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Iran news agency covers up Michelle Obama at the Oscars
The Iranian government had lots to say about last night's best picture winner at the Oscar's, "Argo."
They dismissed Ben Affleck's film about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis as an "advertisement for the CIA," claimed it had an unflattering portrayal of the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and said the win was endorsed by the U.S. government because it was introduced by First Lady Michelle Obama.
They also had some opinions on what the first lady was wearing.
Anyone who watched the Oscars saw that Obama wore a sparkling silver gown, showing off her trademark bare arms. The image shown by Iranian state news agency Fars showed Obama wearing a similar dress, but with covered arms -- clearly photoshopped.
This isn't the first time images produced by Western companies have been photoshopped to comply with the conservative culture of Muslim governments. Last October, Ikea apologized for removing pictures of women in its furniture catalog distributed in Saudi Arabia.
- Okla. tornado survivor finds dog buried alive under rubble
- 5/24: I-5 bridge collapses north of Seattle; "On the Road": Three siblings survive Okla. tornado
- The forecaster who sounded the alarm for Moore, Okla.
- I-5 bridge collapses north of Seattle
- Sibling rivalry takes a backseat after Okla. tornado
- Survivor of KKK Baptist Church bombing: "I had to forgive"
- On the road: Three siblings survive Okla. tornado
- Jersey Shore shop owners reopen for Memorial Day
- CBS News goes undercover in a Bangladesh clothing factory
- Man killed in brutal London attack
- Survivor of Bangladesh factory collapse speaks out
- Second London terror suspect identified
- Did Obama admin. know of IRS targeting during campaign?
- The power of a uniquely American song
- Resentment over wars may have motivated London terror attack
- Storm spotter: Oklahoma tornado "a nightmare" | <urn:uuid:0cb13377-e445-43b0-b9b7-b2a7099b60de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57571234/iran-news-agency-covers-up-michelle-obama-at-the-oscars/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944973 | 404 | 1.554688 | 2 |
His visit to Aurora would come two days after the largest mass shooting in American history. Police said James Holmes, 24, entered a midnight premiere of the new Batman movie and opened fire on the audience, leaving 12 dead and 58 wounded.
Authorities arrested Holmes in the parking lot, and they are trying to determine the motive. They said they have found no evidence of links to organized terrorist groups.
Obama expressed condolences during remarks Friday in Fort Myers, Fla., shortly after he learned about the shooting.
“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this,” Obama said at the Harborside Events Center, where he cut short a campaign event to speak about the shooting. “Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason. But while we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the life of another, we do know what makes life worth living. The people we lost in Aurora loved, and they were loved.”
This would mark the third time that Obama has visited a city after a mass shooting.
In November 2009, he delivered an address at Fort Hood, Tex., at the memorial service for 13 service members who were killed by a fellow soldier.
In January 2011, he spoke in Tucson after Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded 13 others, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), outside a grocery store. In that address, Obama called on the nation to “usher in more civility in our public discourse” as a way to honor the victims.
But there have been few signs of progress on that front in Washington, especially during a bruising election season in which Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have traded insults on a daily basis. After the Aurora massacre, both campaigns said they were removing negative TV advertising in Colorado, a swing state that Obama carried four years ago. | <urn:uuid:3a9c8c3e-5bf7-49b0-b818-ff07ff02e641> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-to-attend-shooting-victims-memorial-service-in-colorado/2012/07/21/gJQAjSy60W_story.html?hpid=z1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975942 | 390 | 1.640625 | 2 |
|How do Feed in Tariffs work?|
Solar Bonus Scheme
The Queensland Government Solar Bonus Scheme (the Scheme) pays households and other small customers for the surplus electricity generated from roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) panel systems, which is exported to the Queensland electricity grid. The Scheme is designed to make solar power more affordable for Queenslanders, stimulate the solar power industry and encourage energy efficiency.
The Scheme rewards customers whenever they generate more electricity than they are using - not just the balance at the end of the quarter, but whenever generation exceeds consumption during the day.
The Scheme commenced on 1 July 2008 and is designed to boost the state's use of renewable energy, encourage energy efficiency and stimulate the solar power industry in Queensland.
Customers wishing to reap the benefits of the Scheme will need a solar PV system installed on their premises and have it connected to the electricity grid. Eligible customers will have the option to join the Scheme when the system is installed.
How much are Solar Bonus customers paid?
Customers participating in the Scheme will be paid 52 cents (AGL Qld 2010) per kilowatt hour (kWh) of surplus electricity fed into the grid—more than double the current general domestic use tariff of around 19c/kWh (inc GST as at 1 July 2009).
The average customer operating a 1.5 kilowatt (kW) solar system could save around $400 per year on their electricity bill just by using less electricity from the grid. Solar Bonus Scheme customers also receive payments for exporting excess electricity back to the grid, meaning that these savings could be higher.
The amount of electricity a customer returns to the grid will depend on how much energy is being consumed while the solar panels are generating power. Customers may be able to maximise their solar bonus by improving the energy efficiency of their home to export more electricity to the grid. This could be achieved by reducing standby power consumption, shifting some tasks to the evening and minimising the use of air-conditioners.
The customer's grid-connected electricity consumption will also be lower (than without a solar system) as a result of the household or business consuming a portion of its electricity directly from the solar system.
Visit our Energy Audits section for simple ways to make your home more energy-efficient.
Who is eligible to receive the Solar Bonus?
To be eligible to receive the Solar Bonus, customers must:
How do customers receive the Solar Bonus?
The Solar Bonus of 52c/kWh will be paid (AGL Qld. 2010) for electricity fed into the grid at times when the solar system generates more electricity than the household or business is using at any instant.
The customer's quarterly Solar Bonus payment for this excess electricity exported to the grid will be deducted from their total grid-connected electricity consumption charge on their electricity bill.
If the Solar Bonus payments are greater than the total grid-connected electricity consumption charges over a 12-month period, the customer is entitled to have this balance refunded, rather than maintaining an ongoing credit.
How does the electricity metering operate?
The electricity generated by the solar power system is fed into the customer's electricity load to help power the home or business in the first instance. It is also connected to the electricity grid via a meter (or meters) which record both electricity imported from the grid and exported to the grid. When the electricity produced by the solar power system exceeds the customer's demand for electricity, this excess electricity is fed into the grid via the appropriate 'export' register of the meter.
The meter records the amount of electricity exported to the grid rather than the total amount of electricity generated by the solar system.
When the customer uses more electricity than is being produced by the solar PV system, the balance of electricity required is taken from the electricity grid via the appropriate 'import' register of the meter.
Will I need a special meter?
Customers wishing to claim the solar bonus will need electricity metering that separately records electricity imports and exports.
If required, the installation of new or additional meters will need to be arranged with the electricity distributor after your solar PV (solar power) system is installed and costs may need to be met by the individual customer.
Are investment properties be eligible for the Solar Bonus Scheme?
The Solar Bonus Scheme applies to investment properties that meet all eligibility criteria. Property owners should note, however, that the Solar Bonus will be paid on the retail electricity account for that individual property. If this account is held by a tenant, then the tenant would receive the benefit of the Solar Bonus.
If you have further questions about the Solar Bonus Scheme, contact the Office of Clean Energy:
For more information: 13 GET SOLAR (13 438 76527) | <urn:uuid:702650ee-598f-480d-a0ac-16f675102b0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecoworld.com.au/solar-options/faq-solar/46-how-do-feedin-tariffs-work | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922526 | 975 | 2.375 | 2 |
'It Gets Better Project' Finds Support In Male Librarian Pin-Up Calendar (SLIDESHOW)
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Forget the stereotypical crabby female librarian with a tight bun and nerdy glasses. The Men of the Stacks project introduces 12 steamy bibliophiles in a pin-up calendar to support struggling LGBT youth.
The Men of the Stacks project hopes to promote a more inclusive representation of librarians, while also supporting the "It Gets Better Project," the video movement that offers inspiring testimonials about life beyond bullying in the high school hallways.
Since its Sept. 27 release, the project has sold more than 550 copies and has raised more than $8,000, said Megan Perez of the Men of the Stacks.
"We can't just leave it to others to tell the people who we are," one of the models explains on the organization's website. "That's why the stereotypes about librarians continue to flourish. We have to be the ones to go out there and tell people who we are."
WATCH Related Video | <urn:uuid:31e4f1d7-34b2-4d4d-92dc-216868f3fd51> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/men-of-the-stacks-calenda_n_1003525.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941851 | 223 | 1.515625 | 2 |
The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) recently implemented the new NESC Academy (nescacademy.nasa.gov), an innovative online academy documenting hundreds of lessons learned from senior engineers and subject-matter experts working some of the most complex technical challenges at NASA. Since 2005, the NESC Academy has captured, preserved, and shared the knowledge and experiences of senior NASA engineers and scientists that are invaluable to the work of the next generation of NASA technical professionals. Beginning in 2009, NASA technical fellows and their colleagues, who served as subject-matter experts, delivered courses in a two- to three-day classroom environment. After nine such instructor-led courses, the NESC leadership decided the courses were too costly and required excessive preparation from the experts, whose primary NESC mission is to evaluate critical, high-risk NASA projects.
In 2010, the NESC began reviewing and benchmarking modern capture and delivery mechanisms with the goal of reinventing the Academy while reducing costs and lessening the demands on experts’ time. The NESC’s systems and communications team was given the challenge. The team used the Khan Academy, started by Salman Khan, as a model.1 The Khan Academy began as short, online courses in science, technology, engineering, and math to tutor remote family members. It has since grown to more than 3,500 micro-lectures, with over 190 million views. The NESC team benchmarked products that could facilitate the effective capture and delivery of the NESC online lessons. The team also collaborated with the NASA Safety Center, which uses Mediasite to capture and stream content to the Internet.
Because NESC’s experts are spread across the country, capturing content from remote locations, including a user’s desktop, was a challenge. Initially, a “training toolbox” was physically sent to the expert’s location. It contained all the software and hardware necessary to record a lesson. A simple PowerPoint plug-in and new server software (Camtasia Relay), which enables lessons capture directly from the user’s desktop and transfers the data remotely to the NESC servers, replaced the toolbox. This technology enables remote video capture without requiring travel, complicated data file transfers, and extensive upfront preparation.
“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
— Albert Einstein
Once the NESC’s servers receive the video lessons, they are processed using an eleven-step method that includes editing, course-material insertion, export-control review, and closed captioning. To track the processing, the NESC Academy team uses a tool called TrackVia, an online, cloud-based tool configured to monitor progression. It provides workflow, tracking, dashboards, and processing support for all video production.
In 2011, the NESC began collaborating with the NASA Engineering Network (NEN), also within the Office of the Chief Engineer, to provide live, online webcasts. Using Academy hardware, these webcasts give NASA technical fellows and their colleagues the ability to present material remotely to large audiences in real time. Webcasting allows the presenter, moderator, and producer to reside in different locations. Live webcasts are recorded for later viewing. All upcoming and recorded webcasts are available from the NESC Academy web site at nescacademy.nasa.gov/#features=2. To date, the NESC has captured more than 200 videos, with 123 published, that document work across thirteen technical disciplines online. The new online NESC Academy officially launched on September 8, 2012, and has had more than three thousand viewings to date.
The NASA technical fellows are passionate about sharing technical knowledge. They and their discipline teams solve some of the most varied and difficult technical problems at NASA. This experience gives them a clear picture of where their discipline excels and, more importantly, where critical investments are required to advance NASA’s technical capability. As stewards of their disciplines, they use their experience to develop and document a state-of-the-discipline assessment, identifying knowledge gaps and proposing strategies to fill them. Conducting reviews and assessments daily, they look for opportunities to address these shortcomings and capture knowledge and experience that might otherwise be lost or forgotten.
At a technical interchange meeting sponsored by the aerosciences technical discipline team, for example, the NESC recognized that there was a wealth of NASA knowledge and experience in the aerosciences discipline of significant benefit to both the commercial crew partners developing the next spacecraft servicing low-Earth orbit and the NASA team tasked with the evaluation and selection of these concepts. The meeting was designed as a series of case studies and briefings outlining flight-development projects, including the shuttle orbiter, HyperX/X-43A, X-38, Ares, Ares I-X, and Orion. Presentations focused on the aerosciences philosophy, strategies, techniques, experiences, and lessons learned in predicting aerodynamic performance, constructing aerodynamic databases, predicting flight environments, and managing uncertainty. Participants included the NESC, Langley Research Center, Johnson Space Center, Ames Research Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, commercial crew partners, the NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office, and other industry and agency guests.
All the case studies and lectures were recorded. The content is now being placed on the NESC Academy web site.
Since the technical fellows’ technical discipline teams consist of experts from all NASA centers, along with other government agencies, industry, and academia, members live and work all across the country. Each team assembles in annual face-to-face meetings to share experiences, strategize discipline advancement, and network. In 2011, at a joint meeting of the aerosciences, flight mechanics, and guidance, navigation, and controls teams, a member with extensive experience in the development of Gemini, Apollo, and the shuttle orbiter gave a presentation entitled “Lessons Learned on Previous Manned Spaceflight Programs That Seem to Have Been Forgotten.” While that original presentation was not recorded, an encore presentation to the broader NESC a few months later was captured on video and is available on the NESC Academy site. This is a good example of how engineering knowledge and experience is captured by the technical fellows, in near real time, and preserved by the Academy.
[Technical fellows] get immense satisfaction knowing they are preserving technical knowledge that remains viable and accessible to the current and future community of NASA professionals.
The NASA technical fellow community has enthusiastically embraced the new, user-friendly methodology. They get immense satisfaction knowing they are preserving technical knowledge that remains viable and accessible to the current and future community of NASA professionals. Technical fellows and their discipline teams determine the courses to capture and make available on their NESC Academy catalog. The disciplines and other webcast presenters also suggest future topics.
Classroom courses previously videotaped are now being converted to the new NESC Academy online format, the results streamlined and improved by applying additional editing and cleanup. The content is now more accessible to users than in the past, as there are no prerequisite reading requirements. Of course, in an exclusively online format, the hands-on aspects of viewing hardware and models in the classroom and the back-and-forth dialogue and networking with colleagues and senior professionals are lost. To compensate, all webcasts offer a question-and-answer period at the end of each session. The subject-matter experts answer questions and address issues that were either not addressed or needed clarification. All questions and answers are retained as part of the webcast and are available on the NESC Academy web site and to the communities of practice on the NEN.
An exciting new development is the rebroadcasting of a webcast within university settings, followed by the subject-matter expert connecting to the classroom via Skype to address students’ questions live. The NESC team may explore more possibilities of this kind to increase the level of interaction. Currently, the NEN communities of practice serve as the avenue for interacting with other technical professionals and providing feedback on webcasts and other content so that continuous improvement becomes a part of the process.
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, an African ethnologist, famously stated, “… when an elder dies, it’s a library burning.” With the new approach to capturing and delivering content, the NESC is attempting to preserve NASA’s “technical library.” In short, there is more to acquiring knowledge than what is in textbooks; knowledge also develops from lived experience, and veteran NASA experts possess decades of knowledge and experience that is invaluable to the aerospace community.
While the NESC Academy has changed, the core mission remains the same: to help senior NASA scientists and research engineers pass on critical technical expertise and problem-resolution skills to the younger workforce to support continuing and future mission success.
Patricia Pahlavani has served as a program analyst in the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) since 2007. Currently a member of the systems and communication team, she is responsible for designing communication materials and supporting the NESC web site, and the annual Technical Update. She ensures there is relevant and current content available to these outreach efforts and organizes and distributes outreach content in a variety of other publicity efforts as they occur. | <urn:uuid:c1a08f58-8317-4939-ac72-3766f7500c0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/ask/issues/49/49i_nesc_academy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941362 | 1,888 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Although so slight in stature that he could not serve in the army, Willie Eckstein stood as a giant among Montréal's popular-music pianists from the very earliest days of ragtime and jazz in Canada. This highly talented musician was on the cutting edge of popular piano and dance music during the 1920s and 1930s, and was among the first Canadians to perform on live radio and to record ragtime music.
William Eckstein was born in Montréal on December 6, 1888. He received classical training in piano as a very young child, including lessons from a teacher at McGill University from the age of six. As his talent manifested itself, the boy quickly became recognized as a child prodigy. A career as a concert pianist seemed to be in the works and Willie was, in fact, at age 12, awarded a piano scholarship to McGill. However, because his family was not well off, he gave up this opportunity in favour of becoming a paid performer on the vaudeville circuit.
As a vaudeville star, Willie played the piano on Broadway and on tour in Canada and the U.S., for six years, billed as "The Boy Paderewski". His engagements were varied: the Canadian National Exhibition; Montréal's Karn Hall; and the U.S. White House, where he played for President Theodore Roosevelt. After 1905, while still in his teens, Eckstein made a successful European concert tour that included further piano study in Sweden and Germany.
As Eckstein reached the age of 18, he was obviously too old for the boy prodigy act and he had to leave the vaudeville stage. In 1906 he returned to Montréal and re-established himself as a talented accompanist for silent movies. By 1912, he was demonstrating pianos for J. W. Shaw, a local instrument maker and retailer, and starring as the Strand Theatre's pianist, where he became known by the nickname "Mr. Fingers". Officially, the theatre billed Eckstein as "The World's Foremost Motion Picture Interpreter", since his playing was often more popular than the film itself. Legend has it that even Sergei Rachmaninoff, who saw Eckstein perform at the Strand, commented about his playing: "I don't believe it".
Within a few years Eckstein was also making a name for himself as a songwriter. Ragtime music was at its peak of popularity and Eckstein contributed to the genre by co-writing the piano rags "Delirious Rag" and "Perpetual Rag" with his protégé, Harry Thomas (1890-1941). Thomas recorded these rags as piano rolls in New York in 1916. (Eckstein and Thomas had anticipated the Jazz Age, which had not yet fully arrived in Canada. It was not until the following year that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues" became the first jazz recording released in Canada.) Harry Thomas has been described in the Canadian Jazz Discography as Canada's first real jazz musician; his playing on "A Classical Spasm" demonstrates the skills he learned from Eckstein.
Ragtime was a natural genre for Eckstein to turn to, since it is a composed form of music whose roots are partly in the European classical tradition in which he had been coached. Ragtime's other roots are in the music of African-Americans; indeed it started as music for and by African-Americans. Caucasian Americans and, later, Canadians such as Eckstein, saw possibilities in the new music and borrowed from it. Eckstein specialized in a form known as "novelty rag", which featured flashy virtuoso passages and a high degree of technical difficulty. It should be noted, however, that Eckstein's playing did not fit the strict definition of jazz, largely because he did not improvise, as jazz musicians do.
Eckstein wrote songs in addition to his ragtime pieces. Among these were several patriotic songs, which he was spurred to write when he was refused the opportunity to serve in the armed forces because of his height, which was under five feet (around 150 centimeters). Music became Eckstein's contribution to the war effort; he composed songs such as "Goodbye Soldier Boy" (1917), and performed at war rallies. He enjoyed some success with popular songs, too, such as his "You Are My All In All" (co-written with Thomas; lyrics by Walter Bruce), which was published by Montréal's Delmar Company around 1917.
Another Eckstein song, "Goodbye Sunshine, Hello Moon" (lyrics by Gene Buck), was featured as part of the Ziegfeld Follies 1919 revue.
Eckstein established himself at the forefront of popular music in Montréal and in Canada. In 1919, he made broadcasting history by giving the first-ever live radio performance in North America. This was on Montréal radio station XWA (later known as CFCF); Eckstein provided the piano accompaniment for singer Gus Hill.
Around this time, Eckstein was performing with one of the first jazz bands in Montréal; this was Eckstein's Jazz Band, led by his brother Jack. Willie also played and recorded with his own instrumental band called, variously, The William Eckstein Trio, or the Willie Eckstein Trio. They made many recordings, including one of "Goodbye Sunshine, Hello Moon" for His Master's Voice, featuring a ragtime piano solo by Eckstein. This band also recorded various popular songs and sentimental ballads, such as "That Tumble-Down Shack in Athlone" and Lieutenant Gitz Rice's "Burmah Moon." Typically, the trio employed piano, violin and xylophone. Eckstein's energetic, accomplished playing can also be heard in the ragtime-style solo on "Eyes That Say I Love You", composed by Fred Fisher.
Additionally, Eckstein made recordings as a piano soloist for the Apex and Okeh labels, among others, including a few under the pseudonym "Vi Palmer". He was also a featured performer from 1929 to 1932 with the Victor label. It is also possible that Eckstein backed up the Dumbells Overseas Orchestra on one of their recordings (Such Melodious Racket, p. 97). A recording among Eckstein's most noteworthy was made in 1923: this was the first solo-piano 78-rpm recording of "Maple Leaf Rag," written by Scott Joplin, the foremost composer of ragtime, who had died five years earlier.
Other notable Eckstein recordings include "Music (Makes the World Go Round)", which he co-wrote with Billy Munro. Eckstein recorded this song in 1922 with the Montréal "hot dance band" Melody Kings, of which Munro was a member. The recording showcases a jazz-style improvisatory piano solo by Eckstein. The Melody Kings were one of the few bands making "jazz" recordings in the 1920s in Canada. (Hot dance music, usually played by bands that had piano, saxophone, and cornet or trombone, was then thought of as jazz; but in fact several characteristics distinguished it -- and Eckstein's piano style -- from true jazz. These included arranged solos and a more restrained swing rhythm.)
In 1930, the multifaceted musician left the Strand Theatre when the demise of silent films brought the end of live piano accompaniment in those venues. Eckstein moved instead to cabaret, radio and early television shows. He entertained audiences at many Montréal clubs, eventually settling at the Château Ste. Rose nightspot, where he starred in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His act included improvised two-piano duets with Robert Langlois and others.
In 1959, Eckstein again came to prominence for a patriotic song when he wrote "Queen of Canada", in honour of Queen Elizabeth II's royal tour of Canada. Eckstein received letters of thanks for the song from Buckingham Palace, Governor General Vincent Massey and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.
By that time, Eckstein had been entertaining audiences for well over a half-century. He wielded considerable influence on his fellow Montréal pianists, as well as his protégés and collaborators, such as Harry Thomas and Bob Langlois. Another noteworthy protégé was Vera Guilaroff (1902-1976), a fellow Montréaler and novelty ragtime pianist who collaborated with Eckstein in radio and nightclub performances under the name "The Piano Ramblers", and who was one of his co-writers on "Lonesome Rose". Willie Eckstein led the way for a generation of Canadian jazz pianists, among whom was Oscar Peterson.
In May 1963, Eckstein's many friends and fans held an appreciation night to commemorate his long career. It was his last public performance; later that night he succumbed to a stroke, from which he died four months later, on September 23.
The music of Willie Eckstein has been kept alive by recording artists, including the well-known jazz singer Sarah Vaughan; and as recently as 1999, the French-Canadian ragtime pianist Mimi Blais recorded Eckstein's "A Musical Massacre", based on a Frederick Chopin composition.
Eckstein was the type of pianist who is often envied by both classical and jazz musicians: he was skilled in classical piano technique, while able to perform convincingly in popular styles. A multi-genre musician, he left a legacy of achievements as a performer, songwriter and recording star.
For more information on Willie Eckstein's recordings, please consult the Virtual Gramophone database.
"Eckstein, Willie". -- Encyclopedia of music in Canada. -- Edited by Helmut Kallmann et al. 1-- 2nd ed. -- Toronto : University of Toronto Press, c1992. -- xxxii, 1524 p. -- AMICUS No. 12048560
Gilmore, John. -- Who's who of jazz in Montréal : ragtime to 1970. -- Montréal : Véhicule Press, 1989. -- 318 p. -- AMICUS No. 19065160
Gracyk, Tim. -- Early recordings of African Americans / early Ragtime [online]. -- [Cited July 2, 2003]. -- Access: www.gracyk.com/
"The great Canadian big bands". -- Big Bands database homepage [online]. -- [Cited July 12, 2003]. -- Access: http://nfo.net/can/cl.html
Hardie, Tom. -- "Mr. Fingers" [Willie Eckstein]. -- Jazz vine. -- Vol. 3, no. 10 (1995). -- P. 3. -- AMICUS No. 114710827
Litchfield, Jack. -- The Canadian jazz discography : 1916 - 1980. -- Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1982. -- 945 p. -- AMICUS No. 13401671
Miller, Mark. -- Such melodious racket : the lost history of jazz in Canada, 1914-1949. -- Toronto : Mercury Press, 1997. -- 288 p. -- AMICUS No. 116922705
Moogk, Edward B. -- Roll back the years : history of Canadian recorded sound and its legacy : genesis to 1930. -- Ottawa : National Library of Canada, 1975. -- xii, 443 p. -- AMICUS No. 180154. -- Also published in French under the title: En remontant les années : l'histoire et l'héritage de l'enregistrement sonore au Canada, des débuts à 1930
"Willie Eckstein" [vertical file]. -- National Library of Canada, Music Division
Return to the First World War Era | <urn:uuid:8da6dc0b-dded-4840-9d13-1e28fa5a35ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/gramophone/028011-1008-e.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974709 | 2,461 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Ice-T time: The rapper's 1991 tracks are among the bravest ever on a major label.
Great sleeper discs of the '90s
By Karl Byrn
THE DECADE'S crucial pop music? Nirvana's Nevermind, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Bob Dylan's Time out of Mind, Beck's Odelay--these and works by artists like Lauryn Hill, Lucinda Williams, the Chemical Brothers, and Nine Inch Nails are well-known Billboard breakout performances, yet there are dozens of discs of equal vision, craft, and power that have escaped notice. Here are a dozen that stuck with me.
Ice-T O.G. Original Gangster (1991)
HIP-HOP has outdistanced indie-rock on the charts, and its footprints are now shared by every pop genre except country. Hardcore rap has remained essential to hip-hop's success. On this fierce, funky, funny, and relentless old-school ride, Ice-T really was the O.G., echoing Public Enemy's sonic assault and inviting a decade of controversy with his smart topical outrage. His spoken-word closer, "Ya Shoulda Killed Me Last Year," may be the bravest track ever released on a major label.
Warrior Soul Drugs, God and the New Republic (1991)
THIS PERFECT punk-metal hybrid was more a political-psychedelic Guns 'N Roses than anything related to the decade's punk and metal trends (i.e., Green Day and grunge). Yet their early '90s discs sustained a smoldering, sci-fi-meets-the-gutter apocalyptic vision that hard rock wouldn't hear again until Radiohead's OK Computer.
Marty Stuart This One's Gonna Hurt You (1992)
DIDN'T the Rolling Stones used to sound like this? Perhaps I'm thinking that Stuart, country's most non-clichéd act, could have been included on the recent tribute to country-rock icon Gam Parsons.
Iggy Pop American Caesar (1993)
AS THIS ERA ENDED, this decade found many old pop icons still kicking. Iggy's deeper than the punks he inspired, and on this disc full of love and hate, he still came up with the second-best version of "Louie Louie" of all time.
Patty Loveless The Trouble with the Truth (1995)
POST-GARTH commercial country-pop with a purpose. Loveless started with a Cajun-flavored cover of English folk-rocker Richard Thompson, and from his line "Cry, cry, if it makes you feel better" she focused excellent hit material into determined self-awareness that's free from bitterness and blame.
Everclear Sparkle and Fade (1995)
THE BEST of the post-Nirvana grunge-pop hitmakers. Bandleader Art Alexakis showed a gift for both confessional songwriting and emotion-laden big rock, and the anthemic shout "I don't want to be the . . . baaaaad guy" from the single "Santa Monica" cued this flushed, brittle effort to grow up.
Sepultura Roots (1996)
A SURPRISING triumph of minimalism, Roots reduced thrash/ death/speed metal's low-end blast to its basic building blocks, where the band then began rebuilding with the tribal drum-'n'-chant rhythms of its native Brazil. Ferocious as hell and widely imitated.
Patty Griffin Living with Ghosts (1996)
GRIFFIN DEBUTED with just her voice and acoustic guitar at a time when female singer/songwriters favored a thick-'n'-groovy rock sheen. But Ghosts was more about sweet and self-assured passion than folky bravery, as she filled her detailed, weary portraits with stories of religion, bravado, and whispers.
Nuyorican Soul Nuyorican Soul (1997)
THE WORLD-FUSION field mixed ancient and modern music, breeding dance hits for varied acts like New Agers Enigma and alt-rockers Cornershop. This NYC collective effort married Latin/Cuban jazz to house, diva disco, and hip-hop and scored a home run of fresh, seamless world-pop grooves.
Steve Earle El Corazon (1997)
THE PEAK in a series of bluegrass-based roots-rock discs that established Earle as both the comeback artist of the '90s and the O.G. of the alt-country crowd. Loose but edgy, clear, compassionate, and humorous, Earle packed a rocking center between two now-classic plaintive folk ballads, "Christmastime in Washington" and "Fort Worth Blues."
The Coup Steal This Album (1998)
OAKLAND has been a wellspring for '90s hip-hop talent. These indie-label revolutionaries are street-level but not gangsta, jazzy and poetic but not alt-rap, and their latest effort paints gritty ghetto narratives with creative, dramatic funk.
Anthrax Vol. 8: The Threat Is Real (1998)
THE DECLINE of metal and the shrinking role of guitar in late '90s pop is a myth. Sharp and punchy dynamics, thoughtful lyrics, and a classic hard crunch that superseded style still left these '80s rock survivors room to flirt with techno and alt-country.
From the December 9-15, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.
© Metro Publishing Inc. | <urn:uuid:4f3a5d2c-1558-46d1-95fd-ad88bad8889d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/great-cds-of-the-90s/Content?oid=2128962 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922236 | 1,150 | 1.523438 | 2 |
"Preserving Our Past in Images, 1930-1999" will be display at G.A.R. Hall, 508 Douglas Avenue, Yankton, until Jan. 30.
"The USD Photograph Collection consists of over 300,000 negatives and is the first collection in South Dakota to be preserved utilizing sub-zero preservation. In this exhibit, we have included images not only of historical campus events, but also people of broader interest such as Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Howe, Robert Penn, and Jimmie and Clifton Daniels," said Sarah A. Hanson, photograph collection manager and curator.
"Our greatest challenge in preparing this exhibit was picking 50 photographs from a collection of this magnitude," said Gayla Koerting, special collections librarian. "The exhibit represents an educational opportunity for the public, showcasing images of superior quality while emphasizing the preservation concerns for this important collection."
To accompany and commemorate this occasion, a catalogue of exhibition will be available for sale at G.A.R. Hall for $18.50. This companion book provides a look at the history and future of the USD Photograph Collection as well as features guest commentary by distinguished Professor Emeritus Wayne S. Knutson, Ph.D., John Banasiak, USD professor of photography, and Nancy Hoy McCahren, retired director of the USD Alumni Association.
Catalogues of the exhibition may also be purchased at the USD Archives and Special Collections, I.D. Weeks Library, Vermillion, or online at www.usd.edu/library/special/photobook.cfm. The Archives and Special Collections department also will be offering for sale two limited edition portfolios of the full exhibition.
The exhibit will travel to The Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls in February and March, and is scheduled to be on display at the Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre during July and August.
This exhibition was provided for in part with generous contributions from the Mary Chilton Chapter, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution through the Mary Chilton DAR Foundation, Sioux Falls. | <urn:uuid:9e98ccf8-aa5f-4478-953c-6681814b9a5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://plaintalk.net/2006/01/usd-photograph-exhibition-travels-to-yankton/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9355 | 429 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Don Messmer has seen how drivers and pedestrians must maneuver in order to get around vehicles that are parked on streets and sometimes on sidewalks in the Houston Landing subdivision in Star Valley.
Messmer said there are areas where two cars traveling in opposite directions cannot pass each other because parked vehicles take up too much of the street.
He has two cars himself, and always parks them in his garage. If he has visitors, he instructs them to park on his driveway.
He said his daughter recently visited him, and he asked her to park her Hummer in the driveway. He said it was a little inconvenient for him since her vehicle blocked in his two cars.
Inconvenience is one thing, but making the roads dangerous for others is another thing entirely. He used Moonlight Drive as an example.
The street has several blind turns and cars parked out into the street could cause accidents.
Messmer, a volunteer posse member for the Gila County Sheriff's Office, was hoping the GCSO was going to get the law enforcement contract for Star Valley because he had planned to focus on the parking issue.
The town opted to enter into a contract with the Payson Police Department instead.
Messmer said he will be contacting the PPD to gauge its interest in having volunteers issue parking tickets.
But in order for him to start ticketing cars, there would have to be wording in Star Valley's code that prohibits parking on public streets.
About a month ago, Messmer approached the Star Valley Council about adopting just such an ordinance.
He said one council member later told him that he thought the issue was going to be in the town's new zoning code.
Star Valley Town Manager Lanny Sloan said that the town code, which is being approved by its attorney, has not been adopted, and therefore there is no parking regulation in the town at this time.
Sloan said there will be some parking rules in the code when it goes to the Town Council for a vote.
"There will be some parking regulations, but I do not know what they will be," Sloan said.
Messmer said he will push for an ordinance if there is not a regulation prohibiting vehicles from parking on the street.
Issuing parking tickets, he said, will get people's attention relatively quickly.
Messmer said most neighbors and residents of the town do not like people parking in the streets, but are too busy or do not want to get involved.
"Nowadays people have no courtesy for other people," he said. "They just have no concern for others.
"They think the law applies to you, not me."
The town code, including any parking restrictions, will come before the Star Valley Town Council on July 18 for approval or disapproval.
-- To reach Michael Maresh call 4745251 ext. 112 or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:c215868c-3af4-48b7-92fd-5868658df565> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.paysonroundup.com/news/2006/jul/06/man_on_mission/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983574 | 593 | 1.507813 | 2 |
OverviewThe Grauspitz is the highest point in the small country of Liechtenstein, famous (sort of) for its abundant hiking trails, yet it would come as a surprise to some that there is no maintained trail that leads to the Grauspitz. The easiest route to the summit is class 3-4, that ascends first the Schwarzhorn and then moves along a razor thin ridge. With this in mind, virtually nobody climbs the Grauspitz. Falknis, 2 kilometers west of the Grauspitz, along with the Naafkopf, 2 kilometers east of the Grauspitz, see far more hikers, since there are maintained trails to those summits. The summit register of the Grauspitz is first dated from 1992. By the summer of 2006, the book was about 1/3 full. Getting to the Grauspitz requires a rather tedious approach via gravel roads and narrow trails. Once the climber reaches the farm of Ijes, steep grass slopes and awkward scree fields must be ascended. Once the summit of the Schwarzhorn is obtained, the most dangerous part of the route, the East Ridge is yours for the taking. Presuming you know the terrain (a must) and you've studied the route a dozen times, the Grauspitz can make for a very fun day hike. The view from the summit is grand, stretching from Germany in the north, the entire country of Liechtenstein at your feet, Austria to the east, and Piz Bernina in the far south. Don't let the elevation of the Grauspitz fool you; this mountain packs quite a punch for its "low" elevation.
Grauspitz (upper left)
Getting ThereApproaches to the east ridge start from the Älpli Bahn in the town of Malans. This takes you from 500 meters to 1800 meters. From there it is an 800 meter vertical ascent to the Grauspitz. To get to the Älpli Bahn, follow the directions on the Schwarzhorn page.
Class 4 below the Schwarzhorn
Red TapeIf one wants to take the tram, one must make reservations for the Älpli Bahn. The number is +41 81 322 47 64. A round trip cost for an adult (older than 16) is 15 Swiss Franks. I would assume English isn't spoken in this small town very much. Parking is free. The tram isn't open in winter. Other than this, there is no red tape.
When To ClimbThe best time to climb the Grauspitz is in the summer, when it is snow free. Fall, winter, and spring can also be good climbing times, however, naturally there will be snow and the climb will be more difficult, with the usage of crampons and ice axes needed.
Mountain ConditionsThere is a webcam in Buchs, Switzerland that almost shows the Grauspitz, located here. Fog and cloudy conditions can appear from nowhere up there, so be prepared.
VideosHere are a few low-quality videos I shot while climbing that day. Enjoy!
External LinksPeakbagger.org Trip Report from 1993. | <urn:uuid:f41e267f-0201-471d-a79a-0dd63df6de0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.summitpost.org/grauspitz/151118 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920414 | 655 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Article Archive for March 2012
Everyone, at some point in their lives, gets sick, even if it is with just a mild “bug.” Interestingly, the Talmud notes: “Until the time of Jacob, nobody became sick before he died. Then Jacob prayed [for a warning before death so that last wishes may be conveyed], and sickness came into being…Until the time of Elisha [the prophet] no sick person ever recovered, but Elisha prayed and he did recover…” (Baba Metzia 87a). Alas, this is really no consolation to humankind today which is afflicted by a wide range of illnesses and diseases.
Most people tend to fall into similar patterns when they are looking for a product. You’ve probably heard someone say, “I only buy Mercedes®,” or “I’m a Mac® person.” What are they really saying? They’re saying they have a type and they’re not going to stray!
Dear Mrs D says that could be a problem! If you’re choosing the same type over and over again, and it’s not working out, it’s time to try something new!
I decided to give JDate one more try after one of my good friends met her husband on the site and encouraged me to try again.
The Jewish nation is a people of faith and, as part of our unique combination of peoplehood and religion, must grapple with defining heresy. Jewish life has a basic, structured framework, but, within that, lies a great deal of latitude for individuality. So what makes one a “heretic”?
From I Will Always Love You to Wonderful Tonight, love songs are easy to find, and even easier to listen to! Picking your favorite, however? That’s the tough part! Robert Greenberg, author of How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart, is sharing his Top 10 Romantic Songs in hopes of helping you pick your favorites, and ultimately, making your next date even sweeter!
JMag contributor Mark Miller loves Jewish women! Of course, that’s no surprise. As Miller points out, there is a unique connection to a shared culture, history, religion and tradition that just fits. And although Miller has certainly dated his share of non-Jewish women, he has plenty of reasons to believe he will ultimately wind up with a Jewish woman. Do you love Jewish women too? Read his column and then share what it is about Jewish women that makes you love them as well!
“A person should drink on Purim up to the point where they cannot tell the difference between ‘Blessed is Mordechai’ and ‘Cursed is Haman’” (Megilla 7a).
I guess what I have been looking for is someone whom I can spiritually grow with, and who is possibly into Kabbalah, as that is a main passion of mine; it is what brought me into Judaism. However, I have been getting a sense that Kabbalah is considered a Neanderthal belief system. Is this considered a turn off to women in the Jewish community?
I am grateful to Jason for his love and devotion, as well as to JDate for the introduction to this wonderful man.
I love the coming of spring for wine. It’s still cool enough to drink big hearty reds and complex whites. At the same time, you can finally order rosé again, or chill those crisp whites that pair so well with light fare and seafood, i.e., warm-weather delicacies.
Spring is also a time of optimistic transition and transformation. That’s the best place to be in dating terms as well. Here are some of my favorite springtime bottles and when to drink them… | <urn:uuid:cd11788b-f414-4a84-ae4d-8642285c6c42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdate.com/jmag/2012/03/page/4/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963995 | 804 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Print version ISSN 1516-635X
Rev. Bras. Cienc. Avic. vol.5 no.1 Campinas Jan./Apr. 2003
Kato RKI; Bertechini AGII; Fassani EJI; Santos CDIII; Dionizio MAIV; Fialho ETII
IPh.D student Depto. de Zootecnia - UFLA/CAPES, Lavras - MG - Brasil
IIProfº do Depto. de Zootecnia - UFLA/CAPES, Lavras - MG - Brasil
IIIProfº do Depto. de Química - UFLA, Lavras - MG - Brasil
IVPh.D student Depto. de Zootecnia UFV/CAPES, Viçosa - MG - Brasil
The supplementation of cobalt and vitamin B12 in diets for commercial laying hens on the second production cycle was studied. Four hundred and eighty light commercial laying hens, Lohmann LSL, were used at initial phase of forced molting laying period. The trial was conducted in a randomized design. The plots were the treatments which were constituted by combination of five cobalt levels (0.00; 0.30; 0.60; 0.90 and 1.20ppm) and two vitamin B12 levels (without and with 10µ/kg), and the split-plots were four periods (21, 42, 63 and 84 days) during the second period of production, with 4 repetitions and 12 hens per experimental unit. Food and water were provided ad libitum and eggs were collected twice daily. Performance and egg quality parameters were evaluated. At the end of experimental period, two layers from each treatment were slaughtered, and liver and blood samples were taken for analysis. Performance and egg quality were not different (p>0.05) among cobalt supplementation levels, although egg damage data were different (p<0.05). Supplementation with vitamin B12 decreased egg weight. No influence of cobalt or vitamin B12 supplementation was seen on the concentration of cobalt in the liver and yolk as well as on blood analysis (hematrocrit, hemoglobin, erythrocytes, and leukocytes). The results revealed that vitamin B12 supplementation was important for commercial laying hens on the second cycle of production, but not cobalt supplementation.
Keywords: cobalt, egg production, laying hens, nutrition, vitamin B12
Advances in husbandry, nutrition and breeding have improved the commercial production of laying hens. In spite of this progress, some nutritional aspects have not been fully understood yet. The trace of mineral cobalt, for instance, is not considered as an essential mineral for chickens, although it may be as much as 4% of the composition of the molecule of vitamin B12. Literature concerning cobalt supplementation for chickens is scarce, particularly for laying hens. Some authors consider cobalt addition for laying hens unnecessary, and the mineral is then supplemented only as Vitamin B12 (National Research Council, NRC, 1994). According to Rostagno et al. (2000), 0.2 ppm of cobalt in the diet may be used for laying hens. However, there is no indication that this trace mineral is unnecessary for laying hens. Birds synthesize vitamin B12 using cobalt inside the ceca, but the levels are below the requirements, and it must be supplemented (McDonald et al., 1975). Furthermore, there is no consensus about cobalt supplementation in chicken diets. In practice, the industries of mineral supplement add, on an average, 0.29 g of cobalt per ton of feed. Considering the high price of cobalt, adding it may represent an additional cost for poultry production. Besides, environmental issues have also to be considered, since cobalt may become a pollutant if used inadequately or when it is not really needed.
In order to produce technical information to this inquiry, the present work was carried out to study the need of supplementing cobalt and vitamin B12 in diets of laying hens during the cycle of egg production.
MATERIAL AND METHODS
Conventional cages with trough feeder and nipple drinker were used, with 12 laying hens per cage. Lohmann LSL laying hens (480 birds) at the beginning of the second cycle of production were used. Experimental phase started at 62.8% of egg production. Lights were on from 3am to 8pm, with 17L:7D. Water and food were given ad libitum and eggs were collected twice daily, at 10am and at 4pm. Environment temperature was registered with a thermometer placed in the middle of the poultry house. The maximum, minimum and average temperatures were 26.2, 13.3 and 19.7ºC, respectively. Ten diets were produced by the combination of five levels of cobalt (0.00; 0.30; 0.60; 0.90 and 1.20 ppm) and two levels of vitamin B12 (0 and 10 µg/kg). The control treatment was given a basal corn-soybean diet, with no supplementation of cobalt and vitamin B12 (Table 1). Cobalt and vitamin B12 were supplemented by addition of pre-mixtures, as described in Table 2.
A split plot experimental design was used with four periods (21, 42, 63 and 84 days) and four repetitions. Forty cages were used with 12 birds in each. A factorial schedule 5x2 was used, with 5 cobalt supplementation levels, with and without vitamin B12 supplementation.
Performance was evaluated by egg production (%/hen/day), egg loss (%/hen/day), egg weight (g), egg mass (g), feed intake (g/hen/day) and feed conversion (g/g). Egg quality was evaluated in the last three days of each period using specific weight (g/cm3), shell percentage (%), shell thickness (mm), weight of the shell per unit of surface of area (mg/cm3) WSUSA (Abdallah et al., 1993) and internal quality was expressed in Haugh units (Card & Nesheim, 1968).
At the end of the experiment, one hen was sacrificed per cage thirty minutes after laying an egg, and a sample from liver tissue was collected. The egg was collected for yolk analysis and stored at 5ºC for later processing (lyophilized and degreased). Cobalt concentration was determined in the yolk and liver (dry matter basis) using flame atomic spectrometry.
Two hens per treatment were killed 30 minutes after laying and blood samples were taken to determine hematocrit, hemoglobin, erythrocyte and leukocyte numbers.
The data were submitted to statistical analysis using the software SISVAR - Variance Analysis System for Balanced Data (Ferreira, 1999).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Cobalt supplementation had no effect (p>0.05) on performance, except for egg loss (Table 3). No significant interaction (p>0.05) was seen between cobalt and vitamin B12 supplementation in the evaluated performance characteristics, demonstrating that the effects of vitamin B12 and cobalt supplementation were independent.
Vitamin B12 had no effect (Table 4) on egg production (p>0.05), probably due to the relatively short experimental period (84 days), and the absence supplementation of vitamin B12 in the diet did not result in clinical signs related to vitamin deficiency. Squires & Naber (1992) reported a decrease in egg production only after 12 weeks of production when a diet without B12 was given. As reported by Scott et al. (1982) birds have hepatic storage of vitamin B12 and the reserves are not affected up to 12 weeks when that nutrient is not given in the diet.
Egg loss was affected (p<0.05) by cobalt levels (Table 3), which could not be explained by regression analysis, but was not influenced (p>0.05) by the absence or presence of vitamin B12.
Vitamin B12 increased (p<0.01) egg weight, data similar to those were reported by Skinner et al. (1951) and Squires & Naber (1992), which demonstrated the importance of vitamin B12 supplementation. Egg mass, feed intake and feed conversion were not affected (p>0.05) by vitamin B12 supplementation.
Cobalt supplementation had no effect (p>0.05) on egg quality (Table 5). This indicates that cobalt supplementation is not necessary in order to improve internal and external egg quality. There was no interaction (p>0.05) between supplementation of cobalt and supplementation of vitamin B12 on egg quality parameters.
Vitamin B12 supplementation decreased (p<0.01) specific egg weight when compared to the treatment without vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 increased egg size and, consequently, specific weight was decreased. Eggs were smaller when no vitamin B12 was added and specific weight was inversely proportional to the size of the egg. Smaller shell percentage (p<0.01) was observed with vitamin B12 supplementation. In the absence of vitamin B12, egg shell thickness and the weight of the egg shell per unit of surface of area (WSUSA) were higher (p<0.01) than the treatment with vitamin B12 (Table 6). This finding, as it was already expected, was inversely proportional to the weight of the eggs (Squires & Naber, 1992). The same was observed for egg shell percentage, egg shell weight and thickness.
The treatments had no effect (p>0.05) on Haugh unit values. Maybe the trial period was too short to induce any change in the internal quality of the eggs.
Cobalt concentration in the liver and the yolk
Cobalt concentration (dry matter basis) in the liver or in the yolk was not affected (p > 0.05) by the treatments (Table 7). This finding could be explained by the low level of cobalt used in this study when compared to those used by Southern & Baker (1980), who observed 0.03 to 0.85 ppm of cobalt in dry matter basis when no cobalt was used, and 16 to 55.5 ppm when 250 ppm of cobalt was supplemented. Adding vitamin B12 to the diet had no effect (p>0.05) on cobalt concentration in the liver and yolk.
The addition of cobalt plus vitamin B12 in the diet had no effect (p>0.05) on hematocrit, hemoglobin, erythrocytes and leukocyte numbers (Table 8), and the supplementation of cobalt only also did not interfere with erythrocyte and hemoglobin values (p > 0.05). Conversely, Diaz et al. (1994) reported an increase in hemoglobin and erythrocytes in chickens fed with diet containing cobalt.
Cobalt supplementation in the diets of laying hens in the second cycle of production did not influence egg production, egg quality, blood characteristics, and cobalt levels in the liver and yolk within the trial period, suggesting that there is no need for cobalt supplementation; however, vitamin B12 supplementation increased egg weight.
Abdallah AG, Harms RH, El-Husseiny O. Various methods of measuring shell quality in relation to percentage of cracked eggs. Poultry Science 1993; 72(11):2038-2043. [ Links ]
Card LE, Neshein MC. Produccion Avícola. New York: Ithaca, 1968. 392p. [ Links ]
Diaz GJ, Julian RJ, Squires EJ. Cobalt-induced polycythaemia causing right ventricular hypertrophy and ascites in meat-type chickens. Avian Pathology 1994; 23 (1):91-104. [ Links ]
Ferreira DF. Sistema para análise de variância para dados balanceados (SISVAR). Lavras: UFLA; 1999. 92p. [ Links ]
McDonald P, Edwards RA, Greenhalgh JFD. Minerais . In: Nutrición animal. 2.ed. Zaragoza: Acribia, 1975. p.107-109. [ Links ]
National Research Council. Nutrient Requirements of Poultry. 9.ed. Washington, 1994. 155p. [ Links ]
Rostagno HS, Albino LFT, Donzele JL, Gomes PC, Ferreira AS, Oliveira RF, Lopes DC. Tabelas Brasileiras para aves e suínos; Composição de alimentos e exigências nutricionais. Viçosa: UFV. Imprensa Universitária, 2000. 141p. [ Links ]
Scott ML, Neshein MG, Young RJ. The vitamins. In: ML Scott (editor). Nutrition of the chickens. 3.ed. New York, 1982. p.237-243. [ Links ]
Skinner JL, Quisenberry JH, Couch JR. High efficiency and APF concentrates in the ration of the laying fowl. Poultry Science 1951; 30(3): 319-324. [ Links ]
Southern LL, Baker DH. The effect of methionine or cystine on cobalt toxicity in the chick. Poultry Science 1980; 60(7): 1303-1308. [ Links ]
Squires MW, Naber EC. Vitamin profiles of eggs as indicators of nutritional status in the laying hen: Vitamin B12 study. Poultry Science 1992; 71(12): 2075-2082. [ Links ]
Antonio Gilberto Bertechini
Depto. de Zootecnia - Universidade Federal de Lavras Caixa Postal 37
37200-000 - Lavras - MG - Brasil
Arrived: May 2002
Approved: September 2002 | <urn:uuid:832ed021-404b-459d-a005-27c335e4f48f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1516-635X2003000100006&script=sci_arttext | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923538 | 2,951 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Design and implementation of Boundary-Scan Test system based on network interface card
ABSTRACT Boundary-Scan Test (BST) technology has been widely used. To further extend the application of BST, a BST system based on network interface card is designed and implemented. In this paper, the theorem of boundary scan test is briefly introduced. The methods of designing the BST controller including hardware and software are presented. On the basis of Client/Server model, BST controller played as a server role while circuit under test(CUT) as a client. By using the designed controller and DEMO board which contains two BS chains, the remote boundary-scan test system has been established. Test results indicate that the system can correctly identify fault styles and exactly locate the fault pins. | <urn:uuid:db11ef38-8e08-48f8-bf2f-a1b1f63b6bae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.researchgate.net/publication/224134987_Design_and_implementation_of_Boundary-Scan_Test_system_based_on_network_interface_card | 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 | 0.947955 | 155 | 2.34375 | 2 |
U.S. EPA is working on a coarse screening tool as part of its "environmental justice" initiative to help its employees spot pockets of people whose health has suffered disproportionally over the years.
The Environmental Justice Strategic Enforcement Assessment Tool uses a complex combination of census data, a respiratory hazard index, poverty levels, toxic emissions, infant mortality, an index of documented pollution events and other such numbers to assign a score to a geographical area.
The end result will be a national database that will identify small tracts of people as unfairly affected over the years. Officials can take the score into consideration while making land-use and permit decisions, reducing chances of human judgment errors. Officials stressed that the tool was only a starting point, and other information would also be used to make decisions.
The tool is being developed to assist the agency in its quest to help officials take into account concerns of minorities, low-income and indigenous communities while they prepare rules, issue permits and seek compliance. The interim guidance on the issue, released Monday, will go for assessment to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), a council put together by EPA in 1992 to address environmental justice issues.
"Historically, the low-income and minority communities that carry the greatest environmental burdens haven't had a voice in our policy development or rulemaking," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement. "This plan is part of my ongoing commitment to give all communities a seat at the decision-making table."
The guidance, called Plan EJ 2014, will be a road map for EPA to carry out Jackson's priority of enforcing justice over the next four years, states the document. It is now open for public comment.
"Environmental justice has always been a focus for the agency, and we see overwhelming energy and focus. It comes from the top," said Heather Case, deputy director of the Office of Environmental Justice (OECJ), an arm of EPA.
EPA was not always so diligent. In 2008, it proposed getting rid of federal oversight of hazardous waste recycling to make easy recycling of secondary waste products. The industry goes through 1.5 million tons of waste from steel, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Many hazardous waste sites are located in poor and minority communities.
The Sierra Club submitted a petition for the agency to reconsider its 2008 "Definition of Solid Waste" or DSW rule. EPA then began an environmental justice review in 2009.
The new guidance this week from Jackson gives officials a guide to include environmental justice concerns while working on rules such as the DSW. It will be included in the permitting process, while enforcing rules, creating new rules and providing support for communities hard hit by pollution.
The guidance asks employees to consider if a community is long-suffering and has been especially vulnerable. People may also be suffering from the effects of many factories, each of which plays a minor role but can add up to a larger health or environmental effect.
Wilmington, Calif., for example, has an 85 percent Latino population and is the site of five oil refineries, oil drilling, recycling facilities, freeways, ports, diesel trucking and more sources of pollution, according to Communities for Better Environment, a California-based environmental justice organization.
"Factoring multiple and cumulative exposures in our decisionmaking has long been a focus for the agency," said Case of OECJ. She said the agency's work on permitting will help tackle this issue.
So far, the health effects of pollution from multiple sources are acutely felt by communities, but polluting permits for air, water, soil and others are all issued separately.
Stephen Lester, science director at the Center for Health, Environment & Justice said the EPA guidance, while commendable in giving a voice to the community, should also give them a chance to say, "Enough is enough."
"Having a voice is critical, but it's also about having a voice to say, 'No, this community has suffered enough,'" he said.
Lester said that given its background with environmental justice, EPA should make sure the staff integrates environmental justice into its work. "It is a good thing they are doing something like this; getting the staff to integrate it into its work is another thing," he said.
Getting the data
The tool, currently under review, is being deployed in a limited manner in regional environment offices.
"There is a potential for false negatives," Case said. "For example, some council members were worried that Native Americans are not all noted in the census."
There are also significant data gaps in land, water and other environmental data in the United States, making it necessary for EPA to rely mostly on air toxics data. Drinking water pollution data, for example, is often incomplete when received yearly by EPA from regions. Health indicators, such as cancer rates and neurological effects, can be even sparser.
But even with sparse data, removing health as an indicator in the tool radically changes the scores of the sites, according to EPA officials at the meeting. This gives a vague indication of the health burdens of environmental pollution.
"Data is critical, and often data is not great when it comes to health," Case said. "So it [EJSEAT] is a screening tool."
For decades, reports have found that the poor and minorities face disproportionate pollution burdens. A 1983 report by the General Accounting Office, since renamed the Government Accountability Office, found that minorities are more likely to live around hazardous waste landfills in the three Southeastern states it reviewed. And new permits issued by regulators did not take the existing environmental burdens into account.
According to the report, there were four off-site hazardous waste landfills in Region IV's eight states. Blacks made up the majority of the population in three of the four communities where the landfills were located. At least 26 percent of the population in all four communities had income below the poverty level and most of this population was black.
In 1994, President Clinton developed Executive Order 12898, "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations," which requires most federal agencies to actively collect, monitor and use information on health and environmental effects within populations.
Since then, federal agencies including EPA have failed to actively follow through, according to the Government Accountability Office. As late as April 2005, the office issued the report entitled, "EPA Should Devote More Attention to Environmental Justice When Developing Clean Air Rules." In 2007, it again criticized EPA, saying that although the agency had made some progress, significant challenges remained. With Jackson as administrator, the issue has regained prominence, as she has toured the country to meet with minority communities affected by environmental pollution (Greenwire, July 27). | <urn:uuid:4f6a3f33-1b29-4424-a1a3-baa8f990b25f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eenews.net/stories/93888 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962392 | 1,369 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Shel Silverstein's inimitable drawings and comic poems have become the bedtime staples of millions of children and their parents, yet few readers know much about the man behind that bearded face peering out from the dust jacket. Lisa Rogak tells the full story of a life as antic and adventurous as any of Silverstein's creations. He collaborated with anyone who crossed his path, and found success in a wide range of genres. He penned hit songs like "A Boy Named Sue" and "The Unicorn." He drew cartoons for Stars & Stripes and got his big break with Playboy. He wrote experimental plays and collaborated on scripts with David Mamet. With an apparently incurable case of wanderlust, Silverstein kept homes on both coasts and many places in between; everywhere he went he charmed neighbors, made countless friends, and romanced almost as many women with his bouyant energy and never-ending wit. Rogak gives fans a warm portrait of a restless, enthusiastic artist.
"I didn't think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it."—Otto Penzler
"Shel Silverstein was a genius in a dozen genres, the last of the real Renaissance men. He loved life and lived it more intensely than most of us dare to dream. There's a surprise on every page as Lisa Rogak tells the whole untold story of this truly fabulous character."—Dr. Demento | <urn:uuid:d3ececd0-3030-4053-9bb2-6970236a3f00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.daedalus-books.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=101036&Media=Book&SubCategoryID=2171&ReturnUrl=%2FProducts%2FCategoryMain.asp%3FMajorCategoryID%3D16%26Media%3DBook%26Special%3D | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963756 | 326 | 1.710938 | 2 |
'Role of Law' Inadequately Taught By U.S. Colleges, Berman Charges
American colleges fail to provide their students with a clear understanding of the role of law as a means of resolving conflicts in society, according to Harold J. Berman, professor of Law.
"It is a shocking thing that most American students graduate from college with only the faintest conception of the nature of our legal system, and especially of the judicial process," Berman said.
Berman was commenting on a three day Conference on the Teaching of Law in the Liberal Arts Curriculum, of which he was the chairman. A transcript of the proceedings of the conference, held at the Law School in November under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation, was released yesterday.
"There is no reason why the study of law should be a monopoloy of the law schools," Berman said. "A knowledge of the legal aspects of social life is fundamental to a proper understanding of both the social sciences and the humanities."
The conference did not come to any final conclusions on what kinds of law courses colleges should offer, but the 30 participants were generally agreed that efforts should be made to develop student's awareness of the nature of law as a means of creating and maintaining social order.
An introductory course in law, according to Judge Charles E. Wynanski, Jr. '27, who key noted the conference, should stress the techniques of legal reasoning and the political values of American society as they appear in our legal are tem. | <urn:uuid:43c2f351-efe0-47fe-9d61-650c6a23d6a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1955/4/14/role-of-law-inadequately-taught-by/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967501 | 304 | 1.835938 | 2 |
What stood out on the international LGBT human rights front in 2011? A lot. But lets go out on a limb and pick three things.
- The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ban on lesbians and gays in the U.S. military, in September.
- The appearance of LGBT organizing, at some level, in most African countries. (See, for example, what’s happening in Mozambique in a post from January).
- The death of the last known gay survivor of the Holocaust, Rudolf Brazda, in France.
I’ll be rounding up the year in a series of posts over the next week – in which no doubt I’ve missed something, so please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments!
Same-sex marriage (or ‘marriage equality’ or ‘gay marriage’) was a leading international concern — whether in the West or raised as a chimeric threat, particularly in Africa. This year it was legalized in the second most populous US state, home to the UN and intentional media — New York state. American polls also, for the first time, showed clear majority support for marriage equality.
The immigration problems of bi-national, same-sex couples due to the Bill Clinton-era federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) drew national attention in America, but the Obama administration was criticized for being slow to act to use its powers to stop deportations of husbands and wives.
In the United Kingdon, the Conservative-led government committed itself to marriage equality, there is to be a consultation next year, with Tory Prime Minister David Cameron famously saying he supported it because he was a conservative. The Scottish Nationalist government in Scotland appears likely to legalize same-sex marriage too, although there has been a strong, Catholic Church-led backlash.
In France, although marriage equality failed in the French parliament it is rumored that President Nicholas Sarkozy will announce his support in elections next year, supposedly inspired by Cameron’s comments. But in Spain, lesbians and gays fear that a new conservative government may go backwards and convert gay marriages into gay civil unions.
It’s been proposed by the Luxembourg government and by the Finnish government, and the Danish government permitted gay marriage in churches. The German parliament is going to vote on marriage equality next year. Civil partnerships are being mooted in Poland and Estonia – a first in a post-Soviet Union state.
Last month the governing Australian Labor Party supported same-sex marriage, though its leader does not and it is likely to fail when it reaches the parliament next year.
In July the Constitutional Court of Colombia ordered the Colombian government to legislate on same-sex relationship recognition – and that if they fail to, same-sex couples will be granted all marriage rights in two years.
Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples are legally entitled to civil unions, and same-sex marriage will be included in the new Nepalese constitution.
In October, in a little noticed but extremely interesting case, a Kenyan court recognized ‘traditional’ same-sex marriage.
In July, a court in Delhi, India, effectively recognized the marriage of a lesbian couple, whilst ordering that the state must protect them.
The International Growth of LGBT Projects | <urn:uuid:c2338f63-1f3f-4a2d-b052-5f0128f10520> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2011/12/same-sex-marriage-was-a-leading-international-concern/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955153 | 689 | 2.5 | 2 |
Re: Execute Windows program from Perl script (??)
From: Brian McCauley (nobull_at_mail.com)
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 19:16:54 +0100
Tony McGuire wrote:
> email@example.com (Tony McGuire)
>>system( "start", "C:\Program Files\TextPad 4\TextPad.exe");
>>There is no error. The web page I post from just sits there as if the perl
>>were executing. And when I check the 'server' box I find a cmd.exe in Task
>>Mangler, one for each time I run the script.
>>And the only way to remove the 'hidden' copy of cmd.exe (there's no DOS box
>>up) is to reboot Windows. When I try to end task on them, I get 'Access
> I guess what I am looking for isn't doable from perl.
What in this thread makes you guess that?
> I was looking to start a Windows program independent of the Apache
Well that is a question about Windows - having worked what succession of
windows API calls was necessary to achive that effect you could then
make those calls from a program written in any lanuage that gives you
access to the low level Windows API. This would include Perl with the
relevant Win32::* modules intalled.
> But I doubt Apache will restart if there is a process running, which
> there would be if perl must wait on anything it starts with system().
There are other windows-specific ways to start processes from a Perl
script as I mentioned earler in this thread.
> Well, back to the drawing board. I guess I'll write to a file (with
> perl), and have a scheduler watch for the file to be changed - then
> kick off that other Windows program using the scheduler.
And there is, of course, no reason why that program can't be written in
Perl. Just like there's no reason why your CGIs can be written in C.
> That way the Windows program is running independently of
> Apache and the perl script.
I think you mean the CGI script. Yes it may be the case that your CGI
script is in Perl but the issues you are facing here would be the same
is you CGI script was written in C, Python, Java, FORTRAN etc.
> I was hoping to coordinate everything with just perl,
There is no reason why you should not.
> but it doesn't seem to be up to this particular task.
What causes you to imagine that? | <urn:uuid:6ffac269-e646-421a-9c56-4644db1044a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Perl/comp.lang.perl.misc/2004-08/2099.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936322 | 562 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Nearly 50 years of research by the TRACOM
group has revealed that people operate with four distinct ways of interaction, or SOCIAL STYLES. A brief explanation of each
style is detailed by following the links below;
There are three elements that make up the TRACOM
Profiles, ASSERTIVENESS, RESPONSIVENESS and VERSATILITY
VERSATILITY - This is the key to making SOCIAL STYLE
work and is the ability to adjust your behaviour in various situations to achieve increased performance. This concept developed
by TRACOM, is similar to the popular Emotional Intelligence theories. (See Comparing Versatility to Emotional Intelligence.). It is important to remember that versatility is not about changing who you are, it's about genuinely
meeting the needs of others, more than your own and a desire to work well with other people.
Flexibility, responsiveness and adaptability are seen as
important qualities and versatile individuals make adjustments to their behaviour by determining the SOCIAL STYLES of others
and how they would prefer to be communicated with, building positive relationships based on trust. By completing a self-assessment
or multi-rater assessment instrument, individuals receive low, medium or high Versatility ratings. This score creates a generalisation
about how you will handle the tension of interpersonal relationships. Are your actions typically focused on your own comfort
level, or are you concerned about the tension your behavior can create in others?
Research shows that people with high Versatility
outperform their lower-Versatility counterparts across a broad spectrum of performance measures. (See the TRACOM Managerial Success Study.) Research shows that people consider four basic elements when determining an individual's Versatility.
IMAGE - Dress, grooming and appearance can be critical to making good first impressions. It’s not necessarily
how well you’re dressed, but whether you’re appropriate for the situation. You may lose as much credibility wearing
a suit to a company social outing as wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a board meeting.
PRESENTATION - Our ability
to verbally communicate with others is vital as people are more likely to trust us if we present clear, well-organised ideas
and use vocabulary that is appropriate to the situation.
COMPETENCE - Obviously showing competence and understanding
in your work will help you gain respect, however it is also important to recognise what others are interested in, and be able
to discuss those topics. The ability to listen and learn helps to build common ground, leading to mutual productivity.
FEEDBACK - In this two-way process, people send and receive both verbal and non-verbal signals to gain mutual understanding.
It is vital to make sure you are clear in your communication and sensitive to the signals of others in order to minimise any
chance of confusion. | <urn:uuid:53b5940b-98ca-4900-91de-c033b61e70ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.accelerate-uk.com/social_style_and_versatility.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937785 | 594 | 2.46875 | 2 |
The Light Tape® Battery Backup Emergency Lighting System was originally designed and produced by Lister Electrical of York, and installed at The National Trust’s Nunnington Hall in North Yorkshire. The system is designed to provide a battery backup to operate Light Tape® as an Emergency Egress Light in case of mains power failure.
Light Tape® Battery Backup System.
Light Tape® Battery Backup Emergency Lighting System includes a mains input to a 12V transformer, which in turn runs a trickle charging unit attached to a 12V 4Ah backup battery.
In application should the mains power be cut off a relay switch immediately connects power from the backup battery to the Light Tape® DC Power Supply to drive the Light Tape®, providing sufficient light to exit the building avoiding trip hazards in the event of an emergency.
The backup system also features an override switch that can be used to operate the Light Tape® directly from the 12V transformer providing ancillary lighting.
In tests, the 12V 4Ah battery drove 5m of 25mm (1″) Light Tape® for 12 hours without needing to be recharged. | <urn:uuid:60dd6aa2-0670-4648-a045-034c1f997892> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lighttape.co.uk/?content=batterybackup | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917931 | 228 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Nestlé buys Pfizer Nutrition
Feeding little emperors
A Swiss firm bets on babies in emerging markets, especially China
BABY food looks like glop, but it is an attractive business. Global sales are $30 billion and growing by 10% annually, mostly thanks to developing countries. That is why Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, is paying so much for the infant-nutrition arm of Pfizer, an American drug firm. On April 23rd it announced that it would buy Pfizer Nutrition for $11.85 billion—almost 50% more than analysts thought it was worth only a few months ago.
Nestlé, the world's biggest foodmaker, was not the only bidder. It had to beat Danone, its big French rival, which was also keen to gobble up Pfizer's baby-food brands such as S-26 Gold, Promil and SMA. The price tag was a hefty 20 times Pfizer Nutrition's estimated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation this year.
Kurt Schmidt, the boss of Nestlé Nutrition, says it will be worth it. Mr Schmidt is a baby-food veteran, having joined Nestlé in 2007 when it took over Gerber, an American maker of baby food, of which he was the boss. His new Swiss colleagues may or may not have told him that gerber in French describes what babies do with food that irks them. But they were impressed enough to put him in charge of the newly acquired business.
Mr Schmidt is excited about China. “That's where the births are,” he says. That is not strictly true: Africa has twice as many. But China is where the largest number of mothers are newly rich enough to buy pricey mush. Last year they bought baby food worth $6 billion; by 2016 that number is likely to double, according to analysts at Citigroup, a bank.
The baby business is lucrative in China. Chinese mothers dote on their solitary moppets: those who buy packaged baby food typically choose the most expensive type. And they prefer foreign brands: they still remember the melamine scandal of 2008, when at least six babies died because Chinese firms had added a toxic chemical to raw milk to make it appear higher in protein.
Nestlé has been an also-ran in China. (Its reputation suffered in 2008 after Hong Kong authorities found tiny traces of melamine in milk powder produced by a Nestlé subsidiary in Qingdao.) The new acquisition could help. Pfizer Nutrition boasts a healthy 7.4% market share in China and generates 85% of its sales in emerging markets more broadly.
The deal could raise antitrust alarms. Warren Ackermann of Société Générale, a bank, predicts that Nestlé will have to sell about 30% of Pfizer Nutrition's business in a dozen markets, including the Philippines, Taiwan and Mexico—but not China. Buyers should be easy to find. Danone and Heinz, an American food firm, are said to be keen. Like a well-fed tot, this market is sure to grow. | <urn:uuid:9b2e2200-adc9-445d-9dc4-7f6da60cc49f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/node/21553507 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974875 | 639 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Institute Of Plant Breeding: Intensifying Ornamental Industry Through Plant Breeding
The Philippine ornamental industry continues to gain popularity and recognition in the country and more so abroad. The increasing demand for ornamentals has been one of the pressing issues faced by the ornamental sector today, making it self-sufficient, sustainable and diversified.
Encouragingly, there are private sectors, entrepreneurs, government institutions, and state colleges and universities that have the same goal to bring about a sustainable development in agriculture for the country.
This is where the Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB) under the College of Agriculture at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, Laguna, comes into picture. IPB is geared toward strengthening plant breeding research through development of new and improved crop varieties.
Enactment of laws
As a headstart of plant breeding in the Philippines, researches began in 1914 though improvement of rice and corn. This led to the establishment of a plant breeding division in 1945 under the Department of Agronomy of the College of Agriculture. It was in 1960 that breeding work came into full blast, which included more crops.
Presidential Decree (PD) 729 issued on 5 June 1975 created the IPB under the College of Agriculture in UPLB. PD 729 recognized the importance of modern plant breeding requiring closer collaboration among plant breeders and scientists. IPB also envisions the need for a strong research and administrative staff and excellent facilities.
Two years later, another Presidential Decree, PD 1046-A established the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory (NPGRL) within IPB. The laboratory served as the national center for germplasm collection and maintenance of important and potentially useful agricultural crops.
And by virtue of Republic Act (RA) 7308, otherwise known as the Seed Industry Development Act of 1992, IPB was also identified as the lead agency for crop biotechnology research.
IPB at front
Since then, IPB has been at the forefront of plant breeding research and applications in the country. Now, Dr. Jose E. Hernandez serves as the director of IPB and concurrent director of the Crop Science Cluster.
IPB serves to: (1) develop new and improved varieties of important agricultural crops; (2) undertake studies in plant breeding and allied disciplines related to crop improvement; (3) systematically collect, introduce, preserve, and maintain a germplasm bank of important and potentially useful agricultural and horticultural crops; and (4) assist other agencies in the multiplication of quality seeds and vegetative materials of recommended crop varieties. They likewise ensure availability of the varieties to small farmers.
Facing new demands for research breeding, IPB has classified its major programs into five categories, namely: germplasm collection and conservation, varietal improvement, crop biotechnology, seed multiplication, and seed and technology dissemination.
Ornamentals are considered among the priority crops of IPB, which include cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruit crops, root crops, industrial crops, and special crops. IPB now has a wide collection of germplasm that utilizes its collection for evaluation and distribution of important and potentially useful agricultural crops. The collection ensures biodiversity, making traditional and wild varieties readily available for breeding new improved varieties.
At present, the Institute maintains more than 43,000 accessions of about 500 species. The National Seed Industry Council (NSIC) and the IPB-Germplasm Registration and Release Office have approved more than 100 varieties developed by the Institute. The varieties are planted by farmers and growers nationwide under the national programs for increased crop production.
Plant breeding research also focuses on breeding crops, resulting in improved varieties in terms of quality, yield, and pest and disease resistance to include other abiotic stresses. More so high quality breeder and foundation seeds, seedlings, vegetative planting materials, and asexually propagated fruit trees are being propagated. These include crop varieties that have been developed through tissue culture technique.
IPB’s work on ornamentals
As among the priority crops of IPB, new and promising ornamental varieties, specifically the Mussaendas, Hibiscus and the Hoyas, have been the subject of research.
Cutflowers (fresh buds that have been cut from the plant), foliage, and other plants fresh (foliage and branches of trees, shrubs, bushes and other plants) or dried, and live plants comprise the ornamentals. Live plants include palms, trees, shrubs, and bushes. For dried ornamentals, dyes and bleaches are used in plant materials of fruits, grasses, eucalyptus, and ferns.
One of the promising contributions of the Institute is the release of Hibiscus varieties the “Centennial”, “Millennium”, “Star”, and the “Oblation” Series.
In recognition of the Centennial year celebration of Philippine Independence, IPB has released the “Centennial” Series in recognition of Philippine heroines. Eleven Hibiscus varieties have been released in yellow tone colors (Oryang, Marcela, and Nay Isa), orange tone colors (Lolay, Ningning, and Heneral Aqueda) and red tone colors (Gabriela, Goria, and Sentenarya). The Tandang Sora is the only white tone color variety. The Hibiscus varieties are characterized by their single-petal and that can be easily propagated by cutting.
Also, IPB has released the Hibiscus “Millenium” popular for the single-petalled and very prolific bloomers.
This served as a tribute to UPLB women scientists for their significant contribution to the advancement of Philippine Agriculture. Scientists given recognition were Drs. Claire Baltazar, Dolores Ramirez, Gelia Castillo, and Emerita de Guzman. The hybrids were in yellow tone colors. Red tone varieties were named after Millennia and Obdulia Sision while the two-tone color after Helen Valmayor.
The “Star” Series are the “Megastar”, “Diamond star”, “Superstar”, “Star for all Seasons”, and “Novastar”. The “Oblation” Series were named after UP President Emerlinda Roman, DOST Secretary Estrella Alabastro, and UP Board of Regent Nelia Gonzales.
The potted mussaenda is one project of the Institute coordinated with the Bureau of Agricultural Resarch (BAR). The study on the Development of Colored Multi-Petaloid Mussaendas Suited for Potted Ornamentals, conducted by Dr. Simeona V. Siar, aimed to develop indigenous ornamentals such as Mussaenda as substitute and alternative to the traditional and introduced potted ornamentals such as poinsettias and chrysanthemum. This included: (1) hybridization and development of outstanding plants; and (2) evaluation and mass propagation of outstanding plants. To date, 513 seedlings have been generated from hybrids and open-pollinated cultivars with outstanding varieties being mass-propagated for varietal release and registration and eventual distribution to ornamental growers and enthusiasts.
The project is under the Ornamental RDE Program of the Department of Agriculture closely working on the ornamentals. This is under the High-Impact projects.
IPB also introduced the Philippine endemic and indigenous “Hoya” species as potential export ornamental through studies conducted by Dr. Siar. This showed great potential in the world market. “Hoya” is characterized as “wax plants because of the waxy leaf texture”. New species of Hoya was named after Dr. Siar, Hoya siariae.
Philippine Hoya has gained recognition abroad. In fact, at the Flora Conference on Sustainable Floriculture Industry in Asia, Dr. Siar presented the export potential of the Philippine Hoyas.
As an Institute for plant breeding researches, IPB has served the ornamental industry, making the Philippines known even in other countries, setting new trends and breakthroughs in ornamental production. As an ending quote, the institute states that “IPB breeds crops for a healthy, food-secured and globally competitive Philippines.”
source : www.bar.gov.ph | <urn:uuid:671e4869-a226-4905-8dd6-3cf61d605e78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agribusinessweek.com/institute-of-plant-breeding-intensifying-ornamental-industry-through-plant-breeding/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928788 | 1,747 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Nonprofit muckraking organizations are mushrooming, but most of these have budgets less than $50,000 and five or fewer people on staff.
Five years ago, there were 39 nonprofit investigative reporting organizations in the world. Today there are 106 of them in 47 countries. According to David Kaplan, director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and author of a new study that maps this space, this number includes reporting centers, training institutes, professional associations, grant-making groups and online networks dedicated to investigative journalism.
These nonprofit groups range from lean, one-person operations to multimillion-dollar newsrooms like the Center for Public Integrity (the parent organization of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) in Washington DC, the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco and ProPublica in downtown New York. They are everywhere – from Bosnia to Brazil, and from Iowa to Iraq.
The newest centers – in Italy and Pakistan – have been formed only in the past month. But most of these, says Kaplan, have budgets of less than $50,000 and five or fewer people on staff. Yet, many of them wield clout that is disproportionate to their size, producing or enabling high-quality, high-impact journalism that holds wrongdoers to account.
Most of these organizations have been formed only in the last decade. In the U.S., the growth has been spurred in part by the demise of newspapers and the downsizing of investigative staffs in traditional newsrooms.
Elsewhere, the formation of investigative reporting groups has less to do with collapsing business models than with the emergence of new democracies and the dysfunctional meda systems that have taken root during the democratic transition.
Kaplan attributes the phenomenal expansion of the nonprofit model in part to donor support. He calculates that annually, some $12.5 million in donor funds go to investigative reporting organizations outside the U.S. That’s just two percent of the nearly $500 million that donors spend every year on media assistance.
I ran a nonprofit investigative reporting center in the Philippines for 17 years, and so have intimate knowledge of the challenges faced by these investigative reporting organizations. For sure, physical threats and legal harassment are difficult to deal with, but more routine problems – like training and keeping talented staff, managing partnerships with mainstream news organizations, and perhaps most formidable of all, ensuring a stable revenue stream – can be even more challenging.
I’ll wager that for the most part, directors of investigative nonprofits stay awake at night thinking about next year’s payroll rather than contemplating jail time because of a controversial story.
The sustainability issue is a difficult one. Investigative reporting has mostly been subsidized – in profitable newsrooms, by money-earning sections of the business, and in unprofitable ones, by owners with deep pockets or political agendas (or both). Independent nonprofits can be brave and nimble because they don’t have to please press proprietors; neither are they saddled with legacy newsrooms or news products. They can afford to be experimental and innovative; they can take risks – and reap the rewards accordingly.
The downside is that they are in an unending race to raise money, whether it is from foundations, rich individuals or earned revenue. At the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, we made at one point up to a third of our annual budget from the sale of books, the syndication of stories and training courses. We tried everything, including selling DVDs, magazine subscriptions and even a game that could be downloaded on mobile phones (it was a nice experiment but flopped as a revenue-earner). We’ve contemplated setting up money-making businesses, including café, a conference center, even a Kinko’s type of operation but chickened out because we were fundamentally journalists, not businesspeople. Besides, investigative journalism was risky enough as a business.
In a forum sponsored by the Center for International Media Assistance in Washington, D.C. last week, Kaplan argued for more donor funds for investigative reporting organizations around the world. He said that the funds could go to supporting national organizations as well as regional and international networks. These groups need help with training and with sustainability, he said, and the international support that they currently get is miniscule, especially compared to their impact and potential for bringing about reforms.
Both he and Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project want donors to take a more coherent and strategic approach, eschewing things like one-off training courses for more programmatic support that includes funds for reporting as well as sustainability, capacity building and legal and physical safety. (A video of the forum can be viewed here; Sullivan also wrote a critical report on donor funding for investigative journalism in emerging democracies.)
I was in that forum as well, and expressed concern about the capacity of these organizations to spend say, twice or thrice more than their current budgets. Most of them, given their current size and capabilities, can grow only incrementally.
I believe many groups deserve more support than they are currently getting, but also worry that if they become accustomed to certain levels of foreign support, they will be left holding the bag as donor attention shifts before they can develop revenue streams.
The truth is that nonprofits occupy only a small, albeit important, place in the watchdog space. Commercial media, especially independent media, are doing accountability journalism as well. Publications like Tempo in Indonesia, The Mail & Guardian in South Africa, Caixin in China and Tehelka in India are producing prizewinning watchdog reporting. Support for independent media, like the loans and investment provided by the Media Development Loan Fund, is therefore as crucial. [Disclosure: I am on the MDLF board.]
Meanwhile, as the investigative capacity in traditional newsrooms in the West declines, advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch and Global Witness are filling the watchdogging gap, fielding researchers, many of them former journalists, to dig up the dirt. And this is how the future looks: A watchdog ecosystem that professional journalists share, rather than dominate – a space that includes advocacy groups, citizens, bloggers and partisan muckrakers. If we get it right, that space will be vibrant and alive. | <urn:uuid:d409318a-5a2f-447e-9e99-4994b792edcb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.icij.org/blog/2013/01/why-investigative-reporting-life-support | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962649 | 1,263 | 1.9375 | 2 |
This article was originally distributed via PRWeb. PRWeb, WorldNow and this Site make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.
SOURCE: National Center For Policy Analysis
10 Policy Changes That Lower Costs and Increase Access to Higher Quality Care
Dallas, TX (PRWEB) February 01, 2013
Reforming the Medicare payment structure to reward market-driven entrepreneurial innovations would cut healthcare costs by nearly $2.5 trillion by mid-century, according to a new study from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).
“To truly reform Medicare, entrepreneurs must be free to innovate,” said NCPA Senior Fellow and co-author of the study, Devon Herrick. He singled out four basic categories for reform that would provide immediate results:
•Freeing the Patient: it is time to treat patients as partners in their own health care. The first step is to make individuals responsible for managing at least some of their own money. They would benefit from prudent decisions and costs would be reduced.
•Free the Doctor: Medicare’s bureaucratic rules prohibits payment for many services that providers would like to offer and patients would like to receive. Instead, any Medicare provider should be reimbursed for any service that: (1 does not increase cost, and (2) improves the quality of care.
•Free the Market: Medical fees should be determined the way prices are determined everywhere else in the economy -- in the marketplace.
•Free the Insurer: Insurers need to be given incentives to create specialized plans -- especially for chronic illnesses -- that compete with each other. An example can be seen in Medicare Advantage plans, which allow seniors to choose to receive their benefits from a private insurer.
“Most current and proposed health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, are changes developed by third-parties, such as insurance companies and bureaucratic administrators,” said Herrick. “In every other industry, innovations come from entrepreneurs who provide new services and come up with new products and solutions that revolutionize each market. It’s time we changed the incentives and applied the same approach to health care.”
How to do that? The NCPA study explores several specific examples of successful entrepreneurial health care solutions and proposes 10 important policy changes:
•Retail Outlets: Medicare should immediately allow enrollees to obtain care at almost all walk-in clinics and free-standing emergency care clinics — paying posted market prices, not Medicare’s prices.
•Telephone and E-Mail Services: Medicare should allow beneficiaries to use telephone and e-mail physician services — paying market prices, not Medicare’s prices.
•Concierge Doctors: If patients and doctors are willing, Medicare should be willing to throw away its 7,500 item price list, pay some portion of the concierge fee (usually about $1,500 per patient per year) and let the medical marketplace handle the rest.
•Billing by Time, Rather Than Task: Doctors should be allowed to change the mix of services they offer. If the change in practice is substantial enough, we should allow patient copayments and let them be determined in the marketplace.
•Paramedical Personnel: Nurses and physician assistants should be allowed to perform tasks that do not require a physician’s level of expertise in order to expand the availability of low-cost medical care.
•Bundling: Providers should be encouraged to offer package prices for bundled services and Medicare should be willing to pay the package price wherever it is expected to be less than what taxpayers would otherwise have paid.
•International Medical Tourism: Medicare should take advantage of the international medical tourism market — a real market where providers routinely compete for patients based on price and quality.
•Domestic Medical Tourism: Medicare should allow seniors to share in the savings created by traveling to a higher-quality, lower-cost facility domestically.
•Selective Relaxation of Price Controls: Medicare should let a few doctors in a given area — but not most — charge anything they like for covered services. Medicare would continue to pay its list price, but the patient would have to pay any extra charge out of pocket.
•Health Care Stamps: Health Care Stamps for low-income seniors eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid (so-called dual-eligibles) would function similar to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called food stamps, ensuring that the poor can complete for resources with all other buyers of care.
The NCPA proposes replacing Medicare's current structure with a new simplified structure meant to mimic the health insurance benefits the rest of Americans enjoy. A “Standard Comprehensive Plan” (SCP) would be the new “core” Medicare plan. It collapses all of the current archaic divisions of Part A, Part B and Part D into a single comprehensive program with an across-the-board $5,000 deductible. Beneficiaries would pay a premium equal to 15 percent of program costs. Current enrollees could stay where they are or could switch into the new plan, but all new enrollees would be in the SCP.
Future retirees would save for future health costs using individually-owned Health Insurance Retirement Accounts (HIRAs). Through these accounts current workers would partially prepay future Medicare costs and thereby reduce the projected tax burden on future workers.
“Without reform, Medicare will consume nearly nine percent of our economy by the middle of this century but the proposed NCPA reforms would save an estimated 2.5 trillion in the same period,” said Herrick.
Full text: How Entrepreneurs Could Solve Medicare’s Problems: http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st344.pdf
These reforms are outlined in NCPA President John Goodman’s latest book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.
The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, established in 1983. We bring together the best and brightest minds to tackle the country's most difficult public policy problems — in health care, taxes, retirement, small business, and the environment. Visit our website today for more information.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/2/prweb10385003.htm | <urn:uuid:cc17c2c3-1435-4ea5-aaee-3eb19815f190> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kljb.com/story/20939579/ncpa-study-the-key-to-successful-medicare-reform-entrepreneurs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932284 | 1,302 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The conventional wisdom is that this is a function of ideology. Conservatives say that the public is disgusted with liberal theology and marshal convincing statistics to support that claim. A variant on that description is the candle burning at both ends theory, that says that mainline churches are losing members both to conservatives on the right, and to secularism on the left.
But, a recent study from an Episcopal demographer begs to differ with this assessment. In this view, it mostly comes down to differences in birth rates.
The membership of the Episcopal Church has been predominantly white. And the birthrate among whites has declined substantially since the fifties. Hathaway finds (p. 13) “the association between [white birthrate and mainline membership growth] is so strong that it produces a correlation of .94 (0 being no relationship and 1.0 begin a perfect relationship). In statistical terms, 88% of the year to year variation in mainline membership can be explained by the birth rate.” (He finds the correlation .89 between white birthrate growth and member growth in the Episcopal Church.) Further (p. 16),
"As noted earlier, all denominations—mainline and conservative—were affected adversely by social changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. However, mainline denominations were hit hardest by the changes because declines in the birth rate were much more severe among the more highly educated white population. (Among conservative Protestants and Mormons the birth rate remained much higher than for the mainline, insulating these groups from the full effect of declines in fertility)."
and (p. 17)
"The Episcopal Church has the highest proportion of members among mainline denominations who are college graduates and in households earning $75,000 or more. As a result, the birth rate among Episcopalians is much lower than the national average—and even lower than the population of non-Hispanic whites. A reasonable estimate, based on education and race, is approximately 1.5 children per woman (compared to the replacement level of 2.1) for Episcopalians."
The evidence for the demographic view is convincing, and also explains why one would see in a single Roman Catholic Church with a single ideology, a decline in Anglo membership matched by an increase in Hispanic membership, to produce little net change.
The Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page noted data that support a mixed demographic and political view a year and a half ago, implying that the demographic differences between denominations that fall upon political lines are no coincidences:
According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%[.] . . .
The fertility gap doesn't budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race--or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative. Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today. As one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it, "Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation."
The Episcopal demographic study doesn't directly measure either inflows through conversion to mainline denominations, or outflows by people who leave religion entirely or join a different religious denomination. But, looking at the birth rate data and bottom line numbers, the implication of the demographic study is that conversions into and out of denominations are largely a wash.
A Baptist source (cited by an Episcopalian and probably reporting on a study also reported here) puts the relative contributions of birth rate and conversion at 70% birth rate and 30% conversion, while a labor source cited in the same place acknowledges but down plays the denominational impact on birth rates.
Christian Century magazine has a 2004 report that is more nuanced.
Membership statistics have nuances that support a variety of conclusions. If Unitarians, a liberal denomination, grew by 80 percent between 1963 and 1976, if liberal Protestants and Jews have low birth rates while conservative Protestants have high birth rates, if church attendance across denominations has been relatively constant in the 20th century, then the received notion of liberal or mainline "decline" since the 1960s needs some complicating footnotes. In any event, denominational religion's twists and turns provide grist for the historian's mill, enhancing an overall understanding of the evolution of the American religious scene that includes a shift toward nondenominational religious expression.
One place where this doesn't add up is the growing ranks of the not religious. Non-religious people are now a much larger share of the population than they used to be, but are demographically closer to the mainline Christian denominations than to the conservative Protestant and significantly non-Anglo denominations. This can't be explained with birth rates. | <urn:uuid:a10a0aee-dd68-478c-9780-263556a74b70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2007/12/denominational-demographics.html | 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 | 0.952897 | 1,118 | 1.78125 | 2 |
You're writing an introduction for one of your favorite teachers for a speech that she's going to give at a conference. You want to say really nice things about her. She works really hard, so you write this in your introduction.
She goes above and beyond to deliver the very best education to each and every student.
This is a set expression. To "go above and beyond the call of duty" means to do a lot more than you are required or expected to to for your job. If you break the expression down into parts, "go above and beyond" means to do more. "The call of duty" means "the things that you're asked to do for your job". This expression comes from the military, where it was used to talk about soldiers who died while fighting for their country.
Now, the phrase is often used to talk about teachers, social workers, nurses, and other people who work hard to help people. It can also be used to talk about customer service:
We go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that every customer is 100% satisfied.
As you can see from the example at top, you can also leave off the second part and just say:
They really go above and beyond.
Whether you include "the call of duty" or not, this is a pretty formal phrase. It fits best in written English or in formal speeches.
You probably already know that "deliver" is used as in, for example, delivering a pizza. But it can also be used to talk about giving something valuable to your students, customers, readers, listeners, bosses, and so on. This isn't usually a physical object. It's usually some kind of feeling or idea. For example:
PhraseMix delivers realistic English phrases that you can use in day-to-day life.
Our job is to deliver an entertaining and relaxing experience for our guests.
My methods can be a little disorganized, but I deliver results.
The phrase "the very best" is just a stronger way of saying "the best". It's a sign that the person is not talking about the top 20% of something, but maybe the top 5%. For example:
The secret to our success is that we only hire the very best people.
In this sentence, the speaker wants the listener to think that they hire the most qualified employees, with a good educational background and a lot of experience.
If I'm taking my wife out for dinner at a really nice restaurant and she acts surprised, I might say:
Only the very best for you, my dear.
This would be a joke, because she knows that we don't always eat at such expensive restaurants.
"Each" and "every" basically mean the same thing. But people use them together in the phrase "each and every" when they want to emphasize the idea of "every" or "each". It's also a little more common in speeches to large groups of people than in one-on-one conversation. For example, you can say this to a group of employees:
I want each and every one of you to come up with a list of five to ten potential customers. Who should we be pitching this to?
(Print this lesson) | <urn:uuid:440e3571-2890-4de6-b73b-1259494c098c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phrasemix.com/examples/she-goes-above-and-beyond-to-deliver-the-very-best-education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968414 | 669 | 2.109375 | 2 |
INVENTION and DISCOVERY:
Printed Books from Fifteenth-Century Europe
An Exhibition at Bridwell Library, February 1 – May 3, 2010
|BEGINNINGS IN MAINZ||
8. LUCAS DE TOLLENTIS, Bishop of Sebenico (1428–1491). [Indulgence for the Jubilee Year 1480]. Broadside, printed on vellum. [Mainz: Peter Schoeffer, before 22 March] 1480.
This rare letter of indulgence, one of two known
copies, was offered for the remission of sins in the Jubilee Year of 1480.
Bridwell Library’s copy was purchased and filled out by hand at Kirn,
Germany, on 17 April 1480; unfortunately, the name of the purchaser has been
erased. The bottom edge was folded up and pierced with string used to attach
the issuer’s official seal, which is not preserved.
may not be published without the permission of Bridwell Library. | <urn:uuid:65762d7a-888b-4384-a16b-810163fe391c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smu.edu/bridwell_tools/specialcollections/I&D.Mainz8.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916905 | 221 | 2.59375 | 3 |
8 March 2013
Maralinga's past is part of veterans' present and future
It may be decades since the British government's nuclear weapons tests in South Australia but for the men who worked on the site, the damage of nuclear exposure is very real.
A group of veterans have taken their complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. But, Meagan Kopatz says, time is running out.
Between 1952 and 1963, the United Kingdom conducted 12 nuclear weapons tests in the Monte Bello group of islands off the coast of Western Australia and at Emu Field and Maralinga in the South Australian desert.
Prime minister Menzies agreed to the tests and for using the Australian army as ground support without even putting the proposal to his cabinet for approval.
Most people don't know that part of Australian history. I do.
My father, Ray Phillipson OAM, served in the Australian Army at Maralinga. He was scheduled to work on the Buffalo series of four explosions over a three month period.
As a child, this aspect of my father's army career fascinated me. It seemed other worldly to think that my dad had witnessed nuclear bombs explode not even two miles from where he had been standing.
I once asked him what it was like to stand so close. He stated quite plainly that he recalled a flash, a gush of wind and a smell not unlike a NSW Cityrail train when it pulls up the brakes hard into a station. He added that when he went into ground zero to recover cameras and film, the ground crackled underneath his feet. The heat was so intense that in some spots it had turned the sand to glass.
As I grew older, I understood more about the implications of his participation at Maralinga. It wasn't just a boys own adventure, it was an ongoing risk to his health - one that he was not fully informed about at the time.
It seemed unbelievable to me that the soldiers didn't know of the risks. Hiroshima happened years before the tests. But there they are in the archival footage, smiling and watching in awe as the mushroom clouds climb higher into the sky above their heads. They are dressed only in shorts and shirts. Their ignorance to the danger almost seems surreal.
I came to understand that this was Australia in the 1950's. The 24-hour news cycles and internet connections of the future were all but fantasy. It was only years after the fact that citizens learnt what had really happened in Darwin during the war, let alone Hiroshima. Australia was truly an island continent, closed off in innocence from the world around it.
Even if he had known, my father was not the type to disobey direct order. He diligently joined the parade in the field, turned his back when instructed, and waited until the explosion went off. At this point, he received heat flashes on the back of his uncovered neck and was asked to turn around. He remembers physically seeing the blast hurtle across the barren landscape towards him.
About 10 years after the tests, the veterans who were there started to notice higher than normal rates of cancer as well as infertility, miscarriages, birth defects and mental illness in their children. An association was formed to campaign for access to veteran benefits and compensation. It is a campaign that has yet to bear fruit.
Service at Maralinga was classified as not active duty since no bullets or enemy combat were involved. Those who served there but not elsewhere were not eligible for access to veterans affairs benefits, such as the white or gold card. My father had also served in the Malaya Intervention so his health costs have thankfully been covered.
In 2006, a report commissioned by the Australian Government showed that Australians working at the Maralinga and Emu Field testing sites had a 23 per cent higher risk of developing cancer than the general population and were 18 per cent more likely to die from those cancers. Bullets or not, these men have suffered because of their duty.
Over the years, my father testified at a royal commission into the tests and leant his name to class actions against the British government seeking compensation for the fatherless families -rare points of protest by him. And now there is the latest appeal to the Human Rights Commission (paywall). It is more like an appeal to common decency to right the wrong of how these young men were used and damaged. I doubt much will come of it.
There is seemingly no impetus to provide these men with access to medical care, let alone compensation for what they and their families have suffered because the Australian government of the time decided to use them as guinea pigs.
Governments of all shades and persuasions have adopted the strategy ever since of sitting the remaining veterans out. It is a ghoulish calculation, waiting for these veterans to succumb to old age or cancer so the problem disappears into history.
The strategy seems to have worked so far. Every other year since his service my father has marched on ANZAC Day and noted how a few more of his mates had succumbed to cancers. Now he too is living on borrowed time as cancer spreads throughout his body. His life can be measured out in months, not years. And that is if he is lucky.
Apart from the questionable morality, it is not good enough to wait these men out. Overexposure to radiation is far more complex than that. It is not just limited to the veterans - their children and their grandchildren have also been genetically touched by the tests.
For us, the questions of the past and its impact on our future health loom in the unknown. This makes it not just a shameful blight on Australia's history but also on our present-day.
Meagan Kopatz lives in Canberra. She is a public servant, writer, wife, mother and daughter. Her father, Ray Phillipson OAM, served in Maralinga during the nuclear tests. He is currently battling terminal cancer. View her full profile here. | <urn:uuid:cd9f4f23-d8b7-4d84-b456-618a58666df0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4558620.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986845 | 1,209 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Surprisingly, India has a long and unpardonable history of clinging to antique and colonial laws like Indian Telegraph Act. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that laws like Telegraph Act do not serve the present purposes of lawful interception in India.
In the absence of a Constitutionally Valid Lawful Interception Law in India, companies like Google, Skype and Blackberry can legally refuse to part with any information regarding its users citing absence of a lawful interception law on the one hand and protecting its users’ Privacy on the other hand.
Unfortunately, Blackberry’s maker Research in Motion (RIM) has succumbed to Indian Government’s pressures and has openly shown its intentions to violate the Privacy Rights of its users in a “Cloud Computing Environment”. This also proves that India is still not ready for a cloud computing environment. Fortunately, Google has rightly rejected Indian Government’s possible demand well in advance citing privacy reasons.
India is deliberately escaping from enacting suitable Privacy Laws and Data Protection Laws. Further, since the Colonial Laws like Telegraph Act serve the purpose of Indian Government, it is abstaining from enacting suitable and timely Legislations.
However, of all Illegal and Unconstitutional Projects nothing can match the Violating Limits of Aadhar Project and UDIAI. With “Biometric Information” as its base and core components, Indian residents have virtually surrendered their Privacy Rights in the hands of a Regime and Government that cannot be trusted at all in this regard. That is why there is an urgent need of Robust, Effective and Constitutionally Sound Legal Framework in this regard.
In these circumstances it can be safely said that Indian Parliament is slightly better than a non operational one. It does not conduct any relevant business these days and even if it does not operate at all, not much difference would be there. Are Indian Parliamentarians listening or has Indian Constitution been “Bypassed” for surrendering all its “Constitutional Powers” to its Executive Branch and Bureaucrats? Perhaps, the concept of “Separation of Power” no longer exists under Indian Constitution. | <urn:uuid:7b652045-8801-4dbd-8e33-353b317d7c33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hrpic.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9405 | 431 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Thirsty lawns and farm fields throughout the Wichita area can expect a welcome helping of rainfall over the next few days, forecasters say.
Up to 3 inches of rain could fall in parts of the metropolitan area and southeast Kansas by the time the storm system departs the area late this week.
“There’s going to be a lot of gradual rain here, which is what we need,” said Mike Smith, senior vice president at AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions in Wichita.
The “widespread soaking rain,” as National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Smith put it, will be embedded with the occasional thunderstorm.
The Hydrometeorological Prediction Center is projecting between 1.5 and 2.5 inches of rain for Wichita through Friday, with parts of southeast Kansas receiving up to 4 inches.
If that forecast proves accurate, the rain should take a healthy bite out of the drought still gripping the region, forecasters say. Wichita is 4 inches below normal for precipitation.
“We are way behind” in rainfall for the year, Scott Smith said. “That should help quite a bit.” | <urn:uuid:c7a797a4-ccc5-4c77-98b3-0710377b6a04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kansas.com/2012/09/25/2504038/rainy-week-should-take-bite-out.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935169 | 237 | 1.625 | 2 |
RIGHTING YOUR HOBIE
On that reach...flying through the air and water then...WHAM!!! Your Hobie Cat has forced you to swim instead of sail. Not really what you had in mind? if you have planned ahead you will be up and sailing again quickly. Whether sailing singlehanded or with a few friends, righting your boat can be quick and easy. First, preventing your mast from becoming one with the bottom, or turtling is a priority. We at Hobie have designed mast floats to help keep your Hobie Cat from becoming a mudhen. The floats attach to the top of your mast and will prevent the mast tip from sinking. The next objective will be to get back to sailing! Righting systems vary a bit but the theory is the same. A line is attached to your Hobie, thrown over the hull in the air and then weight (yours and or your friends) is used to lever the boat back to an upright and sailable position. After you have checked that everyone is OK, turn your hulls and mast into the wind (see diagram)
and uncleat your sails. You and your friend now need to congregate on the hull that is in the water. Grab the righting line, lean away from the trampoline and get as close to the water as you can. Try to stay out of the water. If you don't have enough body weight to right the cat we have the Righting Bucket! Just attach it to the boat with the hook that is provided, throw over the upper hull and fill the bucket with water! With the bucket strap over your shoulder, lean your weight out from the boat. The bag comes clear of the water and up the cat will come!! Grab the dolphin striker or crossbar as it comes up, climb aboard, sheet in and GO! Tipping your Hobie over can be a great way to cooloff and enjoy the water...try it! It's excellent practice for when you weren't planning to go for a swim but your Hobie decided that you needed to cool off! | <urn:uuid:58d2df50-ff15-461f-ae2a-df174610a39e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hobiecat.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5452 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96365 | 425 | 1.960938 | 2 |
South Africa's telecommunications industry has lived through yet another year of growth, change and upheaval, touching lows like the worrying upheaval at Telkom, and reaching highs such as the launch of the country's first commercial long-term evolution (LTE) networks. The factor that I would single out as perhaps the most important trend of 2012 is the rapid move of smartphones into the mainstream.
In the process, they have brought easy, personal access to services such as the web, social networking, email and instant messaging to many South Africans for the first time. This reflects a worldwide trend in which smartphones have emerged beyond the developed country into the emerging world at an impressive speed. Indeed, the uptake of smartphones must surely rank as one of the most rapid adoptions of a technology that we have ever seen, with falling prices of data and devices acting as the spur.
According to Strategy Analytics, one billion people around the world - or one in seven people - today carry smartphones, compared to 708 million in the third quarter of 2011. Adoption in South Africa has been just as impressive, with a World Wide Worx study earlier this year showing that about 10 million smartphones have been sold in South Africa to date.
Spend on data has increased by half
World Wide Worx also notes that the average user's cellphone spend on data has increased by half in the past 18 months - from 8% of budget at the end of 2010 to 12% in mid-2012. This shows that smartphones are slowly starting to deliver on their promise of closing the digital gap between those who can afford PCs and ADSL lines, and those of more modest means.
Behind the scenes, one reason that smartphones are becoming such an attractive proposition for users is the way that data tariffs in South Africa have tumbled over the past three years. The investments that the industry has made in undersea cables, national fibre, transmission networks, and so on, mean that bandwidth is cheaper and more plentiful than before.
From our side, we are seeing massive uptake of smartphones among our subscribers. It is interesting to see that many users are looking for financing to purchase the smartphones they aspire to own. In some cases, these are users wanting to buy latest devices from Samsung or Apple. In other instances, the requests for financing come from people who really want to take up the technology for the first time so that they can be connected to the Internet and all the services and benefits it offers.
Smartphone penetration is still very low
It's encouraging to see this adoption, but smartphone penetration is still very low - one in five, if that much. So the challenge that we face as the telecoms industry for the next year is to get even more of these devices in the hands of the consumer at an affordable price.
Falling device prices may help - we're seeing talk of sub-USD40 Android handsets - but innovative financing models will be important. It will also be critical for the industry to package more flat-rate data services that make prices affordable and transparent to the end-user. If we get these factors right, smartphones could, within a few years, become as pervasive as cellphones are today.
Mark Taylor, chief executive officer (CEO) of Nashua Mobile, is an ICT industry veteran with more than two decades of experience. Prior to re-joining Nashua Mobile on 1 October 2012, Taylor was the managing director (MD) of Vodacom Payment Services (M-PESA) as well as managing executive for Vodacom's Supply Chain and Logistics divisions.
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Mark my words: OK is actually much worse
The Final Word By Craig Wilson
Just last week, a reader wrote to say he was concerned about me. He said I'd succumbed to the "actually" disease. I use the word too much, he said. He called it a "twitch." Who knew?
He pointed out that I had used "actually" three times in a recent column, and therefore I was now infected.
The only known cure, he said, is to listen for the word in conversation, since it's overused by everyone. (Obviously I'm not that special.) He warned that this exercise would drive me nuts but would cure me of ever using it again.
It did drive me nuts, actually. But a cure? No.
I'm always up for some constructive criticism, but I think this reader might have a bit too much time on his hands. And between you and me, I don't think I do use the word all that much, actually. But I'll take the good reader's comments under advisement.
So many words to abuse. So little time.
Today, for instance, is the first annual OK Day, a day to celebrate the invention of OK.
OK was born 172 years ago in the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, when the editor was engaging in a fad at the time ó creating humorous abbreviations. He wrote in the middle of a paragraph, "o.k. - all correct." It took off.
"In today's troubled world we should celebrate when things turn out OK, even if they aren't perfect," Allan Metcalf says in his book OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. "OK inspires us to keeping going."
Not that there isn't an OK disease, too.
I had an editor once who added OK to either the beginning or end of every sentence she uttered. It didn't matter what she was saying.
This story needs just a bit more work, OK?
OK, I'm going down to lunch, and we'll talk when I come back.
I was about to strangle her when she wisely moved on to another job. Saying goodbye, she told me I was going to be OK.
She was right. Actually, I've been better than OK. It's everyone else …
I overheard some guys talking about the NCAA basketball tournament last week when I realized one of them said "you know" at the end of every sentence.
Duke's not going to make it, you know. Kansas has it all locked up, you know …
Compared with him and the OK editor, I think my "actually" tick is a minor ailment. In fact, I don't think I'm ailing at all.
About USATODAY.com: Site Map | FAQ | Contact Us | Jobs with Us | Terms of Service | <urn:uuid:28fb0402-0851-4179-bec8-311c93550b04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20110323/final23_st.art.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984578 | 597 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Joe Romm has an important post about the folks down in Texas who are constantly trying to bring the textbooks into line with ideology. This is something we usually think of as affecting the evolution issue, but no–climate change is also a topic that is being watched closely by the watchers of educational content.
Romm himself is linking a Washington Monthly piece called “Revisionaries,” which reports the following:
A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.
The strategy is identical, isn’t it? “Critically analyze” evolution, “critically analyze” climate change…and smuggle bad science into the classroom to sow doubt and confuse the kids. Frankly, I am wondering these days if climate denial may not be growing into an even more massive phenomenon than evolution denial in the US. I doubt it has the potential to be as long-lived. But the intensity of it, which I feel every day now, simply dwarfs what’s going on in the evolution fight…. | <urn:uuid:480d1218-f528-4941-a4a0-907d23723a88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/tag/textbooks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956308 | 316 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Alpha & Omega Ministries Apologetics Blog
More From Pulpit Crimes
09/13/2006 - James WhiteRecall that in Acts 10:42 Peter spoke of Jesus as the judge of the living and the dead, and that this was a definitional portion of the proclamation the Lord Himself commands from His servants. Clearly, this aspect of the biblical message was vital to the first generations of the faithful, but it has fallen out of the consciousness of a wide portion of the church today. The meek and mild Jesus standing at the hearts door looks very little like the powerful judge of the living and the dead announced in Scripture. The Jesus of the Bible is indeed a gracious, loving Savior. But there is an order to divine truths, and before Jesus can be experienced as Redeeming Friend He must be seen as Creator, Maker,Judge, Lord. Inverting the order may save us from the frowns of men but it likewise creates the kind of malaise we see in so many would-be-Christians today. The wonder of Jesus as Savior is that as just judge He could so properly leave us to wrath, but, in mercy, He does not.
The charge Paul delivers to his beloved son Timothy is lodged with solemnity in the presence of God and of the divine judge, Jesus. This is not a human charge. It is not witnessed solely by a human tribunal. This kind of high adjuration is hard for modern Westerners to fully grasp. We have lost, in the main, any sense of honoring those in authority. Even our highest public officials are regularly mocked in the media, or asked what kind of underwear they prefer! The weight of representing a high standing person is difficult for many to understand today, so the picture of receiving a charge in the presence of the Father and the Son does not strike us with the solemnity it should. Western individualism has deeply seated the concept of egalitarianism in our thought. Rarely do we experience true solemnity, especially in the context of the commissioning of one to go and represent another who is high and exalted and full of authority. And yet this is surely what Timothy would think of here. He would have seen with his eyes, or depicted in art, the commissioning of representatives of high officials, even kings and emperors, and so he would have a context in which to hear Pauls words. His mentor is giving him a solemn charge in the presence of the very judge of all mankind.
Notes on Acts 10:42
09/05/2006 - James WhiteHere are some notes I wrote up on Acts 10:42 for the book. Now the trick is converting notes to final text.
And He ordered us to preach to the people, and solemnly to testify that this is the One who has been appointed by God as Judge of the living and the dead.Let's consider what we can learn from this description of preaching in the early church. First, we see that it is a divine command. He ordered us to preach to the people.Christ, to whom all authority in heaven and earth has been given (Matthew 28:18), commands us to preach. It is not an optional activity. It is not, Well, if it is convenient, we will invest a little effort.It is a command of Christ to His church, a divine imperative. There are not many activities defined for the church where it can be said with certainty, Christ ordered us to engage in this activity, but preaching is just such an activity.
In this context preaching to the peoplehad a particular meaning; those doing the preaching knew there would be resistance and a cost (John 9:22). This was due to the content of the message. To proclaim the One crucified by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem as the One appointed by God as Judge of the living and the dead was to take a stand that admitted no compromise. Anyone who would knowingly confess Christ in this manner was taking a definitive step with lasting results. But given that this is a command, obviously, those fulfilling the command could not choose to edit, alter, or soften, the message itself. It was an all-or-nothing message. They were not testifying that Jesus might bethe Judge of the living and the dead. They were not testifying that Jesus was the Judge of some of the living and some of the dead, either. This was a message that was directed at each and every person inwhatever audience they addressed (since, we would assume, everyone fits into the two rather all-encompassing categories of the living and the dead).
Note as well that proclaiming Jesus as the Judge of the living and the dead is not quite the same thing as saying Jesus will be your best buddy. It is not the same as saying believing in Jesus will fix your financial woes and straighten your teeth and improve your marriage. In fact, accurately identifying Jesus as each persons judge is anything but attractive. In fact, outside of the work of the Spirit of God in a persons heart, this message will repel. Think of it: Hello Mr. Criminal. You know you are guilty. And here comes the judge.
This message was delivered in the form of a testimony. We testify to these things. I swear that this is true. Ive experienced it myself. I have acknowledge Jesus to be the judge of the living and the dead, and I have put my faith in Him so as to receive forgiveness of sins. By testifying we are putting ourselves on the line as a matter of integrity, but we are also joining our audience as fellow sinners in need of grace and forgiveness. It is only as the redeemed that we point others to the Redeemer, as those forgiven testifying of the source of forgiveness.
And finally, there is a key term used here that has truly been lost in the large portion of preaching and proclamation today. Solemnly. This is actually part of the term to testify. Our testimony is to be solemn, serious, fitting of the subjectof proclamation. There is something unnatural about speaking of eternal judgment, redemption, forgiveness, lordship, and life, in the context of light-hearted entertainment and Hawaiian shirt informality. I'm sorry, but it is hard for me to take a man seriously who rides a Harley into the service, for example, or who is going out of his way to be viewed not as a herald of a majestic person with a weighty message but as my buddy, my pal, my next door neighbor. This kind of seriousness, fervency, gravity, is not inconsistent with the joy that marks ones own testimony of redemption and forgiveness. Nor does it mean ones proclamation has to be boring, stiff, or lacking in interest or even appropriate humor. Sadly, we live in a day when many who come intothe fellowship lack basic listening skills or the discipline to listen for almost any length of time at all. An appropriate, topic-sensitive use of humor can refocus an audience so that you can press home an important statement. But humor can never become the vehicle of real Christian preaching. When we testify that Jesus is the judge of the living and the dead, that is not a joking matter. One cannot but speak of such weighty matters with a solemnity fitting the subject. | <urn:uuid:51d4f874-14d7-4632-9218-4e77871bfdbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2006-09&catid=8 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974263 | 1,475 | 1.703125 | 2 |
May 12, 2008 @ 6:18 am
Ian Mobsby, one of the founding members of Moot, explores the issue of risk, 'the body of Christ', God the Holy Spirit, or more metaphorically God the Sustainer & Challenger. This God unsettles things, stirred things up, encouraged people to move on, to attempt to catch up with what God the Trinity was doing. In this homily Ian quotes the words of Metropolitan Anthony of the Russian Orthodox Church in his book "The Living Body of Christ"
The Church is not just the Eucharistic community, but is an extension of the incarnation; it encompasses all matter, all creation, all of humanity where the Holy Spirit is at work... There is a difference between tradition and traditionalism, as the outworking of the Holy Spirit through risk since Pentecost. Tradition is life-giving where traditionalism fossilises and kills. Many churches steeped in traditionalism have become liturgical ghettos. The true nature of the Church since Pentecost, is to be outward-looking, open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and willing to take risks: it should be a missionary community. A Community of Servants full of love". | <urn:uuid:81b11628-9dbc-43bb-b47d-7fc41899da20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mootuk.podbean.com/2008/05/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94617 | 251 | 1.804688 | 2 |
A retiring top deputy at the FBI has given a blunt assessment of public and private efforts to combat cyberattacks on corporate targets: "We're not winning."
Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director in charge of cybersecurity, told the Wall Street Journal that the government and private companies aren't up to the task of defending sensitive data from would-be hackers. He called the current approach to the problem "unsustainable," because criminals can easily outsmart the defenses put in their way.
Henry, who is leaving the FBI after two decades, didn't focus his criticism on specific legislation, but the pessimistic appraisal comes as Congress attempts to tackle the issue in two competing measures aimed at improving security at power plants, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure.
One Senate bill, in a stab at bipartisanship, strips away a controversial Internet "kill switch" and makes other concessions. The authors stress the urgency of imposing a new cybersecurity plan at a time when major data breaches and denial-of-service attacks are increasingly making the headlines, however, several Republican senators have raised concern with the bill and have urged Senate leaders to allow time for other committees to weigh in.
Henry, who is leaving the FBI for a cybersecurity job at an unidentified Washington firm, advocates companies make major changes to persistently vulnerable networks.
"I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security,'' Henry told the Wall Street Journal.
On the congressional front, the bill introduced last month in the Senate, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, calls on the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate cybersecurity programs into one office -- the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications.
At the heart of the bill is a requirement that the federal government identify the most critical components of the country's cyber-infrastructure and require them to meet certain security standards. This would cover everything from the nation's power to water to transportation services.
The bill would require DHS to look at systems that could, among other scenarios, severely damage the economy or cause widespread casualties if they were disrupted in a cyberattack. Operators would work with DHS to secure those systems. | <urn:uuid:6e465807-7e97-4e8f-aef4-bb99081c6a10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/03/27/retiring-fbi-official-says-current-cybersecurity-unsustainable/?intcmp=related | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959008 | 470 | 1.851563 | 2 |
New EPA program pushes for higher e-cycling rates
Sep 21, 2012 | 09:57 AM
| Sean Davidson
NEW YORK A program aimed at encouraging better electronic recycling practices has been launched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA is hoping the program will allow it to make "protective electronics refurbishing and recycling practices the industry standard," the agency said Thursday.....
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The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall on the northern edge of South Kensington, in the City of Westminster, London, England, best known for holding the annual summer Proms concerts since 1941.
Since its opening by Queen Victoria in 1871, the world's leading artists from several performance genres have appeared on its stage and it has become one of the UK's most treasured and distinctive buildings. Each year it hosts more than 350 events including classical concerts, rock and pop, ballet and opera, sports, award ceremonies, school and community events, charity performances and banquets.
The Hall was originally supposed to have been called The Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but the name was changed by Queen Victoria to Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences when laying the foundation stone, as a dedication to her deceased husband and consort Prince Albert. It forms the practical part of a national memorial to the Prince Consort – the decorative part is the Albert Memorial directly to the north in Kensington Gardens, now separated from the Hall by the road Kensington Gore. | <urn:uuid:752d7f54-f0fb-4550-87d6-e291d49bd8f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fotopedia.com/albums/ee0f8b49-14b4-2d4b-9a0f-fdc3caa6adad/entries/0ThI-ZRlYQ0 | 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 | 0.970883 | 214 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Maybe men, who are forever being called into the kitchen to rid the room of spiders, may need to be a little more understanding with their female partners and should learn not to be too hard on them for their fear and phobia.
Researchers have recently discovered that women may actually be genetically pre-pre-programmed to instinctively be more afraid of our cute little arachnids than men.
Almost from birth, girls younger than a year old learn to associate images and illustrations of spiders as depicted with scary faces. A lot sooner, it would seem according to research, than boys of the same age.
According to these same researchers, during the course of human evolution women have become instinctively more aware and cautious about potentially dangerous or harmful animals. During further research into this theory the scientists showed ten boys and ten girls a colour picture of a spider paired with a scary cartoon character, whilst they sat on the lap of their parent. This test was designed to try and teach the children to be afraid of spiders. They also then showed them two alternative pairings. One was a spider alongside a smiley face and the other a flower next to a frightened face.
The results were surprising. The girls actually spent more time looking at the picture of the happy face than they did the frightened face, which researchers concluded is due to the fact that they ‘expected’ spiders to be associated with fear.
The girls were actually more distrustful of the smiley face as they instinctively associating the spider with the frightened face.
When the boys were tested in the exact same way, they were found to have looked at both sets of images for exactly the same length of time. Showing that the anxiety symptoms in children of both sexes did in fact differ.
The prognosis then was that the boys had no pre-conditioned response which would cause them to associate the spider with fear.
In conclusion the researchers summed up these experiments as showing that girls as young as 11 months have already learnt the relationship between a negative facial expression and a relevant frightening trigger (such as a spider or a snake), where as boys of the same age have not.
Based on these reactions it was summarised that because woman can only procreate a limited number of times when compared to men and that they are also in nature the primary carers for their offspring during their childhood, that evolution had provided a built in wariness, where venomous spiders or snakes etc are concerned. These may have been dangers that were faced millions of years ago, when searching for food and as the threat not only to themselves but also their offspring would have been immense, this sense of fear has been developed through evolution
In addition, where the men were concerned, there would have been less pressure on them to avoid these smaller threats. One because the women were the primary carers for the children, and two because of the risks they took every day when hunting for larger prey.
Statistics suggest that around six percent of the human population are afraid of snakes and that four percent have a phobia about spiders (arachnophobia). Researchers believe that based on those included in these figures that women are four times more likely to have a fear of phobia than men. Read the rest of this entry » | <urn:uuid:4610718e-c62b-40d7-95d4-bfe0da48a3e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visualanguage.org/tag/harmful-animals | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985478 | 658 | 2.9375 | 3 |
While most of the world’s attention was focused on Hollywood for Oscars weekend, several miles to the south the Hilton at Los Angeles International Airport was packed with over two thousand Linux users, free software enthusiasts and nerds of all general descriptions attending the 11th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE for short).
SCALE was co-founded by a former UCSB computer science student, Ilan Rabinovitch, along with friends from other universities.
“It started about 11 years ago when we were students at various local universities,” Rabinovitch said. “I was at UCSB from 2001 to 2003, the first event was in 2002 … There were about 5 or 6 of us that started the event together, and most of the core team is still involved ten years later. We’d done some smaller events at the Simi Valley LUG [Linux Users’ Group] … we decided we wanted to do something bigger.”
This year’s conference hosted more than 100 exhibitors and more than 90 speakers holding sessions on topics ranging from kernel hacking and system administration to 3D printing and cloud computing.
Perhaps the main draw of the event was the expo floor, featuring booths from a wide variety of exhibitors. Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox web browser, showed off their new Firefox OS for mobile phones, which was also announced at Mobile World Congress on Sunday. Like the Ubuntu Phone OS, Firefox OS is an operating system for smart phones roughly comparable to iOS and Android, but a Mozilla Phone isn’t likely to replace your iPhone or Android device anytime soon.
“We are targeting a low-cost open web mobile handset,” said Brandon Burton, Web Operations Engineer for Mozilla. “The overall goal is a 50-to-100 dollar unlocked handset.” Rather than compete in a saturated U.S. smart phone market, Mozilla hopes to release it in emerging markets around the world.
“Places like Hungary, Brazil, Montenegro, Poland, Colombia and Venezuela … 2 billion people are going to be coming online in the next five years, and they’re going to come online mobile,” Burton said.
Though 18 carriers and four hardware manufacturers have committed to working with Mozilla, according to a statement from Mobile World Congress, there is no official hardware release planned for the U.S. yet. “We don’t have an initial launch partner … Sprint has said they’re interested in being a partner, so that’s possible,” Burton said. However, the software is freely available for download on existing hardware for experimenters and others curious to try a new platform.
At another booth, three computers ran a demo version of the Haiku operating system, a new OS still in alpha testing. Haiku aims to offer an alternative to the traditional triad of Linux, Mac and Windows, focusing on simplicity, elegance and efficiency.
“We’re really focusing on the everyday desktop user. We’re looking for a system that’s extremely easy to use, very efficient, doesn’t slow you down, doesn’t get in your way,” said Urias McCullough, who was working at the Haiku booth. The project, according to McCullough, should be released relatively soon for those interested.
“The operating system itself is very stable; it runs very well at this point. We feel it’s ready for beta and official release in the coming year or two years,” McCullough said.
Other booths included giants like HP and IBM, demonstrating their latest products and services in areas like cloud computing, and hobbyist groups, such as the one dedicated to building a weather balloon powered by Linux and Arduino, a popular open-source hardware platform. There were also various recognizable companies looking to hire technical talent, such as Facebook, Ticketmaster, Disney and Riot Games, makers of the popular game League of Legends.
In addition to the expo floor, there were talks and presentations on a range of topics, from systems administration and using vi, a text editor for the Unix OS, to cloud computing. One of the most interesting was a keynote speech on 3D printing presented by Kyle Rankin, System Engineering Lead at Artemis Internet, Inc. The talk covered the history of 3D printing, how it works with the open-source community and some useful household items that can be made with a 3D printer. According to the talk, many designs, both for printable objects and for the printers themselves, are open-source and freely available on websites such as www.thingiverse.com. The greatest revolution in 3D printing, according to Rankin, came when 3D printers began to be able to print parts for 3D printers, allowing a sort of self-replication that brought prices down significantly. The cheapest kit, according to Rankin, only cost $499 on Kickstarter — a bargain compared to $1000+ kits commercially available — and can be used to make everything from kids’ toys to replacement parts for dishwashers to a 30-round AR-15 magazine (which, apparently, actually works).
Another interesting talk was by David Uhlman, CEO of ClearHealth, entitled “Hacking Your Health,” about the application of technical, DIY and open-source perspectives to personal healthcare. The talk covered everything from the best way to choose a doctor to how to make a 3D printout of your own skull. (When you go to the radiologist or imaging center, ask for the raw .DICOM files of your images — in many states you have a legal right to them, and they can be converted with open-source software like Osirix and Blender to a format that a 3D printer can interpret, according to Uhlman.)
Ruth Suehle, Community Marketing Manager at Red Hat, gave a talk about the potential applications of the Raspberry Pi, a $35 fully functional and programmable microcomputer, which packed the room and had people sitting on the floor and spilling out the door. Some of the applications included using it as a video player, making it into an FM radio, emulating a Gameboy and even using it in a balloon, along with sensors and cameras, to float in the sky and collect data. Suehle humorously and enthusiastically encouraged attendees to buy a Pi and try it out for themselves.
“The whole point of the Pi is education. It’s meant for people who don’t know what they’re doing … it’s cheap, you can screw up and the worst thing that can happen is you lost 35 dollars,” Suehle said. “Really hard to break it, because you can just buy another SD card and stick it in — I did it three times yesterday.”
Other talks, such as “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Cloud,” focused on the recently-popular topic of cloud computing, the delivery of shared computing resources as a service over a network. Cloud computing was a major topic at SCALE this year, with several talks on its technical details and exhibits from companies delivering their “as-a-service” products.
The event, which lasted three days from Feb. 22 to 24, drew crowds of over 2,300 people, according to Larry Cafiero, SCALE’s Publicity Chair. SCALE 12X will be held around the same time next year at the same location, according to Rabinovitch, and could always use volunteers.
“We’re always looking for help running the event. We’d love to see a current generation of college students come in and kind of take the reins,” Rabinovitch said. For more information, visit www.socallinuxexpo.org.
IMAGE COURTESY OF Larry Ewing
A version of this article appeared on page 13 of February 26th, 2013′s print edition of the Nexus | <urn:uuid:7232bd07-5f41-4459-b68d-4553b12be710> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dailynexus.com/2013-02-26/southern-california-linux-expo-features-3d-printing-cloud-computing-product-demos/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953053 | 1,663 | 1.75 | 2 |
Wikileaks' recently released Guantanamo Bay files suggest that Uighur separatists waging a low-intensity war against China obtained training and logistical support in Pakistan, the Times of India reports.
An ethnic Uigur woman on crutches protests in front of a line of paramilitary police in Urumqi, in China's farwest Xinjiang region. (PETER PARKS- AFP/Getty Images).
If substantiated and expanded to implicate the Pakistani military establishment or the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the revelations could drive a wedge between Pakistan and its most crucial ally, as it is the threat of "losing" Pakistan to China altogether that prevents the US from taking a harder stance in Islamabad.
Notably, China--which has insisted more vociferously, even, than the US that Pakistan is a hapless victim of terrorism rather than an active supporter of terrorist groups--was virtually the only world power to defend Pakistan against charges of duplicity and/or incompetence following the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Files of 22 Uighur detainees at Gitmo, many of whom were held in Pakistan, speak of the ease with which they found their way to extremists mosques in Pakistan and their passage to Afghanistan. They vent their ire against Chinese rule and claim the rules for Uighurs were discriminatory.
Along with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Chinese rebels hoped to form a larger jihadi front that would be allied with the al-Qaida as well. The rebels saw Beijing as a foreign and un-Islamic implant with one detainee Ahmad Yuqub complaining that Chinese rulers did not permit farmers to plant crops of their choice.
While Yaqub was reportedly a leading member of the East Turkestan Movement, he was believed to have worked with Osama and fought the coalition forces at Tora Bora.
Beijing is concerned about the Islamic insurgency in east Turkistan, but it banks on Pakistan cracking down on Uighurs. China's state-controlled political and administrative system allows it to cut off areas where rebellion breaks out and deal with insurgents without having to bother about the prying eyes of the world media.
But as the linkages that emerge from the Gitmo files show, there are several ports of call for Uighurs in Pakistan and access to arms training is not so difficult. Groups of Uighurs have frequently travelled to and from Pakistan to countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan.
Presumably, Pakistan tells China that they have no idea any Uighurs are there, right? | <urn:uuid:b09bc799-2df8-4871-a9d0-94c9ef861954> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/bric-yard/wikileaks-suggest-chinese-militants-trained-pakistan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951963 | 523 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Matt Kibbe, Contributor
I cover limited government, conservative economics and the Tea Party.
The ”Occupy Wall Street” movement desperately wants to be compared to the Tea Party, because such a comparison would give the fledgling, misguided movement unearned legitimacy. But there are three key characteristics that separate OWS from the Tea Party: First, the Occupy protesters pride themselves on provocative resistance to law enforcement and in some cases violence. Second, they disrespect public and private property. Third, and most important, the Occupy movement lacks a coherent guiding philosophy.
The Sept. 12, 2009 Tea Party demonstration in Washington, D.C., is a perfect example of the way Tea Partiers do business. Organizers planned for 100,000 Tea Party activists to show up on the National Mall, but more than one million turned out. In spite of the huge group of people, there was never an ”angry mob” mentality. Protestors said ”excuse me” and ”thank you.” No one was arrested and no property was damaged. No one told us to, but we picked up every bit of trash, even if it was not ours. In only a month of much smaller Occupy-related protests, hundreds of people have been arrested from New York City to San Diego and abroad, and in some cases protesters have resorted to physical violence. The property damage has been significant.
When the Tea Party demonstrates, we get permits. We cooperate with police. We fund porta-potties. We respect the rule of law and are responsible for meeting our own needs including food, water, shelter, medical care and bathrooms. The Occupy protestors just showed up and took over a busy part of Lower Manhattan, using local businesses’ bathrooms as their own personal washrooms – or worse – and even refusing to temporarily leave Zuccotti Park so it could be cleaned for their own safety and hygiene.
But the biggest difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is that the Tea Party is bound by a common set of values based on freedom, responsibility and property rights. While the Tea Party members hold a diverse set of views on many issues, they are united in a desire for less government, lower taxes and more freedom. Conversely, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are unified only by their hatred of the wealthy, and seem to take pride in the movement’s inability to present a coherent set of proactive initiatives. Their attacks are disturbingly similar to those levied against the rich in Ayn Rand’s ”Atlas Shrugged,” where punishing the most productive members of society was more important than fixing the nation’s problems.
The values that inform and shape Tea Party demonstrations also require the Tea Party to be consistent in applying its principles. We are willing to hold both Republicans and Democrats accountable, as well as bad actors and crony capitalists on Wall Street. We support capitalism based on hard work and wealth creation, not crony capitalism based on whom you know in Washington, D.C. That’s why we opposed the Wall Street bailout, handouts to GE and Solyndra, insurance companies writing individual mandates in ObamaCare, and Car Czars choosing winners and losers in the automobile industry.
Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, suffers from cognitive dissonance. They say they oppose special favors to Wall Street but their so-called ”progressive” leaders who are waging the same kind of class warfare in Washington, starting with Barack Obama, are the enablers of bad actors on Wall Street. Big banks and investment firms were among Obama’s top donors in 2008, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup, UBS AG and Morgan Stanley.
Tim Geithner, current Treasury Secretary and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, orchestrated the AIG bailout. Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law got a $737 million loan guarantee from the same Department of Energy that gave $535 million to Solyndra. Rep. Maxine Waters helped arrange a bailout for a bank that counts Waters’ husband among its board members. Rep. Barney Frank’s boyfriend was an executive at Fannie Mae as the government lender made it easier for unqualified homebuyers to get loans.
Where was Occupy Wall Street when the bailouts were being handed out? Where was Occupy Wall Street when politicians in Washington were handing out taxpayer dollars to irresponsible bankers, bad businessmen, and political donors? While Occupy Wall Street is making threats against people trying to earn a living and making a mess in New York and other cities, the Tea Party is working for real change at the source of the problem, Washington, D.C., by electing fiscal conservatives.
Their answer is more government, but more government has been the problem all along. Our answer is less government and more freedom. But with individual freedom comes individual responsibility and respect for private property. These are the values that bind us as a community. That’s why freedom works.
Matt Kibbe is the president and CEO of FreedomWorks, a nationwide grassroots organization fighting for lower taxes, less government and more freedom; and the co-author of ”Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.” | <urn:uuid:5c4db7f8-21c2-4ff8-a585-9ac16ae347a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattkibbe/2011/10/19/occupy-wall-street-is-certainly-no-tea-party/?commentPage=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954934 | 1,078 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Computerworld - Google today dramatically raised the bounties it pays independent researchers for reporting bugs in its core websites, services and online applications.
The search giant boosted the maximum reward from $3,133 to $20,000, and added a $10,000 payment to the program.
The Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) will now pay $20,000 for vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution against google.com, youtube.com and other core domains, as well as what the company called “highly sensitive services” such as its search site, Google Wallet, Gmail and Google Play.
Remote code flaws found in Google’s Web apps will also be rewarded $20,000.
The term “remote code execution” refers to the most serious category of vulnerabilities, those which when exploited allow an attacker to hijack a system and/or plant malware on a machine.
A $10,000 bounty will be paid for SQL injection bugs or “significant” authentication bypass or data leak vulnerabilities, Google said in the revised rules for the program.
Other bugs, including cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (XSRF) flaws, will be compensated with payments between $100 and $3,133, with the amount dependent on the severity of the bug and where the vulnerability resides.
Google explained the higher bounties as ways “to celebrate the success of this [program] and to underscore our commitment to security.”
The website and web app reward program debuted in November 2010, and followed Google’s January 2010 launch of a bug bounty program for its Chrome browser. Google paid out about $180,000 in Chrome bounties last year.
The maximum award for reported Chrome vulnerabilities remains at $3,133, Google confirmed today.
Since VRP’s introduction, Google today said it has received more than 780 eligible bug reports, and in just over a year, paid out around $460,000 to approximately 200 researchers.
“We’re confident beyond any doubt the program has made Google users safer,” said Adam Mein, a Google security program manager, and Michal Zalewski, a engineer on the Google security team, in a Monday post to a company blog.
Google has shown that upping bounty payments will shake loose vulnerabilities it wasn’t aware existed.
Last month, the company wrote $60,000 checks to two researchers at Pwnium, the Chrome hacking contest it ran at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Both researchers revealed bugs and associated attack code that demonstrated how hackers could escape the browser’s isolating, anti-exploit “sandbox, to hijack the browser and plant malware on a machine.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His email address is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more about Malware and Vulnerabilities in Computerworld’s Malware and Vulnerabilities Topic Center. | <urn:uuid:f21f11dd-3a9e-4736-9312-9cb561ed40c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chromebygoogle.net/2012/04/google-boosts-web-bug-bounties-to-20000/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9052 | 660 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Tomasi reserves special opprobrium for labor regulations, as of maximum hours and minimum wages, and disparages workplace democracy. Regulations of labor contracts, he claims, are forms of paternalistic domination. They deny individuals’ rights to “personally negotiate” the terms and conditions of their employment, and deny their personal “independence” as self-authoring economic agents. He concedes that in the industrial age such regulations were warranted for vulnerable factory workers, but claims they are obsolete in today’s “personalized” capitalism, which offers work options tailor-made to each individual’s preferences.
Has Tomasi bothered to check on the typical conditions of entry and work in the lowest ranks of WalMart, say, or the farming, meat processing, fast food, nursing home, and domestic cleaning industries, where millions of workers toil in the U.S.? Such workers would be lucky to get a contract of adhesion, with no terms open for negotiation, but at least with all the terms specified. What they actually get is arbitrary, authoritarian government, with open-ended terms of subjection. In the default legal regime of the workplace, employers may comprehensively govern workers’ ends and means, and minutely regulate their bodily motions. They may dictate what workers can wear. Until recently, many prohibited their workers from urinating on the job. Workers have no privacy: bosses can search their possessions, eavesdrop on phone calls (if they allow phone calls), read their emails, and spy on them in the bathroom. Workers have no freedom of speech: bosses can forbid them from complaining, speaking a different language, and talking to fellow workers about unapproved topics. They can be fired for off-hours activities such as supporting an unapproved political candidate or having a same-sex partner. No wonder 25% of American workers say their workplace is a dictatorship.
While workers at the top have bargaining power to negotiate freedom from such despotism, those at the bottom have long found this a useless tool. Many conditions affecting them, such as dust levels, assembly line speeds, and equipment safety, are not subject to individual tailoring. Others could be individually negotiated, but employers prefer to simply impose terms. Workers have therefore forged other tools to gain control over their work and off-duty lives: fair labor laws, labor unions, workplace democracy. Tomasi bizarrely supposes that they function as paternalistic constraints on workers.
By Elizabeth Anderson In Liberalism, Libertarianism, Social Justice, Symposium on Free Market Fairness
This essay is part of a symposium on John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness. | <urn:uuid:d463367c-7b22-4780-9bb6-3fb7f18ac3f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shrinkrants.tumblr.com/post/32201067786/tomasi-reserves-special-opprobrium-for-labor | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958131 | 541 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Tom Kosnik, Professor at Stanford University, spoke at Microsoft Startup Boot Camp in Silicon Valley this week and shared his advice on how startups can successfully cater to their customers in a way that makes sense for their business goals. Here are the top 5 must-dos to help narrow your focus and get to building the app your customers actually want.
1.) Why will customers buy your product over a competitor’s?
If you’re in the early stages of development, take a break to go out and find out about your potential customers. Why are they going to use this product over what they’re using now or what they’d buy from a competitor? You must answer this question conclusively before moving on.
2.) Stop selling, start listening.
At the beginning stages you should be continuously discovering what your target customer base wants. Don’t wait until you have a finished product to do this. Remember the 80/20 rule. Listen for 80% of the conversation and talk for 20%.
3.) Test your hypotheses.
Turn customer guesses into facts through constant research and analysis.
4.) Keep a clear focus.
At some point you need to filter those customer suggestions and use only the ones that make sense for the success of your product. As Tom stated during the workshop, “customers are not product developers. It’s your job as a business owner to understand which of their asks make sense to focus on.”
5.) Don’t be afraid to pivot! Change course if required.
Great entrepreneurs realize that at some point their company needs to pivot so do not be ashamed to do so, especially when you have a strong conviction that the market is changing. However, diminishing returns result when you pivot too frequently so make sure it is the right move to make.
Keep up with live updates from Startup Boot Camp!
If you can follow these steps you will be able to develop iteration after iteration of your product without crisis and will have built a fast, agile and opportunistic company capable of disrupting markets.
Follow the hashtag #MSBootcamp or follow the Tech Student handle on Twitter for tips, quotes, and insights from angel investors, startup leaders, evangelists, and students between now and the end of the week. We’ll also be highlighting events and fielding questions on Facebook. | <urn:uuid:ebedc589-49c2-4d6b-990c-ecfb458ab5ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2013/03/14/5-programming-lessons-from-tom-kosnik.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944793 | 482 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Internationally, coal is currently the most widely used primary fuel, accounting for approximately 36% of the world's electricity production. This situation is likely to remain until at least 2020.
Coal has traditionally dominated the energy supply sector in South Africa, from as early as 1880 when coal from the Vereeniging area was supplied to the Kimberly diamond fields. Presently, about 77% of our country's primary energy needs are provided by coal. This is unlikely to change significantly in the next decade, due to the relative lack of suitable alternatives to coal as an energy source.
South Africa produces an average of 224 million tones of marketable coal annually, making it the fifth largest coal producing country in the world. 25% of our production is exported internationally, making South Africa the third largest coal exporting country. The remainder of South Africa's coal production feeds the various local industries, with 53% used for electricity generation. The key role played by our coal reserves in the economy is illustrated by the fact that Eskom is the 7th largest electricity generator in the world, and Sasol the largest coal-to-chemicals producer.
South Africa's coal reserves are estimated at 53 billion tonnes, and with our present production rate there should be almost 200 years of coal supply left.
Producing electricity from coal starts when the coal is pulverised in huge mills into a fine powder before it is blown into huge kettles, called boilers. Due to the heat in the boiler, the coal particles combust and burn to generate heat to turn water into steam. The steam from the boilers is used to turn the blades of a giant fan or propeller, called a turbine. The turbine turns a coil made of copper wire (the rotor) inside a magnet (the stator). Together they make up the generator. The generator produces an electric current, which is sent to the homes and factories of consumers via power lines.
- SA has abundant coal reserves.
- Coal-fired power stations are reliable.
- South Africa's infrastructure to generate electricity from coal is well established.
- Burning coal is the most cost-effective and energy efficient way of generating electricity.
- Coal has the most waste problems of all energy sources. Waste includes sulphur and nitrogen oxides, organic compounds, heavy metals, radioactive elements, greenhouse gases and a lot of ash.
- Building a coal-fired power station is a long and expensive process.
- South Africa's coal fields are concentrated in Mpumalanga, which limits the location options for power stations. | <urn:uuid:a54eeff2-3de1-4a15-bc75-48ca116ffdbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eskom.co.za/c/article/200/coal-power/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948012 | 521 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Individuals with military experience already have a jump start on the career development process. Through your commendable service, you have most likely developed personal qualities and skills that can transfer to a new career.
This section is a starting point for veterans to evaluate their skills, abilities, and interests when choosing what type of career and degree program to enter. The career development process may not necessarily move in a “linear” path.
Many veterans choose to enter degree programs which reflect their military background while others pursue lifelong career goals unrelated to their service. Either way, your military experience can remain an important part of your identity as you expand your career interests and select a college program that is right for you.
Research Career Paths
Identify Transferable Skills | <urn:uuid:df6aacf3-5e14-4726-8f05-1ab7b586a411> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wearevirginiaveterans.org/Vets-on-Campus/Career-Decisions.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955161 | 152 | 1.84375 | 2 |
COME AND LEARN ABOUT HEALTHY EATING THROUGH OUR NUTRITION WORKSHOPS:
A fun, hands-on cooking experience! Learn how to prepare nutritious and tasty dishes to promote healthy eating in the fight against cancer.
For anyone who wants to learn about food and delicious recipes for promoting good health, preventing disease, and looking and feeling your best! Workshop topics range from “Slow Food vs. Fast Food”, “The Truth about Organics- Are They Worth it?”, “Deciphering the Food Code: Food Labels, Ingredients, and Health Claims”, “Go with the Whole Grain”, “Portion Your Plate”, “Healthy Holiday Eating”…and many more! | <urn:uuid:5403728b-1969-40e2-8ec3-ab56dd725047> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.einstein.yu.edu/centers/cancer/support/page.aspx?id=29810&page=support | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921223 | 162 | 1.867188 | 2 |
ICANN not a “domain name authority” under ACPA; no in rem jurisdiction in district where ICANN is based — Vizer v. Vizernews.com, 2012 WL 2367130 (D.D.C. June 22, 2012)
First off, my apologies for writing two consecutive posts with headlines that play off the word “can’t.” Now on to more serious matters…
This case scuttles one way of getting a quick default judgment against a cybersquatter who is nowhere to be found. The plaintiff (Vizer) wanted to bring a cybersquatting suit against the registrant of a domain name that contained his last name and was linked to a website dedicated to providing news about him (Vizernews.com). Vizer couldn’t identify the registrant of the domain name; the domain was registered anonymously and the registrant used a privacy service to hide its contact information. Vizer therefore brought an in rem action under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). Vizer is correct that the ACPA allows a trademark owner to file an in rem civil action against a domain name in the judicial district in which the “domain name registrar, domain name registry, or other domain name authority is located.” The issue is, did Vizer file in the correct judicial district?
Vizer filed the in rem action in Washington, D.C. on the theory that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) maintains an office there. The court dismissed the case because ICANN didn’t fit into any category of entities who can be sued in rem under the ACPA. ICANN is not the domain name registrar (in this case, Melbourne IT, LTD d/b/a Internet Names Worldwide) nor the registry (in this case, VeriSign, Inc.). Vizer argued that ICANN is a “domain name authority,” but the court rejected that suggestion. According to the court, the term “domain name authority” refers to an entity that has some authority over the domain name, i.e., it plays a role in registering or assigning domain names. ICANN doesn’t do either of those things. Although ICANN coordinates the global domain name system, it doesn’t actually assign specific domain names or maintain a registry of such names. The court also found persuasive legislative history of the ACPA stating that the in rem provision was not meant to cover ICANN.
LegalTXT Lesson: It looks like Vizer’s attorneys did their homework before going the in rem route. I’m not sure what they could’ve done differently, except one wonders why they didn’t file in where the registrar (VeriSign) is located. Verisign is based in Reston, Virginia, just a short distance far from D.C.
Only owner of a mark can sue for cybersquatting — Garruto v. Longo, 2012 WL 1981838 (D.N.J. June 1, 2012)
Say a disgruntled customer of your business decides to complain to the world about how dissatisfied he is with the product you sold him. He writes scathing online reviews. He even goes so far as to register a domain name that includes part of your company’s name. What can you do?
At first glance, one solution might be to sue under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). But not so fast. First, you need to be the legal owner of the trademark that’s part of the offending domain name. The plaintiff in Garruto v. Longo apparently overlooked that step.
A pet store (Fancy Pups, Inc.) sold a German Shepherd puppy to the defendant (Longo). Immediately after the sale, the puppy contracted the parvo virus and died. Longo claimed the puppy contracted the virus at Fancy Pups. According to the complaint, Longo then “began an internet crusade to run Fancy Pups out of business.” Longo allegedly posted photos of the dead puppy on the Internet, called the owner of Fancy Pups a “puppy killer,” and labeled Fancy Pups a “puppy mill.” Longo voiced her complaints on online review websites like Yelp! and published advertisements in a local newspaper. Longo also created a company profile for Fancy Pups on Manta.com. In the profile heading “About Fancy Pups,” Longo stated: “We sell sick puppies at top dollar that will die. I am an unscuplious [sic] man who will take your money and leave you with a dead dog. I am evil LIAR.”
Fancy Pups and its owner sued Longo under the ACPA. Notably missing in the complaint was an allegation that “Fancy Pups” was registered as a trademark by the plaintiffs or that it is a famous mark that everyone knows. This omission proved fatal to the ACPA claim. A cybersquatting claim must be brought by the “owner of a mark,” and the plaintiffs failed to establish that “Fancy Pups” was entitled to trademark protection. The court also noted that there was no allegation that Longo registered a domain name that included “Fancy Pups.” The court concluded without much discussion that posting a fake profile on an online business directory like Manta.com does not constitute cybersquatting.
LegalTXT Lesson: Register your trademarks. The ACPA won’t help you if you can’t establish you own the marks you’re trying to protect. | <urn:uuid:44c11d09-dba6-4eb5-b533-5c133510cab9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.legaltxts.com/tag/acpa/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932153 | 1,199 | 1.539063 | 2 |
It will be better for women not to take up night shifts, as a new research has revealed that it can increase breast cancer risk among them. The study was carried out by a group of researchers from the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (Inserm).
Lead researcher Pascal Guenel of Inserm was of the view that they have gone through previous studies and after evaluating all the previous data, they have reached at a conclusion that night shift jobs are not healthy for women.
"Our work has corroborated the results of previous studies and poses the problem of taking night work into consideration in public health management", said Pascal.
Study researchers not only assessed previous studies, but they also conducted a research in which they assessed health implication of night shifts on 3,000 women, who were working in France from 2005 to 2008.
In four -year-long -study, it was revealed that women, who had worked in night shifts, were at increased risk of developing breast cancer, which is believed to be the biggest reason of female mortality.
Pascal said that it seems to be one of a kind study, which has proved that night shifts and occurrence of breast cancer is linked.
US Business News
New Zealand News
- After Suspected Botulism, CFIA Warns People
- Health Care Education Necessary for the Future of Province: Analysts
- B.C. Government Grants $700,000 for Managing Facial Deformities
- Michelle Shocked delivers hate speech about homosexuality at her gig
- Guess who Justin Bieber got burned by?!! His ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez | <urn:uuid:e65f0980-c381-47aa-b811-f8529e1fbaca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://topnews.us/content/249015-night-shifts-and-occurrence-breast-cancer-linked | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97031 | 338 | 2.796875 | 3 |
There were countless great moments that occurred at the former Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. It was the home of the Big Red Machine throughout the 1970s. The site of Pete Rose's record-breaking hit. Home of the 1990 World Series Champs. Scene of the thrilling 1999 pennant race. Fans of the Reds, you will love this panoramic view of the former home of your team!
With this poster, you are transported back to another great moment at the stadium. It was late in the 1998 season, the year of The Great Home Run Chase, and who was at bat? Mark McGwire of the visiting St. Louis Cardinals. The Reds were already out of the pennant race, but the stands are packed and everyone is on their feet. McGwire did not go deep that day...but we all know how his season ended.
Like all prints in photographer Rob Arra's Everlasting Images series, every detail of the ballpark is in perfect focus, and as you pan across the image you feel like you are actually there. For fans of the Reds, this item belongs in a nice frame in a prominent place on your wall. | <urn:uuid:6c339079-0415-462e-81ec-bc0f0c75c6ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sportsposterwarehouse.com/detail_EI037__812__cynergy98ei_htm.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980309 | 233 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The new officers include: Charmaine Savasten, president; Lisa Carlson, first vice-president; Marsha Hebert, second vice-president; Marlene Castille, secretary; Betty Bulliard, treasurer and Dale Mouton, historian.
The club was organized and federated in 1953 and is celebrating its 58th year of serving the St. Martinville community. It’s objectives are to develop and advance gardening, to study artist design, encourage and assist in civic beautification and to protect and improve the environment.
The club is also a member of the District III Louisiana Garden Club Federation, Inc., Deep South Region and the National Council of State Garden Clubs, Inc.
During the course of the year, the garden club recognizes outstanding residential gardens and businesses in St. Martinville, organizes the Tour of Homes, and holds an annual Flower Show at the city library. The club is also involved in the Cleanest City Contest and the Litter Prevention Program. Club members also maintain the civic beautification planters on Main Street.
Garden club members who have attained the title of Nationally Accredited Flower Show Judges are Jessie Bienvenu, Lynne Bonin, Betty Bulliard, Gussie delaHoussaye, Noonie Guidry and Margorie Melancon. Bonin is also a member of the Landscape Design Critics Council and delaHoussaye and Guidry are Life Members of the Louisiana Garden Club Federation.
Jessie Bienvenu, a charter member, was the first secretary in 1953 and is still a member today. In addition to being a Nationally Accredited Flower Show Judge, Bienvenu is one of the founding members of the Heritage Garden in St. Martinville.
Bienvenu is not only a horticulture judge but also an advisor for the Garden Club’s monthly meetings and the yearly flower show. Her responsibilities as the Civic Beautification Chairperson include designing and maintaining the planters along Main Street. | <urn:uuid:acb5c388-0f25-4deb-a0ac-74c22f1e0abb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techetoday.com/pages/full_story/push?article-SM+garden+club-installs+officers%20&id=15529257&instance=secondary_stories_left_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937883 | 411 | 1.625 | 2 |
Following up on the post, White Blood Cells in Vegans, I came across two more pieces of info.
The Linus Pauling Institute says, “Vitamin A and retinoic acid play a central role in the development and differentiation of white blood cells, such as lymphocytes, which play critical roles in the immune response (1).”
Unlike omnivores, vegans do not have a direct, dietary source of vitamin A, but rather get it indirectly via carotenoids (mainly beta-carotene). Beta-carotene is fat-soluble. It seems theoretically, possible then, that a low intake of carotenoids or fat could contribute to lower vitamin A status and white blood cell count (WBC).
This is purely hypothetical; to my knowledge vitamin A levels have not been measured in vegans and other signs of low vitamin A status have not been a noted problem. Anecdotally, I had been eating plenty of beta-carotene and fat at the last measurement of my WBC which showed them to be below normal.
Paul Appleby, of EPIC, passed on a study to me of a clinical trial using a “Daniel Fast” from the University of Memphis (2). In this trial, mostly healthy and some vegetarian subjects (13 men, 30 women; 20-62 years old) went on a Daniel Fast for 21 days, eating no processed or packaged food and only plant foods (as much as they wanted). Their WBC went from an average of 5.7 to 5.0 (2). 5.0 is within the normal range, but on the lower end (normal being about 3.5 to 12.5 billion per liter).
The authors of the Daniel Fast study say, “It has been suggested that ingestion of food additives and preservatives can increase white blood cell count by triggering an immune response due to a sensing of invading pathogens from the food stuff; however, we are unaware of any scientific reports that confirm this hypothesis.” I should point out that lots of things have been suggested, but it doesn’t seem impossible that vegans generally eat less food additives and preservatives and this could be contributing to low WBC.
I have added this information to VeganHealth’s article on White Blood Cells.
There were some other interesting things about this study. Here are the before and after (or during in the case of the nutrient intakes):
calories: 2,185 → 1,722
fat (g): 74 → 54
fat (%): 30 → 27
saturated fat (g): 24 → 9
cholesterol (mg/dl): 171 → 139
LDL (mg/dl): 98 → 76
weight (lbs): 171 → 167
bp: 115/72 → 106/67
The authors did an analysis which showed that the improvements in these parameters did not occur in only the unhealthier subjects, but rather across the board. They say, “It is interesting to note that even those subjects who were vegetarian prior to starting the fast experienced dramatic reductions in total and LDL-[cholesterol], in addition to improvements in other markers. Clearly, the exclusion of meat from the diet (as is the case for vegetarians) is not the only dietary factor involved in raising circulating cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic disease.”
It should be noted that this trial had no control group and was not randomized in any way.
I found this interesting because even though the subjects didn’t lose much weight (the weight change wasn’t even statistically significant), their blood pressure and cholesterol levels went down substantially in only 3 weeks. That’s impressive. But does it mean that it is the diet that everyone should be on all the time, indefinitely?
1. Linus Pauling Institute. Micronutrient Information Center. Vitamin A. Accessed 5/20/13 | link
2. Bloomer RJ, Kabir MM, Canale RE, Trepanowski JF, Marshall KE, Farney TM, Hammond KG. Effect of a 21 day Daniel Fast on metabolic and cardiovascular disease risk factors in men and women. Lipids Health Dis. 2010 Sep 3;9:94. | link | <urn:uuid:4c083d01-9fa7-4c4a-98a7-6fe751f7eafc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jacknorrisrd.com/category/vitamin-a/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949628 | 878 | 2.34375 | 2 |
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1640SU Photo Scanner Test Review
Mandatory: First learn all about scanners and how to select the right scanner here
Skip straight to resolution test images here.
See comparative review of $1,500 Microtek Artix 1100 here.
This $399 (list) scanner is a great way to scan medium and large format film if all you have is $400 and need to scan hundreds of large format images. I paid $320 for mine; look at Amazon and just order over the Internet. Of course that was back in 2002. Today the Scanner sells for about $300 and the model 2450 is probably the way to go for not much more money.
If you only work in 35mm don't even think about this or any other flatbed scanner. You should get a real 35mm film scanner like the $480 Canon FS2710. The small difference in price will get you an enormous improvement in quality for 35mm scans. If you still need the ability to scan flat art and prints, you can get a bargain scanner to do that, too. Scanning prints is easy and any cheap scanner works great. I just paid $30 (after rebate) for a UMAX 2100U scanner for scanning flat items. It works just as well, and actually far better than the $1,500 Microtek 1100.
Of course if 35mm scans are just part of what you need to scan, read on. Just don't get any wild ideas about being able to use the scanned 35mm images for anything other than e-mail and web pages. The resolution is insufficient for making bigger than 3x5" prints.
After using two other scanners, all of which crashed my computer, I really came to appreciate the fact that this EPSON scanner just worked the way it was supposed to. Many scanners will screw up your computer, even a Mac, and take you hours of fooling around just to get it to work. This nonsense will make Mac users recall one of the reasons the moved from Windows! Thankfully the 1640SU had no problems right out of the box, and I got one of the first units in November 2000.
There are a couple of versions. The 1640SU lists for $299 and has no 'transparency adapter," which is the light box that mounts on top of the scanner to shine through the film. The 1640SU "Photo" version includes this "TPU" to allow the scanning of slides, transparencies and negatives. The 1240 series seems similar, but with less resolution.
The Epson 1640XL is an entirely different professional scanner that sells for about $1,000. I'm not addressing it here.
Since the real resolution of the 1640SU scanner is only about 1,000 DPI the 1240 scanner may give the same results.
The only real issues I had with the 1640SU are:
1.) Poor color accuracy and consistency (should be fixable with better software costing almost as much as the scanner did)
2.) Silly film handling with those silly holders, although no cutting required for 120 which is great!
3.) Glass in the way of the scan. The glass will get dirty on the inside of the scanner, and being uncoated it does lead to shadows if you are looking for it (see grayscale test below).
4.) Some noise in shadows of Velvia.
Actually the best way to scan large format film is to pay for drum scans at a print shop ($20-200 each scan) or Kodak ProPhotoCD scans at $15 each, but those get expensive after the first dozen or so.
Professional drum scanners for 4x5 run around $60,000 - $100,000 and take forever to learn how to use. The best CCD based scanners for home use from Microtek, Polaroid and Imacon run around $5,000 - $16,000.
A benefit of this Epson over a real film scanner is that it also scans flat art, and comes with software to turn your computer and printer into an easy-to-use color copy machine.
The colorimetry is inaccurate and the scanning software is a bit primitive, however for $400 list the darn thing gives an 80% perfect scan.
I'm unsure how good the colors would become when profiled properly with a few hundred dollars worth of software and color targets. For now the colors are too saturated and the oranges turn reddish from my Velvias. The contrast and saturation for Velvia scans is on the high side, and I usually love saturation. This scanner needs you to buy the Monaco EZ Color software available for half price at $150 (the promotional price once you buy the scanner) and a special test transparency called an IT8 target (another $40-$100) to attempt to get decent color from transparencies. I have not tried that. Others swear by the Lasersoft software that runs around $250.
The Epson Twain scanning software is primitive but stable. It may be fine for a dull office drone or someone who doesn't even know or care what density is, but for people familiar with industry standard units for density and etc. the Epson Twain scanning software has you make adjustments using totally arbitrary units for gamma and exposure. There is no histogram or pixel sample values shown until AFTER you have made the scan and are in Photoshop. You must set the prescan parameters by eye looking at the preview window.
I am scanning from transparencies or slides. I am not scanning from negatives as most amateurs are.
The scanner plugs right into the wall which is good. The Canon 2400 requires an idiotic AC adaptor by comparison.
Here's what I measured on a Mac G4 450 MHz Dual-Processor, direct USB connection, scanning through Epson Twain 5.00a into Photoshop 6.0 for a 35mm transparency:
For a 4x5 transparency at 1600 DPI: 5 minutes
8.5 x 11" reflective art:
DPI: 55 seconds (descreen [document])
Epson in California tells me that since I was using such a hot processor that going to the SCSI connection probably wouldn't speed things up much. I didn't try it.
The 1640 did a swell job delivering scans at any selected resolution. There was minor aliasing as you can see in the resolution tests, but otherwise things were properly resampled.
This is in contrast to the all-in-one Microtek ScanDeck, which when set to resolutions below its maximum of 300 DPI gives nasty alias images. With that stand-alone office scanner one always needs to scan at 300 DPI and do the downsampling in Photoshop, which of course wastes lots of time scanning and then having to play with it in Photoshop.
Gray Scale tests
The image below should look reasonably gray. If you see alternating bands of green and magenta you may not have your monitors control panel set to Millions of Colors (Mac) or video card set to 24 or 32 bit (Windows).
This was scanned in color.
This scan of the 21-step Kodak gray wedge made at 300DPI in 42 bit color transparency mode. The lightest square on the left is just film base, at about 0.05D, and each step becomes 0.15D darker. It was scanned with Epson Twain 5.0 directly into Photoshop 6.0 on a Mac, resized to 750 pixels wide, set back to 8 bits per channel and then "saved for web" in Adobe Image Ready 3.0 at 100% quality. The scan was made in color sync mode with the exposure determined arbitrarily by the software.
It's noisy in the dark areas of a transparency, as all modern consumer flatbed scanners are.
If you copy this into your own computer and play with the levels to see the dark areas more clearly you will see that 1.) all the steps are there, clearly showing the darkest square at the right (3.05D), and that 2.) you have quite a lot of noise, too, there. Much of the noise goes away when resampled to these lower resolutions. The tan tint in the highlights is the natural tone of the film base; I have not tweaked it at all.
You also will notice double peaks in the histogram. I suspect that those are some weird artifact of reflections inside the uncoated glass platen. The reflections will tend to mix together adjacent bands and make small areas that have densities that are mixes of the the adjoining areas. I suspect that those are what's causing the double peaks on the histogram. This would be more obvious to you if I included the black areas beyond the test strip that showed all these internal reflections.
It probably does great for negatives. Set to the negative scan mode it had a maximum range of about 1.85D, the same as a regular negative. If you have a negative so dense the highlights block up then try scanning in the "positive" setting and use the IMAGE > ADJUST > INVERT command in Photoshop to restore your image. Now work in Photoshop and do your image manipulation. This will probably allow me to print negatives way too dense for conventional printing.
Overall, it can be coaxed to make make decent scans for the Internet, however it always requires an artist's eye to tweak the scans. A decent scanner like the Nikon coolscans just give great scans 90% of the time without tweaking, but they can't do 6x6 or 4x5. Kodak PhotoCD scans are usually dead-on, too, compared to this Epson.
I'm going to return the Epson in favor of a professional scanner that costs 5 times as much and probably just a few percent better, but hopefully will not require all the tweaking for each scan.
The Myth of 42 Bit Scanning
Even the dumpiest scanners today brag about 42 bit scanning, and so does this Epson. That means that they use an analog-to-digital convertor that just happens to have 14 bits coming out of it to digitize each of the signals from the analog outputs of the CCD preamplifier for each of three color channels (red, green and blue.)
If this sounds technical, it is. If this makes no sense to you, that's my point. I used to work where we made the A/D convertors for all the world's best scanners and I can, and probably will, explain this in excruciating detail someday. What is important for you to know is that there are so many factors that relate to scanner quality that the number of bits alone is completely and totally insignificant. Skip to the end of this section for the real answer if this gets too technical.
Last years models were 36 bits (12 bits per channel) and the year before that it was 24 bits (8 bits per channel).
Let's explain why more bits are better, then I'll explain why this make no difference on scanners in this price range.
We only can see between 6 to 8 bits per channel log (18 to 24 bits per pixel) at best.
The reasons a scanner would like to have more than 8 bits per channel is that is so that one can 1.) convert digitally from linear analog input to log digital output instead of doing the process in analog (in other words, resolve fine differences in the black areas of the image) and 2.) to allow further fine-tuning of an image in the higher resolution so that one still has 8 good bits per channel (24 bits per pixel) after all the image tweaking is completed.
One looses accuracy in every 8 bit Photoshop operation, even though all the bits are still there. Mathematical errors accumulate with every operation, just as you would if you always had to write down your results from balancing your checkbook with only 4 digits. You need 16 bits to represent the product of two 8 bit numbers, so when the answer has to be truncated or rounded or redithered back to to 8 bits you loose something. If you only start out with 24 bits, by the time you get done in Photoshop you have lost a few bits of accuracy due to all the small mathematical errors. By starting with and working with more buts you can easily preserve your accuracy. This becomes critical if you are playing with levels and curves.
Scanning in the 42 bit mode into Photoshop lets you attempt to retain plenty of bits of accuracy even after a lot of Photoshop tweaks. This is good.
Here's the problem: The noise of the CCD and it's circuitry completely cover up any of the precision the A/D convertor might have. At best the noise level of this scanner is at about 30 bits per pixel, and probably even more. ALL THE EXTRA BITS ARE DOING IS REPRESENTING NOISE. They aren't adding any noise, they are just describing it more precisely.
If this were a $50,000 photo-multiplier tube (PMT) based scanner you might have enough signal-to-noise ratio coming from the image sensor (that tube) to justify a 12- or 14-bit per channel A/D convertor.
These CCDs simply don't yet have the signal to noise ratio to justify the high-bit ADCs.
Therefore, ignore people who work in computer stores and try to get you to believe that more bits are better, and can't even explain exactly what the extra bits do. In this case they mean nothing.
Even worse, unless you are using a pretty hot version of Photoshop, very few computer programs even can read anything other than 24-bit (8 bit per channel) images. The JPEG (.jpg) format only works in 8 bit mode, for example. If this is your case, the only advantage to more real bits inside a scanner is if the scanner was doing some signal processing in the digital domain in which case more bits could be better. Hopefully by now I've convinced you that these internal details are meaningless taken outside the context of the entire system design of a scanner.
I found the best way to reduce noise is to scan at the maximum claimed optical resolution (1600 or 3200 DPI) and then resample down in Photoshop to the resolution I really need. One also could try the various noise and median filters in Photoshop before resampling down to the required resolution.
Scanning from transparencies is tough because of the great density of the dark parts of the transparency, typically around 3.0 D log 10 on amateur and Kodak films, and close to 4.0 D log 10 in a real film like Fuji Velvia. In the dark sections of these slides you can see noise that helps separate the $100,000 scanners from the $300 ones.
Negatives get nowhere near as dark, and therefor have none of these dark noise or DMax issues. The big issues with scans from negs is just getting the right color, which can be a horrendous issue.
I only scan film, but for laughs you probably have one of the best technical reflective scanner test targets in your pocket: a new US 20 dollar bill. The US Treasury department always tries to stay ahead of counterfeiters and therefore makes US currency as hard to scan as possible.
Here's the sort of thing you can see with the ridiculously high resolution of the Epson 1640SU: a section of the US Twenty scanned at 1600 DPI: (click to enlarge)
US Twenty dollar bill at about 2x or 3x magnification (213 DPI, click to enlarge)
The color is deliberately hard to reproduce, but the most fun aspect here is the microprinting. There is very tiny printing on US currency that looks like a line to the eye, but actually is teensy lettering when viewed through a magnifier. This is done because color copiers simply can't resolve those. The Epson 1640 easily can, but so can most scanners nowadays. For reflected art, 300DPI is all you want, not even 600DPI.
Caution: Of course the US Treasury is rightfully paranoid about this, which is what makes it a good test. Before you start scanning your own cash, please remember these rules as I recall them, otherwise you're committing a federal offense:
Don't scan the whole bill, or
As far as I know it's totally illegal to scan and print a whole bill in the right size and color. That, duh, is counterfeiting.
Here's the important part. Read the below if you like, or just see the resolution test results here.
These were made by:
1.) Digging out some photos of USAF Targets made testing my 4x5 lenses. They easily go to 60 - 90 lines per mm on the Velvia originals, the limit of my vision with a 22x loupe. On the film the line pairs in the -1 group as circled are clearly resolved. All the scans you see here don't resolve anywhere near that, as expected. The target was an 8.5 x 11" target shot at 100:1
2.) Scanning them into Photoshop 6.0 on a Mac using the Epson Twain 5.00a driver at resolutions from 9600 DPI to 300 DPI on the Epson 1640SU Photo, using the 4x5 film holder. They were scanned as 42 bit color transparencies. Epson in CA confirms that the scanner resets it focus to a point slightly above the glass platen when the transparency adapter is used. The Epson film holders try to hold the film just off the glass to eliminate Newton rings. I tested resolution with film varying distances from the platen to see if focus was a factor. I saw little variation if the film was placed directly on the glass.
3.) Once in Photoshop, I resampled all the images in bicubic mode to 3200 DPI. Since I saw all the raw scans I saw that the real resolution of the Epson is about 1200 DPI regardless of the setting, so 3200 DPI was chosen so you could easily see the differences over the Internet. This uniform resampling also lets all the images appear the same size on your screen.
4.) Then they were cropped, requantized to 8 bits per channel, and "saved for web" in Adobe Image Ready 3.0 at quality 67 (that seemed to have no degradation to the image).
On each of the film originals there were three targets. They all measured the same, also confirming that we are seeing the limits of the scanner and not simply the limits of the focus at one point. I've only shown one of these targets for the sake of your download time.
These were all made from the same piece of film right after one another.
See these resolution test images here. | <urn:uuid:68d3ab85-8aa1-4c2e-83b1-2148a6bd6946> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kenrockwell.com/1640.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94753 | 3,886 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Australian Bureau of Statistics
1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2003
Previous ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 24/01/2003
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Disability among adults 15-64 years
Of all people with a disability, 5% live in cared accommodation (including hospitals, nursing homes, aged care hostels and cared components of retirement villages), while the remainder lived in the general community.People aged 15-64 years often participate in education and/or employment, and many have family responsibilities. If they also have a disability, this may increase the difficulty in managing all the responsibilities in their lives. Of all people aged 15-64 years, 17% had a disability. In contrast, of people aged 65 years or more, 54% had a disability.
Types of restricting impairment
An impairment, in terms of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF), can be considered to be any loss or abnormality of body functions or structures including psychological, physiological or anatomical aspects. Data from the ABS survey have been classified to five broad types, relatable to the ICF:
Physical impairments are the most common of all impairment types and show a steady increase with age. Of people aged 15-64 with a disability living in the community, the proportion who reported that they were restricted by a physical impairment increased with age, from 61% for 15-24 years to 79% for those aged 55-64 years. Traffic accidents, as well as work and sporting injuries, are relatively frequent causes of this type of impairment in the 15-64 years age group.
The proportion of people with disabilities who had a sensory or speech impairment also increased with age, from 15% for 15-24 year olds to 26% for 55-64 year olds. Many people with a sensory impairment had developed industrial deafness or age-related hearing loss in the course of their working life.
In contrast, intellectual impairments are more common in younger people. This impairment type is often caused by congenital disorders such as Down Syndrome. The proportion of people with an intellectual disability declined from 32% of people aged 15-24 years to 4% of people aged 55-64 years.
How participation in employment varies by type of restricting impairment
Government policy is designed to provide services to people who are restricted in the basic activities of daily living. A number of employment assistance programs give support to people with disabilities for job search activities and/or provide ongoing support at work. Under the Commonwealth/State Disability Agreement, the Commonwealth Government has responsibility for the planning, policy setting and management of disability employment services (primarily focused on people aged 15-64 years).
The labour force participation rate of working-age people living in the community was 76%. This rate dropped to 53% for people with a disability, ranging from only 29% for those people restricted by a psychiatric impairment to 56% for those restricted by a sensory impairment (table 9.7).
Need for assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks
Many people with a disability live independently within the community. They may at times need assistance in some areas of their day-to-day lives. In the 1998 SDAC people were asked whether they had difficulty performing a range of day-to-day tasks and whether they needed help with them. These tasks, such as dressing, washing, walking, understanding and communicating with others, are grouped to form a number of activities of everyday life. People may need help with one or more of these activities.
In addition, the ability of a person to make good decisions, to manage their feelings and emotions, and to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships can have a significant impact on a person's ability to access support programs (accommodation, respite, employment and others), and the outcomes of those support programs. These abilities were grouped together as cognitive or emotional tasks.
Cognitive or emotional tasks are:
These essential day-to-day tasks make a large contribution to a person's wellbeing and can be difficult at times for anyone. People with a disability, particularly those restricted by a psychological or intellectual impairment, may experience additional difficulty with these tasks and may need help from others.
The ability of a person to gain meaningful employment can be influenced by many factors, including their ability to interact with others and to make sound decisions.
In 1998, 8% of the 2,066,700 people aged 15-64 years with a disability living in the community reported that they needed help to make friends, interact with others, or maintain relationships; 15% needed help to cope with feelings or emotions; and 14% required assistance to make decisions or think through problems (table 9.8).
People with some impairment types are more likely to have a need for assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks than others: 72% of people with a psychological impairment needed assistance with one or more of these tasks, compared to 56% of people with an intellectual impairment. Less than half (41%) of people with head injury, stroke or brain damage required this type of assistance, and this form of assistance was needed to an even lesser extent among those restricted by a sensory or speech impairment (24%) and least of all among those restricted by a physical impairment (20%).
A person may have more than one impairment type. Some of the people with a physical or sensory impairment who needed assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks had a psychiatric or intellectual impairment as well.
Coping with feelings or emotions was most frequently reported as the area of need for assistance, ranging from 60% of people with a psychological impairment to 15% of those with a physical impairment. The least need for assistance was required with making friends, interacting with others and maintaining relationships. People with a physical impairment had the lowest need for help in each of the three tasks.
Of those who had a need for assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks because of their disability, 20% reported that they always needed such help, while 80% sometimes needed it. The highest need was among those with an intellectual impairment, with 36% of those with a need for cognitive or emotional assistance always needing help. The lowest intensity of need was among those restricted by a physical impairment, with 22% of those needing cognitive or emotional assistance reporting that they always need help.
Impairment, the need for cognitive or emotional assistance, and the level of participation in a broad range of community activities are likely to be interrelated. In 1998, people with a disability aged 15-64 years who needed cognitive or emotional assistance had lower labour force participation rates than people who did not need cognitive or emotional assistance.
The labour force participation rate declines in line with increasing need for assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks. It was lowest among those who always needed cognitive or emotional assistance (20%), was higher for those who sometimes needed cognitive or emotional assistance (41%), and was highest (47%) for people who had difficulty with at least one of the cognitive or emotional tasks but did not need help with any of them. However, people who had any difficulty with cognitive or emotional tasks were less likely to participate in the labour force than people with a disability in general (53%) (table 9.9).
In the 15-64 age group, people with a disability who had no recorded difficulty with any of the three cognitive or emotional tasks had a much higher participation rate (61%), though still considerably lower than the rate for the total population (76%).
There are strong moves to encourage people with a disability to greater participation in the labour force. These findings suggest that the kinds of support needed by people who require assistance with cognitive or emotional tasks should be an important consideration in the design of programs for their better labour force integration.
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This page last updated 8 December 2006 | <urn:uuid:8f2b0068-1d5f-4979-a9f0-fe39048e6e19> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article92003?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=1301.0&issue=2003&num=&view= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973193 | 1,596 | 2.84375 | 3 |
"Belief in People" Was Key to Obama Victory, Campaign Manager David Plouffe Says in Ubben Lecture
February 2, 2009
February 2, 2009, Greencastle, Ind. — [Download Video: "The Improbable Upset" - 1104kb] "You cannot understand who he is, who we were as a campaign, without understanding how improbable all of this was," David Plouffe, manager of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, told an audience at DePauw University tonight. "There has never been a bigger political upset in modern political history, maybe in all of political history. It's hard to reconcile that with now he's on the stage, he's been elected president, he's serving as our president -- but 2 years ago this seemed like something that would have the lowest of odds and a lot of things would have to happen right."
Just thirteen days after the inauguration of President Obama, Plouffe discussed "Leadership Lessons from a Presidential Campaign Manager" in a Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture. A crowd of about 700 -- including students from DePauw, Purdue, Ball State and Indiana universities -- gathered in Kresge Auditorium of DePauw's Green Center for the Performing Arts to hear from the man Obama called "the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the . . . best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America."
Plouffe recalled his first discussions with Obama about the possibility of a run for the White House after the 2006 congressional elections, describing the then-U.S. Senator as a man "who did not have a pathological desire to be president ... [Download Audio: "The Beginning" - 238kb] And I did not know then if he would be a good presidential candudate. The reason I'd work for him is I thought he had a chance to be a very good president, but, in some respects those are two different things. He ended up being an outstanding presidential candidate, but I think in many ways he's much better suited to the presidency, even in these times of crisis, than the presidential campaign because of his style and his intellect."
Plouffe, who has worked on a variety of campaigns since 1990, took the helm of his first national campaign when he agreed to lead Obama's presidential bid. [Download Audio: "An Improbable Journey" - 606kb] "People forget 2 years ago he wasn't even announced for president. And 2 years before that, he had been a state senator in Illinois. And here he was going up against the strongest front-runner in our party's history in a time of war."
The lesson that can be drawn from the Obama's campaigns beginnings is "don't see things as they are right now; kind of imagine what they might be," Plouffe offered. As the "improbable journey" began, the Obama team developed a plan that was carefully considered and followed consistently over the months that followed. "Very early, Barack Obama knew exactly what he wanted to say. If you look at his announcement speech, it is very similar to what he said on the night of November 4," when he was elected president. "His message really did not change," says Plouffe.
A "clarity of focus" and "structure in hierarchy" were also pillars of a campaign which Plouffe says was determined to ignore the "stale playbook of how to run for president" that had been used by candidates for decades. [Download Audio: "Pathways to Victory" - 395kb] "We were confident enough as an organization -- and a lot of this was based in research and data, it wasn't just flying by the seat of our pants -- to not accept those old nostrums." According to Plouffe, "We've all gotten accustomed to every 4 years, on the first Tuesday in November, to looking out and seeing how Ohio and Florida are going to vote. And we were tired of that, and we thought that we to create as many pathways to victory as possible, so we'd wake up on November 4th and could say, 'Well, if we win Florida, we win. If we win Indiana and Colorado, we win. If we win Virginia and Montana, we win.' A lot of different combinations to get there."
To build bases in each state, Plouffe and his staff used the Internet, text messaging and other forms of communication to build and grow a now-legendary grassroots network of organizers and volunteers. [Download Video: "The Domino Effect" - 1232kb] "It was a domino effect," he said tonight, "and we believed in the power of people to really try and change their country. Now it grew to a scale that we could not have imagined in our wildest dreams: 13 million people, 4 million contributors, 6 million volunteers. Think about that. Thirteen million people are on our e-mail list; that was 20% of the people who voted for Barack Obama." Plouffe says, "So that belief in people that really came from Obama really, I think, made a big difference."
Plouffe began his address by stating, [Download Video: "Plouffe's Welcome" - 696kb] "It is good to be in Indiana, which is blue on that electoral map for the first time in far too long." The Hoosier state, usually the first to be declared for Republican presidential candidates in each election, went Obama's way in 2008. It was the first time a Democrat carried the state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Indiana was the last of 18 states put on the Obama campaign's battleground list and "the state we wanted the most," Plouffe said tonight.
[Download Audio: "People Power" - 562kb] "The notion of us winning Indiana without a grassroots campaign is just completely nuts," Plouffe asserted. "If we had run a lot of TV ads here and the candidate came occasionally and we had a decent field operation, we would've lost by 6 points. We wouldn't have won Florida, we wouldn't have won Ohio. We had millions of people out there who were giving us money they couldn't afford to give, time they didn't have to give. Half of the people who gave money or volunteered for our campaign had never done so before in American politics. Think about that, that's a shocking number."
The man called "the mastermind behind a winning strategy" by the Chicago Tribune went on to say, [Download Video: "The Untold Story" - 1215kb] "What has never really been properly appreciated by the press, this grassroots campaign wasn't about how many calls we made or how many doors we knocked on, it was the quality of those contacts. See, if I talk to my circle of people I know every 2 years, they kind of tune me out about politics 'cause I'm gonna say 'Vote for this Democrat, you know, this is a great guy.' But if it's someone in your circle whose never raised their voice about politics before, who might not even have been registered before, who's an independent or Republican who's passionate about a Democrat for the first time -- that has an enormous impact."
Plouffe's day at DePauw began with a student forum, which was moderated by Bruce Stinebrickner, professor of political science, and David Bohmer '69, director of the Eugene S. Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media. The session, held in Meharry Hall of historic East College, provided an opportunity for students to ask questions about Obama campaign strategies and the electoral process.
The visitor's next stop was the Pulliam Center, where he took part in a news conference. Audio of the session can be accessed here.
Plouffe was introduced at tonight's Ubben Lecture by David R. Dietz, a DePauw sophomore who is president of the University's College Democrats and an Obama campaign volunteer.
The campaign made its share of mistakes, Plouffe admitted -- among them, he says the Clinton team was the first to focus its messaging on economic issues. He also noted, "We could have won the Texas primary and didn't, which doesn't seem like a big deal now but could have cost us the presidency," he declared. "We probably started targeting some states like Georgia and North Dakota a little early; we should have just focused on that next tier of Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. All of these things do not look like big things now, but they were then."
The calm, self-assured Barack Obama that the public got to know was the same man Plouffe saw consistently throughout the campaign's peaks and valleys. [Download Video: "On President Obama" - 2322kb] "He is someone who commits to a strategy -- again, is willing to adjust tactics, but he won't throw something overboard just because the chattering class or pressure internally gets too itense. He's very resolute. He thinks long-term. That's why today, even when we're dealing with this economic crisis, he is committed to doing the longer-term things on energy we need to do to put this country on the right track. Things, by the way, that won't be evidenced for years and years, if not decades."
Plouffe continued, "Washington doesn't like to do a lot of things that don't have immediate benefit to them in the next election, so this is going to be a big challenge. But he thinks long term; it's one of the prime reasons he ran. We've got these big, festering problems -- competitiveness, energy, health care -- that Washington just keeps kicking down the field. And he will consider his presidency a failure if he has not put us on the road to progress" on those issues, the campaign manager said to applause from the audience.
Plouffe's experience with the Obama campaign [Download Video: "Young Voters" - 1336kb] "has given me a huge amount of confidence in the future and the belief that younger voters, younger people in this country, are willing to do something beyond themselves -- if they're asked properly, if they're motivated, if they're trusted. And I think one of the reason younger voters gravitated to Obama -- some of it was generational -- they thought he was not B.S.ing them, they thought he was being honest with them and understood the future of the country a little better than some of the other candidates. But I think they also got the sense that as a campaign we trusted them, we believed in them, that in many ways our futures and destiny were tied together: we would only do as well as younger voters took us."
The resume of David Plouffe (pronounced "Pluff") includes stints as a state field director for Tom Harkin's unsuccessful 1992 presidential campaign and a strategist for Richard Gephardt's failed 2000 bid for the White House, directing successful campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and serving as campaign director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. From 1997-98, Plouffe served as Democratic leader Dick Gephardt's deputy chief of staff. From 1999 to 2000, as executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Plouffe led a national campaign that raised a record $95 million for House races across the country.
For the moment, Plouffe is taking a break from politics and offering his help to the White House as needed, and is determined to spend time with his wife and two small children after a grueling stint on the presidential campaign trail kept him away from home. "It was a brutal 2 years, but worth every second," he says. His plans also include penning a book, The Audacity to Win and he's helped launch Organizing for America, a grassroots campaign network which will work to mobilize volunteers to improve their communities and support policy in Washington.
The Ubben Lecture Series was created in 1986 by a gift by Timothy and Sharon Williams Ubben, both 1958 graduates of DePauw. Designed to "bring the world to Greencastle," it brought humanitarian Greg Mortenson (seen at right), author of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time, to campus November 13, and will welcome veteran journalist Jane Pauley on April 17.
Previous Ubben Lecturers have included: Shimon Peres, Margaret Thatcher, Elie Wiesel, Tony Blair, Spike Lee, Mikhail Gorbachev (pictured at right), Benazir Bhutto, Gen. Colin Powell, Paul Bremer, John Major, Andrew Young, Naomi Wolf, General Wesley Clark, Barbara Bush, E.O. Wilson, Robert Gates, Elie Wiesel, Ross Perot, L. Paul Bremer, Bob Woodward, Ralph Nader, Eric Schlosser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Willy Brandt, Jesse Jackson, Mike Krzyzewski, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Peyton Manning, Allan Bloom, Hotel Rwanda's Paul Rusesabagina, PostSecret founder Frank Warren, ice cream entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry, Paul Volcker, Brian Mulroney, Mary Frances Berry, Mitch Albom, David Brower and Harry Belafonte.
A video retrospective of the Ubben Lecture Series -- produced by DePauw students -- was premiered in June 2008 over Alumni Reunion Weekend. Read about the project, and view the piece, via this article.Back | <urn:uuid:5b3ef941-3bbe-4749-903d-2ce870be0710> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/22876 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977865 | 2,799 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The duct system is cleaned using a high powered vacuum called Negative/Reverse Air. We recommend the duct system to be cleaned every three years. The duct cleaning will reduce dusting, removes pollen, animal hair and construction debris. The duct cleaning will prolong the life of the heating and cooling system by removing the debris, and will reduce dusting.
A high powered vacuum, made for duct cleaning, is attached to the main duct in the basement. We go to each supply register starting with the top floor and farthest room from the furnace unit. Two hundred fifty pounds of compressed air is blown through each supply line. From the basement a whip line is run through each main to dislodge the debris. A reverse air line extends to the end of the main trunk line to remove any and all debris that has been taken to the main. All debris goes into the vacuum. The same process will be done to all return registers and return mains. Debris is removed off of the blower, blower compartment and any burners on the furnace unit. This would be sanitized. The furnace filter is checked and then the system is sanitized with an EPA registered sanitizer. The sanitizer is a bacteriostat, fungustat and deodorizer. The EPA sanitizer contains no alcohol or perfumes and is safe for people and pets.
The same process will be done to all return registers and return mains. The system is sanitized with an EPA registered santizer, contains no alcohol or perfume and is safe for people and pets. You do not have to leave your home during the process.
Our company cleans air ducts for slab homes, homes with basements, condominiums, apartments and commercial buildings. | <urn:uuid:7e8b1750-aa41-4d8a-b525-baa8a1bd5ec6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://madhatterchimneysweepohio.com/air-ducts/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949751 | 357 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Policy / Advocacy / National
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» Letters of Support
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of the Ryan White
AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families
AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families is the only national organization focused solely on the needs of children, youth, and families living with, affected by, or at risk for HIV and AIDS.
Since agencies founding in 1994 as AIDS Policy Center for Children, Youth & Families, it has been the leading advocate for children, youth, and families affected by HIV/AIDS. During the past several years, it has expanded its mission to include not only policy analysis and advocacy, but also education and training for consumers and providers. For this reason, it changed its name to AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families in early 2000.
AIDS Alliance's membership includes over 500 community-based organizations that provide HIV prevention, care and research services in 30 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Its members also include HIV-affected youth, women, and other family members throughout the nation. Many of these organizations and individuals provide or receive services funded by Title IV of the Ryan White CARE Act. Title IV funds comprehensive HIV/AIDS care services for children, youth, women and families.
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|© Copyright 2003, NY HIV Disclaimer Privacy Statement| | <urn:uuid:77b0a77f-df42-4876-8ef5-b69ccdf2af5b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nyhiv.com/policy_advocacy_national_alliance_families_children_youths_aids.html | 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 | 0.908316 | 310 | 1.648438 | 2 |
A sticker is a type of a piece of paper or plastic, adhesive, sticky on one side, and usually with a design on the other. They can be used for decoration, depending on the situation. They can come in many different shapes, sizes and colors and are put on things such as lunch boxes, in children’s rooms, on paper, lockers, notebooks and so on. Some people collect and trade them with other collectors.
Sticker printing can be tricky. Many people just go and buy their stickers from random places and after a month or two they get bumped and useless. You better do a little research about their quality from your local printing companies before you purchase any. | <urn:uuid:0d101aab-ebc2-403e-8e94-7b8073682530> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smokingdesigners.com/cute-inspiring-stickers-part-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970138 | 140 | 2.234375 | 2 |
With the threats of cybercrime, cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare looming over our hyper-connected world, the best defense for the U.S. might be a good offense, says new research by a University of Illinois expert in technology and legal issues.
Law professor Jay P. Kesan warns that an active self-defense regime, which he terms "mitigative counterstriking," is a necessity in cyberspace, especially to protect critical infrastructure such as banking, utilities and emergency services.
"The threats from cyber-attacks are real, and the harm of a potential attack can be far greater than what we can currently combat," Kesan said.
Kesan's analysis, co-written with former U. of I. law student Carol M. Hayes and published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, concludes that mitigative counterstriking against attacks instead of simply relying on passive defense options (firewalls, patches and anti-virus software) is legally justifiable as self-defense, although a more exhaustive legal framework needs to be implemented.
"The principles of mitigative counterstriking are legally justifiable under several areas of domestic and international law, and can be made consistent with other areas of law by amending or reinterpreting the law," he said.
Kesan says an active defense regime consists of three distinct elements: detecting intrusions, tracing the attack back to the attacker, and executing a counterstrike.
A counterstrike can be characterized in one of two ways: retributive counterstrikes, which punish the attacker; and mitigative counterstrikes, which minimize the damage to the victims' information-technology infrastructure.
According to the authors' study, there currently is no effective domestic or international legal apparatus to deter cyber-attacks. Criminal law enforcement is complicated by the lack of a consistently enforced international law, jurisdictional issues and the difficulty of identifying an attacker in a manner specific enough to justify criminal prosecution. Resorting to civil litigation would likely be slow and impractical.
"Cyber-attacks are fundamentally different from crime," Kesan said. "The person may be physically very far away from you, and you may not be able to use traditional legal remedies against that person, since civil and criminal remedies require jurisdiction over a person. In those circumstances, what do you do?"
Kesan suggests that a government-affiliated agency, preferably a public-private partnership, should be responsible for an active defense program, including providing resources for private parties to detect and trace intrusions, and executing counterstrikes.
"We're at a particularly interesting moment in time because the technologies available to do this are getting better," Kesan said. "Trace-route and trace-back technologies where we pinpoint where certain intrusions are coming from, even if they're going through intermediaries are getting better. The swiftness of the technologies is getting better, which itself might be a deterrent."
Kesan says the confluence of better technology and inadequate legal protection provides a unique opportunity to think through the issues associated with creating new legal policy.
"Obviously, some sort of self-defense in cyberspace is justifiable," he said. "But how far do we go? Do we just block packets, or do we send them back? That's something we need to think carefully about."
Active defense, however, has been and continues to be a controversial subject. Kesan says the reason the government has been tentative is that, in some quarters, an active defense is viewed as tantamount to vigilantism. It also carries the risk of inflicting significant collateral damage.
"There will be consequences to engaging in that kind of conduct, so we don't want to take actions that are perceived as being lawless or could potentially cause lots of collateral harm," Kesan said. "Technologies are never 100 percent perfect or foolproof."
But if the U.S. is subject to an attack, "then we should have the ability to enact some measures to at least minimize the damage," he said. "Additionally, I would argue that a system to promote active defense and permit mitigative counterstriking should also include a liability rule to protect innocent third party intermediaries whose systems are compromised by attackers and counterstrikers."
Kesan says it's vital that formal policy is finalized soon, while there is still time for thoughtful deliberation and analysis of all of the potential implications of an attack.
"We rely on our online infrastructure for just about everything," he said. "That represents a good choke point, one that might be an attractive target for people who wish to do harm to us. If they were successful, it would have the potential to cause a great deal of economic hardship. That's why we need to be prepared before we are faced with the fallout from an attack."
Explore further: Facebook joins Web freedom group
More information: The paper, "Mitigative Counterstriking: Self-Defense and Deterrence in Cyberspace," is available online. | <urn:uuid:d5c7436d-43be-44ea-bc03-4794d9ee9004> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phys.org/news/2011-06-self-defense-strategy-deterrent-cyber-attacks.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96338 | 1,030 | 2.34375 | 2 |
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Petition Tag - faro
Obscene ritual to attain something called Moz or coming of age.
There is a particularly horrific email circulating regarding the yearly killing of thousands of whales and dolphins in a ritualistic slaughter called Moz which so called civilized members of the Faro Islands Denmark consider to be a rite of passage
If you wish to view the email with all the horrific affirmation of this appalling display of barbarism and collective bad karma which reflects on us all until it stopped then you may find it on hoax slayer site - this email status hoax slayer has sadly affirmed to be a valid email and not at all bogus
Another website http://facthai.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/denmarks-calderon-dolphin-pilot-whale-slaughter/
Every year around 2,000 whales are driven ashore and cruelly slaughtered in the Faroe Islands, mid-way between the Shetland Islands and Iceland.
For centuries the Faroe Islanders have hunted pilot whales, driving entire schools into killing bays, where they are speared or gaffed from boats, dragged ashore and butchered with knives.
Although the Islands are a protectorate of Denmark, they have their own Government and regulations governing the pilot whale hunt or "grind" as it is known.
Aside from the fact that the number of North Atlantic long-finned pilot whales is unknown and they are listed as 'strictly protected' by the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, this is an act of barbarism and pointlessness.
By slaughtering 100 whales at a time, the Faroese are wiping out entire pods and family groups. They are removing building blocks from the gene pool of the species and damaging the web of life in the North Atlantic and the North Sea.
The drive hunt is a practice abandoned elsewhere many decades ago, and now outlawed by other European states. The inhabitants of the Faroe Islands have no subsistence need for whale meat, and much of the flesh is left to rot and be dumped; it cannot be exported, as it is polluted with heavy metals and other toxins and therefore cannot meet EU heath standards for human food.
According to Faroese legislation it is also permitted to hunt certain species of small cetaceans other than pilot whales. These include: Bottlenose dolphin; Atlantic white-beaked dolphin; Atlantic white-sided dolphin; and Harbour porpoise (There are also specific regulations for the hunting of harbour porpoise. Harbour porpoises are killed with shotguns). | <urn:uuid:4cfce6a5-03d1-4a98-a81d-333a7ef2632e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gopetition.co.uk/tag/faro | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939085 | 548 | 1.648438 | 2 |
A 1-day-old full-term 3140 gram male neonate presented with large symmetric skin defects of the scalp, trunk, and extremities. Intrauterine fetal demise of a twin was reported between 16-18 weeks of gestation. The parents were non-consanguineous. No other family members were similarly affected. Aplasia cutis congenita (ACC) reflects a spectrum of cutaneous and subcutaneous tissue defects. Most frequently, aplasia cutis congenita presents as a small, isolated defect in the scalp of neonates along the lines of embryonic fusion. This limited form of aplasia cutis congenita must be distinguished from traumatic ulceration from scalp electrode placement in the perinatal time period and congenital or neonatal herpes simplex infection.
Frieden has classified ACC into nine subtypes, based on clinical presentation, prognosis, and associated conditions. Type V ACC is associated with a fetus papyraceus, or mummified co-twin present at birth. The fetus papyraceus is formed after the co-twin dies early in the second trimester. This rarely described entity presents as isolated extensive symmetric areas of cutaneous and subcutaneous skin defects. Areas of skin aplasia generally heal well, albeit with scarring, and infection – with the exception of extensive scalp ACC – is not usually a problem.
The etiology of ACC remains poorly elucidated. Clearly, genetic predisposition plays a role in the development of this disorder, but other factors, including intrauterine infection, amniotic adhesions, intrauterine necrosis, and teratogens may play a role. Additionally, some authors have proposed that areas of aplasia result from watershed areas of necrosis due to impaired vascular supply. Similarly, scalp aplasia has been proposed as a result of tissue tension in the setting of head growth leading to a further impaired vascular supply and tissue necrosis. Type V ACC associated with fetus papyraceus may result from vascular compromise secondary to the co-twin’s demise in the early 2nd trimester. In our patient the scars in the groin and axillae represent areas of aplasia that healed over the ensuing months of gestation between the insult and birth.
ACC may be associated with a number of complications. One case of ACC reported by Campbell was complicated by fatal sagittal sinus hemorrhage 18 days postpartum. Estimates suggest that the mortality rate of patients with extensive scalp ACC may be as high as 20-30 percent . Death is generally a result of hemorrhage, thrombosis, or infection. Prompt diagnosis and appropriate management are critical in avoiding adverse outcomes. This patient underwent successful plastic surgical repair and continues to do well postoperatively.
1. Boente MC et al. Extensive symmetric truncal aplasia cutis congenita without fetus papyraceus or macroscopic evidence of placental abnormalities. Pediatr Dermatol. 1995;12: 228-230.
2. Cambiaghi S et al. Aplasia cutis congenita in surviving co-twins: four unrelated cases. Pediatr Dermatol. 2001;18: 511-515.
3. Classen DA. Aplasia cutis congenita associated with fetus papyraceous. Cutis. 1999;64: 104-106.
4. Frieden IJ. Aplasia cutis congenita: a clinical review and proposal for classification. J Am Acad.Dermatol. 1986;14: 646-660.
5. Schneider BM, et al. Aplasia cutis congenita complicated by sagittal sinus hemorrhage. Pediatrics. 1980;66: 948-950. | <urn:uuid:d035fe37-df3c-45a0-9d93-285f95351faf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dermatlas.med.jhmi.edu/image/aplasia_cutis_congenita_1_050111 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910155 | 778 | 1.8125 | 2 |
THIS ITEM QUALIFIES FOR FREE SHIPPINGFree Shipping only applies to items that qualify for free shipping. Only valid when shipping to lower 48 states.
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AOS 4th-Graders Sell Lemonade at UST on May 6
In collaboration with the University of St. Thomas School of Education and School of Business, fourth-graders from Annunciation Orthodox School will participate in Lemonade Day on Sunday, May 6, selling Lemonade from 2 to 3:30 p.m. on the UST Academic Mall. In a sip-and-stroll fashion, there is a $5 tasting fee per person and six teams of students will provide lemonade. All proceeds go to BARC Animal Shelter & Adoptions.
Lemonade Day is a free, community-wide educational initiative designed to teach children how to start, own and operate their own business – a lemonade stand.
Dressed in lemon-yellow T-shirts, 62 fourth-graders from AOS visited the University on March 7 to take part in a kick-off event for Lemonade Day.
The elementary students received inspiration from the event’s founder, Michael Holthouse, a Houston entrepreneur and philanthropist, and co-founder of Prepared 4 Life, a non-profit that provides fun programs infused with life skills, character education and entrepreneurship. Holthouse shared the story of his daughter’s experience of starting a lemonade stand to help buy a turtle.
“Maybe you have a goal in mind,” Holthouse said to the students. “A turtle or an iPad or drum lessons.”
Holthouse underscored the value of educating kids to become entrepreneurs through training in life skills, character and morals. But let’s not forget the point of a lemonade stand:
“It’s going to be big fun, and at the end of it, you’re going to make a bunch of money,” he told the fourth-graders.
Holthouse said he was glad to be able to partner with the University for the kick-off and the Lemonade Day program.
“St. Thomas has produced so many great leaders,” he said. “We are so honored to be able to partner with you.”
Two UST alumni also shared their stories about starting their own businesses: John Daugherty III ’12, who started ’Cue Sauce last year, bottling his own barbecue sauce, and Tino Ramirez ’85, owner of The Chocolate Bar and Candylicious.
Daugherty said he considered speaking about hard work, teamwork and resourcefulness – all important in starting a business – but decided to make his message about encouraging students to build a business they enjoy.
“I thought about how we got ’Cue Sauce from a piece of paper to a product – it’s fun,” Daugherty said. “It wouldn’t be successful if it wasn’t fun.”
Ramirez, whose businesses included a pizza restaurant and dog sitting before starting The Chocolate Bar, said it is important to make a plan and understand the product well.
“My favorite part of running my business is research,” Ramirez said. “That meant trying every piece of candy and chocolate.”
He encouraged the kids to focus on their product. “Do you want to make organic lemonade? Do you want to make pink lemonade?” he asked. “Make sure you sample your lemonade.”
Cameron Waldner ’06, MLA ’08, the Chief Service Officer for the City of Houston, also represented the mayor in presenting a city proclamation of May 6 as Lemonade Day.
“Lemonade Day is a day of learning and celebrating Houston’s future,” the proclamation read. “On Sunday, May 6, every citizen has a job – either buying or helping children sell lemonade.”
The Annunciation Orthodox School kids will be assigned to teams to sell lemonade at UST on Lemonade Day, giving the UST community an opportunity to support their sales.
The University’s Lemonade Day program is a collaboration between AOS, the UST School of Education and the Cameron School of Business. UST faculty will offer 14 lessons on topics like site selection, finding an investor, purchasing and advertising. The final lesson will be about how the students can use their profits to give back to the community.
The final lesson will be about how the students can use their profits to give back to the community. | <urn:uuid:690661c0-822b-4857-894c-8a29302fc693> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stthom.edu/Public/Index.asp?0=0&page_id=5534&Source_URL=%2FAbout_UST%2FSuccess_Stories%2F1_Index.aqf%3FNewsScriptAction%3DSimple_Search%26AQ_Year%3D2012&Content_ID=13040 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957565 | 927 | 1.507813 | 2 |
At Real Clear Politics the other day, I came across an article by economist, Arthur Laffer in theWall Street Journal. the same Arthur Laffer whom developed the Laffer Curve during the Reagan administration. As I often do, I scanned the article and bookmarked it as a possible source for a post. Then this morning I had an e-mail in my in-box from Pat Slattery of The Free Market Projectsuggesting that I consider doing a post on an article by John Hayward about the Laffer article. And, I thank him. So, I will discuss both the Laffer and Hayward articles in today’s post on economic statistics.
Economic Statistics that Deceive
With good reason, we mere mortals, without a PhD, have to wonder if government agencies and politicians, including the President, are lying to us. Well, of course, they lie to us. That is a given. But, when it comes government generated statistics, they don’t so much lie to us as they don’t tell us all that we need to know. In other words, they tend to cherry-pick data to put the economy in the best possible. With today’s economy, that is more difficult than usual.
One example of government cherry-picking data is the reported inflation rate. According to the Federal Reserve, inflation is negligible. We know that is not true. The reason reported inflation appears low is that they do not include price changes in oil, gasoline, and food. The items that impact the budgets of 90% of the population the most are not included in the calculation of inflation.
Anther example of the government only telling us part of the story are the monthly employment numbers. I watched a news video the other day Debbie Whatshername-Schultz say how proud she was of Obama because under his leadership we have had 29 consecutive months of job growth. PROUD! Give me a break.! The workforce participation rate is getting smaller by the month! The July jobs report announced that non-farm jobs increased in July by 163,000. This was more than what was expected. The stock market went wild. If you want to know what really happened with the jobs market, check out this article at PJ Media and this article at Inform the Pundits. You will find out that there was a net loss of jobs in July. Just ask yourself why the unemployment rate increased to 8.3%?
So, with all the efforts to put our economy in the best possible light, our GDP is growing at an abysmal rate of 1.5%. That is pathetic! Let’s find out why our economy is so anaemic.
Some Economic Statistics Matter
The Obama administration, more than any administration in my memory, has based their economic policies on nothing more than tax and spend. Obama has set the all time record for government spending “crapweasels” like Paul Krugman and Democrats in general and the main stream media keep calling for more and more stimulus. (Crapweasel is a term Kurt Silverfiddlealways uses when referring to Paul Krugman. It fits.)
One of the best ways to measure the success or failure of an economic policy is to look at the empirical results where that policy has been tried. This is exactly what Arthur Laffer has done and reports on his findings in this Wall Street Journal article and suggest that:
Policy makers in Washington and other capitals around the world are debating whether to implement another round of stimulus spending to combat high unemployment and sputtering growth rates. But before they leap, they should take a good hard look at how that worked the first time around.
Dr. Laffer looked at 34 countries that implemented stimulus programs after the 2008 financial crisis. The results weren’t very stimulating:
It worked miserably, as indicated by the table nearby, which shows increases in government spending from 2007 to 2009 and subsequent changes in GDP growth rates. Of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, those with the largest spending spurts from 2007 to 2009 saw the least growth in GDP rates before and after the stimulus.
There is a table in Laffer’s article show just badly stimulus worked for these countries. John Hayward in his Human Events’ article about the Laffer report, like this quote from Laffer:
Often as not, the qualification for receiving stimulus funds is the absence of work or income – such as banks and companies that fail, solar energy companies that can’t make it on their own, unemployment benefits and the like. Quite simply,government taxing people more who work and then giving more money to people who don’t work is a surefire recipe for less work, less output and more unemployment.
” a surefire recipe for less work, less output, and more unemployment.” This reminds me of a conversation back in the eighties, to which I was present, between brother-in-law and two of his friends. They were all UAW members and employees of the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. They were all in their middle fifties and they had been doing some sharp penciling about whether it made sense for them to take early retirement at age 58. They concluded that with their General Motor’s pensions and Social Security (in those days you could opt for early Social Security at a reduced rate at 58) that it made no sense to keep working 40 hour weeks for just a few hundred dollars more. I’m thinking that the same thinking applies to many of our citizens on welfare and other government assistance. They are likely figuring why should they take a forty-hour a week job when they can do nothing for only a few hundred dollars less..
John Hayward would add something to Laffer’s analysis:
The other obfuscating factor I would add to Laffer’s analysis is that government spending is treated as highly significant by the media, while private investment is either ignored or criticized. The financial papers might carry tales of business success, and once in a while the public imagination is captured by a company like Apple… but none of that compares to the front-page, above-the-fold coverage given to huge government spending initiatives.
We know what Obama and his team are up to. With the support of the main stream media, they want to pull the wool over the eyes of those that still have a job (the majority of voters) by convincing them that the economy, however slowly, is steadily growing and now is no to change horses. Economic statistics do matter and it is going to be up to us, the conservative bloggers, to get the truth out there. It won’t come from the media, that is for sure.
Well, that’s what I’m thinking. What are your thoughts?
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This morning Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced that $500 million will be directed toward early education in the next six months. The money will be awarded through the Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge, a new state-level competition that Duncan and Sebelius hope will spur states to create holistic, coordinated early care and education systems (including players like childcare centers, Head Start, state-funded pre-k programs, and home-visiting programs) to close the school-readiness gap.
The officials divulged no information on how many winners they expected to name, nor how the money would be divvied up. By law, the money must be awarded by December 31. A notice inviting applications will be posted by the federal government by the end of the summer, according to officials in a conference call this afternoon from the White House, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The program is designed to cover the "birth to age 5" years – it does not include kindergarten, nor does it extend up through third grade, an omission that was dictated by the legislation approved by Congress, according to Jacqueline Jones, senior advisor to the Secretary for early learning in the Department of Education.
The new program was borne out of the 2011 continuing appropriations bill, which was passed last month. In that bill, Congress allocated $700 million in new funding to the Race to the Top grant program and added early learning as another strategy to be added to four education reform areas outlined in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which guided the structure of the Race to the Top program. (For more information read here and here.)
It is significant that such a large portion of the $700 million – nearly three-quarters of it – will be dedicated to early learning programs. Early childhood advocates were cheering about that news throughout the day, hoping that it will send a message to states about the importance of investing in childcare and state-funded pre-k programs. The remaining $200 million, officials said, would be made available in a new competition for the nine states who made it to the final round of RTTT* but didn’t win last year. (South Carolina has already declined.)
For the Early Learning Challenge program, Congress specified that the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services must jointly administer the early learning funds and outlined three required criteria. To win a portion of the $500 million, states must:
· Increase the number and percentage of low-income and disadvantaged infants, toddlers, and preschoolers who are enrolled in high-quality early learning programs;
· Design and implement an integrated system of high-quality early learning programs and services; and
· Ensure that any use of assessments is consistent with the recommendations of the National Research Council’s reports on early childhood. (One key report is Early Childhood Assessment: Why, What, and How)
As we said in a previous post, the three criteria listed above don’t come close to the level of detail that was first proposed in 2009 in legislation for the Early Learning Challenge Fund but they are complimentary.
Today’s announcement did not provide any additional details on what the states’ applications will have to include. That will be an area of considerable speculation over the next few months.
But here are some things we do know:
Funds will go directly to states and the application framework is expected to look similar to the Race to the Top application. ED and HHS are aiming to give states enough time (at least six weeks) to submit thoughtful, high-quality applications. The areas that states will be required to show progress in or to develop plans to address are still undefined. In light of the short turnaround time the Departments were granted a waiver to hold an official public comment period, and instead are asking stakeholders to weigh in with their suggestions, ideas and comments on the Race to the Top-Early Learning blog post.
Based on information from Obama Administration officials thus far, here is what we anticipate:
1) States will be prompted to challenge the “status quo” as they were in the Race to the Top- K-12 program. Duncan said this means addressing uneven quality and leveling the playing field for children beginning kindergarten.
2) States will be asked to consider the health, social-emotional and cognitive development of young children. Sebelius talked about the importance of each of these domains in ensuring that children are ready to succeed in school and in life.
3) Systems-building will be key. A press release from the Departments said that states will be encouraged to “bolster training and support for the early learning workforce, create robust evaluation systems to document and share effective practices and successful programs and help parents make informed decisions about care for their children.”
As to what states will really be asked to address in their applications, Early Ed Watch sees three possible existing models that could define the areas of focus for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge.
1) The four assurances from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which requires states to focus on:
a. Effective teachers
b. High-quality standards and assessments
c. Data to support instruction
d. Plans to turnaround low-performing schools
2) The Early Learning Challenge Fund legislation, which called for:
a. Early learning standards reform
b. Evidence-based program quality standards
c. Enhanced program review and monitoring of program quality
d. Comprehensive professional development
e. A coordinated system for facilitating screenings for disability, health, and mental health needs
f. Improved outreach and support to parents
g. A process for assessing children's school readiness
h. Use of data to improve child outcomes
3) The three basic areas included in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011 that we mentioned above. The Departments of Education and HHS could simply choose to stick with the prioritiesof Congress.
Then there is always the possible wildcard option: The priorities that arise from the comments. So, be sure to offer your own suggestions.
Look for several more posts on the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge in the coming days, weeks and months as we learn more and provide commentary on the implications of this new initiative. One area that we've stressed – the connection between the early years and the early grades of elementary school – is missing in this grant program, which we expect may cause trouble down the road. But the larger point – the availability of new money for early childhood programs that are extremely strapped for funds and the insistence on building better systems for young children – deserves big applause.
* The first phase of the original Race to Top program, which provided $4-billion in grants, featured only two winners, Delaware and Tennessee. In the second phase, 10 won. This time, as then, all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico are invited to compete in this new Early Learning Challenge program.
P.S. Already, the National Institute for Early Education Research is providing some helpful context in its blog post today, "Winning the Future: Early Learning, Race to the Top, and Federal Funding." | <urn:uuid:0781acdb-d1a8-4b46-92ad-1b5ef60d9f46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://earlyed.newamerica.net/blogposts/2011/states_invited_to_compete_for_500_million_via_early_learning_challenge-51969 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957958 | 1,484 | 2.0625 | 2 |
On June 27, 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar, took a surprising turn when patrons decided it was time to fight back. As a riot erupted in Greenwich Village, a new era in the gay rights movement was born.
Among the crowd that day was 23-year-old film student Vito Russo. In the aftermath of the infamous rebellion, a raid on an after-hours bar he frequented ended with a young gay man impaling himself on a fence while trying to escape the police. This is when Vito found his voice as a gay activist and critic of homosexual representation in the media. Over the next 20 years, until his death from AIDS in 1990, Vito Russo was one of the most outspoken and inspiring activists in the LGBT community’s fight for equal rights.
Recounting the life of one of the founding fathers of the gay liberation movement, the inspiring documentary Vito debuts Monday, July 23 (9:00-10:45pm ET/PT), exclusively on HBO. Other HBO playdates: July 26 (4:00pm, 12:50am), 29 (8:30am, 5:10am) and 31 (12:45pm), and Aug. 4 (3:00pm) and 8 (9:15am). HBO2 playdates: July 25 (8:00pm) and Aug. 12 (11:45am) and 17 (2:30pm).
HBO Documentary Films presents another summer series, debuting provocative specials every Monday through July 30. Other July films include: Hard Times: Lost on Long Island (July 9); Birders: The Central Park Effect and The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (July 16); and About Face: Supermodels Then and Now (July 30).
Directed by award-winner Jeffrey Schwarz (Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon), Vito paints a touching portrait of this outspoken activist in the LGBT community’s struggle for equal rights, using period footage and film clips to capture a vibrant era of gay culture. “If you’re going to talk about the gay-rights movement, you’re going to talk about Vito,” says journalist David Ehrenstein.
The documentary features rich archival interviews with Vito, as well as insights from gay rights activists, including: Larry Kramer and Arthur Evans; film scholars, among them former MoMA film curator Jon Gartenberg; and journalists/writers such as Michael Schiavi and Gabriel Rotello. Vito also offers personal accounts from his many friends, including Lily Tomlin and Bruce Vilanch, and his family members, including brother Charles Russo and cousin Phyllis Antonellis.
Raised in the Italian neighborhoods of East Harlem, Vito’s family moved to suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, which he hated. At 18, Vito moved back to New York City, where he was enthralled with the sexuality and positive energy of gay liberation. He progressed to activism, and as Marsha P. Johnson, a transgendered gay rights activist states, “the energy became channeled into organizations.”
Vito was one of the pivotal players in many of these gay rights organizations during their formative years. He was an early member of GAA (Gay Activists Alliance), whose goal was to secure basic human rights, dignity and freedom for all gay people. He was one of the co-founders of GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), which was formed to ensure that media representation of gays and lesbians was accurate. Towards the end of his life, he was one of the founders of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a guerilla activist group whose goal was to bring legislation, medical research, treatment and policies to ultimately eradicate the AIDS epidemic.
An accomplished journalist, Vito befriended Lily Tomlin, who supported his work as a writer and activist. She notes, “He never really tried to motivate me to come out in a big way, but I knew he would have liked it.” In 1975, TIME Magazine offered her the cover if she would come out. Tomlin recalls consulting with Vito about the offer and agreeing instead to an interview with Vito for The Advocate, explaining, “When they offered it [the TIME cover] to me I called Vito and I said, ‘You know, it feels like I was being bought.’ They wanted somebody, and they were just out fishing around to get somebody. That’s why I wasn’t afraid to do The Advocate interview with him, because I felt his humanity was so evolved that it wasn’t like he was out to make points.”
Vito’s love of movies guided him to a job in the film department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he began taking note of gay characters in early films. The result of his research was The Celluloid Closet, an entertaining and informative lecture and clip show that combined his love of show business and radical gay politics, which he took on the road to gay film festivals and college campuses. His seminal 1981 book of the same name explored the ways gays and lesbians were portrayed on film, what lessons those characters taught gay and straight audiences, and how those negative images were at the root of society’s homophobia. The book was later adapted into the 1995 HBO Peabody Award-winning documentary The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.
At the 1981 Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in San Francisco, Vito met and fell in love with Jeffrey Sevcik, a young theater hand. Though opposites in many ways, they shared a love for film. At the same time, the AIDS crisis was spreading through the community, and friends were disappearing from what was first known as “gay cancer.” Once it was determined that the disease was spread through sexual activity, it stirred up a lot of anxiety within the gay community. Even though people were becoming rapidly sick, the federal government would not acknowledge AIDS as an epidemic. ACT UP used a variety of attention-grabbing techniques, including members chaining themselves to the VIP balcony at the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high price of AZT, at the time the only approved, effective AIDS drug.
Said Vito, “Everything I’ve done I’ve chosen to do. This is the life I wanted. I’m one of the very few people I know who can say I never did anything I didn’t want to do, and I always did exactly what I pleased. Very few people can say that about their lives.”
In the early 80s, Jeffrey was diagnosed with HIV and Vito became his caretaker through his passing. In June 1985, Vito noticed a dark spot on his own leg, a sign of the disease. Undeterred, he continued writing, lecturing and speaking out – helping form ACT UP and GLAAD – until just months before his own death from AIDS on Nov. 7, 1990.
Vito had its world premiere at the 2011 New York Film Festival and has screened at numerous film festivals across the country, opening the 2012 Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, the same place Vito met Jeffrey more than 30 years ago when he performed The Celluloid Closet. Vito was also the opening night selection at the 2012 Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles on July 12.
Director and producer Jeffrey Schwarz won a 2007 AFI Fest Documentary Audience Award for Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, about the Hollywood showman. He is currently in production on I Am Divine, an independent feature documentary about John Waters’ muse.
Vito was produced and directed by Jeffrey Schwarz; executive producer, Bryan Singer; co-producers, Philip Harrison, Lotti Pharriss Knowles; editor, Philip Harrison; director of photography, David Quantic; composer, Miriam Cutler. For HBO: supervising producer, John Hoffman; executive producer, Sheila Nevins. | <urn:uuid:b286c48f-2420-4171-96a2-b43a9d5155a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theseattlelesbian.com/hbo-presents-aids-biopic-vito-featuring-raw-footage-from-early-epidemic/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978547 | 1,699 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Posted by alicemercer on 2nd June 2007
Here is a review of our favorite sites:
Villainy, Inc. | Maryland Public Television
Tessellations, like Busy Beetles puzzle
and, Fun Brain
This week’s question, make up a question for Math…
What’s bigger, one quarter of 200 or half of 100?
Posted in 05/29/2007, 06/04/2007, Mathematics, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Posted by alicemercer on 28th May 2007
This week, we will read about a true American character (someone who is interesting), Bill Pickett, a famous rodeo cowboy.
Here is the introductory PowerPoint for our selection:
Links about the subject of our selection:
Links related to our study skills for the week:
Posted in 05/29/2007, Language Arts, Unit 5 | No Comments »
Posted by alicemercer on 27th May 2007
With just three weeks left of school, we still have a lot to do. This week we will be working hard on our unit projects on Going East.
Here is Homework for 5/28/2007.
Our links for the week:
Comments from last week:
Here is a video from last week’s dodgeball game:
Download: Posted by mizmercer at TeacherTube.com.
And pictures of our picnic on the grass:
How did your week go?
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“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.”
- Hebrews 12:1-2
Lots of people want to be considered iconic. Lots of people want to be remembered for years after their deaths for doing great things, having great ideas, or simply being a nice person. Lots of people want to be remembered for something here on Earth, perhaps as a way to still cling to this frail world. We take pictures of special events in an effort to preserve people and accomplishments, in hopes that we’ll never, ever forget one moment in history. We want iconic lives that will be talked about.
Yesterday at church, we learned that Christians saints that we see engraved on icons were not passive individuals. They didn’t simply sit around and say their prayers and hope for a better world. No, many of the saints that have gone on before did really, really big things for the Lord. St. Perpetua threw herself into the arena to be martyred for Christ (despite just giving birth to a baby!), St. Benedict created a special rule that helped guide monks into holy living, St. Julian of Norwich wrote fervently and lived alone for the sake of the Lord (despite her femaleness in Medieval England), and St. Therese of Lisieux, overcame her temper for the cause of Christ and often served the ones she disliked the most. There are hundreds of more saints in the Catholic and Protestant traditions, but these are just a
few examples of active living for Christ.
Of course, the single mom who opens her home to someone in need, the pastor who helps an addict overcome her struggle, and the nun who teaches small children at a religious school are all active agents of Christ. Sometimes there’s not a need for martyrdom, going away to a monastery, or even to have visions for one to be iconic. Sometimes, all one needs to do is get up, look around, and help another in need. Sometimes, all it takes is one step.
However, I talk a good talk. I’m not always the example of Christian service. My college was a place where large-scale social justice issues were emphasized and touted because it is something “Jesus would care and do something about,” but it was never explained why Jesus was important in the first place. They all had good intentions, but sometimes, all of the justice work and fervor was exhausting for someone like me who was usually weighed down with academic stress. I probably didn’t care as much as I should have. I’ve turned many a blind eye to several issues (not a very Christ-like thing for me to do).
But like everyone else, I’m striving towards Christ. Whether or not our faith tradition makes us into glorified saints after our deaths or we are eventually forgotten, Christ never forgets our deeds. Even despite our turning a blind eye, ignoring the helpless, or even sharing a cross word with a family member, we’re all still called to help the others in what the author of Hebrews called a “race.” Living the iconic life, whether literally in the form of a wall plaque or metaphorically, is a life of action. A race is never won by standing still, it’s a life of running, falling, getting back up, and running again towards Christ. | <urn:uuid:8e51c0b4-5892-4107-8b0c-629d78d08920> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atimeandaseason.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/living-an-iconic-life/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974815 | 742 | 1.976563 | 2 |
HONG KONG.- With a career which spans more than 40 years, Bernard Frize is widely recognised as one of the most important and influential painters of his time. The breadth of the formal and conceptual vocabulary he has developed, encompassing elements of process, of seriality, of colour and of the passage of time has made the influence of his work on painters of his own and later generations unsurpassed.
Frizes abstract compositions are the systematic products of carefully constructed sets of rules, sometimes elaborate, sometimes simple; choreographed performances which determine the works formal compositions.
For his first exhibition in Hong Kong, Frize will show paintings from the 2004 sequence Insulaire alongside one new monumental work. Of the Insulaire paintings Frize has written:
The starting point is a motif composed of eight colours, from which I cut 27 different frames. The edges were covered with tape, and then the colours were painted on four at a time. I chose this motif for its potentialities, because it suggests all kinds of images: the strata of a geological section, a landscape, a fan, an Indian fabric, a rainbow. But I do not care much about these suggestions. Paradoxically, the ambiguous nature of the motif creates the effect of the image disintegrating, allowing me to replace it with a visual and mental mechanism.
Placed end to end, the canvasses follow one another in precise arrangement. A continuous band constructs a panorama around the spectator, and each painting in it is a viewpoint. The whole thing begins to vibrate, but this phenomenon is slowed down by disruptions: here a fault in the canvas, by attracting the eye to the materiality of the painting, cancels out its decorative aspect; there the change in intensity of a gradation of colour has the effect of arresting the circular motion. Defects and disruptions vie with one another to bring the dynamics of fragmentation back into play: they cast the mind back to elements of the construction of the whole. (Bernard Frize, FAT Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Brandts. October 7 2007 January 20 2008)
This idea of fragments of a whole has a particular resonance when considering the disjunction between Frizes studio practice and the structure of display of his work. While the bodies of work he develops in series are often worked through in the studio in their entirety in the way he describes here, when he shows the works, he will often place works from different series together, pulling them out from the company of their siblings and highlighting resonances between paintings which result from quite different systems of making.
The result is to underline the artists own assertion that all his paintings are in a certain sense, one and the same, each the result of the application of this systematic approach. The rules may be different, but the project is the same.
Taken out of the context of the complete series each painting acts as a microcosm of the whole, carrying within it all the associations and resonances of the system and method of the series. It is for this reason that the dialogues between the works from different series Frize presents are so vibrant. Here, Plontois, a 3.6 metre frieze-like painting from 2012 is juxtaposed with the Insulaire works. It too uses a modelled gradation of paint within each band of colour to suggest volume, a formal device which gave its name to the 2007 exhibition of the Insulaire sequence at Kunsthalle Brandts: Bernard Frize FAT Paintings. In this new work, though, the riotous swirling ebullience of colour seems to rupture any logical ordering in the picture plane, creating a tension between the system of the Insulaire paintings and the freedom of the new work.
Bernard Frize was born in 1949 in Saint Mandé, France. He lives and works between Paris and Berlin. His work is represented in public collections around the world, including: The Tate Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUMOK, Vienna; NMAO the National Museum of Art Osaka, Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt the Kunstmuseum, Basel and the Kunstmuseum, Zurich.
He has exhibited extensively both in Europe and in the United States including solo exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst Landkreis, Cuxhaven; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Germany; Gemeente Museum, La Haye, and de Pont, Tilburg, Holland; S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; The Bakersfield Museum of Art and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA; and Kunsthalle Brandts, Odense, Denmark. He participated in the 2012 Bienal of Sao Paulo, curated by Luis Perez-Oromas. | <urn:uuid:3b9090a1-4375-47e7-a325-12b5982cded2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=59833&int_modo=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933042 | 1,076 | 1.679688 | 2 |
"While previous research has examined the effects of genes related to dopamine, a chemical in the brain associated with reinforcing the effects of nicotine, this study provides the first evidence that genes that alter dopamine function may influence smoking cessation and relapse during treatment," said lead author Caryn Lerman, Ph.D., Associate Director for Cancer Control and Population Science at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor in Penn's School of Medicine and the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Dr. Lerman led a research team that examined 418 smokers enrolled in a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial of bupropion for smoking cessation. Participants provided blood samples and received bupropion or placebo plus seven sessions of behavioral group counseling. Smoking status, abstinence symptoms and side effects were recorded weekly, and smoking status was verified at the end of treatment and again at a six-month follow-up appointment.
Researchers found that participants with particular variants of the SLC6A3 dopamine transporter gene and the DRD2 dopamine receptor gene reported significantly higher abstinences rates and a longer time before relapse than smokers carrying other variants of these genes.
"This gene-gene interaction provides new evidence for the effects of dopamine genes on prospective smoking cessation and underscores the importance of not limiting genetic investigations of smok
Contact: Megan Kasimatis
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine | <urn:uuid:1e29fddc-9905-46fe-93a7-0c9be569b01b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-2/New-Penn-study-shows-genes-may-influence-smoking-cessation-5328-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906018 | 273 | 2.5 | 2 |
So Marvin's statement would tend to be an accurate assessment ... while the $7/hr American citizen can sit home on unemployment, the illegal will be happy to work for the $7 since in Mexico he couldn't earn anything. Don't think we have to worry too much about the $90,000/yr people in the scenario.At lower income levels, you may well be right. For example, a person earning $10/hour will still receive the equivalent of almost $7/hour on unemployment if they have worked long enough at their job. However, for someone earning $90,000/year on their job, unemployment is not much of an option since it would provide only about 10-15% of the amount they had been earning.
So, if unemployment benefits for $7/hr workers were limited, they would have the jobs that the illegals are doing?
I don't think amnesty works very well. Reagan did it, and it solved nothing. More illegals came; in even greater numbers. Makes sense to me that eventually they figure another amnesty will occur & they want to be ready to take advantage of it.
And work is definitely the key. I recall one report that illegals in the US shrank as the recession hit. With no work, there was no point in staying.
Illegals may not get unemployment compensation, but I'm sure that those anchor babies are getting Medicaid & other social welfare programs that also extend to their illegally residing mother? | <urn:uuid:f3219ae2-d6eb-404d-9863-4108a7aa5c06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.retrievertraining.net/forums/showthread.php?52074-Common-Ground&p=579986 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986295 | 303 | 1.609375 | 2 |
mastitis (măstĪˈtĭs) [key], inflammation of the breast. Mastitis most commonly occurs in nursing mothers between the first and third weeks after childbirth, usually of the first child. It is an infection that results when bacteria enter through cracked nipples; the organisms may already be in the body and attack breast tissue weakened by injury. The breast becomes swollen and painful and a high fever may be present. Mastitis is usually easily treated with antibiotics. In severe cases, when an abscess forms within the breast, the suckling baby must be weaned completely. Chronic cystic mastitis is a common, noninfectious but often painful condition in women between 30 and 50 years old, in which cystic nodules develop in the breasts, giving them a lumpy appearance. It sometimes results from a hormonal imbalance. Biopsy may be necessary to distinguish the condition from breast cancer. Another type of mastitis may occur during puberty, and another is associated with other infectious diseases, e.g., mumps and tuberculosis.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on mastitis from Fact Monster:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Pathology | <urn:uuid:14e41594-009e-4ad7-8ed9-1286e956a7a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.factmonster.com/encyclopedia/science/mastitis.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940842 | 253 | 3.765625 | 4 |
This is an image of Jupiter.
Click on image for full size
Courtesy of NASA
An Overview of the Evolution of Jupiter's Atmosphere
The giant planets have definitely changed since their formation
. But how much remains to be seen.
Most of the original air of the giant planets remains in place. (The earth-like planets lost most of their atmospheres very soon after they formed because the atmosphere drifted away).
Jupiter is made primarily of the basic materials hydrogen and helium, which is what existed near Jupiter when it was forming.
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The troposphere of Jupiter is where the clouds are. Clouds form in regions of strong atmospheric motion, when condensation takes place. The troposphere is the region rapidly stirred by vertical motions....more | <urn:uuid:40059a1a-e4cc-4e39-bff5-624f893e99f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.windows2universe.org/jupiter/atmosphere/J_atm_evolution_overview.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944004 | 460 | 3.578125 | 4 |
“Ruth [Krauss] broke the rules and invented new ones, and her respect for the natural ferocity of children bloomed into poetry that was utterly faithful to what was true in their lives.”
– Maurice Sendak in The Horn Book
The Backward Day. By Ruth Krauss. Illustrated by Marc Simont. New York Review Children’s Collection, 32 pp., $14.95. Ages 3 and up.
By Janice Harayda
Ruth Krauss isn’t as well-known today as Margaret Wise Brown, her contemporary and fellow member of the Writer’s Laboratory at the Bank Street School in New York City. But like Brown, Krauss helped to change the path of children’s literature, partly by incorporating more naturalism into a field dominated by fairy and folk tales. One of her most appealing books is The Backward Day, recently revived in a series of classics from New York Review Children’s Collection.
In a wholly nondidactic way, this brief story reminds us — and children — of the joy of activities that cost nothing. A young boy wakes up one morning and decides that it’s “backward day,” an occasion that some children call “opposite day.” He puts his underwear on over his coat and suit and his socks over his shoes. Then he walks backward down the stairs to the breakfast table, where he turns a chair around. When his parents and younger sister arrive, he tells each of them, “Goodnight.” Without so much as a “Don’t be silly!” they go along with him – and keep going along — until he announces “BACKWARD DAY IS DONE” and everything returns to normal.
Simple as it is, this story speaks to – and vicariously fulfills – children’s yearning for power over others, and does so in a realistic and believable way. Its young hero needs no magic wand or potion to get others to do his bidding, which must make it all the more thrilling to many children. Marc Simont’s appealing drawings of a late 1940s family have an ageless elegance leavened with wit. And in an era of oversized picture books that are way too big for many 3-year-olds to handle comfortably, this is the rare hardcover book that has a scale that’s right for small hands.
Recommendation? This book is smaller than most used for library story hours — it’s about the size of Goodnight Moon — but it could still be a great story hour book for a small group, because it offers so many opportunities for audience participation. Children could turn around at some point during the reading, for example, or the leader could “read” the book upside down.
Best line: “Over his suit, he put on his underwear. He explained to himself, ‘Backward day is backward day.’” This line shows Krauss’s understanding of how children think and reason, a hallmark of her books.
Worst line: None.
Published: 1950 (first edition), 2007 (New York Review reprint) www.nyrb.com.
Furthermore: Krauss also wrote A Very Special House, a Caldecott Honor Book, and A Hole Is to Dig, both illustrated by Maurice Sendak. She won another Caldecott Honor for The Happy Day, which has pictures by Marc Simont.
Other titles in the New York Review Children’s Collection include E. Nesbit’s The House of Arden, Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, Lucretia P. Hale’s The Peterkin Papers and Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Wee Gillis.
This is the latest in an occasional series of posts on classic picture books every child should read. Reviews of books for children and teenagers appear on Saturdays on One-Minute Book Reviews. Please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed to avoid missing these posts.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:e8942b4a-834a-49b0-913a-9c53bd8311ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957265 | 862 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Genetic testing has become the norm, rather than the exception, as increasing numbers of women are becoming parents after the age of 35. From a woman's mid-thirties through her forties, the chance for abnormalities increases dramatically.
Prior to the age of 35, the chances of having a child with Down's syndrome are smaller than the risk of miscarriage from the procedure, which tests for Downs. At 35 years of age, a woman's statistical probability of having this complication of pregnancy becomes equal to the risk associated with the amniocentesis procedure. After this point, risk of chromosomal abnormality increase dramatically into a woman's mid to late forties. Still, it is far more likely that a woman at 45 will indeed have a healthy, normal child. (A point that sometimes loses its place in the mound of statistics, but is worth remembering!) The birth of a special needs child, can occur at any time, precipitating a life-changing event in any family's life cycle.
Psychological factors involved in genetic testing
By far, the most common procedure pregnant women over 35 use is amniocentesis, performed between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy. The chorionic villus sampling, which offers earlier detection (at 10 to 12 weeks of pregnancy) of chromosomal abnormality, is also a common test which many women of this age are choosing, even though the risk of miscarriage is higher with this intervention than the amnio.
For most women, the reason to use this earlier detection test is psychological. Should they receive bad news, terminating a pregnancy before 12 weeks seems less traumatic. Shortening the period of emotional stress caused by "not knowing," if everything is all right, may play a factor in women who are at greater risk of abnormalities due to family medical history. | <urn:uuid:280fbbeb-f135-4872-a100-4279c32c3342> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ivillage.com/prenatal-genetic-testing/6-a-129300 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967808 | 376 | 3.125 | 3 |
7 Mutant Animals Created by (Mad) Science: Amazing or Disturbing?
Video via YouTube
The promises of genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms have been touted for decades. Tinkering with DNA could yield new drugs to cure terrible diseases and other medical miracles for the human race, like limbs that regenerate. On the way down that road, however, there have been some wild, experimental examples of new creatures created in labs. Species hatched by innovation bring with them issues of ethics, environmental consequences and the good, old-fashioned cringe factor. For example, a goldfish that glows in the dark.
1. GloFishCredit: glofish.com.
Check it out. A fluorescent zebrafish visible even during Earth Hour. Kinda. The GloFish appears to glow in the dark and comes in dazzling colors like Starfire Red, Electric Green, and Sunburst Orange.
These fish absorb light and then re-emit it, which makes them look like they're glowing, especially under a black light. The GloFish was developed by scientists who were trying to create a fluorescent fish that would respond to polluted water, according to glofish.com.
The fish's debut in pet stores was met with a ban in California and concerns in Michigan that the fish could contaminate native stocks if released to the wild, Greenpeace notes. They are only available for purchase in the U.S.
2. See-Through GoldfishCredit: NY Daily News.
Also called the "ryunkin" goldfish, this translucent swimmer was created by researchers at Mie and Nagoya universities in Japan. The see-through goldfish sports see-through skin that reveals a beating heart, brain and other internal organs. The idea was to eliminate the need for dissecting fish for lab experiments, a practice opposed by animal rights groups, as noted in a previous TreeHugger post.
What do the groups think about this mutant as a replacement for the razor, or computer simulations, we wonder? The researchers also hope to sell the fish to the public some day, perhaps for daddy-daughter fish anatomy lessons.
Japan also is home to the see-through frog, developed by the Institute for Amphibian Biology of Hiroshima University, with plans for public sales.
3. Sterile Pink BollwormCredit: USDA.
These worms are already nightmarish when it comes to destroying cotton crops. The United States Department of Agriculture has done field testing of a genetically engineered version of the bollworm designed to help control populations of the pest. That's sparked concern from groups like The Center for Food Safety, who wonder what's coming next. On the other hand, how does the use of a GE worm to control cotton losses square up with using pesticides or GE crops made by Monsanto?
A non-mutant pink bollworm is shown here. The GE worms are sterilized by radiation and imprinted with a florescent marker for easy tracking, according to Oxitec, the worm's developer. Sterile insects help reduce populations of the worms, since sterile males compete with wild males for females.
4. Sudden-Death MosquitoCredit: Tanais Fox via Flickr.
Oxitec, the same British biotech company involved with the GE bollworm, has created mosquitoes that are programmed for sudden, early death. The idea is to release quick-dying males to mate with wild females, passing on lethal genes that kill the young before they can reproduce, according to Wired News. The short-lived bugs could help control the spread of dengue fever and other diseases.
Imagine the opposite: A super mosquito designed to live longer. Hollywood script writers, take notice.
The Sudden Death mosquito is not without its critics:
"Releasing millions of genetically modified terminator mosquitoes into wild ecosystems amounts to a reckless and uncontrolled experiment with a risky technology," Jim Thomas, of the ETC Group, a technology watchdog, told Wired. | <urn:uuid:0f192267-bae4-4855-b4cb-8c4401dc8648> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/7-mutant-animals-created-by-mad-science-amazing-or-disturbing.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946737 | 815 | 2.984375 | 3 |
What issues affect children and young people today? On our blog, our volunteers, staff, leaders and the young people we work with share their experiences and tackle the issues. Let us know what you think – leave a comment or send us a message about what you find on our blog.
Why advocates matter
Imagine not being given a chance to say what you like, where you want to live or tell someone about your worries or fears.
Disabled children and young people with complex needs and severe speech, language and communication disorders live with these challenges. It is difficult for them to communicate without assistance.
Our new report ‘Someone on our side: Advocacy for disabled children and young people’ (full report, executive summary) emphasises that not only do these children have opinions and wants, they can express them and contribute to complex decision-making processes—if they’re supported through advocacy.
Advocates can make a huge difference
Disabled children and young people are more vulnerable to abuse and neglect, yet their participation in decisions that can make a major difference in their lives lags behind their more able peers. An independent, professional advocate can help change this.
Provided by The Children’s Society and other organisations, advocates facilitate a disabled young person’s participation in decision-making by ‘speaking up’ for them or supporting them so that their views and wishes are heard when decisions are made about their lives.
For many disabled children and young people, this means listening to their opinions. For children who have very complex communication needs, advocates would use observation, non-verbal communication and information from those who know the young person well.
Many children are not receiving these vital services
Our study and others indicate that there are high levels of unmet need and that accessing services is particularly difficult for disabled children and young people, and those with communication needs.
These children’s needs are unmet primarily due to unclear, inconsistent routes of obtaining an advocate; the time an advocate needs to properly understand a young person’s wishes; and resistance advocates receive from other professionals.
Difficulties young people face when trying to secure an advocate
Specifications for advocacy services vary tremendously between local authorities. This limits children’s access to advocates because there is no uniform point of contact and referral route. Often, information on advocacy services for disabled children and young people is not readily available or accessible making it incredibly difficult for them to know enquire about services or self-refer.
It takes time, skill and experience to earn the trust of children with complex needs. When that trust is established, a young person more freely expresses their views. Unfortunately, many agreements between local authorities and the providers of advocacy services lack a sufficient amount of time spent with children. There is also a lack of training opportunities concerning young people’s speech, language and communication needs.
Advocates also report that they occasionally experience resistance from other professionals who think disabled children are unable to express an opinion.
Benefits of advocacy
The process of advocacy brings significant benefits to children. For example, an advocate can improve a young person’s confidence and self-esteem. It also helps them make informed decisions, and enables them to speak out about abuse and neglect.
Advocacy can result in improvements to services and quality of life. More appropriate placements, changes to personal care, establishing likes and dislikes are some of the ways advocates can contribute to improving young people’s daily lives.
Advocacy can reveal hidden problems. Although advocates are generally commissioned to address a single issue, once their relationship with an advocate develops, young people often raise multiple issues.
Local authorities can use information from advocates to help improve care packages, resolve complaints more quickly, and change perceptions of disabled children and young people.
'Get an advocate now!'
Disabled children and young people are incredibly positive about advocacy services but say that advocacy services need to be more accessible and visible. They particularly value the independence of the advocate and the relationship of trust and respect that develops between them.
Their words sum up how positive and powerful advocacy can be:
‘It’s not easy but I can talk to Neil (advocate). He’s been there for me and helping me.’
‘I’m just sat there and like they’re all talking about things but he doesn’t talk about me, he talks to me.’
‘Get one (an advocate) now! Get one and look back at what happens. Leave the past. Take all the rubbish out of your head.’
Improving advocacy services
Disabled children and young people must be able to express their wishes and feelings about their lives: it is their right to do so and we fail them terribly if we do not listen to their views and take these into account.
Independent, professional advocacy can enable disabled children and young people to complain if necessary, ask for changes to be made to their daily care, and tell those making important decisions about their lives what they would like.
That is why we continue to campaign for improved specialist advocacy provision for disabled children and young people.
Our recommendations to improve advocacy services are:
- Local authorities should ensure that independent advocacy services can provide specialist skills in working with disabled children, including those with complex communication needs.
- Local authorities should identify those who are eligible for advocacy, integrate the arrangements for commissioning and provide one point of contact and referral route.
- Information should be provided in accessible formats to disabled children and young people. Information should also be provided to foster carers, residential care staff, Independent Reviewing Officers, and young people's parents or carers.
- The availability and accessibility of advocacy services should be monitored and learning from individual advocacy cases should lead to improvements in services for all disabled children and young people.
- A right to advocacy for all disabled children placed away from home should be embodied in legislation.
- Training and skills development to support advocates working with disabled children and young people, particularly those with communication needs.
- Funding agreements should enable advocates to have the necessary time to spend with the child, in order to facilitate them expressing their views. | <urn:uuid:81604f0d-ac6f-468d-aeaf-83bd6632124a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/news-views/our-blog/why-advocates-matter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958963 | 1,276 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Thirty Years of Progress in Educating Children with Disabilities Through IDEA
Lee is a young man with autism whose achievements belie his disability. An African-American graduate of a public high school, Lee was valedictorian of his class, went on to college, earned a degree and entered the world of work. Lee is one of many young people who have benefited from the landmark law we now know as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Congress enacted what was then the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) on Nov. 29, 1975. The law was intended to support states and localities in protecting the rights of, meeting the individual needs of, and improving the results for infants, toddlers, children and youths with disabilities and their families.
Before IDEA, many children like Lee were denied access to education and opportunities to learn. For example, in 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws excluding certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded, from its schools.
Today, thanks to IDEA, early intervention programs and services are provided to more than 200,000 eligible infants and toddlers and their families, while about 6.5 million children and youths receive special education and related services to meet their individual needs.
More students with disabilities are attending schools in their own neighborhoods-schools that may not have been open to them previously. And fewer students with disabilities are in separate buildings or separate classrooms on school campuses, and are instead learning in classes with their peers.
When President Bush and Congress set out to reauthorize the IDEA legislation in 2004, they made sure it called for states to establish goals for the performance of children with disabilities that are aligned with each state's definition of "adequate yearly progress" under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Together, NCLB and IDEA hold schools accountable for making sure students with disabilities achieve high standards. In the words of Secretary Spellings, "The days when we looked past the underachievement of these students are over. No Child Left Behind and the IDEA 2004 have not only removed the final barrier separating special education from general education, they also have put the needs of students with disabilities front and center. Special education is no longer a peripheral issue. It's central to the success of any school."
IDEA is now aligned with the important principles of NCLB in promoting accountability for results, enhancing the role of parents and improving student achievement through instructional approaches that are based on scientific research. While IDEA focuses on the needs of individual students and NCLB focuses on school accountability, both laws share the goal of improving academic achievement through high expectations and high-quality education programs.
Through these efforts we are reaching beyond physical access to the education system toward achieving full access to high-quality curricula and instruction to improve education outcomes for children and youths with disabilities.
Evidence that this approach is working can be found in the increase in the number of students with disabilities graduating from high school instead of dropping out.
The National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2), which documents the experiences of a national sample of students with disabilities over several years as they moved from secondary school into adult roles, shows that the incidence of students with disabilities completing high school rather than dropping out increased by 17 percentage points between 1987 and 2003.
During the same period, their postsecondary education participation more than doubled to 32 percent. In 2003, 70 percent of students with disabilities who had been out of school for up to two years had paying jobs, compared to only 55 percent in 1987.
Employment and independence are important pieces of the American Dream. In today's world, getting there depends on having the foundation of a good education. Through IDEA and NCLB, students with disabilities have the support that they need to be the best they can be. | <urn:uuid:52a2d3cc-8797-42e8-820a-70d952e8f1b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.ed.gov/policy/speced/leg/idea/history30.html?exp=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972759 | 809 | 3.703125 | 4 |
Mold is a dangerous pest that can be found around the edges of the shower, under the carpet in a basement or lurking behind wallpaper in a house.
"If an individual sees mold, they automatically think health concerns," said Eric Christenson, owner of Christenson Carpet Cleaning in Hastings.
And, in some cases, that's a relevant concern, as mold can cause a myriad of health problems from mild allergies to severe respiratory problems and even death.
Ron Seymour, extension educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension in Adams County, said the key is to remove problems that can cause mold before it starts to grow.
"The best thing is to do whatever you can to keep water out of your premises for any period of time," Seymour said. "Short term is fine but if things get wet, mold will grow." | <urn:uuid:2ee0e296-8cf8-41d0-9ad8-5eacf3142e1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hastingstribune.com/march/news0307mold.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948827 | 172 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Happy Spring Equinox everyone! As we all know, yesterday was not just any ordinary day. Everyone was posting up pictures of eggs standing up on ends on their Facebook walls. Some, on the other hand, were lost in cyber space wondering what was going on.
Well, let us enlighten you.
Equinox simply means ‘equal nights’. What happens during the Spring Equinox is that the Sun is positioned above the equator, day and night are about equal in length all over the world during the equinoxes. During the times of pre-revolutionary of China, it was customary for the Chinese to stand eggs on their end on the first day of spring. To do so would guarantee good luck for the entire year. Hence, proving that the an egg being able to stand on its end allows us to experience the influence of gravity, balance and equilibrium.
The equinox symbolically restores balance to the world by signaling its rebirth after a season of darkness, it literally balances the day by equally dividing it into equal portions of darkness and light. Thus, what mattered on this day was the importance of the familiar, reassuring ritual to demonstrate that all was right with the world, a sign that all nature was in harmony, dismissing the contradiction that the balancing of eggs could also happen on any other day.
Last year in America, a huge celebration known as the “ Eggs on Stand : Standing on Ceremony ” was held to honor this day of such power of nature. Everyone takes an egg, and hold them up in the air together, pledging to walk on the earth as if we were walking on eggs. Promising, in honor of the season, to protect our fragile yet resilient planet home. They then count down the minutes to the equinox, and when the time is right, they stand their eggs in unison in salute to spring.
This year, our team did not miss the fun. We did our experiment and it really worked! It was so exciting! And it certainly did felt like the yolk shifts inside to find its perfect point of balance, holding the entire universe in the palm of your hand. - Donna Henes.
Here, watch it for yourself!
How did yours went? Did you succeed too? Like us on Facebook at Venusbuzz.com and follow us on Twitter @VenusBuzz for more updates! | <urn:uuid:193ac244-ba48-4edb-9dca-81fc6bbd768a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.venusbuzz.com/archives/7541/spring-equinox-2012-eggs-on-stand/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971245 | 488 | 2.421875 | 2 |
Public outrage, following a series of stories in the Tampa Bay Times outlining the financial realities, began to weaken the law’s once unshakable support in the Legislature. Nuclear supporters like Latvala, who will be joined by Sens. John Legg, R-Lutz, Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, and Wilton Simpson, R-New Port Richey, at the news conference Thursday , began to hear from voters.
“It’s an issue of concern to my constituents on an increasing basis,” Latvala said.
Duke Energy spokesman Sterling Ivey said the utility is “committed to a reasonable discussion” about the law.
“When specific legislation is introduced we will have the opportunity to determine the impact on our business and customers,” he said.
But what’s the perfect fix?
Repealing the law, a proposal championed by a small group of legislators, would stanch customers’ financial liabilities. It would also doom any new nuclear projects.
“There’s no question that repealing the law would effectively kill all investment in new nuclear power for Florida,” said Mark Bubriski, spokesman for Florida Power & Light, which has two new nuclear reactors in the planning stages.
Legislators could force utilities to refund the money to customers if a project isn’t built. But that, essentially, is the same as shifting all the risk back to the utilities. They have said they won’t build nuclear plants under that condition.
How about setting construction deadlines? The nuclear industry has an infamous history of delay, cost overruns and failures. Given that, utilities are unlikely to accept any hard deadlines that would require paying customers back or that could cutoff the flow of money in the middle of a project. It would be too much of a financial risk. And if the deadlines were too wishy washy, they would not do much to protect customers. Besides, it isn’t easy for utilities to control the timing of federal regulatory decisions on new reactors.
Lawmakers could attempt to cap the amount customers would have to pay, exactly what Bradford said he recommended to Florida regulators years ago. Progress’ response at the time: Not if you want a nuclear plant built.
The legislators could remove utilities’ ability to profit on the advance fee. That fix might make customers feel better, but it would be largely symbolic. In the case of the Levy project, for instance, Progress Energy Florida would have to forgo its $150 million cut. That would still leave customers on the hook for more than $1.3 billion.
House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, and Senate President Don Gaetz agree that the law needs review.
“I’m going to make sure it gets a full debate, gets considered,” Gaetz told the Tampa Bay Times recently. “Absolutely.”
The debate could be long one.
Some utilities and legislators remain fixated on nuclear projects, concerned that Florida is becoming overly dependent on natural gas. The state now gets more than 60 percent of its electricity from natural gas, more than double than just a decade ago.
Even so, Bradford doesn’t see much hope for new nuclear projects in Florida. Even a successful fix to the advance fee law would not change the reality that new nuclear plant projects have huge upfront costs that often lead them to get canceled.
“You can’t make the cost of these things go away.” Bradford said.
His solution? “Build something else.”
Ivan Penn can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or (727) 892-2332. | <urn:uuid:3fe8b7c9-86b7-443c-813b-ed0d6ce77e81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/21/3245774_p2/florida-legislators-hope-to-fix.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951931 | 776 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Renew On Line (UK) 57
Extracts from NATTA's journal
|Welcome Archives Bulletin|
1. £40m for Carbon Abatement
The government has produced a pioneering £25m plan to tackle climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it in depleted North Sea oil and gas fields. The DTI says that carbon capture and storage demonstration projects could be up and running within a decade.
2. Renewables are the priority
The new DTI Secretary of State, Alan Johnson has made it clear that there will not be an early decision on nuclear power and for the present ‘the priorities must still be renewables’.
3. Wave power Developments
Wave gets Juiced
The green fund element of npowers Juice green power scheme, which is backed by Greenpeace, has provided £195,000 to Regen SW to help with the development of its wave energy programme. npower donates £10 for each
4. Wind developments
Coming to Blows on Wind
Police have been called in to investigate a spate of attacks on property on the Isle of Skye as disagreements over the proposed 27 turbine wind farm there have flared.
5. Intermittency? No problem!
Research at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University shows that intermittent renewables, combined with small scale domestic combined heat and power (dCHP) could provide the bulk of Britain’s electricity on a reliable basis.
6. Diversity is the Key
'Wind-powered generators and increasing energy efficiency will not meet the White Paper targets on their own. The projected decline in non-CO2 generation capacity is greater than the feasible increase in existing renewable energy sources up to 2020.’ On the basis of this assertion, in its report ‘An Electricity Supply Strategy for the UK’ the government’s top-level advisory Council for Science and Technology has called for significant investment in low-carbon
7. Commons on Energy
On 19th May the House of Commons debated the Climate and Energy policy aspects of the Queen’s speech, focussing, perhaps inevitably, on nuclear power. The new DTI Minister Alan Williams said that the government was sticking to the 2003 While paper policy, and though not every speaker agreed with that, simple assertions that we desperately needed new nuclear plants were balanced by more cautious views from Conservatives
8. REFIT beats RO
The UK’s Renewable Obligation (RO), with its emphasis on competitive prices, is not only poor at stimulating the installation of new generation capacity, it also costs more per kilowatt installed than the fixed price ‘REFIT’ Renewable Energy Feed In Tariff approach adopted in Germany and elsewhere in europe.
10. New BREW to cut waste
A new £284m initiative to help businesses manage resources more efficiently and cut waste has been launched by DEFRA- BREW, the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste. This programme recycles revenue generated through increases in Landfill Tax (which was increased to £18/tonne in April and will rise in stages to £35/tonne)
11. Global Developments
$100bn green energy market
Renewables like wind & solar, and hydrogen fuel cells, could expand from £16bn, as at present, to a $100 bn a year global market by 2014 as technology costs fall, according to a study by Clean Edge, a research and publishing firm based in California.
12. EU round up
EU Green Scenario
Strong support for renewables and energy efficiency in Europe could increase the contribution from renewables by 43% over the next 25 years and decrease greenhouse gases, according to the European Union. Primary energy demand in EU-25 would drop by 14% if the goal of 12% from renewables by 2010 was met-
13. Nuclear Developments
‘5,000 new plants’
With global energy demand increasing, a clean-energy future will require at least 5,000 nuclear power reactors by 2050, producing electricity as well as hydrogen and clean water, according to Director General of the World Nuclear Association John Ritch.
14. In the rest of Renew 157
The Feature looks at wind power Intermittency-or rather variability as David Milborrow prefers to call it and as he explains in his article, its not much of a problem. The Technology section includes a look at Carbon Capture and Storage and at a new EU report on Energy R&D, while the Reviews look at some new global energy scenarios, at the UK Public Accounts Committee's recent discussions on the UK renewables programme and at ECI' s '40%House' and Carbon Rationing ideas. The Groups section is packed with news on developments and projects around the UK (including the Zero Carbon City Campaign and the ECI's new Meeting Place in Oxford) and as usual there's an insightful Editorial and a quixotic Forum section-open to all..
*Conferences OU EERU, in conjunction with Dave Toke from the University of Birmingham, has organised a conference on Locating Renewables In Community Contexts , looking at windpower and other local renewables, on Nov 15th at the OU. It will look at the planning problems and at community initiatives. See flyer. Then on January 24th there will another conference, again at the OU, looking at the Intermittency issue: 'Integrating Renewables into the Energy System' . See http://eeru.open.ac.uk under 'Conferences'
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In 1999, Fulton County Juvenile Court Judge Nina Hickson began to notice a steady stream of girls coming through her courtroom on charges related to prostitution. Dozens of children each month—age 14 on average, but some as young as 9 or 10—described being physically forced or psychologically manipulated into prostitution on Atlanta’s streets.
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Circle of Protection for a Moral Budget
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The children were runaways lured into relationships with savvy pimps who showered them with affection and then turned violent. They were teenagers sent to a street corner to “find dates” or sold out of hotel rooms to settle family debts. They met men online in chat rooms. They were girls, and sometimes boys, from notorious inner-city neighborhoods, or from the city’s expansive ring of suburbs. Or they were kids from Alabama or Arkansas, or rural Georgia, transported to the city by men who saw them as a source of easy cash. And, as a 2008 report by Emory University’s Barton Child Law and Policy Center would later confirm, the exploitation cuts across all racial and economic lines.
As Judge Hickson put it, Atlanta’s children were literally being “rented by the hour.”
At the time, she had few options: She could sentence girls to juvenile detention or return them, under court supervision, to their guardians. Georgia had no treatment facilities equipped to deal with the special needs of these girls. There was no funding available to supplement the services of the foster care system and the juvenile courts. And while there were laws to punish them, there were effectively no laws to protect them. In 2000, buying or selling sex with a minor—“pimping and pandering,” in legal parlance—was a misdemeanor in Georgia.
The fine: $50.
As Hickson described in a bold op-ed published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June 2000, the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Atlanta was “an epidemic of tragic proportions.” Her words unleashed a flood of agony, outrage, and action.
More than a decade later, Atlanta remains a major center for child prostitution, according to federal law enforcement reports. The city’s busy airport makes it an easy destination for men who want to buy sex with minors, as well as a national and international distribution hub for trafficked women and children. Advocates say that 400 girls are prostituted in Georgia each month—and the number is growing as the Internet makes the prostitution of minors easier and more lucrative.
But Atlanta is also gaining attention for the broad coalition that has emerged to fight the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the city.
In the weeks after Judge Hickson’s call to arms, a dynamic group of women, many of them steeped in the lessons of Atlanta’s civil rights era, began building a movement to stop the exploitation of Atlanta’s children. With the support of the Atlanta Women’s Foundation, they began by calling a meeting, inviting representatives of every women’s organization they could think of—from garden clubs to sororities to the Junior League and the League of Women Voters.
Together, they began to put together a legislative agenda and identify their allies. They committed to raising enough money to fund a treatment program that would provide an alternative to juvenile detention and help victims put their lives back together. And they launched a broad media campaign to raise awareness.
Today, the movement is well-established, widely respected, and extremely diverse. “This is not just ‘radical feminists,’” says Stephanie Davis, a founder of the Atlanta Women’s Foundation and part of the small group of women that launched the effort a decade ago. “We are a very diverse group, but we have the same agenda: to rescue kids and create policy that makes their rehabilitation possible and gives them the dignity they deserve.”
At the heart of this movement is a campaign whose name—“A Future. Not A Past.” (AFNAP)—captures the dream these women have for Atlanta’ children.
In the wake of Hickson’s 2000 op-ed, a key awareness-raising role was played by Jane Hansen’s series of Atlanta Journal-Constitution articles, “Selling Atlanta’s Children,” which debuted on the front page on a cold Sunday morning in January 2001. Under the series title was a blunt summary: “Runaway girls lured into the sex trade are being jailed for crimes while their adult pimps go free.”
A photograph showed the shackled ankles of a 10-year-old girl appearing before Judge Hickson on charges of running away and prostitution. The girl said she had been forced into prostitution by the boyfriend of a relative, Hansen reported. Like many young victims of commercial sexual exploitation, she had been failed by the systems that were supposed to protect her. Kicked out of group homes for acting out and rejected by mental health programs because of her history with prostitution, she had been in and out of jail for months.
The image and the story were unforgettable. “I read it at the breakfast table and cried,” recalls Kaffie McCullough, the campaign director of AFNAP and a long-time child advocate in Atlanta. Across town, philanthropists Harold and Kayrita Anderson read the same article; the next day, they began six years of financial support to Angela’s House, the treatment program developed by the Atlanta Women’s Foundation.
For most Americans, “child prostitution” is a problem that conjures up images of far-off corners of the developing world, brothels in Thailand, and international smuggling rings. While international trafficking of women and children has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years, the domestic sex trafficking of children has remained largely invisible.
The terms “human trafficking” and “sex trafficking” don’t necessarily imply crossing borders. In defining human trafficking, state and federal law and international conventions tend to focus on the use of force, coercion, and slavery-like conditions, rather than movement from one place to another. (An older meaning of “traffic” is “to act as a merchant of something,” focusing on buying and selling rather than movement through space.) The commercial sexual exploitation of children counts as trafficking in almost all legal definitions, even if force and deception are not apparent.
Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, researchers say that somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 American-born children are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation each year. The factors that make children more vulnerable to exploitation are loneliness, conflict at home, and a history of sexual abuse.
The 10-year-old girl in Hansen’s article put a human face on these numbers.
The AFNAP coalition’s first results came quickly. Hansen’s articles ran in January 2001. By March, the state legislature had passed a law making it a felony to pimp anyone under the age of 18. They also approved the seizure of assets used in the pimping of children. In May, the Atlanta Police Department formed a special unit to focus on child prostitution.
Over the next several years, the Atlanta Women’s Foundation and the Juvenile Justice Fund spearheaded a series of public-private partnerships, government task forces, and coalitions that brought together churches, civic groups, and social service agencies. They hired a research firm to help them describe and quantify the problem; collecting data was a major part of their strategy. Armed with information, they hired a consultant to help mobilize state legislators to take on the issue.
Their education efforts brought solid returns. They won funding for a statewide coordinated referral network for victims of sex trafficking, the first of its kind in the U.S. As of June, Georgia was scheduled to have 32 beds available in facilities that focus on the needs of girls who are victims of commercial sexual exploitation. That’s more than half of all the beds in the country—but still small compared to the hundreds of girls who are exploited in Georgia each month.
Information—and outrage—continued to spread. In 2005, “Hidden in Plain View,” a report commissioned by then-Mayor Shirley Franklin, made the first attempt at a comprehensive assessment of commercial sexual exploitation of children in Atlanta. The report used police data to identify “hot spots” where the outdoor prostitution of minors took place.
One of those spots was the corner of North Avenue and Peachtree Street—just beyond the front door of North Avenue Presbyterian Church, a vibrant congregation known for its social ministries and its growing international congregation. “We had never seen it,” says senior pastor Scott Weimer, shaking his head as he recalls his initial disbelief.
Weimer preached about what was happening; the response was immediate and overwhelming. At the back door of the sanctuary, women offered to open their homes to girls in need of shelter. Young people offered to do outreach on the streets in the middle of the night.
Weimer knew that addressing this problem required not just outrage and passion, but also strategy and expertise. Over the next year, he began meeting with other concerned clergy to talk about how they might respond. The eventual result was Street GRACE (Galvanize Resources Against Child Exploitation), a dynamic coalition of more than 30 Atlanta-area churches, including urban and suburban congregations, mainline and nondenominational, megachurches and small emergent communities.
One of Street GRACE’s major aims is to connect the human and financial resources of its member churches to local community organizations that operate in underserved communities, doing preventative work such as tutoring, mentoring, job training, and offering parenting classes.
“This problem is so messy and complex,” says Chip Sweney, the metro outreach pastor at Perimeter Church, a megachurch in a northern Atlanta suburb and one of Street GRACE’s founding members. “You can’t just go out and pull girls or boys off the street. That’s not the answer.”
“We are a servant organization,” says Street GRACE’s executive director, Cheryl DeLuca-Johnson. “We aren’t going to come into your neighborhood and ask how we can fix it. We are going to come in and ask how we can support you.”
Churches are working hard to challenge the perception that community outreach is a thin veil for proselytizing, said Weimer: “Evangelicals haven’t always played well with others, so we have had to earn credibility.” The focus on prevention has brought a wide range of social issues into focus for Street GRACE and its member churches. “In the beginning, it was mostly about sex trafficking. Now it’s about economic justice and quality education for all children,” says Weimer.
Although the coalition is largely white, leaders say they are working to bring a more racially and theologically diverse group of churches to the table. Even so, the breadth and vibrancy of Street GRACE has gotten the attention of politicians and advocates across the state. “I’ve never known a coalition of churches that have come together around an issue like this,” said McCullough.
Christian leaders' broad influence in Georgia politics was made clear this spring in a different and painful way—by the surprising failure of a bill that would have sent girls under the age of 16 directly into rehabilitative programs instead of leaving them subject to arrest as prostitutes.
The bill had broad support from advocates, and in February more than 500 people, many of them members of Street GRACE churches, had turned out to lobby in favor of it. But in a surprise twist, the bill ran into opposition from some of Georgia’s stalwart Christian conservatives—including the Georgia Eagle Forum, the Georgia Baptist Convention, and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition—who said it was an effort to legalize prostitution in the state. In an election year, that opposition proved deadly.
Advocates say this reflects a misunderstanding of the bill. They plan to come back next year and press for the same legislation; this time, they expect to win.
Another challenge Atlanta’s anti-trafficking coalition faces is that, despite its successes in the past decade, researchers working with AFNAP say that the number of girls forced into prostitution in Georgia is growing at an alarming rate. According to the most recent count, 400 girls are sexually exploited for profit each month in Georgia’s sex trade—a number that has almost doubled since the organization began keeping track in August 2007.
One big culprit: the Internet. “Craigslist has normalized the buying and selling of our kids,” says McCullough.
In May 2009, under pressure from state attorneys general, Craigslist agreed to screen for potentially illegal postings, including sex-for-money offers. But more than a year later, law enforcement officials say prostitution is still there. In April, the FBI charged members of the Gambino crime family with selling the sexual services of girls, aged 15 to 19, on Craigslist. Industry experts estimate that in 2010, Craigslist “adult services” ads—one of the few categories of advertisers from whom the site charges a fee—will bring in more than $36 million, almost a third of the company’s total revenue.
Increasingly, the movement is attempting to address the issue of demand. According to a study released in May, researchers estimate that in Georgia alone, nearly 28,000 men pay to have sex with prostituted adolescents each year. And our culture does little to censure those men; as Alesia Adams, who heads the Salvation Army’s 15-state regional task force on trafficking, puts it, “We’ve taken prostitution and glamorized it. We’ve mainstreamed the term ‘pimp.’”
Focusing on the demand is essential, but it is going to be difficult, said Jennifer Swain, the director of AFNAP’s statewide campaign. “Who’s doing this? It’s someone’s husband, pastor, judge, politician.”
Despite the challenges, the vibrant Atlanta coalition is inspiring others. Earlier this year, the Women’s Funding Network, an international network of women’s philanthropic organizations, announced plans to expand the AFNAP campaign by providing training and support for groups across the nation who want to build on the model developed in Atlanta. They will focus initially on three states where significant anti-trafficking work is already happening—Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.
What has worked in Atlanta will not necessarily map precisely onto other areas’ needs. But the Women’s Funding Network believes that what’s happening in Atlanta has the power to inspire and motivate people in other places.
“This is a long-term campaign,” said Sweney of Street GRACE. “This isn’t going to be solved over a couple of years. This is going to take an intentional effort over a long period of time.”
Letitia Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate in Christian social ethics at Emory University, is a founding editor of Practical Matters (www.practicalmattersjournal.com). With gratitude to the United by Faith: Building a Better Future for Women and Girls, a conference hosted by the Women’s Funding Network where Sojourners encountered Atlanta's "A Future Not A Past" program. | <urn:uuid:aa79d9dd-7629-4298-adb6-e9fc0e2891e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sojo.net/magazine/2010/08/selling-our-children?quicktabs_web_extras=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963554 | 3,293 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Think of game-changers like Nintendo's Wii or Apple's iPod. They overturned our understanding of what a video game means and how we listen to music. This book shows that for truly breakthrough products and services, we must look beyond customers. It offers a fresh view of innovation thinking and practice.
Until now, the literature on innovation has focused either on radical innovation pushed by technology or incremental innovation pulled by the market. In Design-Driven Innovation: How to Compete by Radically Innovating What Things Means , Roberto Verganti introduces a third strategy, a radical shift in perspective that introduces a bold new way of competing. Design-driven innovations do not come from the market; they create new markets. They don't push new technologies; they push new meanings. It's about having a vision, and taking that vision to your customers. Think of game-changers like Nintendo's Wii or Apple's iPod. They overturned our understanding of what a video game means and how we listen to music. Customers had not asked for these new meanings, but once they experienced them, it was love at first sight. But where does the vision come from? With fascinating examples from leading European and American companies, Verganti shows that for truly breakthrough products and services, we must look beyond customers and users to those he calls 'interpreters' - the experts who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in. Design-Driven Innovation offers a provocative new view of innovation thinking and practice.
One of the Design Primers for Businesspeople. Eschewing the received wisdom that the customer is always right, Politecnico di Milano professor Verganti focuses on game-changing designs that up-end expectations and create entirely new markets... Verganti also includes a useful section on how executives can attempt to instigate their own programs of radical innovation. One of the Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009. - BusinessWeek, December 16, 2009
How should a company devise new meanings and create the designs to embody them? Mr. Verganti suggests that companies form relationships with interpreters --individuals and organizations looking at settings similar to the one in which the company's products would be used. For Mr. Verganti, it might be said, if life imitates art, corporate life should imitate the making of art. - The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2009
If you follow Mr. Verganti's advice, it may take a while, but your competition will be left wondering how it was you managed to redefine (and capture) their business. - San Francisco Book Review, September 2009
Verganti ... tells how design innovators add unsolicited meaning that consumers don't even know they're craving - and they create products people can't live without. - BiZed, November-December 2009
One of the best books of the year is undoubtedly Design-Driven Innovation. In it Verganti attacks one of the central mysteries of innovation-how can a company successfully create a product that is a radical break from the past, and which shows the way to a new future? - John Caddell on The Customer Collective, August 12th 2009
Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something meaningful rather than just acquire things. Roberto Verganti, in his new book, Design-Driven Innovation, argues that there is a Third Way of Innovation, driven by meaning, or to be more precise, by those cul
Table of contents
1. Design-Driven Innovation. An introduction Part One: The Strategy of Design-Driven Innovation 2. Design and Meanings. Innovating by making sense of things 3. Radical Pushes. Placing design-driven innovation in the strategy of a firm 4. Technology Epiphanies. The interplay between technology-push and design-driven innovation 5. The Value and the Challenges. Why companies do or do not invest in design-driven innovation Part Two: The Process of Design-Driven Innovation 6. The Interpreters. Doing research with the design discourse 7. Listening. Finding and attracting key interpreters 8. Interpreting. Developing your own vision 9. Addressing. Leveraging the seductive power of the interpreters Part Three: Building Design-Driven Capabilities 10. The Design-Driven Lab. How to start 11. Businesspeople. The key role of top executives and their culture
Roberto Verganti is Professor of Management of Innovationat Politecnico di Milano. He is the founder of PRoject Science,a consulting institute which advises global corporations on themanagement of strategic innovation, and is the author of manyarticles in scientific journals, as well as the article InnovatingThrough Design, published in the Harvard Business Review (December 2006).
Customer reviews & ratings | <urn:uuid:230261dc-b6e1-4358-b419-7149a6c6db32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kalahari.com/books/Design-Driven-Innovation-Changing-the-Rules-of-Competition-by-Radically-Innovating-What-Things-Mean-Changing-the-Rules-of-Competition-by-Radically-Innovating-What-Things-Mean/632/32800012.aspx | 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 | 0.931681 | 994 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Global Security Newswire
Daily News on Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Weapons, Terrorism and Related Issues
Netanyahu: U.S. Threat to Use Force Can Deter Iran
A credible military threat by the United States is the only way to deter Iran, whose nuclear program represents the "greatest danger facing the world," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience in New Orleans, La., yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 8).
"The simple paradox is this: If the international community, led by the U.S., wants to stop Iran without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action," he said, in a speech to the Jewish Federations of North America, which is holding its general assembly in New Orleans.
Netanyahu began his five-day trip to the U.S. with a weekend meeting with Vice President Joseph Biden in New Orleans, and he will hold talks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New York City. Much of the official focus of his visit is to discuss ways to resume peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, which stalled after the Israeli moratorium on building settlements in the West Bank expired in September.
Netanyahu’s saber rattling about Iran comes at a time when the U.S. has hardened its own rhetoric toward Tehran but is counting on wide-ranging U.S. and international economic sanctions to pressure the Iranian government to curb its suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Apparently in response to the prime minister's discussions with Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Australia that the threat of military force was not the only way to deter Tehran from pursuing its nuclear program, as sanctions have hurt Iran more deeply than anticipated.
"I disagree that only a credible military threat can get Iran to take the actions that it needs to, to end its nuclear-weapons program. We are prepared to do what is necessary, but, at this point, we continue to believe that the political-economic approach that we are taking is, in fact, having an impact on Iran," Gates told reporters in Melbourne.
Although new United Nations-backed sanctions are proving detrimental to Iran so far, they are not "an end in themselves," but rather a means to persuade Tehran to conform to international nuclear regulations, Biden told the Jewish group on Sunday night. "The door to diplomacy remains open -- but there is a price to walk through that door," the vice president said.
"We continue to seek a peaceful resolution and hope that Iranian leaders will reconsider their destructive and debilitating course," Biden declared. "But let me be clear: We are absolutely committed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."
The fiscal 2011 budget included a record-breaking $3 billion in military aid to Israel, and the U.S. has provided an additional $205 million for the country’s short-range missile defense system and a $400 million increase in the authority to stockpile American military equipment in Israel as a "tripwire," he said.
Additionally, last month, Israel and the U.S. held the largest joint military exercise the two countries have ever conducted. Code-named Juniper Cobra, the ballistic-missile defense maneuvers involved 1,300 U.S. military personnel, Biden noted.
Israel now has the ability to buy U.S. weapons for the first time on the "same exact terms our NATO allies can purchase those weapons," Biden said, citing provisions in the Security Cooperation Act of 2010, which President Obama signed into law on October 8.
Feb. 14, 2013
A new brochure describes the origins and the work of the Nuclear Security Project.
Feb. 14, 2013
George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn laid out their vision of a world without nuclear weapons and the urgent, practical steps to get there in a groundbreaking series of co-authored Wall Street Journal op-eds.
This article provides an overview of Iran’s historical and current policies relating to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile proliferation. | <urn:uuid:e9a9ccf6-da4f-40fa-a007-28a9e8bb4f52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/netanyahu-us-threat-to-use-force-can-deter-iran/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951933 | 822 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Hogan Lovells has kicked off its first global Diversity Awareness Month with the aim of raising awareness among staff and to ensure an inclusive atmosphere in the workplace.
The month will see a host of activities taking place throughout the firm’s offices, with a range of seminars and workshops open to all staff.
Co-chair of Hogan Lovells Worldwide Diversity Committee, Ruth Grant, said: “Holding a formal Diversity Awareness Month is a tangible way of demonstrating our commitment to diversity and to progress initiatives in this area,”
“It also serves as an opportunity to raise awareness of diversity-related issues among our people.”
The activities will include sessions on disfigurement and bias, black students and City law, generational diversity, understanding mental illness, sexuality in the workplace, financial planning, nutrition and first aid for families.
Additionally, Hogan Lovells is rolling out its London Disability and Wellbeing Network, with a talk from a member of ParalympicsGB and captain of the wheelchair rugby team, Andy Barrow.
This will coincide with its previously established affinity groups and employee networks which institute activities for racial and ethnic minorities, members of the firm who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and other groups traditionally underrepresented in the legal profession. | <urn:uuid:f49ef649-5cc4-46bf-9ed6-520d8d66b371> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thelawyer.com/hoglov-launches-diversity-month/1007218.article | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949873 | 261 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Beware dangerous cliff
There are a lot of numbers and assertions in these statements by the president. We will primarily focus on the first statement, since it raises interesting questions of presidential responsibility.
But we do want to note the tax statement, since we seem to have a rare moment when Obama and GOP rival Mitt Romney appear to agree. Here’s what Romney said on Tuesday: “I admit this, he has one thing he did not do in his first four years, he’s said he’s going to do in his next four years, which is to raise taxes.”
Generally, Republicans have argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that Obama’s health-insurance mandate is a tax. The health-care law also included a number of taxes aimed mostly at the wealthy. But broadly speaking, Obama has reduced taxes for most Americans, so much so that the Congressional Budget Office says that effective tax rates are at their lowest point in three decades.
In October 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (Division A of Public Law 110-343) established the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to enable the Department of the Treasury to promote stability in financial markets through the purchase and guarantee of “troubled assets.” Section 202 of that legislation requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to submit semiannual reports on the costs of the Treasury’s purchases and guarantees of troubled assets. The law also requires the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to prepare an assessment of each OMB report within 45 days of its issuance. | <urn:uuid:3b76c84d-6e7b-47c6-9788-f0d9c24be699> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sunfoundation.tumblr.com/tagged/CBO | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965277 | 332 | 1.898438 | 2 |
New York (CNN) -- First it was trans fats. Then it was high-calorie fast food. Now, the New York City Health Department is tackling another diet enemy: salt.
The department unveiled an initiative Monday urging restaurants and food companies across the country to voluntarily reduce their products' salt levels, city officials said.
"Salt is a huge problem in our diets," said Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and Control Program at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "The majority of us consume too much salt, which increases blood pressure and puts us at risk for heart attack and stroke."
New York has partnered with cities, states and national health organizations across the country with the goal of cutting the salt in packaged and restaurant foods gradually by 25 percent over five years. Doing that would reduce the nation's salt intake by 20 percent, Angell said.
The average American adult consumes about 3,400 to 3,500 milligram of sodium a day, while most people only need about 1,500, she said. The excess sodium does not come from salting food at the table or while cooking, but from pre-packaged food and restaurant meals, which Angell said amount to nearly 80 percent of the average person's total sodium intake.
"Consumers can always add salt to food, but they can't take it out," Dr. Thomas Farley, the city's health commissioner, said in a written statement. "If we can reduce the sodium levels in packaged and restaurant foods, we will give consumers more choice about the amount of salt they eat and reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke in the process."
The only way to do this, according to Angell, is to get the food industry onboard.
During the past year, city officials have met with industry leaders, company representatives, restaurant owners and health experts to come up with a plan. The result of their meetings is a list of proposed benchmarks for 61 categories of packaged foods and 25 classes of restaurant food to help companies and restaurants nationwide gradually reduce sodium.
Subway, one of the companies that advised the health department, says that it is ready to commit to reducing salt in all Subway locations across the country.
"We have been looking at ways to reduce sodium in all of our products," said Kevin Kane, a spokesman for Subway. "This seemed like an extension of what we were doing already."
The company's most popular product, the 6-inch turkey sandwich, already meets the recommended sodium criteria for the five-year mark. But Kane acknowledged that the chain needs to work on getting some of its other offerings to make the grade without affecting the sandwiches' taste.
Finding that balance between low salt and good taste is not as easy as it sounds. Campbell Soup Company, which has quadrupled the number of its lower-sodium products in the past five years, is not favorable about the initiative simply because of the quick turnaround.
"We feel really strongly that we share the same goal in reducing sodium," said Campbell spokeswoman Julie Mandel Sloves. "However, we think the targets and time frame recommended are quite aggressive."
Sloves said that reducing the salt content can bring out different flavors in foods. Campbell taste-tests all of its new products to ensure that consumers respond positively to any changes, she said, and this would be a challenge in the timeline provided.
While it may take some time to find the correct balance, Angell stressed that reducing salt in a food does not mean reducing flavor.
"If salt is reduced gradually, we won't notice a difference in our palate," Angell said. "Our palate will adjust and we'll enjoy foods as much as we do now."
The campaign against salt is the latest of several health initiatives by New York. In 2006 the city required restaurants to phase out use of trans fats, a goal it said last year had been largely met. The city has also campaigned against high-calorie fast foods and is urging people to choose low-calorie beverages. | <urn:uuid:f2d58b71-f7bb-43af-9805-c1a943b1d153> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/11/new.york.salt/ | 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 | 0.971962 | 828 | 2.328125 | 2 |
Author Zaber's Book
Sins of the Father
Jebediah Simpson Ellsworth, a young brigadier general from Vicksburg, Mississippi, arrives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, seeking not only victory for his army and freedom from Northern tyranny, but also to prove his worthiness to his father's ghost. Instead, his army suffers defeat, he is wounded, and while recovering in enemy territory, is falsely accused of plotting a heinous crime. With the aid of Faith Bradshaw, a young Yankee woman, and Isaiah Wal...
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Trace Edward Zaber Message Board
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Zaber has written! | <urn:uuid:a96c2dc1-f9fe-4ef4-97ce-a0a2b7805ab4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.allreaders.com/topics/Topic_600.asp | 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 | 0.918067 | 140 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Discount Electric - Energy Reduction Programs
BidURenergy, Inc. pairs customers with discount electric providers to cut costs and reduce overhead. BidURenergy, Inc. (BUE) has revolutionized the way customers shop for discount electric and natural gas suppliers. Using more than 30 competitive electricity and natural gas suppliers, BUE has developed the PowerPit™ auction platform where suppliers compete for your business. In the PowerPit™ blind auction, suppliers are given one shot and one opportunity to submit their absolute lowest rate to earn your accounts. Because BUE is paid an equal amount by each discount electric and natural gas supplier, they are completely impartial to which supplier wins the auction.
What is Discount Electric?
Receiving discount electric is not a matter of buying coal or natural gas from an alternative supplier; it is a matter of taking advantage of market conditions and aggressive purchasing strategies. Since discount electric providers are not bound by tariffs (laws) on when or how they can purchase blocks of wholesale energy, they are at a distinct advantage over local utilities.
While a few electricity suppliers own generation assets, most third-party suppliers are simply wholesale traders. Third-party suppliers are strongly funded organizations with the financial backing to purchase large “futures contracts”. With this freedom, discount electric providers are able to take advantage of market lulls and purchase large blocks of wholesale electric. Most tariffs, governing the supply of electricity to default service customers, are written to where utilities must purchase electricity in certain intervals, no matter current market conditions. This generally results in default service customers paying higher prices for electric supply than customers choosing to purchase from a third-party supplier.
Discount Electric Market Knowledge
BidURenergy’s market analysts constantly watch the wholesale market and are trained to watch for market triggers indicating an opportune time to lock-in for your next term. In an effort to realize higher margins on customers, many discount electric providers will persuade customers to lock-in their rates at less than optimal times in the market. BUE’s market analysts ensure you are shopping for discount electric at a time that will benefit your organization. Should suppliers return rates that will not ultimately benefit you, BUE will place your accounts in the PriceWatch™ system that alerts your dedicated market analyst when market conditions turn favorable.
Discount Electric ... More than just rates...BidURenergy, Inc. is your one-stop shop for all your energy needs. Whether it’s securing the most competitive discount electric and natural gas rates, completing a comprehensive energy audit, helping prevent blackouts through demand response programs, or if you feel your utility bills may have errors, BUE can help. BUE has partnered with its sister companies, Energy Curtailment Specialists (ECS) and Ace Energy, to create an all-inclusive package of energy products.
Over the past decade, ECS has become the largest privately-held demand response provider in North America. With the decommissioning of more and more coal-fired generators, demand response programs are becoming increasingly important to maintaining stability on the grid during peak times. Competition amongst demand response providers is at an all-time high, and much like BUE’s discount electric and natural gas rates, ECS guarantees the best rates in the industry. By participating in a demand response program, not only are you helping to keep the lights on across the country, but you’re earning a measureable revenue stream for your organization.
Along with the growth of demand response programs, building automation and building management systems have become ever popular amongst large-scale energy users. Having the ability to completely control a facility’s energy consumption from a centralized location has become increasingly popular with today’s green initiatives. Ace Energy has spearheaded the push for building automation and efficiency upgrades through their SMART Automation and SMART Metering programs. Ace’s efforts have given facility managers complete control of their energy use at their fingertips; all while reducing overhead costs and doing their part to protect the environment.
BidURenergy takes pride in providing comprehensive energy consulting service through its PowerPit™ auction platform, Inspect-UR-Bill utility bill auditing service, and demand response and building automation programs through its sister companies ECS and ACE Energy. BUE is an industry leader in brings discount electric providers to clients and has quickly moved into the upper echelon of vetted energy consultants in North America! | <urn:uuid:646bf6c6-dcc1-46b3-aff7-1cc9979ff9c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bidurenergy.com/discount-electric | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943654 | 906 | 1.53125 | 2 |
New Zealand’s Love Canal
(This is the first of four blogs about the government cover-up of major health problems related to the production of dioxin-related chemicals at Dow AgroSciences in New Plymouth between 1948 and 1987)
When is corruption not corruption? The anti-corruption campaign in India has received substantial international coverage. Likewise complaints of extensive government corruption in debt-ridden Spain and Greece. Yet massive electoral fraud by Republican-controlled states in 2000 and 2004 goes virtually unreported, even in the so-called alternative media. Likewise allowing corporations to bribe elected officials by paying for their election campaigns is rarely referred to as corruption. Neither is the CIA’s involvement in narcotics trafficking. Nor rewarding banksters with billion dollar bailouts rather than jailing them. Surely any government that openly engages in such activities is deeply corrupt. So why does the world media point the finger at India, Greece and Spain and not the US?
This paradox seems to revolve around the specific nature, not severity, of corrupt practices. What passes for corruption in India, and to some extent Spain and Greece, is major tax avoidance and the expectation that applicants for passports, visas, drivers and business licenses and construction permits will pay a bribe on top of the application fee. All relatively minor stuff, compared to American-style corruption, but fairly common in poor countries where government bureaucrats don’t earn enough to live on.
Since coming to New Zealand, I’ve learned there is a third variety of corruption typical of struggling second world countries. Numerous safeguards make electoral fraud very difficult here. Likewise public officials who accepted bribes would be harshly punished, owing to the disastrous effect it would have on foreign investment. In fact, New Zealand is widely promoted in the global community as being corruption-free. It also enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most regulation-free for overseas corporations, especially when it comes to hazardous corporate waste.
This is the conclusion I have come to: what the corporate media refers to as “corruption” are extra legal activities that interfere with the ability to conduct business. Corruption that results in environmental degradation or destroys the lives or health of ordinary people doesn’t count.
New Plymouth: the Dioxin Capitol of New Zealand
The whole issue of chemical trespass and inadequate toxics regulation is of particular concern to me as a New Plymouth resident. I have numerous friends and former patients who have had their health and lives ruined by the government;s total refusal to oversee or regulate the activities of Dow AgroSciences (formerly known as Ivon Watkins Dow).* The latter produced extremely hazardous dioxin-related compounds between 1948 and 1987. After World War II, chlorinated hydrocarbons (aka organochlorines), such as 2,3,7,8 TCDD (dioxin), 2,4,5-T and 2,4 D were developed as herbicides (weed killers). Dioxin, also known as Agent Orange, was extensively sprayed during the Vietnam War to expose guerrilla positions by defoliating the jungles. The damaging health effects of these compounds were noted in many returning GIs and Vietnamese civilians and their children and grandchildren.
New Zealand, which has long had an economy driven by agricultural exports, relied heavily on the toxic petroleum-based insecticides and herbicides that came out after the war. As early as 1957, the New Zealand Royal Society cautioned that these chemicals needed to be thoroughly investigated, owing to the potential hazard they posed to human health. The warning went unheeded. In the 1950s and 1960s New Zealanders experienced the highest per capita exposure to DDT and related pesticides and 2,4,5-T in the western world. This appears to be the major culprit in the doubling of New Zealand’s cancer rate between 1960 and 2012 – and the halving of Kiwi sperm counts between 1987 and 2007. This drop is the most dramatic fall in the developed world. Neither Australia nor the US experienced a comparable decline in sperm counts during the same period.
The New Zealand government got their first wake-up call regarding their heavy use of these chemicals in 1961, when the US issued a ban on New Zealand beef exports, owing to excessive residues of chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, and BHC, which were used extensively as soil insecticides to combat ‘grass grub’. In 1969 the US notified the New Zealand government of their intention to test beef and lamb exports for TCDD (dioxin), based on research showing that dioxin contaminated 2,4,5-T had caused birth defects in animal studies. A confidential 1960s Dow internal memo reveals that Dow knew TCDD contaminated 2,4, 5-T was hazardous to human health: “The material presents a definite hazard. It shouldn’t be sold until animal tests show these products to be free of significant hazard from dioxin-related materials.” (For additional background and sources, see http://paritutuiwd.hostzi.com/?q=node/2).
*While Ivon Watkins (incorporated in 1944) prided itself on research and development geared towards New Zealand conditions, several major international chemical firms had substantial financial interests in the company including Monsanto (USA), the American Chemical Paint Company (USA), Geigy (Switzerland), Cela (Germany) and the Union Carbide Corporation (USA). Solidifying such connections, the company became Ivon Watkins-Dow Ltd (IWD) in 1964 after Dow Chemicals USA bought a 50% interest (Sewell 1978 – see http://www.dioxinnz.com/pdf-NZ-RAD/RAD-Thesis-BWC.pdf).
To be continued. | <urn:uuid:e0b772b5-4f9a-46c4-8a6a-8a0fc1789d13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2012/04/09/new-zealands-love-canal/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959616 | 1,193 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Summer Field Station
The Summer Field Station allows for close and concentrated study of one site, program, and community/client in a remote location. The Lower Embudo Valley of New Mexico, a traditional agricultural landscape in transition, serves as the base of operations for ALI's Summer Field Station through Summer 2012.
SInce 2007, Woodbury students have worked collaboratively with the people of Embudo/Dixon to map and analyze the social, economic, topographic, and infrastructural landscape as the community works to address the challenges of urbanization (changing land uses), globalization (limited local economies), and climate change (a reallocated hydrologic cycle).
Drawing on field work and research into contemporary discourse on distributed energy, local economies, slow food, and integrated watershed management, students develop infrastructure proposals that employ the basic principles of sustainable, low-impact design, and extend the design principles + methods of landscape urbanism.
Ongoing design work focuses on a suite of architectural, infrastructural, and public space interventions within a community-generated watershed management plan. Research and design proposals are informed by a multi-week survey of arid lands architecture and infrastructure conducted during the Summer Field Station's Desert Road Trip.
Funded by a substantial HUD/Hispanic Serving Instituions Assistng Communities (HSIAC) grant, ALI works during the school year with the City of Burbank, and in the summer term with communities in the Lower Embudo Valley of New Mexico to provide no-cost planning and design assistance to low-income communities working to devise sustainable water and energy strategies in the face of climate change. Community partners in both locations contribute technical assistance from planners, engineers, and water commissioners. The grant also funds public education programs on water- and energy-smart design in both locations, and funds publications resulting from work in both locations.
The Desert Road Trip is designed to introduce students to the magnitude of an extreme environment—the arid West. Students and faculty travel together for approximately 15 days to survey architectures and infrastructures people have devised over time to adapt their cultures to the arid lands, and to adapt the arid lands to their cultures.
The itinerary, which varies each year, includes architectural innovations and infrastructural approaches from multiple eras and cultures—pre-contact indigenous empires; European colonials; contemporary Native American dry-land farms; modern industrialists; utopic and dystopic experiments; and thriving hybrids—each with a building and irrigation system designed to minimize the extremes of the climate and maximize the yields of the land. All were designed for “sustaining” culture; all contain the seeds of their own obsolescence. Emphasis is placed on exploring how each engineering feat, archeological artifact, and settlement pattern examined is both a functional and ideological tool: a carefully devised instrument that negotiates the relationship between a cultural ideal and an environmental reality.
Students are asked to read each case study site critically: What are the forms of robust fluorescence? What are the forms of empire over-reaching? Is dispersion necessarily symptomatic of collapse? What are the strategies for adaptation in the face of change? What are the seeds of resilience?
FieldWork includes extensive GIS/GPS mapping, photography, and sketching, in tandem with a rigorous bibliography and outdoor seminars. Students record observations in a field book throughout the trip, and routinely present their responses to readings and sites in the field.
Students design, fabricate, and occupy desert shelters of their own design, and work as teams to produce nightly dinners that celebrate food from the landscapes of their origins. | <urn:uuid:74100738-c18f-4aaa-a67b-7b6584f6d4a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aridlands.woodbury.edu/education/summer_field_station_2009.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938087 | 743 | 2.4375 | 2 |
Students Will Make Presentations That Show Flawed Information Was Used In Their Decision To Cut Athletic Programs
On January 12, 2007, The James Madison University ( Harrisonburg , VA ) Board of Visitors will hear presentations from students who believe that their recent decision to eliminate ten athletic programs was made with flawed information and data. Student representatives of the Coalition to Save JMU Sports will ask the Board of Visitors to let the student-athletes from the ten teams proposed for elimination play out their eligibility through 2010. They will also ask the board to establish an Athletics Task Force to study alternatives to the cuts. The Board of Visitors meeting will be held at 1:00 PM at the Leeolou Alumni Center on the campus of James Madison University . The Coalition to Save JMU Sports will also hold a rally outside of the Leeolou Alumni Center at 12:00 PM.
On September 29, 2006, the JMU Board of Visitors voted in a closed door meeting to cut ten athletic programs from the university (7 men's / 3 women's) effective July 1, 2007. The main reason the JMU Board of Visitors provided for the athletic program cuts was to bring JMU into compliance with Title IX. Ironically, the law that was passed to afford women athletes equal opportunity is now being turned around and used against three women's athletic teams at James Madison University .
The Coalition To Save JMU Sports is made up of athletes, students, alumni, parents and fans have asked JMU to reconsider the decision to eliminate the ten athletic programs.
If you'd like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Jennifer Chapman, please call Paul Beardmore in Media Relations at 540.631.4210 or e-mail Paul at email@example.com | <urn:uuid:6b0e380d-1b6e-4316-abd6-9ff43040478c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://va.milesplit.com/articles/12025 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948159 | 360 | 1.773438 | 2 |
DescriptionCheck information on chemical food additives (also known as E numbers). Some of them are toxic, while others are just vitamins!
Easily and quickly check which E numbers in the food ingredients can be harmful to you. The E-Codes app is perfectly designed to ensure maximum speed and usability. Just try it!
Screen-shots present the full version (search for: E-Codes). Which additionally includes the scoring system, especially helpful while doing fast shopping!
Fully supported languages: English, Deutsch, Polski.
Tags: Food, Diet, Health, Additives, E Numbers, E Codes. | <urn:uuid:43ca0598-bbae-426b-951e-3b6b977fd567> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/com.appsisle.ecodes.free/E-Codes-Free-Food-Additives | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9287 | 129 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Ethnic Groups in Yugoslavia
In 1990, the Yugoslav Communist Party divided into several separate parties, one for each of the six Yugoslav Republics. Tensions among the ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, divided among the republics, led to an outbreak of a civil war by 1991. This map demonstrates the complexity of the Yugoslav situation, as few of the republics were populated by just one ethnic group. This is especially important for the central province of Bosnia, with a population consisting of significant numbers of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. As a result, Bosnia, and its capital of Sarajevo, became the central battleground of the Yugoslav Civil War.
Central Intelligence Agency, "Former Yugoslavia," The Former Yugoslavia: A Map Folio, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), University of Texas (accessed May 6, 2008) and Nyrop, Richard F., ed. "Peoples of Yugoslavia," Yugoslavia: A Country Study, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 61. | <urn:uuid:035a8cd3-dd6e-4241-99c6-1f3a6027d8b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/170 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940532 | 214 | 3.609375 | 4 |
4 reasons why it is difficult to quit smoking?
There are many reasons why it is so hard to quit smoking. This article will cover some of the major reasons why it is so difficult to quit smoking. It is possible to get past the difficulties of quitting, but one will have to understand the “why” and how they can overcome it. The four major reasons why it is so difficult to quit smoking is that we are creatures of habit, nicotine is extremely addictive, cigarettes are readily available, many people lack will power. If you want to quit smoking you will have find internal motivation to quit smoking and have a good understanding so you can overcome the difficulties.
1.) The first major problem reason is that people are creatures of habit. Those who have been smoking for a long time experience have patterns of smoking that will be hard to break. Think about it…What do you do on a typical day? Most of use have patterns from the moment we get up. Most people when they wake up in the morning might go get a cup of coffee, take a shower, brush their teeth and eat breakfast. The same holds true for how you smoke, making it difficult to quit smoking. You might smoke after you eat a meal, while you’re driving, or in social situations. If this is the case for you, you might want to start thinking about the “triggers” or habits you have while you smoke. Being aware of this will make it easy to quit smoking.
2.) The second is Nicotine is a chemically addictive substance. Ninety percent of people who smoke will develop a chemical dependency to Nicotine. This will make it very difficult to quit smoking. The reason that nicotine is highly addictive is because of its chemical makeup. When we have nicotine enter our bloodstream, nicotine releases serotonin into our body. After continued usage, our bodies depend on nicotine to only release serotonin into our body. When we become depleted, we actually fall into a depression, which we will need nicotine to release more serotonin into our body. Symptoms include anxiety, depression, frustration, withdrawal, body aches, head aches, and mood swings. This cycle becomes creates a large dependence the more that a individual smokes.
3.) The third is the availability to get cigarettes. We are a society of convenience and getting a pack of smokes is extremely easy to do. There is nothing illegal about smoking in any country (assuming you are over the age of 18), there for the availability of cigarettes is easy to get to. You can pick up a pack of smokes at any convenience store, supermarket, drug store, casino or bar. Most smokers are very liberal with giving away a cigarette to a fellow smoker.
4.) People lack the will power to quit smoking. Most people that attempt to quit smoking lack the will power or internal motivation to quit smoking. A person who really wants to quit smoking will truly have to want to quit smoking. Just because a person is receiving pressure from a family or friend to quit, is sometimes not enough to make someone want to quit smoking. That person who is just trying to appease the person to stop has an extremely high failure rate. The person who is quitting needs to have the internal drive to quit for their own personal gain. That individual will find it less difficult to quit smoking.
It is difficult to quit smoking, but if you understand that difficulties in quitting, you will find your path to smoking cessation much easier. The saying is true as ridiculous as it sounds…knowledge is power!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Name: John Durham
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Hi, my name is John and I am proud to say that I am smoke free for almost 5 years! I have recently decided to start writing for Stopcigarettes.net to help those who want to quit the habit. Quitting Smoking is a very difficult thing to do and hopefully this the resources on this website can help aid other to becoming smoke free. | <urn:uuid:fde9ac8d-0241-45f7-aa52-529cabcc9555> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stopcigarettes.net/4-reasons-why-it-is-difficult-to-quit-smoking/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9686 | 802 | 2.25 | 2 |
Bricks and Tiles
This activity from Cre8ate maths investigates the lines of horizontal and vertical weakness in walls. Initially students are shown four walls and have to identify the lines of weakness in them, before finding the smallest rectangular solution which has no lines of weakness. Students should record their designs as they work and use them to improve upon. Dominoes could be used for this task as they are in the same ratio as a brick.
Drawing tiles demonstrates how a design can be tessellated to create patterns and students could create a tile using the draw toolbar within Microsoft Word, as this will allow them to experiment with rotation and reflection possibilities very easily.
Square tiles gives rich opportunities to consider reflective and rotational symmetry and could be used to introduce art from different cultures. Guide lines for a square tile are provided, with lines of symmetry marked, to support students when completing this task.
HEALTH and SAFETY
Any use of a resource that includes a practical activity must include a risk assessment. Please note that collections may contain ARCHIVE resources, which were developed at a much earlier date. Since that time there have been significant changes in the rules and guidance affecting laboratory practical work. Further information is provided in our Health and Safety guidance.
Bricks and Tiles
Posted by nearyh on 18th May 2011
Activity time: 1 hour
Level/prior knowledge: Level 2 upwards
Subject/curriculum links/skills: Maths – problem solving, trial and error, methodical working strategies.
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Extra Resources: Dominoes
I used this activity with my mixed ability Year 5/6 class. They found the theory behind the activity interesting as it was linked to building and engineering. The part of the activity which looks at lines of weakness in a wall (simulated by using dominoes as ‘bricks’) was particularly enjoyable and the pupils became very competitive with one another to be the first to complete the activity. When asked, the pupils said they found the lesson enjoyable and liked the challenge. With a bit of creativity, this resource could be used over a series of lessons. | <urn:uuid:eeeef29e-c1bc-4033-940d-8fe15813dc9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/maths/resource/117/bricks-and-tiles | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96089 | 445 | 3.8125 | 4 |
Miko Onodera is trying to provide a different type of recovery for her neighbors in the tsunami-battered city of Kesennuma: emotional healing.
Onodera, 41, who runs a nonprofit focused on helping the disabled, is now the maître d of a newly opened café, which she is hoping can in small ways help survivors get over the psychic scars left by the March 11 disaster.
Jim Seida / msnbc.com
A child and his mother attend a “kids from the past” gathering at the “Cha No Ki Café” (Tea Tree Café) in Kesennuma, Japan. Miko Onodera, who runs the nonprofit that operates the cafe, says that her mission is to help the people of the tsunami-devastated city recover emotionally.
She sees that as the next phase in getting her hometown back to normal.
Onodera said she has so far seen three phases of recovery in the nearly three months since the tsunami generated by a massive 9.0 earthquake offshore roared into Kesennuma and other coastal communities in northeast Japan. First was the immediate need for food and shelter, then the survivors needed clothing, then the focus turned to replacing home supplies such as electrical appliances and cooking tools as the survivors moved into temporary public housing.
Naomi Ogata of Kesennuma brought her toddler and baby to the center because it is a safe place to play in the tsunami-ravaged town.
“Now, we are in the fourth phase: to bring the community back, to make it vibrant again,” Onodera said.
Well before the tsunami struck, Onodera and her nonprofit, Network Orange, planned on opening “Cha No Ki Café” (Tea Tree Café) last week to provide work and a gathering spot for members of the disabled community. But the tsunami, which ran out of steam just short of the café, changed the complexion of the grand opening on June 2.
“We are all hurt, suffering, so I hope this place will be a place to give hope to everybody,” she said.
Network Orange, which Onodera set up in 2002, held a “sit-down” comedy event, known as “rakugo,” for the opening, and Onodera plans to hold small concerts and lectures there, such as a talk by a novelist. On Wednesday, it hosted a “kids from the past” gathering for the elderly, many of whom were accompanied by kids and grandchildren, who played games while the older folks chatted.
“This is a symbol of the reconstruction of Kesennuma city,” said Yumiko Onodera, a 59-year-old nutritionist who works with Network Orange, as she sat in the cafe with a friend. “It’s not a facility organized by the city or government official. But this is something that we, the ordinary people, created, so that’s why it’s important.”
“Knowing that there is a place for us, it helps,” added her friend, Kazuko Suzuki, 72.
After the towering waters smashed through Kesennuma and flooded two of the group’s offices, Onodera and her team sprang into action, locating the 27 disabled people in Network Orange’s network by going from “town to town, shelter to shelter.” They found them all living in shelters or with relatives, though one family initially opted to live in their car, since it was difficult for their handicapped child to live with others, Onodera said. Network Orange staff and volunteers then updated the group’s blog, noting what supplies were needed, then distributed goods as they arrived. They also helped cook meals at the shelters.
Nearly 1,000 people died and another 511 remain missing from Kesennuma, a warren of hamlets nestled amid forests, where families of farmers and fishermen have plied their trades for centuries. Some people remain in temporary shelters, many crowded into school classrooms and gyms and others living in trailers.
Onodera said that the big shelters have held numerous events aimed at lifting the community’s spirits, but she said that people who aren’t living there were not invited, even though their lives undoubtedly also were touched in some way by the tsunami. The café helps fill that need, she said.
Jim Seida / msnbc.com
“There are people who want to be healed in smaller spaces, too. … So I think this space is the right size,” she said.
As the recovery unfolds – cleanup crews and excavators can be seen hard at work all around Kesennuma – Onodera said that nonprofits and medical professionals will have to remain focused on the emotional well-being of the tsunami survivors.
“There are people who lost family, houses and even jobs,” she said. “They can’t see the future, they don’t have hope. So for them, what they need is an event or some activities where they can participate and have fun so that they can start having the will to live
“We need to get our normal life back as soon as possible. That’s very important for us." | <urn:uuid:a6a6b4b7-ebf7-458e-b18d-8cb4cde6e1c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://worldblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/06/10/6827524-nonprofits-cafe-serves-up-healing-for-tsunami-survivors | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971596 | 1,106 | 1.921875 | 2 |