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Philadelphia, Pa. -- Chromosome 22, a hot spot for human disease, yielded a few more of its secrets to genetics researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who analyzed details of the chromosome's structure. Focusing on specific sites on the chromosome with repetitive sequences of DNA, the researchers found direct evidence that these sites are unstable areas where the chromosome is prone to rearrangements that cause a loss of important genes.
Reporting in the March issue of Human Molecular Genetics, the research team implicated the areas of instability, called low-copy repeats, in a relatively common genetic disorder, chromosome 22q11 deletion syndrome. Hundreds of patients are treated at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for that disorder, which includes heart defects, cleft palate, feeding problems, an abnormal thymus gland and learning disabilities. The researchers drew on a database of 200 patients, as well as the hospital's participation in the federally sponsored Human Genome Project, which announced in December that chromosome 22 was the first human chromosome to be fully sequenced. Sequencing chromosome 22 involved listing the order of 33 million DNA bases that comprise the chromosome's genes (In addition to the 22q11 deletion syndrome, separate genetic abnormalities on chromosome 22 are linked to certain leukemias and other cancers, mental retardation, schizophrenia and numerous other diseases).
"The ends of the areas deleted from chromosome 22 are more likely to be located where the low-copy repeats exist," said Beverly S. Emanuel, Ph.D., chief of Human Genetics and Molecular Biology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and senior author of the paper. "We can begin to describe the molecular mechanism by which a deletion in a chromosome takes place." For instance, two areas along the chromosome, designated as low-copy repeats A and D, have portions with identical sequences. Because each chromosome must pair off with an identical chromosome before a cell divides to make an egg or sperm, portions A and D sometimes combine with each other and leave out the genes in between them. The result is a chromosome that is missing genesthe basis of the chromosome 22 deletion syndrome.
As the Human Genome Project moves forward quickly to compile sequences of all 23 human chromosomes a result expected to be announced later this year one challenge for scientists will be to interpret that enormous mass of information. "Chromosome 22q11 deletion syndrome is representative of an emerging field in genetic medicine, called genomic disease," said Dr. Emanuel. Genomic diseases are disorders originating in the structure of the genomethe full complement of genes carried by a set of chromosomes. One group of genomic diseases originates in the low-copy repeats that cause unstable areas on their specific chromosomes. Occurring once in every 4,000 births, chromosome 22q11 deletion syndrome is the most prevalent such disease. Other such diseases include Williams syndrome, based on a deletion on chromosome 7, and Prader-Willi syndrome, in which a portion of chromosome 15 is missing. All three syndromes include defects in organs, distinctive facial features and learning disabilities.
"It's too early to know the clinical applications of our research yet," said Dr. Emanuel. "We're still seeking to better understand the molecular mechanisms. Perhaps we might eventually be able to predict subgroups in a population more likely to have this deletion syndrome." Upcoming investigations at Children's Hospital will study variations of the chromosome 22q11 deletion among patients and their parents and grandparents.
The genetics laboratory at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia recently received a four-year renewal of its federal grant for the chromosome 22 deletion studies. The National Institutes of Health will provide $1.5 million per year for the next four years. "This represents continuing recognition of our longstanding work on chromosome 22," said Dr. Emanuel.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the nation's first children's hospital, is a leader in patient care, education and research. This 373-bed multispecialty hospital provides comprehensive pediatric services, including home care, to children from before birth through age 19. The hospital is second in the United States among all children's hospitals in total research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Source: The Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia, March 1, 2000 | <urn:uuid:ef1b4ece-5fef-4c45-a052-038e910a8861> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biology-online.org/articles/details_chromosome_22_structure.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947796 | 852 | 3.515625 | 4 |
a1 Tromsö University Museum, University of Tromsø, 9037 Tromsø, Norway Email: email@example.com
An examination of meanings associated with bears among early hunter-gatherer-fisher populations in northern Fennoscandia, based on beliefs and ritual practices in the ethnohistoric record, indicates that they were an animal attributed multiple meanings in prehistoric as well as historic times. They were clan ancestors, spirit masters and symbols of power and reincarnation such as rebirth and the change of seasons. The evidence indicates a pattern of local variation and identities rather than a uniform regional pattern, and some large-scale differences from the coastal area of Norway in the west to Karelia in the east.
(Received September 09 2011)
(Accepted December 07 2011)
(Revised March 05 2012)
Knut Helskog is Professor of Archaeology at Tromsø University Museum, Tromsø University, Norway. Responsibilities include the management of the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act, salvage archaeology, archives, collections, museum exhibitions, popularization and research. His research interest is oriented towards hunter-fisher-gatherer populations in northern Fennoscandia with a special focus on the interpretation of rock art. | <urn:uuid:e02e3c4c-6b10-4406-925e-ca52341bd967> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8589662 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949135 | 267 | 2.390625 | 2 |
This statue and fountain are located at the entrance to the Trammel Crow Collection of Asian Art.
The Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, located downtown Dallas, Texas (USA), is a member of the Dallas arts district and offers free daily admission. The museum is a gift to the people and visitors of Dallas from Mr. and Mrs. Crow. It opened officially to the public December 5, 1998. The Crow Collection is a permanent set of galleries dedicated to the arts and cultures of China, Japan, India and Southeast Asia. The museum offers a serene setting for quiet reflection and learning. The museum is located at the bottom of Trammell Crow’s own namesake tower, the Trammell Crow Center. from wikipedia.
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Isaiah Chapter 2
Viewing the Standard King James Version (Pure Cambridge). Click to switch to 1611 King James Version of Isaiah Chapter 2
2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD'S house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
3 And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
6 Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers.
|<< Isaiah Chapter 1||
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Matthew Henry's Isaiah Chapter 2 Bible commentary...
The conversion of the Gentiles, Description of the sinfulness of Israel. (1-9) The awful punishment of unbelievers. (10-22)1-9 The calling of the Gentiles, the spread of the gospel, and that far more extensive preaching of it yet to come, are foretold. Let Christians strengthen one another, and support one another. It is God who teaches his people, by his word and Spirit. Christ promotes peace, as well as holiness. If all men were real Christians, there could be no war; but nothing answering to these expressions has yet taken place on the earth. Whatever others do, let us walk in the light of this peace. Let us remember that when true religion flourishes, men delight in going up to the house of the Lord, and in urging others to accompany them. Those are in danger who please themselves with strangers to God; for we soon learn to follow the ways of persons whose company we keep. It is not having silver and gold, horses and chariots, that displeases God, but depending upon them, as if we could not be safe, and easy, and happy without them, and could not but be so with them. Sin is a disgrace to the poorest and the lowest. And though lands called Christian are not full of idols, in the literal sense, are they not full of idolized riches? and are not men so busy about their gains and indulgences, that the Lord, his truths, and precepts, are forgotten or despised?
10-22 The taking of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans seems first meant here, when idolatry among the Jews was done away; but our thoughts are led forward to the destruction of all the enemies of Christ. It is folly for those who are pursued by the wrath of God, to think to hide or shelter themselves from it. The shaking of the earth will be terrible to those who set their affections on things of the earth. Men's haughtiness will be brought down, either by the grace of God convincing them of the evil of pride, or by the providence of God depriving them of all the things they were proud of. The day of the Lord shall be upon those things in which they put their confidence. Those who will not be reasoned out of their sins, sooner or later shall be frightened out of them. Covetous men make money their god; but the time will come when they will feel it as much their burden. This whole passage may be applied to the case of an awakened sinner, ready to leave all that his soul may be saved. The Jews were prone to rely on their heathen neighbours; but they are here called upon to cease from depending on mortal man. We are all prone to the same sin. Then let not man be your fear, let not him be your hope; but let your hope be in the Lord your God. Let us make this our great concern.
Binoche's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 3/15/2013, 5:22am...
The first five verses of the second chapter of Isaiah are a beautiful beginning of the Pope Francesco's pontificate. The clue and answer to the global problems as well as God's words for every man, not only Catholic or Christian.
Manvilla Kemp's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 10/04/2012, 10:18pm...
In Isaiah 2:5 it says come lets walk in the light, we can\\\'t stay in sin and walk in the light. He\\\'s asking us to get away from sin and walk with Him because He is the light, so if we are in sin we wouldn’t see the light, but if we come out from under sin then we are free to walk with the light. Thank you Jesus for being that light in my life.
Lydia newburn's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 5/15/2012, 6:51pm...
god is warning us to listen to his word and turn from our wicked ways before its to late
Godfred's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 6/25/2011, 7:25am...
Ad Christians we always want people to obey us n keep our wishes or commandment but thee that created heaven n earth is more than that of we Nomal human we do have to keep his commandments cos he created Heaven n earth n all things in it so we need to obey n keep his commandment
Indu's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment about verse 16 on 11/03/2010, 1:57am...
i think the word beautiful or pleasent pictures says about the T.V ... movies and stuff....
Daniel Cohen Assuline's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 9/16/2010, 1:07pm...
The Word of the Lord is glorious and full of Majesty and Honor. I am delighted and comforted that I am in His Kingdom as a Christain serving the Lord of Hosts daily. The book of Isaia, tells it to the whole earth and speaks to his people Israel about Himself and what He expects from the people of the Earth and Israel.
J Wisor's Isaiah Chapter 2 comment on 5/11/2010, 10:06am...
In a very colorful way, Isaiah depicts the humiliation of those who prefer high-sounding philosophy to the knowledge of God. One acknowledging God as His own humble servant admires and magnifies Him in seeking to show forth His virtues, as we're exhorted by the Letter (epistle) of Saint Peter Chapter One.
This esaic prophecy can help a person who loves his or her own life too much to forsake pride, to colorfully imagine what it might be like to have to relinquish such pride involuntarily in being humbled.
The conclusion to and summation of this chapter also liberate us from oppression of man (to feeling oppressed in servitude to our fellow-man's opinion).
What Do You Think of Isaiah 2?
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|<< Isaiah Chapter 1| | <urn:uuid:b10b6f62-1eaf-4c56-9490-4789c46fdcd9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/book.php?book=Isaiah&chapter=2&verse= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962402 | 1,514 | 1.820313 | 2 |
- beat (v.)
- Old English beatan "inflict blows on, thrash" (class VII strong verb; past tense beot, past participle beaten), from Proto-Germanic *bautan (cf. Old Norse bauta, Old High German bozan "to beat"), from PIE root *bhau- "to strike" (see batter (v.)). Of the heart, c.1200, from notion of it striking against the breast. Meaning "to overcome in a contest" is from 1610s (the source of the sense of "legally avoid, escape" in beat the charges, etc., attested from c.1920 in underworld slang).
Past tense beat is from c.1500, probably not from Old English but a shortening of Middle English beted. Dead-beat (originally "tired-out") preserves the old past participle. Meaning "strike cover to rouse or drive game" (c.1400) is source of beat around the bush (1570s), the metaphoric sense of which has shifted from "make preliminary motions" to "avoid, evade." Command beat it "go away" first recorded 1906 (though "action of feet upon the ground" was a sense of Old English betan). To beat off "masturbate" is recorded by 1960s. For beat generation see beatnik.
- beat (n.)
- c.1300, "a beating, whipping; the beating of a drum," from beat (v.). As "throb of the heart" from 1755. Meaning "regular route travelled by someone" is attested from 1731, also "a track made by animals" (1736), from the sense of the "beat" of the feet on the ground (late Old English), or perhaps that in beat the bushes to flush game (c.1400), or beat the bounds (1560s). Extended to journalism by 1875. Musical sense is by 1842, perhaps from the motion of the conductor and the notion of "beating the time":
It is usual, in beating the time of a piece of music, to mark or signalize the commencement of every measure by a downward movement or beat of the hand, or of any other article that may be used for the purpose .... ["Godfrey Weber's General Music Teacher," 1842]
Earlier in music it meant a sort of grace note:
BEAT, in music, a transient grace note, struck immediately before the note it is intended to ornament. The beat always lies half a note beneath its principal, and should be heard so closely upon it, that they may almost seem to be struck together. ["The British Encyclopedia," London, 1809]
- beat (adj.)
- "defeated, overcome by effort," c.1400, from past tense of beat (v.). Meaning "tired, exhausted," is by 1905, American English. | <urn:uuid:1035e067-4b7a-403d-92cf-3b01a06eda2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=beat&allowed_in_frame=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949948 | 609 | 3.375 | 3 |
The nature of commenting in social media is itself changing the way our conversations are interconnected. This change came about as comment aggregation services made it possible to build a reputation via commenting on a wide variety of blogs. First there were the plug-in aggregators like Disqus and IntenseDebate. These systems require the blog owner to add them to their platform and the commenter to register with the aggregator. Once registered any comments made on blogs using these systems would be aggregated on the source site. You can see other comments by a person you find interesting, regardless of whether you’d ever been to the actual blog post they reference.
The next iteration is BackType which does not require the blog owner to participate via a plugin. Their unique and IMHO, brilliant approach, is to track the URL that the commenter uses as an identifier when they post a comment. Commenters need to register at BackType but once registered virtually all of their comments are captured on the Backtype site. Participants offer a Profile and can be followed a la Twitter.
The reason this interests me is that it creates an entire new social layer that connects heretofore unconnected social sources. The commenters themselves become something you follow across a variety of places. What I’ve found interesting is how this builds personal reputation and has for me at least, somewhat replaced blogging as a way of expressing my opinion. Unlike Twitter, commenting has a threaded context (the post that started the conversation) and no limits on length. It includes the discourse elements of Twitter but goes further.
As an example, when forums were the primary conversations on the early web, certain participants became notorious on the forums where they were useful, disruptive and/or annoying presences. The commenting systems take this model and move it out of a narrow forum and into the entire social media eco-system. | <urn:uuid:82b25849-d854-4114-98bd-30075bb7bd0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.techrigy.com/2008/11/are-comments-the-next-social-layer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954731 | 374 | 1.6875 | 2 |
History & Culture
Historic Resource Study
Creating A National Monument
On October 25, 1949, President Harry Truman signed a proclamation establishing Effigy Mounds National Monument. The monument consisted of two areas: the Jennings-Liebhardt tract (South Unit) and the Yellow River Unit (North Unit). Sny Magill was not initially included in the monument due to land title problems. This site, however, was federally owned and thereby afforded a degree of protection.
Just as no one knows why effigy mound building started, no one knows why it ended. Perhaps the more flamboyant Mississippian culture, moving upriver from the south, supplanted the older Woodland lifestyle. The Mississippian culture differed considerably from the Woodland. The Mississippian culture was based on cultivation, primarily of corn, which was supplemented by gathering the resources of stream and forest. There were no significant changes in the tools the Mississippians used save for the addition of bison scapular hoes and a few other agricultural implements.
by Clark Mallam
Did You Know?
Stephen H. Long, of the U.S. Army's Topographical Engineers, explored and described the Effigy Mounds National Monument region in expeditions undertaken in 1817 and 1823. Long was one of the first to document the presence of mounds in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. | <urn:uuid:bc0a155b-7989-475b-93e8-928553652b63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nps.gov/efmo/historyculture/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945186 | 284 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Town takes charge of its future health
Salem, in Dent County sits 30 miles off the nearest interstate. About 13,780 people live in Dent, some 8,900 of them in Salem. The area's average annual per-capita income is $8,845 -well below national poverty lines.
Those are the county's vital statistics and they paint the picture of an area in need of several boosts, from health care to the economy. But those numbers don't tell the story of the people of Dent, a community that decided to take charge of its future and change its nagging ails, from improving access to physicians to luring industry.
"The concerns facing Dent residents are the same concerns facing other rural Missourians," says Gail Carlson, state specialist in continuing medical education. "How Dent is handling these challenges can serve as a model for the rest of the state."
How is Dent handling these challenges? For one thing, it's starting at a grassroots level and working up. The town of Salem formed the Salem Area Community Betterment Association (SACBA), to address the area's most pressing needs. One sub-group of the association is looking at improving access to health care, a major concern for a county that is heavily populated with low-income elderly residents. Child and family development extension specialist Bryan Adcock is a member of the group, known as Healthy Communities 2000.
"Health care is a big issue, a major issue for people in this area and our goal was to get them involved in the process, get them talking about what needs to be done," says Adcock.
To get the process rolling, Adcock applied for and secured a sought-after affiliation with the National Rural Health Association's program known as Community Solutions for Rural Health (CSRH). Salem was one of only 17 counties nationwide to receive a seed money grant of $7,000 from the national organization.
The effort was pure grassroots. Town hall meetings were held to assess the community's needs and moods toward health care. From there, Adcock and other organizers formed Salem's Healthy Communities 2000 Volunteer Council, a coalition comprised of health care providers and consumers working in partnership.
"At our town hall meeting was where the real work happened," said Adcock. "The community identified its most pressing needs."
The needs include:
What makes Salem's efforts so outstanding is that the
community didn't stop once needs were addressed. They
moved full-force to solve them, applying for grants to
help fund initiatives and forming committees to oversee
the process. Reaching some goals will be more manageable
than others. For example, finding physicians, while a
challenge, will be more attainable than creating an
affordable health care program, which is a national
problem as well. | <urn:uuid:67a5eb62-2a9c-42f1-8dc5-8714f2311286> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://extension.missouri.edu/hes/impact/imp97/comty.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973668 | 574 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Mars Rover Makes Discovery For "the History Books," but NASA Is Keeping It a Secret For Now
By Josh Voorhees
Curiosity is living up to its name. The NASA rover currently wheeling itself around Mars has apparently sent back some very interesting data from the Red Planet in the form of a soil sample that shows ... well, something. From the sounds of it, something big. But for now at least, that's all anyone is willing to say.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are keeping their lips sealed for the time being while they run additional tests to make sure the discovery holds up. That, however, hasn't stopped one of the mission's leaders from speculating loudly that it'll be one that rewrites at least some of what we know about the universe.
Continue reading: http://www.theblackvault.com/m/news/vie ... et-For-Now | <urn:uuid:ac4cca05-fec3-4fa4-a9d4-99bbea66eb3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theblackvault.com/phpBB3/topic8247.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95806 | 192 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Our Disordered LivesBy Norman Horn
The colonists had won a war and, desiring to set up a republican form of government, they installed a Constitution designed to limit the public authority and thus maximize personal liberty.
Now that they were free, what did these early Americans do with their newly won liberty? For one thing, they worked. They had to provide their own food, clothing and shelter, so work was a necessity of survival. Moreover, these people remembered the poverty endured by their ancestors in Europe and how life was demeaned thereby. Now that these Americans were free to enjoy the fruits of their toil they became more productive, and with the gradual increase of wealth came a new sense of human dignity which accompanies modest economic success. The Puritan Ethic was sound when it endorsed work, thrift and frugality. This ethic fitted in well with the burgeoning interest in the new science of economics, masterfully set forth in 1776 by Adam Smith. It is significant that more than twenty five hundred copies of Wealth of Nations were sold in this country within five years of its appearance. Obviously, the book addressed itself to a real need.
Economic activity is fundamental to human existence. A Robinson Crusoe could get along without politicking, but if he did not work he would die of hunger and exposure. Emerging from economic activity are the concepts of rights to property and claims to service around which many political battles are fought. Economics, on the surface, deals with prices, production, and the operations of the market as determined by the buying habits of every one of us. In reality, however, economics is concerned with the conservation and stewardship of the earth’s scarce goods; human energy, time, material resources and natural forces.
These goods-in-short-supplies are our birthright as creatures of this planet. Use them wisely, as natural piety dictates and common sense confirms — that is providently and economically — and human well-being is the result. Ignore the realities in this area, as we have done in our time, and a host of evils follow. We might be able to live with economic ills if we didn’t think we could cure them with political nostrums, but our political efforts aimed at mopping up the consequences of economic mistakes head us in the direction of the Total State. Every collectivist ideology —from the welfare state idea to totalitarian communism — is strung on a framework of economic error. People are prisoners of their beliefs, and so long as they cherish a wrong understanding of economics they will be appealed to by one form of collectivism or another. But when they embrace sound economics, collectivism will cease to be a menace.
All creatures take the world pretty much as they find it, save man. Man alone has the gifts which enable him to entertain an idea and then transform his environment in accordance with it. He is equipped with needs which the world as it is cannot satisfy. Thus he is compelled to alter and rearrange the natural order by employing his energy on raw materials so as to put them into consumable form. Before he can do much of anything else, man must manufacture, grow, and transport. His creaturely needs man shares with the animals, but he alone employs economic means to satisfy them. This is an enormous leap upward, for by relying on the economic means man becomes so efficient at satisfying his bodily hungers that he gains a measure of independence from them. And when they are assuaged, he feels the tug of hungers no animal ever feels: for truth, for beauty, for meaning, for God.
Whatever may be man’s capacities in the upper reaches of his nature — to think, dream, pray, or create — it is certain that he will attain to none of these unless he survives. And he cannot survive for long unless he engages in economic activity. At the lowest level, economic action achieves merely economic ends: food, clothing, and shelter. But when these matters are efficiently in hand, economic action is a means to all our ends, not only to more refined economic goods but to the highest goods of the mind and spirit. Add flying buttresses and spires to four walls and a roof, and a mere shelter for the body develops into a cathedral to house the spirit of man. Economics is not one means among many, Hayek has pointed out, it is the means to all our ends.
The freer a nation’s economy the more prosperous are its citizens. The wealth of Uncle Sam became the envy of the world. America’s greatness is not, of course, to be measured by monetary income and material well-being; but it is interesting to note how well Americans have done economically with the resources available to them.
The United States is only one-sixteenth of the land surface of the world, and Americans are only about one-fifteenth of the world’s population. Nevertheless, Americans own three-quarters of all the television sets. Americans consume about two-thirds of all the petroleum products in the world, one-half of all the coffee, two-thirds of all the silk. An American factory worker can buy four suits of clothes with a month’s wages; his counterpart in a totalitarian country can buy half a suit with a month’s wages. An American can buy six pairs of shoes with the results of a week’s work; his totalitarian counterpart can buy one shoe. These figures prove only one thing. They demonstrate with what dramatic success Americans have waged the great war on poverty.
There was general progress during the nineteenth century; the American Dream appeared to be in the process of realization. The War Between the States shed brothers’ blood and dealt the nation a staggering blow, but the country’s spiritual and political leadership had enough vitality to begin the long job of putting the pieces together again. There were several periods of economic dislocation during the nineteenth century, but the masses of Americans tightened their belts and took the hardships in stride. The prevailing mood, as the nation entered the twentieth century was optimistic, but this mood was badly shaken by World War I. There was a lot of cynicism in the literature of the twenties and a few voices began to propagandize for the Planned State. Then came the shattering experience of the Great Depression and large numbers of Americans lost faith in themselves and in their institutions. They felt powerless before the forces leading them toward the war they entered in 1941.
Given their "druthers," most people choose freedom; they would have settled — anytime during the 1929-1941 period — for a resumption of the old ways and the prospect of a steady job. But there was almost no one to tell them that economic stagnation and war are not market place phenomena; these are consequences of political interference with the free market. The economy which collapsed in 1929 and continued stricken during the thirties was a politically rigged economy; it bore little resemblance to the classical model of the free market!
The Voice of Socialism
This message was drowned out in the thirties by the confident, strident voices of Socialists, Communists and Social Planners. The prescriptions of these folk were heeded, in large measure, and their remedies applied. The walfare state was given carte blanche in the nineteen-thirties and has had the field virtually to itself for the past forty years. What are the consequences? Examine any sector of the nation you choose and the survey turns up a shambles. Dissension tears apart our churches; influential church bodies support revolution; churchmen embrace one weird theology after another. On the campuses there is not only a breakdown of educational theory, there are student riots, burnings and bombings. Never have Americans been so divided against each other; never has America stood so low in the eyes of the world.
It is an ominous portent for a nation when significant numbers of its people carry the political dialogue out into the street, forsaking the painstaking, two-way process of argumentation and discussion for the more spectacular device of demonstration. Thus the marches, the sit-ins, kneel-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, and the like. Public order exists only because the overwhelming majority of people voluntarily obey the rules of the game. The law does not create public order; law is the creature of that order. Order creates an instrument, the law, to punish those occasional breaches of propriety which occur because men are not angels. No society comes into existence, nor can a society endure, unless most of the people can be trusted most of the time to play fair and deal justly with their fellows.
Every free society develops its customary style of political life as a reflection of its peculiar ethos and, according to its own lights, gives to every faction in the society a voice to match its merits. A free society devises political machinery for the orderly succession in office, and cannot long endure chaos in this sphere.
Not a Tyrant’s Rule
Our situation in 1973 is not like that of a conquered country, pinned down by a tyrant’s heel. A suppressed people is denied access to the political levers by which orderly changes in society are effected. They cannot plead their case across the abyss which separates them from their conquerors, and thus they are impelled to protest by actions which smack of guerrilla warfare. How different here! The channels of political communication in the United States were never more open than today, but never has the country witnessed more protest marches, demonstrations, and riots. The ends the demonstrators hope to accomplish by taking to the streets—recognition, economic improvement — were not being thwarted by the strongest political currents flowing during the past generation; to the contrary, new ground was being gained with each passing year, and the trend was continuing. There was undeniable progress, but it was not being accomplished fast enough by regular political means, seconded by moral and educational movements; so they took to the streets to speed up the action.
Then there are the cop-outs, the denizens of the counter-culture, the drug people, the vagabonds, the experimenters with new life styles.
What went wrong? What will bring us back into the mainstream of the American tradition?
The Decline of Religion
The past two centuries — the period during which the American experiment got started, rose to heights of prosperity, then lost its sense of direction — coincides with the general decline of religious belief. The decline I refer to is not something to be gleaned from statistics. There are millions of people who attend church every Sunday; there are a great many devout Christians and pious Jews in Europe and America; there are philosophers who can demonstrate by close reasoning that God is; and there is in the average man a sense that he is taking part in events of a more than mundane significance. But the God reached at the conclusion of a chain of reasoning is not the same God as The One in Whom our being is rooted — although it is with the philosopher’s God that the recovery of religious faith must begin. Hold fast to that which can be proved; then faith, when it comes, is a gift of grace.
While religion has gotten onto rather shaky ground in modern times, the philosophy of Materialism has gained ascendancy almost everywhere. It is the typical faith of the laboratory and the market place. Science has taken on a magic radiance during the past two centuries, appearing to deliver what religion had only promised; and the world view dictated by science was widely assumed to be Materialism. Scientists, for the purposes of their work, visualized the universe as an intricate, interlocking piece of clockwork. Every event is the effect of a mechanical cause, and a thing is "understood" when broken down and analyzed into its antecedents. Science takes on messianic significance in what Karl Marx referred to as his "Scientific Socialism," and the philosophy of dialectic Materialism on which communism is based rigorously excludes God and regards religion as the enemy.
Religion was a compelling force in the formation of American ideals and institutions. From the religious heritage of Christendom came our understanding of human nature and destiny — the belief that God has called men to His service while in the body to perform their duties as citizens, their tasks as employers and employees, as well as in their homes, their churches, and their play. The central doctrine of our political theory is the idea that each person possesses inherent, God-given rights, whose protection is government’s primary job.
But if man is not a created being, if man instead is simply the end product of material and social forces — as the strict environmentalists believe — then there is not a spark of the divine within him. If there is no God there are no God-given rights in a person, which all other persons are bound to respect. And if there are no rights natural to man as such, then men will not strive to limit government to the public domain. To the contrary, the powers and functions of government will be extended and some men will come to regard other men simply as objects to be manipulated: "We who wield power will create the environment to mould men to our specifications and thus bring a new humanity into being." At the first Creation God made man in His own image; the second Creation proposes to improve on the first!
The philosophy of Materialism cannot allow the idea of inherent rights, nor does it countenance the idea of a soul, or mind, as a genuine reality. Materialism is the theory that bits of matter alone are ultimately real, and when one reflects on this position it is evident that Materialism is self-refuting. If only matter is real, the theory that only matter is unreal is fanciful! A theory, or an idea, or a belief is certainly nonmaterial; and the fact that we can have an idea of matter demonstrates that there is more to the universe than matter!
The Reality of Ideas
Ideas are real! An idea does not occupy space, nor is it in time; it will not submit to chemical analysis, nor can it be weighed or measured. But it begs the question to assume that these are the only tests for genuine reality. If we deny reality to an idea or a thought, then neither can we vouch for the truth of an idea or thought. The Materialist actually denies the validity of thought when he doubts the reality of an idea; and, to be candid, he must admit that he cannot trust the reasoning which purports to lead him to Materialism!
The tragedy is that religion has weakly succumbed to this ideology, and the idea of rights derived from the Creator has been replaced by the notion of privileges granted by the State. This has had a profoundly disturbing effect on American political institutions.
The second ill consequence following upon the decay of religious belief affects the individual person by diminishing his life goals. It is the Christian position that man is made to serve a transcendent end, in other words, to seek first the Kingdom. The ancient promise is that if we put this first thing in first place the other necessary things will come in sequence. But under the rule of Materialism men are limited to the pursuit of earthly goals which, in practice, boil down to two; the pursuit of power and the pursuit of wealth.
The relentless pursuit of power destroys the idea of limited, Constitutional government; the ruthless pursuit of wealth destroys the market economy. If a people acknowledge the Ten Commandments, seek freedom and justice, practice love of God and of neighbor, and then employ a modicum of intelligence in their economic and political arrangements, they will restrain government and release productive energy; they will have a free and productive commonwealth on these terms, and on no others. For it is almost a truism that disorder in society is but a reflection of disorder in the souls of men. Earmarks of today’s inner disorder are widespread uncertainty about the meaning of life, loss of proper goals, confusion as to what it all signifies, a loss of hope, and an enfeeblement of resolution.
As the religious man understands the universe, this natural world is grounded in a spiritual reality, which we cannot sense, but whose reality may be corroborated by intuition, reason, or revelation. When man loses contact with this divine order he will transfer his loyalty to worldly objects, and a part of him will be crippled as a result. The full embodiment of the Gospel vision is beyond the capacity of any generation of men. But the City of Man may be a proving ground for the City of God, and a portion of that vision has worked its way into the law, customs and conventions of Christendom. This ideal once inspired our free institutions, and its original inspiration can be rekindled. Until that rekindling occurs the promise of America remains unfulfilled.
What Is Life’s Meaning?
Each of us is thrust into life and saddled with the task of discovering what this life of ours is all about. The first thing we discover is that the life-meaning we seek is not something which will simply drift toward us while we passively wait; we have to work for it. It is only as active participants in life that we begin to discover clues as to the meaning of our earthly pilgrimage.
The full meaning is, of course, denied us. Mortal man, with his finite understanding, can do no more here than "see as through a glass darkly." But the part we can and do see is at least enough so that we know what our next step should be. Take the right step and it leads to another. Look back over our trail and a definite pattern is decipherable.
We human beings did not invent ourselves. Our fumbling efforts to discover the laws of our being —the rules for our proper operation — contribute toward making human life the painful thing it is. But this pain of ours is a peculiar pain; joy is mingled with the pain — the joy that comes from knowing that each one of us participates in the very process of creation itself. Every other creature but man obeys the Laws of God, which are the Laws of Life, willy-nilly — almost mechanically. But God solicits the cooperation of man. We have free will, and we may refuse to cooperate; or, we may exercise our power of choice and thus begin to realize the tremendous potential that lies latent in each one of us.
Life challenges us to grow, and it provides abundant occasions and opportunities to test our nerve. Every test is just a little beyond our capacity; so, in one sense, we fail. But in the very act of striving lies our success, for new powers emerge out of our shortcomings; and the hardships we overcome on each level of life spur us to rise higher. | <urn:uuid:f157e53a-3743-4b5d-8cd5-b122281bea84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://libertarianchristians.com/2012/10/05/our-disordered-lives/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967068 | 3,842 | 2.625 | 3 |
SACRAMENTO — Although there is wide agreement that Proposition 99, with its tough anti-smoking commercials and local anti-tobacco campaigns, has helped to cut smoking in California, the evidence does not make it clear why it is working.
Americans in general are gradually lowering their tobacco consumption and in recent years Californians have been reducing their consumption at an even faster rate--27%--compared to a national decline of about 10% over the past six years, said John P. Pierce, head of the cancer prevention and control program at UC San Diego.
California's sharpest decline in tobacco use began in September, 1988, two months before voters approved the anti-tobacco initiative and four months before the 25-cents-a-pack tax increase took effect.
Pierce and his colleagues at San Diego have been tracking Californians' smoking habits in a study funded by Proposition 99 tax dollars.
He believes that the campaign to pass the measure, in which cigarette manufacturers spent more than $20 million in opposition, may have triggered what he calls "an anticipatory effect"--smokers deciding to quit because of their heightened awareness of the issue and to avoid the impending tax.
Pierce's figures show that the sharp drop in cigarette consumption continued for months as the new tax took effect and then leveled off. By October, 1989, sales began rising again.
"If (the state) didn't do anything else, the effect of the tax would have worn out," Pierce said.
In April, 1990, the state launched a mass media campaign--and tobacco consumption began to fall again. Supporters of the state Department of Health Services' anti-smoking efforts cite this as proof that the commercials were effective.
When the blitz of commercials ended, Pierce said, tobacco sales began rising again. In early 1992, Gov. Pete Wilson refused to sign a new contract with a private ad agency to continue the media campaign--a decision that was reversed only after a lawsuit. For months, there were no commercials or ads.
But for reasons that are not quite clear, tobacco consumption during that time began falling again. Confounding Pierce's findings are a host of other factors, such as cigarette advertising and price changes.
Pierce contends that other tax-funded efforts to restrict smoking--such as community campaigns to promote workplace smoking bans--were probably having an effect.
His survey has shown that smokers employed in smoke-free work sites are much more likely to quit than those whose jobs permit smoking.
But like all retrospective looks at human behavior, there are confounding factors, such as a recent drop in the price of premium cigarettes or the impact of a new sales campaign.
No one can explain, for example, why the state-funded programs appear to be having little effect on teen-agers. Since 1988, when R.J. Reynolds began its Joe Camel promotions, smoking rates among 16- to 18-year-olds have risen in California, according to Pierce's statistics. | <urn:uuid:96ccf73e-3020-45f2-b4ec-85f06d5e8648> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-27/news/mn-9156_1_smoking-rates | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973857 | 609 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Women should not be automatically expected to have children.
She-Wolves documents the difficulty early queens of England had asserting power.
Definitely recommended if you enjoy historical novels, or are interested in First Wave feminism.
A fascinating autobiography by one of the founders of modern feminism, Benoite Groult.
Two reissued books feature some of the best essays of rock critic and social observer Ellen Willis.
Amy Brenneman stars as Playwrights Horizons calls on the deities and demons of feminism, from Freud and Nancy Friday to Phyllis Schlafly.
How feminist, deconstructionist literary criticism killed the strong male protagonist.
Friends from a liftime ago stick together and help each other during times of turmoil and grief.
Affirmative action was initiated to level the field for women and minorities. Has it honestly lived up to its purpose?
The gap between individualists and collectivists is not only intellectual, but geographic as well. | <urn:uuid:3655527e-b656-4f79-871e-b6ea372082b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogcritics.org/tag/feminism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943196 | 197 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Measles in Mexico, 1941-2001: Interruption of Endemic Transmission and Lessons Learned. Santos JI, Nakamura MA, Godoy MV, Lucas CA, Kuri P, and Conyer RT. Journal of Infectious Diseases 2004;189:243-250 (Suppl 1)
Could measles be eliminated in Mexico?
This study analyzed the historical distribution of measles in Mexico and evaluated the impact of measles control strategies used in that country.
Between 1989 and 1991, Mexico, like the rest of the American continent, experienced a measles pandemic. After the pandemic, the Mexican Ministry of Health implemented programs to eliminate endemic measles—the common low-level occurrence of the disease in the country.
These programs were based on the Pan American Health Organization’s strategies for measles elimination: Increasing vaccination coverage in children through 5 strategies (“catch-up”, “mop-up”, “keep-up”, “follow-up” and “push-up”); performing aggressive control measures in response to outbreaks; and developing a high-quality and specific surveillance system for cases and outbreaks.
Researchers calculated the coverage levels achieved with vaccination campaigns and evaluated the effectiveness of the measles surveillance system.
Since 1991, measles elimination efforts in Mexico have resulted in increasing coverage to more than 95% among children 1 through 6 years of age with 2 doses of either measles or measles-mumps-rubella vaccine since 1996 and in coverage of 97.6% among children 6 through 10 years of age since 1999.
Surveillance data suggest that the transmission of local measles virus was interrupted in 1997. During 1997 1999, there were no confirmed cases of measles.
After almost 4 years without measles cases, in April 2000, measles virus was reintroduced into Mexico by a Canadian visitor. Thirty laboratory-confirmed cases were reported during that outbreak.
Researchers concluded that the specific strategies adopted for measles elimination have enabled Mexico to eliminate the endemic transmission of measles.
Measles is no longer prevalent in Mexico. A few cases have been imported from other countries, but these have been controlled successfully thanks to high rates of immunization coverage and the surveillance system to detect cases.
The elimination of measles from Mexico demonstrates that high immunization coverage, aggressive case finding, with targeted immunization can eliminate local measles from a country.
This article outlines the approach led by the Pan American Health Organization that resulted in the virtual elimination of endemic measles in the Western Hemisphere. May, 2004, marked 18 months without local transmission. That is, over the past year and a half all cases of measles in the Western Hemisphere have been traced to importations from China, Japan, Europe or Africa. The most recent limited outbreaks of measles in Mexico appear to have been imported from Asia, affecting largely unimmunized infants and young adults. | <urn:uuid:71b095ed-9df3-4666-a290-cf5aac33a9a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/measles-elimination-mexico | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947795 | 579 | 3.34375 | 3 |
All across Oklahoma ranchers are looking at short winter pastures, scarce and expensive hay and high supplement costs. The temptation is to hope that the cows can make the winter and then everything will be better next year. Unfortunately for some producers who fail to meet the nutritional demands, there will not be a next year.
In times of scarce forage, toxicity problems are intensified. Lots of corn stalks and other crop residues have been baled this year. One of the big problems in baled crop residues is accumulated nitrates. It can also be a problem in the big stemmed tall cultivated grasses. We don’t normally associate nitrate toxicity problems with Bermuda or prairie hay, but it can occur in drought years, especially if the hay was baled late and has a significant amount of pig weed or curly dock. These plants are nitrate accumulators and in dry times their growth can outrun the growth of the grass. Nitrates can cause death of the cattle consuming the hay, but they cause abortion in cows at an even lower level.
If the nitrate levels are high it can’t be used for livestock unless it is ground thoroughly and diluted with other feeds. If the nitrate levels are suspect the hay may be used by feeding it to non-pregnant yearlings. Bova Pro boluses can help cattle compensate for moderate nitrate levels. If there is any doubt, especially with crop residues, sorghums, sudan, johnsongrass, or weedy hay, have the hay tested for nitrates. We have already found a number of high nitrate forages in this area this season. Obviously the few dollars you spend on a test can save a disaster.
As ponds and creeks get lower, the water not only gets foul but also minerals and toxins become more concentrated. Sulfur amounts that may not be a problem in a pond at normal level can easily exceed toxic levels in low ponds and result in poor performance or death. Bluegreen algae is a problem that causes sudden death and is usually found in pond water in the summer.
This year, however, the Oklahoma State University Diagnostic Lab is still finding bluegreen algae in water samples submitted. Old or thin cows may expire in the mud trying to get to drinkable water. This will likely be more and more of a problem as the winter progresses. Perhaps the biggest and most widespread water problem producers face is decreased consumption. As ruminants, cattle not only require water for metabolic functions but also for digestive functions. Many ponds still have water, and the cows are drinking it, but it is so foul tasting and smelling that they only drink minimal amounts. The rumen can’t work properly if it isn’t full of water. If you are not providing clean water in sufficient quantities for cows to consume adequate amounts, you may be wasting the high priced supplemental feed you are paying for.
The trend toward feeding round bales has saved a lot of labor but it can also bring on other problems. Always retrieve and destroy twine and netting. Every winter many cows die from ingesting these plastic items which then cause intestinal blockage. Be sure to spread the hay far enough or use sufficient hay feeders to insure that the weak, old, or timid cows get their share.
OSU veterinary practitioners are predicting that malnutrition will claim the lives of many cows this winter, and it may eliminate the production of many more. Available nutrients are utilized in a predictable priority. The first priority is body maintenance such as circulatory and respiratory functions and maintaining body temperature. The second priority is lactation. Only when these priorities are met and more nutrients are available can the cow meet her reproductive requirement and become pregnant. Simply put, cows in poor body condition simply can’t breed back efficiently. As the winter progresses adverse weather increases the maintenance requirement and the problem worsens. You may marginally make it through the winter with thin cows that just can’t breed back. That winter feed bill looks awfully expensive if there is no paycheck next year to cover it.
Now is the time to take a realistic look at your winter program. Dr. Dave Sparks, OSU veterinarian, reminds producers that if you haven’t already pregnancy checked your cows you should do it now. Before we get farther into the feeding period would be a great time to eliminate the expenses involved in wintering open cows, old cows, poor mothers, poor producers and cows with too much “attitude.” The salvage value of these cows may help you purchase enough feed to arrive in the spring with your best cows in good shape and ready to breed back while doing a better job of milking for the calves they have by their side. If you decide to save replacement heifers when it rains again you will be saving these replacements from your most profitable cows.
All of these topics and more will be discussed in further detail at the annual KOMA/Oklahoma Cattle Conference and Trade Show which will be held on Jan. 16 at the fairgrounds in Dewey. To register for the conference or for more information go to the local office website at http://oces.okstate.edu/washington.
Yard and Garden Tips
Not all firewood is created equal. Some species of trees are able to produce much more heat per cord of wood. A cord is the amount of wood in a well-stacked woodpile measuring 4 feet wide by 8 feet long by 4 feet high. Following are heat values (in million BTUs) per cord for various species of tree. In those observations, note that the higher the value, the better the wood for heat.
Foresters have also made some other observations about certain trees.
Ash, Green 22.8
Elm, American 19.8 — Difficult to split
Elm, Siberian 20.9 — Difficult to split
Locust, Black 28.3 — Difficult to split
Maple, Sugar 24.0
Maple, Silver 18.9
Oak, Red 24.0
Oak, Bur 24.9
Oak, Post 25.6
Osage Orange (Hedge) 32.6 — Sparks, do not use in open fireplace.
Sycamore 19.5 — Difficult to split
Walnut, Black 21.8
For additional information, refer to the firewood publication provided by OSU Extension at http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-2507/NREM-944....
Contact Randy Pirtle at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:721ed908-39fb-407f-9e14-22df328d6f3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://examiner-enterprise.com/sections/living/features/state-drought-causes-winter-problems-stockmen.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930836 | 1,365 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Gift of the Harmon Foundation/Smithsonian American Art Museum
Robert McNeill, Make A Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York), 1938, gelatin silver print
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Hughie Lee-Smith, Confrontation, circa 1970, oil
National Academy of Design/Smithsonian American Art Museum
Richard Hunt, Study for Richmond Cycle, 1977, soldered, bolted, and burnished copper with wood edging
General Services Administration/Smithsonian American Art Museum
Lois Mailou Jones, Initiation, Liberia, 1983, acrylic
Bequest of the artist/Smithsonian American Art Museum
The African-American experience is reflected, right now, on the walls of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Exuberant dancing in Chicago. Laundry on a line in the nation's capital. A girl smiling out from her father's warm jacket — all captured in photographs, paintings and sculptures from the 1920s through the 1990s.
The show is called "African-American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond." And there is a question: Does it segregate — or at the very least compartmentalize — African-American artists? Yes, says exhibition consultant Renee Ater, an art historian at the University of Maryland. But, she says, it also shows African-Americans involved in visual conversations that have absorbed artists of all races.
"They're concerted with color, they're concerned with line, they're concerned with form, and that's one of the things that you see in the show," Ater says. "And the other thing about this exhibition is that you see African-American faces looking out at you."
But those faces are still a rare sight on the walls of a 21st-century museum. A story about one of the artists in the show — Lois Mailou Jones — underscores the point. Jones studied painting in Paris and Boston, taught at Howard University, had a firm reputation. But curator Virginia Mecklenburg says that back in the 1930s, when Jones wanted to submit her work to a show, she would send it anonymously, through an art shipper.
"She was fairly convinced, and rightly so, that if whatever museum was receiving the painting knew that it was painted by a black woman, that it would probably have very little chance of getting on the walls," Mecklenburg says.
Now, the walls of the American Art Museum are full of 100 works by 43 African-Americans, the result of three decades of collecting by the Smithsonian. The museum claims the largest collection of African-American art in the world — a critical mass that prompts this exhibit.
There are actually more photographs than paintings in the show — powerful black and white images shot in places like Baltimore, Houston, Norfolk and 170th Street in the Bronx. That last photo, taken by Robert McNeill in 1938, is called "Make a Wish," the title of a movie poster hanging in the corner of the photo.
The image, subtitled "Bronx Slave Market," shows a man in a cap and beat-up leather jacket, and two women, wrapped in worn, fur-trimmed coats against the sunny cold. All three are looking for daywork — cleaning, or hauling. It's a photograph about patience, endurance and hope.
"They never knew if they were going to get work," says curator Mecklenburg. "They just sat there and waited." And that hopeful lineup remains familiar. "You see it in Home Depot parking lots, as men who are waiting for day labor, for construction work, for gardening, lawn work."
Farm labor — the kind that reaps sweat and aches along with the crops — is painter Benny Andrews' subject in "The Long Rows." Made in 1966, it's Andrew's memory of his share-cropper parents, hoeing the red Georgia earth on a hot summer day. It's hard to tell who the painting really depicts — all that's visible is a broad back and backside over bare legs, and a hoe held to the earth in a pose that elicits sympathetic aches in the viewer.
"We don't actually know if it's a man or a woman, hoeing a row of cotton," says Betsy Broun, director of the American Art Museum. "But this figure looks like an outdoor monument or sculpture, so massive. And suddenly we realize that the perspective we're getting is that of a small child trailing behind."
On a nearby wall hangs an image of two little boys who also could have been working in that field: Malvin Gray Johnson's 1934 painting "Brothers." The boys are barefoot in sun hats and overalls, and their hands look big for their ages — they seem to be around 8 or 10 years old.
Virginia Mecklenburg says she loves the way one brother leans against the other, "as his older brother is the protector ... someone who will care for the younger sibling." And in its time, the painting was quite unusual.
"Johnson actually did this while he was working for something called the Public Works of Art project, which was a government sponsored program that allowed artists to paint whatever it was that they chose to paint," she says. "Scenes of little black boys sitting in a yard would not have had any market, certainly not in New York in the 1930s, but because of this federal program, Johnson could paint things he thought were important for us to see."
Another featured artist, Hughie Lee Smith, shows us a more contemporary image of two young people — girls with the long skinny legs of adolescence. His 1970 painting is full of tension. Museum director Betsy Broun says the work's title, "Confrontation," is both clear and mysterious.
"They're both standing somewhat separated, somewhat apart, and they're in a landscape that's a little hard to understand," Broun says. "It appears to have a ruined wall behind them, a brick wall. Beyond that you have a glimpse of the water of the ocean. It has a feeling of desolation."
Broun adds that she thinks Hughie Lee Smith may be the great poet of alienation. "He is able to convey the thwarted lives of growing up in a society where the full opportunity is not open to you," she says. "And I think this was really important after World War II and even before the civil rights movement and after, to convey that, that sense of what it means to be an African-American adolescent, ready to move ahead with your life but feeling you're lost in a ruined landscape in some way."
The exhibition remains at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through early September, then travels to seven other museums in the U.S. It offers a wide, colorful range of visions — tense, hopeful, optimistic and abstract. Plus a stunning catalog. | <urn:uuid:94325366-4f6d-4bf4-9c27-f453efe9cea6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151533233/colorful-visions-at-african-american-art-exhibit | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97036 | 1,420 | 2.484375 | 2 |
Nobody ever really thinks that they need to do it, until they do. “Oh, my computer is fine and I’ve never had a problem”, (people usually say this minutes before their hard drive seizes up forever.)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the lament, “I wish I had backed that up.” Well guess what? You being the supremely intelligent person that you are, have come here for a reason. You don’t want to be one of those statistics and I won’t let you become one.
We’re going to compare the different types of hardware that can be used for backing up and the pros and cons of using each. Are you ready to be prepared?
There are a zillion different kinds of hardware that can be used for backing up data out there (don’t run away yet.) Many of these disparate solutions are used in the business world and cost many thousands of dollars. That’s great, but it’s not what we’re going to talk about here. We’re more interested in the simpler and cheaper solutions that a person can use in a small or home office environment. For this there are basically two devices, the Hard Drive and the Thumbdrive.
- The Hard Drive
There are are a few different ways to implement a Hard Drive into your backup strategy. For instance if you have an extra internal physical hard drive you can copy files to it manually or automatically.
Pro: The advantage of this is speed. Any drive that is installed in your system box itself is going to be much faster than externally connected drives. Faster, means quicker and easier as the drive is probably just a letter (i.e. E:) in your folder structure. This can make it easier to configure software for it as well.
Con: The thing that makes it fast, being internally installed, also makes it vulnerable. If your computer would go up in a ball of flame, it would probably take your backup drive with it. So it’s fast, but as a slab of charcoal probably doesn’t help you much. Chances are it wouldn’t happen but we’re being proactive here remember?
Pro: The advantage to the external hard drive for backups is that it’s external to the computer for safety’s sake. Heck you could even make it external to the physical presence of the computer and store it offsite until you need to use it. Such as in a safe-deposit box, your Mother’s house, or in a coffee can buried in your yard. If you have to backup many computers in other locations the mobility of this solution works to your advantage as well. I often have a backup drive with me for just such an occasion. You can also take advantage of a multi-drive system, such as the Drobo, for redundancy and to reduce the chance of lost data. We’ll speak more about this later in the article.
Con: The drawback to using the External Hard Drive in a backup scenario is its speed, capacity and fragility. These external drives are slower than the ones directly connected to your motherboard inside the computer. Although with the advent of eSATA and USB 3.0 drives the speed is very close to internal speeds.
Capacity in a small size is a challenge as well. Generally the smaller external drives have less capacity than a large internal drive, but self-powered USB 1TB drives are not very expensive and quite common.
Lets face it, when you carry a drive around with you they can get banged around more than they were designed for. Be careful if you use one. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.
A thumbdrive (also known as a flashdrive, usb stick, or thumbstick) is a small device usually about the length and width of a stick of gum that contains flash (rewritable) memory within for storing data and a usb (usually) connector on the outside to connect to computers or other electronic devices.
Pro: The thumbdrive is small in size which makes it extremely portable, just stick one in your pocket, bag, or even on a keychain (I only recommend the keychain if you encrypt your data as well). Most thumbdrives will work just by plugging them into any computer made within the last 5 – 7 years or so. The average sized one can hold a bunch of datafiles, music, pictures or even a movie or two. If you have no other backup solution or portability is very important to you, the Thumbdrive will work well.
Con: The thumbdrive’s best attribute is also its limitation. Its size limits its speed and storage capacity. Don’t get me wrong, these things are light years ahead of where they were in capacity and price just a few years ago. When compared to an actual hard drive however they don’t quite offer the speed, capacity or cost per megabyte that a hard drive can.
They are also only designed for a limited amount of reads and writes. It’s a very large number, but a limitation none-the-less.
My suggestion would be to use them as temporary backup storage and be sure to either back them up or move the data to a more stable platform. Be judicious about what and how much you put on them. Take care of your data and it’ll take care of you.
What Actually is RAID?
Other than the bug spray, the acronym RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”. It’s a technology where data gets replicated on many hard disks simultaneously. As a result if one of the disks stops working, it can be replaced and the RAID system will rebuild the data from the pieces on the other disks.
The system does have a few drawbacks though. One of them is price. There are a few software based systems, but most of the really good ones are hardware based and pricey. Also in most of these systems all of the disks have to be exactly the same size which limits future expandability…except for one really good option for the home and small business user, the Drobo.
Drobo is a hard drive enclosure that contains bays for 4, 5, 8, or 12 hard drives, depending on which one you purchase. The more drives, the more redundancy. That means that for a larger number of drives, several drives could fail without compromising your data. I think the 4 and 5 drive models are adequate for most users. Many professional photographers, for example, use the system for this very purpose. When your livelihood depends on your data, you want to protect it.
If a drive fails the light turns red, pop the drive out and pop a new one in. When the light turns green everything is rebuilt and things can move along.
Another plus is the ability to use different size drives, so you can use spare hard drives that might be lying around unused. So older drives don’t end up in landfills or as is often the case, cluttering up your basement.
I really like the Drobo system and wholeheartedly recommend it if you can afford it, or if you can’t afford to not have it.
…but what do you think “I” should do?
It really isn’t all that complicated.
- Like portability and have a small amount of data – USB Thumbdrive
- Like portability but have a lot of data – USB Hard Drive
- Need speed over portability – Internal Hard Drive
- Need the ultimate in redundancy - Drobo
- Need redundancy but can’t afford a Drobo – Get several USB Hard Drives and switch between them
If you want to protect yourself with backup the tools are there, and they cover many different needs and price points. The most important thing is that you’re Doing Something. Don’t become a statistic. Don’t lose your precious memories. Backup.
The next article in this series will go over the different types of software that can be used for backup, and how best to utilize them. It’s the complement to the new hardware that you’re going to run out and get now that I’ve convinced you…What! You’re still here? Go!
P.S. If you would like to read the previous article in the series click here.
Disclosure: Some of the above links are affiliate links for products that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do I am extremely grateful and please contact me if you have any questions about any of the products or services. | <urn:uuid:ae547377-4fff-4e8c-8b72-42368ada1b4c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sybersquad.com/backup-hardware-what-should-i-use/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956512 | 1,818 | 1.765625 | 2 |
A driver loses control and the car skids off the road and into a pole. The passenger had been bending forward to grab something they dropped on the car floor. The air bags deploy and the driver is fine, but the passenger is injured because they were so far forward.
There may now be a way to prevent such an injury. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute of Silicate Research have developed a sensor that can be stretched to twice its size. The sensors could be integrated into a car seat to determine the position of the occupant such as when the person is leaning over or sitting back in the seat. This would allow the force of the airbag to be lessened if the occupant is leaning forward in the event of an accident.
The researchers say the flexibility of the new dielectric elastomeric sensors makes them suitable for a wide variety of applications. According to the researchers, the sensors are supple enough to go unnoticed when sewn into clothing, which could assist in analyzing movements to help athletes optimize their training.
The sensors work in a similar way to conventional strain gauges by measuring the change in electrical capacitance as the sensor is stretched. However, these sensors are made of a highly stretchable elastomeric polymer film that is coated on both sides with flexible electrodes. By controlling the degree of chemical bonding within the elastomer film, the researchers are able to tailor the sensors for different applications.
Useful industrial applications include embedding sensors in the floor of a factory, which would warn someone who is coming too close to hazardous machinery. The researchers will be demonstrating the new sensor at the Sensor+Test trade fair being held in Nuremburg, Germany from June 7 to 9, 2011. | <urn:uuid:a7b0b825-f921-45c5-918f-60e0f2a9b64d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mobilemag.com/2011/05/17/new-pressure-sensor-can-stretch-to-twice-its-size/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963811 | 351 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Lufthansa Takes Delivery of its 1st Airbus A320 Equipped With Sharklets
Lufthansa has taken delivery of its first A320 equipped with Sharklets at the Airbus site in Hamburg, Germany. Lufthansa is becoming the first carrier in Europe to take benefit of the new fuel-saving wing-tip devices. The airline will receive 21 more A320 Family aircraft equipped with Sharklets until 2015.
Sharklets are made from light-weight composites and are 2.4 meters tall. They are an option on new-build A320 Family aircraft and standard on all members of the new A320neo family. They offer operators up to four percent fuelburn reduction on longer range sectors and provide the flexibility of either adding an additional 100 nautical miles range or increased payload capability of up to 450 kilograms.
Source : Airbus, an EADS N.V. company (Paris: EAD.PA)
Aug 19 - 22, 2013 - Boston, United States | <urn:uuid:46c2ff62-97ed-43fd-a4db-5c381f4fa478> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asdnews.com/news-47942/Lufthansa_Takes_Delivery_of_its_1st_Airbus_A320_Equipped_With_Sharklets.htm | 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 | 0.934161 | 206 | 1.523438 | 2 |
“Many of the successful people in the world say that they owe their success not only to their own skills but to all the people that help them achieve their goals, others say that it is not enough being smart, you have to be surrounded by smart people. Given this, you can know how important is to have the right people near you, keeping a good network of friends, partners and clients can help achieve your goals faster and more efficiently. Nowadays there are lots of tools to help you manage your networks, you could take advantage of several options that they offer to their users. We are going to focus on these advantages and in the importance of having a solid professional network.”
Keywords: professional networks, potential customers, colleagues, friends, profile, business, visibility.
Recently, the number of sites dedicated to social networking has been growing. Sites like Hi5 (http://www.hi5.com/) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) have become really popular between Internet users of all ages, popularity that grows thanks to the fact that people can keep in touch with friends, meet new people, share pictures, hobbies and stories among other things.
Along with social networking sites, the popularity of sites for professional networking has been growing as well; one example is LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com), a professional networking site with thousands of users from all over the world.
This type of sites have all the same advantages as social networking sites, but adding their own features and focusing mainly in professional people who wants to do business and keep in touch with colleagues and potential customers.
In this article, we would be focusing on the main advantages of being part of a professional network and how this type of network can help your career.
2 Main Advantages
A professional network offers a lot of advantages to all the people who are part of it and now you can find several sites in the Internet that work as tools, allowing professionals to create their networks easily.
Some of the main advantages and features these sites offer are explained as follow.
2.1 Keep in touch
The biggest advantage of a professional network site is that users can easily keep in touch with friends, colleagues or partners.
Keep in touch with all the people you have known along your career is sometimes impossible, addresses and phone numbers change. Lost contact is sometimes inevitable, so having a site that gives you the ability to connect with those you lost contact over time is just a great advantage.
On the other hand, you can keep your contact list in one place, knowing that it always will be up-to-date, since each contact information is updated by the actual contact letting you have reliable information almost all the time.
“Relationships are meaningful, in every aspect of life including career management. Networking is the key to discovery of our career selves and you never know, you might just make some friends and continue to find your path.” Katie Metcalfe (LinkedIn user)
2.2 Become visible
Publishing your profile, having it up-to-date with relevant information about your education, experience and skills will make you visible to your network. Colleagues, classmates and partners will be able to reconnect with you and people that don’t know you will be able to get to know you better and even get interested in what you have to offer.
Having a well-built profile will allow you to get job offers and business opportunities allowing you to grow your network and your business.
Your profile will help you to promote yourself, to market your experience and brand your business.
2.3 Contact potential customers
If you own a business with services to offer, you can use your network to promote your services and find potential customers.
In a professional network site you can contact potential customers directly or by getting recommended by your actual customers or partners, getting a lot of benefits from something as easy as that.
“I have always been taught when selling to try to find common ground with potential customer. Haveing a business network in common can be a big help.” Louis D'Esposito (LinkedIn user)
2.4 Share ideas
Most of these sites offer features that allow their users to share ideas or things that other people might find interesting.
Some have forums, blogs or question and answers modules promoting the transfer of knowledge. These features allow their users to contact people who are experts in certain areas or even become experts themselves by sharing their answers and knowledge with others, winning recognition for their expertise.
“The knowledge that is freely shared both on the site and between connections off site is priceless. We can reach out to an almost unlimited number of great minds and share ideas, solve problems and do business.” Sheilah Etheridge (LinkedIn user)
When professionals publish their articles or answer questions related to their fields, they are demonstrating that they have experience and expertise in a certain area, allowing others to get to know them and even maybe becoming a “go to guy” in that specific area creating a lot of opportunities for themselves and why not?, helping others with their knowledge.
2.5 Connect with international professionals
“To me, the biggest advantage is making international contacts that I otherwise wouldn't make. I appreciate the diverse insights and perspectives, and who knows how these contacts might pay off in the future? In business and in networking, there's rarely such a thing as incidental contact. Relationships are meaningful.” Tom Field (LinkedIn user)
Since these sites are based on the Internet, they are accessible to everybody in the world, creating a network of a big number of users that you have access to. This gives the advantage that one user can easily connect to another no matter if the other user lives in a country in the other side of the world. Also, it allows getting different experiences from different professionals around the globe.
Some of the professional networking sites offer the possibility of managing recommendations; users can give recommendations to their connections or get recommended.
This type of features gives the user the chance to help others by giving their recommendations, which can be accounted on looking for a new job, a new business partner or a potential customer since recommendations add more completion and credibility to your profile.
2.7 Hiring people
Since users of professional networking sites manage a public profile where they describe their education, experience and skills, recruiters can use these sites to look for potential candidates for the job positions they are offering.
The good thing is that these recruiters can use the site to contact these potential candidates directly or through their connections. In addition to this, since these sites are used by a lot of people around the world, recruiters have access to a bigger number of potential candidates.
Besides, if the users have a completed profile, just by reading their profiles, recruiters can get to know their potential candidates before even contact them, sometimes saving time in phone calls and emails.
2.8 Finding a job
Some professional networking sites offer the opportunity for companies to promote their business and to public their job openings allowing professionals to apply to these jobs directly in the site.
Having a completed profile and several recommendations will give the professional more chances to be selected for a job. You could be contacted directly by the recruiter; you might have been recommended by someone or be discovered through your participation in forums or blogs. It is all a matter of how much effort you put when you publish your profile or how much advantage you take of the features the site offers.
2.9 Quality of business
This type of sites let you get leads on possible customers that are actually looking for a product or service that you could provide. Most of the time, these customers are referred by someone you know well, someone who is a mutual acquaintance of you and the prospect customer, which is something good for your business because it lets you save time in looking for new clients, spending less money in advertising and getting more profit since you are not investing resources in a prospect that is less probable would do business with you.
Professional networking sites are great tools to keep in touch with colleagues, clients and partners, since they offer a lot of advantages that make things easier inside a network. However the use you do of these features is completely up to you. You can be an active user that takes advantage of all features and make them work for you by branding yourself, promoting your business and getting recognized for your expertise or you can be a user with an active account that is never updated and therefore not visible inside the network.
Professional networking sites can create a lot of opportunities for you if you know how to take advantage of them. These opportunities can be used in the present or in the future, the bigger your network the bigger the number of opportunities you will have.
"Knowing the right people" is one of the keys to success in today's world, especially because you need to work with partners to grow your business more quickly, so being part of a well developed and broad professional network is more important than ever. Keeping a large number of "business friends" is critical for your career, therefore the importance of professional networking tools.
If you are an entrepreneur promoting your services or someone looking for a new job, these tools can really help you achieve your goals, but it is always up to you. | <urn:uuid:102ba2eb-6178-4b00-aa8f-c6930f5e87e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://maricel-tech.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967898 | 1,907 | 1.796875 | 2 |
|1423 Cemetery Rd|
Postal Code: 74434
|Cemetery notes and/or description:|
Fort Gibson National Cemetery is located in Muskogee County, 1 1/2 miles northeast of Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. The cemetery has significant historical value as a Civil War cemetery and also a rich Indian tradition. It covers 48 acres and includes 17,000 interments. The office, which is open Monday through Friday, excluding Federal holidays, offers a historical self-guided tour. Weekend visitors may use the graveside locator in front of the Administration Building to find directions to a grave. | <urn:uuid:76fde1d4-33b5-4256-a74c-7d69b861e70d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&GSvcid=161480&CRid=98460&pt=Fort%20Gibson%20National%20Cemetery | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941181 | 124 | 1.789063 | 2 |
I’m in the kitchen attempting to open a jar of curry paste. The lid is stuck tight and try as I might it just won’t come off. Tapping the lid with a knife could work as could giving the jar to a stronger member of the family to open (that’s all of them). As no one else is around I pretend I am an oak tree with big roots harnessing the earth’s energy. Sounds a bit daft but it worked. Homeopathy is another thing that sounds a bit daft, but it seems to get results in eradicating pests and diseases in the garden.
Homeopathy and plants
Homeopathy works by adding tiny amounts of plant extracts into a solution to the body, (or plant in this case) to help eliminate problems that chemicals are generally used for. For example Calendula is used for damage during repotting , and Calcium phosphoricum can be used for root rot. For an idea just how watered down these solutions are, there are generally only 20 drops of the homeopathic liquid in a litre of water. It doesn’t end there. This litre is then added to 19 litres of tap water and stirred. Some scientists say that the amounts used are so minimal that it’s only the memory of the solution present in the water.
One of the leading lights in this field is experienced Dutch homeopath Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj. Kaviraj stumbled by accident upon the homeopathic treatment of plants (called Agrohomeopathy) when he was asked to treat a rust problem in apple trees. The apples had dark red rings on the skin and needed more watering than normal. The symptoms of redness with thirst fitted the remedy Belladonna, which he duly administered. To everyone’s surprise, the rust problem disappeared. What‘s more, the apples the following year tasted noticeably better. For Kaviraj, this was a turning point. In the next twelve years, he undertook intensive research in this area, employing homeopathy for all kinds of plant diseases. He has published a book on the subject that focuses on the homeopathic treatment of plants in cases of malnourishment, parasitic and fungal attack, bacterial and viral disease, damage, and weed infestation.
Here are a couple of examples how homeopathic remedies could help.
For powdery mildew use Silicea or Sulphur as a remedy. Both are good remedies to cure fungal diseases. However, they should not be used simultaneously.
Ants do not like the smell of Marigolds. Mentha piperita and Calendula are both remedies that can be used to deter ants. Also Tagetus.
Blossom End Rot
Tomatoes love Basil, in the kitchen as well as in the garden. Ocymum basilicum is the remedy to use. Silicea is also a remedy to use, but that is more useful to soak the seeds before planting them.
Suppress the weeds
As well as preventing and curing plant problems homeopathy also helps to keep weeds down. VDK has this to say about the issue. “In homoeopathy we have nothing that kills. However, we do have a remedy that will suppress weeds for a considerable time. It also inhibits the seeds from germinating. It is called Juglans Nigra. In order to use this, it must be applied thinly to existing weeds, which will then stop growing any further. Three days later, plant the crop. It will be safe to plant other plants 72 hours after application. The weeds will remain suppressed for up to 7 months.” He tells us.
There are other natural ways of treating plants. You might be familiar with Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy for a sick house plant, then there’s Maye Bruce’s ‘the herbs are enough’ policy of healing. She developed her own ‘Quick Return’ (QR) method based on homoeopathic dilutions of herbs and honey. Maye was originally associated with the method of Biodynamic agriculture but branched out on her own to get away from using animal parts such as the horns.
Find out more
You can check out Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj’s book on the net and also track down remedies that are easy to buy online too (or from the local health store) You never know you might find some very effective treatments for long standing problems in the garden that conventional chemicals don’t work on. | <urn:uuid:36187e51-534a-4f97-b53e-bbd11c9bb006> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greenme.ie/greenblog/2012/02/homeopathic-gardening/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954451 | 945 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Medical mysteries, that is.
Though its incidence is rare, one local doctor said the diagnosis is very real – and can be quite scary.
It’s called Munchausen syndrome, though those in the medical field call it a factitious disorder.
Call it what you will, the complex psychological disorder is so complicated, even experienced medical personnel may have trouble with its diagnosis, which is why there are no hard-and-fast statistics concerning the number of people who have been diagnosed with the ailment.
Dr. David Josephs, clinical director of Baptist Hospital’s Lakeview Center, said typically the disease is far more insidious than it seems.
For more on this story, check out the Sept. 23 edition of the Navarre Press, or subscribe online. | <urn:uuid:6d5c4412-7201-4e2c-8f85-7f187573f065> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://navarrepress.com/news/21/2598-the-munchausen-mystery?reset-settings | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954305 | 161 | 2.125 | 2 |
Leeks are not very choosy when it comes to the soil where it is grown into. But if you would like to maximize your yield during harvest, its best to grow this herb under the best conditions. One thing you can do is to prepare the ground for your leeks.
If the soil in your backyard is deep loam, you would be happy to know that’s what leeks prefer. But any other soil will do so long as it drains well and has an acidity between 6.5 and 7.5 pH.
Once you have chosen the perfect sunny site to grow your leeks, it is time to prepare the soil where they will grow.
A few months before you are scheduled to plant, you may enrich the soil by adding garden compost and well-rotted manure to it. Dig in a bucketful of this soil for every eight square yards of ground.
Rake the soil in at a depth of a spade. The organic compost you will mix into the soil will not only enrich it, but would also help it to retain moisture. Make sure to remove all visible stones and seeds
It is best to plant leeks in an area where lettuce, cabbage or peas were previously planted. Avoid choosing a site where leeks have also been cultivated.
You can add fish and bone manure to the soil about two weeks before planting your leeks. Add it at a rate of 3 ounces or about 90 grams for every square yard.
If your soil lacks the right acidity, you can add lime to the soil accordingly.
Tags: Growing Leeks | <urn:uuid:7f094614-6232-46cd-9fa1-20064bdacbbf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.leekrecipes.co.uk/preparing-the-ground-for-leeks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962547 | 326 | 2.75 | 3 |
Washington, DC, October 12, 2011 – In the aftermath of a recent deal between the Obama administration and automakers to force higher fuel economy standards on “light duty vehicles,” the House Oversight and Government Reform chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is holding a Wednesday hearing to question the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to impose those costly new standards.
“The Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out a power grab of breathtaking proportions,” said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis , in written testimony submitted to the committee.
EPA is regulating fuel economy and determining national policy on climate change. EPA claims that in doing so it is merely implementing the Clean Air Act. But, Lewis notes in his testimony, the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, “almost two decades before global warming emerged as a public concern and five years before Congress enacted the nation’s first fuel economy statute.
“The Clean Air Act was neither designed nor intended to regulate greenhouse gases, and it provides no authority to regulate fuel economy,” said Lewis.
Lewis’s testimony develops the following points:
- If packaged into a bill, EPA’s fuel economy/greenhouse gas regulations would be dead on arrival. That’s after almost two decades of global warming advocacy. There is no plausibility Congress signed off on EPA’s greenhouse agenda in 1970.
- EPA cannot regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles without implicitly – and obviously – regulating fuel economy, because carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes almost 95% of motor vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, and the only technologies that can reduce vehicular CO2 emissions are fuel-saving technologies.
- Congress, however, delegated the responsibility to regulate fuel economy to another agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), under a separate statute, the Energy Policy Conservation Act (EPCA). EPA’s actions are inconsistent with the statutory scheme Congress created.
- To preempt auto industry opposition to its power grab, EPA pursued a strategy of regulatory extortion, confronting auto companies with the economically ruinous prospect of a market-balkanizing “regulatory patchwork” if they did not waive their right to sue EPA.
- EPA created the patchwork threat by reconsidering California’s request for a waiver allowing states to implement their own greenhouse gas/fuel economy programs. EPA did this even though EPCA expressly prohibits states from adopting laws or regulations “related to” fuel economy.
- The May 2009 “historic agreement” between the White House and the auto industry recognizing EPA’s new role as fuel economy regulator was conducted behind closed doors, under strict orders to “put nothing in writing, ever,” thereby flouting federal standards for transparency and accountability in rulemaking.
- The Obama administration’s latest agreement with automakers, establishing a fuel economy target of 54.5 mpg by 2025, was also a closed-door proceeding and similarly tainted.
Currently, no vehicles except plug-ins or battery electric cars meet that standard. The new CAFE standards will add over $3,000 to the cost of an average vehicle in 2025, according to government estimates. The actual cost could be even higher .
► View the testimony by Marlo Lewis, Jr | <urn:uuid:b1cfdfcb-54e9-43d8-9291-4d969bf201a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cei.org/print/127140 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9279 | 678 | 2.171875 | 2 |
Jeff Garzik noted that the hardware documentation for the Promise SX4 chipset is being opened up and therefor the sata_sx4 driver is a good candidate for improvements, "I would like to take this opportunity to point hackers looking for a project at this hardware. The Promise SX4 is pretty neat, and it needs more attention than I can give, to reach its full potential." He notes that it is an older chipset that's probably not sold anymore, that the ATA programming interface is similar to that in the sata_promise driver, and that it contains a fully programmable on board DIMM and on board RAID5 XOR. Jeff went on to explain:
"A key problem is that, under Linux, sata_sx4 cannot fully exploit the RAID-centric power of this hardware by driving the hardware in 'dumb ATA mode' as it does. A better driver would notice when a RAID1 or RAID5 array contains multiple components attached to the SX4, and send only a single copy of the data to the card (saving PCI bus bandwidth tremendously). Similarly, a better driver would take advantage of the RAID5 XOR offload capabilities, to offload the entire RAID5 read or write transaction to the card.
"All this is difficult within either the MD or DM RAID frameworks, because optimizing each RAID transaction requires intimate knowledge of the hardware. We have the knowledge... but I don't have good ideas -- aside from an SX4-specific RAID 0/1/5/6 driver -- on how to exploit this knowledge." | <urn:uuid:5372d56a-177a-4a4e-8273-6700a879b14f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kerneltrap.org/taxonomy/term/570 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945769 | 322 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Toddler’s Eggs Hatch Into Deadly Snakes
December 21, 2012 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
TOWNSVILLE, Australia, (UPI) – An Australian mother said her 3-year-old son found some eggs and hid them in his wardrobe — and they hatched into seven of the world’s most deadly snakes.
Donna Sim of Townsville, Queensland, said she opened the wardrobe belonging to her son, Kyle Cumming, Monday and discovered what she learned were eastern brown snakes in a takeout container she had given him when he found the eggs, Sky News reported Friday.
Experts say the eastern brown is one the most deadly species in the world.
Steve Wilson, Queensland Museum information officer and snake expert, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the snakes could have been deadly even at their young age.
“Any venomous snake, as soon as it hatches, has all the apparatus to deliver venom because the first thing they have to do is catch and kill prey — it’s a perfect replica of an adult snake,” Wilson said. “Brown snakes are highly venomous and a baby brown could potentially kill or at least seriously harm a human being — adult or child.”
The snakes were taken to the Billabong sanctuary, where wildlife rangers said they will be released into the wild. | <urn:uuid:0cb40d8f-241c-4af2-a7ed-c36afe0e3f8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://personalliberty.com/2012/12/21/toddlers-eggs-hatch-into-deadly-snakes/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=20ee2ea151 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972577 | 283 | 2.125 | 2 |
Area Catholics, and in fact all people of faith, could be in for a spiritual treat on Monday, thanks to the folks at the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta worship center in Winchester.
Starting at 6:30 a.m., the World Apostolate of Fatima Statue of the Lady of Fatima will be on display at the center and everyone, especially Catholics, are invited to come and meditate and pray the Rosary. The statue will be on display until 9 p.m.
This is a major event for local Catholics because the traveling statue rarely makes it to this part of the country. The last time was about three years ago, according to Mollie Kelly, a member of the Blessed Teresa parish.
“It travels all over the United States and Europe and now it’s coming here,” Kelly said. “It will be a time to pray for peace, hope, the end of abortion, and all the good things in this world.”
Political leanings aside, the statue of the Lady of Fatima is very important in the Catholic Church. It signifies an event that dates back nearly 100 years ago and has been blessed by the church as a modern-day miracle.
The story is that in the spring of 1917, three shepherd girls near Fatima, Portugal, were visited by an apparition that eventually confirmed the existence of the Virgin Mary.
More visits followed, along with encouragement that the world’s problems would be solved with stronger belief in God and praying the Rosary.
The highlight was on Oct. 13, 1917, with the Miracle of the Dancing Sun. It was viewed by a crowd estimated at 70,000 people, including some who said the sun moved and trembled and defied all cosmic laws.
Secularists have explained that what actually happened that day was everything from a dust cloud, to mass hallucination, to an eclipse.
But the Catholic Church placed much of its faith in what the little girls saw and heard. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 is even linked to a prophecy delivered by the Fatima apparition.
There are many statues of the Lady of Fatima in circulation, but the one coming here is from the World Apostolate of Fatima based in New Jersey.
The apostolate is also known as the “Blue Army,” which, according to its website, was started by the Rev. Harold Colgan. While he was seriously ill, the story goes, Colgan prayed to the Lady of Fatima. After his recovery, Colgan devoted his life to driving away the evil demonic red in the world, and replacing it with the strictly traditional principles of the Catholic Church, and its Blue Army.
Praying the Rosary daily to the Lady of Fatima is one of its most important tenets.
I know, it all sounds like a script from a Pat O’Brien movie, but it also lends itself to believing in a spiritual power that we can somehow embrace in our individual ways.
And for folks in Southwest County, that can be done on Monday. The Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Worship Center will be open for prayer all day. Various ministries will be praying that day, Kelly said, and everyone, no matter what denomination, is welcome.
The center is at Winchester Road and Briggs Road, just behind the Moose Lodge.
If you know of someone who would be interesting to feature in a column, call Jim Rothgeb at (951) 676-4315, ext. 2621, or email firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:6d7cf484-2a7e-4d19-89b3-216926037506> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/mar/01/rothgeb-lady-fatima/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968634 | 744 | 1.632813 | 2 |
The dilithium crystal chamber (or dilithium regulation chamber or matter-antimatter chamber) was a component in a starship's warp core that contained the dilithium crystals. The chamber included dilithium regulators and antiproton injection seals. Aboard Galaxy-class starships, this chamber was located on Deck 36. (TNG: "Elementary, Dear Data", "Contagion", "Galaxy's Child", "The Drumhead", "Cost of Living")
There are four types of dilithium chamber that have been shown to date. One was that of the NX-class starship, though exactly which component of the reactor was the chamber itself was never disclosed.
The second was used on board the original configuration of the Constitution-class. It was a squat cylinder with a blunt domed top in the center of main engineering. The dilithium crystals were housed in a framework that rose out of one side of the chamber.
The next was the columnar "swirl" chamber, as shown in the Constitution-class refit and the Intrepid-class. Backstage information, including interviews with Rick Sternbach, indicate that in this model of chamber, the entirety of the column is the reaction chamber, which is lined with a layer of dilithium to moderate the reaction. | <urn:uuid:e1b6ea6b-a474-4eaf-9427-c74392eb3fda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Dilithium_crystal_chamber?oldid=1469768 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966383 | 270 | 1.90625 | 2 |
What challenges do palm oil producers face?
Among the 92 grower members of the RSPO there have been public commitments to produce up to 15 million tonnes of RSPO-certified palm oil by 2020—more than enough to meet the demand for palm oil in Europe and to start also supplying against demand in China and India.
Unfortunately, the users of palm oil in the RSPO have not yet matched these commitments.
Since the first batch of RSPO-certified palm oil was delivered to the market in 2008, less than half of what was available has been bought.
WWF’s 2011 Scorecard shows that, although many retailers and manufacturers using palm oil have made public commitments to use only RSPO-certified palm oil, fewer have made public what volumes of palm oil they use or have started to actually use it.
This situation makes it very difficult for responsible growers, who have made commitments to produce RSPO-certified palm oil, to judge whether they have made the right decisions. It also hinders efforts to persuade other growers to start certifying.
In the longer run, it makes it difficult to persuade certified growers that the RSPO standards need to be improved. All this needs to happen and palm oil users need to play their part in making sure it does.
One of the reasons WWF is publishing a second Scorecard is to help growers ascertain what the likely demand for RSPO-certified palm oil is going to be in the coming years.
That is why we have not only recorded the commitments made but also asked the retailers and manufacturers to disclose what volume of palm oil those commitments represent. | <urn:uuid:42116351-5b03-499b-8ae1-d340d9280fa7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/palm_oil/solutions/responsible_purchasing/scorecard2011/producers.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978936 | 340 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Spondylolysis is a defect or fracture on one or both of the wing-shaped parts of a vertebra, usually in the lower lumbar region.
Spondylolysis is usually detected sometime during childhood. It may occur for one or more reasons.
Most people can manage spondylolysis by resting from strenuous activity, stretching and strengthening exercises, and taking pain relief medicine, such as ibuprofen. Surgery is rarely needed, although it may be considered for people who do not respond to other treatment.
Last Revised: August 5, 2011
Author: Healthwise Staff
Medical Review: William H. Blahd, Jr., MD, FACEP - Emergency Medicine & David Messenger, MD
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2012 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated. | <urn:uuid:09e05d88-89f4-4a36-a8bd-d933150493ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sanfordhealth.org/HealthInformation/Healthwise/Topic/tv6567 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912635 | 194 | 3.3125 | 3 |
The lighting thief
Just a coincidence, says McAllen
In late August 2008, McAllen Arts Council member and Voices of Art publisher David Freeman contacted Blue Star Director and sculptor Bill FitzGibbons to congratulate the artist on his “public art commission in McAllen.” FitzGibbons was perplexed. Unbeknownst to him, an artwork with nearly identical qualities to FitzGibbons’s local “Light Channels” had been installed in an Expressway 83 underpass in the South Texas boomtown.
FitzGibbons’s “Light Channels,” commissioned by the City of San Antonio in 2006, consists of programmed LED lights embedded under the I-37 underpasses at Commerce and Houston that fade from green to blue to red then bright white in 20-minutes cycles. Part of the concept for the project, according to the artist, was to create an inviting passageway from downtown to the near East Side, which is visibly and psychologically cut off from the heart of the city by the freeway. “Light Channels” was unveiled on May 1, 2006, in a three-hour celebration that included remarks by Mayor Hardberger, and a ceremonial “light switch.” The project was featured along with several other local works in a public-art catalog published that year by the city.
Strangely, nobody in McAllen seems to know when exactly McAllen’s lights were installed. Stranger still, the project has never been given a formal unveiling, the idea never credited to any person, and the work never titled.
Officials with the City’s Chamber of Commerce, which oversees its arts commission, and the McAllen City Attorney’s office, say they don’t know where the concept came from. But FitzGibbons says “Light Channels” was stolen directly from his studio in the summer of 2007, after Freeman brought McAllen Arts Council Director Juan Carlos Suarez to get pointers on successful public-arts programs from FitzGibbons. Freeman and FitzGibbons both recall that the discussion with Suarez led naturally to FitzGibbons’s work, including “Light Channels.” The artist says he gave Suarez a copy of the 2006 San Antonio Public Art catalog that features “Light Channels” in full-color photos to take back to McAllen.
FitzGibbons calls the incident an “egregious act against the integrity of the artwork.”
The installation of McAllen’s underpass lighting followed a recent push by McAllen to develop public-art projects to promote a cosmopolitan image, with the help of McAllen’s recently formed Arts Council. According to Suarez, his meeting and discussion with FitzGibbons concerned only “public art policy” and not FitzGibbons’s work in particular. Suarez’s San Antonio visit was followed by two more official tourists, who were reportedly canvassing the state for ideas.
Yet, members of the Arts Council claim to have had no involvement in the project and the most official information released about the installation came in an email from City Commissioner John Ingram to Arts Council member Nancy Moyer. In response to her request for information about the lights, on September 3, 2008, Ingram wrote, “The lights on 10th and Expressway 83 are a pilot project developed by our city staff. They were built by the city using LED (cool lighting) that is inexpensive to build and maintain ... This is a great idea developed by our city staff who are working diligently to make the McAllen [area] distinctive and a great place to live.”
In response to a further inquiry as to who, specifically, was responsible for the idea and the installation, Moyer was given the name of city engineer Pilar Rodriguez. (Rodriguez has not responded to calls for comment.) Another email reply to Moyer’s query came from city engineer Shawn Seale, who on September 6 wrote, “It was McAllen’s Traffic Operations. The same dept. that gives you light, traffic lights, etc. I am on the Traffic and Safety Commission and it was done a month or so ago.”
Attorney Ed Valdespino, who’s assisting the artist in his lawsuit, said that FitzGibbons informed the McAllen representatives he believed would later commission him which manufacturer made the lights and software. McAllen, he says, took that information and “cut Bill [FitzGibbons] out.”
McAllen’s official legal response is a combination of surprise — City Attorney Kevin Pagan says he had never heard of FitzGibbons’s “Light Channels” until he received “A semi-threatening letter from an attorney for an artist in San Antonio, claiming that somehow, putting colored lights underneath an expressway overpass somehow infringed on his rights” — and an aggressive offensive game.
Following the advice of McAllen’s City Commission, Pagan says the city decided to “get a declaration from a court to say we hadn’t violated anybody’s rights.” Pagan argues that the sequence of the lights in McAllen are different from FitzGibbons’s; McAllen’s lights simply fade from one color to the next and don’t involve any “chasing” as “Light Channels” does. Pagan also argues that when Suarez visited FitzGibbons, the ordinance for McAllen’s Arts Council had not yet been adopted and therefore the council was not officially connected with the city.
FitzGibbons’s lead attorney, Tim Maloney, says the case is fairly straightforward. There are strong similarities between the two projects, which can be easily observed, and the same equipment and software was used in both installations. Valdespino says that because McAllen filed a preemptive lawsuit against FitzGibbons, it’s the City of McAllen’s burden to prove there is no substantial similarity between the two pieces of art.
Most Arts Council members who spoke with the Current asked to remain anonymous, echoing a common theme among McAllen sources for this story: Retribution would be swift and certain for any finger-pointing. Three members say they believe McAllen stole the idea for its underpass installation from FitzGibbons, but they’re unsure, or unwilling to say, who is responsible for the theft.
“They usually always have pomp and ceremony for public art. If it wasn’t covert, they would have had so much pomp and ceremony out there,” said Freeman. “They didn’t announce it to anybody. Nobody knew about it. It was covert. It was put up in such an unknown kind of a manner that doesn’t reflect any of their standard operating procedures for putting up public art.”
“I think [FitzGibbons] should be compensated,” said one of the council’s founding members, who added that it was “impolite” for the City of McAllen to engage in a lawsuit against FitzGibbons.
“It’s bad ... this is an embarrassment for the whole art community,” concludes Freeman. “In my mind, there’s no doubt as to where [the idea] came from.” •
The parties are scheduled to be in court in early May. Watch for updates on QueBlog, at sacurrent.com. Elaine Wolff contributed additional reporting to this story. | <urn:uuid:16c65c6c-7440-425f-9b13-7b29f2a8e5c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=69955 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971808 | 1,589 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Project Home Page
- WFN has been providing DNA Information, Websites, and Administration to FTDNA Surname DNA Projects since 2004 (About Us).
FTDNA and WFN have a long-standing relationship (Learn more).
Surname DNA testing is the newest tool available to genealogists. These tests help genealogists verify their paternal ancestry (father's father) in a quick and easy way. It saves time, prevents mistakes, and provides invaluable data that can be obtained in no other way.
This Family Project is started to:
1. Help researchers on common or related families work together to find their common heritage (See the Patriarch Page)
2. Identify the DNA of the ancestor families and compile them and their lost branches into distinct genetic lineages through DNA matches
Click here to order a DNA test now
For more information on the relationship between DNA testing and traditional genealogy, visit World Families Network. | <urn:uuid:d3edb511-49f4-42e5-8d1a-d6d1395b3332> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldfamilies.net/surnames/paulson | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920367 | 192 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Highly integrated hardware and software platforms are particularly important for competitive industries such as energy, medical, and transportation, which feel tremendous pressure to deliver new and innovative ideas to market faster. They can use commercial platforms as another potential factor when deciding how to balance project tradeoffs for schedule, risk, and cost.
For the last 50 years, Dynapower has been producing high-voltage, high-current power converters for industrial automation, mining, and high-energy physics applications. The company focuses on efficiently addressing complicated power conversion challenges by using the most advanced digital control technologies available. The design team recently adopted FPGA technology to implement its control and processing algorithms and was able to achieve 40 times more processing performance per dollar than the traditional DSPs it had used in the past. Development time went from 72 weeks to just 24 weeks by using a standard off-the-shelf platform with proven hardware and an integrated software tool chain.
Helping premature infants
Half a million premature infants are born in the US each year, and almost half of them experience feeding problems when their brains struggle to coordinate sucking, swallowing, and breathing. KC BioMedix, a startup medical device company based in Shawnee, Kan., developed a product called the NTrainer System to help premature babies learn to feed orally and greatly increase their chances for survival.
Based on years of university research studies on premature infant brain development, this device is essentially a computerized pacifier featuring a tip that pulses with gentle bursts of air. When it was ready to commercialize the system, KC BioMedix started working with a third-party company to develop a custom embedded solution, but quickly realized that the projected costs would be too high. It decided to bring the development in-house and use an integrated embedded platform to design the system and simultaneously reduce the development cost by $250,000.
Fire suppression systems
With the increased presence of combustible materials such as lithium batteries in aircraft cargo, FedEx Express decided to invest in advanced fire suppression systems to improve flight crew and cargo safety. The engineers at Ventura Aerospace, a small company in California with focused expertise on building integrated control and monitoring systems for aviation shipping safety, recognized the opportunity to work with FedEx Express and started developing a system that would need to be lower cost than safety systems offered by larger, established suppliers, and delivered on an aggressive timeline.
The engineers initially considered designing all the electronics in-house, but they quickly realized that the time and expense involved wouldn't meet their project constraints. The team began by evaluating off-the-shelf platforms for the fire suppression system and ultimately selected NI Single-Board RIO hardware and LabVIEW graphical programming software. Having a platform-based approach allowed the engineers to focus on designing an innovative fire suppression system, rather than low-level electronics programming and development. They estimate that they spent one-third of the man-years in development that they would have invested using another solution. They generated profit from the project within 20 months and saw a 10X revenue improvement within five years.
The ever-increasing number of design starts and escalating complexity are forcing embedded design teams to be more efficient as they select technology for their projects. To address embedded design market needs and help teams get to market faster, technology providers are developing components, modules, or even complete embedded platforms with higher levels of integration and increased functionality. Ultimately, they're working toward a complete platform for embedded design containing communications, processing, system I/O, and integrated system design software. This combination of custom and off-the-shelf components is keeping design teams on pace with technology advancements and ahead of their competition.
Vineet Aggarwal is the group manager for embedded systems products at National Instruments. | <urn:uuid:9da402fc-f4d6-4c0e-8625-976b810b6cb3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&piddl_msgorder=thrd&doc_id=257806&page_number=2 | 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 | 0.952786 | 756 | 1.851563 | 2 |
On "Birds and Fishes"
"Birds and Fishes," one of Jeffers' last poems, almost makes the mistake of attributing greed and malice to the feeding of seabirds on fishes but then recovers to find in the violence of the scene a manifestation of the "beauty of God":. . . .
For Jeffers, then, as for Emerson, original sin consisted in a fall into ego consciousness, which sets mind against nature and individuals against one another.
from A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Copyright © 1987 by Cambridge University Press.
Jeffers's sense of natural beauty as independent of man dominates the account of pelicans feasting on fish who are drawn to the shore during mating season in "Birds and Fishes." Jeffers closes the poem by proclaiming "their quality ... the beauty of God," but not before asserting the lack of "mercy ... mind ... [and] goodness" in their actions. Though Jeffers sees God behind nature, he cannot imagine the existence of human virtues in their absolute states operating there:
... and which one in all this fury of wildfowl pities
No one certainly. Justice and mercy
Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish
nor eternal God.
It goes without saying that Emerson would not have been so naive as to look for pity in a pelican, but Jeffers's position that God also lacks any concern with virtues, such as justice and mercy, renders Emerson's search for universals within nature pointless. How can nature be a tool for man in his search for realization if those absolutes he seeks do not reside there?
from "Transcendental Echoes in Jeffers." In Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers: Essays in Honor of William H. Nolte. Copyright © 1995 by University of South Carolina.
Return to Robinson Jeffers | <urn:uuid:18e917fa-718a-48a2-8887-aa5acfb70e88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/g_l/jeffers/birds.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932377 | 395 | 2.5625 | 3 |
At a Glance
Why Get Tested?
When to Get Tested?
A blood sample drawn from a vein in your arm, or for a self check, a drop of blood from your finger
The Test Sample
What is being tested?
Glucose is a simple sugar that serves as the main source of energy for the body. The carbohydrates we eat are broken down into glucose (and a few other simple sugars), absorbed by the small intestine and circulated throughout the body. Most of the body's cells require glucose for energy production; the brain and nervous system cells rely on glucose for energy, and can only function when glucose levels in the blood remain within a certain range.
The body's use of glucose depends on the availability of insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas. Insulin acts to control the transport of glucose into the body's cells to be used for energy. It also directs the liver to store excess glucose as glycogen (for short term energy storage) and promotes the synthesis of fats, which form the basis of a longer term store of energy. We cannot live without glucose or insulin, and they must be in balance.
Normally blood glucose levels rise slightly after a meal, and insulin is released to lower them, with the amount of insulin released matched up with the size and content of the meal. If blood glucose levels drop too low, such as might occur in between meals or after a strenuous workout, glucagon (another hormone from the pancreas) is produced to tell the liver to release some of its glucose stores, raising the blood glucose levels. If the glucose/insulin system is working properly the amount of glucose in the blood remains fairly stable.
Hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia, caused by a variety of conditions, are both hard on the body. Severe, sudden high or low blood glucose levels can be life threatening, causing organ failure, brain damage, coma, and, in extreme cases, death. Long-term high blood glucose levels can cause progressive damage to body organs such as the kidneys, eyes, blood vessels, heart and nerves. Untreated hyperglycaemia that arises during pregnancy (known as 'gestational diabetes') can cause mothers to give birth to large babies who may have low glucose levels. Long-term hypoglycaemia can lead to brain and nerve damage.
How is the sample collected for testing?
A blood sample is obtained by inserting a needle into a vein in the arm, or a drop of blood is taken from your finger by pricking it with a small pointed lancet.
Ask a Laboratory Scientist
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NOTE: This article is based on research that utilizes the sources cited here as well as the collective experience of the Lab Tests Online Editorial Review Board. This article is periodically reviewed by the Editorial Board and may be updated as a result of the review. Any new sources cited will be added to the list and distinguished from the original sources used. | <urn:uuid:d1eda083-3613-491f-ae61-2c7cb243d275> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.labtestsonline.org.au/understanding/analytes/glucose/tab/glance | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939868 | 608 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Gene doping at Torino?
Evidence from a trial in Germany raises fears that athletes are already misusing gene therapy
With the Torino Winter Olympics
due to kick off on Friday (February 10), anti-doping authorities are still hoping that the spectre of gene doping -- the misuse of gene therapy to boost athletic performance -- will not cast its shadow over the competition. However, a recent court case in Germany appears to suggest otherwise.
Gene doping is a cause for concern among those who want to keep sports clean because it is potentially hard to detect. Until very recently, experts had spoken about it as something that would happen in the future. But in recent days, a German court hearing evidence in the trial of a running coach
accused of giving performance-enhancing drugs to young athletes was told that a search of his Email inbox turned up references to a product called Repoxygen.
, developed by UK firm Oxford Biomedica, delivers the gene for erythropoietin to muscle cells in a vector configuration that brings the gene under the control of an oxygen-sensitive gene switch. In one Email, the coach, named Thomas Springstein, wrote that "new Repoxygen is hard to get. Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas," according to German news service Deutsche Welle
Repoxygen is still in preclinical development, according to the Oxford Biomedica Web site. The company's representatives have said Springstein did not receive the product from the company.
Regardless of whether Springstein actually administered the product to an athlete, gene doping will assuredly be a reality sooner rather than later, said Theodore Friedmann
, head of the gene doping panel for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). "It's almost an irrelevant question whether it's being done at the moment," he told The Scientist
. "The technology is getting to the point that someone is going to do something silly."
The untested nature of many gene transfer technologies means they could pose serious threat to the safety of athletes, Friedmann said. "None of these systems are well enough characterized to know what their impact will be. The danger to the athletes far exceeds the level of knowledge needed to do this safely."
WADA was created by the International Olympic Committee in 1999 to maintain an international anti-doping code, coordinate testing of athletes, and fund scientific research to develop new detection methods. Since 2002, growing concern about the possibility of gene doping has prompted it to spend some $3 million on the field.
In 2003, WADA added gene doping to the list of banned substances and procedures in its World Anti-Doping Code
. It is also included in the International Olympic Committee's anti-doping rules
for the Turin games.
Olivier Rabin, the agency's science director, said athletes are most likely to use gene technologies that offer them the same kind of benefits as banned drugs. "Boosting of oxygen transfer and muscle mass building are definitely two of the key areas of gene doping, as indicated by the abuse of pharmaceutical drugs by some athletes for those purposes today," Rabin said.
from University College London is one researcher whose work on gene therapy for muscle mass has already brought him unwanted attention from the sporting world. He and his colleagues are developing a treatment for muscle wasting diseases that involves transferring the gene for mechano growth factor, using a plasmid vector. In mouse studies, the gene triggered a 30% increase in muscle mass within weeks, suggesting the treatment could be more potent than anabolic steroids.
Goldspink said he is frequently contacted by people from what he calls the "sports counter-culture," who want him to supply them with his technology. He forwards such Emails to WADA, but acknowledges it wouldn't be impossible for a lab elsewhere to produce it themselves. "It's not rocket science to make genes," he said. "Many graduates in biochemistry can make them if they're experienced enough."
As a result, WADA and other anti-doping agencies are working on developing ways to detect athletes who have misused gene technology, including mass spectroscopy approaches that can distinguish between endogenous and introduced growth factors, tomographic detection of mRNA being formed in unusual tissues after gene transfer, and microarray searches for alterations in the expression profile of certain genes.
Rabin said that WADA does not announce which substances and methods are detectable, but did acknowledge that gene transfer generally produces effects that are measurable in the body. "So yes, there could be ways to detect some forms of gene doping now," he told The Scientist
And even if gene therapy techniques are not currently viable, he added, use of gene doping could still come back to bite athletes in years to come. "Whatever happens in Turin," he said, "athletes' samples will be stored for several years and may be re-analyzed in the future once new doping substances and methods can be detected. The World Anti-Doping Code provides for an eight-year statute of limitations."
Links for this article
"German coach suspected of genetic doping," Deutsche Welle
, February 3, 2006.
World Anti-Doping Code
The International Olympic Committee anti-doping rules applicable to the XX Winter Olympic Games in Turin, 2006
G. Goldspink, "Age-related muscle loss and progressive dysfunction in mechanosensitive growth factor signaling," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
, June, 2004. | <urn:uuid:f5609ae0-7d67-41d4-9997-f83080e90095> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/23703/title/Gene-doping-at-Torino-/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952951 | 1,123 | 2.875 | 3 |
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
by Jennifer Ericsson Illustrated by Susan Meddaugh
Reviewed by Blake M. (age 5)
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustration will appear here.
Blake M. is a student in Ms. Edsall's Summer Reading Club
The book is about a little girl who wants to be beautiful
because grandma's coming over for dinner.
I like the book because it was funny. It was funny when the little girl picked her own clothes. They were all of her favorite clothes in one outfit. | <urn:uuid:a192c075-bae2-4eb7-8c56-623904f6df48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.spaghettibookclub.org/review.php?review_id=1310 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961836 | 113 | 1.5625 | 2 |
If he chooses a track about octopuses . . I will kill him ! ! !
Welcome to the special Cross Cultural Edition of He Said – She Said ! ! ! This time we decided to show what we think is typical of the music from each other’s counties ! ! ! So I will be picking typically English tracks and Mr P will be picking typically Japanese tracks ! ! !
We think it will be fun and hope you like the post ! ! !
This time we have chosen to visit each other’s musical heritage in a fantastic cross cultural exchange type of a thing. I think it’s interesting to see how others see us, through the medium of music. We have chosen one contemporary track, one oldie and one traditional. We hope you enjoy the tracks.
200 years ago today, Richard Wagner was born. As an historical figure, he is undoubtedly controversial. His personal traits and character flaws have been documented extensively and his popularity with the 20th Century’s darkest regime is perhaps the single best known fact about him, and probably the reason so many people are reluctant to engage fully with his music. But on his birthday, I ask indulgence and a few moments attention to try and demonstrate quite why his music is among the most sublime ever written…
So, this week’s ‘Spill Challenge is all about the Wizard of Wimborne, Robert Fripp.
Apart from being the sole constant in the ever-changing kaleidoscope that is King Crimson, Fripp has contributed his guitar work to albums by many varied artists as a session player, recorded collaborative albums with others and produced a fair number of albums too.
The constant factor here is that everything either features Fripp as a musician or producer or has ex-Crimson members performing on the tracks on offer.
The rules are the same as always, select the one that appeals least and consign it to the dustbin of history.
So, to the music.
1) David Bowie – Up The Hill Backwards. Fripp had previously worked with Bowie on “Heroes” and this track is from “Scary Monsters”, probably Bowies last truly great album. Fripp plays on several tracks, and this one has some typically angular and spiky work. 2) Peter Gabriel – Fear Is The Mother Of Violence. Gabriel’s second solo album after leaving Genesis was produced by Fripp and also features him playing guitar on some tracks. A deceptive ballad, with a rather unsettling feel. 3) Van Der Graaf Generator – The Emperor In His War Room. VDGG were never an easy listen for many people and notably didn’t really go in for guitar solos, although Peter Hammill did play a bit of acoustic guitar. Anyway, here Fripp contributes some trademark sustain-driven electric guitar work. 4) 21st Century Schizoid Band – I Talk To The Wind. The band is made up from former Crimson members and occasionally tours playing classic Crimson tunes. This is from Crimson’s groundbreaking first album, “In The Court Of The Crimson King”. 5) David Sylvian – Wave. One of Fripp’s more interesting and enduring partnerships in the 1980s and 90s was with ex-Japan frontman David Sylvian. Fripp wanted him to join a reformed Crimson in around 1991, but it never happened. This track is from Sylvian’s earlier solo album, “Gone To Earth” and features Fripp’s distinctive sustained guitar and elements of Frippertronics. 6) McDonald and Giles – Flight Of The Ibis. After quitting King Crimson, Ian McDonald and Michael Giles released an eponymous album in 1971. This ethereal track is similar to “Cadence and Cascade” from Crimson’s second album, “In The Wake Of Poseidon”. 7) Daryl Hall – Something in 4/4 Time. Daryl Hall’s first solo album, “Sacred Songs”, was produced by Fripp, who also played on it. At the time, in 1977, Hall was enjoying a lot of success with John Oates as Hall and Oates and, fearing that this allegedly uncommercial solo record might impact on his success, Hall’s record label refused to release the album and it was shelved and only released three years later. 8) Judy Dyble – Dreamtime. Judy Dyble was the original female singer in Fairport Convention. She was also, for a time involved with the precursor to King Crimson, Giles, Giles and Fripp. She gave up the music business in the 1970s and only began perfonming and recording again in 1994. This track is taken from her 2009 album, Talking with Strangers, and features Crimsonites Ian McDonald and Pat Mastelotto. 9) Peter Hammill – Child. This track is from Hammill’s 1971 debut solo album, “Fool’s Mate”. The album is made up from material that Hammill felt wasn’t really suitable for VDGG but features all the band’s members as well as Fripp and several others. 10) Robert Fripp – North Star. From Fripp’s 1979 solo album “Exposure”. This features the vocal talents of Daryl Hall, again something that Hall’s record label wasn’t too pleased about. There are different versions of the album, with some songs rerecorded with other singers replacing Hall, notably Peter Hammill and Peter Gabriel, but both are available as a double CD. 11) King Crimson – Exiles. Finally, to round off, we have the Mighty Crim itself, recorded live in 1974 in Providence, Rhode Island and issued on the live 4-CD box set “The Great Deceiver”. This was arguably Crimson’s greatest line-up, with David Cross, John Wetton and Bill Bruford joining Fripp for some truly incandescent virtuoso playing.
Some old, some new, more Earworms for you. At least one is borrowed and the air is blue because ITunes just deleted my carefully crafted playlists. Good job I write them down. Ha!! Thanks as ever to our gracious contributors, without whom (etc. etc.) Please keep them coming to email@example.com, thank’ee.
Cake – Mahna, Mahna – tincanman: A quirky, good-humoured band playing the ultimate earworm. I win.
Gene Autry- Deep in the Heart of Texas – pairubu: One of my favourite films is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and this song features in a scene set in Texas. Guaranteed thigh-slapper, (for me at least)!
Etta James – Something’s Got A Hold On Me – williamsbach: Etta James is in the car CD player at the moment, rediscovered during a move. Turns out both Sandra and I are fans. Her ’62 Billboard R&B no 4 is amazingly fresh to the worms in our ears. Stylistically straight outta church with the Amen Corner on overtime, it’s a love song most upbeat, typical of Ms James’ mix-it-up tendencies and summing up the musical changes happening at the time. Don’t tell S, but it’s top of my wedding playlist.
Be You – Irma Thomas & Dr John – glasshalfempty: A while back Betty Harris went down well with those of you in the wiggly-things-in-the-ears fraternity. So here’s another great N’Awlins songstress, Irma Thomas, ‘The Soul Queen’. She deserves a wider audience, after only one chart hit in a 50 year career. It was hard to pick just one track to offer. Here she is with Dr. John imploring her man to just ‘Be You’.
Sore – Nancy Bird – barbryn: A year’s supply of ‘Spill points to anyone who can guess what year this was made and what country it comes from.
Manhattan Transfer – On A Little Street In Singapore – ali: OK, so you can’t beat Glenn Miller. But this reminds me of “waltzing” in the snow with my friend Nicky, outside the Student Union, in unsuitable footwear. Those were the days …
Here’s a piece of music that’s been haunting me for some months now, ever since I saw the film last year. This is just a short selection, it seemed to run throughout the film. I left the the theater with it running through my head. There’s a fair bit of information at Wiki so I won’t bore you with it here. It’s well worth a listen.
So, what do the two things have in common? The first thing is Mogwai*, my useless former tortie sulker. The second is “I See You Baby (Shakin’ That Ass)” by Groove Armada & Fatboy Slim.
The answer is….nothing! Apart from the fact that the two things are irretrievably, utterly linked in my mind. Mrs McFlah & I used to sing the song towards Mogwai because of the way her furry rump swung when she walked, waaay back when it came out (the song, not the cat’s bum) in ’99. Whenever I hear the song, I can think of nothing else but the feline booty sway.
So then, I would like you please to recommend songs that are solidly bonded by association in your minds – the winner will be the one that has the most convoluted & bizarre or ridiculous & mundane explanation to it! | <urn:uuid:2ad6cbd5-8398-4b67-b925-e86ce0ceb5c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thespillblog.co.uk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957099 | 2,045 | 1.632813 | 2 |
When our daughter was almost five, I read Peter Pan aloud to her. A chapter at a time, snuggled side by side, her newborn brother napping in my arms. Now, two years later, she visits Peter Pan and his wily comrades again, on her own solo adventure.
We entered the realm of Neverland through the classic original Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, written as a fairy play in 1904. I watched this grand play as a little girl, with Peter Pan flying above the stage from ropes and pulleys. The magic of the theater erased those ropes, and all I saw was the magic of the story. I was drawn into the land of mermaids and fairies, magical flight, and especially the underground cozy tree root house where Peter and the Lost Boys hid out. The adventures of both pirates and fairies resonate with children so it comes as little surprise that this story has endeared young imaginations for so many generations.
Pirates and treasure often intermingle in the pages of pirate adventure books. Here in Peter Pan however, treasure is not to be found in a chest buried anywhere. It can't be searched for using any map. Treasure will be found in Neverland, but it can't be held in one's hand. The treasure of Neverland is the treasure of childhood. Of boys at play in the woods. Of pirate duels. Of Indian encounters. Of being able to fly. The story is of children at play, pretending.
The treasure of childhood imagination.
Peter tells Wendy that the way to Neverland is, "second to the right and straight on 'til morning." The way to adventure is left page then right and straight on 'til bedtime. Books are the treasure of adventure, the treasure to fly to places found on the pages. The treasure of imagination. The treasure of childhood.
After pirate stories and pretend pirate play, are you little pirates hungry for lunch? Visit the library to dig up some healthy, and funny, pirate grub in Mark Northeast's book Funky Lunch: Happy Food for Happy Children. | <urn:uuid:63bdbdb2-0001-4751-844b-29a09f7efe31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordplayhouse.com/2011/01/pirate-and-treasure-books.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950953 | 430 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Mud wasps are large, solitary Australian wasps.
Mud wasps: solitary and harmless
Mud wasps are large, solitary Australian insects that build nests of mud and provide live, paralysed prey for their larvae to feed on.
1 October 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011
There are many different species of Australian mud wasps in the Families Vespidae and Sphecidae. They vary in size and colour but are often all black or black with orange or yellow bands or markings. They build nests of mud or 'clay'.
Mud wasps are found all over Australia and in all terrestrial habitats.
They are solitary insects and the nest is constructed by a single female wasp. Some species attach nests to rock faces, tree trunks or buildings.
Others build inside cavities, such as holes in tree trunks or machinery and in infrequently used taps and pipes or the handles of tools left outside.
They are part of Australia’s native fauna and should be left alone if possible.
Typically, the female wasp catches a particular an insect or spider (what depends on the species of wasp) then stings and paralyses it. She then carries it back to the nest, lays an egg on it and seals the nest. The wasp grub hatches, consumes the food provided and pupates in the cell. When the adult emerges it chews its way out of the cell.
Adults feed on nectar and drink water. Sometimes the wasps can be seen gathering mud at the edges of streams, dams or puddles.
Mud wasps are not pests. The females are not aggressive and rarely sting.
They are part of Australia’s native fauna and should be left alone if possible. If a mud nest is considered unsightly it can be knocked off, which is probably best done when the owner of the nest is not around.
CSIRO Entomology is not currently researching mud wasps. This fact sheet is provided for information only.
Find out about more Australian insects. | <urn:uuid:909314c8-344c-4f73-9f18-d8dc3dce6b65> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csiro.au/Outcomes/Environment/Biodiversity/MudWasps.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946583 | 428 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Photograph provided by the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry of a statue of the goddess Sekhmet carved more than 3,000 years ago and found near the Karnak temple complex at Luxor, some 700 km (435 miles) south of Cairo. EFE
Cairo, Jan 15 (EFE).- Egyptian authorities have discovered a granite statue of the goddess Sekhmet belonging to the epoch of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390-1352 B.C.) in the ruined city of Luxor, some 700 kilometers (about 435 miles) south of Cairo.
The Egyptian Antiquities Ministry announced Tuesday in a communique that the statue was found inside the temple of the goddess Mut, near the famous Karnak temple complex.
The find was made during restoration work on the temple of Mut, which is not yet open to the public.
The statue, which measures 180 centimeters (71 inches) high, represents Sekhmet, who has the head of a lion but a human body, and it includes an image of the sun's disk and a cobra atop the goddess's head.
In addition, the figure is holding a flower in one hand and the so-called "key of life" in the other, common symbols in ancient Egyptian artwork depicting pharaohs and gods. | <urn:uuid:da37be41-ca4c-4dd4-9b40-f77692b43d10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laprensasa.com/309_america-in-english/1891049_statue-more-than-3-000-years-old-found-in-egypt.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951542 | 262 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Steven Chu, Barack Obama's pick for Energy Secretary, recently stated that "Sustainable carbon-neutral energy is the most important scientific challenge we face today."
Antonio Bento uses this quote to start his examination of the pressing needs for fossil fuels and the costs and environmental consequences of federal and state ethanol subsidies.
Bento is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Applied Economics and Management. Most of his research lies at the boundaries of environmental, energy, urban, and public economics, and uses state-of-the-art econometric and computable general equilibrium methods, as well as geographical information (GIS) tools.
Bento graduated from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, with a B.A. in economics in 1996 and earned a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Maryland in 2000. Prior to joining Cornell, he was a faculty member at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management and the Department of Economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara and, more recently, at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. He has also been a consultant to the research division of the World Bank. | <urn:uuid:1d85061c-f596-40b1-bb9b-d4518bf0f127> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cornell.edu/video/the-heat-is-on-biofuels-and-climate-change | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950538 | 240 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Sorry, no definitions found.
“NewToFatWalletUser said: what is this 'vhs' they speak of?”
“Only drawbacks I see are 1) no wireless and 2) no what is this 'vhs' they speak of? this means even an old guy can figure out the controls.”
“I'm being gifted about 250 vhs tapes later this week.”
“Consumer Reports says not to get anything smaller than 32 so that's what I'm thinking -- just some store brand that lets me plug in dvd and vhs players.”
“None of the vhs tapes have copyright protection so copy away.”
“DANCER in the DARK vhs movie/video 2001 starring* Bjork”
“BELIEVE vhs Horror flick/video/movie rated PG 1999**”
“Now to go from dvd to vhs you may run into that problem.”
“Okay, scary has nothing to do with budget ... unless you're using dad's ole vhs camcorder.”
“I remember going to the local video store, Evan's Video, and the movieboxes (vhs or beta) were empty and there was a nail on the shelf that held a hand printed circular tag.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘vhs’.
Words that people on Twitter don't think are words.
I wrote a little script that runs every day. It searches the Twitter API for tweets containing the words, "is not a word". Each (non...
Trademarks that have lost their character as indicators of source to become a general term for a product or service.
Looking for tweets for vhs. | <urn:uuid:fd925d0c-e557-4bf8-94eb-900764a53181> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordnik.com/words/vhs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93588 | 375 | 1.984375 | 2 |
But MY Kids Are Just So Advanced …..
Hmmmmm…. when I was a kid all the rage was Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, Sun-In, Hash Jeans, and Sea Monkeys — don’t you wish you (or rather your parents) would’ve invested? And then again, wasn’t it just 5, maybe 6 years ago that pets.com and WebVan.com were THE HOTTEST.
How soon the VCs forget, but then again they didn’t pay that $50,000 /year tuition for pre-school for nothing.
From The New York Times:
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16 – Wanted: investment adviser, the younger the better.
In a nod to the wisdom of youth, many wealthy, highly connected and well-educated technology investors are taking counsel and investment tips from their children, summer interns and twentysomething receptionists.
These venture capital investors say there is good reason to ask young people to help them assess new technology: as the investors themselves are aging, the technology – including social networking Web sites and mobile gadgets – is designed for, used by and sometimes built by people half their age.
“Children are a secret weapon in my arsenal for making investment decisions,” said Heidi Roizen, a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley firm.
Last year, Ms. Roizen asked her daughters, Niki and Marleyna Mohler, ages 13 and 11, to check out a handheld video player she was thinking about backing. The daughters quickly tired of the gadget, so Ms. Roizen did not invest.
And this year, Ms. Roizen bought Niki a subscription to World of Warcraft, the popular online role-playing game. The idea was to get her daughter familiar with the genre so she could offer advice about an investment Ms. Roizen had made in another game company.
“I was a guinea pig, a lab rat,” Niki said of the experience, in a tone that suggested she was also experimenting with sarcasm.
While the idea of testing products on consumers is hardly new, its emergence in the world of venture capitalists is something of a sea change. After all, this is an industry of independent-minded investors who have historically made decisions by trusting their knowledge of engineering, strict analytics and their own gut instincts — along with a bit of the herd mentality.
Unlike the formal consumer tests and focus groups at large companies like Procter & Gamble, these inquiries are taking place closer to home, with friends and family. But their impact can be broad, because venture capitalists not only help steer the development of new ideas but also invest billions of dollars in those ideas on behalf of investment groups and wealthy individuals.
To some, the approach looks like a product of the desperation felt by investors trying to identify the next YouTube or iPod.
“There is something comical, and maybe silly, about relying on kids,” said Paul Romer, a professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It seems risky.”
But Mr. Romer noted that it was getting tougher to pick the winners among start-ups. Young people, Mr. Romer said, may be better equipped than investors, who tend to be in their 30s or older, to see nuances and identify trends.
“The people making the decisions may not appreciate some of the small differences that might be apparent to end users,” he said.
Those end users include Mariana and Tatiana Megevand, who live in Geneva. Last year, Neil Rimer, their uncle, heard the girls, 14 and 12, talking about one of their favorite Web sites, Stardoll.com.
The site lets visitors create and dress up virtual paper dolls. Mr. Rimer is not just an uncle but also a venture capitalist, a partner with Index Ventures, based in Geneva. He decided that his nieces’ interest constituted one of the better tips he had heard in a while.
“The next Monday I went in and talked about it with my partners,” he said, “and that week we were on the phone to the company.”
Index and other firms, including the venerable Sequoia Capital, have invested more than $10 million in Stardoll this year, and the company has moved to Geneva from Finland. Mr. Rimer says he still talks to the girls about what they like and what they would improve. He has given them some incentive, too: a small stake in Stardoll that could be valuable if the company prospers.
Other firms have started surveying groups of children. IDG Ventures, a Boston firm, recently asked one of its associates to visit its partners’ homes and ask their children to assess a new social networking site.
The trend may indicate the rise of something new in the venture capital industry itself: humility. A notoriously self-assured bunch, these investors are admitting that some innovations may be lost on their g-g-generation.
“The funniest thing is when we sit around and say, ‘I’m not sure because I would never use this,’ ” said Jeff Fagnan, 36, a general partner with Atlas Ventures.
The investors said consulting with younger people would have been unheard of in the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Then, investors were immersed in the very technology they were financing, ordering books on Amazon, downloading music from Napster and buying and selling on eBay. But now, in the so-called Web 2.0 era, venture capitalists’ personal interests have strayed from the sweet spot of innovation: Web sites like MySpace intended to connect people, free Internet calling tools like Skype or software for mobile phones.
And people now in junior high and high school have spent their lives with technology. “This is the first generation for whom the computer is a native language,” said Jim Gauer, managing director of Palomar Ventures, a Los Angeles firm. “We’re all going to have to get re-educated and learn that language.’
Or they can do what Palomar and others have: hire a native speaker. Last summer, the firm had an intern, Adam Gottesfeld, 21, who was heading into his senior year as an international studies major at Princeton. Mr. Gottesfeld so impressed the firm with his technological knowledge that it has offered him a job as an associate when he graduates.
After Niki, Ms. Roizen’s daughter, became proficient at World of Warcraft, her mother took her to visit Perpetual Entertainment, a game company in San Francisco she had invested in. Niki had some criticisms of the company’s game, a role-playing epic called Gods and Heroes, telling its developers that it seemed unpolished and choppy. The game makers, taking advice from Niki and others, improved the product by the time she visited again.
“When she picked me up, she said, ‘Did you like it? Was it more fun?’ And I said yes, the whole car ride home,” Niki said.
Niki is not only teaching, it seems, but also learning about business. A couple of years ago, Ms. Roizen said, her daughter was looking at Neopets.com, a Web site where people play with virtual pets.
“She said, ‘I don’t get their business model,’ ” Ms. Roizen recalled. “She was 11.” | <urn:uuid:aad846b4-b8fb-4596-8721-69c11aeb0353> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://meganwilson.com/sub/2006/12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971171 | 1,586 | 1.703125 | 2 |
My Saffire Pro 24 Firewire audio interface has S/pdif in/out ports. My computer also has s/pdif in/out ports. My interface is already connected to my computer bia firewire. Would there be any benefit or usages to connecting the audio interface to the computer via S/pdif S well as firewire? If the answer is yes can you direct me to proper connection Protocols? Thank you, Jim
The S/PDIF I/O on the Saffire Pro 24 is stereo. The Optical is an 8-track ADAT input.
The use case for using the S/PDIF I/O would be for using a digital stereo source or destination. You could use put an outboard digital effects processor in that loop, or say, get audio from a separate digital recorder into your computer, or bounce a stereo mix out to a digital tape recorder, etc.
Another graphic from the website:
There is no benefit to connecting your audio interface to your computer via S/PDIF if you can already make a good Firewire connection.
Some additional detail: The big problem with S/PDIF is that it lacks any form of flow control. That means that the sender sends bits out, and the receiver receives them. There is no way for the receiver to request a retransmission or even verify that all the bits are good. In practice, this isn't much of a problem, but it is a minor disadvantage compared with Firewire.
Audio over Firewire could implement flow control, error control, etc. There is plenty of bandwidth for rich control channels. The same is true of USB.
The only reason to use S/PDIF is when you have a device that only speaks S/PDIF (or AES/EBU). But if you have a high quality audio interface with S/PDIF, you are better off routing your S/PDIF signals into that interface along with the rest of your audio than into your computer.
As usual, when you have the opportunity to test out two options you should run some experiments on your own. It is possible, but unlikely, that the S/PDIF on your computer is better than on your Focusrite. The only way to find out is to develop some tests, run them, and evaluate them. | <urn:uuid:781d603f-595c-41a8-a2ba-3d8531ddc2ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://avp.stackexchange.com/questions/5780/s-pdif-ports-should-can-i-use-them/5785 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941154 | 477 | 1.578125 | 2 |
I’ve discussed PACBI before, and despite a name which implies that the organization’s focus is on academic and cultural boycotts (the least successful variant of BDS), the PACBI name – and Barghouti’s – tend to get invoked by participants in any BDS project (university and union divestment battles, product boycotts at US food co-ops, etc.) regardless of whether they fall into PACBI’s alleged mandate.
When the Irish trade union movement met to discuss their controversial boycott resolutions against Israel, Barghouti was on the agenda. When the San Francisco Jewish Federation was debating how to prevent BDS activists from subsidizing their project with community money, local Jewish leaders were denounced for not debating Barghouti on the subject.
Even within the Israel-de-legitimization movement, where the efficacy of BDS vs. other tactics are debated (usually behind the scenes), Berghouti’s name is used as a show-stopper, an attempt to end disputes over the subject by claiming PACBI’s 2005 academic boycott call means the BDS movement wells up purely from Palestinian civil society and is thus beyond discussion. (The fact that PACBI and Barghouti himself are late-comers to the BDS campaign, which began in 2001, seems to have fled the consciousness of anti-Israel campaigners.)
So who is Mr. Barghouti?
If the name rings a bell, Omar Barghouti is related to a pair of older Barghouti’s, Mustafa Barghouti (the man who ran against current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) and the more notorious Marwan Barghouti who is currently serving five consecutive life sentences for his involvement in terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Like the Husseini’s, a clan which includes PA negotiator Faisal Husseini, the late Yassir Arafat (whose real name is Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini), and the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini (the George Washington of Palestinian nationalism who spent World War working for the Nazis in the Middle East), the Berghouti’s are major players in regional Arab politics.
Like a number of “professional Palestinians,” Omar Barghouti’s role as stand-in for the suffering local masses is a bit of a stretch. He was born in Qatar, but grew up in Egypt, the land that produced two of the most famous names in “pro-Pal” politics: Yassir Arafat and Edward Said (Arafat’s Egyptian accent was always a bit of an embarrassment for his allies, and Said had to admit to his Egyptian origins towards the end of a life of Palestinian identity politics).
Deeply ensconced in the higher end of the local upper Middle Class, Barghouti lived abroad and attended Columbia University before moving to Ramallah after college and, most recently, enrolling in a graduate program in philosophy at Israel’s Tel Aviv University. It is from this perch within Israeli academia that Barghouti runs his global campaign to have all academics everywhere shun their Israeli colleagues until all Arab demands against Israel are met in full.
The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do nature of a leader supporting (and supported by) an Israeli university calling for academics (and everyone else) to boycott Israeli universities is a touchy subject within the BDS movement. When asked directly about the contradiction, Barghouti dismisses questions as a personal matter over which he does not wish to comment. When one critic refused to ignore the issue, Barghouti stated that “oppressed people don’t have a choice of where they go to school” (an interesting statement for someone who got into New York’s Columbia University, an honor denied to 90% of the “non-oppressed” people who apply).
When thousands of people signed a petition calling for Barghouti to be kicked out of Tel Aviv university for his tireless attempts to shut down Israeli schools, the humble Barghouti claimed kinship with Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King (all of which attended university within countries they criticized and fought against). And when the head of that university refused to punish him for his political activism, Barghouti became even more enraged, fearing that this act of Isreali academic liberalism would be used to besmirch his campaign to have Israeli acadamia globally condemned and boycotted for its alleged illiberalism.
If all of this makes your head spin, the key to understanding Barghouti is to see him as an academic vs. a political phenomenon. Like many (if not most) of the people who fuel the BDS “movement,” Omar Barghouti does so from within the ultimate safe environment: the womb of the university. There, his middle-class lifestyle is subsidized, his graduate school workload as light or as heavy as he chooses to make it, his position at the university protected by those he condemns, just as his body is protected by the Israeli security forces he claims are homicidal maniacs.
Like the many student activists around the world who look to him for leadership, Barghouti gets to pose as a risk taker knowing full well that his political activity will never be punished. The opposite, in fact, since his role within PACBI has provided him global celebrity status complete with endless speaking opportunities and trips around the world which don’t seem to be getting in the way of his preparation for final exams.
Like students at Berkeley and elsewhere, Barghouti gets to endlessly complain about his movement being silenced, even as jets around the planet delivering his message and penning articles that routinely get published in major newspapers. Like the BDSers who endlessly claim to be showing great courage by standing up to “Jewish power,” he rails against fantasy threats knowing full well that a late night knock on the door by his alleged oppressors will never materialize.
If the global leadership of the BDS movement resides anywhere, it resides at Tel Aviv University where a graduate student who does not seem to engage in any academic activities gets to dwell in highly-subsidized perpetual adolescence, jetting around the planet in luxury condemning the very institutions that support a comfortable lifestyle. In this role he takes no risks while claiming great courage, the ultimate middle class warrior acting as a stand-in for the repressed of the world.
Given all this, is it any wonder that Omar Barghouti is the poseur-child for BDS, leading ranks of the privileged all playing the role of repressed victim at someone else’s expense? | <urn:uuid:834487db-664b-47fe-977a-750207a9a1fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://divestthis.com/2010/05/barghouti.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964201 | 1,412 | 1.726563 | 2 |
To outsiders, Mexico City might conjure up images of banditos, urban sprawl and smog, but Mexico City is a surprising jewel in the crown of the Americas. Once home to the ancient civilization of the Aztecs (also known as the Mexica), the conquering Spaniards completely reshaped the already heavily populated city (then called Tenochtitlán) and made it into the capital of Nueva España, mostly constructed from forced labour and over the Aztecs’ sacred ground. The Spanish government tried to keep Nueva España under a reasonably short leash, but a long war of independence was fought and finally won by the rebels in 1821. A four-year occupation of Mexico City by the French under Napoleon III occurred from 1863 until 1867, and the Mexican Revolution followed in 1910 and lasted for a decade, but the 1920s heralded a boom period for Mexico City. Following this, and right up to the present day, growth and migration has lead to Mexico City battling problems such as crime, pollution and overcrowding, but post-millennium great strides have been made in these areas and the city has become an iconic, vibrant hub of eclectic arts and architecture. We set out our iconic top ten of Mexico City’s architecture below.
1. PALACIO DE BELLAS ARTES
Above left: The Palacio de Bellas Artes at night; photo courtesy of José Alberto Ochoa
Above right: One of the masks of Chaac decorating the interior vertical lights; photo courtesy of Alejandro Linares Garcia
The Palacio de Bellas Artes (or the Palace of Fine Arts) may not at first glance appear typically Mexican – and this may have something to do with the initial Italian architect, who was influenced greatly by Art Nouveau and neoclassicism. Scratch the surface, however, and you’ll find that this is no ordinary European-influenced building. The initial construction of the project began in 1904, designed by Adamo Boari and based on European neoclassical design, but soon ran into difficulties as the ground proved too soft and the heavy marble began to sink into the subsoil. The subsequent Mexican Revolution led to construction halting completely in 1913 and Boari returning to Italy, and once the political situation calmed down the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal took over the design. Construction began again in 1932, when Mariscal fused the European outer shell with a more modern Art Deco interior, adding pre-Hispanic touches such as the masks of Chaac and Tlaloc that decorate the vertical interior lights and the serpents’ heads set into the window arches of the lower floor. This adds a quintessentially Mexican flavour into a beautiful but alien piece of architecture, weaving a story of Mexico’s struggle to retain its pre-Hispanic culture in the face of colonialism.
2. TORRE LATINOAMERICANA
The Torre Latinoamericana; photos courtesy of Eduardo Rodriguez and Eneas de Troya
The Torre Latinoamericana is not the most beautiful tower in Mexico City, but it hasn’t made this list based on its looks. The Latinoamericana is, after all, a celebrity of the skyscraper world, and a VIP of architectural circles. Completed in 1956, it is 45 stories tall, and was Latin America’s tallest tower – and what makes it so special is that it is the world’s first major skyscraper built in a highly active seismic area. The architects, Dr Leonardo Zeevaert and his brother Adolfo Zeevaert, were Mexican-born civil engineers that designed the tower’s steel frame and deep-seated pylons, as well as pioneering the study of the soil’s composition at the site of construction to test how the mechanics of the earth would affect the tower’s stability – a practice that is now mainstream, if not mandatory. Despite its detractors declaring that the tower was too tall to be strong in the face of an earthquake, the tower not only survived an earthquake in 1957, just after completion, but also weathered the huge 8.1 magnitude quake in 1985 that destroyed many other buildings around Mexico City. Today it is considered one of the safest buildings in the city, and paved the way for other massive structures in seismic areas around the world.
3. MUSEO SOUMAYA
Left: the hexagonal aluminium tiles that make up Museo Soumaya; photo courtesy of Yovany Gasca
Right: Museo Soumaya under construction, with some tiles still missing from the facade; photo courtesy of Adam Wiseman
In contrast to the traditional pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican architecture that can be found elsewhere in the city, local architects are now designing innovative, intriguing structures that compete for recognition on a global level. The Museo Soumaya was designed by the internationally-recognised Mexican architect Fernando Romero, designer of the Bridging Tea House in Jinhua, China and the International Holocaust Museum in Texas, as well as winner of Architect of the Year 2010 amongst numerous other international awards. Funded by Carlos Slim, currently the world’s richest man, and named after his late wife, the Museo Soumaya is an abstract, organic shape that rises up from the ground like smoke, curving in the middle and resembling a Rodin sculpture. At 46 metres high, and covered in 16,000 aluminium tiles, the structure houses exhibition space, an auditorium seating 350 people, offices, a library, and a restaurant, gift shop and lounge, with the roof suspended from a cantilever to allow natural light into the top floor art gallery. The hope is to bring European art, a passion of Carlos Slim and his late wife, to the Mexican masses that otherwise would not have the money to experience it in person.
4. CASA DE LOS AZULEJOS
The Casa de los Azulejos; photos courtesy of Veronica V and Alejandro Mejía Greene
The Casa de los Azulejos, or the House of Blue Tiles, is an 18th Century palace of which the facade on three sides is completely covered in the blue and white tiles of the Puebla region of Mexico, known as talavera. Built by the Count del Valle de Orizaba family, the current structure originates from 1793, but the tiles were added later during a period of remodelling. Two stories exist as to the origin of the tiles; one states that the tiles were added by the fifth Countess Del Valle de Orizaba after her husband’s death in order to demonstrate the family’s immense wealth, and the other tells of a wayward son who was told by his father that he ‘would never build his house of tiles’ – that he would never amount to anything. Legend has it that the tiles were added by the son after he inherited the house to prove his father wrong. Inside the house is an opulent courtyard, modelled in a Baroque and slightly Moorish fashion, which features a large fountain decorated in mosaics and surrounded by French-style columns, covered with a 20th century stained glass roof. After a long and turbulent history, including being occupied by the Zapatista Army during the Mexican Revolution, the house was bought in 1917 by the Sanborn brothers, who made it into a successful flagship site for their chain of restaurants, and has now become a tourist attraction and local landmark.
5. CONVENTO DE LAS CAPUCHINAS SACREMENTARIAS
Latticework and glazing at the Convento de las Capuchinas Sacrementarias; photographer unknown
A tiny Mexican convent may seem an unlikely place for a piece of breathtakingly innovative architecture, but tucked within Mexico City’s quant Tlalpan backstreets is the Convento de las Capuchinas Sacrementarias, a 1950s modernist paradise. Designed by the iconic Mexican architect Luis Barragán, the convent and chapel is designed in a minimalist fashion, with its clean parallel lines and natural raw materials echoing the simple convent lifestyle. Rather than using pure minimalism, however, Barragán utilised light to create an ‘emotional space’, offsetting the austerity of the structure with beautiful glazing that turned the light entering the chapel into shades of sunshine yellow, caramel and rose red. Elsewhere, latticework allows light to stream through from the outdoor courtyard whilst decorating walls with shadow play and acting as a veil to allow an element of privacy. The result is a simple space where the warm lighting evokes colours of the earth, linking the manmade structure back to nature. The convent was Barragán’s last independent work – he financed the project himself – and is now a UNESCO world heritage site.
Join us next week for the second half of our top ten of Mexico City’s architecture. | <urn:uuid:2dd28be4-4926-4b07-8a98-4ce67ebee1fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.origindesignstudio.co.uk/blog/tag/commerical | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952372 | 1,860 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Know Your Constitution (3): Myths About the Supreme Court
This is the third in the series and it addresses three myths about the Supreme Court with a minimum of legal jargon.
The First Myth. The Supreme Court’s primary function is to do justice.
Reality. The Supreme Court’s primary function is to interpret the Constitution and federal statutes. These interpretations become the supreme law of the land. The Court’s function is not necessarily to do justice in individual cases.
Of course, there are times when interpretations of particular constitutional provisions are considered by many to be just. For example, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits racial and other kinds of discrimination by government, is considered to be a just constitutional provision because it is based on the concept of equality.
Another example is the due process clause and its application in criminal cases. Due process has been interpreted to include concepts of justice and fairness so as to protect the rights of criminal defendants to an unbiased court, to confrontation and cross-examination, to be free from self-incrimination, to an attorney, and so on.
What is most important to remember, though, is that Supreme Court decisions are not necessarily just or moral. A Supreme Court decision can uphold an unjust federal or state law as constitutional. For example, the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson unfortunately upheld separate but equal in the racial setting at the end of the 19th century.
On the other hand, a Supreme Court decision can rule that a wise and just federal or state law is unconstitutional. For example, the Supreme Court struck down the Violence Against Women Act in United States v. Morrison at the beginning of this century.
The Second Myth. The Supreme Court is a political body like Congress and the President.
Reality. The Supreme Court is the only branch of the national government that is not directly politically accountable to the electorate. The justices have lifetime tenure once appointed in order to insulate them from political pressure. To demonstrate how important judicial independence is, consider that the Court’s rulings are typically complied with on a voluntary basis by those affected. Al Gore’s concession to George Bush after the Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore is an excellent example of such voluntary compliance.
On the other hand, the justices are human beings who cannot help but be influenced by their upbringing and by contemporary political and social values. Consider, for example, the infamous Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions, where the justices could not distance themselves from their support for white supremacy.
Still, because the justices are not directly answerable to the electorate, it is an important part of their judicial function to avoid applying their personal values, to the extent possible, when they interpret the constitution.
The Third Myth. The Supreme Court simply makes up most of its constitutional decisions.
Reality. It’s much more complicated than that. Some constitutional provisions are very easy to apply because they are very specific. For example, the President must be a natural born citizen, over thirty-five years old and a resident of the United States for fourteen years.
Similarly, it is clear from the text of the Constitution that it is Congress that has legislative powers, it is the President who has executive powers and it is the Supreme Court that has judicial powers. There are many such examples.
In contrast, other provisions of the Constitution, because they are less clear inherently, necessarily require a fair amount of interpretation. What do freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, mean anyway? Does the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures apply to electronic surveillance, to the internet? The text of the Constitution and the history of these provisions provide no clear answers; obviously the Framers never thought of media such as radio and television, or about electronic surveillance and the internet.
So what does the Court do? The short answer is that the Court usually proceeds cautiously and develops the meaning of these and similar textual provisions on a case by case basis. Typically the justices focus on the values implicit in the constitutional provision they are interpreting. They then ask whether and how to apply those values in the new situation confronting them.
This is what some call judicial restraint, and what others call judicial activism.
Of course, it must be admitted that this gives the justices as individuals, and the Supreme Court as an institution, a good deal of interpretive latitude on such difficult questions. And it must also be admitted that this often generates a great deal of controversy.
However, controversy is one of the costs of being a citizen in a democracy with a Supreme Court that interprets the Constitution. And it is a cost I’m willing to acknowledge and bear. | <urn:uuid:8bebb42a-07e5-4fb0-bd2b-4d0d6b85be42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nahmodlaw.com/2012/12/06/know-your-constitution-3-myths-about-the-supreme-court/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945348 | 963 | 3.625 | 4 |
Find Needed Business Help Through SCORE Hawaii
By Keith Ogata | SCORE National Director and Secretary
What makes entrepreneurs special is the passion they have to pursue an idea and the courage to take enormous risks to turn that idea into a successful business.
But passion and courage alone do not translate into success. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs lack the experience and skills to successfully launch a new business or take over management of an existing one. Ask anyone who has started a business on their own and they will tell you it was the toughest thing they have ever done.
Grit and determination are great, but to start or run a business, you also need to know something about strategy, marketing, finance, operations, management and leadership.
And that’s not all. You need life skills and certain attributes as well.
Do you listen well? Can you collaborate with others? Can you prioritize and focus well? Are you well organized? Do you have tenacity? Can you rationally weigh risks? These are some of the skills every entrepreneur must have to succeed. The good news is you don’t have to develop these skills entirely on your own. SCORE is a national nonprofit organization known for being counselors to America’s small businesses. There are 13,000 former and current business owners and executives whose mission is to counsel and mentor entrepreneurs.
SCORE Hawaii has more than 50 business counselors who donate hundreds of hours mentoring island entrepreneurs in areas such as marketing, turnarounds, business planning and strategy, finance, accounting, retailing and manufacturing. They provide these needed services through confidential counseling sessions tailored to meet each entrepreneur’s needs.
And they do it for free. So if you need help getting your business up and running, reach out to SCORE Hawaii. Along with the free counseling services, SCORE Hawaii also offers – for a small fee – workshops on various subjects.
Entrepreneurs who work with SCORE’s business experts typically have one regret: “I wish I had heard about SCORE sooner.”
Call us at 547-2700 to set up an appointment, or visit our website at Hawaii.score.org. | <urn:uuid:1123068f-577e-462f-ab43-079b2b19eec4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.midweek.com/find-needed-business-help-through-score-hawaii/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960367 | 447 | 1.585938 | 2 |
A car in an amusement park ride rolls without friction around a circular track. It starts from rest at a point with height h above the bottom of the loop. The loop has a radius R. Treat the car as a particle. If h = 3.50R and R = 20.0 m, compute the speed, radial acceleration and tangential acceleration of the passengers when the car is at the end of a horizontal diameter. Show these acceleration components in a diagram, approximately to scale. | <urn:uuid:9be6ca52-1a16-4b26-a4f1-36c6f0e971b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/car-amusement-park-ride-rolls-friction-circular-track-starts-rest-point-height-h-loop-loop-q1705961 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90332 | 98 | 3.734375 | 4 |
Interview conducted and provided by the Biopresence Press Office. Part 1 Part 2
Q. The Common Flowers Project is on display as part of this year’s Ars Electronica, a Media Art Festival in Linz, Austria. How do you feel being part of that festival?
Georg Tremmel: It’s great to be invited to show the Common Flowers at such a prestigious festival. We are also very happy, that the project was awarded an ‘Honorary Mention’ in Hybrid Art Category.
Q. Your Project deals with genetically-modified blue carnations. Can you tell me a bit more about them?
GT. Yeah. We think, that the blue GM carnations are very relevant and very special flowers. As far as we know, they are the very first genetically-modified product, which is neither animal feed not human food. It is purely aimed for aesthetic consumption. We believe that this represents a shift in the perception of GM plants, and that’s why we found the highly interesting in the first place.
The plants themselves are the result of decade long research by Florigene, an australian plant biotech company, which was acquired by the japanese beverage company Suntory some year back. They managed to make a couple of varieties of the blue carnation, ranging from a very light blue hue, to some quite dark blue varieties. In addition to the gene for colour, they also introduced a gene that prolongs shelf-live. The last for about 3 weeks, which is quite long for cut-flowers.
Q. But would it be easier to colour the flower with inks? Wouldn’t that be much easier, that breeding a special variety?
Shiho Fukuhara: If you would only make a couple of flowers, the ink process you mentioned would be faster, but my guess would be, that on an industrial scale it would not really make sense to use ink colouring. Too much hassle, too expensive, and probably the flowers would also not last so long.
But once you manage to create a transgene plant, which looks and behaves to your desire, it is then quite easy to duplicate and breed that plant. Really the same as growing any other non-GM plant. And don’t forget, that the cut-flower business is a huge global logistic operation, just think of the flower auctions in the Netherlands. And Suntory figured, that introducing novel varieties could be very profitable. Very profitable indeed.
Q. There are other blue flowers. Why is it not possible to conventionally breed blue carnations?
SF. As far as I know, some flowers are missing some genes and pathway, and these missing bit prevent them from making blue pedals. Obvious carnation, but also roses don’t come in blue.
Q. So they managed to make the blue carnations, but isn’t it illegal to sell genetically modified products? Especially in Europe the public seems to be very sensitive about this issue?
GT. Well, they spent a lot of time, effort and probably money to conduct trials and experiments that proved that the flowers are harmless and pose no risk to animals, humans or other plants. They were granted permission to grow, sell and distribute the flowers in their key markets, including Japan, the EU and the US.
Therefore, the plant are 100% legal, despite being genetically modified.
Q. Is it known, which genes from which plants were used to change the carnation?
GT. I believe they used a gene from Petunia to express the blue colour. No idea, what they used for the extended shelf-life, but I guess this could be easily found out. All the information regarding the genetic-manipulation of plants is freely accessible.
Q. And with your “Common Flower” project you are growing the carnation yourself?
GT. Exactly. We buy the flowers from a flower shop, cut them in small pieces, sterilize them and grow the in sterile plant containers.
SF. One could say we are bringing the flowers back to life.
GT. Yeah. Kind of. Cut flowers are basically dying a slow death from the moment they are cut. But if they are kept cool and with enough water they can survive quite a while. At least some weeks to get to the show and to the buyers house.
Carnations also come with so-called axillary buds, that are little buds that grow between each leaf and the stem. These are the most promising part for re-animation.
Q. Sounds quite complicated. Surely you must have a biotech background and a lab to your disposal…
GT. Actually no and no. We neither have a biotech background not a lab. But we have a strong interest in learning and doing basic lab work. Although our lab is the kitchen and our clean-room is an inverted plastic box.
SF. For plant containers we use baby food jars. They are ideal…
GT. … Or sake cups. The “One Cup Oseki” is particularly nice. They have nature scenes printed on the backside of the label. So when our plant are growing they can perceive images of beautiful nature.
SF. Don’t be silly.
GT. And the protocols and lists of ingredients can be downloaded from our website. It’s quite easy to get all the necessary stuff, the most difficult parts are the plastic caps for the baby food jars. They are a bit special, but they are also super cheap, and once you buy them they last forever.
SF. It’s very important for use to share and communicate this technology. We want to learn it and pass it on. Ideally everyone with interest and a bit of time should be able to grow their own blue carnations.
Q. The project title is “Common Flowers – Flower Commons”. Can you tell me a bit more about the second part, about the “Flower Commons”. What is meant by that?
GT. Common Flowers refers to the process of taking ownership of the very ‘special flowers’ that are the GM blue carnations. The goal is somewhat to take them down from their pedestal and make them ordinary. Flower Commons is the next logical step. Once we have the flowers, we can obviously not keep them in the containers forever. We realized pretty soon, that Suntory actually did do the dirty and difficult work for us. They got the permission to grow them, they obtained the proof that the plants are harmless.
Therefore we decided to set the flowers free. We want to create feral population of genetically modified blue carnation. In fact we already created some Flower Commons in Japan, Germany and also Austria. We also made a nice map of the locations, but we decided to keep it hidden for a bit longer, and see how the public reacts to the project here at the Ars Electronica.
Watch out for Part 2 for more about Bio-Sharing, Bio-Hacking, the legal challenges and the meaning of “BCL”. | <urn:uuid:4f674d50-7334-4369-94ad-c1fd78bdc4bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bcl.biopresence.com/journal/tag/exhibition/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964037 | 1,470 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Using Mainframes is becoming more and more mainstream. The value-add of leveraging mainframes for quick deployment and lowering costs is becoming more of a standard practice. There are some great solutions for leveraging mainframes... sorry, corrupted sector in my brain, I meant Virtualization everywhere I said Mainframe.
Seriously, while we have come full circle in some peoples opinion, Virtualization is becoming a common technology in the data center for several reasons. You'll see value-add pitches for lowering your costs for hardware, space and power, shorter time for provisioning new/existing solutions, automated expansion and reduction of the technologies supporting a service, reducing the complexity of disaster recovery, and many more great use cases.
The idea is that you set up one of the technologies that represents the service or supports a service. One example is a fully configured Operating System with a web server and the underlying configuration (HTML, CSS, JSP, etc) that is required. Once you have verified the configuration to be accurate through ITIL processes/practices, the overall configuration can be captured as a Workload, Slice, VM, etc and saved off. One of the best practices is to store the workload within a version control system, for those on the ITIL bandwagon, the Workload should be placed in the Definitive Software Library. There are other needs such as ensuring that the Workloads have the proper monitoring/agents to report on health (I'd like to see the vendors get more creative in this area.. sounds like another blog).
For those who want to move to a more automated environment, with the proper monitoring tools in place, the Service can expand and contract automatically based on over/under usage. Tie together all of the management systems, tools, cmdb, change management, etc into a live service model with state propagation rules, thresholds to compare against and automated service adjustments and/or making adjustment via a point and click. In this case, the monitoring tool watches the CPU utilization, or session count (or some other KPI) and as the service usage increases, more workloads can be automatically provisioned to reduce the stress on the service and in turn provide a more predictive end user experience. The opposite holds true as well, when usage of the service has lowered to specific metrics, duplicate technologies supporting the service should be automatically de-provisioned to reduce heating and cooling costs. Automated Service provisioning is an ideal world, waiting for end users to complain about the performance via Help Desk after the fact is not good for IT or the Business.
There are some corporations that found that there is a clear lower cost associated to outages (revenue, personnel costs, etc) by spinning up a new Workload, pulling the failed Workload out of Service, slide in the newly powered up Workload and getting the Service back online as quick as possible. When the Service is restored, then start analyzing what the failure point was in a more offline capacity. Upon resolution, adjust any configurations, update the DSL (opps, DML), CMDB, etc.
In a dynamic environment, it becomes a requirement to have the proper tools to build, manage, secure and measure the workloads in order to keep IT agile, compliant and focused on the service offerings, aligning IT with the Business.
Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).
It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it. | <urn:uuid:2d0cb3f5-690a-40d7-9e4e-053b05b64f15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.novell.com/communities/de/node/11629 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945323 | 758 | 1.539063 | 2 |
We’ve seen strollers and car seats that have a steering wheel for the baby to play with (like in the opening of The Simpsons). But what we hadn’t seen is a stroller that allows baby to actually steer. You might think that a putting a motorized vehicle in the hands of someone so young is an accident waiting to happen. But [Xandon Frogget] thought of that and used familiar hardware to add some safety features.
The stroller seen above is a tricycle setup, making it quite easy to add motors to the two rear wheels. These are controlled by a tablet which you can see nestled on the canopy of the stroller (look for the light reflected on the glass). This interfaces with two Kinect sensors, one pointing forward and the other pointing back. They continually scan the environment, looking for obstacles in the stroller’s path. You can see [Xandon's] little girl holding a Wii Wheel, which connects with the tablet to facilitate steering. A test run at the playground is embedded after the break. | <urn:uuid:f679a8f9-09f9-4b26-ab1e-14e97f40f96c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hackaday.com/2012/11/12/robot-stroller-lets-baby-steer-without-mowing-down-other-toddlers/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=178c498074 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945728 | 218 | 2.8125 | 3 |
which statement describes a type of plagiarism.
If $700 is borrowed at 8% interest, find the amounts due at the end of 2 years if the interest is compounded as follows. i know how to solve this problem but i don't know what to plug in for n in the formula for finding the amount quarterly and hourly. plz help
math plz help
please can someone help me do this problem. atleast help me find an equation to start with thank you. each page in a children's picture book has area 58 squared inches and a left side margin of 1.5 inches and top,bottom and right side margins of 0.5 inches. Find the dimens...
Plz Explain how to use a graphing calculator to solve the equation: x(x^2+2)=15. Then state the solution rounded to 2 decimal places.
algebra2 plzz help
how do you solve these problems (5x)to the power of a+4(5x)to the power of a-2 3 to the power of 5 times xto the power of y+4 divided by 9 times x to the power of y factor 5aa-2 , which is the greatest common factor, out. 5aa-2(25x2 + 4) check my thinking. In the second, mulip...
in 1979, the death rate,D, from acute myocardial infarction for people between the ages of 65 and 74 years was 577 per 100,000 people. In 1996, the rate was 262 deaths per 100,000 people. Round to one decimal place in part a. write sentences for your answer in part b and c. a....
determine if the following lines are parallel, perpendicular or neither. Explain your reasoning. -2x+3y=3 2x+3y=3 Rewrite them in y = mx + b form to get the slopes, m. The lines are parallel of the slopes are the same. They are perpendicular if the product of the slopes is -1 ...
How do mirrors affect the way a plant grows? Mirror, Mirror on the wall See how I grow green and tall. Answer me this question puzzling Nepal Who is the most beautiful plant of all? I guess it will depend on what you use the mirrors for. If it is collecting light, then it will...
For Further Reading | <urn:uuid:4130fe6d-0378-42ac-b80e-e0c265b608d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jiskha.com/members/profile/posts.cgi?name=britteny | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913686 | 492 | 2.421875 | 2 |
The Energy Recovery Council's settlement with EPA was finalized today as part of a final rule revising the Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rule. Today's action codifies the settlement reached by ERC and EPA in July of this year. Today's action is significant since the relief afforded by the settlement could not take effect until EPA solicited public comments on this settlement (and settlements reached with other industries) and issued a final rule. The final rule had to be issued prior to January 1, 2011 or the facilities that will now benefit from the settlement would have been out of compliance with the original rule on January 1.
Under the original mandatory reporting rule, municipal waste combustor units greater than 250 tons per day were required to calculate and report greenhouse gas emissions using a burdensome Tier 4 methodology. The settlement provides relief for municipal waste combustor units which have a maximum rated input capacity less than 600 tons per day of MSW. Essentially, under the final rule, any units between 250 and 600 tons per day have been granted a reprieve and may now use the Tier 2 methodology to calculate and report greenhouse gases to EPA.
The settlment also clarifies that waste-to-energy facilities may utilize site-specific default moisture values if CO2 concentrations are measured on a dry basis. The signed copy of the rule can be found here. It will be published in the Federal Register shortly. | <urn:uuid:11b04b14-7f08-4902-9d7f-fdb179c28db7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.energyrecoverycouncil.org/erc-settlement-ghg-mandatory-reporting-rule-a3046 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964245 | 279 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Looking for the missing lynx
by Allen BestEAGLE COUNTY, Colo. - Already the nation's largest ski area, Vail may soon be even bigger. In September, the U.S. Forest Service approved a 4,000-acre expansion that has been in the works for a decade. If the decision holds and Eagle County approves the expansion, the resort will clear over 800 acres of new runs, an increase of nearly 25 percent.
But what is good for business may be bad for the lynx, a wild cat that has all but disappeared from Colorado. The reasons for the lynx's decline aren't know for certain, though environmentalists suspect trapping (prior to the 1971 ban) and development in the state's high-elevation forests. The federal government has dragged its heels on protecting the cat, they say, while second homes and ski runs eat away its remaining habitat.
"Are we humans so important that we can wipe out species just to make ourselves comfortable, just so we can have more ski terrain, just so we have more housing for millionaires?" asks Rocky Smith of the Colorado Environmental Coalition.
The lynx, a large-pawed cousin of the bobcat, is faring better in the Northern Rockies, where large tracts of high-elevation forests remain in Montana's Glacier National Park and Bob Marshall Wilderness. But in Colorado, no one has seen a lynx since 1974.
The elusive cat may remain in the state, however. In 1989, wildlife researchers verified lynx paw prints in an area known as "Super Bowl," which is part of the proposed Vail expansion. That and other evidence of lynx in the area causes some to believe that it may represent the best hope for the cat in the state.
The Forest Service contends it's wrong to conclude that ski area development will be harmful to lynx. Far more effort has gone into searching for the cats around Vail than anyplace else in the state, says the agency's Loren Kroenke. "I don't think we know enough to say this is the hot spot of lynx activity."
"It's OK lynx habitat," says Vail planner Tom Allender. "There is no great lynx habitat in Colorado." But even Vail's wildlife consultant, Rick Thompson, acknowledges the cat is a mystery. "We don't know squat about lynx in Colorado," he wrote in a letter to the Forest Service last year.
That's the problem, says Jasper Carlton, director of the Boulder-based Biodiversity Legal Foundation. One of the few things we know for sure is that the lynx is disappearing, he says, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hesitates to protect the cat because of pressure from politicians and the timber and recreation industries.
In 1995, Carlton petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the cat as an endangered species. Against the advice of biologists, the agency rejected the petition, arguing that lynx populations were healthy in the northern U.S. (HCN, 6/12/95). Carlton took the agency to court over the issue, and won. In May, the agency ruled that the cat was "warranted" for listing; then it held off, saying funds were low and other species in more immediate danger.
"They say you can't show any imminent threats to the lynx," says Carlton. "I say you can't show me any lynx. So every car that goes by is a threat to the lynx, every single action is a threat."
In September, Carlton joined Defenders of Wildlife and 15 other groups in a lawsuit aimed at forcing Fish and Wildlife to give the lynx emergency listing, protecting it under the Endangered Species Act. In October, he joined environmental groups in appealing the Forest Service's approval of the Vail expansion.
Keeping the feds out
Meanwhile, the state of Colorado hopes to keep the lynx off the endangered species list by importing lynx from Canada and protecting cat habitat.
"We think there are lynx remaining in Colorado. We just don't believe there're enough of them to have a sufficient sustaining population," says John Seidel, who is writing the state's conservation plan. Leaving the cat in the hands of the state "is better for us, and it's better for the lynx," he says. "This is a native species, and it's a state's-rights issue."
Seidel hopes to finish the plan by Dec. 1, then spend the winter sweeping Colorado's high-elevation conifer forests for tracks of snowshoe hares - the lynx's main food. Areas with lots of hares will be the best spots to transplant lynx, he says. He hopes that the first 100 lynx can be transplanted from Alaska or Canada in the winter of 1998-99.
By studying these radio-collared transplants, says state biologist Gene Byrne, "maybe we can do some scientific, sound evaluation of lynx at this habitat and how we would best protect lynx in this state."
But Jasper Carlton sees the state's plan as a fraud. If state and federal agencies are serious about saving the lynx, they'll have to set aside large areas of land, he says; the Forest Service's approval of the Vail ski expansion is the latest indication that they don't have the gumption to do so.
Asks Carlton, "If we can't defend the lynx, this fascinating wild cat that doesn't eat children, that doesn't eat cattle, that doesn't predate on sheep - if we can't defend and bring back a magnificent wild cat like the lynx, can we bring anything back?"
* Allen Best
Allen Best writes from Eagle County, Colorado.
You can ...
* Contact acting district ranger Loren Kroenke with the U.S. Forest Service, P.O. Box 190, Minturn, CO 81645 (970/827-5715);
* Contact Eagle County commissioners, Eagle County Building, P.O. Box 850, Eagle, CO 81631 (970/328-8605);
* Contact Tom Allender with Vail Associates, P.O. Box 7, Vail, CO 81658 (970/476-5601); or
* Contact Jasper Carlton with the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, P.O. Box 18327, Boulder, CO 80308-1327.
© High Country News | <urn:uuid:52c2a13b-519f-487a-8070-d14bee221145> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hcn.org/issues/119/3805/print_view | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948952 | 1,332 | 2.328125 | 2 |
In the analysis of RNA and especially when regarding the secondary structure it is often required to take also suboptimal structures into account. As the number of suboptimal structures is very large and even the number of near-optimal structures grows rapidly with sequence length, these kind of analyses are quite expensive. One property of suboptimal structures is that they often only differ in a few base pairs, while maintaining the same overall shape. These are less interesting because in most cases one is interested in those structures that are rather dissimilar, meaning those having a different shape. RNAshapes is an approach to the direct folding of only those structures having a different shape. | <urn:uuid:4ea56519-5aba-4fb3-ac65-35af85dc1d5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ags/pi/pages/rnashapes.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973966 | 133 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Research conducted by the state of California’s Select Committee on Status of Boys and Men of Color presented an action plan Wednesday in the capital city of Sacramento, which aimed to introduce policies to assist young boys and men of color in the state. According to a report drafted by the legislative committee, research and data was compiled over a year and a half that focused on why California’s minority youth were less healthy, testing lower in school, and heading to prison at alarming rates.
Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, D-Alameda, leads the Select Committee and introduced more than 50 pages of policy and recommendations to a bipartisan panel in a hearing held yesterday. The report also highlights 19 bills, eight of which are focused on cutting down on the record number of expulsions and suspension that Swanson and the Committee feel affects students of color disproportionately.
California averages 800,000 such infractions a year, with more than half of the occurrences being non-violent. As much as 36 percent of young Black men without a diploma in the state are more likely to be in prison versus being employed. Forty percent of young Latino men are more likely to end up in prison when compared to their White counterparts.
One of the more harrowing details of the report was a segment that noted that Black kindergartner students are three times more likely to view themselves as scholastic failures when compared to their fellow White students. | <urn:uuid:2ea39d8d-6c5b-47b5-8e2e-9daea65c1535> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kysdc.com/2839677/committee-creates-plan-to-keep-black-latino-youths-from-prison/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968624 | 283 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Truth be told, the list of those in medicine who praised whey goes on and on. They include: Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), also known as the “English Hippocrates;” Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), a famous Dutch physician; Victor Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), a Swiss biologist who is considered the father of neurology; Wilhelm Hufeland (1762-1836), a German physician who noted ways to prolong life by adopting healthier habits—to name just a few.
But what’s so special about whey, and why is it so valuable to health even today—24 centuries later?
As mentioned earlier, during the making of cheese, milk coagulates and forms a hard part called casein and a liquid part called whey, which is a transparent and golden in color. In spite of its French name petit-lait, meaning “little milk,” whey is anything but diminutive—especially when it comes to its health benefits.
For instance, whey positively affects the intestines, liver and kidneys in multiplied ways. According to Christopher Vasey, N.D., author of The Whey Prescription: The Healing Miracle in Milk, here are some primary areas in which whey works wonders: intestinal peristalsis, intestinal flora regeneration, the elimination of excess water from tissues due its potassium content, and in eliminating toxins—and general cleansing—by the kidneys.
Additionally, whey is cited as supporting a healthy bladder, blood sugar balance, energy levels, cardiovascular health, healthy blood pressure, healthy joints, skin, muscles and liver; weight management and much more.
Now, that’s a lot of golden benefits.
Not only does whey boast numerous health benefits, it also provides body-friendly protein and much more—but let’s start with whey’s protein profile. Although whey has a small amount of protein in it, don’t be fooled. The proteins it has are of high biologic value because it delivers all eight of the essential amino acids—those the body can’t make. The protein in whey is also easy on the body as far as breaking it down for use.
All proteins, of course, need to be broken down for the body to use—which can often put strain on the kidneys and skin to eliminate unhealthy by-products of the breakdown of proteins. Whey, however, has what’s termed “a high utilization coefficient” of proteins, meaning that it is more “body ready” than many proteins. In other words, whey offers body-friendly proteins.
Likewise, the sugar in whey is lactose, which is easy for the body to metabolize and to use for energy. It also serves the digestive system well because lactose turns into lactic acid by the bacteria in the intestines. It also encourages the assimilation of calcium, phosphorous, potassium and magnesium because the lactic acid makes these minerals soluble at the intestinal level—making those valuable minerals easier for the body to absorb and utilize. Whey is also rich in potassium as well as many vitamins.
One last point: in order to get these golden benefits, whey needs to be in its purest, healthiest form possible—unlike most of the whey out there that’s been made almost unrecognizable and biologically inactive due to being overly processed and adulterated. | <urn:uuid:e5b0a7b7-c049-4e58-8616-e70503fa935d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beyondorganicinsider.com/2012/06/whey-golden-color-golden-benefits.html | 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 | 0.950583 | 729 | 2.921875 | 3 |
I was awake and could feel everything - but I was paralysed and couldn't speak. 'Pass the scalpel', said the surgeon ...
By ANNA HODGEKISS
Last updated at 16:33 08 April 2008
Diane Parr could only listen in horror as she heard the surgeon asking for the scalpel.
She was lying on an operating table for a tooth extraction due to an abscess ? a procedure she'd been assured was routine.
Minutes before, the anaesthetist had administered something into a tube in the back of her hand and she felt a woozy, relaxed feeling wash over her.
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Terror: Diane Parr was in such pain, she thought she might suffer a heart attack
She began to count backwards from ten, as instructed, but as she was wheeled into theatre, she realised she could feel the trolley judder beneath her and hear the voices of the theatre staff.
"I thought they were being rude and ignoring me," recalls Diane, 44.
"Then I heard the surgeon approach the table and ask the nurse for a metal clamp to keep my mouth open."
She screamed ? but paralysed by muscle-relaxing drugs, she made no sound.
"I could feel the surgeon leaning over me and push down on my body before pulling up.
"It felt as if my tooth was coming out of my foot, not my mouth. A searing pain shot up my body.
"'It's a toughie', I heard him exclaim.
"I thought I was going to die ? not because of the pain, but the fear. I thought I was going to have a heart attack."
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Under the knife: Some 2,000 people a year are operated on while under the effects of anaesthesia awareness in Britain
At this point, the surgeon realised Diane's tooth was cracked and coming out in pieces.
"That was when he asked for the scalpel."
As it cut into her gum, Diane passed out with shock. "The next thing I remember is my mouth being stitched up. It was hideous."
It's a story many of us would dismiss as urban myth ? an anaesthetic dose being miscalculated so a patient wakes up during surgery or, like Diane, fails to fall asleep at all - but it happens to up to 2,000 patients in the UK every year.
Known as anaesthesia awareness, this terrifying phenomenon is the subject of a new Hollywood film, called Awake, to be released next month.
In the film, a character played by Hayden Christensen wakes up during an operation as the surgeon is about to cut open his chest. He can feel everything, but cannot move or speak.
Anaesthesia awareness usually occurs when muscle-relaxing drugs are used, rendering the patient paralysed. It is estimated that these are used in 10 per cent of operations.
"Anaesthesia awareness has caused some of the most severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder I have seen," says Professor Michael Wang, a clinical psychologist at the University of Leicester.
He says it doesn't matter whether the operation is a major or minor one.
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Fiction: But new movie Awake tells a story which is all too real for thousands of patients
Diane, who lives in St Teath, Cornwall, with her husband, Tim, and daughter, Dawn, 22, says the experience has "ruined" her life.
"I changed from an outgoing, laidback person into a woman angry with the whole world," she says.
"I couldn't work, I lost friends, and it nearly cost me my marriage."
Six years ago, while living in the North of England, Diane was admitted to Hull Royal Infirmary to have two teeth extracted under general anaesthetic.
"I had absolutely no reservations about the anaesthetic," says Diane, a children's party entertainer.
"This was simply a 20-minute procedure to take out a couple of teeth."
In the theatre prep room, the anaesthetist put a cannula tube in the back of her hand and told her to count backwards.
But it later emerged that he administered only a dose of atracurium ? a commonly used muscle relaxant. This was because her mouth needed to be clamped open to extract her teeth.
"I began to feel floaty, but then I was aware of being wheeled into theatre.
"I thought 'I'm not asleep', but at the same time I couldn't move.
"I also couldn't see ? I think my eyes had been taped with plasters."
The anaesthetist had assumed, wrongly, that because it was a dental operation, the surgeon would apply a local anaesthetic to the mouth.
The surgeon, however, had assumed that Diane had already been given a full general anaesthetic.
After 37 minutes, the operation ended and Diane was given another injection to reverse the relaxant.
"I shot up, desperate to get the ventilator tube out of my throat.
"The theatre staff watched in horror. Then shock kicked in and I began to sob.
"One of the nurses screamed 'Oh, my God, she was awake!', to which I replied: 'Of course I was awake ? the whole bloody time!' The anaesthetist ran out of the room."
What is worrying is that had observations of Diane's pulse and blood pressure been done during the operation ? in accordance with the Royal College of Anaesthetists' guidelines ? staff would have realised what was going on.
A hospital inquiry found the anaesthetist negligent and in 2002, Diane received a £15,000 out-of-court settlement.
Back home, Diane struggled to get over her ordeal. "I would lie in bed, reliving the event over and over.
"My daughter left home, and my work and marriage suffered terribly.
"In the end, I thought it would be better for everyone if I drove my car into a wall."
Professor Wang ? who counselled Diane for months after her ordeal ? estimates between 50 and 80 per cent of patients who are awake during surgery suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. It is, he says, similar to being tortured.
Around six million general anaesthetics are administered in the UK each year.
According to the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCA), between one and two people in 1,000 experience some degree of anaesthetic awareness.
"Anaesthesia is a scientific balancing act," says Dr Keith Myerson, an RCA spokesman and a consultant anaesthetist.
"You have to try to ensure pain relief and loss of consciousness while minimising the side-effects of the drugs, such as a reduced supply of oxygen to the blood and the brain.
"But anaesthetists are highly skilled and while incidents of awareness do happen, they are extremely rare."
One solution is a brain monitor, which measures electrical signals and can identify when a patient is in distress. It is already used in some UK hospitals for high-risk patients.
Another option is "isolated forearm" technique. A tourniquet-style band is placed around one arm, cutting off the blood supply from the rest of the body. This means it isn't affected by the muscle relaxant and enables the patient to move their fingers if they're still awake.
Professor Wang is calling for the forearm technique to be used routinely, but the RCA is more reserved, stating that patients are constantly monitored during surgery and an anaesthetist will be able to spot a patient in distress.
In 2006, Diane had to undergo another general anaesthetic to remove lumps in her breasts.
"I was terrified," she says, but the forearm technique was used and the operation was without incident.
"The college says that if patients are monitored, then there's no need for things like the forearm technique, but why shouldn't there be an extra safety net?
"I'm convinced the reason some people don't survive surgery is because they're awake during it ? but they never live to tell the tale."
■ AWAKE is released nationwide on April 4. For more information about anaesthetics, visit www.rcoa.ac.uk.
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Israel Closes Airspace, Border Crossings for Yom Kippur
As part of the Jewish nation's preparations for the holy Day of Atonement, Israel will close its borders for the holiday of Yom Kippur.
The Israel Airport Authority announced Thursday that Ben Gurion International Airport will close its airspace to all air traffic on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday, Friday October 7, at 12:50 p.m. At that time, all aircraft movements at Ben Gurion International Airport will officially cease, IAA said in a statement.
Currently Israel's sole international airport, Ben Gurion will reopen for international arrivals at 9:30 p.m. Saturday night, about four hours after the end of the holiday. Departures from the airport will commence an hour later, starting at 10:30 p.m.
Passenger traffic at the airport Friday is expected to be heavy, with some 21,944 passengers traveling on 151 flights. At the end of the holiday, another 2,830 passengers are scheduled on 17 flights. It has been a record-breaking summer for travel through the airport, and the Tourism Ministry has predicted similar figures for the fall season as well.
Tel Aviv's Sde Dov airport and Eilat's Ovdat airport will both be closed at 1:00 p.m. Friday as well. The final arrival time at Eilat's airport scheduled at 12:15 p.m. Friday, with the facility reopening after Yom Kippur at 9:30 p.m. Saturday night.
Haifa's local airport will also be closed on the eve of Yom Kippur, at 2:00 p.m. Friday. It will reopen after the holiday at 9:00 p.m. Saturday night.
All cargo terminals (including the ones at Nitzana, Ashdod and Haifa) and border crossings in and out of the country will close for the holiday as well.
The Allenby Bridge terminal will close at 11:00 a.m., and the Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan River crossings will close at 12:00 noon on Friday.
As usual, the crossings into Gaza, Judea and Samaria will also be closed until the end of the holiday. | <urn:uuid:9ea96d11-3cf2-47ad-b001-eceadd489c1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/148546 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946429 | 470 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Web hosting service allows corporations or individuals to make their websites accessible to the masses through the World Wide Web. A web host is a company that provides a particular portion of the space on its private or lease server to be used by the clients. It also typically provides internet connectivity in the form of data center. Generally, a web host provides a wide range of services including small-scale personal file hosting to a giant business-scale websites. There are several types of services for web hosting available, including:
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This type of web hosting offers very limited features and options and is mostly supported by advertisements. This service is ideal for personal, non-commercial websites.
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In this service, one server is used by more than one websites. One server can be used for up to hundreds of thousands of websites. Usually, the domains share the shame pool of server resources such as the RAM and the CPU. Shared hosting service generally provides extensive features and may be hosted with a reseller.
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With this kind of service, the clients can be the host of their own websites by affiliating to the reseller. Resellers probably have their very own personal virtual dedicated server to a colocated server.
4. Virtual dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (vps)
This server divides the server resources into virtual servers. A Virtual Private Server is made for some reason such as in order to be able to move a vps container between servers. Although high in portability, users still hold the root access to their own virtual space. Often they are also having the responsibility for the server maintenance and patching.
5. dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting service allows a client to have his or her own web server. The user also has full control of it by gaining root access for Linux operating system or administrator access for Windows operating system. Nevertheless, commonly the client does not own the server.
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Although clients are able to manage their data through FTP, they are not given the access to Linux or Windows administrators. By not allowing the clients to modify the server, the provider can guarantee the quality of the web service. Server is also leased to the client in this service.
7. colocation web hosting
This service is almost the same as dedicated hosting service, except that the user owns the colocated server. Hosting company provides server space for the client and maintains the server as well. This type is the most effective hosting service yet the most expensive of all types.
Web hosting providers offer a wide range of hosting services including high hosting. Get more info about hosting a website from our page. | <urn:uuid:f73f252a-fdeb-4518-897e-9973f48ca24c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seothai.in.th/7-types-of-web-hosting-services/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945479 | 546 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia
On-line version ISSN 1806-4841
PIMENTEL, Eugênio Raul de Almeida; OLIVEIRA, Juliana Pedroso de; BLOCH, Leila David and NIWA, Anne Beatriz Mautari. Risk of complications during dermatologic surgery: protocol for excisional surgery. An. Bras. Dermatol. [online]. 2005, vol.80, n.5, pp. 493-498. ISSN 1806-4841. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0365-05962005000600007.
BACKGROUND: Dermatologic surgery is a common daily practice for dermatologists and it is necessary to carry out studies to demonstrate safety of these procedures. OBJECTIVES: To create a protocol to assess risk of complications during and immediately after dermatologic surgery, mainly in patients with comorbid conditions. METHODS: From January 2001 to November 2003, 860 excisional surgeries were performed and all procedures were recorded according to the following variables: age and sex, type of excised lesion, comorbidity, use of medications, size of elliptical excision, duration of surgery, amount and type of anesthetic used, blood pressure. The variables were correlated with risk of complications. RESULTS: Out of 860 patients submitted to surgery, 64.6% did not present any complication, 34.6% had high blood pressure with no clinical significance, 0.5% had major but controllable bleeding, and two patients had hypotension. CONCLUSION: Dermatologic surgery is safe and may be performed in private offices or outpatient clinics, and, in most cases, they consist of small and quick procedures, with low risk of complications.
Keywords : Intraoperative complications; Blood pressure; Outpatient surgical procedures. | <urn:uuid:829417c5-c780-4416-b290-61ffd5455479> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0365-05962005000600007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917667 | 398 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The objective of a DDIP report is to examine developing countries´ and LDCs´ policy, legal and institutional framework for IPRs, particularly as it relates to important development objectives such as innovation, technology, FDI, competition and health. In addition, a DDIP report will take into consideration the bilateral, regional and international commitments the target countries have entered into and the flexibilities available to them.
Based on this analysis, the reports will incorporate medium to long-term recommendations on how governments and other stakeholders could make these frameworks more coherent and transparent, with a view to making IPRs contribute to a country´s sustainable economic and human development goals, and respond to emerging global opportunities.
The aim will be to present an analysis and recommendations designed to promote innovation and technology transfer from abroad, as well as a pro-competitive and transparent domestic IP system. The DDIPs will take due account of the importance of maintaining an appropriate public domain and the means to pursue important public interest objectives.
A DDIP will not be limited to a legal analysis but will also examine, through fact finding missions and interviews with stakeholders, the domestic circumstances that are affected by the extent of dissemination of knowledge which are the subject of IPRs. | <urn:uuid:5935ee72-cdcc-4205-b1d1-b7fd51c1211f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://unctad.org/es/paginas/DIAE/Intellectual%20Property/UNCTAD-ICTSD-Reports-Development-Dimension-of-Intellectual-Property.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947482 | 250 | 2.09375 | 2 |
THE HISTORY OF SCIENTOLOGYS EXPANSION
OT III Released
On September 20, 1967, in a particularly important recorded message, Mr. Hubbard announced that he had discovered the means to eradicate those spiritual factors which stand in the way of peace and tolerance for mankind.
Further growth followed, with 104 organizations, missions and field groups in twelve countries around the world. All told, Scientologists were now ministering some 50,000 auditing hours per year. By the end of 1967 there were also over 500 Clears.
To provide Scientologists with the fruits of Mr. Hubbards upper-level research, 1968 saw Sea Organization teams establish Advanced Organizations in Edinburgh, Scotland and Los Angeles, as well as an American Saint Hill Organization in Los Angeles.
The year 1968 additionally signaled a significant boom in churches around the world. For instance, hundreds of students could be found in the Academy during any given course period. Likewise, San Franciscos newly formed Church of Scientology, with 23 staff members, reported large numbers of students on course, as did Detroit, Toronto and London. More than 400 Scientologists convened at a Saint Hill graduation to hear those who had recently completed the OT levels and the one-thousandth Clear attested in March. A broader look at statistics revealed 15,000 professional auditors, and by this time some 3,000,000 people had purchased Scientology books or services from 37 official Scientology churches worldwide.
As Scientologists continued to reach deeper and deeper into society, however, they increasingly came face to face with societys problems in particular, drug abuse which had risen to epidemic proportions by 1968. To help reverse the trend, Mr. Hubbard began a comprehensive research program to search out a means to alleviate not only the effects of drug abuse but also the causes. This work led to the first Drug Rundown in 1968, allowing still more individuals to ascend the Bridge.
More statistical facts about Scientology | <urn:uuid:913cd8b8-1ba4-4a25-96da-16ca97095bf9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part11/Chp33/pg0592.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957565 | 392 | 2.65625 | 3 |
The White House had invited Rev. Louie Giglio, an Evangelical pastor of the Passion City Church, in Atlanta, to lead the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration. However, once Rev. Louis Giglio’s past anti-gay sermon surfaced, the White House has decided that he is not the right person to be praying for a blessing on the people of the United States.
2012 saw a new generation of religious voices speaking for LGBT equality. Some are new, and some have been around for a while. All of them have helped to change the religious landscape concerning LGBT people.
Over the coming days and weeks, pundits will be exploring what the 2012 election meant. One thing that is certain, the election demonstrated the days of LGBT people being invisible, or worse, a wedge issue, are over.
This week, former Camp Winton Program Director Alex Hayes and 22-year-old gay Eagle Scout Tim Griffin delivered more than 70,000 signatures to the Golden Empire Boy Scouts Council urging the council to reinstate Griffin and reject the Boy Scouts' policy banning gay scouts and leaders.
As pressure grows for the Boy Scouts to end their ban on gay scouts and leaders, a spokesperson for President Obama announced that the President opposes the Boy Scouts of America's policy of discrimination, joining Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. | <urn:uuid:2b3d930f-0150-4d92-b604-a7ef2c87c349> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glaad.org/tags/president-barack-obama | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958 | 270 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Governor Chris Christie Announces State-FEMA Damage Assessments to Begin Monday
Trenton, NJ –
- Friday, November 4, 2011
- Tags: Other
Today the Christie Administration announced that the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management (OEM), in coordination with FEMA and county emergency management partners, will begin Joint Preliminary Damage Assessments (PDA’s) on Monday to assess damages from the October 29th storm. The conditions of the storm led Governor Christie to declare a state of emergency for the entire state on the day of the storm. Joint PDA’s will be conducted starting in Bergen, Essex, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic, Somerset, Union, Sussex, and Warren Counties.
The PDA process is used to determine the impact and magnitude of damage caused by a disaster. It summarizes resulting needs of individuals, businesses, the public sector, and the community as a whole. Collecting, evaluating, and documenting damages through joint assessments are the critical first steps in the process for obtaining federal assistance for impacted New Jerseyans and governments.
“In many areas of the state, the damage caused by the storm on Halloween weekend was worse than Irene. High winds, rain, snow, and mixed freezing precipitation, along with coastal, stream and river flooding and downed trees and power lines, led to the loss of power for 750,000 utility customers and damage around the state,” said Governor Christie. “Beginning Monday, county, state and federal emergency management officials will start the process of assessing that damage and determining if the appropriate thresholds are met to seek federal relief for New Jersey residents and their governments.”
The Joint PDA Teams are comprised of personnel from OEM, FEMA, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and county and local emergency management agencies. The teams will review the types of damage or emergency costs incurred by the State and the impact to critical facilities and infrastructure, including: roads, bridges, public utilities, hospitals, schools, and fire and police departments. The team will also assess the impact on individuals and businesses, including the extent of the damage, the number of people displaced, and the threat to health and safety caused by the incident. Additional data from the Red Cross or other local voluntary agencies may also be reviewed. During the assessment, the team will document eligible estimates of the expenses and damages.
PDAs are the first step in determining whether the disaster is of such severity and impact that it is beyond the capabilities of the State and the affected local governments, and that Federal assistance is necessary. The PDA is typically used as a basis for a State Governor's Request for a Major Disaster and it shows the cost of response efforts, such as emergency personnel overtime, other emergency services, and damage to public and private property that is beyond State and local recovery capabilities. The President considers the PDA a principal factor in making a determination whether to declare a Major Disaster in response to the Governor's request.
All residents and businesses that have experienced damage to their property as a result of the storm are advised to contact their insurance company and open a claim for damages. All municipal and county officials should continue to work with their respective offices of emergency management and gather data/damage reports to be forwarded to the State for review. Persons with unmet needs should contact 2-1-1, New Jersey’s Helpline.
For more information regarding disaster recovery and the PDA process please access the following web resources:
NJ 2-1-1 Call Center: Call 2-1-1 or click www.nj211.org
; Free 24-hour statewide service - putting people in need of assistance, in-touch with people who can help.
Disaster Related Stress: NJ Disaster Mental Health Helpline - Emotional support for people affected by disasters or other overwhelming events is available by calling New Jersey MentalHealthCares' Disaster Mental Health Helpline toll free at (877) 294-HELP (4357), where experienced crisis counselors can be reached. A TTY line is also available at (877) 294-4356.
FEMA Background Information: www.fema.gov
Disaster Declaration Process: http://www.fema.gov/hazard/dproc.shtm
Individual Assistance Info: http://www.fema.gov/assistance/process/individual_assistance.shtm
Public Assistance Info: http://www.fema.gov/government/grant/pa/index.shtm | <urn:uuid:5a08cda1-f7a2-437b-a6ac-1bf4c99ae8de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.state.nj.us/governor/news/news/552011/approved/20111104b.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927643 | 932 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Quit Smoking: A Guide
Thinking about quitting, preparing to quit, quitting and staying quit.
Think about why you want to quit. Decide for sure that you want to quit. Promise yourself that you'll do it. It's OK to have mixed feelings. Don't let that stop you. There will be times every day that you don't feel like quitting. You will have to stick with it anyway.
Find reasons to quit that are important to you. Think of more than just health reasons. For example, think of:
Write down all the reasons why you want to quit. List ways to fight the urge to smoke, too. (You will find tips for coping later in this guide.) Keep your list where you'll see it often. Good places are:
When you reach for a cigarette you'll find your list. It will remind you why you want to stop.
Your body gets more than nicotine when you smoke.
There are more than 4,000 chemicals in cigarette smoke. Some of them are also in wood varnish, the insect poison DDT, arsenic, nail polish remover, and rat poison.
The ashes, tar, gases, and other poisons in cigarettes harm your body over time. They damage your heart and lungs. They also make it harder for you to taste and smell things, and fight infections.
Here are some examples of reasons to quit:
Smoking's impact on others
Even a little second-hand smoke is dangerous.
Second-hand smoke can cause cancer in non-smokers. It can also cause breathing problems and heart disease. People who breathe second-hand smoke get colds and flu more easily. And they often die younger than those who don't breathe it.
Pregnant women who breathe second-hand smoke have many risks:
Get the latest health and medical information delivered direct to your inbox FREE! | <urn:uuid:23e1d477-1fdd-4e54-a8ae-f3afb774fddd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52853 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96037 | 388 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Complete Guide To Investment Companies, Funds And REITs
Mutual Funds Versus ETFs - Other Considerations
ETFs continue their innovation, offering active management and funds of funds (an ETF pursuing a strategy by investing in other ETFs). Some go further out along the risk continuum with the advent of synthetic ETFs, for which return comes from a swap rather than an index, ETNs (exchange traded notes), which hold fixed income, and ETVs (exchange traded vehicle), which are similar to ETNs but issued through a special purpose vehicle to gain access to more opaque markets; here counterparty risk exists. Finally, there are leveraged ETFs and inverse ETFs that track the opposite performance of an index, effectively making a directional bet. The aforementioned suite of products is best reserved for the more sophisticated risk-aware investor.
comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:259725cd-8fe7-4174-a2e2-7ece8c6d83ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.investopedia.com/walkthrough/fund-guide/mutual-funds-etfs/which-is-better/other-considerations.aspx | 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 | 0.942108 | 177 | 1.695313 | 2 |
- About the VMC
- Pet Owners
- Farm Animal Owners
- Horse Owners
- Clinical Trials Office
Things to consider about feeding management include when, where, and how to feed pets. Pet can be fed on many schedules, from once a day to continuously (ad libitum), based on lifestage, conditions and owner wishes. Dogs naturally eat a smaller number of meals per day than do cats, who may kill and eat prey 10-20 times in 24 hours to meet their needs in the wild. Basically, whatever frequency accommodates the owner’s schedule and permits the pet to remain in a moderate body condition can work. One also can vary the amount of food offered at each meal. For example, an owner can feed a smaller meal in the morning before leaving for work if the pet is to be kenneled to avoid kennel soiling, followed by a larger meal later in the day when the pet can be released to relieve itself.
Feeding location is another consideration, especially for cats. Domestic cats are a prey, as well as a predator, species, so they are at their most vulnerable when eating, drinking, or eliminating. If frightened while engaged in these activities, they may avoid these resource locations later. To avoid this, place food resources away from machinery that can start up unexpectedly or areas where the cat may be startled or trapped.
While pets traditionally have been fed from bowls, the current “captive” or “zoo” animal status of the many pets confined to the indoors or restricted outdoor areas has led to consideration of using food puzzles. A food puzzle is any object containing food that requires the pet to work to find a way to obtain the food. Food puzzles are intrinsically rewarding objects that stimulate pets’ mental and physical activity, which can benefit both health and welfare. Food puzzles can contain part or all of the pet’s daily food; either frozen canned food that slowly melts and becomes available or dry food may be used. Another variation for dogs is to smear some peanut butter (which contains 100 Calories per tablespoon, so use mindfully) just inside the opening of a hollow chew toy. There are many brands and types of food puzzles available; more information about their use for dogs is available here: http://www.animalbehavior.net/Library/AllPets/PPM/PetfoodPuzzles_BoardingDogCat.htm .
We also recommend following safe pet food and treat handling practices. | <urn:uuid:c4e266ff-4cf8-4f7c-9e26-21d00fe64dc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vet.osu.edu/vmc/feeding-management | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943381 | 509 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Aurore was one of the first organisations in India to actively start installing and studying renewable energy systems, in particular solar, in the early 80s. The first projects were implemented at its home base, Auroville, where Aurore's first major venture was the installation of 132 solar pumping systems in the community during 1993-94.
This was followed in 1997 by another large project -the 36.6. kWp Matrimandir solar power plant, the largest of its kind in South India at the time.
At the start of the new millennium, Aurore India ventured out of Auroville for a large-scale solar pumping project in northern India, where it installed over 500 solar pumping systems on rural farms in Punjab. Download the presentation.
This project firmly put Aurore on the Indian renewable energy circuit. It established our reputation as a reliable provider, integrator and installer of renewable energy systems and applications with expertise in turnkey project management.
Since then, Aurore India has successfully executed renewable energy projects all over the country. It takes pride in having completed projects in some of the remotest areas of Gujarat, Ladakh, Orissa, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Look at our blog for an overview of our work, including our most recent projects. | <urn:uuid:2fc02d77-291c-495f-ad0b-8f307e26d4c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aurore.in/Ourwork.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945437 | 268 | 1.976563 | 2 |
Student’s Web project takes aim at sorority stereotypes
Anyone who visits the website TotalFratMove.com leaves with the impression that college fraternity and sorority members drink, skip class, post dumb things on social media, and not much else.
It’s a popular site, especially among college students, and one that irks Illinois State junior Jessica Garber. The proud member of Alpha Delta Pi (ADP) says Total Frat Move, or TFM, presents a distorted view of Greek life. But instead of quietly griping to her sorority sisters, she’s doing something about it.
Garber is the brains behind Actual Sorority Move (ASM), an answer to TFM that’s picking up steam online. In the same vein as TFM, Garber collects one-liners and photos from Greeks across the U.S. and publishes them on her site and social media channels. Instead of TFM’s photos of someone doing a keg stand, Garber collects poignant messages about how going Greek can profoundly change your life.
“A lot of people think we’re here to party and we pay for our friends. It’s not about that at all,” said Garber, an English and political science major. “It’s changed who I am, as a friend, as a student, even as a daughter.”
The goal is to combat the negative stereotypes that “sorority girls” face, reinforced in the media and, admittedly, through self-defeating sites like TFM, Garber says. It’s a perception battle that’s important to Illinois State Greeks, who make up around 10 percent of the undergraduate student body.
Garber started her ASM site in November 2012, part of an assignment for a technical communication course. She’s since expanded to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, posting up to five times a week. That additional exposure on social media has helped the site grow to almost 8,000 views already.
“That’s why it kinda blew up,” Garber said.
She’s reached out to Panhellenic organizations across the U.S., drawing submissions from sorority women in 18 states. Other Illinois State sororities have been supportive too, she said.
One of her recent tweets, for example: “Knowing that your every action reflects upon your founders, your alumnae, your peers, your organization, and sorority women everywhere. #ASM”
The Orland Hills native was recruited into ADP in fall 2011, drawn to the sorority’s three pillars: sisterhood, scholarship, and service. That’s translated into countless philanthropic efforts, most notably for the Ronald McDonald House charities, undertaken by her Alpha Delta Pi chapter.
Her favorite part about sorority life, however, is that it requires her to “make a commitment to the sorority to become a better person.” Indeed, her grade point average has gone up since joining, thanks in part to study programs run by Alpha Delta Pi. (Fun fact: 450 fraternity and sorority members had over a 3.5 GPA for the fall 2012 semester, with 121 members recording a 4.0, according to an end-of-semester report produced in December by ISU’s Dean of Students’ Fraternity and Sorority Life team.)
Garber picked up valuable leadership skills as chapter president in 2012, and now she serves as vice president of scholarship for Illinois State’s Panhellenic Association, serving all Greek women.
“I hope it inspires my peers to be in it for the right reasons, and to show recruits what it’s really about,” Garber said of ASM.
It’s extremely important that people know how being in a sorority can change lives and enhance skill sets, said Michael Zajac, coordinator for Fraternity and Sorority Life in the Dean of Students Office.
“The opportunities offered are endless, and ASM is designed to accentuate all that a sorority offers by providing real-life examples of success,” Zajac said. “ASM is a fantastic idea.”
After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Garber wants to be a leadership consultant for her national sorority, or possibly go to graduate school. She ultimately wants to work in collegiate student affairs. She’s getting a taste of that now as a student worker in the Dean of Students’ Leadership and Service office.
Zajac said Garber’s academic success and additions to the campus culture make her the “type of student we dream about having on campus.”
“She has a passion for people and wants to create a culture of greatness within our fraternity and sorority community,” Zajac said. “She puts 100 percent into all that she does. I thoroughly enjoy working with Jessie and appreciate all that she has done for her chapter and the Greek community.”
Ryan Denham can be reached at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:7657e7ea-5b12-4934-8985-359a8429e73f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stories.illinoisstate.edu/2013/03/magazine/illinois-state/state-side/students-web-project-takes-aim-at-sorority-stereotypes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95434 | 1,077 | 1.6875 | 2 |
ABOUT THE CARBON CAPTURE REPORT
The Carbon Capture Report is one of the world's premiere sources of daily news and public perception reports of carbon capture and sequestration, climate change, and the energy sector around the world, 365 days a year. Based on more than a decade of research on global information discourse, the Carbon Capture Report has become the "go-to" resource for governments, companies, environmental groups, law firms, venture capitalists, researchers, and even private citizens, with subscribers in more than 120 countries.
© 2005-2012 The Carbon Capture Report. A service of the University of Illinois. All results are generated by computer and no guarantees of any kind are provided regarding accuracy or completeness. | <urn:uuid:2243dcdb-1bcc-486d-8eac-f7ceecf888ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ccs.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/profiler?key=carl_berg&pt=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904143 | 146 | 1.921875 | 2 |
Industry may disagree with the cost effectiveness methodologies NICE uses to decide which products the UK’s National Health Services (NHS) should reimburse, but that isn’t stopping at least one US-based company from touting a NICE recommendation in its marketing materials.
Celgene’s Vidaza print ad, running in UK medical journals this month according to AdPharm, touts the tagline, “The way ahead is clear with the new NICE recommendation: ‘…[Vidaza] has the potential to extend life expectancy…’” That sentence is excerpted from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence’s (NICE) release last February, announcing its recommendation of Vidaza (azacitidine), an injection for abnormal bone marrow blood cells. The next two sentences from the release are as follows: “During consultation on the draft recommendations, the manufacturer of azacitidine offered to provide the drug at a reduced price. Azacitidine is an expensive drug, and this discount enabled us to recommend it as a cost effective use of resources on the NHS.”
That’s fine for Celgene, but industry groups opposed to government price controls – including PhRMA – may have a trickier argument to make against NICE when a member company is out using the institute’s recommendation as a selling point to physicians. Almost no one stateside thinks NICE’s primary cost-effectiveness measure – Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY) – is without flaw, but if companies want NHS as a customer, they’d better play ball. And a lot of companies do play ball, in order to receive NICE’s blessing, but they don’t usually crow about it in their subsequent promotional pieces.
Do physicians in the UK respond positively to product marketing that incorporates a NICE recommendation? Does Celegene’s marketing on the back of a NICE recommendation splinter a unified industry front that considers price controls a hindrance to R&D innovation? Maybe and maybe not; but given the global influence of drug pricing in the UK, these considerations may require some additional assessment. | <urn:uuid:ced344b4-1d09-471d-8c33-08e41a5be8ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.pharmexec.com/2011/08/10/nice-ads-deserve-a-double-take/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924935 | 457 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Renowned scholar, activist and intellectual, Professor Edward W. Said, 67, died Thursday morning after a decade-long battle with leukemia. His death comes just days before the third anniversary of the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising. He had been diagnosed with cancer during the Persian Gulf War. The past decade he fought tirelessly against both the cancer and the war.
Said, a Palestinian-American, was known throughout the world as a leading thinker, and there are few fields of intellectual endeavor that have been untouched by his contributions.
He was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of over a dozen books, including Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism. His writings have been translated into 26 languages. He was a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and other Pacifica programs and a great fighter for voiceless victims around the world. [Includes transcript]
Said was born in Jerusalem on November 1, 1935, when it was under British control. He grew up in Cairo. At the age of 17, he was sent to the United States as a student. He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war stirred him to political activism. When Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir infamously declared in 1969, "There are no Palestinians," Said decided to take on "the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving her, of beginning to articulate a history of loss and dispossession that had to be extricated, minute by minute, word by word, inch by inch."
He was an eloquent voice for justice throughout the Palestinian struggle and noted as one of the foremost intellectuals on the Middle East and colonialism.
Because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and his membership in the Palestine National Council, Said was not allowed by Israel to visit Palestine until several years ago.
A prolific scholar and intellectual, Said was also an acomplished concert pianist and music critic and was fluent in Arabic and French.
Today we spend the hour listening to Edward Said in his own words. We play a speech he gave on June 15, at the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s annual conference. It was one of his last major addresses. | <urn:uuid:12aa9286-e05b-41d8-bb8c-6c2172e23621> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.democracynow.org/2003/9/26/professor_edward_said_scholar_activist_palestinian | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981477 | 489 | 2.015625 | 2 |
|Wendy Behary Attachment Theory Anxiety William Doherty Narcissistic Clients Brain Science Diets Men in Therapy Clinical Excellence Symposium 2012 Gender Issues David Schnarch Mary Jo Barrett Community of Excellence Clinical Mastery The Future of Psychotherapy Alan Sroufe Etienne Wenger Linda Bacon Mind/Body Great Attachment Debate Challenging Cases Couples Therapy Mindfulness Ethics Attachment Trauma CE Comments Couples Future of Psychotherapy|
|Vertically Challenged - Page 3|
Enter the Post-Boomer Era
I had my first real insight about what might be going on in today's families a few years ago, as I returned home from a series of presentations to parents and therapists across the country. Sitting on the plane, I found myself struck by one characteristic of the audiences I'd been addressing, recognizing something I hadn't consciously grasped until then: My God, I suddenly thought, how young are these parents anyway?! The answer—20- to 40-something—had the effect of parting a curtain in my mind. I suddenly understood that our society had crossed a major generational divide and embarked upon the first "post-boomer" era of parenting.
While the usual definition of a "boomer" is a person born between 1946 and 1964, even those born after 1956 weren't true members of the boomer counterculture: they were too young to have experienced firsthand the defining events of the '60s: civil-rights marches, the riots, Vietnam, the pill, Woodstock Nation, the assassinations. Many boomers had broken profoundly with their parents, the generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. These pre-boomer mothers and fathers, like my own, were quintessentially "old-style" parents, who believed in hierarchy, privacy, conformity, and sacrifice, while many of their children were caught up in the '60s social revolution. Boomers and their parents knew intimately what generational conflict was all about.
Most of the parents coming to our offices today are too young to have identified with the boomer rebellion. They're really post-boomers. Consider the generation of parents born, on average, in the mid-1950s, who had their first child at 25. Their children would have been born in 1980 or 1981. These were the kids who began showing up in our offices, agencies, and hospitals in the early '90s, some who are now having kids of their own.
Chances are that the families you're sitting with in your practice are post-boomer families—parents and children who've experienced variations of key social changes: the growth of suburbia and exurbia, widespread divorce and blended families, the ubiquity of mothers in the workforce, continual geographic relocation, overscheduled lives, technology, globalization. Shaped by this shared experience, parents and children in the post-boomer era are more alike than different. Despite the hair-raising chaos that we see in our offices, these generations have life narratives closer than any other generational dyad we've treated since World War II. Post-boomers and their kids are, to a remarkable degree, kindred spirits, mostly unaffected by the "generation gap" that was the buzzword of the '60s and '70s.
What characterizes the post-boomer family, then, is the gradual replacement of a vertical, intergenerational struggle over hierarchy, boundaries, and individuation (the starting point of most therapy approaches from the '60s through the '90s) by a horizontal, multidirectional tension between a culture that breeds fragmentation and an increasing desire for family engagement. This is a revolutionary way for parents and children to feel and interact, suggesting that it may well be time to radically reimagine our clinical work with families.
You're sitting in a consulting room trying to make something stick to what feels like slippery walls: the collective mind of kids and families in our slick, attention-deprived, post-boomer world. Although there's never much overt rejection of what you say, few interventions "take" for long. So you throw a whole lot more against the wall—a new therapeutic module, the latest evidence-based protocol, a few compelling facts from some promising psychoeducational approach—and, frustratingly, much of it disappears from everyone's awareness by the time they come in the next week.
But one day, something you try makes an impression, and a little change occurs: a child or teen thinks before lashing out, a parent effectively soothes an unhappy girl. Then nothing you do works for a while, until all of a sudden something else adheres to the one change that had stuck before. Then, another and another, until that once empty wall holds a hodgepodge of moments that may make a difference.
Like the swirling tangents of 21st-century dinnertime conversation, therapy with today's kids and families often borders on the chaotic. So how can we move beyond random success to identify some well-anchored and dependable clinical principles of working when old styles don't cut it with 21st-century families? Thanks to a powerful convergence of post-boomer findings on temperament, child development, and learning processes, along with a growing literature on successful parenting practices, we know far more than we used to about what kids and parents need so they can change in ways that dovetail with the realities of contemporary family life. To illustrate, let's focus on how two traditional bulwarks of family functioning—hierarchy and communication—can be redefined for 21st-century families. | <urn:uuid:90b51dee-dc7b-4f8f-aaf6-1000db3614fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/magazine/recentissues/664-vertically-challenged?start=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957063 | 1,147 | 1.976563 | 2 |
Real Assets mean your wealth compounds and grows – without you working for it!
I was trained as a Chartered Accountant (CPA) and I still hold that qualification. I also have a first class honors degree in Accountancy. So you could say I was well qualified to give advice on accounting.
However, what you are taught in:
- School accounting classes;
- Small business classes;
- University accounting classes;
- On the job accounting and book keeping;
is almost exactly the opposite of what you and I need to know about our own personal finances.
For you and I accounting for our own personal finances is simple:
A real asset is anything that:
- Puts money into your bank account; or
- Increases in value; or
- Is cash; or
- A cash equivalent.
A liability is anything that takes money out of your bank account.
Sounds simple doesn’t it? So you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you:
- Your car is a liability.
- Your home is a liability.
- Your boat is a liability.
- Your holiday house is a liability.
- Your TV is a liability.
- Your pool is a liability.
- Your mobile phone is a liability.
- Your pet is a liability.
- Your household furniture and furnishings are a liability.
- Your hobbies are a liability.
- Your vacations are a liability.
All of these cost you money. They all take money out of your bank account. Even if some of them don’t do it every week (e.g. your furniture), they all need to be replaced, so over time they cost you money.It is vitally important we realize these are real liabilities that are causing huge amounts of money to disappear from our lives. You might rightly argue that some of these are necessary for living and I agree with you. But almost everyone in the industrialized world falls into the trap of buying bigger and more expensive than they need. And then of course acquiring all of the other paraphernalia we don’t actually need. You only get to spend money once!
Tip #1 Your Assets
Write out on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet all of the Real Assets you own. You might be surprised to realize you have none or very few. But that is a great realization and a good place to start.
Tip #2 Your Liabilities
Calculate how much your Real Liabilities are costing you every week, every month, every year. You are likely to be shocked how much money is pouring out of your bank account to pay for all of your liabilities.
Tip #3 Make a Change
Make a radical change now so that you store up wealth for your future. Change your expenditure from funding liabilities to buying real assets that will continue to gain in value over the years. This change could literally lift your level of future wealth by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I look forward to helping you improve your Lifestyle.
“Creating the Perfect Lifestyle” | <urn:uuid:950635d7-ccab-4458-a02e-7772cd50a91c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lynngalbraith.wordpress.com/tag/make-a-change/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952238 | 633 | 2.625 | 3 |
John and Tasha Webb -- Rocking W Cheese
John Gibson knows cows. He kinda got caught in a ‘Webb’ of ‘moo’ when he married into the Dairy business in Olathe, Colorado. Webb Dairy has been around for more than a half a century. The Family run business spanning 6 generations of herding heifers and producing some of the best milk around. So… four years ago when the family decided to expand just a little bit…it was a natural choice to move to cheese.
John says it was just a great fit…”we’ve been milking our own cows …why not take that milk and make our own cheese?!” And they have and the name , Rocking W Cheese?...It is slowly rocketing across the Centennial state. recognized as an “All Natural” Artisan Cheese. And what is an Artisan Cheese you ask? Well I looked it up and found this: “It means that someone has taken the time to do things slowly, with care and respect for the product. It means that the cheesemaker cares about tradition. It means that hands were laid on the cheese, milk, curds and animals. It means that smaller batches of cheese are made because it's all about quality, not quantity. It means that the milk came from farms in the area, not a huge truck going cross country. It means that the maker, in addition to being a scientist (if you think cheesemaking isn't a science, think again) is also a creative artist.”
And that’s exactly what I found out here in Olathe …Small town America…with an attention to detail …but that loose country feel and a huge sense of pride. And delicious cheese. All the cheese is made by hand…a few machines are used to stir …but all in all it is a simple operation…and I was amazed at how small the little area is that they work in. And all the cheese they sell across the state? Is sliced, cut and packaged by hand! You can go by the store and the little lady is right in front of a small glass window inside …cutting and weighing the Cheese. John says they have 29 varieties right now…from Sharp Cheddar to their Habanero Jack (which is my favorite)….Gouda, Swiss and the list…goes on and on.
All Natural and all good…Rocking W Cheese is proving that local is the new standard for ‘high-quality’…and state-wide, people are beginning to realize what we here locally on the Western Slope have known for a while now…The ‘W’ in Rocking W Cheese stands for Wonderful and “Watch Out’ because as John Gibson Says…”Mile High Cows are the Happiest and produce the Best Milk…”. So there is truth to that John Denver song…’Rocky Mountain High’. He apparently was singing about …Cheese. Here is Rocking W Cheese’s … Allgood News
More Information on Rocking W Cheese and Webb Dairy.
Check out their Website:
Call Us Toll Free - 970-323-5994
5644 Highway 348 Olathe, CO 81425-9754
(Listen to this Allgood News by Clicking the ‘play” button on the Player on top) | <urn:uuid:04a37589-6978-456f-9fd9-976e4323769d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.daveallgood.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/191-rocking-w-cheese.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959601 | 707 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Great expectations – generation Y are transforming communications and driving ICT innovation
In 2010, about half the UK's work force are comprised of Generation Y - those born between 1980 and 2000. They're the people for whom personal communications technology has always been there - it's the norm.
Not only does this generation demand to use their technology of choice in the workplace, they also make the same demands as customers.
When it comes to customer service and contact, two things are clear: firstly, if they receive bad service they don't complain, they simply leave. Second, they've grown up into the world of social media and that's how they want to communicate. They barely use email, let alone the dinosaur concept of fax.
Generation Y will shape the technologies that support employment and customer service
Teenagers communicate using IM, Facebook and SMS, so our team implemented custom connectors on top of our existing multi-channel contact centre product, bringing web 2.0 technologies into the contact centre platform. | <urn:uuid:4dd50f09-875c-4669-98b6-8ae0bc66bf42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.azzurricommunications.com/en/about-you/your-people/generation-y.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95063 | 203 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Women smokers are on the rise. Here are some facts you didn’t know about women and smoking:
About 200 million of the world’s one billion smokers are women
Far fewer women than men use tobacco. Globally, about 40% of men smoke as compared with nearly 9% of women. However, the epidemic of tobacco use among women is increasing in some countries. More research is needed to understand trends in tobacco use among women.
As many girls as boys now smoke in some countries
A WHO survey of smoking trends in youths showed that in half of the 151 countries surveyed, similar numbers of girls and boys smoked. Evidence suggests that most of these girls and boys will continue to smoke into adulthood. Bans on tobacco advertising, as called for in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, could help to stop the increase in tobacco use among girls.
Boys and girls start using tobacco for different reasons
Many more girls than boys smoke in the false belief that it is a good way to control weight. Low self-esteem is associated with smoking among girls, and available evidence from some developed countries shows that girls have lower self-esteem than boys. Tobacco control strategies must recognize that boys’ and girls’ decisions to start using tobacco are influenced by different cultural, psychosocial and socioeconomic factors.
Every year, 1.5 million women die from tobacco use
Of the more than 5 million people who die every year from tobacco use, approximately 1.5 million are women. Most (75%) of these women live in low- and middle-income countries. Unless urgent action is taken, tobacco use could kill up to 8 million people every year by 2030, of which 2.5 million would be women.
Women are one of the biggest targets of the tobacco industry
The tobacco industry gears richly-funded marketing campaigns towards women through advertisements that draw on gender stereotypes and falsely link tobacco use to concepts of beauty, prestige and freedom. The industry actively targets women because comparatively few women currently use tobacco, and women are increasingly able to afford tobacco.
More women than men smoke “light” cigarettes
Marketing strategies lure consumers with misleading categories, such as “light” or “low tar”. More women than men smoke “light” cigarettes (63% versus 46%), often in the mistaken belief that “light” means “safer”. In fact, “light” smokers often engage in compensatory smoking, inhaling more deeply and more frequently to absorb the desired amount of nicotine.
Tobacco use harms women differently from men
Women who smoke are more likely than those who do not to experience infertility and delays in conceiving. Smoking during pregnancy increases risks of premature delivery, stillbirth and newborn death, and may cause a reduction in breast milk. Smoking increases women’s risk for cancer of the cervix.
Women constitute 64% of deaths from second-hand smoke
Worldwide, second-hand smoke causes 430 000 adult deaths per year. Sixty-four per cent of these deaths occur in women. In some countries, second-hand smoke is a greater threat to women than the possibility that women might start using tobacco. More than 90% of the world’s population is still not covered by comprehensive national smoke-free laws.
People who smoke should avoid exposing the people with whom they live and work to second-hand smoke
Women and children often lack power to negotiate smoke-free spaces, including in their homes, in their workplaces and in other public spaces. Everyone, regardless of age or sex, should be protected from second-hand smoke.
Controlling tobacco use among women is an important part of any tobacco control strategy
Tobacco prevention and cessation programmes should be integrated into maternal, child and reproductive health services. Warnings about the harmful effects of tobacco must take into account that illiteracy is higher among women than men, and should use clear pictures to ensure that those who cannot read are also able to understand the health risks of tobacco use.
Read more about World No Tobacco Day:
- Quit smoking or die!
- Shaan’s “Life Se Panga” anti-smoking song
- Health benefits of quitting
- Did you know smoking can give you heart disease and strokes?
- 200,000 children die from passive smoking every year!
- WHO urges governments to watch out for tobacco industry interference
- Smoking okay on-screen, not in real life says Bollywood
- Heart attacks, cancer on the rise in young smokers
- Want to quit tobacco? Here’s a helpline to your rescue!
- Are tobacco-less e-cigarettes less harmful?
- 10 facts about passive smoking
Content Courtesy: WHOFirst Published: Jul 13, 2012 at 8:40 AM | <urn:uuid:e1ce7119-63ed-47c4-b5d8-2de369fade21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://health.india.com/diseases-conditions/why-smoking-is-more-dangerous-for-women/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942678 | 989 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Carbon fiber or (alternatively called carbon fibre, graphite fiber, graphite fibre or carbon graphite) is a material consisting of extremely thin fibers about 0.005–0.010 mm in diameter and composed mostly of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms are bonded together in microscopic crystals that are more or less aligned parallel to the long axis of the fiber. The crystal alignment makes the fiber very strong for its size. Several thousand carbon fibers are twisted together to form a yarn, which may be used by itself or woven into a fabric. Carbon fiber has many different weave patterns and can be combined with a plastic resin and wound or molded to form composite materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic (also referenced as carbon fiber) to provide a high strength-to-weight ratio material. The density of carbon fiber is also considerably lower than the density of steel, making it ideal for applications requiring low weight. The properties of carbon fiber such as high tensile strength, low weight, and low thermal expansion make it very popular in aerospace, civil engineering, military, and motorsports, along with other competition sports.
In 1958, Dr. Roger Bacon created high-performance carbon fibers at the Union Carbide Parma Technical Center, located outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Those fibers were manufactured by heating strands of rayon until they carbonized. This process proved to be inefficient, as the resulting fibers contained only about 20% carbon and had low strength and stiffness properties. In the early 1960s, a process was developed using polyacrylonitrile (PAN) as a raw material. This had produced a carbon fiber that contained about 55% carbon and had much better properties. The polyacrylonitrile (PAN) conversion process quickly became the primary method for producing carbon fibers.
The high potential strength of carbon fiber was realized in 1963 in a process developed at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in the UK. The process was patented by the Ministry of Defense and then licensed by the NRDC to three British companies: Rolls-Royce, already making carbon fiber, Morganite and Courtaulds. They were able to establish industrial carbon fiber production facilities within a few years, and Rolls-Royce took advantage of the new material's properties to break into the American market with its RB-211 aero-engine.
Even then, though, there was public concern over the ability of British industry to make the best of this breakthrough. In 1969 a House of Commons select committee inquiry into carbon fiber prophetically asked: "How then is the nation to reap the maximum benefit without it becoming yet another British invention to be exploited more successfully overseas?" Ultimately, this concern was justified. One by one the licensees pulled out of carbon-fiber manufacture. Rolls-Royce's interest was in state-of-the-art aero-engine applications. Its own production process was to enable it to be leader in the use of carbon-fibre reinforced plastics. In-house production would typically cease once reliable commercial sources became available.
Unfortunately, Rolls-Royce pushed the state-of-the-art too far, too quickly, in using carbon fibre in the engine's compressor blades, which proved vulnerable to damage from bird impact. What seemed a great British technological triumph in 1968 quickly became a disaster as Roll-Royce's ambitious schedule for the RB-211 was endangered. Indeed, Rolls-Royce's problems became so great that the company was eventually nationalised by Edward Heath's Conservative government in 1971 and the carbon-fibre production plant sold off to form Bristol Composites.
Given the limited market for a very expensive product of variable quality, Morganite also decided that carbon-fibre production was peripheral to its core business, leaving Courtaulds as the only big UK manufacturer.
The company continued making carbon fiber, developing two main markets: aerospace and sports equipment.The speed of production and the quality of the product were improved.
Continuing collaboration with the staff at Farnborough proved helpful in the quest for higher quality, but, ironically, Courtaulds's big advantage as manufacturer of the "Courtelle" precursor now became a weakness. Low cost and ready availability were potential advantages, but the water-based inorganic process used to produce Courtelle made it susceptible to impurities that did not affect the organic process used by other carbon-fibre manufacturers.
Nevertheless, during the 1980s Courtaulds continued to be a major supplier of carbon fibre for the sports-goodsmarket, with Mitsubishi its main customer. But a move to expand, including building a production plant in California, turned out badly. The investment did not generate the anticipated returns, leading to a decision to pull out of the area. Courtaulds ceased carbon-fiber production in 1991, though ironically the one surviving UK carbon-fiber manufacturer continued to thrive making fibre based on Courtaulds's precursor. Inverness-based RK Carbon Fibres Ltd has concentrated on producing carbon fibre for industrial applications, and thus does not need to compete at the quality levels reached by overseas manufacturers.
During the 1970s, experimental work to find alternative raw materials led to the introduction of carbon fibers made from a petroleum pitch derived from oil processing. These fibers contained about 85% carbon and had excellent flexural strength.
Carbon fibers are the closest to asbestos in a number of properties. Each carbon filament thread is a bundle of many thousand carbon filaments. A single such filament is a thin tube with a diameter of 5–8 micrometers and consists almost exclusively of carbon.
The atomic structure of carbon fiber is similar to that of graphite, consisting of sheets of carbon atoms (graphene sheets) arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern. The difference lies in the way these sheets interlock. Graphite is a crystalline material in which the sheets are stacked parallel to one another in regular fashion. The intermolecular forces between the sheets are relatively weak Van der Waals forces, giving graphite its soft and brittle characteristics. Depending upon the precursor to make the fiber, carbon fiber may be turbostratic or graphitic, or have a hybrid structure with both graphitic and turbostratic parts present. In turbostratic carbon fiber the sheets of carbon atoms are haphazardly folded, or crumpled, together. Carbon fibers derived from Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) are turbostratic, whereas carbon fibers derived from mesophase pitch are graphitic after heat treatment at temperatures exceeding 2200 C. Turbostratic carbon fibers tend to have high tensile strength, whereas heat-treated mesophase-pitch-derived carbon fibers have high Young's modulus and high thermal conductivity.
Carbon fiber is most notably used to reinforce composite materials, particularly the class of materials known as Carbon fiber or graphite reinforced polymers. Non-polymer materials can also be used as the matrix for carbon fibers. Due to the formation of metal carbides (i.e., water-soluble AlC) and corrosion considerations, carbon has seen limited success in metal matrix composite applications. Reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) consists of carbon fiber-reinforced graphite, and is used structurally in high-temperature applications. The fiber also finds use in filtration of high-temperature gases, as an electrode with high surface area and impeccable corrosion resistance, and as an anti-static component. Molding a thin layer of carbon fibers significantly improves fire resistance of polymers or thermoset composites because dense, compact layer of carbon fibers efficiently reflects heat. .
Each carbon filament is made out of long, thin filaments of carbon sometimes transformed to graphite. A common method of making carbon filaments is the oxidation and thermal pyrolysis of polyacrylonitrile (PAN), a polymer based on acrylonitrile used in the creation of synthetic materials. Like all polymers, polyacrylonitrile molecules are long chains, which are aligned in the process of drawing continuous filaments. A common method of manufacture involves heating the PAN to approximately 300 °C in air, which breaks many of the hydrogen bonds and oxidizes the material. The oxidized PAN is then placed into a furnace having an inert atmosphere of a gas such as argon, and heated to approximately 2000 °C, which induces graphitization of the material, changing the molecular bond structure. When heated in the correct conditions, these chains bond side-to-side (ladder polymers), forming narrow graphene sheets which eventually merge to form a single, jelly roll-shaped or round filament. The result is usually 93–95% carbon. Lower-quality fiber can be manufactured using pitch or rayon as the precursor instead of PAN. The carbon can become further enhanced, as high modulus, or high strength carbon, by heat treatment processes. Carbon heated in the range of 1500-2000 °C (carbonization) exhibits the highest tensile strength (820,000 psi or 5,650 MPa or 5,650 N/mm²), while carbon fiber heated from 2500 to 3000 °C (graphitizing) exhibits a higher modulus of elasticity (77,000,000 psi or 531 GPa or 531 kN/mm²).
Precursors for carbon fibers are PAN, rayon and pitch. Carbon fiber filament yarns are used in several processing techniques: the direct uses are for prepregging, filament winding, pultrusion, weaving, braiding etc. Carbon fiber yarn is rated by the linear density (weight per unit length = 1 g/1000 m = tex) or by number of filaments per yarn count, in thousands. For example, 200 tex for 3,000 filaments of carbon fiber is three times as strong as 1,000 carbon fibers but is also three times as heavy. This thread can then be used to weave a carbon fiber filament fabric or cloth. The appearance of this fabric generally depends on the linear density of the yarn and the weave chosen. Some commonly used types of weave are twill, satin and plain.
PAN aerospace/high end carbon fiber:
PAN commercial grade carbon fiber:
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"In the distant past, the city functioned more or less as a self-sustaining system. All that now remains is consumption." -- Regine Debatty, Worldchanging.com
Over the past week I've noticed a number of articles popping up about cities and food. The quote above, which I found particularly provocative, came from an article about an exhibit in Maastricht called "The Edible City," which focuses on the role that food plays in contemporary society. I think that line captures the current problem facing metropolitanized areas, especially stateside. Food plays a huge role in our daily lives, and the idea that it could play a role in the reconstruction of urban communities seems powerful to me.
Another article over at AlterNet covered urban gardening efforts around the U.S. Hearing quotes from proud locals reminded me of the stories that I had heard about Victory Gardens during WWII. These gardens not only lessened demand on the industrial community (so that I could focus on weapons production), they provided their owners with a genuine sense of pride. Victory gardens were a symbol of a family's commitment to the nation during a difficult time.
Cities, now, are facing a difficult time. While gentrification is adding cash to the tax base of many cities, huge stretches still remain impoverished, both in the States and around the world. A big part of the solution to urban problems, of course, is the strengthening of urban communities. It seems natural, then, that the creation of community gardens could serve as a big part of the community-building process. A quote from one of AlterNet's urban gardeners highlights one of the major benefits: "Just having face-to-face contact -- that's something that's very positive...It's the kind of thing that feeds your soul."
By getting people together to work on a project that directly impacts their communities, socially and visually, urban gardens can help communities develop their own self-sustaining systems. These gardens have been around for a while, but they don't seem to have caught on as a major trend...yet. The rumblings on the internets seem to suggest a change in that area.
Urban Farming: Coming to a City Near You (AlterNet)
Edible City: Part I (WorldChanging)
EDIT (4/9/2007 - 7:20 PM): Check out the second (and equally fascinating) part of the Edible City coverage by following this link--and don't miss the part about Fritz Haeg's "Edible Estates" project. | <urn:uuid:4afd7a4b-8a77-48e1-a5d2-4c54611414aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thewhereblog.blogspot.jp/2007/04/growth-of-local-food-production-in.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969594 | 524 | 2.1875 | 2 |
China Medical Board Awards $149,000 Grant to Bentley University
September 13, 2011
The China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a $149,000 grant to Bentley University. Assistant Professor of History Bridie Andrews will use the funding to organize a conference on the history of medicine in China, scheduled for December 10 to 12 at Endicott House in Dedham, Mass.
Medical history is a longtime focus for Andrews, whose research centers on the history of medicine in East Asia as a lens through which to examine cultural exchange. “This grant is an endorsement of Bentley as a resource for scholarship in this field and as a research partner for the China Medical Board,” says Andrews.
The conference will bring together leading historians of medicine from Australia, China, Europe, Taiwan, and the U.S. to discuss the history of medicine in China during the past hundred years. Special recognition will be given to presenters whose papers are to be included in a forthcoming edited volume, Health and Medicine in Twentieth Century China, co-edited by Andrews.
Professor Andrews studied in China for two years at Xiamen University and the Nanjing College of Pharmacy, where she explored the evolution of Chinese medicine in relation to politics, public perceptions, and Western influences. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University in England and is co-editor of Medicine and Colonial Identity (Routledge, 2003), and Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1997).
The China Medical Board (CMB) is an independent U.S. foundation that aims to advance health in China and neighboring Asian countries through strengthening medical, nursing, and public health research and education.
BENTLEY UNIVERSITY is one of the nation’s leading business schools, dedicated to preparing a new kind of business leader – one with the deep technical skills, broad global perspective, and high ethical standards required to make a difference in an ever-changing world. Our rich, diverse arts and sciences program, combined with an advanced business curriculum, prepares informed professionals who make an impact in their chosen fields. Located on a classic New England campus minutes from Boston, Bentley is a dynamic community of leaders, scholars and creative thinkers. The McCallum Graduate School emphasizes the impact of technology on business practice, in offerings that include MBA and Master of Science programs, PhD programs in accountancy and in business, and customized executive education programs. The university enrolls approximately 4,100 full-time undergraduate, 140 adult part-time undergraduate, 1,430 graduate, and 43 doctoral students. Bentley is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges; AACSB International – The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business; and the European Quality Improvement System, which benchmarks quality in management and business education.
Type: Latest Headlines | <urn:uuid:8eeb76ef-a3a2-4c63-b06d-f1e010772369> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bentley.edu/newsroom/latest-headlines/china-medical-board-awards-149000-grant-bentley-university | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931681 | 567 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Welcome! We understand that career development can be a very labor intensive process for your son or daughter, and we are here to help. All of the services we offer are open to all students from all class years/ majors. We hope the below resources/ programs will be of assistance to your son or daughter.
The below events are run every academic year- please check the Career Center Calendar for dates/ times:
Senior Meetings- information will be shared regarding our services, employment and graduate school.
Career Development Workshops- 1 hour interactive presentations designed to hone career-related skills. Currently, the below 4 topic areas are offered:
- Cover Letter and Reasume Writing
Annual Spring Career, Internship, and Graduate School Fair
Lunch and Learns- informal lunchtime guest speaker series to expose students to a variety of different career fields
We offer the below services throughout the semester:
1 on 1 career counseling appointments (including evening hours)
Drop-in sessions- (15 minute sessions with a career counselor, no appointment needed.) These are held Monday- Thursday from 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM during the fall and spring semesters.
Walk In Wednesdays- drop-in (no appointment needed) resume critiques with area employers from a variety of fields. Wednesdays from 10 AM - 12 PM
Employer In Residence program- mock interviews with area employers with feedback provided on how to improve
Credentials File service- students/ alumni can house their letters of reference in our office for jobs and graduate school applications
CareerSaint- Job and internship database for the exclusive use of by Siena students and alumni | <urn:uuid:2d722421-7f30-46c1-aa54-ae2bed0e17cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.siena.edu/pages/4961.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926998 | 340 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Wed May 9, 2012
Why Chen's Blindness Is 'The Central Fact' Of The Chinese Activist's Life
Originally published on Wed May 9, 2012 9:38 am
For two weeks now, the world has been following the story of Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng. And in nearly all reports, the phrase "blind activist" is used at least once. Friday, Alan Greenblatt wrote for us about why some say Chen's blindness is just one factor in "a much larger life." Today, NPR's Louisa Lim, who is based in Beijing, tells us why Chen's blindness is "the central fact" of his existence:
From the outside, Chen Guangcheng's blindness may seem simply one factor in a much larger life, but within China, his blindness elevates him to become an inspirational figure, rather than a "sympathetic victim."
Statistics tell the story: there are 16 million blind and visually impaired people in China, according to the official Xinhua news agency. This disclosure comes in an article explaining there are just 28 trained guide-dogs in the whole country.
As for high schools for the blind,China has only 19 such schools, whose entire intake last year was just 1,009 students. (Like some other links in this post, you'll need to use Google translate or a similar application to translate that page into English.)
So only a tiny minority of visually-impaired Chinese ever receive an education. Chen was one of them, receiving four years of education at Qingdao High School for the Blind. But that did not change his future, and he — like many other blind Chinese — ended up training to become an acupuncturist and masseur. This is the default occupation for blind Chinese, with 14,067 blind masseurs receiving training last year.
"I never wanted to be a masseur," a 35-year old visually impaired masseur, Mr. Guo, tells us. "I wanted to study hard and get high marks at school. But then my sight began to fail, and my father suggested this as a job." Of his blind friends and acquaintances, he says the vast majority are masseurs, with many on duty for 15 hours a day. "I have to tell you, it's a very very hard life, being a blind masseur in China," Guo says. "The work hours are very long. There are no holidays, and on public holidays, we are extremely busy."
So it is really the central fact of Chen Guangcheng's existence — and testament to his strength of character — that he managed to study law, despite being blind and while working as a masseur. Supporting others with disabilities was clearly important to him, since his first successful legal challenge was against the local government's taxation of disabled people in contravention of the law. Then he angered local authorities, by helping villagers sue family planning officials in Linyi,Shandong, for forcing women to have abortions and sterilizations.
In 2006, he was given a four-year jail sentence for allegedly damaging public property and organizing an illegal assembly which stopped traffic. On his release from jail, he was put under house arrest, despite the absence of any outstanding charges, and for the next 19 months he was kept a prisoner in his own home, sometimes brutally beaten.
For Chen's devoted core of supporters, his tireless work for others, despite his own disability, is inspirational. And the persecution by the local authorities has served to multiply outrage and rally support. This much is clear when talking to He Peirong, also known as Pearl Her, who was instrumental in Chen's escape from house arrest, taking enormous risks to drive him to Beijing, even though she had never even met him before.
When asked why, she talks about her first attempt to visit him in January 2011, when her car was smashed by his guards, "It was extremely terrifying," she says. "I felt it was so terrible for such a blind person, to be living in such a village. The risk I was taking was just temporary. After I came back to Nanjing, I felt safe. But for a blind person to be living in such an environment, I thought he needed more help."
China's official press has also emphasized Chen's blindness, in an attempt to undermine him. One opinion piece in a state-run newspaper refers to him repeatedly as "the blind masseur" and "the blind peasant masseur," without a single reference to his legal activism.
Another piece, in the Global Times, also singles out his physical condition, in arguing that he has been used as a political tool of the U.S.: "As a disabled man, Chen hasn't received a higher education. He has a very unusual way to deal with his conflicts in rural society. You can say this is paranoid or impulsive."
The piece is illustrated by a cartoon of a blind man with a white stick walking into a black hole. Such offensive commentary from state-run newspapers is just one small indication of the widespread discrimination against those with disabilities in China today.
Yet, for many internet users, Chen's blindness gave his escape from the all-seeing eyes of the state an almost allegorical significance. After it became public, artist Ai Weiwei tweeted a remark made by a friend about Chen Guangcheng: "You know he's blind, so the night to him is nothing. I think that's the perfect metaphor."
And another netizen obliquely dodged censorship by posting a line from a contemporary poet Gu Cheng:
"The dark night gave me black eyes, but I used them to find the light." | <urn:uuid:111f9a9d-4ac4-493a-904b-fe2e8ddbf8ef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utahpublicradio.org/post/why-chens-blindness-central-fact-chinese-activists-life | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98345 | 1,159 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Current annual measurements of the average pH of precipitation in the northern hemisphere range from about 4.0 to 7.0. The lower, highly acidic values occur primarily over and immediately downwind of urban and industrialized areas in North America, Europe and Asia. Higher pH values in precipitation are found over less industrialized regions where the atmosphere contains larger amounts of alkaline dust. The primary cause of low pH in precipitation over northeastern North America is sulphuric acid (H2SO4) resulting from industrial and urban emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2). Nitric acid (HNO3) generated from emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) is a significant contributing factor in this region. The annual emissions of SO2 for 2006 were 12.0 million tonnes in the US and 2.2 million tonnes in Canada, down from 1980 levels of 23.4 and 4.7 million tonnes respectively. Coal-fired thermal electric power plants produce about 70% of US emissions and a little more than 20% of Canadian emissions. Nonferrous smelters, producing such metals as nickel and copper, are the largest source of Canada's SO2 emissions. NOx emissions for 2006 were 15.8 million tonnes in the US and 2.9 million tonnes in Canada compared to the 1980 levels of 20.9 and 1.8 million tonnes in the US and Canada respectively. Transportation sources contribute the majority of NOx emissions. The acid rain precursors, SO2 and NOx, can be transported thousands of kilometres through the atmosphere, returning to earth as dry deposition or in wet acid form.
Degree of Effects
When acid rain reaches the Earth's surface it can cause damage to aquatic ECOSYSTEMS and buildings. Acid rain and the associated pollutants (SO2, NOx, sulphate particles and ozone) can also damage forests and crops, and there is evidence of adverse human health effects. The degree of effects depends on the acid-reducing capability of the receptor (eg, vegetation, soils and rock, lakes and streams). In areas where this buffering capacity is low (eg, the Canadian SHIELD), acidic deposition over several years has led to increased acidity of rivers and lakes and to accelerated leaching of aluminum from soils. In Canada, surface waters exhibiting these effects have been largely restricted to the southeastern portion of the country where acid rain levels are highest. However, SO2 emissions in western Canada have increased to the point that vulnerable lakes in this region may be threatened also.
As the pH of surface waters falls below about 5.5, the diversity of aquatic life such as vegetation, zooplankton, amphibians and fish is reduced. The aluminum leached from soils may also be in a form that is toxic to aquatic organisms. Most fish populations are eradicated by reproductive failure or disappearance of suitable food sources when the average pH of a lake drops to about 4.5. Fish populations in thousands of lakes in eastern North America and Scandinavia have declined or disappeared because of water acidification; hundreds of thousands more are threatened. Rivers, too, have shown adverse effects such as the marked decline of ATLANTIC SALMON in the Maritimes and in Scandinavia. Birds and other fish predators may decrease in numbers because of reduced food supply.
Reductions in North American SO2 emissions promote an expectation that aquatic ecosystems will soon recover from acidification. Only lakes located near smelters that have dramatically reduced emissions approach this expectation. Most lakes are only affected by long range emissions, and so far, they show relatively small increases in pH. This delay in the chemical recovery of lakes is due to several geochemical factors related to the storage or release of acids or bases from the forest soils and wetlands that surround these lakes. Biological recovery in lakes necessarily follows chemical recovery. The only extensive evidence of biological recovery occurs in lakes from the Sudbury/Killarney region of Ontario.
The effects of acid rain, and the associated pollutants, on forests and agriculture are not as clear cut but are potentially serious. These include direct damage to plant foliage, seed germination failure, retardation of growth particularly at early life stages, deterioration of plant roots associated with the leaching of soil constituents and, possibly, increased plant susceptibility to insects and diseases.
There are several potential effects of acid rain on human health. Acidified drinking water supplies may become contaminated by leaching of copper, lead and other metals from delivery pipes. Increased concentrations of heavy metals in fish in acidified rivers and lakes can pose a problem for populations consuming significant quantities of these fish.
Methods available to reduce SO2 emissions include the use of low-sulphur coal and oil; the removal of sulphur from fuel and feeder ore; the use of flue-gas desulphurization techniques; energy conservation; and the use of alternative energy sources. North American techniques for controlling acid rain precursors have been aimed primarily at reducing near-source air concentrations to levels necessary to avoid immediate and short-term impacts on human health (See AIR POLLUTION). The installation of pollution control devices and the building of taller emission stacks were effective in achieving the goal of improved air quality in North American cities. However, the result of taller stacks was to disperse SO2 and NOx emissions over large regions, and the emission standards for the short-term protection of human health are inadequate for the protection of impacted regional environments and longer-term human health.
Emissions of SO2 in both Canada and the US decreased between the early 1970s and the present as a result of the increased use of pollution control devices, the use of more low-sulphur fuels and the introduction of some nuclear power plants. These decreases in SO2 emissions resulted in reduced acid rain levels and the chemical recovery of some lakes in specific locations in eastern Canada, thereby illustrating the potential effectiveness of further control actions. In the absence of new controls, or the expansion of SO2 emission sources (eg, in western Canada), the cumulative acidification effects on regional environments remain a serious problem. In addition, there has been little reduction in NOx emissions over North America.
As a first step in controlling the effects of acid rain on surface waters, in 1983 Canada adopted a target loading of 20 kg of wet sulphate per hectare per year. It was estimated that a reduction of deposition rates to this value would protect moderately sensitive LAKE ecosystems and could be achieved by reducing North American SO2 emissions by about 50%. The eastern Canadian provinces and the federal government agreed to reduce emissions by 50% by 1994; several formal federal-provincial agreements were signed in 1987. Since 1990, Canada has used a more precise deposition standard called the "critical load," which is the highest deposition rate that an ecosystem can tolerate without exhibiting negative ecosystem effects. For lakes located on the Canadian Shield, the critical load is almost always less than the 1983 target load, and it varies spatially depending on the acid sensitivity of the surrounding terrain.
About one-half of the sulphate deposition in eastern Canada comes from SO2 sources in the US. Therefore, control action in the US was needed for Canada to achieve its target loading goal. After years of pressure from Canada, in November 1990 the United States government passed a new Clean Air Act promising to reduce SO2 emissions by 50% by the year 2000. The following year, the 2 countries signed the Canada-US Air Quality Agreement, which further codified the reductions in S02 and N0x emissions. In 1998, the federal, provincial and territorial Ministers of Energy and Environment agreed to "The Canada-Wide Acid Rain Strategy for Post-2000," which has the long-term goal of reducing acid rain to meet the critical load standard. What this means is that much greater SO2 emission reductions than those presently required by legislation will be needed to promote widespread chemical and, latterly, biological recovery.
At the international level, Canada signed, in 1985, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) Helsinki Protocol to reduce their sulphur compounds (or the export of these compounds to other countries via the atmosphere) by 1993. In 1994, Canada signed the Oslo Protocol to cap sulphur emissions at 1.75 million tonnes.
Acid rain is but one manifestation of the increasing effects of man-made chemicals on the composition of the global atmosphere. Other anthropogenic effects associated with growing industrialization and the "chemical society" include ARCTIC HAZE, CLIMATE CHANGE and the depletion of the stratospheric OZONE LAYER (see OZONE DEPLETION). These changes in regional and global environments and their socio-economic impacts are attracting increasing international attention.
See also SUDBURY, GREATER.
Author H.L FERGUSON and D.S. JEFFRIES
Links to Other Sites
Explore this Webby award-winning website about the ills besetting the waters of the Great Lakes. From the National Film Board of Canada.
An introduction to environmental issues related to acid rain. From Environment Canada.
Science and Technology into Action to Benefit Canadians
"S&T into Action to Benefit Canadians" tells the story of Environment Canada's success in generating tangible environmental, social and economic benefits. From Environment Canada.
Canada-United States Border Air Quality Strategy Border Projects
This site features updates about joint projects operated under the Canada-United States Border Air Quality Strategy. From Health Canada. | <urn:uuid:c4bdf599-dcf0-4fce-bc3a-22b697c6413f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/acid-rain | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933877 | 1,913 | 3.890625 | 4 |
What is atrial fibrillation?
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a heart rhythm where the upper chambers of the heart (called the atria) move very fast and may cause the lower chambers of the heart to also beat fast. Your provider may describe this condition as having "an irregular heart rhythm". It is also very common in patients with heart failure as the heart becomes enlarged. It is also very common in people over the age of 80 years. When a person has AF, there is less blood being pumped out of the heart to the organs. This leads to symptoms.
What are the symptoms of AF?
- shortness of breath
- palpitations (feeling like your heart is jumping)
- fainting or feeling like you are going to faint
- chest pain or pressure
What are the risks associated with AF?
People with AF are at risk for having a stroke. Since less blood is getting pumped out of the heart this means more blood is staying inside the heart. Blood can swirl around in the atria (upper chambers of the heart) and form a blood clot. This blood clot can travel and cause a stroke. To prevent a clot, your doctor may prescribe a blood thinner.
You may be started on warfarin (Coumadin) or dabigatran (Pradaxa).
Your doctor needs to know about all other medicines you are taking or start while taking these medications. Ask your doctor before starting any over-the-counter meds or herbal products if you are taking any prescription drugs.
What are the common causes of AF?
- High blood pressure
- Heart failure
- Acute infections, especially pneumonia
- Electrolyte imbalances
- Lung cancer
- Pulmonary embolism
- Sleep apnea
- After a surgery or procedures
What are the types of AF?
There are three types of AF and your treatment will depend on the type of AF that you have:
- Paroxysmal: AF starts and stops on its own and may occur for just a short time.
- Persistent: AF is continuous and does not stop it but may be changed to a normal rhythm by medical or electrical treatments.
- Permanent: AF is continuous and cannot be changed to a normal rhythm by medical or electrical treatments.
Other than a blood thinner, what are the treatments for AF?
Treatment will depend on the kind of AF that you have, what type of symptoms you are having, and your how you feel when you are in AF.
There are two common treatments:
- Control the heart rate (slowing the heart rate down). Heart rate control means that patients are left in AF but the heart rate is slowed down (goal of 50-70 bpm usually) to allow the upper and lower chambers more time to fill and pump more blood out of the heart with each beat. This is done by certain medications such as beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, and/or digoxin (lanoxin).>
- Control the heart rhythm (by getting you out of AF). Heart rhythm control means that attempts are made to convert the heart back into a normal rhythm. This is done through certain drugs such as dofetilide (Tikosyn), amiodarone (Pacerone), dronedarone (Multaq), sotolol (Betapace), flecainide (Tambocor), rhythmol (Propafenone) or diltiazem (Cardizem).
What are the Surgical Treatments for AF?
Surgical treatment for AF is considered when:
- Treatment does not control or correct AF and You are still having symptoms
- Meds for AF cause more harm than good
- Blood thinners cannot be taken
- Blood clots or a stroke occurs
Surgical treatments may include an atrial fibrillation ablation, an A-V nodal ablation, a "Maze" procedure or a "mini-Maze" (pulmonary vein isolation) procedure.
American Association of Heart Failure Nurses
15000 Commerce Parkway, Suite C
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Wednesday morning I attended a panel discussion with: ARM, IBM, Cadence, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung.
The panelists all sang the same song of collaboration between EDA, IP and Foundry to enable 28nm, 20nm and even 14nm.
Steve Leibson, Cadence (host)
Gary Patton, IBM
technology scaling is not over, a few more decades are left with scaling although it becomes harder to do. It requires high R&D costs to bring to market. Collaboration at many levels is needed: materials, suppliers, equipment, virtual IDM with EDA and designers.
Disruptive innovations - Bipolar in the 1980s (hit power limit), planar CMOS in 1990s (gate oxide limit), Strain engineering in 2000s (HKMG), 2010 at the planar device limit (3D era of Devices like FinFET and packaging, need closer collaboration between EDA and design), 2020s at the Atomic dimension limit (nanowire devices, carbon nanotubes, 3d multi-chip stacking, photonics on chip).
Chi-Ping Hsu, Cadence
Lot of pressure on IC design tools to create a yielding chip. Statistical effects, well proximity effects, stress effects as process nodes continue from 180nm to 22nm. Nvidia quote on number of physical design team members at 28nm was 30X more than before.
"20nm design takes 5X the number of people compared to 65nm design. At 20nm we need 4-5 layout people for each 1 designer."
More automation required on the full custom IC layout side to handle 20nm design.
EDA investment for new 20nm tool development is about $800M to $1.2B for the entire industry.
Dr. Dipesh Patel, ARM
Complexity of 28nm and 20nm rules is high, so give me rules that tell me what to do. Use these 20 or 30 layout patterns based on what will yield and have minimal variation effects. Look at the block level for density, not the cell level.
Voltage hasn't been scaling so power remains high. Write assist in memory can raise the internal voltages to speed up cycle times.
Layout challenges: DPT coloring is new, how do we apply automation to do coloring?
SIgn-off complexity - 30 to 40 corners take a long time to simulate and analyze, automation required.
Metal stack is more complex at 20nm from design and extraction viewpoints.
Use multiple cycles of silicon validation at each node on Cores, cells, blocks, memory.
KM Choi, Samsung
Current mobile needs: smaller power and area, higher performance.
Process technology at 20nm and beyond requires use of TSV for wide IO paths. DPT needs to be decomposed automatically, router-aware. FinFET requires new SPICE model and cell structures.
20nm and 14nm test vehicles in fab now. Collaborate with IBM and Cadence.
Mojy Chian, GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Fabless foundry business is thriving and will continue to grow in size and profits, however the engagement model will be changing. Foundry business will have a 2X growth over the semiconductor business. 2011-2015 CAGR for semi is 5%, foundry is 10% and systems leading edge is 19%.
Driver for semi is mobility.
At 20nm the level of interdependence between foundry and IC design is extremely high. Virtual integration of IDM model: Foundry, Design, EDA.
Q: Is the foundry model broken at 20nm?
A: Mojy - no, the economics is still there, foundry and design are distinct. We just need to rely, and plan closer.
Choi - both IDM and Foundry. The foundry model isn't broken, we need closer relationships.
Hsu - we've done horizontal segmentation as an EDA industry, where the R&D is amortized across many users. Vertical re-integration is required to be successful.
Collaboration must be started years ahead of production date from now on. 2.5 to 3 years before tape out we need collaboration between foundry and design.
Cadence tools completed 25 test chips for 20nm so far.
Q: Gabe - Can the fabs make money at 20nm and 14nm nodes?
A: Mojy - Two factors: we see consolidation in industry with high volume products, mobility is driving and China/India geographies are yet to be developed. Future looks bright.
Patel - new nodes always cost more at first, then provide better economics eventually as learning occurs.
Choi - history shows that semi costs come down.
Q: What does 14nm require?
A: Patton - presume that 14nm may use EUV but not demand it. Prescriptive design rules needed. More DPT needed. Dipole self assembly techniques in research now.
Choi - more than one 14nm development underway. EUV would be useful, but not required.
Chian - collaborating with IBM on EUV, interest is high. Industry is driven by performance per dollar, so when will EUV become economically viable?
Q: What effect does FinFET have on SoC designs?
A: Patel - IP will be created so that the user has a cell library and memory compiler, so don't worry about the details. Yes, the IP will be more complex especially for analog and fixed device widths.
Hsu - full custom designers will have to learn about FinFET requirements.
Q: At 14nm how will collaboration work?
A: Chian - we compete for the same business and customers, however we collaborate on process development issues. GLOBALFOUNDRIES will have only one version of 28nm library, not multiple.
Patton - multi sourcing is good for business. | <urn:uuid:e00537a2-22cc-4686-b802-d454d205c64f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/1349-collaboration-28nm-20nm-14nm-ibm-cadence-arm-globalfoundries-samsung.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923435 | 1,231 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The holiday season is a time for love of children, compassion for the poor, and good will toward all—and a good deal of religious acrimony. Every year we hear stories of lawsuits and bitter fights over which religious symbols can be displayed in public. This year the big issue concerns cases in New York City, and Palm Beach, Florida, where symbols of the Islamic and Jewish faiths are freely displayed but Christian ones are not permitted.
The Thomas More Law Center is assisting plaintiffs who claim that this amounts to discrimination. They reject claims that the Menorah has secular significance whereas the Christian crèche does not. On the contrary, they say, all these symbols have both religious and secular content. If one or two from other faiths are allowed, surely Christian signs and symbols should not be excluded from display on public property.
Similarly, in hundreds of public schools around the country, we are witness to strife over what kind of music can and cannot be sung at holiday concerts. Concerts that are completely barren of religious content can seem abstracted from reality and drained of emotional energy, but that is what faces a multi-cultural, multi-faith world in which leniency for differences of opinion is at a low ebb.
Many of these cases are in and out of litigation, and some eventually go to trial, deciding for or against a particular symbol based on the finer points of law or, perhaps, on the arbitrary opinion of a judge. But lawsuits and court hearings are not going to solve the issue. So long as there are competing religious faiths that lay claim to the right to express themselves on public property, there will be disputes and acrimony.
Might I humbly suggest another approach? It comes down to one word: tolerance. It is something that sane living requires of us and it is a virtue because it is the underlying principle of social peace. It requires that we still our minds when we see symbols of beliefs that are not ours, and we do so because we understand that people are not homogenous and society does not require that they be so. We need to see through the symbol's particular meaning and appreciate what its very existence says about our ability to get along.
In practice, we do this all of the time. We see advertisements for products we have no interest in buying. People wear clothes that we do not like. People decorate houses in ways we might find tacky. Stores and restaurants play music we would not choose. And what do we do about it? As old-time Catholics used to say, we offer it up. We go on about our business and live with it, knowing that sights and sounds with which we do not agree do not fundamentally threaten our rights.
Perhaps the least tolerant institutions in America are the courts, which do indeed render decisions that seem arbitrary and discriminatory, as the cases cited above demonstrate. Christians are frequently asked to privatize their religion even as other religions enjoy the freedom to practice their faith publicly. We all know the source of this discrimination: a form of political correctness that censors Christianity as inherently oppressive but regards other faiths as living examples of diversity.
This double standard should come to an end but it will not until people of all faith learn to adopt values of tolerance. There is no more reason for people of the Jewish or Islamic faiths to be offended by the very sight of a crèche than there is for a Christian to be upset by seeing a menorah or a crescent. The world is made of many different perspectives on fundamental matters, and it is no concession to relativism to recognize this.
Let me illustrate what I mean. When my friend, Rabbi Daniel Lapin and his wife were expecting a child, he told me that they looked around for a hospital in their area that they felt represented their values on family life and children. They ended up selecting a Catholic hospital.
When their child arrived, family and friends came to hospital to see the newborn. Upon entering the room, one of the visitors noticed a crucifix on the wall and remarked that it was insensitive of the staff to have left it up. He offered to remove it and place it in a drawer.
Mrs. Lapin stopped her visitor and said, “I know what the people who placed the crucifix on the wall theologically mean by it, and of course, I do not agree with them on that point. But I also know that it is a symbol that also guarantees a certain set of values that we do share, which is why we chose this hospital. So you leave it right where it is; it does not disturb me.”
A potential conflict was resolved in a manner that was satisfactory to all concerned parties. Imagine if the courts had gotten involved. The result would not have been to anyone's liking. Would that all such conflicts could be similarly resolved.
The guidepost of religious freedom offers only an imperfect way around these kinds of conflict, since one person's freedom can be seen by others as an imposition. The only real answer here is tolerance, which implies a spirit of liberality and limits on the ability of the state to impose religion where people do not want it. As Fr. John Courtney Murray, architect of Vatican II's document on religious liberty, used to say, separating church and state is not an article of faith; it is an article of peace.
Each case of religious conflict has its own special issues at work. In the Alabama courthouse case, a state judgeaggressively confronted an imperious federal court—recipe for conflict that is not to anyone's advantage. Religion neither stands nor falls on whether a stone image of the commandments is displayed in a public place. Better that Chief Justice Roy Moore had never made an issue of it.
Tolerance does not create perfect peace or perfect freedom. But it does minimize the likelihood of conflict and prevents conflicts from spinning out of control when they do rise. It minimizes the resort to central governmental authority when those proximate to the situation can deal with the problem. This is the best we can hope for in this world, especially in times when mono-religious states of any sort are increasingly a thing of the past.
In a world of pluralism, believers are going to have to make some compromises with faiths that are not their own as well as secular society in general, in exchange for which they are given the freedom to practice their faith and have the widest possible influence on the culture. So too do state courts need to realize that religious faith is a universal feature of the human experience, and it cannot and should not be legislated away.
There has never been a single answer to the problem of conflicting rights when it comes to religion. That is precisely why there is no top-down solution. Tolerance is the best means to achieve the social peace that everyone should seek. Surely that is a solution that both liberals and conservatives should embrace, if they agree that they should live peacefully under the same form of government. | <urn:uuid:e95fd7a4-f606-4206-a913-7df1fdfd35af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.acton.org/print/3533 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966322 | 1,410 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Animations from Need-Less
"It is indeed a feeble light that reaches us from the starry sky. But what would human thought have achieved if we could not see the stars?"
Jean Perrin 1870-1942.
French physicist; Nobel prize for physics 1926.
Many of us have been dazzled at one time or another by an intense light source, such as a stadium's floodlights or a neighbour's security light, or struggled to see the wonders of the night sky through the now-familiar yellow glow that accompanies any profusely illuminated area such as a car park or shopping centre.
These are but some of the adverse effects of 'light pollution': the inadvertent illumination of an area other than that which the given light source is intended to cover. It comes in many forms: light trespass, for example when a neighbour's so-called security light is shining into your garden or through your bedroom window; sky glow, the illumination of the atmosphere by unshielded lights which limit our view of the cosmos to a handful of the brightest stars; and glare, the dazzling effect of floodlights or spotlights which prevents one from making out objects such as people or vehicles near the source.
The 9th European Symposium for the Protection of the Night Sky takes place from September 17th - 19th 2009 in Armagh, Ireland. The Symposium will deal with the issue of light pollution, its effects on the environment, health, and astronomy and examine how bad lighting is contributing to global climate change.
United Kingdom and Ireland
European and International
Last Revised: 2013 February 11th | <urn:uuid:7d6b5f82-56e2-46a1-a191-cf39b0964b93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://star.arm.ac.uk/darksky/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942568 | 327 | 3.171875 | 3 |
General Mills wants you to remember that breakfast is important and Chocolate Cheerios are a great choice because they contain “Whole Grain.” Hormel wants to help you get dinner on the table quickly, so they’ve created dinner “plates” and pre-marinated pork loin options. And you know that Mom always told you to eat your vegetables, so you grab a couple cans of green beans . . . and then you remember Christmas with green bean casserole! So you grab a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and, or course, Durkee’s fried onions for that yummy topping! Mom would be so proud, so you walk out of the grocery store with your arms full of packaged promises that don’t deliver.
The Conditioning Classroom wants to help you navigate through the aisles with eyes wide open . . . able to identify real food versus non-food . . . and be able to prepare meals that taste great and are filling because the nutrition they provide is real, not some advertising ploy.
Come join us for our Focus on Food seminar each month. This presentation covers:
Being a Savvy Shopper
Reading and deciphering food labels
What to buy and what to avoid
Understanding organic and conventional food options
You will get an incredibly informative manual with the seminar and the option to schedule a private session:
We will take you to the grocery store of your choice and spend 1 1/2 hours helping you make the best choices for your family
or We will come into your home and do an individualized walk-through of your kitchen pantry, helping you eliminate those items that are nutritionally void and potentially harmful to your family.
The entire package is just $97, or you can choose to do just the seminar for $30. Call us for our next class date and time!
Optimal Supportive Eating:
1. Eat small meals every 3 to 3 1/2 hours.
2. Each of these small meals should include a lean protein, a fibrous carbohydrate (vegetables) and a starchy carbohydrate (whole grains, potatoes, beans).
3. Include good fats such as olive oil, avocados, nuts.
4. Avoid pre-packaged, processed foods.
5. Reduce or eliminate sugar
How do you accomplish this? One day at a time. If you eat better this week than you did last week, you are moving in the right direction. Don’t try to change everything at once. The biggest help you can give yourself is to plan your meals ahead of time. Look at your day and determine when you will eat each meal. And then plan what you will eat at each meal. Food storage containers such as Tupperware are indispensable. Invest in a small cooler with some reusable ice packs as well.
We have created an 8-week Food Journal that is available for $12. Writing out what and when you are eating is a very powerful feed-back tool when you attempting to change life-long habits.
When you cook dinner, make a little extra and then put the leftovers in your food storage containers. They’re all ready to go for the next day . . . just grab them out of the fridge, put them in your cooler and go!
Food ideas: (If you have food sensitivities or allergies, please modify as you need to!)
- Hard-boiled eggs with carrot sticks, bell pepper strips and whole grain pretzels
- Edamame with 1/2 a whole-grain English muffin spread with Almond butter
- Scrambled eggs with spinach and mushrooms and a slice of whole-grain toast
- Ground turkey burger on a whole grain bun with lettuce and tomato
- Any lean cut of beef, some broccoli and half a sweet potato
- Chicken Orzo Salad – click here for this recipe and other great ideas! | <urn:uuid:fbd6c705-0316-466c-940a-c1840d50b8d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theconditioningclassroom.com/focus-on-food/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925159 | 814 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Island of Cozumel, Mexico
Mayan myth claims that Cozumel was home to the gods. Truly Cozumel is a place fit for the gods, with its dazzling white-sand beaches, ruined Mayan temples, exotic jungle wildlife, and crystalline waters teeming with tropical fish. Just offshore lay Palancar Reef, considered one of the most spectacular coral formations in all the Caribbean. Of course, the gods weren't the only individuals attracted to this terrestrial paradise: during its long and colorful history, Cozumel has been home to pirates, buccaneers, and freebooters, including Sir Henry Morgan and Jean Lafitte. Today's traveler will discover the same ravishing beauty and relaxation that entertained gods and pirates alike. | <urn:uuid:ec1b0fb0-eac7-43e7-b0c1-3a8db6dea792> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.princess.com/find/excursion/exlistfordestination.page?portid=CZM&t=C&exType=S | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901852 | 156 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Definition of Environmental medicine
Environmental medicine: The interactions between risk factors in the environment and human health. Environmental medicine focuses on the causes of disease in an environmental context. The environment creates exposures to many different physical, biological and chemical agents. Environmental exposures may be general such as to UV-irradiation from the sun or specific such as to toxic mushrooms and dioxin.
Current concerns in environmental medicine include but are by no means limited to the environmental contributions to cancer, ozone depletion and its effects on health, global warming, air pollution, airborne allergens, water pollution, contaminated sites, nuclear accidents, radon, mercury and cadmium toxicity to the kidney, and food poisoning.Source: MedTerms™ Medical Dictionary
Last Editorial Review: 6/14/2012
Find out what women really need. | <urn:uuid:b2b476cb-6ade-4529-91e0-59bf9fcd8929> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rxlist.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=25558 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90783 | 165 | 2.765625 | 3 |
There is a very useful object in VB.NET called System.IO (the IO stands for Input and Output). You can use this object to read and write to text files.
We're going to be having a closer look at objects (and what System is) in the next section. For now, let's just see how to open up a text file using the System.IO object.
First, here's an explanation of just what we mean by "text file".
What is a Text File?
The files on your computer all end in a three letter extensions. Microsoft Word files will have a different three letter extension from Microsoft Excel files. The extension is used to identify one file type from another. That way, Excel won't try to open Word files, or vice versa. You can just write some code to strip the last three letters from the file name, and then check that these three letters are the ones you want. Rather like the code you wrote to strip the last three letters from an email address.
Text files have an extension that ends in .txt. The Windows operating system gives you a good, basic Text Editor in Notepad. The Notepad programme allows you to save files with the .txt extension. In other words, as Text Files. These Text Files can then be opened by a wide variety of programmes.
A simple text file like this is called a Sequential File, and that is what we will be opening here. So let's begin. | <urn:uuid:6ba06a21-9856-45bd-99db-6f3ec8320f94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://homeandlearn.co.uk/NET/nets8p1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91748 | 303 | 3.75 | 4 |
Pet Adoptions: Daria Still Needs a Home
Daria at the Animal Rescue League has survived "extreme neglect" and is need of a loving forever home.
Daria is a 5-year-old Mastiff mix in need of a loving home.
She has survived years of extreme neglect.
"This sweet and trusting dog is most deserving of a special home. Daria's incredible spirit and resilience is evident after hearing her sad story," according to the Animal Rescue League.
Daria was kept as an outdoor dog somewhere in Beaver County. She managed to escape the home and came back with an eye injury, a possible result of a dogfight or cruel person. Her owner panicked and instead of bringing her to the vet, left Daria at a shelter tied to a water spicket.
The owner later called the shelter anonymously and said Daria lived with older kids in her former home and was good with them. She also is said to be generally house trained.
As you can see in the picture, Daria's eye could not be saved. However, the wound will heal and Daria will be able to manage perfectly with one good eye.
If you can find it in your heart to help this deserving dog, contact Colleen at firstname.lastname@example.org. Daria's adoption fee is $115.
Have you rescued a dog? Share your story in the comments below. | <urn:uuid:6fc178fc-96ef-46b5-a6ad-7db3c84f1c5b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chartiersvalley.patch.com/articles/pet-adoptions-daria-still-needs-a-home | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976113 | 289 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The disputes in the South China Sea and North Korea's planned rocket launch this month are top security worries expected to feature prominently at a two-day summit of Southeast Asian leaders in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
Myanmar, meanwhile, was basking in praise from colleagues for its recent democratic reforms. It was a marked reversal for the country, condemned for years for massive human rights violations, from its previous black sheep image at the Association of Southeast
Myanmar President Thein Sein briefed fellow leaders on Sunday's historic by-elections, which saw pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party sweep to victory, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said.
Thein Sein said he hoped the encouraging way the polls were held "will contribute to a higher confidence ... and will contribute to Myanmar's own standing within ASEAN and in the international community," Surin told The Associated Press in an interview.
Cambodia, the 10-nation ASEAN's steward this year, has wanted to focus on nonpolitically volatile issues like the goal of transforming Southeast Asia from a disparate cluster of fledgeling democracies, socialist states and monarchies into a European Union-like bloc that could compete in a bustling region dominated by rising giants such as China and India.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen outlined the financial problems roiling the world, including skyrocketing oil prices, that he said could hurt the region if it did not unify. He did not touch on controversial security issues.
"ASEAN is facing challenges that need to be addressed in order to realize its objective of 'one community, one destiny,'" Hun Sen said in a speech, mentioning this year's summit theme.
Ahead of the leaders' summit, foreign ministers and senior diplomats discussed a proposal to turn a nonbinding 2002 political declaration into a legally binding "code of conduct" to discourage aggression and prevent armed clashes among China and five other claimants—including ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam—in contested South China Sea areas, officials said. Taiwan also makes claims to the South China Sea.
China has said it wants to take part in the drafting of the code with ASEAN. But Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said the bloc's members should complete a version among themselves before discussing it with China.
"It is important we maintain ASEAN centrality," told the other leaders. After ASEAN drafts a code, "then ASEAN member states will meet with China," he said.
Surin said a target has been set to have a code in place this year.
China has rejected arrangements that would force it to negotiate with a bloc of nations over the disputes, preferring one-to-one talks with each claimant.
Chinese officials, who were not present at the Phnom Penh meetings, have relayed a proposal for the setting up of a 10-member group of experts and prominent statesmen that can help think of solutions, but Vietnam and the Philippines outrightly rejected the idea, according to two Southeast Asian diplomats involved in the discussions.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
Despite differences, Surin said it was a sign of progress that China was willing to join ASEAN in discussing ways to solve the disputes.
"There may be some variation of opinions but I think on the whole, we're moving in the direction of engaging very actively on the issue," Surin said. "I think it's very important to reassure the world that we can manage our differences."
The conflicts have settled into an uneasy standoff since the last fighting, involving China and Vietnam, killed more than 70 Vietnamese sailors in 1988.
North Korea's planned rocket launch is also expected to be a main topic at the summit. U.S. officials say the rocket is actually a test of long-range missile technology, and nations are concerned that parts could fall in Southeast Asia. North Korea insists it is planning to place a peaceful observation satellite into orbit sometime between April 12 and 16.
Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:8fb60001-fb98-4f13-96a1-3bf8eebf6036> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yorkdispatch.com/nation/ci_20313606/southeast-asia-nations-china-bring-rift-summit | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960285 | 862 | 1.625 | 2 |
Is it expensive to eat a vegan diet? There are a lot of pricey vegan specialty foods that could lead you to think so. Countless hours of research and development have lead to vegan versions of many meat-and-dairy staples. I’ve tried nearly all of the items below, and I’m quite fond of some of them. But with very rare exceptions, vegan alternatives to meat, dairy, and other animal-derived products cost significantly more than the items they are replacing.
Of course, there’s a good reason for the disparity in price. Government subsidies (yep, that’s our tax money) keep the price of animal products artificially low. In other words, animal farmers and their suppliers are on welfare! (They have to be, because they’re running an unsustainable industry. People simply wouldn’t buy much meat or dairy if they had to pay the true cost for it, and factory farms would rapidly start going out of business.) The makers of these vegan products are not subsidized, so what seems like a high price, is really just a fair price. Now for some vegan munchies. This is just a tiny sampling of the many incredible animal-free foods now on the market!!
(almond milk — vegan bacon — roasted vegetable cheese-free frozen pizza)
(strawberry soy yogurt — vegan butter — the latest in vegan meltable cheese)
(cookie dough coconut milk ice cream — chocolate fudge hemp-milk ice cream — the original tofurkey roast dinner)
(soy hot dogs, vegan sour cream, more vegan cheese..)
(vegan cream cheese, vegan grated parmesan, vegan burger patties)
(vegan candy bars, vegan marshmallows, and the original Vegenaise)
I’ve listed these products (by the way, clicking on them will take you to their respective websites) to show that you can be vegan and eat just about everything you were used to as an omnivore. But you can also be vegan without any of these items. Whether they’re out of your budget, or not sold in your area, they’re simply not necessary. Honestly, they’re beyond my usual grocery budget. Looking up some of these pictures, I thought wistfully, “I haven’t had that in years!”
I eat a vegan diet every day, and I do it without spending a fortune, or having to shop at health food specialty stores. Here’s how: you cut out the processed foods. A low-budget vegan grocery list has items like rice, canned beans and vegetables, fresh produce, frozen produce, pasta, bread and oats, bulk seeds and nuts. Buying whole plant foods not only gives you total control over your meals (because you’re starting with the simplest ingredients and can combine them to make whatever you can dream up), it also gives you the most nutrition for your buck!
Now, I’m not knocking vegan convenience foods. They’re tasty, and, well, convenient! They’ve helped many a non-chef kick the animal-eating habit, and anything that leads to kinder living has my approval. But they’re also the reason many omnivores think that you have to be rich to eat a vegan diet. As Natala (of veganhope.com) has said: “There’s a vegan section in every grocery store. It’s called the produce section!”
Speaking of Natala, she recently blogged about eating vegan on a food stamp budget, and issued a poverty-awareness challenge to vegan cooks. That’s largely what motivated me to write on the subject. So check out her blogs about it here, here, and here. And in Vegan Grocery Bills -Part 2, I’ll give you one of my favorite easy, dollar-stretching recipes. | <urn:uuid:18cf8ff3-bdba-4320-b537-6e2aaa63ffc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vegansalt.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/vegan-grocery-bills/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945126 | 824 | 1.867188 | 2 |
The Manufacturing Mythhttp://seekingalpha.com/article/218615-the-manufacturing-myth?source=feed
They still don’t get it – or perhaps they do and just won’t admit it. Either way, it doesn’t matter much as the jesters, namely Msrs. Bernanke and Greenspan, continue to chirp their assigned lines, playing good cop/bad cop with the US economy. Right now, Bernanke is the good cop, pointing to increasing wages and the likelihood that the consumer will once again step up and rescue us from the grips of the double dip. On the other side of the room is Greenspan, talking about how that double-dip is still possible, although extremely unlikely. Today the mainstream press jumped on the bandwagon and trumpeted the smashing success of the ISM’s manufacturing index for June as an indicator that all is and will be well. Stocks soared, bonds shed a point, and oil jumped over $80/barrel for the first time since May.
So what gives with manufacturing anyway? For years now we’ve heard stories about the deindustrialization of America and have seen countless pictures of decaying factories and manufacturing infrastructure. Yet at the same time the economic masterminds of this nation are telling us that manufacturing is going to pull us out of this horrible recession, and in fact, prevent any and all future recessions. If ever there was a dichotomy in perception, it is now. It would appear as if suddenly everyone is realizing that we must produce in order to consume. While this is a notable departure from conventional Keynesian theory, are we seeing a true sea change or just lip service to the common sense of the matter? | <urn:uuid:85bcc472-f1b1-4393-9724-15dee9c5401f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://snuffysmithsblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/manufacturing-myth.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953238 | 358 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Montclair isn’t wanting for restaurants, yet we’ve been watching, waiting and wanting to know more about Montclair’s Pig & Prince Restaurant and Gastro-Lounge located at 1 Lackawanna Plaza. A new restaurant in Montclair is always news, especially one with a coveted Montclair liquor license, but there’s so much more to the Pig & Prince story. Chef-owner Michael Carrino, in creating a sprawling restaurant, with a gastro-lounge, tap room and huge dining space, has also brought back a piece of Montclair history in his thoughtful renovation of the long neglected Lackawanna Terminal. I met with Carrino and got a chance to see the restaurant, which is readying to open on or about August 24, with a grand opening in September.
About that history: The restaurant repurposes the former Lackawanna Railroad Station, which opened in June 1913 as the end of the Lackawanna’s Montclair Branch. Designed by William B. Hull, service at the six-track, four platform terminal was once used by thousands of commuters. The station ended service February 27, 1981 when the Montcalir Branch was rerouted to a one-track terminal at Bay Street along an alignment with the proposed Montclair connection. The Grecian-Doric style building is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. Hull, a then 25-year-old architect, died in the wreck of the Titanic before construction began. The cost of the station in 1913: $500,000.
Stepping into Pig & Prince, there are historic details just waiting to be discovered at every turn.
Carrino was able to track down and obtain one of the original wooden benches from the terminal’s waiting room that had been taken to the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center in Phillipsburg in 2010. The long gleaming bench, beautifully restored, is one of the first things you notice when walking into Pig & Prince. Inside, under layers of carpet and linoleum, Carrino and business partner Serge Hunkins, of Kadan Productions Inc, fashion producer and the design talent behind the restaurant space, discovered the intact stunning marble chip terrazzo floors with borders of inlaid tile in the main waiting room of the terminal, now the main dining room of Pig & Prince. Hunkins devised a warm, welcoming palette of rich wood, dark orange and metal that harmonize with the terminal’s historic elements.
At the bar, you can rest your feet on an actual rail from the station, stamped with the word Lackawanna. Surrounded by the buff-colored brick walls, softened by sections of upholstered wall and terra cotta colored leather banquettes, the dining room has a focal point – a mural featuring playful pigs frolicking around pots – that fills the space of an arched opening in the waiting room wall. Carrino says he plans to switch out the murals, allowing an ever-changing showcase for local artists. Outside, wooden and glass boxes that once held train schedules are now mounted on the exterior of the building, waiting to hold copies of Pig & Prince’s menu.
About that menu: It’s an eclectic and approachable Modern American showcasing local meats and produce. Dishes include everything from Duck Duck Goose (duck prosciutto, duck rillettes and foie gras crème brulee) Spanish chili empanadas with chorizo and smoked sausage, fish and chips, spicy Korean lamb, to a sweet pea risotto with country ham and cracklings and a lobster tagliatelle that will “change your life.”
Carrino, a past winner of Food Network’s Chopped who became a member of Chaîne des Rôtisseurs at age 28, conceived Pig & Prince as a place where everyone – families, couples and late-nighters can feel comfortable. “This is more my style,” says Carrino, of Pig & Prince, as opposed to his former, more formal Restaurant Passione.A 1913 New York Times article described the opening of the Lackawanna terminal as ushering in an “era of better feeling” in Montclair. The same could be said for Carrino’s impact on Lackawanna Plaza and the area’s revitalization.
“People in the neighborhood are great, and they are so excited that someone is doing something with this space,” says Carrino, who had kept his eye on the historic terminal for some time, hoping to create a downtown destination. “I love this corner. I think it’s a great corner.”
Carrino ignored naysayers who told him the area wasn’t right for a fine dining establishment [other restaurants already in the area include Fascino, located less than a block away from Pig & Prince and Greek Taverna, across the street]. “I’m putting my flag down. There were areas in Brooklyn that people never used to go to that are now cool. I think this area is vibrant and is going to become even more so.”
The kitchen, which faces Bloomfield Ave, has a pizza oven that Carrino plans to keep busy baking bread for the restaurant, as well as a glass curing room visible to diners from the tap room, where aromatic meats already hang seductively. The restaurant’s transformation makes it hard to remember the Hollywood Video store that previously occupied the space, but Carrino let a piece of that history stand, too. There’s just one remnant of the long-gone video rental business, which previously had its walls plastered with cinematic images. High up in a corner of the kitchen hallway, where the wall meets the ceiling, a smiling Jack Nicholson leers, teeth bared, captured in a scene from the movie, “The Shining.”
Carrino has plans for a beer club, wine club, special tasting menus and experiences with pairings, a butcher’s table, where you can dine in the kitchen an experience a meal “unedited,” and by next spring/summer, dining outdoors in a bordered patio.
At the far end of Pig & Prince’s dining room, there is a large cast bronze clock on the wall, located above what used to be the ticket office, as well as an original drinking fountain with a grapevine tile design. Carrino says the clock still works, but cannot keep time. His plan is to set the hands of the clock to reflect the day Pig & Prince opens its doors. It’s fitting that the clock will serve as a reminder of both the past and the space’s new chapter in Montclair history.
Pig & Prince Restaurant and Gastro-Lounge, 1 Lackawanna Plaza, Montclair (973) 233-1006
Here’s an answer to what Carrino intended with the name Pig & Prince:
The funny answer- it represents the duality of man.
The real answer- it’s where the casual and elegant can co-exist. | <urn:uuid:b489759a-8df9-4dfd-b0e6-8bb8f9734b0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baristanet.com/2012/08/montclair-pig-prince-restaurant-coming-soon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948005 | 1,490 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Keeping your firesuit clean,...
Keeping your firesuit clean, like Veronica McCann's, shown here, is the key to maximizing its performance in the event of a fire. Kevin Thorne
While each and every one of us know that a good firesuit is probably one of the most important pieces of safety equipment you can own, the proper care of your suit will make a significant difference in its performance when you need it most.
In order to understand the vital role proper care plays in the performance of your suit, we also must consider the type of suit or, more to the point, how the suit's manufacturer achieves fire retardancy. To do that, let's take a review of the different type of fire-retardant suits available today.
While there are numerous fire-retardant materials on the market, three that are often seen in the motorsports industry are fire retardant (FR) cottons, Nomex, and CarbonX. You may hear about other FR materials, such as Difco/PBI, Basofil, or Proban, but these tend to be used more in items such as firefighter suits and fire-retardant upholstery. But that doesn't mean you can't find them in the racing world, as Proban and PBI have both made a push into motorsports recently.
All of those FR materials perform admirably when tested, and in many cases, you will find that manufacturers offer suits made from several different materials or a combination of materials. For example, you can buy a custom suit made of either Nomex or CarbonX from Simpson Race Products.
Improper care of your firesuit...
Improper care of your firesuit can lead to its failure. If your firesuit fails, you could end up with second-degree burns. Dr. Rick Malta
The quality of any fire-retardant material can be determined by looking closely at two measuring factors: Limiting Oxygen Index (LOI) and Thermal Protective Performance (TPP). LOI is the most commonly used measure for flame retardancy and refers to the amount of oxygen needed in the atmosphere to support combustion. If a fiber or fabric has an LOI of 25, that means that oxygen needs to be present in at least 25 percent of the air for the fabric to burn. Consequently, a higher rating equals more fire protection. Many fiber manufacturers achieve high LOI ratings by chemically treating their fabrics with a flame-retardant finish. The downside is those chemicals can be washed and worn off over time without proper care. You won't often see LOI in race suit literature, but it's an important factor in good fire protection.
On the other hand, TPP refers to the garment's ability to provide thermal protection when exposed to both direct flame and radiant heat while taking into account the length of time before a person is subject to second-degree burns. While that's a mouthful, TPP is the second most important number you need to know when firesuit shopping. The TPP rating is derived from a mathematical calculation performed with the results of a sophisticated test procedure that utilizes two different heat sources, sensors, and the fabric to be tested. The TPP rating is divided in half to determine the number of seconds until the human tissue reaches a second-degree burn. For example, if a particular fabric has a TPP rating of 35, it takes 17.5 seconds until a second-degree burn occurs in a flashover situation. See the chart to the right.
GForce Racing Gear recommends...
GForce Racing Gear recommends home laundering of its Nomex suits. Use the gentle or delicate cycle and cold water. Karen Bolles
The only way to increase a TPP rating is through adding multiple layers. However, as you increase layers, suits get bulkier, and bulk does not equal comfort. Your goal in selecting a firesuit should be the balance of comfort with maximum protection.
Regardless of whether your suit is made of CarbonX, Nomex, Proban, FR cotton, or something else without the proper care its LOI and TPP can be adversely affected, especially over longer periods of time.
Proban & FR Cottons Certain fabrics such as Proban can be washed using conventional methods. However, you shouldn't use detergents based on soap or detergents containing sodium silicate or metasilicate when the wash or rinse water hardness level is greater than 3 degrees Clark (45ppm calcium carbonate). What? In plain English, if you've hard, water don't wash your firesuit, get it professionally cleaned. | <urn:uuid:36b5e691-f513-462d-ba70-26fae490e099> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.circletrack.com/safety/ctrp_0906_safety_equipment_care/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941358 | 939 | 2.015625 | 2 |