testing it out, the code is prominently displayed on their site as available for download). It includes all the features present in most social networks - blogs, activity feeds profiles, messaging, and people search. It's still lacking a few must-have items like contact importing and developer platform compatibility (we'd expect it to be a likely candidate for OpenSocial).
Despite the protestations sure to come after I post this sentence, I still have qualms regarding Ruby on Rails and scalability. Everyone has seen the trainwrecks Twitter has run into - and granted it's managed to survive most of their natural disasters of the process, but I have to question the wisdom of building a platform that by it's very nature is designed to grow virally in a developer environment that is prone to scalability issues.
Still, if all the features continue to roll out and look as nice and function as speedily as they do in the demo from the Insoshi test environment, they may just prove me wrong on that suspicion.
You can test it out for yourself by joining up here. | <urn:uuid:bd4ff618-43ce-4758-93e8-85aed3549685> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mashable.com/2008/04/30/insoshi/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971773 | 543 | 1.5 | 2 |
Eton Fives was first played in one of the bays of College Chapel by the steps up to the north entrance. Today’s courts retain some of the original features of the original court — the buttress, ledges, and steps. This is the only Eton game to have spread beyond Eton, although it is almost wholly confined to England (and Nigeria — where it is played by thousands!).
The basic pattern of play is quite like rackets or squash, but there is no singles version of the game, and you hit the ball with your hands (protected by gloves) rather than a racket.
The School Fives Club is thriving, and at least 20 boys in each year group represent the School. Regular block fixtures are played in the Michaelmas and Lent against all the leading Eton Fives schools.
There are internal House and Open competitions and leagues for individual pairs and teams at various age groups, as well as a popular Master & Boy competition.
At the end of the Lent Half Eton always has a substantial entry for the HSBC National Schools Eton Fives Championships, which are held in rotation at Shrewsbury. Highgate and Eton.
Click here for details of this half’s fixtures.
Click here to visit the Eton Fives Association website. | <urn:uuid:a567d525-e2ad-4e99-bb0f-0a6be5a603fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.etoncollege.com/Fives.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968127 | 268 | 1.632813 | 2 |
This is a follow-up to an intriguing question last year about tension in string theory.
What are the strings in string theory composed of?
I am serious. Strings made of matter are complex objects that require a highly specific form of long-chain inter-atomic bonding (mostly carbon based) that would be difficult to implement if the physics parameters of our universe were tweaked even a tiny bit. That bonding gets even more complicated when you add in elasticity. The vibration modes of a real string are the non-obvious emergent outcome of a complex interplay of mass, angular momentum, various conservation laws, and convenient linearities inherent in of our form of spacetime.
In short, a matter-based vibrating real string is the outcome of the interplay of most of the more important physics rules of our universe. Its composition -- what is is made of -- is particularly complex. Real strings are composed out of a statistically unlikely form of long-chain bonding, which in turn depend on the rather unlikely properties that emerge from highly complex multiparticle entities called atoms.
So how does string theory handle all of this? What are the strings in string theory made of, and what is it about this substance that makes string-theories simple in comparison to the emergent and non-obvious complexities required to produce string-like vibrations in real, matter-based strings?
Addendum 2012-12-28 (all new as of 2012-12-29):
OK, I'm trying to go back to my original question after some apt complaints that my addendum yesterday had morphed it into an entirely new question. But I don't want to trash the great responses that addendum produced, so I'm trying to walk the razor's edge by creating an entirely new addendum that I hope expands on the intent of my question without changing it in any fundamental way. Here goes:
The simplest answer to my question is that strings are pure mathematical abstractions, and so need no further explanation. All of the initial answers were variants of that answer. I truly did not expect that to happen!
While such answers are sincere and certainly well-intended, I suspect that most people reading my original question will find them a bit disappointing and almost certainly not terribly insightful. They will be hoping for more, and here's why.
While most of modern mathematical physics arguably is derived from materials analogies, early wave analogies tended towards placing waves within homogeneous and isotropic "water like" or "air like" media, e.g. the aether of the late 1800s.
Over time and with no small amount of insight, these early analogies were transformed into sets of equations that increasingly removed the need for physical media analogies. The history of Maxwell's equations and then SR is a gorgeous example. That one nicely demonstrates the remarkable progress of the associated physics theories away from using physical media, and towards more universal mathematical constructs. In those cases I understand immediately why the outcomes are considered "fundamental." After all, they started out with clunky material-science analogies, and then managed over time to strip away the encumbering analogies, leaving for us shiny little nuggets of pure math that to this day are gorgeous to behold.
Now in the more recent case of string theory, here's where I think the rub is for most of us who are not immersed in it on a daily basis: The very word "string" invokes the image of a vibrating entity that is a good deal more complicated and specific than some isotropic wave medium. For one thing the word string invokes (perhaps incorrectly) an image of an object localized in space. That is, the vibrations are taking place not within some isotropic field located throughout space, but within some entity located in some very specific region of space. Strings in string theory also seem to possess a rather complicated and certainly non-trivial suite materials-like properties such as length, rigidity, tension, and I'm sure others (e.g. some analog of angular momentum?).
So, again trying to keep to my original question:
Can someone explain what a string in string theory is made of in a way that provides some insight into why such an unusually object-like "medium of vibration" was selected as the basis for building all of the surrounding mathematics of string theory?
From one excellent comment (you know who you are!), I can even give an example of the kind of answer I was hoping for. Paraphrasing, the comment was this:
"Strings vibrate in ways that are immediately reminiscent of the harmonic oscillators that have proven so useful analytically in wave and quantum theory."
Now I like that style of answer a lot! For one thing, anyone who has read Feynman's section on such oscillators in his lectures will immediately get the idea. Based on that, my own understanding of the origins of strings has now shifted to something far more specific and "connectable" to historical physics, which is this:
Making tuning forks smaller and smaller has been been shown repeatedly in the history of physics to provide an exceptionally powerful analytical method for analyzing how various types of vibrations propagate and interact. So, why not take this idea to the logical limit and make space itself into what amounts to a huge field of very small, tuning-fork-like harmonic oscillators?
Now that I can at least understand as an argument for why strings "resonated" well with a lot of physicists as an interesting approach to unifying physics. | <urn:uuid:aa7eb3ba-d571-4d0a-9bf8-e83e546374ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46573/what-are-the-strings-in-string-theory-made-of/47778 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95475 | 1,134 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Busan is host city of the BIFF(Busan International Film Festival), one of Asia's most popular film festivals. Busan City is stepping up its effort to foster an internationally competitive film industry, developing the city of Busan as the hub of Asian film industry.
Busan City will establish the infrastructure for the film and media industry within the areas of Haeundae Centum City including the Busan Cinema Center, the main theater for BIFF and Post-Production facilities.
In line with this, a film museum, a movie studio and film academies will be built in Busan, equipping Busan with a comprehensive film support system for film- shooting and also for film production and marketing, further promoting the city as a hub of the Asian film industry.
Establishment of Film-related Facilities: Busan Film Center, Busan Culture Contents Complex, Busan Cinema Studio, Busan Post-production Facility, Busan Film Experience Museum, etc.
Film-related Public Sector Relocation: Korean Film Council, Korea Media Rating Board, Game Rating Board, etc. | <urn:uuid:eb033527-b38b-4914-9b18-74dcf5e0a969> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://english.busan.go.kr/vision/sub/06.jsp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913345 | 222 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Deb: Recently the Canadian government decided to stop minting the penny. The bottom line of this reasoning is that it costs too much to produce and can buy very little.
I actually agree with this idea so if you are expecting a rant, you will be sorely disappointed. The penny, despite being the low man on the coin roll, managed to outlive the one and two dollar bills, Sunday as a day of rest, and even the Dominion of Canada. As a result, the penny will proudly go out with its “heads you win” held high.
The finance minister actually had a good idea regards the copper’s demise. He suggested to Canadians that they free their pennies from their jar prisons and give them a good home in a charitable organization. A darn fine idea and I support it. Although I wish the finance minister’s suggestion had been taken one step further. I wish the government had started a campaign to put that idea out there and make it a cross country goal. Call it something like PennyCanadal and make it a reality. The more I think of this the more I think it would be an amazing sendoff for the penny. The lowly copper could go out with a hero’s farewell! In fact I would take it one step farther. Since the Government says it will save 11 million a year as a result of scrapping the penny, why can’t they put half of that towards charity themselves? Or if they can’t do that, perhaps all of it could be placed into social programs that are being scrapped or cut back. Wouldn’t that be Pennies from heaven!
I got to thinking about the penny and what it meant to me when I was a kid. To this day, every single time I see a penny on the floor I say, “Find a penny pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.” I do confess that there have been times when my burning desire for good luck was outweighed by my lack of interest in picking up said penny from a gross sticky unfamiliar floor. In those instances I convince myself that we make our own luck! Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I wait for my gag reflex to abate.
But wow, when I was a kid, a penny could garner three Sour Strawberries or two Lickemaids or a Fruit Compriment, or three Black Balls, or a Sour Key or a licorice pipe. A penny was akin to a pirates booty. And a mere three pennies’ worth of penny candy would guarantee you the most “worth it” upset stomach! Add to that the fact that playing Rummoli will never be the same without the penny. Remember pinning all your hopes and dreams on the 7-8-9 sequence which was always full up with pennies in the last moments of the game. I remember my ten-year-old self thinking, “Just need the 8 and I’m rich. I’M RICH!!!!!”
*Sidebar* I JUST found out as I went online that Rummoli is a Canadian game, which I NEVER knew. So to those that don’t know the game, suffice it to say, it was cards with a big plastic playing board and you bet pennies!
But best of all, even more than what the penny could buy, was the way it looked when it was new. A new penny is a thing to behold. Today’s penny is made of mostly steel, but the penny of my childhood was a gleaming golden red copper, Maple Leaf on one side, Queen on the other.
So penny, I won’t miss you filling up my wallet and I won’t miss you crowding the piggy bank. But I will miss the idea of you and what you stood for in simpler times ... My two cents.
Come on, you knew I had to end with that.
Barbara: My two cents? I’ll miss it. Like you, I don’t need it, I don’t like the crowded wallet, thanks to instant debit, I can barely even remember the last time I pulled out a penny (or rolled a stack), but it is a piece of nostalgia that I do hold dear.
I was never much of a penny-candy girl (frankly, don’t even remember them), more of a chocolate nut (still am). I used to save my precious babysitting quarters for Mars bars and Crunchies. But still ... the penny!!!! It’s a penny. Copper (or at least copper-coloured), etched with its distinct images, a comforting weight in your hand, more lovely and elegant than all the rest. On its way out now like the Canadian dollar and 2-dollar bills before it. Maybe now, too, the winsome “a penny for your thoughts” will go the way of “egads”, “forsooth”, and “malarky”... | <urn:uuid:b4245107-7d00-44ad-b3bc-854ebf964c1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://themiddle-ages.blogspot.com/2012/04/penny-for-your-thoughts.html?showComment=1334070483959 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967811 | 1,056 | 1.570313 | 2 |
see all...Viewing 3 out of 4 projects
Master of Architecture graduate from Texas A&M University with a certificate in Sustainable Urbanism. Specifically interested in energy-efficient building technologies and their application at building and community scales. Research interests include phenomenology and experiential architecture and to develop architecture that responds to human senses.
Leisure activities vary from Calligraphy and Ambigram designing to travelling and exploring new places.
Immediate objective is to work with experienced professionals on projects of various scales so as to build a wide knowledge base.
Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, Design Intern
CMPBS is well-known for its sustainability efforts over the years. Right now we are developing an open building system with multi-use components as a solution to disaster relief mitigation. The building systems transforms itself from being territorial markers initially to permanent house.
Also, tied in to a similar building system is an effort to develop affordable housing for Texas Coast. The building system works on a regular square grid giving it flexibility to expand in both directions at a community level. The multi-use components are plug and play so as to transform the building as per need. I was responsible for the design, detailing and drawings of the system. Also developed the graphic illustrations and model to demonstrate the building system.
Previously, we participated in the Living City Design Competition and developed a solution for building a city over the used surface mines in Khouribga, Morocco. The attempt was to bioremediate the scarred land and leave the historic towns preserved from new development. It introduces a new level of economic prosperity based on abundance, innovation, ecological sustainability, and social justice.
CMPBS is an institution where you not only learn to build sustainably but also to live sustainably. The knowledge gets deep rooted in your thinking ideologies forever.
KEL, Texas A&M University, Graphic Design Artist
This was a part-time undertaking along with graduate school. I was responsible for the graphics and layout designs of two books on Landscape Ecology. It exposed me to various illustration software like Indesign and Illustrator. I got the opportunity to explore graphic design from a non-architectural perspective which certainly broadened my horizons.
Cosmic Designs Pvt. Ltd., Intern Architect
This was my first experience in an architectural office and was a totally enriching experience. I worked on small projects of furniture design to large scale hospitals. My diligence was rewarded with better and greater responsibilities throughout the tenure which aided my professional development. I got the opportunity to discuss projects with clients and consultants, frequently visit sites and meet contractors and vendors for the different projects.
Texas A&M University, MArch, Architecture
Texas A&M exposed me to an international faculty and a different approach to design. My interest got more refined towards sustainable architecture an I realized that LEED accreditation was the first step towards Green Architecture. Being involved with Emerging Green Builders enabled me to participate in campus sustainability efforts.
My final study project was an attempt to develop a community space of refuge that responds to the needs of the people of a common interactive platform within walking distance. A library and museum complex that would harbinger historical, cultural and social values keeping in mind the experience of the user and his response to the space around him.
It's an ongoing process of learning, and eventually I wish to be able to create architecture that responds to human senses and evolves from that to become sustainable.
UP Technical University, BArch, Architecture
Graduated in June 2008 with Bachelor of Architecture degree (Merit Holder).
Active participant in various extracurricular activities.
Paul M. Terrill Jr. Endowed Scholarship 2009-10, 1st Place
Endowed scholarship awarded for the school year 2009-10 based on overall performance.
Incoming Student Scholarship 2008-09, 1st Place
Scholarship awarded by Texas A&M University for fresh incoming graduate students. | <urn:uuid:22d7267f-d532-4fe5-82a2-c8aef437ce9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archinect.com/people/cover/15525908/shruti-gupta | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955801 | 801 | 1.625 | 2 |
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin have just lost their mother—their father had died years before—and find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the Ukraine in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the context of this family’s personal loss and the social turmoil surrounding them, Bulgakov creates a brilliant picture of the existential crises brought about by the revolution and the loss of social, moral, and political certainties. He confronts the reader with the bewildering cruelty that ripped Russian life apart at the beginning of the last century as well as with the extraordinary ways in which the Turbins preserved their humanity.
In this volume Marian Schwartz, a leading translator, offers the first complete and accurate translation of the definitive original text of Bulgakov’s novel. She includes the famous dream sequence, omitted in previous translations, and beautifully solves the stylistic issues raised by Bulgakov’s ornamental prose. Readers with an interest in Russian literature, culture, or history will welcome this superb translation of Bulgakov’s important early work.
This edition also contains an informative historical essay by Evgeny Dobrenko. | <urn:uuid:9c18ae30-b832-4e14-8209-9e7e107f3083> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100084380 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935591 | 264 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Coronary Artery Disease
Also called: CAD, Coronary arteriosclerosis
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common type of heart disease. It is the leading cause of death in the United States in both men and women. CAD happens when the arteries that supply blood to heart muscle become hardened and narrowed. This is due to the buildup of cholesterol and other material, called plaque, on their inner walls. As the buildup grows, less blood can flow through the arteries. As a result, the heart muscle can't get the blood or oxygen it needs. This can lead to chest pain ( angina ) or a heart attack . Most heart attacks happen when a blood clot suddenly cuts off the hearts' blood supply, causing permanent heart damage. Over time, CAD can also weaken the heart muscle and contribute to heart failure and arrhythmias . Heart failure means the heart can't pump blood well to the rest of the body. Arrhythmias are changes in the normal beating rhythm of the heart. | <urn:uuid:47a31f40-f764-4420-8967-127d8f7efe7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medications.com/coronary-artery-disease | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916237 | 210 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Most Active Stories
Thu August 21, 2008
Unacceptable is Unacceptable
By The following is a letter submitted by Commerce resident Alton Biggs regarding the recent accountability rating given to the Commerce High School
Examine the new Texas Education Agency ratings of Commerce schools and school district. Producing graduates who are Unacceptable to the State is not acceptable. Determining solutions to reasonable questions will reverse this detestable rating.
The ratings cause me to pose questions. What is it we want from our public schools? What is it we want from our university? What is it we want from our community? The answers to these questions can only come from a wide forum. The forum must include our schools, our university, and our community - all of us.
Our public schools are to provide a basic education for all students. Graduates must enter society and the workplace as fully functional citizens. They must be equipped to integrate diverse facts and circumstances into a whole. They must be able to make good decisions while continuing to learn throughout their lives. Our graduates must understand history to avoid repeating past mistakes. They must communicate adequately. They must be able to read, to write, and to calculate confidently. These things are what all of us want from our schools.
We must not allow any student to think that he or she will succeed by doing only one or two of these - or none at all. Not every student masters every goal of a glutted curriculum. But every student can learn to read, to write, and to do basic mathematics. It will require all of us to communicate the importance of what the educational system is trying to accomplish.
Let us not look at our present situation with an eye to cast blame. No good results from it. Finger pointing does not bring success. Positive results come from working together. Success begins in realizing our unique opportunities. Our community, all of us, possesses tremendous individual abilities and collective talents. Putting to work our resources builds our community and schools up.
The answers may be new programs, or the old ones may work just as well. The answers may require additional funding, but they may not require any at all. At the very least, all of us must communicate with each other and to our students what it is that we want from them and why.
There is nothing exotic about these goals. They are attainable. When students accomplish them, by whatever method or program, the Unacceptable label will be a thing of the past. Our graduates will be able to enter the workforce at levels not possible today. Fewer (the goal is none at all) will require remediation before entering our college and university classrooms. Fewer (the goal is none at all) will find the work too difficult, forcing them to drop out. More will be informed voters who maintain lifelong learning.
If we believe these goals worthy, all of us must work together. I am ready to begin the work. I acknowledge that the effort, to be successful, will not happen overnight. Are you ready to help?
If we do not work toward these goals, history will not forgive us. If we do accomplish them, history will not forget us. Our students, our community and our future will be better for the efforts we exert, for the work we complete. We must begin the work now for Unacceptable is unacceptable.
Alton L. Biggs is a resident of Commerce and President of Biggs Educational Consulting
For additional information contact:
Alton L. Biggs
2006 Creekview Drive
Commerce, Texas 75428-3947
Telephone: (903) 886-2240 | <urn:uuid:cf5b9cde-eefc-44c5-9123-609829514af5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ketr.org/post/unacceptable-unacceptable | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954275 | 739 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Getting Jews with little or no affiliation excited about participating in the organized Jewish community is a challenge. It’s not a new challenge, though with expanding online media outlets and social networks, the opportunities for reaching the unaffiliated are growing. That’s where a magazine like Tablet comes in. It’s online and therefore easy to access, and it creates a unique space where anyone – regardless of affiliation – can explore Jewish life and culture.
Tablet editor Alana Newhouse recently sat down with Leadel.net, a media hub that highlights Jewish voices and ideas from across the ideological spectrum, focusing on issues of Jewish identity. She explained how the goal of Tablet is to be a place where people “of any religious affiliation, political affiliation,” or people who are “curious about Jewish identity” can come and engage with Judaism in a way that fits the 21st century. “We don’t live in a world where people are embarrassed of their Jewish identity,” she said. “And that impulse needs to be honored and respected and examined and looked at and engaged with.”
Webzines like Tablet and other Jewish media websites understand that we have an amazing opportunity to reach a wide audience of unaffiliated Jews online, and have to decide whether their content is for an already-“insider” audience or accessible by all. But piquing their interest with an article is only the first step. How do we take it to the next level and encourage people to explore and connect with the Jewish community offline? If we simply put everything up on the internet and that’s all we expect from Jews – to read a website – how will that lead to actual community and deeper engagement?
That’s why JOI’s outreach methodology works to engage people deeper in their own Jewish interests, regardless of where those interests are first expressed—whether online or at secular venues like grocery stores, malls and bookstores. Along with additional easy-access destinations like Tablet, we also need to be more proactive in finding the unaffiliated and offering them all that the Jewish community has to offer, because there is great value in being part of a community and exploring one’s heritage.
No comments yet. | <urn:uuid:a9e7494b-3829-48c9-a9f4-072f9f4e6152> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://joi.org/blog/?p=2380 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943365 | 464 | 1.890625 | 2 |
By Bryan G. Pfeifer
August 3, 2012
Charlotte, N.C. — Mobilizing has begun around the country for the March on Wall Street South: protest actions between Sept. 1 and 6 around the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. Activities will include a Sept. 1 Festivaliberación!, focused on youth, students and immigrants; a Sept. 2 March on Wall Street South; and a Sept. 3 Southern Workers Assembly.
A New York/New Jersey delegation joined a MWSS press conference on July 18 in front of the Charlotte-Meckenberg police station in downtown Charlotte. Among those who spoke were Larry Hales, an organizer with the Bail Out the People Movement, who mobilized for protests during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, and Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights.
“Dr. Martin Luther King said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” said Hales. “We see that a great amount of injustice still exists in this world, in this country and this city, which many people witnessed by the recent killing of 28-year-old Black man Michael Lainey by the Charlotte-Mecklenberg police department.
“Much of the suffering and injustice emanates from a system that is based on exploiting working people for their labor. Wars; police brutality; closing our schools, social centers, neighborhood pools; firing teachers — cutting back the entire social safety net that we won through years of struggle – are dictated by the wealthy and powerful, the banks, financial institutions and the corporations. That is why we are marching on Wall Street South.”
Hales stressed, “Banks, financial institutions and corporations have been given at least $20 trillion of bailouts in federal money. It’s our tax money that is put into their pockets while we face constant cutbacks and suffering. This is a great crime and a great injustice. The workers create all wealth in society, not the bosses, corporations and banks. If every worker took the day off tomorrow, billions of dollars would be lost. It’s the workers who drive the buses and trains, open the stores, manufacture the goods and pick the fruit. Yet, the bankers and bosses got the largest welfare check ever issued in this country. It is time that we fight back.
“We will be here in September to tell the bankers that we are not afraid of you. We’ll be here every day until then. Occupy Wall Street was just the opening salvo. We will be in the communities — Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, where there are workers, where there are people suffering and facing injustice — to say that we stand for you. Let’s fight for jobs and health care for all. Let’s occupy our schools to keep them open. Let’s occupy our neighbors’ homes and stop the foreclosures and evictions. Let’s stand up for our rights. March with us in September and continue every day after that. All power to the people!”
‘Immigrant rights are workers’ rights’
Gutierrez explained that “Immigrant rights groups, like other progressive organizations, are mobilizing all over the country to come to Charlotte in September. We consider this a very important event. We consider it crucial to send a message to everyone gathering here that what is needed is not millions of dollars for repression but money for jobs, housing and all the real problems that the people of this country face.
“We want to tell you about the fight for immigrant rights. The press talks about the ‘good immigrant’ and the ‘bad immigrant.’ We are for the rights of all the undocumented to stay in this country and to fight for legalization. What could be more criminal than the economic and foreign policies that have forced our brothers and sisters to come here? What forces people to get in a boat in Haiti or to cross that brutal border into Arizona, risking their lives, if it isn’t desperate conditions? Who are the real criminals? Those who force people to come here because of legislation like NAFTA, which destabilized their homelands. That’s the real crime.
“We want to send a message in September that we need unity for all people of color. We want violent acts such as the killing of Trayvon Martin to stop. It took an upsurge of his family and their supporters and many communities to get any attempt at justice for him.”
Gutierrez emphasized, “We want jobs for all. If we win the right of legalization for immigrants, this benefits everyone. Our sign says ‘Immigrant Rights Are Workers’ Rights.’ The fight for immigrant rights is a fight for unions and for all of us. If we win the struggle for immigrants, we win the struggle for all workers.
“That’s our message for September when we will march with the Coalition to March on Wall Street South. We sent a message to Wall Street in New York City last September that the 99% will continue to fight against the 1%. We’re sending that message again in Charlotte.”
Community outreach is going on daily. MWSS mobilizing meetings take place at the Charlotte Solidarity Center every Monday at 7 p.m. For more information and to help with organizing, contact 704-266-0362, Twitter@WallStSouth or firstname.lastname@example.org; view website wallstsouth.org; or visit the Charlotte Solidarity Center at 516E. 15th St., which is open weekdays from noon to 5 p.m. | <urn:uuid:614ebeae-653b-4b4b-80fe-e403ff494ff6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iacenter.org/actions/wss080412/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953494 | 1,176 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The rumor of the day is that Apple is dumping Intel and its x86 architecture for ARM---at least on laptops.
Semi-Accurate---a wonderful name for a site with an Apple ARM rumor---notes:
- Apple's move to ARM with its laptop line is a done deal.
- Mid-2013 is the timeline.
- 64-bit cores are the big hurdle for ARM.
- That's why Apple is looking for fab capacity.
Now the idea that Apple would move to ARM isn't exactly new. Jason Perlow argued that case a while ago. The big question is how much credence do we give to these SemiAccurate reports. Here are the key questions:
Does Apple and ARM make sense? Yes. Apple would be able to unify its platform and simplify into one ecosystem. It's likely that iOS and Mac OS merge at some point. We all know iOS rules the roost and that system happens to run on ARM. In addition, Apple's laptops are likely to be more of the MacBook Air variety. Think tablet/laptop hybrids. That fact favors ARM too. The problem with all of this is you have to wonder how ARM will play on high-performance Mac laptops and desktops.
When would all of Apple be ARM? That move would take some time. If laptops went in 2013, all of Macs would probably follow a few years later. Why? Raw power.
Would Mac need to be x86? Not at all. ARM chips are likely to be good enough. Meanwhile, hulking Mac towers may not even exist in 2016.
Could Apple go the custom chip route again? Sure it could and already does. The pros would be better margins. The cons is that Apple would have to keep up with Intel's tick tock cadence. Good luck with that. Jason O'Grady notes:
Apple acquired ARM chip maker P.A. Semi in April 2008 for around $300 million in cash which Steve Jobs then explained as a way to acquire expertise and technology to help run increasingly sophisticated software on iPhones and iPods. Shortly thereafter Apple acquired ARM core experts Intrinsity for a reported $121 million. Then in 2009 Apple hired two former CTOs from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Is good enough processors really good enough? Here's the thing with processing power. You always have more than you need---until some killer apps comes along and you need more performance. Performance doesn't matter until it does.
What card can Intel play? VentureBeat made the argument that Intel's Tri-Gate transistor announcement this week makes the Apple -ARM talk pure folly. The problem with the argument is that Tri-Gate is manufacturing process not an architecture. Intel execs avoided all talk of an architecture Holy War with ARM and x86. Reading between those comments leaves the door open that Intel could use Tri-Gate for ARM architecture. Also:
- Intel: Moore's Law has been cubed; Welcome to 3-D transistors
- Why Intel's 22nm technology really matters
- The case for Intel making Apple's mobile chips: A Wintel of the post-PC era
Is the ARM talk overblown? Yes. Let's say Intel does ARM---a move that would make sense since the chip giant needs the tablet and smartphone market. Apple would stay on board. With the timelines SemiAccurate is posing, Intel will be onto 14nm. Remember Intel's manufacturing process is second to none. If it comes down to moving chips, Intel isn't going to sweat architecture religion.
Add it up and it's quite possible that Apple goes ARM. But don't be surprised if Intel tags along somehow. | <urn:uuid:3e5e768d-54ee-455a-a19b-e9f3055330a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-dumping-intel-for-arm-pros-cons-and-a-lot-of-questions/48419 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956824 | 754 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Posts Tagged: undertaker bee
Life and death in the bee observation hive...
If you ever have the opportunity to check out a bee observation hive--a glassed-in hive showing the colony at work--you can easily spot the three castes: the queen bee, worker bees and drones.
If you look closely, you'll observe the foragers performing their waggle and round dances and the royal attendants circling the queen in a retinue.
The queen will lay from 1000 to 2000 eggs a day in peak season. From an egg, to a larva to a pupa to a newly emerged bee, it's all there.
You'll observe the worker bees performing their specific duties: nurse maids, nannies, royal attendants, builders, architects, foragers, dancers, honey tenders, pollen packers, propolis or "glue" specialists, air conditioning and heating technicians, guards, and undertakers. The worker bees (sterile females) run the hive. They're the "you-go" girls and the "go-to" girls.
The Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis has several observation hives. One is in the Laidlaw conference room; another is in an entomology classroom in 122 Briggs Hall. The bees enter and exit through a thin tube connecting the inside of the colony to the outside world.
Avid bee enthusiasts place an observation hive in their homes, often in the living room. It's a honey of a conversation piece, beside being an educational experience.
The saddest part? Watching the undertaker bees carry out the motionless bodies of their sisters and brothers.
Or watching the sisters, as winter approaches, evict their brothers. The girls are protecting their precious food storage and want fewer mouths to feed.
Drones, whose only responsibility is to mate with the queen, aren't needed in the winter months.
But wait 'til spring... | <urn:uuid:427547a0-ab22-46e7-b27c-da1bc136e2e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/?blogtag=undertaker%20bee&blogasset=42184 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938274 | 406 | 2.28125 | 2 |
"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails ... (NIV)"
1 Corinthians 13:4–8a
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (NIV)"
1 Corinthians 13:13
"And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (NIV)"
"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (NIV)"
1 John 4:8
The one topic that is addressed in the bible more than any other is Love. Love bears all and love conquers all. The greatest denominator on earth is Love. We all have a need for love. Contrary to Love is Hate. It has been said that hating someone is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to feel the effects. Love allows us all to connect with the creator in perfect peace. Love heals all wounds, love is the magic elixir that can help sooth any pain, brighten up the cloudiest of days and warm the coldest of rooms. It has been proven that individuals who are not raised in an environment fostered with Love, are not psychologically balanced and healthy individuals. Trying to live without experiencing and exhibiting love is like expecting a plant to live without any sunlight or water. Show me a person who is void of any hope, faith or confidence that they can make it another day, and I’ll show you a person void of Love. There are over 7 billion people in the world. With 7 billion different combinations of experiences, talents, needs and desires. But the one common need we all have is to be loved. A family void of love is not a healthy environment to raise children. A marriage void of love, in unfulfilling as an empty lunch box. A life void of love, is as cold and dark as an empty basement in winter. Don’t underestimate the power of Love in your life and that of others.
-- Eric Tidwell | <urn:uuid:c9660594-cd1c-4432-a201-eec564520a17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thekingcenter.org/blog/mlk-quote-week-sticking-love-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946612 | 532 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Traffic will continue to go both ways on Tilden Avenue in Chardon.
City Council this week decided to drop legislation that would have made the residential roadway a one-way street. Instead, officials intend to designate the street an alley, so as to lower the speed limit and, consequently, liability concerns.
This determination followed months of study and a presentation Thursday by a URS engineering design services firm representative, who conducted a traffic study.
To make the change, city staff is preparing a city code text amendment tweaking the definition of “alley,” and another piece of legislation changing Tilden’s classification from a local collector street to an alley. The items are anticipated on the March agenda.
The alley designation would allow the city to maintain two-way traffic — to the relief of residents — but decrease the speed limit down to 15 mph from 25 mph.
“This would be the only street within the city limits that would be designated an alley other than the current alley behind businesses on Main Street,” Public Service Director Paul Hornyak said.
Tilden, which dates to 1870, has always been considered narrow based on modern-day standards, and it became more so with a repaving project last year that included new curbing. It is less than the 20-foot width required by law for two-way traffic.
Law Director James M. Gillette said the fact that it is a pre-existing road designed for that width would help guard against liability issues. In addition, there have been no accidents on Tilden in the last five years, according to police.
“Those things made council comfortable leaving it that way,” Mayor Phil King said. “The bottom line for council is, we don’t want to see anybody hurt.”
A public works department analysis determined that fewer motorists are using the road — about 900 vehicles a day, which is nearly a 40 percent decrease from a decade ago.
Hornyak called the outcome a win for all involved in the potentially divisive situation.
“It was an example of the government working to find a solution,” he said. “I walked away feeling pretty good that we were able to appease all parties involved. That doesn’t always happen.” | <urn:uuid:9b7007c1-33ae-4fa8-9a61-0d338d4531b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2013/02/16/news/doc511ead2889174606106162.prt | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968129 | 483 | 1.945313 | 2 |
The unwritten dress rule for church and primary educational institutions are skirts should be at least below the knee or fingertip length. Although young women abide by the rules inside these facilities, once they leave, these rules no longer apply.
Because of the influential exposure that the media displays of pop culture, the word dressing appropriately has been redefined. Young girls see tight skirts, low cut shirts, midriffs, and cut off shorts being associated with beauty on a daily basis. It has reached the all time low of the latest trends coming in smaller sizes that targets little girls.
True enough, during your teenage years you have room to explore and express yourself through your clothing, but young ladies have to remember that there is a balance. Young girls evolving into young women need to have women in their lives that set a great example, starting with how to present oneself in public.
For young ladies on the verge of becoming a woman, wearing a low cut blouse should automatically mean that the preferred bottoms are not too short. Or if she wants to show a little leg, then try not to reveal too much up top. The chest, arms, legs, and lower back area are all a woman’s attractive points on her body; therefore, attracting the attention of the opposite sex. But remember all attention is not good attention.
Young ladies are being led to believe that by showing more makes them more attractive; however, they do not realize that by showing too much cleavage, or leg puts them in a category of being treated exactly how they dress. Ironically, in most cases, girls do not have the same perspective of themselves as other people do when dressed in certain outfits that show an excessive amount of skin. When women expose too much, men tend to treat them like objects, or may address them by anything but their name, and assume that they are willing to expose more than what they are already have.
Yes, men should respect women at all times; however, how can they respect women who do not exude lady-like qualities. One’s appearance is the first thing that people use to make judgments about one another; therefore it is extremely important to always, always make a great impression the first time. It may be cliché, but it is true that people can never make a first impression the second time around. The way a person dresses, especially women, shows a lot about one’s character.
On the contrary, clothing manufactures who make little girls’ clothing that strongly resemble the same clothing that you would see in junior sizes do not help the younger generation dress age appropriate. Destroyed jeans or low cut blouses should not be able to fit little girls, because too much is being revealed and young girls are being socialized to think that dressing in such a manner is okay.
We need women, whether celebrities, stay at home mothers, or working women to be positive role models that influence young girls to dress modestly. Because without these women, young girls will continue to attract the wrong attention from men, be ignorant of terms such as business causal and business formal, and be clueless about how to be sexy and classy at the same time. Youth is a time period where people are exceptionally impressionable, so it is our responsibility to teach girls that it is okay to leave something to the imagination, because girls grow into women; however, they have to be taught how to be a lady.
About Yasmin Harrell:
Yasmin Harrell attends Valdosta State University as a graduating senior. After college she plans to attend Graduate School to obtain a Master’s Degree in African-American Studies. Through higher education and giving back, she plans to inspire anyone within her reach.
Photo credit: brechotoshine.blogspot.com | <urn:uuid:2d9f76c3-ef92-4241-8b33-e50835ae6a2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nyahmag.com/?p=2074 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960758 | 769 | 1.835938 | 2 |
NEEP department now Engineering Physics
The college's Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics (NEEP) has changed its name to the Department of Engineering Physics. Both the faculty and the university approved the change this spring.
Engineering physics better reflects the department's broadened mission, explains department chair Gilbert A. Emmert.
In 1995, the Department of Engineering Mechanics ceased to exist as a separate department and the majority of its faculty joined the NEEP department. The new name gives visibility to all of the department's degree programs, which include BS degrees in nuclear engineering, engineering mechanics, and engineering mechanics with an astronautics option; and MS and PhD degrees in nuclear engineering & engineering physics and engineering mechanics. | <urn:uuid:08ae04e3-447f-4cc3-b8e9-4645563329bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.engr.wisc.edu/news/archive/1997/Jun09.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946809 | 144 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The Jackson Pledge has a following on Facebook
Introduced to the community during a gathering Sunday, the pledge asks community members to renounce racism and prejudice and embrace unity and diversity. A group of about 60 people met at the First Congregational Church Sunday afternoon in response to white pride march March 21 in Jackson.
The pledge, which can be viewed at www.facebook.com/jacksonpledge and below, was borrowed from a campaign that started in Birmingham, Ala.
The Rev. Cynthia Landrum, minister at the Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty, started the page on the popular social-networking site Facebook on Monday and was surprised to see it had nearly 100 followers by Tuesday. She hopes more people in the community discover and adopt the pledge. More details on how and where to sign the pledge will be added to the page soon, she said.
The Jackson Pledge
Sign It — Live It
• I believe that every person has worth as an individual.
• I believe that every person is entitled to dignity and respect, regardless of race or color.
• I believe that every thought and every act of racial prejudice is harmful; if it is my thought or act, then it is harmful to me as well as to others.
• Therefore, from this day forward I will strive daily to eliminate racial prejudice from my thoughts and actions.
• I will discourage racial prejudice by others at every opportunity.
• I will treat all people with dignity and respect; and I will strive daily to honor this pledge, knowing that the world will be a better place because of my effort.
Taken from www.birminghampledge.org. | <urn:uuid:7c1bdc61-9175-49f2-8048-a42570423b5a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2010/03/the_jackson_pledge_has_a_follo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959435 | 341 | 1.953125 | 2 |
After graduating with a pre-Forestry degree in 1968 from our community college in the Southern San Joaquin Valley in mid-California, I drove up to Arcata, California where my prospective college experience loomed ahead of me that Fall. On my way to my first summer job away from home, all the trappings of adventure were there. I was off to check out my future, to be shaped by Humboldt State College (HSC) Forestry Department.
I recall driving along the Trinity River on Hiway 299, which amounted to a three hour drive through some of the finest scenery I had seen (still quite worthy!). The last thirty miles was a very steep and very curvy stretch of two lane road, loaded with logging trucks, loud with their engine brakes, big with their heavy, one-log loads (some only 8', few longer than 16'). So steep it was, the trucks had reservoirs of water that were gravity-fed through hoses to the big, finned brake drums to cool them, in their long descent into Humboldt Bay. My car, large by today's standards, seemed rather small in their presence.
Loggers and logging truck drivers and contractors in support of the numerous timber operations, all depended on the uninterrupted supply of big redwoods. It had been their source of income, way of life for many decades, generations even, and woe unto anyone who would disturb their way of life.
Well, outside of Humboldt County, and for that matter, the Southern San Joaquin Valley, the era we now know as "The Sixties" had begun. Many things the "Sixties" were, but my focus here is that of the protest movements that came with them. By the late 60's, a fair number of HSC students (most of whom came from outside the County, often urban areas where parents were looking for a safe haven for their kids) had been exposed to some of the movements going on across the US. Awed by the redwood forests they had driven through to get to HSC, they were dismayed at the number of logging trucks, and the redwoods transported by them.
Protests became common (whether for wars, or what have you), and certainly the cessation of harvesting redwoods in and around a presciently created Redwood Park was brought about by such protests as they gathered national force.
Decades have passed since I last was a Humboldt County resident, but just recently it became apparent that The Sixties are still alive and well in Humboldt County, as witnessed by the scene below in Richardson Grove, where CalTrans had plans of doing some curve-widening along tight stretches of Hiway 101, near the Avenue of the Giants (Eureka Times Standard):
Don Bertolette - President/Moderator, WNTS BBS
Restoration Forester (Retired)
Grand Canyon National ParkBJCP Apprentice Beer Judge
View my Alaska Big Tree List Webpage at:http://www.akbigtreelist.org
For this message the author Don has received Likes :
- canada yew | <urn:uuid:e664cab5-c961-4430-a0a5-a7f894450770> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ents-bbs.org/viewtopic.php?p=16780 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983885 | 646 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Monday, September 19, 2011
There are considerable differences between preparing meals in an aircraft galley and doing the same thing in a restaurant kitchen. For the chefs involved in SWISS Taste of Switzerland, creating menus for airline inflight service is always a great challenge. Considerable time passes until their creations are actually served on dishes in the aircraft.
Many points have to be taken into consideration when it comes to food on board. For example, certain types of food and ingredients are not really suitable for an aircraft galley, due, for example, to issues with digestion. Raw food, too, is problematic. We also avoid products that are questionable on ethical grounds. The first major challenge for the guest chef masterminding the meals and for Gate Gourmet, the caterer later preparing the culinary creations in large volume, is to find the right ingredients.
The SWISS Taste of Switzerland guest chef needs to be aware that the meals are prepared by Gate Gourmet 24 hours before they are served and then cooled down to a temperature of 2 degrees Celsius before being stored until they are loaded on board. During the flight, the cabin crew members working in SWISS First and SWISS Business heat the meals carefully in a hot-air oven or a steam and hot air combination oven up to around 160 degrees. Some food items have to be ruled out as they are not suitable for this process either.
A lengthy period of preparation take place before the meals can be consumed on board. The first step in the creation of a new SWISS Taste of Switzerland occurs about six months before the meals make it on board. During this early stage in the process members of the SWISS Inflight Product team meet with the guest chef to explain the expectations and his/her role.
Once the guest chef has drawn up the initial recipes, Gate Gourmet spends a fortnight testing them for their suitability for SWISS. Significant aspects at this stage are flavour, feasibility for Gate Gourmet and the meals’ visual qualities. Not every chef is familiar with what is involved in designing meals appropriate for the crockery airlines use on flights.
When Gate Gourmet has concluded its overall calculations, the next step is for a "working presentation" to take place, at which all of the dishes created by the guest chef and Gate Gourmet itself are sampled. Any necessary adjustments are made at this point, and one month later a final presentation and sampling together with the guest chef takes place. This occurs about three months before the first meal is loaded on board. The meals are photographed for the purpose of writing the guides which are required to ensure that the meals are correctly prepared on board by cabin crew members.
Part 1: SWISS Taste of Switzerland (Schaffhausen) 1/2 | <urn:uuid:7d2aaef0-5013-4b2f-8f03-88333428f6c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.swiss.com/2011/09/swiss-taste-of-switzerland-schaffhausen_19.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955362 | 558 | 2.15625 | 2 |
I don't know about Latin specifically, but the use and meaning of punctuation like the colon have been changing over the years. There haven't always been clear rules, nor are there universal and fixed rules till this day. If you look at English from the last few centuries, you'll see differing usages through time. By modern standards, it can be really strange at times, varying within a period and even within the works of a single authors. It's only recently that we've attempted to truly standardize punctuation to meet stylistic guidelines.
I imagine all of this applies to Latin texts as well as vernacular ones, considering that modern editors are creating these "critical editions". Editors necessarily have to make choices about how they are going to present the text, and if they are editing something that is originally unpunctuated, they will undoubtedly follow their own judgments, education, and the prevailing style of the time.
Horae quidem cedunt et dies et menses et anni, nec praeteritum tempus umquam revertitur nec quid sequatur sciri potest. Quod cuique temporis ad vivendum datur, eo debet esse contentus. --Cicero, De Senectute | <urn:uuid:f3ea8bfb-379c-4cb8-875a-724d74615ee0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?p=79177 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937665 | 258 | 2.84375 | 3 |
BP's Hole in the World: The Absurdity of the Fix-It Mentality
Continued from previous page
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3 million gallons dumped with the company's trademark "What could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall pointed out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast-multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil—but in the process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat, whose captain asked, "Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response—in the open ocean—was, "You can't be here then." But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by fourteen emissions-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbor to neighbor.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing or when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August—repeated by Obama in his June 15 Oval Office address—is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavor is ever without risk," while Texas Republican Congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly." By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld."
Make the Bleeding Stop
Thankfully, many others are taking a different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else, too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, twenty-four hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the Coast Guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen," he observed what many had felt: "The gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "We are hemorrhaging." Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop." And I was personally struck, flying with the Coast Guard over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upward, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep. | <urn:uuid:8816c27e-db0a-4d72-84c0-b670399dbdcf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alternet.org/story/147348/bp's_hole_in_the_world%3A_the_absurdity_of_the_fix-it_mentality?page=0%2C6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969678 | 869 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Scanning the Public Domain
I am working on a paper on the history of razors and blades (yes, I know that sounds obscure, even for an ivory tower sort; I’ll leave it to another day to try to persuade you that you should be fascinated, too). I have been reading turn of the century—that is the 19th century—catalogues. The 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. catalogue was a wonder. Montgomery Ward was the Amazon of its day, a market leader in the mail-order business. Local stores, especially outside of big cities, might offer only a limited selection, but Montgomery Ward promised the world to the entire country. Catalogue No. 57—Spring and Summer, 1895—was a behemoth, running 624 pages and offering tens of thousands of items for sale.
You would think that it would be a trick to find the 1895 catalogue, and, in truth, putting together a run of catalogues from say 1895 to 1930 does involve an unpleasant mix of brittle paper and clumsy microfilm. But you can have the 1895 catalogue in your hands tomorrow: go to Amazon, spend $22.21, and jump into the Monkey Ward time machine to see what life looked like back then.
What you actually will receive is a Dover Publication described as an unabridged facsimile of the original 1895 catalogue. In a word, a copy. Dover, I assume, scanned an original version of the catalogue to produce the book that it is selling to us. Scanned, meaning, took pictures of the pages of the catalogue. We shouldn’t fear for Dover, of course, as whatever the original copyright status of the Ward catalogue, the U.S. cutoff date for the public domain is 1923. Anything published in the U.S. before that date has entered the public domain, so Dover is on safe ground in making its copy. And in selling the public domain, Dover is doing exactly what it is allowed to do. You can copy the public domain, remix it, turn it into movies and take in more than $330 million at the box office—the Alice in Wonderland remake, of course—and sell it in its original form as Dover is doing with the Ward catalogue.
But that isn’t what I care about. If you turn to the copyright page in the Dover facsimile, it says “Copyright © 1969 by Dover Publications, Inc.” This is where the plot thickens. What exactly—if anything—does Dover have a copyright in? There is an introduction to the catalogue and Dover can hold a copyright in that, as you can with any newly-created content, but what about the catalogue itself? And while I’d like to know where I stand as to the Dover book, of course, the real question is where do I stand as to Google? Google is the big enchilada when it comes to the scanned public domain and we are going to care a great deal about what rights we have as to the scanned images that Google has created. It isn’t clear yet what will happen to Google Book Search—I have views here, here and here—but Google is perfectly within its rights to scan works in the U.S. public domain and that will be a core part of its database going forward.
But what can I do with what Google—and Dover—have created? We should review quickly the basics of copyright in photographs. We start, of course, with the Supreme Court’s 1884 decision in Burrow-Giles and Sarony’s photograph of Oscar Wilde. Burrow-Giles helped itself to that photograph and then defended its use on the ground that the photograph was a “mere mechanical reproduction” and hence insufficiently original to qualify for copyright protection. The Court acknowledged that that might be the case for the “ordinary production of a photograph” though it declined to conclude that no copyright would attach even then. But Sarony had done much more in creating the photograph of Wilde: Sarony had composed the picture, arranged Wilde’s pose and the setting for it, adjusted the lighting and shading, and all of that together represented an original creation by Sarony.
But the line that Sarony seemed to suggest—we should look for originality in the creation of the subject of the photograph—went by the by as courts embraced copyright in uncreated subjects (outdoor settings such as the New York Public Library). As soon as we took that path, we were going to have huge numbers of original photographs. Go to a party, take a bunch of pictures, create original copyrighted works. Indeed, the more interesting question quickly becomes: what does an unoriginal photograph look like? Burrow-Giles could of course have copied the Sarony photograph of Wilde by getting Wilde to repose and making sure that every aspect of the new photograph matched the old one. That would be as much a copy of the Sarony photograph—and therefore unoriginal—as what Burrow-Giles did in the actual case.
Next have Burrow-Giles take a photograph of Sarony’s photograph of Wilde. That is just as much a copy of the original photograph as when Burrow-Giles recreated the picture per my hypo. That photograph of the photograph should be treated as a copy of the original photograph and unoriginal. You could of course make an original photograph that incorporated the Sarony photograph—perhaps with the photograph surrounded by other objects—but a pure photo of the photo should be treated as a copy. When you take such a photo of a copyrighted photo, you infringe. When the original photo is no longer copyrighted because it has entered the public domain, your photo doesn’t infringe but it doesn’t cease to be a copy and it still lacks originality.
Where does that put Google (and Dover) with its digital scanners? We are starting to see skirmishes over photographs and scans of public domain works. The British National Portrait Gallery got into a spat with Wikipedia when Wikipedia uploaded onto its website digital images created by the NPG of public domain works in its collection. Actual caselaw is scarce, with Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., a 1999 federal district court decision, as a leading case. The court characterized the dispute as one over “’slavish copies’ of public domain works of art” and concluded that such copies lacked the spark of originality and therefore could not be copyrighted.
That isn’t to say that an owner of such a digital file couldn’t try to control use of it through some means other than copyright. Go to Google Book Search and download Alice in Wonderland. The first page is from Google, not Lewis Carroll, and it offers a strong defense of the public domain: “Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians.” Then we get to the next word “nevertheless” and you can guess what follows: digitization is expensive—as indeed it is—so Google has imposed a series of limits on how the digital file can be used.
To be sure, there are oddities about this analysis. A photograph of a rose in your backyard is probably nothing more than a slavish copy of the rose and yet it is hard to imagine that a court would find insufficient originality in the photo. Yet a photo of a photo—or a digital scan of the 1895 Ward catalogue—will probably be found to be nothing more than a copy of the original work, infringing or not depending on whether the work has entered the public domain, but almost certainly lacking sufficient originality for the second photo or scan to be independently copyrightable. | <urn:uuid:1db8622a-b3ad-4dc8-856b-0a287a23cd66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2010/05/scanning-the-public-domain.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957807 | 1,590 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Jesse H. Ausubel, M.A.Director and Senior Research Associate
Program for the Human Environment
Mr. Ausubel studies environmental science and technology and industrial evolution. His research focuses on long-term technical change; its relationship with the evolving productivity of energy, materials, land and other resources; and the consequences for human populations. Underlying his work are studies of the mathematics of growth and diffusion.
Recognizing the growing connection between environment and various activities underway at the university, Mr. Ausubel’s program houses research, organizes meetings on topics of interest to the campus community, hosts visiting scientists in environmental fields and encourages collaborations among faculty and students. The program also communicates the results of environmental studies involving the university to scientists and the public.
Under auspices of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Mr. Ausubel led development of an international program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans: the Census of Marine Life. Involvement in the marine census led to environmental genomics, and researchers in the program have explored and advanced the use of very short DNA sequences for species identification, the so-called "Barcode of Life." In addition, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, Mr. Ausubel and his collaborators have participated in creation of the Encyclopedia of Life, a Web site aiming to catalog all of Earth’s 1.9 million known and named species. Under Sloan auspices, Mr. Ausubel is now helping lead the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a decadal program to probe secrets of volcanoes and diamonds, sources of oil and gas, and origins and limits of life.
Mr. Ausubel received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College and two master's degrees from Columbia University. He has been a resident fellow at the National Academy of Sciences' Climate Research Board, study director at the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and director of programs for the National Academy of Engineering. He joined The Rockefeller University as a fellow in science and public policy in 1989 and became senior research associate and director of the Program for the Human Environment in 1993. He worked as a program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 1994 until 2012. He is an adjunct faculty member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, University Fellow of Resources for the Future and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. | <urn:uuid:8ea85bc4-6de3-43d7-82ad-52bbf4ebb760> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/researchaffiliates/JesseAusubel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935848 | 501 | 1.75 | 2 |
Commencement speech conundrum
- One college graduate advertises himself on his cap. Reuters
A year ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told graduates at Miami Dade College: “You are the American dream.”
The message to this year’s graduates as they leave school to find jobs might be something more like: “Keep dreaming.”
The national unemployment rate is 9 percent, nearly double what it was this time a year ago, but there will still be waves of students graduating in the coming weeks — students who will expect to hear some words of encouragement and inspiration in a climate that’s wanting of both.
What’s a commencement speaker to do?
“I think my approach will be to talk about the challenges we face with the economy and really with the world in general,” said Rep. John Boozman (D-Ark.), who will be delivering the address at Harding University, a Christian liberal arts college in Searcy, Ark. “I guess what I’ll be doing is really challenging them, that we are counting on them to be a big part of the solution.”
For the first time since 2004, the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ annual survey showed dips — and significant ones at that — in both internship and co-op hiring projections for this year.
“I think, without a doubt, there is additional stress on the minds of the graduates, some who found jobs, many who are still searching and waiting to hear back from potential employers,” said freshman Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), who is speaking May 16 at his alma mater, Bradley University.
Schock said that while his remarks will acknowledge the precariousness of the job market graduates are entering, he will largely “take the long view about their role in society.”
Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley, who’ll speak at Clarke College in Dubuque on May 9, said he’ll take a page from President Barack Obama and ask the graduates to serve the country in their first few years out of school.
“I’m not going to steal his theme directly,” said Braley, a Democrat who has spoken previously at the University of Iowa College of Law and at Hawkeye State University.
“Part of what I always talk about is the importance of mentoring and volunteering.”Braley said he traditionally works in three to five “life lessons, and I try to make them topical and timely.”
The one boilerplate story Braley tends to tell is that of his little brother, who was diagnosed with cancer as a sixth-grader. Braley, a young father at the time who had just started his career in law, essentially moved his new practice into the hospital room so he could tend to his brother.
“Watching those kids with no hair getting chemo was a life’s lesson about priorities I will never forget,” he said.
On his flight back to Washington from Idaho last Sunday, Democratic Rep. Walt Minnick was working on the first draft of the speech he’ll deliver to the students at the University of Idaho.
Like Braley, Minnick said the virtue of giving back will be salient in his remarks, although he added that he’d deliver that message any year, regardless of the state of the economy.
Several members said they think graduates might be listening to commencement speakers a little more closely now than they did in the flush years.
“Probably the graduates and their parents will pay a little closer attention than they have sometimes in the past,” Boozman said. “There are lots of concerns, there is a lot of fear in society right now concerning job prospects; parents are concerned about maintaining their jobs, too. I think the difference will be that they listen a little closer.” | <urn:uuid:d315c89f-1796-4934-982d-927155efaada> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21885.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974687 | 811 | 1.53125 | 2 |
In our view: Cheers & Jeers
Vancouver centers boost families; when turkeys strike back
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Cheers: To Vancouver Public Schools' expanding network of family and community resource centers. The centers are now found on 11 of the school district's 32 campuses, serving 5,400 of the district's 22,400 students. As The Columbian's Tom Vogt reported in Wednesday's Neighbors section, these are places where families can access academic and early-learning programs, health and social services, youth activities, and some resources for parents. At Harney Elementary School, for example, Tia Vasquez says the after-school soccer program offered by the resource center is her favorite activity of the school week. Other children might get their kicks playing chess. The centers cost a total of $750,000 per year to operate, but many other organizations pick up the bulk of the costs. Most importantly, the centers have proven to be successful at improving lives and students' academic achievement.
Jeers: To turkey fires. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in recent years more than 2,000 such fires have been reported to local fire departments over the Thanksgiving holiday. Many of the fires can be traced to deep-frying the turkey, a practice that has gained favor in recent years. There are several hazards, including the spattering when home cooks put a wet bird into hot oil or overheat or overfill the pot. The safest practices are to cook the turkey outdoors and well away from structures -- not on a deck or in the garage -- and never leave the bird unattended, even to go refill your beverage. That action, of course, could pose hazards of its own.
Cheers: To local groups that offered free Thanksgiving meals, and to those community members who volunteered to serve them. Among those providing service on Thanksgiving Day were Chronis' Restaurant and Superior Court Judge Rich Melnick; Da Kine Cafe; the Fraternal Order of Eagles in Vancouver; Lord's Gym; Share House and the Knights of Columbus. And a cheer to those who volunteer to serve meals on days other than Thanksgiving or Christmas; local charities report that they receive a lot of calls from would-be volunteers for those days, while other days go begging. Unfortunately, hunger is a problem that endures.
Jeers: To people who ignore advice to be prepared for earthquakes. For them, this week's 3.2 magnitude temblor should have provided a wake-up call — literally, since it hit at 6:15 a.m. The tremor was 12 miles below ground, near the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, and may or may not be tied to a fault known as the Portland Hills Fault. It hardly matters. As with all places on the Pacific Rim, Clark County is prone to earthquakes, including the feared Cascadia quake with the potential to cause many deaths and injuries and catastrophic loss. It might not hit in our lifetimes. But it could, and it is worth taking the time to educate yourself on preparedness and take appropriate action.
Cheers: To progress at Mount St. Helens. As nature continues its recovery, the volcano in Skamania County continues to tell a changing story to repeat visitors. Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, rightly called St. Helens "a treasure to our region" at a meeting this week to review the U.S. Forest Service's management of 110,000 acres of land and several associated visitor facilities. Mount St. Helens National Monument Manager Tom Mulder noted numerous facility upgrades, including reopening of the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center, and increasing recreational opportunities, including upgraded trails and kayaking and mountain biking. | <urn:uuid:b0c537af-4b1a-4d40-93ef-9ab1627c2e8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.columbian.com/news/2012/nov/24/cheers-jeers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954839 | 767 | 1.6875 | 2 |
11:49 a.m. |Wrapping Up Testimony
The briefing concluded at 11:45 a.m.
11:42 a.m. |The U.S. Backup-Battery Situation
After the tsunami knocked out power at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that American reactors had batteries that would last for four or eight hours. David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Power Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the committee that this was true, sort of. Only 11 of the American reactors have eight-hour batteries, and 93 have four-hour batteries, he said.
“When the event lasts longer than our assumptions, either four or eight hours, we shouldn’t leave operators with no choices,” said Mr. Lochbaum, a nuclear industry veteran who is among the most technically proficient of the industry’s opponents. If the batteries run out, power from the grid is not restored, and the diesel generators stop running, leaving operators with no options “other than a miracle,” he said.
“Miracles are great, but you can’t rely on them,” he said. “Japan showed the price of not doing that.”
Testifying with Mr. Lochbaum was Anthony R. Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade association. “To get to 48 hours, or 72 hours, pick a number,” he said. “We’re going to have to take a hard look and see what resources would be required.”
He said that extending battery capability was “one of the obvious places we’ll have to look.”
But he emphasized that a natural catastrophe that wiped out the grid, the diesel generators and other plant equipment was highly unlikely. “It’s hard to postulate that here,” he said. “It’s very, very unlikely for that to occur and destroy the entire infrastructure around the plant.”
11:26 a.m. |U.S. Workers Keep a Distance From Japan’s Radiation
The State Department has told American citizens to stay 50 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and it turns out that American government personnel who have been sent over to help are keeping their distance as well.
Mr. Lyons described radiation levels at a radius of 2.5 miles from the plant. He said levels were much higher at the plant itself, but “our flights are not going closer than that.”
The maximum level of radiation observed on the ground 2.5 miles away is 30 millirems per hour, he said. One hour of exposure to that level would subject someone to roughly what the average American gets in a month from background radiation. Exposure at that rate for a day and a half would put a person around the threshold at which the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission advise evacuating or taking shelter.
But Mr. Lyons said exposure rates had dropped since that peak reading.
(As he left the hearing room, Mr. Lyons said that the robots the United States is sending to Japan, mentioned earlier in the briefing, could take pictures as well as measure radiation fields. They could go places where “you certainly wouldn’t send a person,” he said, adding that they have been used in cleanups of Energy Department weapons manufacturing sites.)
7:47 p.m. | Updated
The United States is shipping a “Talon” robot, built by Qinetiq, equipped to take pictures and provide a radiation map of areas with high radiation. The military uses them in war zones.
11:02 a.m. |Franken Asks About Flood Risks in U.S.
So far there has not been much sharp questioning of the witnesses, but Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, did some probing. “We have a plant in Monticello, Minn., that is the same design as the Fukushima reactors,’’ he said. An earthquake there is unlikely, and “if we have a tsunami there, we’ve probably got bigger problems,’’ he said, drawing laughter from the room.
“But we do have floods,’’ Mr. Franken said. “Any chance that the backup generators at places like Prairie Island in Minnesota or Monticello could get overwhelmed by flooding?”
Mr. Borchardt responded that the plants were designed and built after a careful consideration of historical records of floods and other natural phenomena.
Senator Franken asked, “And do they do those kinds of reviews in Japan?”
“I really can’t speak to that,” Mr. Borchardt replied.
“Wouldn’t that be a good thing to know?” Senator Franken said. “Certainly, yes, sir,” Mr. Borchardt said.
Senator Franken added, “I would suggest you hop right on that.” Then he pushed a bit further. “Are any reactors in the U.S. built near faults, or oceans?”
“Or just one ocean?” he amended, to further laughter.
10:45 a.m. |U.S. to Send Robots to Japan
The Energy Department is preparing a shipment of radiation-hardened robots and personnel to show the Japanese how to use them, Mr. Lyons said. “A shipment is being readied — I don’t know if it has left yet,” he said. “The government of Japan is very, very interested in the capabilities that could be brought to bear from this country.”
Mr. Lyons, responding to a question from Senator Murkowski, said the robots could help collect some but not all of the information needed on the state of the reactors.
Both he and Mr. Borchardt declined to predict when conditions would stabilize enough for a thorough evaluation of the reactors’ condition. “I can’t even hazard a guess,” Mr. Borchardt said.
Senator Bingaman, the committee chairman, asked what effect the action would have on re-licensing reactors in the United States. More than half the 104 reactors in service have won 20-year license extensions, and all or nearly all of the others are expected to as well.
This was a question Mr. Borchardt could answer unequivocally: none, he said. “If there was a design change necessary in order to adapt the plants to what we’re learning from Japan, we would take that action absent or outside the license renewal process,’’ he said. “We would take that action without hesitation.”
There is “no technical reason I’m aware of that this would impact the license renewal process,” he said.
Some senators and many opponents of nuclear power have called for a moratorium on re-licensing.
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, asked about the storage of spent nuclear fuel since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Some engineers have said it would be safer to move more of the older fuel from pools to dry casks, which require no mechanical cooling.
Mr. Lyons, who noted that he was a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when spent fuel storage was reviewed, replied, “Using the best info we had at the time, both storage systems were deemed to be safe.”
The spent fuel pools at Fukushima, while adding yet another problem to the travails of the nuclear complex, are not nearly as heavily loaded as American spent fuel pools, however.
10:04 a.m. |‘A Slow Recovery From the Accident’
Seawater cooling, a desperate measure, has ended at the three Fukushima Daiichi reactors that were running at the time of the earthquake, and freshwater cooling has resumed, William Borchardt, the top staff official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told the committee.
And the Energy Department official in charge of promoting that technology, Peter Lyons, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that there was progress in Japan but still a long way to go.
“Current information suggests that the plants are in a slow recovery from the accident,” said Mr. Lyons, who was appointed as assistant secretary of energy but is “acting” in that role because the Senate has not confirmed him. “However, long-term cooling of the reactors and pools is essential during this period and has not been adequately restored to date, to the best of my knowledge.”
The session is officially not a hearing but a briefing. At a hearing, witnesses are supposed to file their testimony 72 hours in advance. “Things are changing rapidly at the Fukushima nuclear power plant,” said the committee chairman, Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico.
Mr. Lyons was vague on some points. He stepped back slightly from the statement two weeks ago by Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that one of the spent fuel pools was empty, or nearly so. “Water levels in the spent fuel pools were also a concern, with some reports that at least one was empty for some time,’’ he said.
He said his department had deployed 40 people and 17,000 pounds of gear, including some that measure radiation from aircraft.
The committee’s ranking Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, pointed out that among the problems for the plant workers is that the earthquake and tsunami may have killed relatives and destroyed their homes.
“It’s probably too early for us to say that the situation is under control,’’ said Senator Murkowski, who, like Senator Bingaman, is a strong backer of nuclear power. | <urn:uuid:cdd88c89-83fe-4a7a-befb-3616a0853d24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/live-blogging-a-senate-hearing-on-nuclear-safety/?ref=alfranken | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973063 | 2,060 | 1.984375 | 2 |
A Jewish prayer book, carried into World War II 60 years ago by a Jewish soldier, will be sent to a University of Cincinnati alum who is serving with the Ohio National Guard. Rabbi Abie Ingber, executive director of the UC Hillel Jewish Student Center, initially planned to ship the prayer book to Scott Kravetz. But now a Cincinnati family will personally deliver the precious package.
Kravetz, a 1988 UC grad and board member for the UC Hillel Jewish Student Center, has been called to Fort Bliss, Texas.
Ingber says Kravetz is a captain for the 2-174 Avenger Missile Artillery Battalion. He remembers Kravetz when, as a student and a member of the UC ROTC, Kravetz would wear his Army fatigues when he visited the UC Hillel Jewish Student Center.
The pocket-sized prayer book, written in Hebrew and English and published in 1943, has a cover made of iron and is engraved with the words, “May the Lord be with you.”
“The book was to be carried in the left breast pocket. The iron cover protected the soldier from gunfire,” Ingber explained. He adds the book holds a specific prayer for soldiers and sailors who were called to fight the Nazis.
“Our enemies, through their evil strength, desire to put in darkness all the world, to rule according to their own will, and to destroy the foundations of civilization; to abolish our faith in one God and His teachings,” Ingber reads from the prayer book. “Isn’t it amazing how current events parallel those of 60 years ago?
“There was a soldier who carried this prayer book into battle in 1943, and he was one of the soldiers who liberated my parents.”
Ingber was contacted by Terri Faulkner, who after seeing a television report about the prayer book, offered to deliver it personally to Kravitz. Faulkner and her daughter Lauren are traveling to Fort Bliss March 21 to visit Lauren's boyfriend, PFC John Buschle, a Sycamore high school grad who is also stationed with Kravetz.
"I explained to them a Jewish tradition," said Inger, "that a person serving as a messenger in a good deed is truly protected."
Ingber says he asked Kravetz to carry the prayer book—60 years after it was first carried into World War II—on one condition: that Kravetz bring himself home safely and return the prayer book to Ingber.
“Here at UC, we link our history and traditions and artifacts in education and their preservation to the young people at this university. Now we have young people representing our country in a very dangerous situation. Our prayers need to be with them, and in this case, one of our UC alums will carry a sheltering prayer book that held up to the Nazi threat of the world community."
Kravetz contacted Ingber on March 21 and said he'll be sending the Faulkners back to Cincinnati with a gift for Ingber, but he won't know what it is until he receives it. | <urn:uuid:9d7e2248-90cd-4ecc-9575-a54c945d7871> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uc.edu/News/NR.aspx?ID=341 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972648 | 647 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Senate panel approves weapons for Syrian rebels
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate panel voted on Tuesday to provide weapons to rebels battling the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the first time lawmakers have endorsed the aggressive U.S. military step of arming the opposition in the 2-year-old civil war.
With a degree of trepidation, the Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 for a bill that would provide lethal assistance and military training to vetted rebel groups, and would slap sanctions on anyone who sells oil or transfers arms to the Assad regime such as Iran and Russia. The measure also establishes a $250 million fund to aid in the transition if and when Assad falls.
An intense committee debate over the bill underscored congressional fears about greater U.S. military involvement in a Mideast war after more than a decade of American combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also exposed divisions within the Republican Party about U.S. foreign policy that will remain well into the 2016 GOP presidential nomination fight.
The fate of the bill is uncertain, with opposition among several senators and far less enthusiasm in the House for stepped-up U.S. military action. The legislation does send a strong message as the Obama administration mulls its next step.
After some 90 minutes of discussion - and rejection of several amendments to undercut the measure, a bipartisan argument for increased U.S. action in Syria swayed lawmakers.
"The greatest humanitarian crisis in the world is unfolding in and around Syria," said Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the committee chairman. "Vital U.S. interests are at stake including the stability of the Middle East, loose chemical weapons, and the danger that Syria becomes a safe haven for extremists. The United States must play a role in tipping the scales toward opposition groups and working to build a free and democratic Syria."
Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the panel's top Republican, implicitly criticized the Obama administration as he joined Menendez in embracing the measure.
"Much of the policy on Syria has been done on an ad hoc basis," Corker said. "This bill lays out a strategy."
The United Nations estimates that more than 70,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million displaced after two years of fighting between Assad forces and rebels. The Obama administration has provided millions of dollars in humanitarian assistance but has been wary of calls to arm the rebels or launch military strikes despite recent evidence that Assad has used chemical weapons on his people.
The administration is mulling its next step as Secretary of State John Kerry pursues a diplomatic solution.
Opposing the legislation were Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a potential presidential candidate in 2016, and Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
Udall questioned whether the United States would know what rebel groups it was arming as it introduced more lethal weapons into a chaotic situation while Murphy argued that the U.S. hasn't learned from history.
"We have failed over and over again in our attempts to pull the strings of Middle Eastern politics," he said.
Paul said the U.S. is war weary and reluctant to get involved in a murky conflict with so many factions. He said there is no assurance that the weapons would end up in the hands of "liberty-loving, Jeffersonian-type of democrats."
"It's impossible to know who are friends are," he said.
His arguments put him at odds with another potential White House candidate - Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who backed the legislation and insisted that it was critical to help groups battling the well-armed, pro-Assad forces and radical jihadists.
The committee turned back two amendments sponsored by Paul, one saying the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force does not allow intervention in Syria and another that barred weapons to Syria.
Paul pointed out the irony that one of the most effective rebel groups fighting Assad is Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-affiliated group. The goal of the legislation is to ensure that the rebel groups meet a certain criteria with no links to terrorism.
The panel also rejected a Udall amendment that would have limited the weapons to .50-caliber arms and smaller. The senator warned that heavier weapons could end up in the hands of U.S. enemies.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a fierce proponent of aggressive U.S. military might against Syria, pointed out that Assad's forces have used helicopter gunships, tanks, Scud missiles and heavy artillery.
"The senator wants to use shotguns against Scud missiles," McCain said derisively.
Udall said Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing weapons to the opposition forces. The United States, he said, "could turn over the weapons we're talking about and next day they end up in the hands of al-Qaida."
On Wednesday, Kerry will meet with 10 of America's closest Arab and European allies in Jordan. Officials said the gathering has two aims: to change Assad's calculation, only fortified by his recent military successes, that he can win the war militarily, and to persuade both the government and the opposition to attend peace talks next month in Geneva.
Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper in Muscat, Oman, contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:63802af8-cb9e-4cd7-bf94-e02a2f58f89e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_US_SYRIA?SITE=NCBER&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958683 | 1,078 | 1.773438 | 2 |
January 27, 2012 at 7:08 am (Environmental crisis, Saving endangered animals + plants, saving oceans/waterways, saving water/waterways, sea life, working together)
Tags: Africa, Antarctica, Black pepper, Business, Faroe Islands, fish, Mackerel, Scottish Adjacent Waters Boundaries Order 1999
A school of jack mackerel in the Southern Pacific. Stocks of the fish, rich in oily protein, have declined from 30 million due to a feeding frenzy in the last two decades.
Jack mackerel, feeds a hungry Africa. People eat it unaware of the shortage of this staple fish; much of it is reduced to feed for aquaculture and pigs. It can take more than five kilograms, more than 11 pounds, of jack mackerel to raise a single kilogram of farmed salmon.
The world’s largest trawlers, after depleting other oceans, now head south toward the edge of Antarctica to compete for what is left.
Industrial fleets bound only by voluntary restraints compete in what amounts to a free-for-all in no man’s water at the bottom of the world. From 2006 through 2011, scientists estimate, jack mackerel stocks declined 63 percent.
Greed knows no bounds until the ocean balance is totally reduced and thousands of species disappear and people starve.
Excerpts courtesy of nytimes.com http://tinyurl.com/8yfea6u
January 17, 2012 at 7:18 pm (ancient animals, Saving endangered animals + plants, saving oceans/waterways, saving water/waterways, sea life, working together)
Tags: animals in crisis, beauty of nature, saving endangered animals & plants, saving the biodiversity of planet, working together
Humpback Whale Shows AMAZING Appreciation After Being Freed From Nets
Thanks for this great video. It makes my heart sing and my energy rise. For more ways to raise energy visit.
Thanks Great Whale Conservancy and UTube.com
January 17, 2012 at 5:18 am (ancient animals, apes, good news, mammals, primates, Saving endangered animals + plants)
Tags: beauty of nature, endangered/threatened animals, saving endangered animals & plants, saving the biodiversity of planet
On the last day of his vacation this man had an encounter with a troop of mountain gorillas in Bwindi National Park, Uganda unlike most will ever have.
January 4, 2012 at 11:17 pm (ancient animals, endangered animals and plants, Nature's wonders, sea life, working together)
Tags: animal rights, animals in crisis, beauty of nature, Canada, Canadian Government, endangered/threatened animals, European Union, good news, Harp Seal, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Russia, saving endangered animals & plants, saving the biodiversity of planet, Seal hunting, Sheryl Fink, working together
International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)’s Seal Team Director, Sheryl Fink, has just let me know that Russia has banned the import and
Seal pups slaughtered for fashion
export of harp seal skins. This is a huge victory as the Canadian Government estimates that Russia receives 90% of Canada’s exports of seal skins.
IFAW supporters have worked so hard to help us close down the markets for seal products around the world.
Next goal end to Canada’s commercial harp seal hunt.
Mother Nature and her seals thanks everyone for their continued support and for saving their skins for them(the seals) to wear.
For more seal info
Image courtesy of NC library
January 2, 2012 at 6:52 pm (ancient animals, animal cruelity, good news, mammals, saving oceans/waterways, sea life, working together)
Tags: Imperial Japanese Navy, MY Steve Irwin, Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, United States, Whale Wars, Whaling in Japan
Eco-activists using drones to protect whales in the Antarctic seas
The Japanese whalers are relentless so whale protectors have taken to the air to save hundreds of whales – remote-controlled drone
Every morning for the past week, a battery-powered drone with a range of 300km (190 miles) has been launched from the MV Steve Irwin. This ship is trying to frustrate the whalers into leaving their annual Japanese whale hunts in the waters off Antarctica.
“We first found the Japanese fleet when they were 28 nautical miles away,” said Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international marine wildlife protection group based in the United States.
Watson has 88 crew on three ships, two of which are equipped with spotter drones.
With these drones Steve Watson hopes to finally end the Japanese hunt and bringing publicity to the cause in Whale Wars, the Discovery channel documentary series that tracks the hunts: “Our goal is to bankrupt them and destroy them economically. Now that we can track them, it is getting easier.”
.For under £500, the drone used by Sea Shepherd can run for hundreds of hours . It was given to Sea Shepherd by Bayshore Recycling, a New Jersey-based solid waste recycling company committed to environmental protection. In addition to paying for the drone at an estimated cost of £10,000, Bayshore also paid for pilot training to run the remote control equipment. It is expected that drones will be used much more frequently to protect Mother Nature’s most endangered species on land and sea.
“Everyone here at Bayshore is thrilled with the Sea Shepherd’s news of not only saving the lives of many whales, but knowing our drone will continue to track the Japanese whaling fleet in this chase,” said Elena Bagarozza, marketing co-ordinator at Bayshore.
Watson expects drones will be used to patrol environmentally sensitive areas ranging from the Galapagos Islands to other famed wildlife areas, including South Africa’s Kruger National Park by the Sea Shepherd crew and other environmental groups. It is very durable handling winds up to 40 knots, waterproofed and has multiple security backups so that if it has problems or low battery it automatically returns to base.
Excerpts courtesy of guardian.co.uk/environment
Image courtesy of guardian.co.uk/bveiga | <urn:uuid:e1142e51-b686-4d21-8ffa-acc43613e737> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://naturescrusaders.wordpress.com/2012/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912682 | 1,320 | 2.65625 | 3 |
05/4/2012 | Lay Offs in Japan
Due to financial hardship, my company is looking to downsize staffing in Japan. Are there cultural differences we should be aware of in regards to lay-offs?
Employees in Japan view jobs as a lifelong commitment on the part of the company, and there is a cultural stigma associated with losing a job. Thus, Japanese companies take a much more paternalistic approach toward their employees compared to their foreign counterparts. Domestic companies in Japan look to exhaust all other restructuring efforts before making the corporate decision to lay off workers. Courses of action that domestic firms may resort to before downsizing include reducing executive compensation, expiring fixed-term contracts, transferring employees overseas, freezing hiring practices, and soliciting voluntary retirement. In an effort to address these cultural differences, foreign companies should make sure their HR practices are sensitive to the local culture and in line with Japanese labor laws. | <urn:uuid:d5689cbb-0156-45be-993f-90e23159ad1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pacificbridge.com/services/employer-discussion-board/lay-offs-in-japan/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96147 | 185 | 1.8125 | 2 |
toby (TOH-bee) — noun: a drinking mug, usually in the shape of a stout man wearing a large three-cornered hat.I can hear you saying it now: “Oh, that toby.”
How Dina came across it: “So I’m playing Scrabble and I get 27 points for toby. Wondering what a toby is, I stumble upon this amusingly specific definition.” Really, that’s what online Scrabble is for. Why else would we know words like adz and vita?
Dina also included a link to what she and everyone else should refer to as a “vaguely terrifying example.” It is below:
Wikipedia’s example photo is no better:
I can’t imagine why people would want to make it seem like they were drinking brains, but I suppose it wouldn’t necessarily strike everybody that way. (It certainly didn’t to the people who designed my mother’s Christmas punch bowl.) Dictionaries aren’t much help for where this term came from. Most entries for toby are actually just entries for Toby, the nickname for Tobias. Which I think we all knew. However, the etymology doesn’t interest me so much as the knowledge that such a specific term exists.
Now mind how much you drink, lest you end up looking like a toby. | <urn:uuid:43828b78-cdcf-4344-8d71-7e84b894b2b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.backofthecerealbox.com/2008/09/beer-as-brains.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965397 | 305 | 1.75 | 2 |
Project Information Literacy, Inc. (PIL) is a public benefit nonprofit corporation, operating in the state of California (501c3 status pending). PIL is a small grassroots research organization led by Alison Head, who is the Founder and Executive Director and an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington's Information School. PIL works in partnership with the University of Washington's Information School, which provides graduate student research assistance, services for grant administration and website support, and ongoing mentor support from Mike Eisenberg, former PIL Co-Director and Professor and Dean Emeritus in the iSchool.
We are a group of library and information science researchers who investigate the information seeking behavior of college students in the digital age. All of PIL's researchers have undergone CITI training in research ethics and are certified to collect data for PIL studies on campuses where we have obtained IRB approval. PIL is not paid any funds by institutions that participate in our studies. Likewise, institutions in our study samples do not receive any compensation for participating in PIL studies though we do share data from surveys we have conducted on their campuses and a brief trends report highlighting key findings. PIL pays the cost of any incentives that may be awarded to survey respondents who enter one of our survey contests (e.g., $100 Amazon gift card to one contest winner per campus).
PIL accepts forms of funding to support our ongoing research efforts. To date, our research has been funded by federal grants (Institute of Museum and Library Services), private foundations (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation), and gifts (ProQuest, Cengage Learning, and Cable in the Classroom). Alison Head, PIL's Director, has received support from the University of Washington's Information School as salary where she was employed as a research scientist during 2009-2012 and from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as a stipend during 2011-2012 where she is a research fellow.
Funds and compensation for PIL's research efforts have not, and will never, influence the content, topics, findings, and interpretations of data PIL makes in its research reports. The views expressed in PIL's research materials are purely those of PIL's researchers, based on the rigorous research we make every attempt to conduct. If we claim or appear to be experts on certain topics about information literacy, education, or students, we will only make such assertions based on our expertise, research findings, and analysis.
We make an active effort and are deeply committed to verifying any trend, quote, statistic, or representation of data we present in PIL materials. We are committed to making all of PIL's research materials (research reports,"Smart Talk" interviews, and videos ) open access and freely available for use and re-use. Our research reports are available on the PIL Web site and ERIC. We have also published research in the open access journals First Monday and College & Research Libraries.
If you have any questions about these disclosures, which are updated when needed, please feel free to write PIL's Director at email@example.com. (Posted: February 5, 2013.) | <urn:uuid:a346b2c4-3180-42d5-9d51-e607e954fc4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.projectinfolit.org/disclosures/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947723 | 648 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Compression pawl pulls door and frame together; an adjustment shim accommodates doors and covers various thicknesses.
Designed especially for overlay doors or covers, this eccentric compression pawl mounts outside the sealed area. An oblong installation opening in the door makes it possible to shift the latch within this area, compensating for tolerances and—with narrow doors—correcting the angular position of the latch as it enters the frame's engagement hole.
Rotating the handle positions a rounded eccentric cam behind the opening. Swinging the actuator handle closed pulls the cam against the frame. The compression pawl is normally delivered in die-cast zinc with a black finish.
By experimenting with the photovoltaic reaction in solar cells, researchers at MIT have made a breakthrough in energy efficiency that significantly pushes the boundaries of current commercial cells on the market.
We looked at a number of sources to determine this year's greenest cars, from KBB to automotive trade magazines to environmental organizations. These 14 cars emerged as being great at either stretching fuel or reducing carbon footprint.
A quick look into the merger of two powerhouse 3D printing OEMs and the new leader in rapid prototyping solutions, Stratasys. The industrial revolution is now led by 3D printing and engineers are given the opportunity to fully maximize their design capabilities, reduce their time-to-market and functionally test prototypes cheaper, faster and easier. Bruce Bradshaw, Director of Marketing in North America, will explore the large product offering and variety of materials that will help CAD designers articulate their product design with actual, physical prototypes. This broadcast will dive deep into technical information including application specific stories from real world customers and their experiences with 3D printing. 3D Printing is | <urn:uuid:37051c62-7b07-4319-a7eb-7d3c0bd30966> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=215721 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923232 | 350 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Uploaded with ImageShack.usAbout the new Russian submarines, which will be in service with Russia in 2030, you can read the following articles:
The submarines of Project 955 "Borey" (NATO SSBN «Borei» or "Dolgorukiy" after the launching of the first vessel) - a series of Russian nuclear submarines of the class "missile submarine strategic" (SSBNs). As of September 2011, the lead ship - "Yuri Dolgoruky" - is a series of sea trials, a ship - "Alexander Nevsky" - launched one - "Vladimir Monomakh" - is under construction, for the fourth ship is created reserve materials.
In 2011, the voice of a plan built eight ships by 2018. In 2012, according to the newspaper "Kommersant" the plan has changed and includes the construction of 10 ships by 2020.
History of creation Project 955 strategic Borei class submarine
Missile submarine of Project 955 strategic "Northwind" ( Borei ) was developed in TSKBMT "Rubyn" (St. Petersburg), under the leadership of V. A. Zdornov . Length submarine - 160 m maximum water displacement - 24,000 tons. Submerged speed - up to 29 knots. Diving depth - up to 400 m Endurance - 90 days. The crew - 107 people.
Originally, submarines armed with a series of "Northwind" was supposed to be solid-fuel ballistic missile of a new generation of P-39UTTH "Bark", but after three consecutive unsuccessful test launches "Bark" and the disappointing estimate the time required for finishing the rocket, the Defense Ministry decided to develop A new missile system for solid D-19M ballistic missile R-30 "Bulava" (RSM-56).
Sonar equipment a MGK -600. "Amphora-Irtysh-D" - a single set of automated digital sonar, combining himself in the pure sense sonar (sound direction finding, echo direction finding, classification purposes, the detection of HA-signal, HA-bond) and all of hydroacoustic stations "small acoustics "(measurement of ice thickness, measuring the speed of sound, the search for mines, search polynyas and leads, the detection of torpedoes). It is expected that the range of the given set of submarine sonar will surpass the U.S. Navy such as "Virginia."
Class submarine cruisers "Borei" created to eventually replace the submarines of Project 941 "Akula» (Typhoon according to NATO classification) and 667BDRM "Dolphin» (Delta-IV according to NATO classification).
In 2008 against the backdrop of failed launches "Bulava" some experts proposed to convert the project 955 "Borei" by cruise missiles ..
Beginning in the late 1980s, was designed as a two-shaft submarine SSBN is similar in construction project 667BDRM "Dolphin" with a reduced height of the mines under the SLBM missile "Bark." On this project with the submarine factory number 201 and was founded in 1996 In 1998, it was decided to abandon SLBMs "Bark" in favor of SLBM "Bulava" to other dimensions, which led to the redesign of the submarine. At the same time, it became clear that the submarine can not be completed within a reasonable time in the face of declining funding and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and stop the flow of specific brands of metal with a steel plant Zaporozhye (Ukraine), there was a proposal to produce more and redesign groundwork for the use of unfinished submarine project 971 "Schuka-B" (Pike-B) and 949A "Antaeus"
According to the Director General of CDB "Rubyn" A. Diachkov , Project 955 submarines are 5 times less noise than the submarine project 971 "Schuka-B " (Pike-B) and 949A "Antaeus"
The motion is carried out using single-shaft water-jet propulsion system with high performance propulsion. Similarly, submarines of Project 971, "Schuka-B " (Pike-B) , the submarine has two reclining thrusters and retractable bow hydroplanes with flaps.
The submarines are equipped with Project Rescue - rescue bubble chamber, designed for the entire crew. Rescue the camera is located in the building behind the submarine from the SLBM launchers. Also, submarines are equipped with life rafts class KSU-600N-4 in the amount of 5 units.
The project has a double-hulled design. Rugged housing is made, probably made of steel with a yield strength of 100 kgf / mm (thickness 48 mm). Assembling the case is made by the block method: the equipment is installed inside the submarine on the shock absorbers and amortization blocks that are part of the overall system design, two-stage damping (each block is isolated from the rubber-cord pneumatic shock absorbers). Nasal tip of the fence cutting is made with forward lean to improve flow. The hull is covered with rubber radar absorbing reflected waves. Probably the active agents are used to reduce noise.
The boat is installed nuclear power, probably with a pressurized water reactor thermal neutron BM-5 or similar to the steam-generating plant QA-650V output of 190 MW. The system control and protection foam - "Alioth". Rowing of the project according to unconfirmed reports will be installed nuclear power a new generation.
For the motion used single-shaft steam turbine plant with a block GTZA OK-9VM or similar to the depreciation of the improved capacity of 50,000 hp
To improve the maneuverability of submarines equipped with two dual-speed propeller thrusters submersible motors PG-160 rated at 410 hp (According to other sources - 370 hp). Located in the nominated speakers in the rear of the submarine.
Currently, the Severodvinsk JSC "Northern Machine Building Enterprise" (SME) are based on state order two submarines of this class: "Vladimir Monomakh" and "St. Nicholas."
Delays in the construction of ships of the series are related to inadequate funding and a shortage of skilled production workers. State test coincided with the first vessel failure at the primary developers of weapons - rocket complex "Bulava". It is planned the construction of ten submarines. The first three will be put into the Pacific Fleet. Naval Pacific Fleet base in Kamchatka will be ready to receive the submarines of this type in 2009-2010.
November 2, 1996 began construction of the first cruiser of this project - "Yuri Dolgoruky". Originally planned for launch in late 2006, but March 19, 2006 the degree of technical readiness was assessed only at 60%. April 15, 2007 the submarine was taken out of the shop, and February 12, 2008 launched, June 19, 2009 the first boat out to sea on factory performance trials ..
The second submarine "Alexander Nevsky" was laid on March 19, 2004. December 6, 2010 "Alexander Nevsky" was launched. Completion date - 2012.
During the construction of the first two SSBNs "Yuri Dolgoruky" and "Alexander Nevsky" unfinished sections were used and dismantled hulls of submarines of projects 971 "Schuka-B " (Pike-B) (K-133 "Lynx" (on russian transcription "Rys") and K-137 "Cougar" , and 949A "Antaeus" (K-135 "Volgograd" and K-160 "Barnaul").
March 19, 2006, the day of the century submarine fleet of Russia, "Sevmash" was held the ceremony of laying the third class nuclear submarine, "Northwind" - "Vladimir Monomakh". Completion date - 2013.
Work on the construction of the fourth class nuclear submarine, "Northwind" at "Sevmash" began in December 2009 . The ship will be called "St. Nicholas" . It will be built in the modification of 955U and 955A . The number of missile silos will be increased to 20 . At the moment, is almost formed a strong case, although the boat has not yet passed the official ceremony. The official ceremony is scheduled for March 18, 2012, eve of the Day submariner. For the fifth and sixth boats at the moment is created reserve, the official start of construction is expected in early 2012.
a reduced version of this article http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%...B5%D0%B9%C2%BB | <urn:uuid:44fc6d6c-a897-4c18-a302-d9fc40900314> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?606552-About-the-new-Russian-submarines-which-will-be-in-service-with-Russia-in-2030&p=13813451&viewfull=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930087 | 1,843 | 2.203125 | 2 |
New column has advice for helping families with kids
By: Tammy Francois, Lake County News Chronicle
“There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children. There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected, that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want, and that they grow up in peace.” —Kofi Annan
The lives of children are on our collective mind. Last week, the Minnesota House conducted three days of hearings on gun violence. Currently there are 23 firearms-related bills up for consideration before the state Legislature. Many of them were introduced this session in response to the mass killing of 20 children in Connecticut in December, but testimony at the hearings also included reminiscences of similar tragedies closer to home.
Locally, meetings are going on to discuss the four-day school week and whether Lake Superior School District schools should continue with the shortened schedule. Administrators, parents and concerned citizens have been weighing in to ensure that the education of our kids is not suffering under the shortened week structure.
On a more cheerful note, it was so much fun to see kids (and grownups) enjoying the events and activities at the Two Harbors Winter Frolic over the weekend. And up on Lax Lake, there was a kids fishing contest. Kids, parents and pets were on hand for the event. The photos tell the story of a good day there, too.
Most of us care deeply about the world in which our children live and we carry the hope that they will grow up healthy and happy, to care about others and contributing something positive to the lives they touch. But before kids reach the point where they can meet these lofty parental aspirations, they have to learn dozens — possibly thousands of skills that will allow them to become successful in relationships, school and the community. I don’t know about you, but as a parent there were days when I felt that I was flying by the seat of my pants. I was just happy when everyone made it to bedtime without any major mishaps, skinned knees or emotional meltdowns — myself included.
The truth is, no matter how much we love our kids and grandkids, there are times when we could use some new insights into helping them learn and grow.
This week we’re welcoming a new columnist to the Lake County News-Chronicle. Deb Archer is a licensed pre-school teacher and parent educator with two decades of experience. She’ll be offering her ideas for guiding kids, parents and grandparents (and the extended families of aunts, uncles, friends of the family, etc.) through the fun, fascinating and sometimes frantic world of young children.
I think you’ll enjoy Deb’s column. Please let us know what you think and feel free to send your comments and questions to email@example.com
Tags: opinionMore from around the web | <urn:uuid:d7be7d20-f276-40bb-af9d-a5aedd698294> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.twoharborsmn.com/event/article/id/24621/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968671 | 606 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Year marked a break in Bush-Clinton continuum
The Daily Briefing
Buckeye Forum Podcast
The Dispatch public affairs team talks politics and tackles state and federal government issues in the Buckeye Forum podcast.
Your Right to Know
For the first time since 1981, there was neither a Clinton nor a Bush on either the departing or the incoming presidential ticket.
In 1981 and 1985, it was George H.W. Bush as vice president to Ronald Reagan, followed four years later by Bush as president.
In 1993, with Bush looking on, Bill Clinton took the oath as president and again four years later in 1997. Then, a departing Clinton took to the inaugural platform in 2001 as George W. Bush was sworn in.
Bush had a second inauguration in 2005 and then witnessed the inauguration four years later, in 2009, of Obama.
Clinton and his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, did join lawmakers and other dignitaries on the inaugural platform yesterday. Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, also attended. | <urn:uuid:62b7dea3-b77f-47e0-be65-b91b6b573627> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2013/01/22/year-marked-a-break-in-bush-clinton-continuum.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966634 | 213 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Spotlight on Alzheimer's Disease: Seminar by William Rodman Shankle, M.D.
Rodman Shankle, M.D. spoke at the “Spotlight on Alzheimer’s disease”, an educational event presented at the CIRM Governing Board meeting on December 10, 2008. Shankle reviewed clinical data, which indicates that stem cells from the fat pad of the intestines have the capacity to repair damaged brain tissue found in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders. Shankle is the founder and medical director of the Shankle Clinic for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders. He is also Chief Medical Officer of the Medical Care Corporation.
Leeza Gibbons, a patient advocate member of the CIRM Governing Board and the founder of the Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation, introduced Shankle.
The CIRM-hosted event was presented in partnership with the University of California, Irvine at the UC Irvine Student Center | <urn:uuid:f1ba7a08-abb4-41d0-b011-f43dee2a028b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cirm.ca.gov/about-stem-cells/video/spotlight-alzheimers-disease-seminar-william-rodman-shankle-md | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94843 | 199 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Italy: Year In Review 1996Article Free Pass
A republic of southern Europe, Italy occupies the Apennine Peninsula and extends northward into the Alps; it also includes Sicily, Sardinia, and a number of smaller islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Area: 301,323 sq km (116,341 sq mi). Pop. (1996 est.): 57.5 million. Cap.: Rome. Monetary unit: Italian lira, with (Oct. 11, 1996) a free rate of 1,523 lire to U.S. $1 (2,399 lire = £1 sterling). President in 1996, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro; prime ministers, Lamberto Dini until January 11 and, from May 16, Romano Prodi.
Italy in 1996 was ruled by a government dominated by the left wing for the first time since the June 1946 proclamation of the Italian Republic. Other significant events during the year included the trial of a former Nazi officer accused of war crimes and the capture of a major Mafia boss.
Two events led to the new government’s emergence following elections in April. The first was the resignation in January of a one-year-old, intentionally stopgap Cabinet of nonpoliticians under Lamberto Dini, a former executive at the Bank of Italy. Second was the failure the next month of a designated successor, Antonio Maccanico, to garner political support for a new team that would have tackled constitutional reform as a prelude to new elections.
Pres. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro thus dissolved the national legislature in February, kicking off a lengthy election campaign that was contested, essentially, by large centre-left and right-wing coalitions. On the right was the so-called Alliance for Freedom, led by business tycoon and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, resounding winner of elections in 1994. The Alliance included Berlusconi’s own Forza Italia ("Go Italy") movement, largely run by his business underlings, and the National Alliance (AN) of Gianfranco Fini, described by its enemies as neofascist. The rival camp, which called itself the "Olive Tree" ("L’Ulivo"), was dominated by Italy’s former communists in the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), though it included small centre parties and was led by a noncommunist, Romano Prodi, a centrist economics professor from the University of Bologna who had once headed the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, a large state holding company.
Though Berlusconi’s side claimed that it stood for a reduced presence of government in Italians’ lives and the Olive Tree pledged both to retain social services and to curb the country’s enormous national debt, both formations were out to capture voters in the centre of the political spectrum. Such voters had been left in the political wilderness after the disappearance of the disgraced Christian Democrat Party.
The Olive Tree coalition won the most votes, and for the first time in a general election, Italy’s former communists formed the biggest single party in the country, with 172 seats in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. Including the communists, the Olive Tree and its centre-left allies won 284 seats, compared with 246 taken by the Freedom Alliance. The unaffiliated Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi (see BIOGRAPHIES), which called for northern autonomy, won a surprisingly large bloc of 59 seats. Consequently, the Olive Tree could enjoy an overall majority in the Chamber of Deputies only with the support of 35 old-style "orthodox" deputies from the so-called Refounded Communist Party, which was to the left of the PDS. In the 315-seat Senate, however, the Olive Tree did gain a clear majority.
Called upon to form a government in May, Prodi swiftly announced a 20-member Cabinet that would have been unimaginable in the Italy of the Cold War. He picked as deputy prime minister, for instance, Walter Veltroni, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper L’Unità. And to the most sensitive Cabinet post of all, that of the powerful Interior Ministry, Prodi assigned Giorgio Napolitano, a veteran hardline communist and former speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. In another novel move, Prodi handed the Public Works Ministry to Antonio Di Pietro, the combatative magistrate who had spear-headed in Milan the so-called Clean Hands anticorruption drive launched in 1992 that brought down Italy’s old regime. Di Pietro took up his post after clearing himself of nine charges of extortion and "abuse of office" leveled against him by rival magistrates, but in November he resigned because he had become the target of a bribe inquiry.
At the end of May, Prodi’s government, with the help of the Refounded Communist Party, won a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies with 322 votes in its favour and 299 against. "We must learn to do obvious things," Prodi told the House, "such as making sure the civil service works and that the post arrives in time."
In regional elections in Sicily in June, held under the proportional system, the PDS and "Refoundation" lost to the Freedom Alliance, but its Forza Italia component lost half of the support it had won in 1994, dropping its share of the vote from 33% to 17%. The AN picked up 14%.
Subjected to filibustering in the legislature by Berlusconi’s Alliance, and at times held to ransom by the Refounded Communists, Prodi’s government fought above all to enable Italy, through severe spending cuts and economic rigour, to qualify for membership in the European Monetary Union, which was scheduled to come into existence in 1999. In November Prodi announced that Italy was seeking approval from European officials for the lira to reenter the European exchange rate mechanism. What best qualified for political originality during the year, however, was a scheme to have one part of Italy break away from the rest. Its author was the unpredictable, gravel-voiced Bossi, who announced on September 15 a proclamation of independence from Italy of "Padania," a big, ill-defined new state centred on the Po River. His call for Padania’s secession took a step farther his drive over the previous 12 years for a federal Italy that would allow the rich industrial north a greater influence in the spending of its money, prone to be snatched, in Bossi’s eyes, by a greedy and corrupt Rome. The League emerged from the April elections as the biggest single party in the North, which signified support for such a stance, and Bossi predicted a turnout of up to 1.5 million during three days of "independence celebrations" on September 13-15 along 652 km (404 mi) of the Po. Bossi himself flew to the source of the Po and filled a test tube with its water, which later, after a triumphal progress along the waterway in a motorized catamaran, he poured into the lagoon in Venice. There he proclaimed Padania’s independence before crowds variously estimated at between 10,000 and 18,000, far below Bossi’s prediction.
A furor broke out in Rome when a military court in August ordered the release of Erich Priebke, an 83-year-old former Nazi officer held responsible for the massacre in 1944 of 335 Italians, including 75 Jews, as a reprisal for a partisan action in Rome in which 33 German troops were killed in a street ambush. Extradited in November 1995 from Argentina, where he had lived since 1948, Priebke admitted to having shot two of the victims himself and was found guilty of implication in the mass killing, which took place in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome; the court, however, recognized extenuating circumstances, finding that he had not acted with cruelty and premeditation. Under Italian military law, crimes committed more than 30 years earlier could not be punished in the absence of cruelty and premeditation.
Priebke, however, was not set free; distraught relatives of the victims besieged the court all night, trapping Priebke and his three judges inside as prisoners. The mayor of Rome turned off the city’s lights in protest, and President Scalfaro said, "The verdict contradicts history." Priebke was then rearrested after midnight because of a request for his extradition from Germany. In October the Italian Supreme Court, responding to further appeals, ordered a retrial. It ruled all the findings of the military court null and void because the presiding judge, Agostino Quistelli, had said before the trial that he anticipated an acquittal.
Two other trials during the year concerned 77-year-old Giulio Andreotti, seven times Italy’s prime minister. In Palermo he continued to be tried for criminal association with the Mafia, scornfully rejecting the accusation that for 24 years he had helped the Mafia in return for votes. Andreotti was also put in the dock in the city of Perugia, where in a second, separate trial in April, he was accused of having been instrumental in the murder of Mino Pecorelli, an investigative journalist gunned down in Rome in March 1979, allegedly by two Mafia gunmen. Pecorelli, argued the prosecution, was a persistent, "inconvenient" scoop seeker with a deep insider’s knowledge of the Italian political establishment; his "inconvenience" became unacceptable when he threatened to reveal an alleged role by Andreotti in the kidnapping and murder in 1978 of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists. Andreotti brushed off the story as absurd, claiming the Mafia had concocted it in revenge for anti-Mafia legislation he had enacted.
In its conflict with the Mafia, the government scored a striking success with the capture in May of Giovanni Brusca, heir to the jailed Mafia "boss of the bosses," Toto Riina, and, according to police, the man who had pressed the remote-control button that blew up the road under the speeding car of Giovanni Falcone near Palermo in 1992, killing Italy’s leading anti-Mafia judge, his wife, and their three-man escort. Brusca was arrested, together with his wanted brother, Enzo.
In January fire gutted the famous La Fenice ("The Phoenix") opera house in Venice. The theatre, first opened in 1792 and called by Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli "the most beautiful theatre in the world," was closed for restoration with the sprinkler system allegedly turned off when fire broke out at night, destroying all but the facade and outer walls. Magistrates opened an inquiry and said they could not rule out arson. Artists and theatres around Italy and the world pledged to help reconstruction, which the city elders promised would be finished by March 1999.
In a poll to mark the Italian republic’s 50th birthday, 84% of Italians said they were republicans. Only 8% wanted a return of the monarchy.
What made you want to look up "Italy: Year In Review 1996"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:7f03b1ac-81ee-48a4-b07c-84ce7ef1728a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/297480/Italy-Year-In-Review-1996 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975663 | 2,317 | 2.484375 | 2 |
Q&A: Supernova Remnants and Neutron Stars
Do you think that our galaxy has supernova remnants like the
Crab Nebula in places that Chandra is incapable of seeing?
Yes, there may be another supernova remnant such as the Crab
Nebula (which is in our galaxy, by the way) on the other
side of our galaxy, so Chandra can't see them through all the
dust and gas. | <urn:uuid:084de1d6-b76f-433a-847a-5394f238e479> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/faq/sources/snr/snr-3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953289 | 91 | 2.5 | 2 |
Described on the inside cover as "a bilingual celebration of friendship and ecological wisdom," Baby Coyote and the Old Woman uses the trickster character of the coyote to illustrate the ways in which ecological awareness may be taught through intergenerational communication.
In the story, Baby Coyote becomes fascinated by an old woman who leaves scraps for him, but cannot understand why the woman leaves piles of waste (some of it poisonous) outside her house. Baby Coyote ultimately decides that he must teach the old woman to recycle her waste, leaving "gifts" of garbage for the woman to use for practical purposes. For instance, he leaves her a piece of paper, which she uses to start her stove, and a tin can, which she uses to store her seeds.
After a couple of days, he leaves her a whole pile of cans and papers, prompting her to guess Baby Coyote's true intention. She promptly sorts her waste and brings it to a recycling center, where she learns about the positive effects of recycling. The book closes with the Coyote and the old woman enjoying the beautiful (and now pristine) desert landscape.
Written in both Spanish and English, Baby Coyote and the Old Woman gives parents and educators an opportunity to teach children about language translation, multicultural expression, and Spanish/English pronunciation. Tafolla's simple yet descriptive language coupled with Matt Novak's vibrantly colored illustration makes this book ideal for young readers. And, while the didactic tone of the story was a bit overbearing for me, my four-year-old daughter Grace found it thoroughly enjoyable. | <urn:uuid:8514fc79-09d8-45db-abc5-4366c25631a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voices.cla.umn.edu/essays/childlit/el_coyotito.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953431 | 323 | 3.421875 | 3 |
The Truth About Style
With her unique talent for seeing past disastrous wardrobes to the core emotional issues that caused these sartorial crises, style savant Stacy London has transformed not only the looks but also the lives of hundreds of guests who have appeared on What Not to Wear. Now for the first time in print, London turns that expert X-ray insight on herself.
Like the women she’s transformed, London has plenty of emotional baggage. At eleven, she suffered from severe psoriasis that left her with permanent physical and mental scars. During college, she became anorexic on a misguided quest for perfection. By the time she joined the staff at Vogue, London’s weight had doubled from binge eating. Although self-esteem and self-consciousness nearly sabotaged a promising career, London learned the hard way that we wear our insecurities every day. It wasn’t until she found the self-confidence to develop a strong personal style that she finally became comfortable in her skin.
In The Truth About Style, London shares her own often painful history and her philosophy of the healing power of personal style—illustrating it with a series of detailed “start-overs” with eight real women, demonstrating how personal style helps them overcome the emotional obstacles we all face. For anyone who has ever despaired of finding the right clothes, or even taking an objective assessment in a full-length mirror, The Truth About Style will be an inspiring, liberating, and often very funny guide to finding the expression of your truest self.
-Women’s Wear Daily
“An honest and heartfelt look at how we dress from the inside out.” | <urn:uuid:ecdcaa06-797d-4d89-878c-cab0f8adbc66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670026234,00.html?sym=REV | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958949 | 349 | 1.5 | 2 |
Giving a special charity gift is a great way to celebrate a friend or loved one's birthday or anniversary, Christmas or valentines day – and show that you really care (in more ways that one) without giving unwanted clutter.
You can give a charity gift through CAFOD, a charity who work with and support some of the poorest and most vulnerable people around the world, regardless of race, gender, religion or nationality. Through their ‘Gifts that Make a Difference' program, you can give an ethical gift to a friend or loved one and help make the world a fairer, more equitable place at the same time.
You could give the gift of chickens for just £20. This fantastic gift is a great investment into the long-term, sustainable wellbeing of a family. More than simply chickens, this special charity gift includes materials and training in poultry management, enabling struggling families to produce eggs that can be used for eating, selling at market or for raising others chickens.
Kenyan widower Stephen Muthai was a beneficiary of this gift after looters burned down his home and stole his possessions. Partially sighted from birth, Stephen had struggled to raise his five children alone since his wife died a few years ago.
Speaking about the gift he said: "I was very happy when I got them. I will feed the children with eggs, but if there is extra I will sell them. I think the future is bright."
When you purchase the gift (which can be done quickly and easily online through the CAFOD website) your friend or family member receives a beautiful gift certificate illustrating your chosen gift. You will also receive gift card, in which you can write your own personal message, and an attractive calendar as a keepsake.
And if the chicken gift isn't for you, the range of charity gifts on offer is wide. But whatever gift you choose, you can be sure that your charity gift is really making a practical difference to lives of poor people. | <urn:uuid:e38851ca-f95c-4a04-8e10-8681c082a98d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/lifestyle/charity_gifts/cafod_world_gifts/chickens | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971374 | 405 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Is it now so politically incorrect to oppose gay marriage that a white shoe law firm will throw over a client rather than defend a law signed by President Bill Clinton? Apparently so, after yesterday's show of invertebrate representation by King and Spalding, the giant Atlanta-based law firm.
King and Spalding dropped the House of Representatives as a client yesterday only days after agreeing to argue for the House in defending the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or Doma. The jilting prompted the firm's lead attorney in the case, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, to resign from the firm in what we would call principled protest.
In a letter to King and Spalding Chairman Robert Hays, Mr. Clement explained that he felt obliged to resign out of a "firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do."
At least there's some honor among lawyers, if not at the top of King and Spalding. In his statement yesterday, Mr. Hays resorted to some spin that the firm had failed in properly "vetting" the House "engagement." But Mr. Clement's letter says "I would have never undertaken this matter unless I believed I had the full backing of the firm."
It's hard to believe such a prominent firm wasn't aware of the high profile of the House case. Speaker John Boehner had convened a bipartisan group to seek counsel to defend Doma after the White House reversed itself and said the Justice Department wouldn't do so. The House group reached out to several firms and chose King and Spalding last week.
The likely story here is that King and Spalding began to fear a political backlash after activists at the Human Rights Campaign launched a campaign to "educate" (read: intimidate) the firm's clients about "King and Spalding's decision to promote discrimination." Clients include Coca-Cola and other Fortune 500 giants that prefer to avoid hot-button social issues.
That's fair enough, but once a firm takes on a client it is the firmest of legal obligations to see a case through save for a clear conflict of interest. To drop a case under political pressure is especially unethical. Imagine the outcry if a firm of similar standing stopped defending Guantanamo detainees?
Whatever one thinks of Doma, it passed both houses of Congress with huge majorities, and Vice President Joe Biden was among 85 Senators who voted "aye." The law defines marriage as between a man and a woman and says states aren't obliged to honor gay marriages recognized in other states.
Social mores have changed in 15 years, but not so much that gay marriage should be imposed by judicial fiat in a way that further inflames the culture war. The Human Rights Campaign has every right to challenge Doma in court, but it does itself no honor by trying to deny that same right to Doma's supporters by harassing their legal counsel. As for King and Spalding, better not turn your back on its lawyers in a firefight. | <urn:uuid:ad56ec68-9604-411c-a660-70b8a7662a81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704677404576285390111659146.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96483 | 640 | 1.515625 | 2 |
- Crash sensors collect the data necessary to make decisions about air bag deployment.
- Crash sensors measure how quickly a vehicle slows down in a frontal crash or accelerates to the side in a side-impact crash. Some vehicles are equipped with a sensing system designed to detect the onset of a rollover crash.
- Frontal crash sensors may be located in the front of the vehicle near the engine, in the passenger compartment, or sometimes in the electronic control unit (ECU).
- Side-impact crash sensors may be located in the ECU, the door, the doorsill, or between the front and rear doors.
- Rollover crash sensors may be located in the ECU or at the vehicle's center of gravity.
- Severe or panic braking alone cannot cause an air bag to deploy; air bags deploy only in crashes. | <urn:uuid:4e9687e1-46cf-44a6-b4e9-39b6b804c155> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/Air+Bags/Crash+Sensors | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924007 | 172 | 3.46875 | 3 |
The two powers that are search and social go hand in hand. Search is always there to provide you with what you’re looking for, but doesn’t include those undiscovered nuggets of information that social media does (it’s always exciting to find out the cute guy in your building likes the same geeky show as you!)
Social on the other hand is bursting with titbits of information, but lacks relevance when sometimes you just want to get straight to the point. So the solution? Launch a channel that combines the best of both worlds.
First we had Google+, the nifty social portal created by a search engine giant. Marked as a rival to Facebook, Google+ has slowly become more popular since its launch in 2011 with more and more of those little red plus boxes emerging on social sharing toolbars.
Now we go the other way, a massive player in the social media market launching a search tool. Launched by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Graph Search allows you to “find more of what you’re looking for on Facebook and discover fun connections between people, places and things.”
In theory, Graph Search could be what we’re missing digitally right now – a tool which allows you to engage as you search. You’ve just moved to a new city and want to join the local swimming club – hop on Graph Search and not only will you find a swimming club nearby, you might also find someone to go with. But there’s just one problem which Facebook seem to have overlooked – privacy.
In order to really push the search part of social search you need to expand into other networks too, not just your own. Would you really want to learn about Aristotle’s thoughts on existence from what your friend posted on Facebook? Probably not. In order to get the most from your search results, you need to expand beyond your personal social network (and this includes friends of friends of friends!) and tap into the big wide world of experts, bloggers and teachers – people that you don’t have a connection to.
This is where Facebook Graph Search hits a dead end. Either Facebook keeps its new tool private, thus restricting the user from powerful search information, or it opens up network after network allowing anyone to divulge any piece of information that they like. And given prior attitudes towards privacy at the company, the latter seems like it could be the more likely option.
One Facebook user has set out to prove just how probing Graph Search can be. ‘Actual
Facebook Graph Searches’ is a new tumblr that has popped up this week, which seeks to portray how a range of controversial searches can be made public. Examples so far include Tesco employees who likes horses and Jewish mothers who like bacon.
Of course, Facebook has explained (and keeps having to explain) that the only content which will be viewable on Graph Search is that which you decide to share. But, unless you visit your privacy settings every few months, can anyone truly remember what they said they would and wouldn’t share with the largest social network in the world?
The truth is that only time will tell. Currently, Graph Search is only available to the users in the USA with the tool rolling out to other countries in the next few weeks. Even though personally I’m somewhat on the fence with Graph Search, I do tip my hat to Facebook for taking on this new social/search landscape. We’re about to enter a new chapter in the way we interact online, and who can blame Facebook for trying to be at the forefront of it?
What do you think of Graph Search? Are you worried about your privacy settings online? Do you think this is the brink of a new digital era of search and social? Tell us in the comments below. | <urn:uuid:5e2512d7-5746-46da-b76a-cada97a49288> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://urbantimes.co/2013/01/graph-search-a-great-new-tool-or-yet-another-threat-to-privacy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953831 | 783 | 1.898438 | 2 |
APRIL 5, 1999
Fiat and Mitsubishi
AS the automotive industry consolidates frantically, there are rumors of a link being planned between Fiat - the parent company of Ferrari - and Mitsubishi Motors in Japan. Both companies are considered to be too small to survive by themselves but have yet to be swallowed up by industry giants General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Nissan-Renault, Volkswagen and Daimler-Chrysler.
Fiat - the parent company of Ferrari - has a variety of joint ventures with Renault, but the two companies cannot easily merge as there would have to be too many layoffs and factory closures for a deal to be politically-acceptable.
Mitsubishi is Japan's fourth largest car manufacturer after Toyota, Nissan and Honda. It is heavily dependent on the Japanese market although it does operate in 30 countries around the world. It is a member of the loose consortium of Mitsubishi companies, although these are independent of one another. It employs 27,000 people and had sales last year of $28bn. If the two companies were to go into partnership the result would be a company slightly smaller than Nissan-Renault but larger than DaimlerChrysler.
If such a merger did happen it would leave Honda, Peugeot and BMW as the likely targets for takeovers. It would also mean that DaimlerChrysler's hopes of finding an Asian partner in its global alliance would be severely weakened.
According to the stories from Japan the Fiat-Mitsubishi talks are centered on engineering alliances rather than a merger. Mitsubishi has a groundbreaking direct injection gasoline engine which it sells to other manufacturers. To date there are deals with Peugeot and with Volvo. It also has an advanced automatic gearbox in which Fiat is believed to be interested.
Mitsubishi is trying to improve its image and has enjoyed considerable success in rally raids with its Pajero model and in the World Rally Championship with the Lancer, with which Tommi Makinen has won the last three World Rally Driver titles. In 1990 it funded the construction of a V12 Formula 1 engine. This was built by Hiroyuki Hasagawa's HKS company and was tested in the back of a Lola Formula 3000 car in 1992 by Kazuo Mogi.
|Print News Story| | <urn:uuid:e6b7bf03-92f9-4a64-95bf-68948cbf436f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns01965.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966441 | 478 | 1.6875 | 2 |
MANKATO, Minn. (AP) - Seth Greenwood has watched parts of Seven Mile Creek County Park between Mankato and St. Peter disappear.
"The Minnesota River is eating the bank away," said the Nicollet County public works director. "It's really bad on that bend on the river. Five to 15 feet of bank has gone just this year."
Much of that sediment will likely end up in the Mississippi River and settle to the bottom of Lake Pepin.
While intense efforts to improve the Minnesota River have gone on for 20 years, now there is a major convergence of better data and mounting political pressure that is bringing to a head problems of suspended solids in the river.
The issue is creating growing friction between farmers and environmentalists and residents on Lake Pepin who are suffering from the Minnesota's pollution.
The millions of tons of sediment getting into the river is emerging as the keystone issue facing the river basin. The impacts on the Mississippi, Lake Pepin and the river basin's contribution to the Gulf "dead zone" are sweeping and the potential solutions expensive, controversial and complicated, considering the Minnesota watershed covers 16,000 square miles.
Decades of scientific research - bolstered by new techniques such as using radioactive isotopes to trace where dirt particles originated - offer a few major findings:
· The amount of sediment getting into the river has increased dramatically - tenfold its natural rate by some estimates.
· Two-thirds or more of the river's sediment load comes from eroding streambanks and bluffs.
· Compared to the past, there is much more water flowing into the river more quickly. Part of that comes from more frequent and heavy rains. But more and more, researchers are convinced the high, fast waters tearing into streambanks are largely the result of extensive farm drainage that has changed the hydrology of the landscape.
·The more powerful flows are altering the river.
The Minnesota R!iver from Mankato to St. Paul has widened by 50 percent since 1938. The scene along Seven Mile Creek County Park is playing out all along the lower half of the Minnesota River.
Farm groups have begun a more aggressive campaign to counter the image of drainage as the primary foe, pointing to research that high bluff erosion and bank erosion are coming from more precipitation.
But researchers increasingly say otherwise.
"We don't know absolutely everything," said Norman Senjem, who recently retired from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency after many years of overseeing river research. "But post-World War II to about 1980 is when we see the biggest uptick in sediment, the biggest uptick in Lake Pepin filling in. It's the time of increased mechanization in agriculture.
"Precipitation plays a role, but primarily it's landscape changes."
Shannon Fisher, who heads the Water Resources Center based at Minnesota State University and is director of the multi- county Minnesota River Board, said he's seen enough credible research to believe farm drainage is a major factor.
"In my opinion, the drainage we're doing is having an impact on the hydrology and we're going to have to address it. Water storage (on the landscape) is going to be very important, and it's hard to sell to people as we put more tile in the ground."
The latest study to peg farm drainage as the culprit was recently released by scientists at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station and the University of Minnesota. The research included examination of 70 years' worth of records on rainfall, flow and land use changes along the 21 tributaries to the Minnesota River.
Shawn Schottler, one of the scientists who worked on the research, said everyone agrees streambank and bluff erosion are putting a majority of sediment in the river. Their latest study looked at how much of that could be tied to increased precipitation. | <urn:uuid:52c9fa63-bcfc-48cd-a8c4-15907a20ead9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aberdeennews.com/farmforum/news/aan-ff.12-16-11.mndrainissue-20111216,0,21653.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961924 | 784 | 3.15625 | 3 |
Campaign timeline is accelerated due to measles and polio outbreaks – five million children targetedWASHINGTON, 8 July 2006 – The government of Kenya has launched a two-phase integrated measles vaccination campaign, targeting more than five million children between nine months and five years of age. In addition to measles vaccinations, the campaign will provide other life-saving health interventions, including polio vaccinations (in select districts), vitamin A and de-worming medicine. Residents in the Nyanza and Western provinces will also receive insecticide-treated nets, proven to be one of the most effective and cost-efficient means of preventing malaria.
The campaign is being supported by the Measles Initiative, a partnership formed to reduce measles deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, which is led by the American Red Cross, United Nations Foundation, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, the Global Fund on AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has provided long-lasting insecticide treated nets to combat malaria, which is a leading cause of childhood death and disability in Kenya as in many other African countries. The Kenya Red Cross will be working with the government and other partners to educate and mobilize communities.
“The Kenya campaign was accelerated to protect children from a recent measles outbreak, the re-emergence of polio in Somalia, and the effects of a severe drought,” said Per Engeback, UNICEF Regional Director for East and Southern Africa. “The drought led to a food crisis that increased malnutrition in children, making them even more susceptible to measles.”
The first phase of the campaign was moved up to April 29 in response to a measles outbreak that has resulted in approximately 42 deaths over the past six months. Preliminary results from the first phase indicate that the campaign reached more than 95 per cent of the targeted population.
“Kenya’s immunization program sets a good example in disease outbreak response,” said Dr. Luis Gomes Sambo, WHO/AFRO Regional Director. “Upon realizing that the country was facing a serious threat of measles and polio, Kenya promptly responded by launching a commendable two-stage vaccination campaign to protect more than 5 million children.”
Successful control of measles in Kenya depends on improving routine vaccinations of children at nine months of age, plus regular follow-up campaigns such as this one. Before Kenya began intensive measles control activities with a Measles Initiative-supported campaign in 2002, measles was a major cause of childhood death and disability. That campaign successfully reached more than 97 per cent of the target and, since 2002, the number of reported measles cases in Kenya has decreased to fewer than 100 per year, prior to the recent outbreak.
Over a five year period, the Measles Initiative has supported more than 40 African countries in successfully vaccinating 213 million children and saving the lives of an estimated 1.2 million. Through the financial and technical support of the Measles Initiative and the commitment of African governments, measles deaths in Africa fell by 60 per cent between 1999 and 2004. This decline reflects significant progress toward the goal of reducing measles deaths worldwide by 90 per cent by 2010.
The Measles Initiative, launched in 2001, is a long-term commitment and partnership among leaders in public health and supports the goal of reducing measles deaths globally by 90 per cent by 2010 compared to 2000. Measles Initiative partners include the American Red Cross, United Nations Foundation, CDC, WHO, and UNICEF.
Largely due to the technical and financial support of the Measles Initiative and the commitment from African governments, more than 200 million children have been vaccinated against measles and an estimated 1.2 million lives have been saved since 2001. Building on this achievement, in 2005, the Initiative expanded its technical and financial support to countries in Asia, where total measles deaths are highest outside of sub-Saharan
The Initiative will also continue to carry out integrated campaigns in which health workers provide not only measles vaccines, but also other interventions such as insecticide-treated nets for malaria prevention, vitamin A, de-worming medication and polio vaccines.
Since 2001, the Measles Initiative has mobilized more than $200 million and supported more than 40 African countries and three Asian countries to implement high-quality measles vaccination campaigns. As a result of these campaigns, as well as improvements in routine and supplementary immunization activities, global measles deaths have dropped by 48 per cent from 871,000 in 1999 to an estimated 454,000 in 2004. The largest reduction occurred in Africa, the region with the highest burden of disease, where estimated measles cases and deaths have dropped by 60 per cent.
Supporters of the Measles Initiative also include: the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI Alliance), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Vodafone Group Foundation, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Japanese International Agency for Cooperation (JICA), Department for International Development of the United Kingdom (DFID), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Federation), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Izumi Foundation, Becton, Dickinson and Company and governments.
Measles is one of the leading vaccine-preventable childhood killers in the world. In 2004, it was estimated that there were 454,000 measles deaths globally-- this translates to more than 1,200 deaths every day or 50 every hour. The overwhelming majority of these deaths, that is 410,000 out of 454,000, are children under the age of five.
A safe and highly effective vaccine has been available for more than 40 years and costs less than US $1, making measles vaccinations one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available for preventing deaths. Despite this, millions of children remain at risk.
For more information about the Measles Initiative, log on to www.measlesinitiative.org. To make a financial contribution, call 1-800 RED CROSS or to make a secure online donation, log on to www.measlesinitiative.org.
Attention editors and broadcasters: Still photos and b-roll are available from recent campaigns. Please visit the press room at www.measlesinitiative.org or contact Michael Oko at email@example.com.
For more information, please contact:
Michael Oko, American Red Cross, Washington, DC, Tel. +1 202 303 6820
Amy DiElsi, UN Foundation, Washington, DC, Tel. +1 202 419 3230
Erica Kochi, UNICEF New York, Tel. +1 212 326 7785
Steven Stewart, CDC, Atlanta, Tel. +1 404-639-8327
Hayatee Hasan, WHO Geneva, Tel. +41 22 791 2103
Zorodza Machekanyanga,, WHO Regional Office for Africa, Tel. +47 241 38129 | <urn:uuid:834f21ef-2a15-4a6a-80bd-46bb1e33b03e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.unicef.org/media/media_34871.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93767 | 1,447 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Updated: Wednesday, 13 Mar 2013, 1:05 PM EDT
Published : Wednesday, 13 Mar 2013, 1:05 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — With their Ivy League pedigrees and East Coast addresses, Supreme Court justices often are rightly described as unrepresentative of the nation. But in one area, the justices look a lot like the rest of America.
Members of the court have firsthand experience with divorce and adoption, as well as making it alone without ever getting married. Just five of the nine justices have been married once and have had biological children with their spouses.
"The diversity of the family lives of the justices mirrors the diversity of American families overall," said Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who studies families and public policy.
These varied family portraits of the justices are somewhat at odds with the arguments of gay marriage opponents who stress the unique ability of heterosexual couples to have babies as a reason to uphold bans on same-sex marriage.
The briefs defending California's Proposition 8 gay-marriage ban and a federal law denying benefits to legally married gay couples are sprinkled with references to the ideal family as having a mother, a father and biological children.
"Proposition 8 thus plainly bears a close and direct relationship to society's interest in increasing the likelihood that children will be born to and raised by the mothers and fathers who brought them into the world in stable and enduring family units," the provision's supporters say.
The conservative, public-interest Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., puts it this way: "Reserving marriage to a man and a woman thus reflects the inherent distinction between those pairs capable of engaging in the act which can produce human offspring, and those pairs which cannot."
The two justices who have adopted children are considered likely votes against gay marriage. Chief Justice John Roberts is the father of two children, Jack and Josie, both 12. They were adopted four months apart as babies in 2000, after Roberts and his wife, Jane, then 45, spent several years trying to adopt. The Roberts family discussed the adoption for a biography of the chief justice that was aimed at young readers and published in 2006.
Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, took custody of Thomas's grandnephew, Mark, when he was 6, in 1998. Soon after they were married in 1987, the Thomases decided they would not have children of their own, author Ken Foskett wrote in his biography, "Judging Thomas." Mark's father had been in and out of legal trouble and his mother was raising three other children on her own. Thomas also has a biological child from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor also is divorced, while Justice Elena Kagan has never married. Neither has children.
The justices' personal lives may not often play a role in the way the court decides cases, but they cannot completely set aside their own experiences and circumstances. Both Sotomayor and Thomas were beneficiaries of affirmative action programs that were intended to boost minority enrollment in higher education. On the court, Thomas has voted to get rid of the use of race in admissions and other areas. Sotomayor has yet to cast a vote on the topic, but she has spoken much more positively about affirmative action than has Thomas.
The justices also are not immune to considering how they might be affected by the course one side or the other is advocating in a dispute before them. Last year's case involving the placement of a GPS device on a car seemed to take a turn against the government when a Justice Department lawyer asserted that federal agents could track the justices' movements the same as any other person's, without obtaining a judge's approval.
"So, your answer is yes, you could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month; no problem under the Constitution?" Roberts said during the argument in U.S. v. Jones.
Cherlin, who does not follow the high court especially closely, wondered whether the gay marriage cases might take on a similar dynamic. "If justices consider their own family lives in these cases, it may change the way they rule," he said.
Gay marriage opponents said they are not worried about the votes of Roberts and Thomas.
"You're looking at what is the best course societywide to get you the optimal result in the widest variety of cases. That often is not open to people in individual cases. Certainly adoption in families headed, like Chief Roberts' family is, by a heterosexual couple, is by far the second-best option," said John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage. Eastman also teaches law at Chapman University law school in Orange, Calif.
Thomas has dissented from two major decisions in favor of gay rights in 1996 and 2003. The latter case, Lawrence v. Texas, concerned the state's anti-gay sex law. In a short, separate opinion, Thomas described his view of the difference between a judge and a legislator.
He called the law "uncommonly silly" and said he would vote to repeal it if he were a Texas lawmaker. But as a federal judge, he said, he was compelled to vote to uphold it.
Both sides in the current cases have spilled a lot of ink about the relevance of another high-profile Supreme Court ruling, the unanimous decision in 1967 that held states could not prohibit interracial marriages. Gay marriage supporters point to Loving v. Virginia as an important precedent in their favor. Opponents say the case is not of much help to the court because race never had a central role in the definition of marriage.
Whether or not Thomas finds any important legal connection between that decision and the gay marriage cases, the personal connection is undeniable. Thomas, who is black, and his wife, who is white, live in Virginia. | <urn:uuid:77f95e24-dd5d-4df2-8a12-2862e7fbc3c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/news/politics/supreme_ct/Diverse-highcourt-families-mirror-country_41478469 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978884 | 1,197 | 2.390625 | 2 |
The source of these questions and answers can be found in the first installment of this series. It bears repeating for newcomers that the person(s) answering these questions is/are not identified, and that the answers given here are not necessarily current teaching. The chief value of these columns today is in seeing what issues were on the minds of ordinary Church members 60 years ago, and in noting what has changed since then, or what issues we consider modern concerns were being discussed that long ago.
Q. When a person is being confirmed a member of the Church, is it proper for the elders doing the confirming to put both of their hands on the candidate’s head, or put one hand on the person’s head and the other hand on the Elder’s shoulder who is standing at the left. – C.A., Petaluma, Calif.
A. There is no set rule on this in the Church. Ordinarily, however, when only a few Elders officiate in this work, they put both hands on the head of the candidate. However, if there are too many men officiating to allow them to comfortably put both hands on the head of the candidate, then the right hand is usually placed on the head of the candidate and the left hand on the shoulder of the Elder next. It is the number of the elders participating which would govern in a case like that.
Q. In our Sunday School class we have been talking about the Urim and Thummim and would like to know just what it is. We all had a different point of view on it. – R.W., Schofield, Utah.
A. The Urim and Thummim consisted of two transparent stones, set in bows of silver and attached to a breast plate. They were mentioned anciently in connection with priestly functions as outlined in the bible under the law of Moses. They were to be used in making the will of the Lord clear and comprehensible to the priests. Aaron wore the Urim and Thummin upon his heart when he went to obtain the judgment of the Lord. His successors did also. See [long list of scriptures not transcribed; consult Topical Guide.] The Prophet Joseph Smith said that the use of the Urim and Thummim, which were deposited with the gold plates and delivered to him with the gold plates, “constituted seers in ancient or former times and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.” The Prophet Joseph Smith received some revelations through the Urim and Thummim. The Urim and Thummim was used ancient not only by the people in the days of Moses, but later on by the Book of Mormon people. Reference is made to them in Mosiah 8:13-19; Ether 3:23-28. There is a discussion on this subject in Dr. Widtsoe’s book entitled “Evidences and Reconciliations.” This discussion will prove of interest to you.
Q. We in our ward are planning to build a new chapel. A ballot was taken in the ward to determine the location on which to build. We have a two-thirds majority to build at our present location. Will this vote be the final decision? – H.M., Idaho.
A. Recommendations as to building sites are made by the ward bishopric and the stake presidency, and are submitted to the building committee at the Presiding Bishop’s Office. The final decision will have to await approval of the General Authorities of the Church through the General Building Committee of the Church.
Q. When minors are married under the civil law, they must have the consent of their parents. Is it likewise necessary when they are being married in the temple? – HCS, Phoenix, Ariz.
A. All legal requirements under civil marriage are also requirements of temple marriage. Temple marriages are legal marriages in every sense, and all requirements of the law must be met.
Q. What is our belief regarding children who died before they are blessed and named by the Elders of the Church? – PC, Pocatello, Idaho.
A. We believe that infants who die go back to the presence of God, whether or not they have been blessed and named. We do not believe an infant is handicapped so far as eternal progress is concerned, merely because of his not having been blessed before death ensues. When children in the Church die before they are blessed, details of the birth and death are entered in the ward record of members in the same manner as children who live to be blessed, and are included in the Church records and statistics just the same as if they had been blessed. However, stillborn children are not reported or recorded with ordinary births and deaths.
Q. I have heard that Joseph Smith the Prophet predicted that there would be stakes throughout the United States. Is this true?
A. On page 363 of the book entitled “The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, there is a paragraph which reads as follows:
“I have received instructions from the Lord that from henceforth wherever the elders of Israel shall build up churches and branches unto the Lord through the States, there shall be a stake of Zion. In the great cities, as Boston, New York, etc., there shall be stakes. It is a glorious proclamation and I reserved it to the last, and designed it to be understood that this work shall commence after the washings, anointings and endowments have been performed here.”
Q. Do we baptize persons of unsound mentality when they arrive at the age of 8 years as we do normal children? – H.S., Salt Lake City.
A. Those who are mentally deficient do not need to be baptized, no matter what their age may be. They are not in a position to understand, nor are they capable of repentance, and therefore they cannot be held accountable. Should they ever become mentally responsible, the ordinances of the gospel may then be administered.
Q. Will the Saints escape all the judgments that are to be poured out upon the earth? – M.C.F., Idaho Falls, Ida.
A. No. At one time the Prophet Joseph Smith discussed this and said: “I explained concerning the coming of the Son of Man; also that it is a false idea that the Saints will escape all the judgments whilst the wicked suffer; for all flesh is subject to suffer and the righteous shall hardly escape; still many of the Saints will escape for the just shall live by faith; yet many of the righteous will fall prey to disease, to pestilence, etc., by reason of the weakness of the flesh, and yet to be saved in the Kingdom of God. So that it is an unhallowed principle to say that such and such have transgressed because they have been preyed upon by disease or death, for all flesh is subject to death, and the Savior has said, Judge not lest ye be judged.” (Doc. Hist. of Ch. 4:11.) In this connection read Doc. & Cov. 112:24-26 and “The Teachings of Joseph Smith,” page 162.
Q. Why is the bishop the president of the priests’ quorum, instead of a priest? We have deacons as presidents of deacons’ quorums, the same on the teachers’ quorums, but why is it different in the priests’ quorums?
A. Through direct revelation from the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith, the ward bishop is made the president of the Aaronic Priesthood of his ward. (Doc. & Cov.
101 107:87-88.) This presidency is shared by his counselors. (Doc. & Cov. 107:15.) In this same revelation, which names the bishop as president of the Aaronic Priesthood, it is also specified that he “is to preside over forty-eight priests and to sit in council with them, to teach them the duties of their office, as given in the covenants.” (v. 87.)
Q. In administering the sacrament, is it right and proper for both priests to kneel at the same time while giving the blessing? – J.H., Salt Lake City.
A. It is customary for only the one priest to kneel at a time, the other priest remaining seated.
Q. Is it ever considered permissible to hold the sacrament tray with the left hand while partaking of it with the right hand and then pass it with the left hand to the next person? – C.O.S., Chicago, Ill.
A. Yes, it is permissible. There is no set rule on this procedure. It is customary for the individual to partake of the sacrament with the right hand.
Q. Is it right to deduct the payments from your tithing which you make to your building fund and ward budget or is tithing a separate and distinct thing from all other contributions? – P.R.L., Logan, Utah.
A. Tithing is separate and distinct from all other contributions. | <urn:uuid:e3030ac9-b250-461c-93d6-82fe5544369e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.keepapitchinin.org/2010/11/16/questions-from-the-grass-roots-1948-8/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969245 | 1,892 | 2.03125 | 2 |
February 12, 2013
I sit at my desk thoughtfully shuffling a deck of cards. I have always loved shuffling cards, as it introduces unbridled chaos into perfect order. Those little numbers which used to count off one, two and three are now completely jumbled with kings and queens of various suits. There is little reason and scarcely a discernible pattern in this stack of cards.
Unfortunately, this dramatic re-sequencing is about all I can accomplish with a deck of cards. Do not ask me to draw a hand or deal someone in—card games are a foreign concept to me. As a child, I could not see the appeal in sitting around the table with a few numbered leaflets. The games seemed to require little skill and had no tangible object other than winning; so I wandered away from card tables in pursuit of different ventures.
I firmly believe this ineptitude with cards is an inherited trait—my family enjoys little interaction with games of chance. We seldom entertain board games or card games; we rarely keep complete decks of cards in the house. Not one of us tries to learn a game – how to beat the odds – because not one of us sees the appeal. So we wallow in our ineptitude.
But now, I regret not finding the time to learn at least the basics of poker or hearts. Cards are an easy pastime, and they crop up in many social interactions.
On the Hill, long, dull periods of time are livened up with a stack of cards. The games are more telling than they first appear. They reveal who is cool under pressure, who is a gracious winner, who is a courteous loser and who is not. But much to my chagrin, I sit out and look on each hand confusedly, offering disjointed commentary and unhelpful advice. These games also reveal that I know absolutely nothing about cards.
Majors: Government and Economics (intended)
Activities: Cross Country, Debate Society
Favorite Pastimes: Late-night Diner breakfast, reading the paper in KJ through the morning, wandering the Root Glen and sipping a latte from Cafe Opus.
Hometown: Newfane, Vt.
High School: Concord Academy | <urn:uuid:a9a2a359-7bab-4623-b182-f83b7e045bfa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hamilton.edu/journals/pages/student-journals?action=ind&id=2A9844BF-A39E-B971-EB4B3335FE342759 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959931 | 463 | 1.53125 | 2 |
I’ve been asked a couple of times recently, as part of separate projects, to split the results of a SQL query on whitespace within. Simply put, how does one go from:
blort wuu spong
to the expanded form:
efficiently and cleanly, only using SQL? (In case anyone’s worried, I’ve scrubbed the data sets of any personal details they might have previously contained: any resemblance to the real Blort Wuu-Spong is entirely coincidental.)
I finally decided it wasn’t possible, and although without the pure mathematics to back me up I could have kept hunting—partial solutions involving a self-join for each whitespace splitting kept rearing their heads—what finally convinced me was comparing the behaviour of SQL with that of XSL(T). The two are more alike than you might think; and no, I don’t mean SQL and XQuery, although that easy comparison provides a clue for the underlying similarity.
In XSL(T), the XML node in your original document(s) is in a sense king: it’s considered bad form (and is at any rate inefficient) to do data management on some transient data set, created within the template. Loops work best over nodesets rather than with some sort of conditional or from/to structure. This stems from XSL(T)’s underlying functional paradigm, where each nodeset is created
Of course, it’s always possible to twist non-functional behaviour out of the stylesheet (and most real-world solutions have to take a pragmatic approach to such programmatic purity) and interpreter-specific kluges exist to node-ize strings based on some non-XML token, but the language works fastest and cleanest when it’s hanging functions off nodes.
In SQL, the equivalent to the node in an XML document is the row in a query. Rows are passed around, compared with other rows based on the content of some of their cells, tied together and discarded, but very rarely can rows be created out of thin air. The closest one gets is the LEFT/RIGHT OUTER JOIN where the ON-condition is not satisfied: then the left-hand row, rather than being discarded as in the INNER JOIN, is in a sense tied to a row of NULLs. Although that equates to it being tied to no row at all, then when the SQL99 dust settles and post-processing can begin, NULLs can be reinterpreted (Coldfusion does this without being asked, for example).
So to create new rows, one can UNION two rowsets, or entangle the rowsets with some sort of a JOIN, but in simplest, non-iterative SQL, there ought to be no easy way to make one row magically split into two, or maybe three, or maybe four, based on its textual content. It breaks the underlying principle, that rows should flow through the SQL into bit-buckets or the STDOUT tray, but shouldn’t be tossed into the stream with flamboyant verve like chillis into a stir-fry.
Exit gracefully: regardless of the data itself, the data model that a given language’s designers had in mind can have the most effect on what’s plausible to do in the language. Almost all languages evolve through proprietary extensions until they can do associative arrays, every kind of loop structure and, if left alone for long enough, GOTOs, but being able to complete a task with a given language is not the same as being able to complete it, for a sufficiently large data set, before the death of your server, your development team or the universe. | <urn:uuid:88db275f-eca6-4e7f-849b-21b01a0bdb36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2006/07/11/this-space-intentionally-left-blank | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919607 | 786 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Twitter is an ongoing conversation powerhouse. With over 500 million monthly active users sending nearly 340 million 140-character messages, or “tweets” daily, the social media network’s potential for real time dialogue with consumers is vastly different from that of Facebook or Google+. Other social media websites are stricter when it comes to privacy settings, and although you can have a “locked” Twitter account, the most successful Twitter users are simply broadcasting their thoughts and tastes to the world in small blurbs every few hours. The conversational freedom that Twitter gives to consumers, it also gives to companies.
It’s important to stay on top of industry trends and customers’ viewpoints, so you know when to offer them the solution they need at the moment of purchase. Twitter is ideal for this, especially if your customer is the primary user demographic, between the ages of 24-54 and making $25K-$75K per year. You need to be in on this real-time conversation, and have a voice in it as well.
Here are 5 rules you can follow that will increase your engagement and connect with more current and potential customers.
1. Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags are the “#” symbol followed by a word, like this: #trendingtopics. This is a simple method that Twitter uses to categorize tweets by “topic”. If you’re trying to share a great solution to your customers’ plumbing problems, you might use a hashtag like “#homeplumbing” to indicate that your message is related to home plumbing. You could add “#tips” so that people looking for help will find your tweet also. This will draw a fresh audience that is looking for new accounts to follow and new experts from the Twitter universe to follow you and spread your brand influence. Tweets with hashtags receive twice the engagement of tweets without.
Remember: Don’t use more than 1-2 hashtags per tweet. Once you reach 3 hashtags or more, engagement drops by 17%.
2. “Listen” for Trending Topics in Your Industry & Customer Feedback
You need to keep up with your customers’ needs, so make sure to search Twitter regularly for hashtags and words that would be related to your customers, your local area, or your industry. Find out what your community and fanbase are saying so that you can offer them a better solution. Read through feedback related to your brand, services, competitors, or products, and you will become an expert in consumer opinion. If you want to, you can even tweet questions you’d like customers to answer. It’s likely you’ll get a few volunteered opinions.
Remember: Listening to customers is key, whether it’s online or in person. Just as you would listen to a customer if they spoke with you face to face, you must listen to them on Twitter.
3. Keep It Simple, Sweetheart
Even if it’s only 140-characters, sometimes a tweet can be long-winded. Be sure to avoid a lengthy introduction to a link or a photo. This will also drive engagement on those clickable links, and drive more traffic to your Twitter profile. This will spread your brand name and gain you more followers as well. Because tweets that contain less than 100 characters receive 17% more engagement, you will need to make sure that every word is perfect. This means you’ll need a firm, distinct voice and a strong Call To Action when you send your messages into the “Twitterverse”.
Remember: If you want your tweet to be shared with more of the online world, tell your followers to retweet, or “RT” your messages. Tweets that directly ask for an RT receive 23x the engagement normal tweets do.
The way a ReTweet works, with the original message on the right.
4. Include Imagery & Link
Although natural, conversational tweets are the most successful text tweets, tweets with links and imagery receive more engagement. Include a photo, or a shortlink sharing an article or appropriate news bit which interests your followers. Tweets with links receive 86% higher retweet rates, meaning that your followers are spreading your brand message farther online. Tweets with images and links receive twice the engagement and follower interest than messages without. Make sure that your content is relevant to your business and the solutions you provide.
Remember: When you add a link, you’re no longer allowed 140 characters – you’re only allowed 118. This makes Rule #3 even more essential.
5. Reply to Connections
Reply to both those who either use @-reply to speak with you directly, and those who use a hashtag reference related to your brand. Acknowledge digital vocalization about your brand and the customer’s need to hear from you, whether it be critique or praise. Be there for those who attempt to dialogue with you. You should also jump into conversations or answer questions that a local potential patron may ask. For example, if you are a bakery and you see a tweet about an indecisive person regarding breakfast, you can @-reply and offer them a delicious solution to their problem. Don’t forget that you can also reply to complaints and have great customer service, right on Twitter.
Remember: Reply to relevant tweets that involve your products or services, and don’t stray from discussion around your industry.
If you are in the right industry, Twitter has the potential to drastically affect your followers’ and potential customers’ brand loyalty. You can use it as a tool, by checking your business Twitter account every day and following these 5 rules. Just as you would engage the customer who comes through your shop door by starting a conversation, answering a question, or offering a solution, engage the customer who visits you virtually. | <urn:uuid:b328c49e-4488-4c18-8a7e-146d85e52472> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dailydose.dreamlocal.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927929 | 1,219 | 1.515625 | 2 |
A pond with Esse.
Theme of La nature sous le givre
Esse (Ezieg in Breton) is a French commune, located in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine and the Brittany region.
The town is known for its famous megalithic site, a covered walkway dolmen, traditionally called the Roche-aux-Fees. The community of communes belongs Esse bears that name today.
The village owes its name to the Gallic god Esus.
In the Middle Ages, the lords of Loroux were entitled to justice.
Black and white version in WS | <urn:uuid:712686d3-e496-481a-958a-7dfc39f16eb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trekearth.com/workshops/1158584/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946577 | 134 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Cardinal Priest of San Camillo de Lellis
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, Archbishop of Lima and Primate of Peru, was born on 28 December 1943 in Lima. A champion basketball player, he studied industrial engineering at the National Institute of Engineering and joined Opus Dei in 1962. After working as an engineer, he was ordained for the Prelature on 21 August 1977 and holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Navarre.
He did pastoral work in Lima and taught moral theology at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology. He was later Regional Vicar for Peru and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Piura.
On 23 May 1988 he was appointed titular Bishop of Turuzi and Auxiliary of Ayacucho, receiving episcopal ordination on 3 July.
He was promoted to Archbishop of Ayacucho on 13 May 1995.
He tried to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the siege of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima (December 1996 to April 1997) and ministered to the Japanese and Peruvian hostages.
He was named Archbishop of Lima on 9 January 1999.
Created and proclaimed Cardinal by John Paul II in the Consistory of 21 February 2001, of the Title of St. Camillus de Lellis. | <urn:uuid:591fe76a-de49-4bd1-8b26-0dcf90bd2e63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholic-pages.com/hierarchy/cardinals_bio.asp?ref=183 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976831 | 267 | 2.03125 | 2 |
A meeting of the Estonian Nature Foundation (ENF) and representatives of Nord Stream took place in Tallinn on Monday in connection with the intention of the latter to build more gas pipelines through the Baltic Sea, reports Postimees Online. At the meeting, Nord Stream could not answer several important questions about the effects of the existing and planned gas pipelines on the environment of the Baltic Sea, ENF said. “The state of the Baltic Sea is critical and additional endangering of it is not acceptable,” ENF sea environment and nature protection expert Alex Lotman said. He added that Nord Stream has not been able to show, despite the environmental studies conducted so far, how much pollution and dangerous chemicals are really released into the Baltic Sea from the sediment at the bottom of the sea. ENF is of the position that building new gas pipelines contradicts the need to curb global climate problems, for which consumption of fossil fuels has to be reduced, it believes.
Russian aviation company Aeroflot started flying the Tallinn-Moscow route after a gap of 16 years on Sunday; Tallinn Airport hopes to increase the number of passengers traveling between the two capitals to 100,000 a year, reports Public Broadcasting. Estonian Air and UTair also fly on the Tallinn-Moscow route. Tallinn Airport board member Erik Sakkov said that Aeroflot won’t take away passengers from existing flights but should increase the market so that next year there would be more than 100,000 passengers on the route. Sakkov said that the Aeroflot flight is not meant just to bring Russian tourists to Estonia, but could offer Finnair competition regarding Asian flights, and Areolflot’s network also reaches Africa and North America. Tallinn Airport has a third more flights this winter than last year and hopes to handle 2.2 million passengers this year.
On Oct. 26 at the Helsinki Book Fair Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet participated in a discussion on opportunities for small countries to influence developments in the European Union and the world in general, reports LETA. Paet participated in the discussion together with Finnish Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade Alexander Stubb, President of the Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen, and Estonian Ambassador to the European Union Matti Maasikas. Foreign Minister Paet stated that in today’s world it no longer makes a difference whether a country is large or small; what matters is whether countries know how to and wish to cooperate with one another. “For example, looking at Europe’s future, the most important thing is the European Union knowing how to be unified in making and implementing decisions. Cooperation is vital if the European Union wants to realize its advantages for economic growth and development and continue to be the greatest economic space in the world,” Paet noted.
Estonia’s national opera house will celebrate its 100th jubilee in 2013, says the Tallinn Tourism Board. To mark the upcoming centenary, local confectionery maker Kalev presented the opera with a miniature model of the 20th century opera building, made of marzipan. Opera, ballet and concert visitors can admire the miniature opera house model in the theater’s foyer. The occasion also marks a three year sponsorship deal. | <urn:uuid:c71dffdc-6f39-46c3-bdee-7c3094a17543> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shaan.typepad.com/shaanou/2012/11/eesti-in-brief-2012-11-01.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926363 | 673 | 1.992188 | 2 |
The old saw that all politics is local is gaining traction as state legislators pass law after law violating women’s constitutional rights to privacy and reproductive choice. According to a recent article in AlterNet, 916 new restrictive laws were introduced by state legislators in the first quarter of 2011. The laws are the most creative, restrictive laws passed since Roe vs Wade became law of the land.
The common core is:
- The Gestational limits on abortion- they have plucked 20 weeks as the standard though viability is not assured at that time.
- Wait time – often women are subjected to (often medically inaccurate) propaganda by religious zealots while required to wait for their procedure.
- Mandatory ultrasounds
- Curtailing insurance coverage in state exchanges
- Mandatory visits to crisis pregnancy centers
The common denominator is to render abortion impossible. The goal is to render women powerless.
The reverberations from Nebraska’s 20 weeks limit on abortion were felt when Danielle Deaver was forced to continue a pregnancy with a nonviable fetus. Her family had to suffer watching their baby die. When lawmakers subvert both a legal procedure and medical science, it is time for them to leave the legislatures. Medical privacy and medical conditions are rights that are guaranteed to women as well as men. Similar scenarios can be expected to occur as more women have medical problems beyond 20 weeks.
South Dakota has the unique distinction of introducing and passing the most restrictive laws regarding wait time and pregnancy crisis centers. Beginning in July, a woman must wait 72 hours after consulting with a physician about an abortion. She also has to visit a registered pregnancy crisis center and listen to these volunteer, non-certified, non-medical personnel give incorrect information about abortions. These clinics are not subject to privacy laws so a woman’s medical record is no longer private. She also has to be read a statement written by the legislators about abortion.
Abortion is difficult enough without these new laws. There is one clinic in the state that has an abortion provider flown in once a week. How the women are to meet with the provider, wait 72 hours, meet with the pregnancy crisis center and have the procedure in a timely fashion has not been worked out. Most of the women are financially unable to pay for hotels or childcare so this is an undue financial burden. Additionally, the pregnancy crisis centers have not signed on to participate in this new program, so it is unclear if the women will be denied abortions because no centers are involved. Could this be any worse? This is a state where voters have twice voted not to ban abortion, but the legislature believes it knows better.
The ultrasound ploy is a favorite of many states. Women are forced to undergo a procedure that they do not want, and which is many times not medically necessary. Depending on the state, they must either watch the ultrasound or listen to a graphic description. Women, many of whom have limited funds, must also pay for this state-mandated procedure. Isn’t there an argument by conservatives about mandatory payments? Hmmm, just not for women when they have abortions.
Insurance is the latest weapon in the war on women’s health in both the states and the federal government. In the US House, HR 3 passed with unanimous consent of the Republicans. This bill would tax insurance plans that cover abortions. It would tax health credits. It would tax people who use them. It would allow the IRS to audit a woman’s abortion. This is all from the no tax, no government in private affairs folks. They will not tax oil companies, but women’s health is fair game.
In the states there is an attempt to restrict abortion coverage in state exchanges. The degree varies but 23 states have already considered such legislation.
While all these laws are aimed at overturning Roe vs Wade, there is the additional attack on the born children. Programs for nutritional programs and child health care are being slashed. Contraception is no longer covered by some states. How does this promote a culture of life?
The Republican-controlled House is railing against the deficit and slashing social programs while refusing to raise taxes. But its microfocus is on depriving women of their basic equality – the right to privacy, the right to control their own lives and the right to make their own decisions without help from the government. Contribute your energy and money to electing pro-choice legislators. The attacks will continue until women mobilize in town halls, in voting booths and in the halls of Congress.
originally posted at JACblog!
Do you know what abortion laws your state has passed since May 2009? | <urn:uuid:8fd897a1-f012-4976-88bc-c9bf4da8bcc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/11/basic-equality-womendenied/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971118 | 942 | 2.328125 | 2 |
|Sponsor||Rep. Castle, Michael N.|
|Committee||Education and Labor|
|Date||March 10, 2009 (111th Congress, 1st Session)|
|Staff Contact||Adam Hepburn|
This resolution is being considered on the floor under suspension of the rules, requiring a two-thirds majority vote for passage. This legislation was introduced by Representative Mike Castle (R-DE) on March 9, 2009.
H.Res. XXX resolves that the House of Representatives:
• "Congratulates the National Assessment Governing Board on its 20th anniversary in measuring student academic achievement; and
• "Recognizes past and present members of the National Assessment Governing Board for their service to the Nation in improving elementary and secondary education."
The National Assessment Governing Board is an independent board created by Congress in 1988 which sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or "The Nation's Report Card." The Board is made up of 26 members including governors, State legislators and school officials. The Board identifies subjects to be assessed, determines content, and approves assessment questions for The Nation's Report Card, which assesses performance of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Except for mandatory math and reading tests in grades 4 and 8, State participation in The Nation's Report Card is voluntary. | <urn:uuid:b476b369-3a0c-4f53-9329-00f87e4fd601> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gop.gov/bill/111/1/hresxxx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948103 | 271 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Finally, the tide has turned in the fearful Salman Rushdie affair. It started out plenty ugly when Ayatollah Khomeini put a price on the head of Mr. Rushdie, the author. The initial response to this vengeful lawlessness added the stench of cowardice. Governments hemmed and hawed. Booksellers hastened to yank ''The Satanic Verses'' from their shelves. Only a handful of famous writers were willing to raise their voices when asked by talk shows to discuss the death threats against a reputable author and his American publishers.
But over the weekend, Europe's leaders led the way back to decency, and yesterday President Bush joined in strong condemnation. Once governments spoke up, private citizens, booksellers and now many famous authors rediscovered Voltaire. These wiser, stronger second thoughts tell a good deal about human behavior. No one wants to be first over the parapets. When property and life are at risk, citizens reasonably look to their political leaders to lead.
This obligation is especially heavy in the Rushdie scandal. When a foreign leader puts a bounty on the lives of citizens in another country, he strikes at the comity of nations. Thus the 12 European Community nations did the minimum in recalling their diplomats from Teheran, and warning that stronger steps would be taken if any harm comes to Mr. Rushdie. Iran is crucially dependent on trade with Europe; it cannot treat the warning lightly.
Once governments show the way, it becomes easier for others - for private citizens to speak out, to defend the freedom to write, publish, sell, buy and read books. That willingness is illustrated on Page A13 today, the formal publication date of Mr. Rushdie's novel, in an advertisement by librarians, publishers and booksellers.
That contrasts favorably with the initial reaction of booksellers last week. Citing anonymous threats against employees, Waldenbooks said it would not display Mr. Rushdie's novel but sell it to customers who ask for it. Harry Hoffman, the company's president, says he takes seriously the abridgment of free speech, but adds that ''the problems of international terrorism are not best solved by a bookstore chain.''
The argument is serious, and his policy is considerably braver than that of competitors who surrendered, pulling the book completely. What's far more shameful is the wobble in other countries. Canada at first considered using trade laws to bar the Rushdie novel, but then relented. In Japan, France and West Germany, publishers have chosen not to publish - in ignominious contrast with Italy, where the book is being sold and the Iranian Embassy picketed. Through much of the Islamic world, embarrassed Muslims, with more at risk than Ottawa or Tokyo, condemn the Ayatollah's incitements to murder.
If courage is one quality needed to fight fanatic barbarism, another is unity, to isolate Iran in shame.
Yesterday's editorial ''On Second Thought, Courage,'' about the reaction to Salman Rushdie's novel ''The Satanic Verses,'' referred to an advertisement elsewhere in The Times. The ad was placed in most but not all editions, however, so the reference mystified some readers. It was signed by the national associations of publishers, booksellers and librarians, to support the book on the occasion of its formal publication date ''in the spirit of America's commitment to free expression.'' | <urn:uuid:190a66cb-75a9-458b-bcf5-2804641eb678> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/22/opinion/on-second-thought-courage.html?src=pm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952455 | 696 | 1.6875 | 2 |
PRESS RELEASE 26/06/09 - EME Funds First Project
Blood pressure cuff could help improve the success of kidney transplants
The first clinical trial funded by the new Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) programme will investigate whether a simple procedure to activate one of the body’s natural defence mechanisms improves the function of kidneys after transplantation. This research is funded by the Medical Research Council and managed by the National Institute for Health Research.
A team of investigators, from six kidney transplant centres in the UK and one in Holland, will be led by Raymond MacAllister, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at UCL (University College London).
The £800,000 clinical trial will recruit 400 patients requiring kidney transplantation over a three year period. In transplantation, the blood supply to the kidney is interrupted during surgery and the damage that results can limit the life-span and functioning of the transplanted kidney. The trial will examine whether activating a natural protective reflex know as Remote Ischaemic Pre-Conditioning (RIPC), which makes organs resistant to injury that occurs when their blood supply is reduced, has an effect on the outcome of transplantation. RIPC is stimulated by reducing blood flow to the arm of both the kidney donor and recipient for short periods (using a blood pressure cuff). If RIPC protects the kidney, then the transplant should work more effectively and last longer.
Professor MacAllister comments that “kidney transplantation transforms the lives of patients with kidney failure. However, there is a growing shortage of kidneys for transplantation and the number of patients on the transplant list is steadily increasing. The RIPC procedure is simple, safe, easily implemented and inexpensive; should this trial confirm that it improves kidney function, this innovation will be a major benefit to kidney transplant recipients. Maximising the functionality and life-span of the transplanted kidney will optimise the use of this scarce resource, and therefore increase the number of patients who can receive a transplant.”
Professor Rajesh Thakker, Chairman of the EME Board said “this exciting project is the first to be funded by the newly established EME programme. This simple intervention could increase survival rates for patients needing kidneys and may impact across other types of transplantation as well“.
To view the full project details visit the Funded Projects page.
[Word count 355]
- Ends -
Notes for editors
- The EME programme funds high quality research which seeks to determine whether a health intervention (e.g. a drug, diagnostic technique or device) works and in some cases how or why it works.
- The EME programme is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and managed by the NIHR on behalf of the MRC-NIHR partnership. It is coordinated by the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre (NETSCC), based at the University of Southampton.
- The NIHR provides the framework through which the research staff and research infrastructure of the NHS in England is positioned, maintained and managed as a national research facility. The NIHR provides the NHS with the support and infrastructure it needs to conduct first-class research funded by the Government and its partners alongside high-quality patient care, education and training. Its aim is to support outstanding individuals (both leaders and collaborators), working in world class facilities (both NHS and university), conducting leading edge research focused on the needs of patients. www.nihr.ac.uk
- The Medical Research Council is dedicated to improving human health through excellent science. It invests on behalf of the UK taxpayer. Its work ranges from molecular level science to public health research, carried out in universities, hospitals and a network of its own units and institutes. The MRC liaises with the Health Departments, the National Health Service and industry to take account of the public’s needs. The results have led to some of the most significant discoveries in medical science and benefited the health and wealth of millions of people in the UK and around the world. www.mrc.ac.uk
Alex Pordage, Programme Manager (Communications)
Telephone: 023 8059 8516, Email: email the EME programme
Dani Preedy, Senior Programme Manager
Telephone: 023 8059 4303, Email: email the EME programme
The following spokespeople are available:
Professor Raymond MacAllister, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology, UCL (Project Lead)
Professor Ian A Cree, Director of NETSCC, EME | <urn:uuid:e071cbe6-30e3-442c-a4d8-45e1cc7c0b0e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eme.ac.uk/news_and_events/item/09062601.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923633 | 928 | 2.421875 | 2 |
In case past attempts with long-term weight-loss haven\’t been interesting, strike a new mindset and procedures from reading the NJOY Electronic Cigarettes reviews. The causes you are dieting are finally going to make or break you. Most dieters motivated through outside activities, like attempting to reduce weight before their own high school gathering become bikini ready for a beach vacation. Even so, the best motivators are the types that come from inside and require long-term commitment for example, a greater self-image or having more strength to play with others.
Alternative motivation can be effective but once you\’ve meet the objective and have nothing else to work toward, it can be difficult to maintain the weight off as well as more difficult still to keep to reduce. You\’re getting very skinny and it is not hocus-pocus; hypnosis can go a long way regarding helping dieters both drop pounds and keep the loss. An extraordinary way of attentiveness and focus, hypnosis helps you commit to making better choices like eating less and working out more. For example, they could enjoy plain vegetables as much as those dripping in butter can.
When you are thinking about hypnotherapy, get help from an authorized health care practitioner who uses it adjunctively. If you are overworked and over whelmed, it might explain why you are also over weight. When the person\’s body is under emotional and physical pressure, it churns out a hormone that both increases appetite, particularly for fat and sugar laden foods and signal the storage of fat throughout the abdomen.
The best neutralizer in the weighty effect is workout it is actually natural because pressure response has already mobilized your body for activity and NJOY Electric Cigarettes after every exercise. Dieting will not need to whizz your efforts. If you believe sluggish, it may be since you are eating less than 1,200 calories per day, the minimum requirements for women. An extreme reduction in calories not simply makes it tough obtain all of the nutrients you require, it genuinely triggers your body burning calories at a lower than usual rate so that you can preserve itself.
Thus, while you may lose weight rapidly at first, your losses will eventually slow to the level that you will find yourself practically starving with little loss to demonstrate for it- talk about discouraging! Never be discourage you have to move on and take advantage of the healthy benefits of NJOY Cigar to pursue your wish to possess a sexy body. | <urn:uuid:6c129fa1-2076-41bc-b8f3-397428020723> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bestarticleswebdirectory.com/food-drink/enjoy-the-healthy-advantages-of-njoy-ecigs-to-have-a-positive-attitudes-on-dieting/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954582 | 508 | 1.695313 | 2 |
ALERT: Afghan Treasures in Danger
The Guardian Reports: "Western experts now fear that the Taliban are melting down Afghanistan's fabled Bactrian treasures - 20,000 gold objects about 2,000 years old.
UN Sanctions against Taliban not hurting Afghans
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, March 24 (Reuters) - The United Nations found that new U.N. sanctions against the Taliban had little impact on the lives of ordinary Afghans,
Bin Laden group gaining power
Thursday, 22 March 2001 21:27 (ET)
WASHINGTON, March 22 (UPI) -- Saudi terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden appears to have come out on top of a power struggle and has moved some of his backers
China seeks Pak help to locate Chinese rebels in Taliban camps
Islamabad, March 23, IRNA -- China has sought the help of Pakistan to locate its Muslim rebels in training camps in Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan.
Kabul collection - Taliban unlock museum to show destroyed statues
Luke Harding in Islamabad
Guardian (UK)Friday March 23, 2001
Journalists toured Afghanistan's national museum in Kabul yesterday to see the results of the Taliban's destruction of statues.
Bamyan Buddha statue 'completely destroyed': local doctor
TOKYO, March 24 (Kyodo) - A Japanese doctor in Pakistan said Saturday he has confirmed the destruction of two world-famous Buddha statues in
Up to half of Afghan children suffer stunted growth: UNICEF
GENEVA, March 23 (AFP) - Between 40 and 50 percent of children in Afghanistan suffer from stunted growth due to chronic deprivation and malnutrition,
Osama to mediate between Taliban, Hekmatyar
Islamabad, March 23, IRNA -- A Pakistani daily on Friday reported that Osama bin Laden had agreed to mediate between Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami chief,
Pak for reform plan to control Islamic seminaries
Times of India
ISLAMABAD: Faced with world community's pressure to crackdown on over 15,000 militant Islamic seminaries dotting nooks and corners of Pakistan
An act of desecration
A H Jaffor Ullah - The Daily Star
The entire civilized world was stunned hearing the news of Buddha statue demolition by the Taliban regime of Kabul. Of special interest to rest of the world was
Baseless Allegations by Jane's Intelligence Review
Washington - March 23: The Office of the Islamic State of Afghanistan in Washington, DC rejects the claim by Jane's Intelligence Review that foreign fighters
UNESCO condemns reported burning of Koran in India
Saturday March 24, 2:52 PM
ISLAMABAD, March 24 (AFP) - The UN cultural organisation on Saturday condemned a reported incident in which the Muslim holy book was burned by Hindu hardliners
As Taliban Gear up for Spring Offensives, United Front Opens New Battle-fronts
Bin Laden and Extremists' Role on the Rise Within Taliban
WASHINGTON, Mar. 23, 2001 - AAR - In response to a major increase in Taliban military capabilities to unleash a definitive offensive this spring, Afghan resistance
Afghan feminists go online
RAWA wants to publicise the plight of Afghan women
A group of Afghan feminists have turned to the internet to draw attention to atrocities and human rights abuses committed against women under Taleban rule.
|Back to News Archirves of 2001|
Disclaimer: This news site is mostly a compilation of publicly accessible articles on the Web in the form of a link or saved news item. The news articles and commentaries/editorials are protected under international copyright laws. All credit goes to the original respective source(s). | <urn:uuid:a2708efb-d501-413b-98bb-98367b767cc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2001/march/mar242001.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908682 | 755 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Madame Bovary C’est Moi: An Interview With Andreï Makine
By Gerry Feehily.
It’s said that on his death in 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, was so obese that his body fell through the bottom of the wooden coffin meant to contain him. Reassigned to a metal casket, a final indignity still awaited at his graveside by the Kremlin walls. The pallbearers lowering him down on ropes proved unable to cope with the weight. The coffin slipped, clunked off the grave’s edge, then disappeared into the hole with a loud crash.
The coffin fell, and so, as Soviet born writer, Andreï Makine, would have it, did the USSR. “You could have heard a gasp go through the length and breadth of the empire, a gasp that said, ‘It’s all over’.’” One might question the historical validity of his argument, but not the metaphor. After an hour of free-ranging conversation with Makine, covering anything from Martin Amis’s Russian-based novels (“Aren’t there enough Russians to write about in London?” he asks) to quoting chunks of Flaubert, one is struck by his novelist’s knack of coupling personal insight to literary and historical anecdote.
Indeed, Makine’s life has something of a Promethean quality, one where life and literature constantly blur. Author of twelve novels, he has fashioned a new identity for himself in a France which, from his native Siberia, he dreamed of in the works of Balzac and Flaubert, and from tales told him by his French-born grandmother. “France is temperamentally at odds to the Russian mind,” he says. “But it’s the intellectual capital of the West, unlike America, its economic one.”
Granted asylum here in 1987, the rude existence of hard-up émigré provided him contrasts between dream and reality which have informed his fiction ever since. “I occasionally slept rough at the cemetery of Père Lachaise,” he says, “observing from my cover women lying out on the tomb of murdered French journalist, Victor Noir, a reputed cure for sterility.”
Makine was at the same time enrolled at the Sorbonne, working on a doctorate on Russian Nobel prize winner, Ivan Bunin. While writing his first novels in a succession of cramped chambres de bonne, those seven-floor walk-ups under Paris’s peaked lead roofs, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, he eked out a living teaching Russian culture and language. “No-one wanted to publish me,” he says. “Editors didn’t believe a Russian could write French like this.”
Having persuaded a French friend to pose as his Russian translator, Makine’s first novel, A Hero’s Daughter, came in by the back door in 1990. Like its two successors, it sold a few hundred copies before sinking into the great book ocean with that plip most first-time authors fear. His fourth, 1995’s Dreams of My Russian Summers, was another matter.
Set between the doleful reality of “real socialism” in Russia, and a dreamed-of life in France, it managed to take with the public and critics, winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Medicis, a feat unique in French literary history. With fame came a number of pleasures and engagements. An avid traveler, Makine amusingly describes literary junkets and colloquiums. “It’s not always a good sensation to feel mummified in an academic paper. There are also one’s fellow writers, who are sometimes as stiff as sphinxes, all tremulous dignity. Beyond the hours of composition, however, I believe a writer owes it to himself to be frivolous.”
Frivolous, however, is not how Makine appears. He is lean, with one of those rock-like Russian faces which wouldn’t look out of place as a monument to the glory of the USSR in, say, Berlin’s Treptow Park. This is reflected in his choice of the unostentatious, café populaire where we sit, at the foot of Montmartre. Having eschewed family life to pursue, with something of a monastic fervour, a literary calling, he lives, as he admits, “a spare life”.
Indeed, he lives in a former mental asylum where, notably, author Gérard de Nerval was treated. “A place which very much suits me,” he says, and spends part of the year in a rented house in the historically resonant Vendée in Western France, where counter-revolutionary Chouans fought and fell to the Jacobins, prototypes, one could argue, of those Soviet zealots of the revolution which, to judge by his novels, he seems to abhor.
Or perhaps not quite. The question of revolution and how it emancipates is the enigma central to his latest novel to be published in Britain, Human Love (translated by Geoffrey Strachan). Elias, an Angolan growing up as his country enters into a war of independence against its Portuguese colonial master in the sixties, is the son of a rebel, who has escaped to the Congo. Having seen his mother die from injuries sustained in a Portuguese jail, he is raised by a Portuguese priest. Attaining to the status of an assimilado (a native Angolan with certain privileges in the colony) he joins his father in neighbouring Congo, where he fights alongside Che Guevara in his unsuccessful 1965 expedition there.
His father killed by Belgian mercenaries, Elias travels to Cuba. Disappointed by what he has seen in Congo and Cuba of middle-class revolutionaries who could “sacrifice millions of lives at the altar of an idea, but who wept …(thinking of a)… blind dog,” he nevertheless pursues the cause in Moscow, where he is readied for service back in Africa. “Elias,” says Makine, “is a ‘total man,’ one of those men Musil believed could no longer exist in our parcelled, segmented, dispersed age. Totalitarianism, however inhuman, did produce such men, monoliths of dedication to the one cause.”
A cause, one might have imagined, difficult for Makine to sympathise with. “It was a real struggle for me to create this character,” he says. “If you grew up in the USSR, having propaganda drummed into you daily, the mere mention now even of Le Parti Socialiste is enough to make your heart sink. It’s a writer’s task, however, not to present a political position, but the world. How could the monarchist Balzac have described the capitalist society of the nineteenth century so copiously?”
Makine’s point of entry is a crack in Elias’s monolithic persona — his capacity to love. As a young man in the Congo, witness to “breathless jiggling” between rebels and local women, he wonders why the “revolution had not yet taught…a different love…”. With Anna, a Siberian destined for life in diplomatic service, love provides a raison d’être to sustain him through the disenchantments of the seventies and eighties, as Africa becomes engulfed in proxy wars fought out by the Soviet Union and the United States.
A novel filled with horrors — Elias’s mother’s collar bone sticking out of her skin, a child soldier who walks around a rebel camp high on dope, wearing a gas mask — Human Love‘s rage is such that it would be too easy and too treacly to conclude that love will save us. It depicts a world where idealism is futile, but offers little comfort elsewhere. In Auden’s words: “History may say ‘Alas’, but cannot pardon”. “History is a nightmare,” says Makine. “A white man in Africa can push a fat steak aside and think of slimming, while a child fifty miles away is gnawing at the bark of a tree. Wouldn’t this drive us mad if we didn’t have art?”
The Africa where dictators’ wives fly to Paris to have their hair styled, while child soldiers butcher entire villages, has haunted Makine for decades. “I wrote Human Love in 2005, but carried it within me for nearly twenty years, waiting for that period of African history to resolve itself, so to speak. I myself have painful memories of Angola and Somalia, where we exported the Communist ideal, when it had been dead in the USSR for decades. It still persisted in Africa, this belief that the ‘other’ is not one’s enemy, and this imposture and lie was a terrible experience.”
This raises an intriguing question about Makine’s own past and political commitments. Championed by right-wing journals like Le Figaro, Makine, in a 2006 essay entitled “The France We Have Forgotten to Love”, railed against car burnings in Strasbourg’s North African banlieues, symptomatic, he feels, of a climate of political correctness which tolerates anti-social behaviour. Elsewhere, however, his scorn of Western materialism suggests he cannot be so easily co-opted. As to the identity of Human Love‘s unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Soviet intellectual sickened by a world which “turns humans into objects of commerce,” Makine says, “The narrator, c’est moi. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
So could it be safe to infer then that Makine, like the narrator, was once a prisoner of UNITA rebels in Angola, on a mission in 1977 with a group of other Soviet “instructors” to prop up the Marxist-Leninist MPLA government? As the interview closes, this part of Makine’s life will remain enigmatic. Flaubert, after all, was not really Bovary, or at least not quite. “If I gave you a three-minute summary of my life, you could write a novel about it, but then I would have to drop some polonium into your coffee,” he says.
“My past is the only one I have,” he continues. “Let’s say I was a teacher, and be content with this. A novelist must say only so much, otherwise his inspiration dries up. This is true of everyday life—- like the poet Mayakovsky, who at the cinema with his mistress, as she commented on the unusual clothes a group seated in front of them was wearing, told her, “save it for the novel”. The novel that is Makine’s life, the novels he has wrought from it.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Russian author Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union, on September 10, 1957 and grew up in city of Penza, 440 miles south-east of Moscow. He obtained a doctorate at the State University of Moscow, having written a thesis on French literature. He then taught philosophy at the Novogrod Institute. In 1987, while on a teacher’s exchange in France, he sought and was granted political asylum. A period of penury followed, but he eventually became professor of Russian language and culture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and wrote a thesis on the works of Russian Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin while at the Sorbonne. His early novels, written in French, met with little success. However, his fourth novel — 1995′s Dreams of My Russian Summers — was critically and commercially acclaimed, and was awarded both the Prix Goncourt and Medicis. Since then he has gone on to write several other works, including Requiem for a Lost Empire (2001) and The Woman who Waited (2004), all of which are translated in English by Geoffrey Strachan. Human Love is published by Sceptre in the United Kingdom. Andreï Makine divides his time between Paris and a rented house in the Vendée, in the west of France.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Gerry Feehily was born in London and raised in Ireland. As a teenager in the eighties, he took to heart Phil Oakey of the Human League’s exhortation to “take time to see the wonders of the world” and has lived in Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan. Paris-based since the mid-nineties, he is the translator of Sniper, by Pavel Hak (Serpent’s Tail), and writes regularly on literature for Guardian Unlimited and The Independent. Fever, his first novel, was published by Parthian in 2007.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, September 1st, 2008. | <urn:uuid:badd71ab-8e75-4cad-9d64-54072d3487cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/madame-bovary-cest-moi-an-interview-with-andrei-makine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968484 | 2,789 | 1.875 | 2 |
Portland Streetcar CL Line
From Portland Afoot
The Portland Streecar CL Line, or Central Loop Line, is a streetcar route that includes a downtown loop between Portland State University and the south edge of the Pearl District as well as a 3.3-mile line of the Portland Streetcar on the east side of the Willamette River, running across the Broadway Bridge to the Lloyd District, then in a couplet south along Martin Luther King Boulevard and Grand Avenue to OMSI. It's sometimes called the eastside loop because by 2015, it's expected to connect to the South Waterfront over the new Willamette River Bridge.
The city aims to use it as a tool to transform Portland's central eastside into a denser, more walkable and more heavily residential area.
The name "Central Loop" and "CL" abbreviation refer to a similar line in the city's streetcar network of the early 20th century.
Construction budget and planned service
As of 2009, the streetcar extension project was expected to cost $127 million, $75 million of which came from a federal Small Starts grant announced in person by then-Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood on a visit to Portland.
Oregon Ironworks, Inc., based in Clackamas, manufactured several new streetcars to run on the line. (Federal grant requirements forbade the city from buying the streetcars from a foreign manufacturer.)
At the time, the eastside streetcar was expected to run every 12 minutes during weekday peak periods and carry approximately 8,700 passengers daily, or 1.6 million annually. That'd be a 40 percent ridership increase compared to 2011 streetcar boardings on the westside loop.
See also
Did you find this page useful? Could it get better? You're meeting Portland Afoot in its toddlerhood! You can help build this free online guide to low-car life in PDX by clicking "edit" in the right sidebar and adding what you know. Or just leave your questions or ideas below. Thanks for visiting! | <urn:uuid:6949a8fc-15ec-40a2-a845-0942986b136b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://portlandafoot.org/w/Eastside_Streetcar | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94458 | 417 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Atlantic Highlands, NJ – In response to the devastation caused by Super-Storm Sandy, it is clear that the need for volunteers is growing, Clean Ocean Action has launched a long term volunteer initiative to help the communities and millions of citizens left devastated in the wake of Sandy. Starting December 8th, and regularly thereafter, COA will connect community needs throughout the NJ/NY region with the volunteers willing to help through a program called “Waves of Action.” Projects and volunteers register for December 8th's first Wave of Action on a newly developed website www.ForTheShore.org.
“What Sandy destroyed in 48 hours will take months and years to fix. We established the Waves of Action program to provide a longer-term, sustainable strategy to help heal our coastal communities and protect the quality of our region’s ocean,” stated Cindy Zipf, Clean Ocean Action Executive Director, “we hope to help communities go green to save big blue.”
As we stand tall and pull together to recover and rebuild our own homes and lives, many are also donating time for neighbors and communities. Added Lisa Cordova, Clean Ocean Action Volunteer and Event Committee Member, “since the storm, a surge of volunteers is one of the top needs for coastal communities.”
“In the aftermath of Sandy, volunteers are ready and eagerly looking to help. Many of the impacted municipalities, businesses, and families are working hard to put their pieces together and may not have the time or energy to recruit and/or direct volunteers,” said Tavia Danch, Clean Ocean Action Education Coordinator. “Clean Ocean Action is organizing the day of service ‘For the Shore’ to streamline the process of connecting people with projects.”
Starting Saturday, December 8, COA organized the first state-wide “waves of action” days where COA’s network of organizations, businesses, citizens and municipalities from Cape May to Montauk - along the Jersey Shore and the South Shore of Long Island - are identifying and implementing projects that are needed within coastal communities.
Clean Ocean Action has already organized many projects throughout Jersey Shore towns for the first Wave of Action on Saturday, December 8 including, Sea Bright, Long Branch, Toms River, Seaside Park, Atlantic City, and Cape May. Projects are also sprouting up across New York from Jones Beach to Hampton Bays.
Saturday, December 8 is the first Wave of Action to help with the initial recovery from the devastation caused by Sandy, but there will is a long journey forward to rebuild. With this in mind, Clean Ocean Action will continue long-term Waves of Action in the future to help implement a vision of sustainability—restoring better, greener, and bluer coasts.
Sign up to volunteer in Long Branch:
Long Branch – Clean Water Gift Card & In-Kind Donation Drive
- 12 pm – 3 pm
- Gift-Drive! Anyone and Everyone Welcome!
- Affiliation: Clean Water Action/Clean Water Fund
- Location: 198 Brighton Avenue (upstairs from Healing Start), Long Branch, NJ
- Project Description: Clean Water Action and Clean Water Fund’s Belmar office was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. We are a non-profit organization that lost everything. Unfortunately, we are not eligible for flood insurance or other forms of assistance. We are badly in need of gift cards to supply stores (i.e. Target, Staples, etc.), as well as in-kind donations of office items including: pens, markers, highlighters, white board markers and erasers, office paper (white), calculators, clear tape & tape dispensers, envelopes (business-size and large manilla, folders and hanging file folders, staples & staplers, scissors, desk lamps, clipboards, cleaning supplies (non-toxic/green), small waste baskets, recycling bins with lids, desk top organizers/ filing units, large & medium sized white boards, cork board, white out, and binders.
- *In kind donations are tax deductible*
- Notes: If you can’t make it on the 8th, but would like to donate, contact Jenny at firstname.lastname@example.org
- Click HERE to RSVP for this Drive
Manahassett Creek Clean Up
- 8 am – 4 pm
- 15 Volunteers Needed
- Meet-up: Manahassett Creek at 108 Atlantic Ave., North Long Branch, NJ 07740
- Project Description: Remove debris, branches, garbage from Manahassett Creek
- Notes: Please bring work gloves, work boots, plywood, garbage bags, lunch
- Click HERE to sign up for this Project
Long Branch, NJ – Beach Clean-Up
- 10 am – 2 pm
- 100 Volunteers Needed
- Meet-Up: Ocean Ave. & Madison Ave. Access Point
- Project Description: Come out and help clean up the beach at Long Branch!
- Note: Volunteers should dress warmly, bring gloves, and wear heavy boots.
- Click HERE to sign up for this Project | <urn:uuid:7842bcd2-f63f-4dc6-98de-aa31bdaa8f9a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://longbranch.patch.com/blog_posts/clean-ocean-actions-waves-of-action-day-in-long-branch | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926749 | 1,061 | 1.648438 | 2 |
It has been nearly a year since the approval of the Strategic Investment Law (Law on Regulation of Foreign Investment in Commercial/Business Entities Operating in Sectors of Strategic Importance). The purpose of the law is to regulate the approval process on strategically important sectors on basis of national security. The SGK determined that strategically important sectors are mining, banking and finance, and media and telecommunications.
Depending on the country’s regime, geopolitics and economical situation, it determines its’ strategically important sectors. Most of the developing and highly industrialized countries have laws to regulate such sectors, Mongolia being no exception.
Laws and regulations constantly need to be updated and improved from time to time. Open door to foreign capital and investments does not mean that it will accept conducts that will threaten national security of a country. Following that example, Mongolia took a brave step to regulate strategic investments.
On 2nd of March, 2013, SGK approved to raise what was mentioned in Article 3.7 of the law from 100 billion to 1 trillion tugriks if foreign acquisition in strategic sector is more than 49% that needs a SGK approval. This decision eased the regulation on SMEs.
The cabinet has passed the procedure to implement the law to minimize the encumbrance. The approvals needed from the government will be given after the Minister of Economic Development consults with the relevant sector’s minister in 30 days, excluding the acquisitions from 1% to 34%. The procedure reflected more contrast distinction between state-owned and private acquisitions, and clarification on operations of strategic importance. | <urn:uuid:6c01920c-e8e5-4983-86b7-9ad33fb6e838> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.business-mongolia.com/mongolia/2013/03/14/regulating-the-strategic-investment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944698 | 315 | 1.585938 | 2 |
1st Robinson Rangers
|1st Robinson Rangers BattleMech Regiment|
|Unit Profile (as of 3062)|
|Parent Formation||Robinson Rangers|
The homeworld of the 1st Robinson Rangers is Robinson.
The Robinson Rangers arrived on Mallory's World to reinforce the AFFS forces there. Though they missed most of the fighting, they did fight the 9th Benjamin Regulars outside the city of Harrison's Ferry. The order to retreat off-world reached the Regulars but the Rangers pursued them all the way to their landing zones, and continued firing on the Combine unit until their DropShips left the world.
Fourth Succession War
During the Fourth Succession War the First Robinson Rangers moved to Edwards to counter expected Draconis Combine activity. With Takashi Kurita focusing on destroying Wolf's Dragoons, the Rangers didn't see any combat on that world.
War of 3039
During the War of 3039, the 1st Robinson Rangers, along with the Tenth Deneb Light Cavalry RCT and 93rd Mechanized Brigade, formed part of a taskforce led by Field Marshal James Sandoval to recapture the important BattleMech producing world of Marduk, lost to the Draconis Combine during the Fourth Succession War. The AFFS taskforce greatly outnumbered the local milita and battalion of Sixth Benjamin Regulars defending the world, capturing the planet with relative ease.
Digging in the face of an expected counter attack, AFFS forces outnumbered the remains of the Sixth and Eigth Galedon Regulars sent to retake the planet, inflicting heavy losses thanks to the old-school Kurita tactics practiced by both units. Trapping the Combine forces in the remains of a Succession Wars era fort, the Rangers only withdrew when First Prince Hanse Davion recalled the FedCom forces, but not before stripped machinery and materials from the manufacturers on-world.
The First Robinson Rangers were one of many Draconis March units deployed to the Lyran Commonwealth during the Clan Invasion. They took up station on Kooken's Pleasure Pit and fought Clan Jade Falcon and Clan Steel Viper forces.
During Operation Bulldog the First Robinson Rangers were part of the multinational force that attacked Clan Smoke Jaguar. Stationed on Wolcott along with several Capellan Confederation and Draconis Combine units, the Rangers protected the world from Smoke Jaguar attacks. Though there were some minor incidents between the Combine warriors and the Rangers, the Rangers were never cited as the cause of the disturbance. Shortly thereafter they traveled to Clan space with Victor Steiner-Davion and returned.
FedCom Civil War
During the FedCom Civil War the First Robinson Rangers were a key unit in Duke Sandoval's attack on the Draconis Combine. They attacked Proserpina along with the 8th Crucis Lancers and Robinson Battle Academy Training Battalion. There they destroyed the 9th Benjamin Regulars. Later the Rangers attacked Aisho and faced the 46th Dieron Regulars. The 46th and the Robinson Rangers inflicted heavy losses on each other, but eventually the 46th's command of the local terrain led Mai Fortuna to relocate to a new city on Aisho. What the Rangers didn't know was that the city was controlled by yakuza, and the Rangers soon found themselves dealing with a guerrilla war. The yakuza held no love for the Combine, but they did want to control the planet and used the conflict to their own advantage. Eventually the Rangers lost patience when they couldn't find the parties responsible, and began leveling whole buildings in the city. The final straw was a conflict at a munitions factory that was being guarded by the Robinson Battle Academy cadets attached to the Rangers. The yakuza lured elements of the Dieron Regulars to the factory and started a fight between the two forces. When the cadets and Regulars were fully committed, the yakuza blew up the munitions plant. The resulting explosion killed every cadet and most of the Regulars who were involved in the fight. The Rangers and Regulars fought even harder, believing that the other side was responsible for the bombing. When the 12th Dieron Regulars arrived to reinforce the survivors of the 46th, however, the Robinson Rangers had no choice but to withdraw from the planet. They went to Mallory's World.
After incorporating the survivors of the 2nd Robinson Rangers into the unit, the First Robinson Rangers liberated Robinson from the Word of Blake forces that held it. They then proceeded to defend the world throughout the rest of the Jihad. After that conflict ended, the First was downsized into a Light Combat Team that was assigned to defend McComb. By reassigning two of the First Robinson Ranger's battalions to form the 1st and 2nd Robinson Strikers, the AFFS High Command both rebuilt the defenses on Robinson and prevented the Rangers from going rogue.
The First Robinson Rangers were recalled to garrison Robinson in 3082. There they assumed command of the defense of the world, but were not authorized to train the newly built Robinson DMM LCT. Instead the 1st Avalon Hussars oversaw that training. The Rangers resent this but are smart enough to realize that they could find themselves transferred to another border world away from their namesake planet and so remain silent. At this time Duke Tancred Sandoval hasn't authorized any replacement 'Mechs, so the First Rangers are at half their nominal strength.
The First Robinson Rangers are skilled in open field battles.
1st Robinson Rangers (Veteran/Fanatical)
- CO: Field Marshal Aaron Sandoval
1st Robinson Rangers RCT (Veteran/Fanatical)
- CO: Hauptmann General Mai Fortuna
- CO: Major General Mai Fortuna
- Two Battalions with a mix of various class
- CO: Major Perdition Feff
1st Robinson Rangers (Veteran/Reliable)
- CO: Leftenant General Jerome Dorant
1st Robinson Rangers Air (Wing/Elite/Reliable)
- CO: Colonel Perdition Feff
The First Robinson Rangers had been reduced to thirty-five percent of their pre-Jihad strength, but most of this was due to the loss of two of the formation's battalions to other units. The First Rangers kept the aerospace assets of the 2nd Robinson Rangers, giving them a huge amount of air support.
1st Robinson Rangers (Regular/Reliable)
- CO: Major General Deann Feff
1st Robinson Rangers Air (Wing/Green/Reliable)
- CO: Colonel Ambrosius Sokal
- ↑ Historical Turning Points: Mallory's World, p. 19
- ↑ NAIS The Fourth Succession War Military Atlas Volume 1, p. 11
- ↑ Historical: War of 3039, pp. 42-44.
- ↑ Historical: War of 3039, pp. 91-92.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 Field Manual: Federated Suns, p. 101, "1st Robinson Rangers Unit Profile"
- ↑ The Dragon Roars, p. 11
- ↑ Field Manual: Update, p. 106
- ↑ FedCom Civil War (sourcebook), p. 90
- ↑ FedCom Civil War (sourcebook), pp. 106-107
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Field Report: AFFS, p. 14
- ↑ Field Manual: 3085, p. 62
- ↑ Historical Turning Points: Mallory's World, p. 8
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 House Davion (The Federated Suns), p. 136 (pdf version), "Robinson PDZ"
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 20 Year Update, p. 19, "AFFC Deployment Table - 3050"
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Objective Raids, p. 23, "AFFC Deployment Table - 3054"
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Field Manual: Update, p. 140, "AFFS Deployment Table - 3067"
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Field Manual: 3085, p. 71, "AFFS Deployment Table - 3085"
- ↑ Historical: War of 3039, p. 136
- 20 Year Update
- FedCom Civil War (sourcebook)
- Field Manual: 3085
- Field Manual: Federated Suns
- Field Manual: Updates
- Field Report: AFFS
- Historical: War of 3039
- Historical Turning Points: Mallory's World
- House Davion (The Federated Suns)
- NAIS The Fourth Succession War Military Atlas Volume 1
- Objective Raids | <urn:uuid:224b2398-3ce7-4fd1-96ea-7342f9d5c5e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sarna.net/wiki/index.php?title=1st_Robinson_Rangers&oldid=258610 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921794 | 1,826 | 1.796875 | 2 |
''Majestic Fjords & Arctic Svalbard'' Voyage 7112 Day 15
Day 15 - June 22, 2011 - 14 of July Glacier and Ny Ålesund, Svalbard
By Kara Weller, Biologist
Co-ordinates: 79° 03’ N 11° 48’ E
Air Temperature: 8° C
Pressure: 1015 hPa
Wind: 5 km / h
Last night was the shortest night of the year and the summer solstice did not let anyone down in terms of showing off the midnight sun. At midnight and at 1 am and 2 am and 3 am and 4 am and all through the night the sun shone brightly, and sparkling gold light reflecting off the water illuminated the beautiful landscapes of Svalbard as we made our way south towards our first destination of 14th of July Glacier. This glacier, inside Krossfjord, was named in honor of the French National Day on the occasion of the Prince of Monaco’s expeditions.
With the sun shining and the seas flat and still as a mirror we headed to shore after breakfast to enjoy this magnificent landscape. The landing site was on a beach in front of a cliff wall that rose vertically in front of us. In one direction was a wonderful bird cliff covered in nesting black-legged kittiwakes and thick-billed murres, where also little auks could be seen from time to time. Flowers bloomed in the tundra at the base of these cliffs and the tiny and delicate purple-saxifrage, moss campion and whitlow grass among others could be seen. These small and seemingly fragile plants are actually incredibly tough to be able to survive and thrive in such northerly latitudes and harsh climates as these.
In the other direction from the bird cliffs lay the beautiful 14th of July glacier and an at-times muddy track leading along the beach, over the rubble and boulders and onto the glacier itself. The opportunity to walk on a glacier and gain a view onto the surrounding bay was irresistible to many, and in the sweltering heat and sunshine with parkas being scattered and dropped by the wayside, we made our way to the top and stared into the deep crevasses and at the ice serracs ready to drop off and fall into the sea. For those who sat and watched hoping for a calving, no such events occurred, but the views of the glacier front were impressive regardless.
During lunch the ship repositioned a short distance south into Kongsfjord or King’s Bay and the small town of Ny-Ålesund. This small community had started as a coal-mining town in 1916 and continued into the 1960s after which the mining activities stopped. After this time it became a science community and researchers from all over the world use the facilities as a base for their scientific investigations. With a small shop, post office and museum and the freedom to walk along the roadways that led through town, it made a lovely afternoon stop. Some people walked over to the dog kennels to admire the beautiful dogs and others went out to the aerial tower on the edge of town that helped launch the Nobile, Amundsen and Ellesworth expedition that first successfully flew a dirigible airship to the North Pole in 1926. Ny-Ålesund was the starting point for several North Pole expeditions including a second expedition by the Italian Umberto Nobile in 1928, which, although successful in reaching the North Pole, crashed on the ice on its way back. This then caused an enormous international rescue operation that resulted in the death of Amundsen and his pilot when they went searching for Nobile over the arctic ice.
All too soon our last day in Svalbard had come to an end and we returned to the ship. But the sunshine continued to shine and we could continue to watch and admire the scenery throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening. Before dinner, our onboard photographer Kristine invited us all to The Theatre for the presentation of her DVD. It was an excellent piece of work that brought back memories of the past two weeks.
Steadily we made our way south towards Longyearbyen for tomorrow’s disembarkation.
PREVIOUS | NEXT | <urn:uuid:1cff72f8-998f-42dc-9c01-6162675b34c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.silversea.com/expeditions/voyage-journals/?voyagejournal=7112&day=15 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963523 | 880 | 2.171875 | 2 |
A growing number of minimalists are trying to cut down on physical commodities and replace them with digital counterparts. So is it possible to live out of a hard drive? And in future could less definitely be more?
Tagged with “technology” (2)
Can you predict future crimes? Or how the entire planet may change? New advances in computer modelling and predictive analystics can forecast all manner of things, but will technology allow us to accurately predict the future! | <urn:uuid:ee35ed03-be6d-4cec-b8ea-5cd17edb707d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://huffduffer.com/lukemenzel/tags/technology | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933205 | 96 | 1.53125 | 2 |
In a recent blog, (If you’re 50 or older, get the shingles vaccine) I told you the good news that the shingles (herpes zoster) vaccine is now available to those 50 and older. In addition, the pneumonia vaccine (pneumoccal vaccine) is now also indicated for many adults younger than 65 (i.e., smokers and those with diabetes, asthma, COPD, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and a number of high-risk factors). But, can these immunizations be given together?
Archives for posts tagged ‘pneumococcal vaccine’
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Monday, 19 October 2009
When children and adults in my practice receive a vaccine, I recommend ibuprofen or acetaminophen to reduce discomfort, inflammation, or low-grade fever. Now comes a study that will change my practice.
Monday, 14 September 2009
This is the second entry in a series from my book God’s Design for the Highly Healthy Child.
Probably the best recent example of the positive impact of vaccines is the Hib vaccine, which prevents meningitis, ear infections, and other serious infections caused by the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib).
When the current Hib vaccine was introduced to this country in 1990, Hib was the most common cause of bacterial meningitis.
For decades, Hib had caused approximately 15,000 cases of meningitis and 400 to 500 deaths every year. After the current Hib vaccine was introduced, the incidence of Hib meningitis declined to fewer than fifty cases per year—typical of all widely used vaccines.
Sunday, 23 August 2009
In my newest book, 10 Essentials of Happy, Healthy People, I teach people how to utilize these ten essentials that are necessary to live a happy and highly healthy life. Under The Essential of Self-Care, I’ve developed a list of what I call “The 10 Commandments of Preventive Medicine.” Here’s the first of what will be a ten-part series.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Infants and children get a lot of shots (vaccinations) to prevent against many different potentially fatal diseases. For this reason, parents or caregivers sometimes ask us as healthcare professionals to space apart, separate, or even not give some vaccines. Parents are worried that their child cannot handle so many shots at the same time. This is one of many concerns that parents may have about vaccinations. This blog entry provides you and your friends the facts about vaccines, to help you make an informed and wise decision about what’s best for your child. Please share this information with as many parents as you can. | <urn:uuid:70c710bf-fc78-478d-b1a9-0483ffabfdae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drwalt.com/blog/tag/pneumococcal-vaccine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93997 | 561 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Love and Marriage
“Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage . . .” or so the song says. Falling in love and marrying, the experiences that are the themes of countless songs, poems, novels, films and soap operas, never came within the grasp of the lesbian and gay community in the U.S.–that is, until Massachusetts made it possible. Of course couples fell in love and committed to each other but marrying–that step of standing before the community and solemnizing a bond signifying responsibility, respect, and privilege–that the lesbian and gay community could experience only vicariously. No action people take in their lives symbolizes more than committing to another person, but that rite of passage, building security for couples, stabilizing communities, and affirming families, is legally denied to the vast majority of lesbians and gay men.
Denying people in love the right to marry has a long history as a way to demean and denigrate. Those who enslaved African Americans in this country made sure that they “got religion” but still prevented them from marriage–religious or civil. Nazis tried to assure that the Aryan race would not be tainted by intermarriage with Jews. Interracial marriages remained illegal in most of the U.S. until 1967.
In this history of shame, however, Massachusetts has remained a beacon of hope. In 1843 the Massachusetts legislature repealed a statute banning interracial marriages. One hundred sixty years later on November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts SJC ruled that same-sex marriage was legal. In 2005, the Massachusetts legislature, recognizing the importance of legal protections for couples and families, overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to the state constitution that would have banned same-sex couples from marrying. In official testimony, legislators shared how touched they were by the love in lesbian and gay families. There always was love and now there is marriage–in Massachusetts. Cambridge led the way.
Free to Marry–At Last–May 17, 2004
Susan Shepherd and Marcia Hams, a couple for twenty-seven years, proved to the world that wanting to have the first legal same-sex marriage license in the country meant that you’d do the extraordinary. Cambridge, a city well-known for its progressive politics, would be the first municipality to open up for business at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, May 17. Susan secured first place in line at Cambridge City Hall, and on Saturday, May 15, the longtime Cambridge residents tucked into sleeping bags under their big tarp close to the front door. The couple, along with their 24-year-old son, Peter, is wild about sports, and so this made sense to Marcia: “If people can do this for Red Sox tickets, we certainly can do this for our lives.”
On Sunday, more couples, arrived to get in line. A family festival took shape on the sloping lawn of City Hall. Dogs and kids cavorted. Frisbees flew. Hand-stands and somersaults wowed the gathering crowds. Kids and adults played catch. Couples held hands and shared their wedding plans. Every once in a while someone would pinch themselves wondering if the bliss would last, if they’d really get marriage licenses, if there would really be a wedding for them.
At 10:30 p.m. on Sunday night, when Mayor Michael Sullivan invited couples into City Hall for music, speeches, and a champagne and cake reception, the crowd of supporters outside had swelled; by midnight, the media estimated the crowd had reached ten thousand. TV crews lit up the scene. The excitement built. Kids waved glow sticks. Everyone sensed history in the making. Inside the Boston Women’s Rainbow Chorus belted out “Going to the Chapel” and the Cambridge Chorus wowed the couples with the Beatles’ hit “Can’t Buy Me Love.” When Mayor Sullivan said, “It is a day to celebrate the immense commitment that couples make to each other. . . . It is a day to recognize the commitment . . . of oneself to something greater than oneself,” the couples cheered him on appreciatively.
The countdown to the first second of May 17 began inside and outside the building, and the city block rocked with cheers at 12:01 a.m. Within the hour, the first couples emerged, waving their completed white application cards to the wild applause of thousands. Reporters and TV crews pressed in. Well-wishers handed the couples roses, threw confetti and rice, and kept up spirited rounds of “Going to the Chapel,” “God Bless America,” and “America the Beautiful.”
Shepherd, clutching the first fully legal US marriage license application for a gay couple told a reporter, “This is like winning the World Series and the Stanley Cup on the same day. I’m trying not to lose it. We just really feel awesome. It’s awesome.” Her partner Hams, thinking of their son, Peter, an NCAA hockey star, looked into a TV camera and said, “There’s a kid somewhere that’s watching this. It’s going to change his whole life.”
While Shepherd and Hams had planned to be at Cambridge City Hall, Ralph Hodgdon and Paul McMahon, who had been together for almost 49 years, did not have marriage at the top of their agenda. That all changed, though, on Sunday, May 16, just after 11 p.m. As they watched the eleven o’clock news, they saw the huge crowds and exuberant party building at Cambridge City Hall. That was it. They rushed out and took the subway to the festivities just to be supportive. Once at City Hall, they got swept up in the spirit. McMahon recalls, “We got there and the excitement was so wonderful, it was so positive and people were so supportive, the next thing you know we’re in line.”
When they emerged at 5:30 in the morning with their completed application, a crew from Good Morning America pounced on them. McMahon and Hodgdon became two of the new faces of commitment and love–and soon marriage. On May 29, 2004, looking very handsome in their tuxedoes, they celebrated their forty-ninth anniversary by getting married by a justice of the peace in the Boston Public Garden.
By the close of business on May 17, Cambridge topped the state in marriage applications, taking in 268 and, then issuing licenses to couples who obtained court waivers on the usual three-day waiting period. Few failed to notice the incredible generosity of city workers, ranging from the superintendent of schools to the chief public health officer to the city clerk’s staff who volunteered to stay up all night ushering in this historic era of marriage equality.
Cambridge was also the site of the first marriage when, shortly after 9 a.m., city clerk Margaret Drury married a couple that had been together for eighteen years. Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish promised each other “my friendship, my support, my love.” Media from around the world captured the moment. The two women, who up until then had led largely private lives, found themselves coming out to an international audience as a married couple. McCloskey, lost for words, choked out, “I’m so happy right now. This is a dream come true. To stand in front of all these people makes us nervous but proud.” Kadish agreed, “I’m glowing from the inside. Happy is an understatement.”
All the Plaintiffs Marry–Media Madness
Across the river, couples, reporters, satellite trucks and well-wishers began gathering on Boston’s City Hall Plaza at 3 a.m. on May 17. The Today show, CNN, and the BBC set up shop. One couple that had never been interviewed before seemed overwhelmed in talking with “a newspaper from Spain, a television station from Japan, People magazine, NBC, NPR, Channel 7″–the world watched. Signs around the plaza declared, MARRIAGE IS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT.
Mayor Thomas Menino rolled out the red carpet and attended to every detail to make May 17 a flawless and memorable day. The first licenses were reserved for three of the Goodridge plaintiff couples who had come to this same building three years before and been denied the licenses that they now had won–for everyone. Menino and Bonauto looked on approvingly as each of the plaintiffs filed a notice. The three couples then went to court, obtained waivers, came back to City Hall to cheering crowds, got their marriage licenses and finally relaxed for a moment at a reception, compliments of the city. Before the day was over, all of the plaintiff couples would marry. | <urn:uuid:9ef9c852-fbd4-4ebb-8185-69cb55c70787> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://courtingequality.com/about-the-book/book-excerpt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967303 | 1,851 | 2.578125 | 3 |
For Release Upon Receipt - July 18, 2007
Contact: Gina M. Digravio, 617-638-8491, email@example.com
VITAMIN D DEFICIENCY: COMMON AND PROBLEMATIC, YET PREVENTABLE
(Boston) - In a review article to appear in the July 19th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Michael Holick, an internationally recognized expert in vitamin D, provides an overview of his pioneering work that expounds on the important role vitamin D plays in a wide variety of chronic health conditions, as well as suggesting strategies for the prevention and treatment of vitamin D deficiency.
Humans attain vitamin D from exposure to sunlight, diet and supplements. Vitamin D deficiency is common in children and adults. In utero and childhood, vitamin D deficiency may cause growth retardation, skeletal deformities and increase risk of hip fractures later in life. In adults, vitamin D deficiency may precipitate or exacerbate osteopenia, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, fractures, common cancers, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases and cardiovascular diseases.
According to Holick, a professor of medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and director of the General Clinical Research Center at Boston University School of Medicine and Director of the Bone Healthcare Clinic at Boston Medical Center, it has been estimated that 1 billion people world-wide are vitamin D deficient or insufficient.
Without vitamin D only about 10-15 percent of dietary calcium and about 60 percent of phosphorus is absorbed by the body. This is directly related to bone mineral density which is responsible for osteoporosis and fractures, as well as muscle strength and falls in adults. In utero and childhood, calcium and vitamin D deficiency prevents the maximum deposition of calcium in the skeleton.
Studies have shown people living at higher latitudes (where the angle of the sun’s rays are unable to sufficiently produce adequate amounts of vitamin D in the skin) are more likely to develop and die of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, colon, pancreatic, prostate, ovarian, breast and other cancers. According to Holick, both prospective and retrospective epidemiologic studies have also shown an association between low levels of vitamin D and an increased risk for Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
Holick believes the current recommended Adequate Intakes for vitamin D need to be increased to 800 – 1000 IU vitaminD3/d. “However, one can not obtain these amounts from most dietary sources unless one is eating oily fish frequently,” says Holick. “Thus, sensible sun exposure (or UVB irradiation) and/or supplements are required to satisfy the body’s vitamin D requirement,” he adds.
Lastly Holick adds, “The goal of this paper is to make physicians aware of the medical problems associated with vitamin D deficiency. Physicians will then be able to impart this knowledge to their patients so they too will know how to recognize, treat and most importantly, maintain adequate levels of this important vitamin.”
— 30 — | <urn:uuid:f0ab9a02-b602-4956-a706-57a9f2d493f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/display.php?id=1369 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917368 | 648 | 2.921875 | 3 |
1. This calumny, then, of these men, having been quashed, it is clearly proved that neither the prophets nor the apostles did ever name another God, or call [him] Lord, except the true and only God. Much more [would this be the case with regard to] the Lord Himself, who did also direct us to
render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's; Matthew 22:21 naming indeed Cæsar as Cæsar, but confessing God as God. In like manner also, that [text] which says,
You cannot serve two masters, Matthew 6:24 He does Himself interpret, saying,
You cannot serve God and mammon; acknowledging God indeed as God, but mentioning mammon, a thing having also an existence. He does not call mammon Lord when He says,
You cannot serve two masters; but He teaches His disciples who serve God, not to be subject to mammon, nor to be ruled by it. For He says, John 8:34 Inasmuch, then, as He terms those
the slaves of sin who serve sin, but does not certainly call sin itself God, thus also He terms those who serve mammon
the slaves of mammon, not calling mammon God. For mammon is, according to the Jewish language, which the Samaritans do also use, a covetous man, and one who wishes to have more than he ought to have. But according to the Hebrew, it is by the addition of a syllable (adjunctive) called Mamuel, and signifies gulosum, that is, one whose gullet is insatiable. Therefore, according to both these things which are indicated, we cannot serve God and mammon.
2. But also, when He spoke of the devil as strong, not absolutely so, but as in comparison with us, the Lord showed Himself under every aspect and truly to be the strong man, saying that one can in no other way
spoil the goods of a strong man, if he do not first bind the strong man himself, and then he will spoil his house. Matthew 12:29 Now we were the vessels and the house of this [strong man] when we were in a state of apostasy; for he put us to whatever use he pleased, and the unclean spirit dwelt within us. For he was not strong, as opposed to Him who bound him, and spoiled his house; but as against those persons who were his tools, inasmuch as he caused their thought to wander away from God: these did the Lord snatch from his grasp. As also Jeremiah declares,
The Lord has redeemed Jacob, and has snatched him from the hand of him that was stronger than he. Jeremiah 31:11 If, then, he had not pointed out Him who binds and spoils his goods, but had merely spoken of him as being strong, the strong man should have been unconquered. But he also subjoined Him who obtains and retains possession; for he holds who binds, but he is held who is bound. And this he did without any comparison, so that, apostate slave as he was, he might not be compared to the Lord: for not he alone, but not one of created and subject things, shall ever be compared to the Word of God, by whom all things were made, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.
3. For that all things, whether Angels, or Archangels, or Thrones, or Dominions, were both established and created by Him who is God over all, through His Word, John has thus pointed out. For when he had spoken of the Word of God as having been in the Father, he added,
All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made. John 1:3 David also, when he had enumerated [His] praises, subjoins by name all things whatsoever I have mentioned, both the heavens and all the powers therein:
For He commanded, and they were created; He spoke, and they were made. Whom, therefore, did He command? The Word, no doubt,
by whom, he says,
the heavens were established, and all their power by the breath of His mouth. But that He did Himself make all things freely, and as He pleased, again David says,
But our God is in the heavens above, and in the earth; He has made all things whatsoever He pleased. But the things established are distinct from Him who has established them, and what have been made from Him who has made them. For He is Himself uncreated, both without beginning and end, and lacking nothing. He is Himself sufficient for Himself; and still further, He grants to all others this very thing, existence; but the things which have been made by Him have received a beginning. But whatever things had a beginning, and are liable to dissolution, and are subject to and stand in need of Him who made them, must necessarily in all respects have a different term [applied to them], even by those who have but a moderate capacity for discerning such things; so that He indeed who made all things can alone, together with His Word, properly be termed God and Lord: but the things which have been made cannot have this term applied to them, neither should they justly assume that appellation which belongs to the Creator.
Source. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103308.htm>.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is feedback732 at newadvent.org. (To help fight spam, this address might change occasionally.) Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads. | <urn:uuid:2a315dba-2e97-4d23-ad80-f8869a26b016> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newadvent.org/fathers/0103308.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985416 | 1,287 | 1.859375 | 2 |
The grass courts of the All England Lawn Club almost unrecognisble during London Olympics
- The Daily Telegraph
- August 07, 2012
ANDY Murray's gold medal triumph was achieved at an almost unrecognisable Wimbledon, and one the Brits loved, writes Ben English.
CENTRE court’s stadium was awash with union jacks, chants of "Andy! Andy! Andy!" reverberating across the venerable arena.
Outside, baby strollers jostled with Cornish pasties and soldiers in camouflage uniform.
On Henman Hill a flash mob materialised: 75 dancers in pink shuffling to Snoop Dog.
Welcome to the grass courts of the All England Lawn Club – on loan to the London Olympics.
It’s Wimbledon, but not as we know it … and not as it is likely to be again in our lifetimes.
This most English of institutions, the very definition of gentility, was turned upside down in the name of London 2012.
And didn't the British love it.
It helped to have the first Briton to win a final at the venue for 74 years. But locals had embraced this very different form of Wimbledon long before Andy Murray swept aside Roger Federer to claim the singles gold medal.
There has hardly been a quibble that, for the first time, the hallowed grounds at SW19 had been handed over to London’s Games organisers for the Olympic tennis tournament.
It meant that, horror of horrors, players were emblazoned in coloured clothing and that music boomed out of the speakers during breaks.
Yes, you could still get strawberries and cream and Pimms No.1.
But you’d be quaffing them while listening to Depeche Mode in between games.
In short, Wimbledon’s straight jacket of etiquette was torn off.
The most outrageous it had been until now was the famous Living Doll sing-a-long with Cliff Richard during a rain break.
Now Wimbledon was taking on the character of other Games arenas, transformed into a grasscourt coliseum for hapless modern-day versions of Christians to be fed to the British lions.
The wall of noise that swept Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and the cyclists to victory had rolled south of London to centre court.
On Sunday, it was Federer’s turn.
The world No.1 likes traditions. His main one at Wimbledon is to win with imperious ease.
On finals day he is traditionally greeted like a favourite son.
But, like just about everything else on Sunday, this was different.
Federer wasn’t exactly booed onto centre court, but he didn’t get the cheer he was used to either. Then Murray arrived, to the sort of deafening noise reserved for fighter jets.
It didn’t get any quieter, either.
Each Murray winner sparked a thunderclap cheer. When he took the first set, the explosion of noise would have blown the roof off, had it been on.
Since he arrived on the tennis scene, Murray has had an up and down relationship with the Wimbledon crowd.
It was said that with his sometimes prickly temperament and failure to convert his promise into titles, they couldn’t quite come to love him.
As he began to dominate Federer, one wag yelled out: "We feel very strongly about you now, Andy."
But that was understating it. There was love in the air, for the man in the Team GB corner.
By the time he served out for the match, Murray had won a nation for life, even if he went on to lose the gold medal mixed doubles match.
As for Wimbledon itself, its transformation into a rock palace achieved more than an amazing atmosphere.
It’s magic and the chance of a gold medal lured the very best players to the tournament.
As a result, for the first time since its reintroduction to the Games program in 1988, tennis didn't seem out of place at London 2012.
It took Wimbledon to make it a true Olympic sport.
Follow the action. Like Fox Sports. | <urn:uuid:0dffba1f-66fc-4577-968d-633ef33e0152> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxsports.com.au/olympic-games/the-grass-courts-of-the-all-england-lawn-club-almost-unrecognisble-during-london-olympics/story-fn5k3iok-1226444383574 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967027 | 867 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Bringing the re-enactment of the 1813 Battle of Ogdensburgh to the streets of the city as a pretty neat idea after all.
And estimated 250 U.S. and Canadian War of 1812 re-enactors had a rapt audience of hundreds Saturday as they - American and British troops - marched and battled their way to Library Park via Franklin, Ford, State, Caroline and Washington streets.
Just like they did on Feb. 22, 1813.
It was beautiful, said Fort La Presentation Association President Barbara J. OKeefe. The re-enactors loved it on Saturday.
So, by the way, did the children who lined the battle route.
The looks on the kids faces when the soldiers marched down Ford Street. Mrs. OKeefe said.
The 200th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Ogdensburgh was noted and celebrated on the sides of the St. Lawrence River. In Prescott, Ontario, there were fireworks from Prescott, military drills, heritage interpreters and demonstration at Fort Wellington, Prescott.
In Ogdensburg, the activities included a 19th century medical display at Dobisky Center, flag-raising ceremony for veterans and current soldiers, and the showcase annual battle at Lighthouse Point on Sunday. | <urn:uuid:cb40329c-4867-4626-9d04-58a9d22018bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20130226/OGD01/702269790/1004 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955344 | 263 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Secondary Site Navigation
Rockfish Deepwater Release
Rockfish are most likely to survive when released quickly at depth by anglers using the following steps.
• Make sure your release device is ready — rockfish are most likely to survive when time at the surface is minimized. With practice, rockfish can be released within two minutes of reaching the surface.
• Reel the fish up as quickly as possible. After unhooking it, hook the release device through soft tissue on the lower jaw. Make sure the hook does not have a barb. Release the anti-reverse on the reel so line can spool out freely.
• Swing the fish slightly to one side and let go of the jig. Let line out as the weight pulls the fish back to the bottom. When the jig hits bottom, lock the reel and give a hard tug to release the fish.
Note: This is a tool that ADF&G recommends sport fisherman use, not commercial fisherman.
Subscribe to Fish and Wildlife News to receive a monthly notice about the new issue and the articles. | <urn:uuid:65a9fd27-cfef-424d-8083-ea7fa145a7ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=531 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92282 | 228 | 2 | 2 |
By Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN
(CNN) – Think back to the age before GoldieBlox, before gender-neutral Easy-Bake ovens, before “My Princess Boy" or “It Gets Better.” Way before apps for infants, TV networks for toddlers or even "Schoolhouse Rock" on Saturday mornings.
That’d bring you to the early 1970s, when an album in a bright pink sleeve was passed among teachers, parents, librarians and kids. It was called “Free to Be … You and Me,” and record players around the country spun songs such as “William’s Doll,” “Parents are People” and “It’s All Right to Cry.”
When it debuted in 1972, there was nothing else like it – at least, nothing so popular. It was feminist and multicultural; an early childhood education in empathy; multimedia before anybody used the word. There was the gold record album, a best-selling book and in 1974, an Emmy- and Peabody-winning TV special that starred its creator, Marlo Thomas, “and friends” – literally, her formidable list of famous pals, including Harry Belafonte, Alan Alda, Diana Ross, Roberta Flack, Carl Reiner, Rosey Grier and young Michael Jackson.
More than 40 years later, there's nostalgia in its opening chords and a legacy that still courses through classrooms.
“Children memorized every lyric and asked their parents and teacher to play the record over and over again,” Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a Ms. magazine co-founder, wrote in the 2012 book "When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made."
“It challenged teachers to face up to their entrenched, often unacknowledged, gender biases and to cast a more critical eye on the books they were assigning, whom they called on most often in class, whom they allowed to dominate the block corner or the dress-up box.”
By Laurel Bongiorno, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Laurel Bongiorno is director of the master’s degree program in early childhood education at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. She is working on a book on the value of play in early childhood development.
(CNN) - Parents want to buy the best toys for their children - the educational toys that will make them grow faster, read earlier and solve math problems faster.
Toy manufacturers often market high-priced toys that play by themselves (no child needed!), are connected to movies and television shows (no imagination needed!) or have just one purpose in mind. Once played with, they go in the closet.
On this last weekend before the Christmas gift-giving commences, parents should go back to basics when toy shopping for their young children from birth to age 8. Children are complex people who need holistic opportunities for development, learning, health and happiness.
Blocks, dramatic play clothes, art supplies, messy play opportunities, books and games are the stuff they need for the holidays. And, parents don’t have to break the bank to afford them. The local dollar stores and thrift stores have many of these materials.
Consider a 4-year-old building a highway with the blocks. She sorts, sequences, maps, plans, predicts, estimates, counts and compares. The 7-year-old might create bridges and ramps, using basic physics concepts. Blocks are open-ended materials that the children don’t tire of and retire to the closet when they are done. Parents can add to block-building fun by supplying play props such as cars, dinosaurs, animals and many other options. Math isn’t the only benefit derived from blocks; children use their small motor skills, build their vocabulary, play cooperatively with others and gain self-control and patience. | <urn:uuid:7bffab0b-01ee-4133-ae8e-f9b9395c24a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/category/educational-toys/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959281 | 822 | 2.25 | 2 |
An Indian took 22 years to break a mountain to make a short cut path from his village getting exposed to the world easily. This man had lot of determination to make it happen. He sold his goats and got hammer and chisel and got going with breaking the mountain despite people calling him mad and his family upset with his intention. He finally makes it and the entire village is happy that there is a easier path to the outside world. Read the rest of the story “Man who moved a mountain” that got published couple of days back in the local newspaper.
While setting objectives and goals requires some thinking and listening to one’s heart, it requires one to work with the determination to achieve it. Everybody’s got 24 hrs in a day but what makes successful people is the ability to keep that vision in mind and be determined to reach there and surpass the difficulties that come by. Without determination there will not be a hold on what needs to be achieved and it could soon be lost in the mind. Time will wait for none to remind and wait for someone to act upon. Lost time can never be recovered. One can earn experience by working in projects. That is what millions of people do. But what is it that differentiates one from that crowd? The answer depends on the interests, goals and objectives and thinking out of the box to do something significant. It requires determination and dedication and continuous effort to reach those goals and objectives.
Note:-This post is part of the Foundation Stone series. | <urn:uuid:54f5f41a-1f1e-4501-85a5-29156dd683e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techmasala.com/2007/01/09/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977853 | 306 | 2.625 | 3 |
Agilita™ is a new humanistic sanserif typeface designed by Jürgen Weltin. The mulitilingual OpenType font family has rather classical proportions, to give it more distinct word shapes through clear descenders and ascenders. This new face has a dynamic, yet strong and very functional appearance with a fine but clear emphasis on the horizontals. The classical approach of Agilita makes it a versatile typeface for largescale textsetting but it can also be used in complex information design projects, and orientation systems, for example.
Agilita consists of 33 variants (10 different weights and six additional versions of Condensed variants with the corresponding italics and the weight Dot Thin).
The first drawings from Jürgen Weltin to be used for digitizing Agilita™ began early in 2000.
A Typeface Family System
Agilita is a type family system with a wide range of weights covering the use for display and headline setting as well as for largescale textsetting. Corresponding condensed weights are suitable where horizontal space is rare as in narrow columns and tables, for example.
Special Arrows and Signs
Agilita comes with special arrows and signs which can be used in dictionaries; like arrows for lemmata, signs for cross references, idioms or colloquial language.
The Agilita OpenType font family supports about 48 languages represented through the Latin alphabet.
The tabular figures in Light, Regular, Medium and Bold versions share the same widths and are compatible with their Italic counterparts. Compatability is also given between Hairline/Ultra Thin, Thin/Extra Light and Heavy/Black. In the Condensed versions all of the tabular figures take up the same space.
Two Sets of Arrows
There are two sets of arrows for the use in orientation systems available for all weights. | <urn:uuid:a92898ec-4c80-4b26-b95c-bed17992e150> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linotype.com/6988/agilita.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903299 | 382 | 2.296875 | 2 |
There ARE unicorns on this planet..
A unicorn is a mythical magical creature that probably has no basis in reality on our planet.. But our universe is so vast and diverse, chances are.. There ARE unicorns somewhere on at least one planet in the cosmos which actually have magical properties: if we can imagine it, chances are it exists somewhere – THAT's how diverse and rich our universe truly is..
What does this have to do with unicorns on our planet? Not much but.. Ah.. Please watch The Last Unicorn – a Wonderful animation about their fictional demise on our planet.. Then you can know where I'm 'coming from'.. Okay? ^^ My point is: I know at least three unicorns in my life; chances are, you know at least one unicorn in your life. How do we spot them? By definition: they're magical creatures with innocent hearts that change our lives simply by being in them. I'm absolutely Certain you know at least one unicorn (who appears to be a human but deep down.. they're fundamentally different from other human beings). Now exactly: perhaps not different to everyone but different for YOU.
If someone makes you feel special, if someone gives you good reasons to get out of bed, if someone gives you good reasons to live,.. they're a 'unicorn' in your life.. Plain and simple. You may be a unicorn to another person.. Chances are, you are! :) As I said to mom the other day: “We're nothing, we're dust, we're insignificant.. But.. At the same time, we're magical wonderful eminently lovable creatures!” :) This is the magic of our existence! :) The name for that magic is LOVE! :)
When somebody opens their heart to you, it is the most beautiful and precious gift they can ever give to you.. They're saying implicitly: “I trust you NOT to break my heart..” As my brother and sister, I ask you in confidence: “Please don't break their heart.” Can I ask any more? Can I ask any less?!
The 'bottom line' is that we live in a magical place full of magical creatures called human beings. As an 'outsider', I find your species absolutely Enchanting.. As a human being, I never want to leave my place in 'my' unicorns' hearts.. I belong to them.. forever. The highest honor we can ever 'do' anyone is to love and be loved by them.. We're 'magical' for the simple fact of our existence. We're doubly magical for our capacity to love. Am I the only one who sees this?!
Take a step back from your life, your ego, your selfish desires.. And think about those you truly care about.. Don't you simply want their happiness? Isn't that what love is?! Chances are, we're all loved by someone.. Chances are, we all love someone.. Is it really money that 'makes the world go round'? Or perhaps it's something more enduring? More meaningful? Starts with an “L”.. ;)
May the Prime Goddess bless you and your love(s).. May She empower you to Take Care of your loved ones and their hearts.. For.. once we know a unicorn, it's our obligation to protect their heart from harm.. There's no more precious thing in your life than a unicorn.. Protect and cherish yours.
I dedicate and promise my heart and life (or lives) to 'mine', sam | <urn:uuid:0387572f-8c3f-4279-89a6-4043a5509e7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nowpublic.com/strange/there-are-unicorns-planet | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948656 | 725 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Skip to main content
More Search Options
A member of our team will call you back within one business day.
Diabetes makes it harder for the body to heal. Even minor foot problems can develop into serious infections. If not treated, infections can lead to amputation. They can even become life-threatening. Prompt treatment by your doctor is needed to protect your foot and restore your health.
In some cases, infections can spread through the feet and up the leg. To treat a severe infection, you may be hospitalized and given intravenous (IV) antibiotics. You may also be referred to healthcare providers who specialize in treating infections. If the infection is a serious risk to your health, surgery may be recommended.
The goal of surgery is to remove the infection and protect your foot or leg. Some surgeries remove a small amount of dead tissue from the infected area. In some cases, toes or larger amounts of tissue may be removed. Surgery may be done in a hospital or wound care facility. The length of your stay depends on the surgery and how well you’re healing. During recovery, you will likely need to limit activity for a while. You may also have visits from a home healthcare nurse. Be sure to see your doctor for follow-up appointments.
Regular wound care after surgery helps keep your foot free of infection and aids healing.
Change your dressing every 6 hours.
You may need IV (intravenous) antibiotics to help control the infection. Other medications may be used to help your foot heal more quickly.
A home care nurse may shorten your hospital stay by helping with your dressings or IV antibiotics at home.
If needed, your doctor may refer you to a wound care facility. These are medical facilities that specialize in treating ulcers and infections that are hard to heal. While you’re there, you may work with several kinds of doctors. You may also be given antibiotics or other medications that help fight infection. Part of your treatment also includes learning to care for the wound at home.
You may be told to keep your foot elevated as much as possible. You may also be told to avoid putting weight on the foot. | <urn:uuid:3511c46e-7f1d-4f14-98b1-7c6f7fa5cb79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.einstein.edu/einsteinhealthtopic/?healthTopicId=194&healthTopicName=Mental+Health&articleId=82110&articleTypeId=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956332 | 441 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Like a Graphic Novel, 2011
silver art clay, Dimensions Variable
Silver art clay is made of silver particles reclaimed from X-rays and suspended in a binding medium that burns off during firing leaving a product that is 99.9% silver. These works function as brooches or medallions hung from ball chains. Each piece is unique and is a part of an ongoing narrative. These works evolved from works with found objects that, in combination, give each other new meaning. | <urn:uuid:8224440e-9c07-441f-9974-41dbcdee1f06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://culturehall.com/artwork.html?page=19134 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95872 | 97 | 1.523438 | 2 |
On this day in 1763, Major Henry Gladwin, British commander of Fort Detroit, foils Ottawa Chief Pontiac's attempt at a surprise attack. Romantic lore holds that Gladwin's Seneca mistress informed him of the western Indians' plans for an uprising.
When Pontiac arrived at the fort with his men, who were concealing weapons under their trading blankets, they discovered that Gladwin had assembled his men and prepared them for a defense of the fort. Knowing that, without the element of surprise, their efforts would not be successful, Pontiac withdrew and instead laid siege to the fort for the rest of the summer, while his allies successfully seized 10 of 13 British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions by June 20. The western Indians' efforts to unite all Native Americans in an attempt to free themselves of addictions to European trade goods and alcohol, guided by their spiritual leader, a Delaware named Neolin, seemed to be succeeding. However, the French failed to come to the Indians' aid in driving the British back to the Atlantic as hoped, dooming the rebellion.
British General Jeffrey Amherst, who first angered western Indians in 1760 by curtailing the tradition of gift exchange long practiced by both the French and English governments, unleashed one of the earliest uses of biological weaponry on the Indians in response to their uprising. He ordered Colonel Henry Bouquet of Fort Pitt to "Extirpate this Execrable Race," by distributing smallpox-infected blankets among them. The plan succeeded in breeding a deadly smallpox epidemic among the Indians in 1763-64.
The Indians' increased unity and success terrified western European settlers, already made nervous by the British king's Proclamation Line of 1763, which denied their right to settle beyond the Appalachians. Colonists' failure to find protection from the crown made them doubt the efficacy of their imperial governments. Meanwhile, officials in London believed backcountry settlers should share in the blame for the violence of the past 10 years and demanded their assistance in paying for the empire's military expenses on American soil. In an effort to collect on this debt from the Americans, the British parliament passed, in rapid succession, the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, the Tea Act of 1773 and the Coercive Acts of 1774. By April 1775, the cycle of taxation and protest had escalated to the point that blood was spilled between colonists and Redcoats on Lexington Green in Massachusetts; the American Revolution had begun. | <urn:uuid:d77bf8e7-464c-4123-abdd-f708ff075085> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pontiacs-plot-is-foiled | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96701 | 520 | 3.890625 | 4 |
MOBILE, Ala. -- If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the University of South Alabama Archives would be valued at a billion. It's a collection of about a million photographs and negatives that chronicle Mobile's past.
Archivist Carol Ellis said the archives have been used by both the History and Discovery Channels. Other recent clients include TV journalist Ted Koppel and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who produced the PBS World War II series.
And the archives continue to grow. Old photographs come from both professional photographers and the general public. The archives welcome pictures related to Mobile, the Eastern Shore or the University of South Alabama. They should be of historical interest, featuring events, locations, or well-known citizens. Ellis says she would especially welcome pictures from the 1960s and 1970s.
The archives are open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The facility is located on the ground floor of the USA Spring Hill Avenue Campus building at 1504 Spring Hill Ave.
(For the complete report and four mystery photographs, see Sunday's Mobile Press.) | <urn:uuid:92ea8f1d-79d0-42a2-965b-3fdcea4e01b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.al.com/living-press-register/2009/03/usa_archives_wants_your_help_w.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940057 | 224 | 1.742188 | 2 |
10 going green tips at work
Going green at work can be a great way to save costs, motivate staff and demonstrate your environmental credentials to your clients and prospective clients. In this article I discuss the top 10 going green tips for the workplace. (image attribution: digitalart)
1. Write an environmental policy
An environmental policy is a statement of intent that sets out your organisations commitment to best practice environmental performance. It also sets the tone for your company’s approach to environmental management. Good environmental policies have been thought out correctly, are relevant to your organisation, demonstrate senior management commitment and have a positive tone of voice.
If you are just getting started on your organisations environmental journey I suggest writing an environmental policy to help you formulate your approach. This article provides detailed guidance on how to write an environmental policy.
2. Measure your business carbon footprint
Measuring your company’s carbon footprint is a great way to be able to assess your impact, identify areas for improvement, prioritise actions and monitor performance over time. The environmental impact of an organisation can be very abstract. A carbon footprint helps in defining your impact and contextualising it against benchmarks. The process of measuring a carbon footprint can be a little complex. In this article I have set out the 5 key steps you must do if you want to measure your carbon footprint.
3. Start a green team
A green team is a group of keen individuals in an organisation that come together monthly, quarterly or annually to work on initiatives to improve their company’s environmental performance. Typically these individuals are passionate about environmental issues and become ambassadors for their company’s approach to environmental management. Starting a green team is a great way to identify key people to help with the going green effort as well as delegate responsibility to ensure things get done. If you would like detailed advice on how to set-up a green team then this article is for you.
4. Implement a comprehensive recycling scheme
A comprehensive recycling scheme means reducing waste wherever possible and recycling instead. Most businesses can recycle up to 90% of their waste by implementing a comprehensive recycling system. The trick is starting with the ‘low hanging fruit’ such as paper waste and card, and then incrementally move on to recycle other wastes such as glass, plastic, CDs, toners, IT equipment, old furniture etc. Here are my top 7 office recycling tips – which includes implementing a zero-to-landfill policy.
5. Print double-sided
It is amazing how much paper is wasted by companies that continue to print single-sided. Some companies could literally halve their paper use, and hence paper stationery cost, if they implement double-sided printing as a default setting on their printers / computers. To get more great green printing ideas review this article.
6. Buy green cleaning and office products
A quick way to reduce your environmental impact is to review your purchasing practices and substitute traditional cleaning and office products for more sustainable options. For example, you could choose to buy recycled paper instead of non-recycled paper. You could also use respected eco labels like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Energy Saving star and the Fair Trade symbol to distinguish sustainable products. Nowadays many of these products can be purchased at the same or better price than their traditional competitors. The trick is to do a little research on the credentials of the products before making a purchasing decision. Perhaps even phone the manufacturer to see whether they can provide more information on the green attributes of the product.
7. Invest in energy efficient lighting
Lighting usually accounts for approx. 20%-30% of an average companies carbon footprint. With such a significant impact on a company’s environmental performance it should be prioritised as an area for improvement. The best way to reduce your lighting energy use and therefore electricity costs is by investing in energy efficient lighting such as LEDs or compact fluorescent lights. This article talks about how to choose energy efficient lighting. Note: before investing in lighting technologies, you should explore the cheaper option of getting employees to turn off lights when rooms are not in use and delamp lights in areas which are over lit.
8. Make sure equipment powers down during out of office hours
Many organisations waste loads of electricity on equipment that is left on over evenings, weekends and holidays. There are two main ways to ensure equipment is turned over – the first is manual and the second is automatic. A manual approach means encouraging users to power off after work or instructing cleaners / security to turn off any computers left on over night. This usually helps in the short-term but things quickly return to how they were before the campaign if people are not continually reminded. The second approach involves using technology to ensure that equipment automatically powers off during long periods of non-use. Typically this technology is installed at a server level enabling an organisation to control the power of the entire IT infrastructure; however, there are solutions which use localised plug points to shutdown specific equipment.
9. Make sure heating and cooling controls are set correctly
Heating and cooling controls are often a contentious point in an organisation. Some people are always too cold whilst other are always too hot. The approach when trying to optimise heating and cooling is to 1. show people the actual temperature on a real time basis by having visible thermometers. Most people are over sensitive to temperature when they don’t actually know what the temperature is. 2. set the temperature of your heating and co0ling system between 20-22 degree Centigrade (68-71.5 Fahrenheit) and protect it like gold. The issue with heating controls is that dramatic changes make the system work harder and makes reaching a stabilised set temperature in the work environment difficult to achieve.
10. Raise awareness by having a green company away day
If you ever run away days in your business then a great way to get staff motivated and inspired to take action is to make the next theme of the away day have a green element. For example, you could organise an away day that involves volunteering at an environmental charity – great for team work building but also great for raising awareness. Think creatively and don’t be preachy about the topic. Try make the green theme subtle but have high impact.
I hope that these 10 going green tips at work have inspired you to take action and green your business. If you would like to follow a straightforward approach which will ensure you cover all of these tips and more then download the how to green your business guide. | <urn:uuid:ed62a520-efff-48f0-9add-5c3d097912cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sustainablebusinesstoolkit.com/10-going-green-tips-at-work/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936393 | 1,321 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Tehran, Iran • Iran is ready to show flexibility at nuclear talks to ease Western concerns over its contentious nuclear program, its foreign ministry spokesman said on Saturday, as tensions rise in the standoff between the Islamic Republic, Israel and the West.
The remarks by Ramin Mehmanparast, published by the official IRNA news agency, underscore Tehran’s push to resume talks with world powers as Western sanctions squeeze the economy tighter and the European Union weighs a boycott of Iranian natural gas.
"Iran is ready to show flexibility to remove concerns within a legal framework but such measures should be reciprocal," Mehmanparast was quoted as saying. "The other party needs to take measures to fully recognize Iran’s nuclear rights and Iran’s enrichment for peaceful purposes."
The five members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany and Iran, aim to resume high-level talks that were suspended in June. The countries want the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium to 20 percent purity because at that level the material can be quickly turned into fuel for nuclear weapons.
Iran has indicated it is ready to stop the higher enrichment if sanctions are lifted and its right to enrich is recognized. The U.S. and its allies accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, a charge Tehran denies.
Earlier, the country’s supreme leader said Iran would defeat its adversaries, who he said are using a combination of sanctions, military threats and clandestine operations in an attempt to make Tehran back down on its nuclear program.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s remarks follow a precipitous decline in the country’s currency linked to economic sanctions imposed by the West, as well as remarks by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta highlighting the possibility of a cyberwar between Iran and the United States.
"We should not neglect the enemy. The enemy enters through various ways. One day it’s talk of sanctions. Another day it’s talk of military aggression. And one day, it’s talk of soft war ... We have to be vigilant," state TV quoted Khamenei as saying during a speech in the northeast. "But they should rest assured that ... our enemies will fail in all their conspiracies and tricks."
Western powers are pursuing a two-pronged strategy that includes a mix of sanctions and diplomacy to try to force Tehran to halt uranium enrichment, a technology that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or materials for use in a warhead.
But the West has not ruled out the possibility of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, and Panetta made a pointed warning on Thursday that Washington will strike back against a cyberattack, underscoring the Obama administration’s growing concern that Iran could be the first country to unleash cyberterrorism on America.
Tehran for its part has announced the discovery of computer viruses at nuclear, industrial and government sites. It blames the West and Israel. Israel has said little to deflect suspicion that it tries to infect some Iranian systems.
Iranian leaders have been consistently defiant, announcing measures they say the Islamic Republic is taking to evade sanctions, defeat cyberattacks, and prepare to repulse or retaliate for a military strike.
"Many politicians ... in the U.S., Britain and other countries ... employed all their might and designs with the assumption they could bring the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation to its knees. They are gone and even their names are forgotten but the Iranian nation is present by the grace of God," Khamenei said.
Iranian leaders have also argued that the country can always find customers for its oil and that the West is hurting itself, more than Iran, by cutting itself off from Iranian crude exports. Khamenei said Wednesday that European countries are "foolish" to support sanctions against Tehran, telling them they are sacrificing themselves for the sake of the United States.
But they also acknowledge that sanctions are taking a bite.
Iran’s currency — already in steady decline for months — lost nearly 40 percent of its value earlier this month. It reached an all-time low of 35,500 to the dollar, down from 24,000 rials days earlier and close to 10,000 rials as recently as early 2011. It’s now fluctuating between 29,000 rials to 32,000 rials in the open market. The decline set off limited, one-day protests in Tehran’s market district.
The plummet of the rial was blamed on a combination of Iranian government mismanagement and the bite from tighter sanctions. Both measures have reduced the amount of foreign currency coming into the country.
Khamenei urged the nation to consume Iranian products and shun foreign goods to support domestic production.
"We should choose what we consume from among our own products. That some are always after foreign brands and names is wrong," he said. "Domestic consumption increases domestic production. When domestic production is increased, it will tackle unemployment and reduces inflation. These are all connected to each other."
Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:a9171227-ebc8-4b7c-ac23-00b59951843c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/55076104-68/iran-sanctions-iranian-nuclear.html.csp?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964476 | 1,043 | 1.5625 | 2 |
A Middle Eastern state has invaded a neighbouring territory with ground troops and airstrikes, retaliating against attacks by militants who are angry that their people live under what they claim to be persecution by that state.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. If the state involved is Israel, this is what the far-left, Palestinian solidarity movement reacts angrily to every time that state stirs to defend itself against terrorism by Hamas.
Those who keep watch over the Palestinian solidarity movement may be surprised to learn that a very similar scenario has been unfolding in the Middle East over the past week. They may not have noticed it because the so-called “peace” activists who align themselves with the Palestine solidarity movement seem to have not taken notice of it.
It’s a short description of what’s been taking place in Turkey and Iraq over the past week, as Turkish forces have been launching incursions into Iraq in response to attacks by Kurdish militants.
They’re attacking camps occupied by the Kurdistan Workers Party (also known as the PKK).
This has been happening periodically since at least 2007. As recently as August 2011, civilian casualties have been reported....More >> | <urn:uuid:e6d485c4-9381-4988-add8-7de18e920dbf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.propagandistmag.com/tags/kurdistan-workers-party | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97466 | 237 | 1.523438 | 2 |
You and your partner may be ready to make a baby (congrats!), but your body may not be quite there yet. That’s where vaccines come in. They’ll protect you against certain illnesses during pregnancy (sadly, though, there's still no progress on a morning-sickness vaccine), and keep your growing baby safe, too. So before you even think about getting pregnant, schedule an appointment with your ob-gyn or primary-care doctor to find out which vaccinations you need. A simple blood test will let your practitioner check your immunity to the following diseases:
Chicken Pox (varicella)
Did you escape chicken pox as a child (while all your friends walked around like human red-dot specials)? Having avoided the calamine-soaked misery of this childhood illness may have seemed like a lucky break at the time, but what it means now is that you might be missing important immunity from it. And even if you were vaccinated with the varicella vaccine when you were younger, you may be due for a booster, since immunity can wear off over time.
Having chicken pox as an adult is no fun at all and in fact can be quite serious. And if you’re pregnant, it’s not only uncomfortable (with all that extra acreage to scratch), it could also spell serious trouble for your growing baby-to-be. If blood work reveals that you’re not immune to chicken pox, the varicella vaccine will keep the pox at bay. You’ll need two doses, four to eight weeks apart. Then, if you can, hold off on conceiving until a month after your second dose (though don’t worry if you become pregnant before the recommended waiting time is up).
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR)
In addition to being very uncomfortable illnesses, measles, mumps, and rubella (aka, the German measles) can cause birth defects and other complications when you’re expecting. So you’ll want to make sure you’ve had this trio of vaccinations before pregnancy. Keep in mind that even if your vaccination records show that you got an MMR shot when you were younger, sometimes immunity can wear off, so your best bet is to get a blood test to check. If you’re not immune, get vaccinated, and then wait one month before trying to conceive.
Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis)
If you haven’t had a tetanus shot in the past ten years, you’re due for a booster. The vaccine will protect you from developing the illness if you’re exposed to the tetanus toxin through a puncture wound from a dirty nail, an unclean ear piercing, or even a splinter. Exposure to tetanus can lead to scary symptoms such as stiffness, lockjaw, and fever — and it can cause serious complications for an unborn baby.
For your booster shot pre-pregnancy, ask your doctor if it makes sense to get the Tdap vaccine instead of just the Td vaccine. The Tdap vaccine will immunize you against not only tetanus and diphtheria (a dangerous bacterial infection) but also pertussis (whooping cough) — a good bet since immunity to pertussis wears off after many years. And while pertussis isn’t usually serious for adults, it can be very dangerous for newborns.
If you’re at high risk for this viral infection that attacks the liver (say, you’re a health-care worker and you come into contact with people’s blood and bodily fluids, which is how hepatitis B is transmitted), then you’d be wise to make sure you’re up-to-date on this vaccine. Hepatitis B can be passed on to an unborn baby, and it can cause prematurity. The vaccine comes in a series of three shots, but you don’t need to finish all three doses before conceiving. You can continue with the series during pregnancy.
HPV (human papillomavirus)
If you’re younger than 26, ask your doctor if you should consider getting the HPV vaccine, which can help protect against genital warts and cervical cancer in young women. If you do decide to add this to your roster of vaccinations before pregnancy, keep in mind that it requires three doses, and experts advise that you not receive this vaccine while pregnant. If you don’t get a chance to complete the series of shots before conceiving, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off in the series after giving birth.
While you’re rolling up your sleeve for all these vaccines, have your partner ask his doc if he should roll up his sleeve, too, to protect him and your baby-to-be. And before you leave your doctor’s office, remember to double-check with your practitioner about when it will be safe for you and your partner to try, try again. Once you get the green light, your newly immunized bod will be better than ever and ready to get down to business! | <urn:uuid:0e68c0cd-8b37-431e-b8e9-8752a72108e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whattoexpect.com/preconception/vaccinations-before-pregnancy.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944889 | 1,088 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Never let it be said that space scientists aren't romantic. A mission to explore an asteroid that's named for a god of love arrived at the asteroid on Valentine's Day in 2000.
The mission was NEAR -- the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. Its destination was Eros, a peanut-shaped asteroid that's about 20 miles long.
Eros is one of a class of asteroids whose orbits come close to Earth's orbit around the Sun. Right now, Eros's orbit stays a few million miles outside Earth's. But over the next couple of million years, the gravity of Mars could push Eros close enough to the Sun to cross Earth's orbit. If that happens, the asteroid could one day hit Earth, wiping out life across the entire planet.
NEAR was supposed to enter orbit in early 1999. But a glitch sent it tumbling out of control and scuttled the attempt. The next chance came on Valentine's Day of 2000, and this time it worked perfectly.
The craft spent a year looping around Eros. It snapped thousands of pictures, and measured the asteroid's mass and composition. It found that a giant impact about a billion years ago rattled Eros enough to erase many of its older craters.
By February of 2001, NEAR was about out of fuel. So even though it wasn't designed as a lander, engineers managed to nudge it gently down to the asteroid's surface. NEAR continued to operate for two more weeks -- providing one last lingering glance at its romantic companion.
Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2009
For more skywatching tips, astronomy news, and much more, read StarDate magazine. | <urn:uuid:eaed2537-54a2-4482-8025-5d3179328d6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stardate.org/print/5164 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960312 | 345 | 3.0625 | 3 |
New rules for private schools
Illustration: Matt Golding.
THE federal and Victorian governments have vowed to do more to prevent the closure of private schools, and are considering joint investigations of at-risk schools, tighter financial oversight and greater state intervention powers, following the shock collapse of two Melbourne secondary colleges.
Federal School Education Minister Peter Garrett said a national approach was needed to better ensure schools were financially viable.
''No one wants to see schools suddenly close … I think we can do more to prevent them from happening,'' Mr Garrett said.
And Victorian Education Minister Martin Dixon said he was looking at giving stronger powers to the state body that reviews the financial health of private schools in the wake of the failure of Mowbray and Acacia colleges.
''The closure of a school is a devastating thing. I'm concerned it's happening and I'm also concerned that the incidences we've seen have been sudden announcements that no one really saw coming,'' Mr Dixon said.
The states and Commonwealth agreed in August to work on tougher regulations for non-government schools, including minimum requirements for ongoing viability to help prevent school closures.
The Uniting Church this month said it would close Acacia College in Mernda at the end of the year after receiving the ''shocking'' advice it was ''saddled with debt'' and ''unsustainable''.
The school has about 540 students in years prep to nine and 50 staff.
Mowbray College, which had campuses in Caroline Springs and Melton, suddenly closed in June on the brink of insolvency after accruing more than $18 million in debt.
More than 1200 students - including 276 doing VCE or the International Baccalaureate - were forced to scrabble to find a new school mid-year, while 200 staff were left without jobs.
ICA Melton College in Caroline Springs and ICA Casey College in Narre Warren South also closed in 2010 after their owner, Independent Colleges Australia, went into voluntary liquidation.
Mr Dixon said he was looking at giving more powers to the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority, which regulates schools and vocational training providers in the state.
Mr Dixon said the VRQA had more powers to oversee the financial accountability of the training sector than independent schools.
''They've got the sort of powers where they can ask for information and act on information far more readily and also to intervene than they have got with non-government schools,'' Mr Dixon said.
''There may be elements of those powers that could be used in terms of the monitoring of non-government schools. We don't want to over-regulate [non-government schools] but we need to have a compromise whereby the financial health of non-government schools is easily assessed,'' he said.
However Independent Schools Victoria chief executive Michelle Green said independent schools complied with a wide range of federal and state funding reporting requirements and further regulation was not needed.
''The failure of any single school is distressing but the four schools that have been forced to close because of financial problems are a tiny fraction of our 214 [schools].''
The Commonwealth-led project agreed to by the states in August will include:
■ A clear definition of how schools are required to use public funds
■ Joint state and federal investigations of schools
■ A national definition of the requirement that private schools are not-for-profit
■ Minimum requirements for ongoing financial viability to prevent closures
The changes would also ensure governments had clear oversight of how taxpayers' funds were being spent so they could take swifter action when problems arose, prompted in part by a federal audit of Islamic schools that identified problems with financial documentation.
''We want to make sure that all government funding provided to schools is being used as intended - on the education of students,'' Mr Garrett said. ''Ministers will meet again in December to agree on a way forward before a public consultation takes place.'' | <urn:uuid:89ec9b70-259f-4f28-8dc7-a97e29f82538> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/victoria/new-rules-for-private-schools-20121027-28cy9.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974269 | 798 | 1.6875 | 2 |
With Context Organizer everybody, without exception, can become an instant speed reader. With just the click of a button, Context Organizer extracts the most relevant keywords and sentences!
Answer: by simply clicking a button, the essential summaries will jump off the page.
See a demo of Context Organizer’s speed reading power.
Students, bloggers, and journalists must read and understand tremendous amounts of material within short timeframes. Being able to read quickly is a vital skill that makes work and research easier.
Most speed-reading methods are based on skim reading first and in reading groups of words. It takes tremendous discipline, effort, practice, and a special aptitude to become a speed reader.
However, with Context Organizer everybody, without exception, can become an instant speed reader.
Reading speed is essential
It is certainly more satisfying to be able to read rapidly, instead of spending what seems like forever ploughing through the words, not knowing if what you read is useful or a waste of time.
Besides the enjoyment factor, you need to get through a lot of reading material in as little time as possible.
Efficient reading skills tremendously help with schoolwork and help improve grades.
Knowledge workers constantly read reports, countless web pages, and research material necessary for their jobs. If you can read faster, with greater comprehension, your chances for success are greatly increased. If you look around, you may notice that a lot of successful people are rapid readers.
Become an instant speed reader with Context Organizer
With just the click of a button, Context Organizer will extract the most relevant keywords and sentences!
You will instantly be able to know what the web page is about. The key points are highlighted. This brings your view into focus. You can view any part of the text that contains your favourite keywords. You can rapidly take notes with references. All of this is achieved with just a click of a button.
You get more done in less time. You don’t have to struggle with the text or train to become champion speed reader.
And you don’t have to struggle with information overload.
See a demo of Context Organizer speed reading power.
Here is an example of Context Organizer instant summary of this post: | <urn:uuid:0c239e72-446b-406f-ac21-358562599e71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.contextdiscovery.com/tag/speed-reading/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926421 | 467 | 2.4375 | 2 |